by Michael Munn
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.
CHAPTER 14
—
The Darkest Time
After 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.
He recalled, ‘Barbara was a sweet lady to work with and she knew I was still grieving, but she was a tough little actress and she said to me, “Come on David, let your emotions do the job for you,” which was in some ways rather harsh but also good advice. Most people who lose someone they love can go to work and usually their work has nothing to do with what they have gone through in life, but acting can be a mirror on your life. It was for me, at that time. But I didn’t deal with it at all well. I couldn’t use the “method”. I’m sure Marlon Brando could have done wonders in the same situation, but I was just barely able to remember my lines and hit my marks. Barbara helped me through it, but the film wasn’t good, and neither was I.’
I actually found The Other Love to be an engaging film, with an excellent performance by Stanwyck and a sympathetic and moving performance from Niven. It was a good B-movie.
Throughout his life, Niven often criticised Goldwyn for pushing him into films that were barely more than good B-movies and taking the loan-out money, but David had to admit that Goldwyn could sometimes be very generous and even paternal. ‘Goldwyn gave me a very generous bonus when I made the film with Stanwyck. He didn’t have to do that but he wanted to show me that he wasn’t just hiring me out for the sake of making money from me. He wanted me to make money from me too. I was getting $3,000 a week from Goldwyn and he was paid just $15,000 for my loan-out, so when he then gave me an extra $7,000, he was actually out of pocket.’
David asked Sam Goldwyn to keep him working. He was prepared to do anything to keep his mind busy. It was easy for Goldwyn to loan him out to other studios, but what he wanted to do for David was find him a film that would really be a special picture built specifically around him and he began preparing what was intended to be a star vehicle for David which might actually propel him into the top league of major stars.
Loretta Young recalled, ‘Sam Goldwyn had a marvellous film he was getting ready for David called The Bishop’s Wife. I remember Sam saying to me, “I am really fond of David, and I think he knows it, but I’m also trying to keep everyone under contract to me working. They all deserve my attention. But I do like David very much and sometimes I wish we could just enjoy our relationship without the work getting in the way. Money spoils relationships.” Sam meant it. All through the war David wrote to Sam, and Sam wrote back. Not like a father and son but more like an uncle and favourite nephew. Sam was delighted when he came up with The Bishop’s Wife and David was happy for the first time since losing Primmie.’
The Bishop’s Wife was the whimsical tale of a Protestant bishop who prays to God to help him find the money to build a cathedral and also to save his troubled marriage. An angel in a suit and tie turns up but the bishop doesn’t recognise him as a celestial being, especially when the bishop’s wife begins to fall for him. David was to play the plum role of the angel and Cary Grant the bishop.
Then, suddenly and cruelly, David had the role taken from him. He recalled,
I loved the story. I thought it was charming and I felt that it would be a quality production. Then one day, before production began, Goldwyn called me to his office and said, ‘Look, David, I’m sorry, but Grant is insisting he play the angel.’
I said, ‘Oh come on, Sam, you promised the part to me. It’s the best part in the picture.’
He said, ‘I know, David, but Grant is the bigger star.’
‘Then what the hell am I playing?’ I asked, and he said, ‘The bishop,’ and I swore very badly and said he can stick the bishop where the sun doesn’t shine.
I was mad, upset, disappointed, but Goldwyn said, ‘The bishop is a wonderful role, David. It’s unlike any other part you’ve played. I think you would be perfect as the angel but I also think you are perfect as the bishop.’ And he said all the right things and pressed all the right buttons, and when it came down to it, I was under contract and had no choice in the matter unless I wanted to go on suspension without pay.
I was as mad as hell at Grant for taking my part away from me, and I let him know it. I do love Cary, and he’s a lovely man, but he’s also given to moments of selfishness – I suppose we actors all are – and he said to me, ‘I’m sorry David, but I’m not cut out to be a bishop whereas you could be a bishop or an angel. Hell, I bet you could even play the wife,’ and he laughed, but I wasn’t laughing.
I said, ‘Oh come on, Cary, that’s bullshit and you know it. You only want the part because it’s the best in the picture,’ and he sucked on his cheek and then said, ‘You’re right, it is. That’s why I want it.’
I sulked through much of the filming, but that was okay because the bishop is a pretty miserable old bugger anyway. They even greyed me up for the part to make me look older. They said I didn’t look distinguished enough. The director, William Seiter, asked me to remove my moustache. I went to Goldwyn and said, ‘Sam, I’ll play this bloody bishop and I’ll turn up on time every morning and I’ll know all my lines, but I won’t shave my moustache off for all the tea in China,’ and he said, ‘That’s exactly how I feel, David, and I’m letting William know that the moustache stays.’
There were times when