David Niven (22 page)

The
Sunday Times
noticed ‘David Niven as Aaron Burr looking traitorous in a gentlemanly sort of way'. The
Daily Express
said, ‘David Niven plays Aaron Burr as if he were cheering on the boat race.'

David recalled, ‘I thought I recognised a political slant to that picture. There was some ill feeling towards the British from the Americans after the war, and since we had been the villains in their war of independence, they decided a smooth talking English actor would make the perfect corrupt American senator. I was beginning to think that being an English actor in America after the war wasn't such a good idea after all.'

He was beginning to have doubts about a future in Hollywood.

He was able to take a week off from filming
Magnificent Doll
, and he and Primmie joined a group of friends – Clark Gable, Nigel Bruce, Ida Lupino and Rex Harrison – on a short vacation in Monterey to fish and play golf. Back at the Pink House, Pinkie the nanny was taking good care of the boys who came to love her, and she them.

I have heard it said, and have read, that Niven didn't like Rex Harrison and that he told Sam Goldwyn that he would never work with James Mason and Rex Harrison because he felt they had shirked their duty by
staying out of the war. Actually, Harrison served in the RAF, a fact which had escaped David at the time of his complaint, and he and Harrison became good friends. I did a formal interview with Rex Harrison in 1982 in Norfolk, where he was filming an episode of
Tales of the Unexpected;
we both knew of David's terminal illness then.

‘I knew David a little and we got on very well,' Harrison said. ‘He'd had a marvellous war record and I suppose I was something of a military lightweight compared to him because he was and had always been a professional solider. I got into the RAF when war broke out, and I was one of those actors the government didn't want getting killed, so I was kept at home. David told me he was envious, that he had often wanted to get out of the war and get back to Hollywood. But he was torn between duty and ambition, and I don't think the Army was prepared to let a professional soldier like him go.'

Back in 1946, Harrison and his wife Lilli Palmer were to play a part in the greatest tragedy of David Niven's life.

At the end of the holiday in Monterey, David and Primmie returned to Hollywood on Sunday 19 May and went to a party at the home of Tyrone and Annabella Power where many of Niven's friends were gathered including Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, Bob Coote, Richard Greene and his then wife Patricia Medina.

David never spoke to me about what took place there; he was able to write about it in
The Moon's a Balloon
, but he was never actually able to talk about it to me. I don't think he talked about it to many. But I did get two accounts of what happened, one from Patricia Medina who I met in London in 1980 when I interviewed her husband Joseph Cotton, and the other from Rex Harrison when I interviewed him.

‘David loves games, always has,' said Harrison (speaking of Niven in the present tense in 1982). ‘Cesar Romero was there and he said he knew of a game called “sardines” where people play hide and seek but in the dark. So it was decided to play this childish game and we turned off all the lights. Nobody could see where they were going and there was a lot of whispering throughout the house.'

Harrison recalled hearing what he described as ‘a sickening serious of thuds, and I just knew that someone had fallen down steps. Primmie had gone through the wrong door. It was the door to the cellar, and she had stepped into the dark but there was no floor, just stone steps and as she stepped forward into empty air she went down, all the way. A terrible, ghastly tragedy.'

Patricia Medina recalled, ‘I was upstairs with Tyrone Power and we heard a thud. Ty put on the lights and we rushed down stairs and, oh my
God, we found Primmie in the cellar, lying unconscious after falling some 20 feet (6m).'

‘She was taken up to the living room,' recalled Harrison, ‘and was laid on the floor. David was deathly white – in shock. He was clearly distressed but he somehow remained outwardly calm. Perhaps it was his military training. He said to me, “If anything happens to her, I think it will be the end of me. I really do.” I poured him a brandy while Lilli sat on the floor, cradling Primmie's head.'

A doctor was called and Annabella Power mopped Primmie's head with icy water. Pat Medina could remember hearing her say, ‘I feel so strange.' Harrison remembers her saying, ‘David, darling, we'll never be invited again.'

David went with Primmie and the doctor to St John's Hospital in Santa Monica. The doctors told him she was suffering concussion and was still unconscious but would be fine. ‘David was terribly worried, of course, but I think he felt better that the doctors were so reassuring,' said Harrison, ‘so the next day he went back to work [on
Magnificent Doll]
and then went to the hospital in the evening, and the doctors were really most optimistic. He told me that while he sat by her bed, holding her hand, she opened her eyes and saw him and then he felt her hand giving his a little gentle squeeze. Then her eyes closed and she went back to sleep.

‘He left her there thinking that she would be expecting him the next day but he got a call from the hospital almost as soon as he got home that evening and they told him they would have to operate because she had a blood clot.'

David was kept company by Bob Coote while the operation was in progress. After two agonising hours the head surgeon told David that Primmie had died.

Pat Medina recalled, ‘He went into such terrible shock that he wandered around the streets in a daze and turned up at our house in tears, literally screaming.'

Richard Greene remembered that he and Pat tried to comfort him, ‘but it was impossible. He'd lost the only woman he truly loved.'

‘I believe he was never the same after that,' said Rex Harrison. ‘He never got over her. Even when he married again, he always loved Primmie. He said to me once, “Do you believe there is the one very special person for each of us, someone we are destined to be with, and when we find that person, we have to make the most of it because we don't know when we'll be parted?” I said, “David, I think we're lucky if we
ever
find one very special person, and some of us never do, but I don't know that we are
destined
to find her.” And he said, “I believe I was destined to find Primmie,
and so the very short time we had together is something I will always treasure, and nobody can ever take her place. And perhaps if there is a heaven, she is there waiting for me, and then I'll be with her for eternity.” And I think he believed that, and that kept him going.'

When I saw David in 1982, he said pretty much the same thing to me, and I told him that I believed, as I then did, that he would find Primmie waiting for him, and that gave him tremendous comfort. I hope it might actually be true.

—

A
fter Primmie was cremated, David flew her ashes back to England and buried them at the church in Huish where they had married six years earlier. The inscription on her tombstone read, ‘Here lies Primula, loved wife of David Niven, died at Los Angeles 21st May 1946, aged 28.'

He flew straight back to Los Angeles where there was a memorial service for her on 29 May. Another was held that same day in London at the Grosvenor Chapel, attended by Grizel, Joyce and her husband plus dignitaries and titled people.

David was unable to bring himself to go anywhere near the Pink House so he went to stay with Douglas and Mary Lee Fairbanks for several weeks while Pinkie took care of the two boys. He received many letters of condolence but was unable to answer them so Mary Lee dealt with them; he kept every one of those letters in a shoe box and, over the years, he periodically took them out and read them.

Then a former girlfriend arrived in Hollywood – Ann Todd. Their affair had ended when he went to Hollywood, but she was still fond of him. ‘I was in New York and he called me up and wanted me to fly out to Los Angeles to be with him,' she told me. ‘So, of course, I did. He was a very different man to the one I had known. He was extremely bitter. There wasn't much more I could do other than listen to whatever he had to say. Then he really took me by surprise by trying to make love to me. He wasn't in his right mind, and I had to yell at him and tell him to pull himself together. He just cried and cried. I thought he would never get over it, and I don't think he ever did. He just learned to live with it.'

His friends all rallied round. Clark Gable, who knew exactly what he was going through, spent a lot of time with him just talking. Others could do little more than try to divert him. ‘I went to see him every weekend,' said Rex Harrison, ‘and I bought him a Boxer puppy and told him his name was Phantom. Over time David learned to smile again, and some of the old spark started to come back, but he was…different.

‘Lilli and Fred [Astaire] cheered up the two lads by painting their nursery walls with Walt Disney characters and while they did that Pinkie and the boys went to stay with Ronnie Colman. Everyone got involved.'

With a lot of help, the Pink House was almost ready to be lived in, and eventually David was persuaded to move in. When the furniture and china that Primmie had chosen arrived from England, almost all of it had been smashed.

One night, after David returned from work, he discovered somebody had broken in and had stolen a case containing Primmie's most precious possessions such as mementos from her childhood, photographs, jewellery and the letters he had written to her during the war.

That night he nearly gave up and tried to take his life.

During the ‘angry interview' I did with him in 1979, he said, ‘Before Primmie died I remember I had actually asked myself if I had any right to be so happy. Did any man have that right? I had two wonderful sons, many wonderful friends, a life in Hollywood that I loved, and a wife who made my life so complete that – and I remember thinking this – that without her, my life would be incomplete.

‘And then I lost her so suddenly, and I lost all sense of reason, and when somebody stole a case with all her most precious mementos, I decided to blow my brains out.'

Hearing those words from him took my breath away, and he fell silent for a few moments.

I asked, ‘Did you simply change your mind?'

‘Oh no, not at all. I took a gun and put the barrel in my mouth and with barely no thought for my children, which was unforgivable, I pulled the trigger. And the bloody thing didn't fire. I was strangely calm about it all up till then, and then I began to shake. I didn't know why the gun didn't fire. I knew about guns, but I couldn't think why it hadn't fired and I think I may have actually thought that this might be God telling me to carry on living for the sake of my children. I even thought it might be Primmie giving me a message and that she had made the gun fail. I shook and cried, and my friend Bob Coote found me. The poor chap, he turned as white as a ghost when he saw the gun. He took it away and said, “No need to have
this now, is there?” My great blessing was to have such good friends around me at the darkest time in my life.'

Almost as soon as David had told me this, he said, ‘I've told you, and now I am asking you not to publish this story when you come to write your article.' Although I was working at
Photoplay
at the time, I was long past the stage of being a career journalist, and I promised him I wouldn't write it. When I saw him next, in 1980 for Peter Sellers' memorial service in London, I told him that I hadn't published a word of that whole interview, and he said, ‘My dear boy, I don't know another journalist in the world, except perhaps Roddy Mann, who would have done that for me.'

Finally, he felt able to take Pinkie and the boys to live in the Pink House. But he did one very strange thing, according to Patricia Medina. ‘He locked the door to the cellar, and kept it locked and never let anybody down there, even though it wasn't the cellar she had her accident in. I think he was always afraid the same thing might happen to someone else. The only person who ever went down there was him.'

He began a routine of rising early every morning and going straight to the studio, throwing himself into whatever work came his way, and then getting home so late that he saw little of the boys. He often walked alone on the beach after dark and had little sleep.

His behaviour became more erratic. He began picking up girls and even prostitutes. He told me, ‘I had some bizarre illness. I had to have sex. I think it was my only way of deadening the pain. That, and getting drunk, but I preferred sex. I paid for it when I had to. Often I didn't have to because there were always plenty of starlets willing to sleep with anyone they thought might be able to help them in their careers.

‘One girl I met at a party was called Marilyn Monroe. I don't remember anything about how I met her except that it was at a party where I got terribly drunk. I only remember waking up in the morning in a friend's bedroom with the worst hangover, and lying next to me was this starlet called Marilyn Monroe.'

For two years after Primmie died, David left the care of his sons firmly in the hands of Pinkie. She was, he once told me, ‘an absolute rock, a brick. What I would have done without her God only knows. She devoted herself to my sons when I was unable to be a real father to them.'

It took time, but slowly –
very
slowly – David began to emerge from the deep dark despair he had been lost in, finding some comfort in sex, work and his family. The work was the most readily available source of much needed diversion, physically but not creatively satisfying. He had managed to finish
Magnificent Doll
after Primmie died, doing his best in a bad film.

Goldwyn realised that David needed to work after his initial grieving,
but he seemed unable to find him the perfect part in the perfect film. Niven was an actor out of fashion in Hollywood, and major studios didn't want him, so he found himself working for independent producer David Lewis in
The Other Love
in which he was featured opposite Barbara Stanwyck. It was a would-be tear-jerker in which he played a doctor falling in love with a concert pianist dying from tuberculosis. It wasn't the easiest film for David to make at that time in his life, just three months after losing his real wife.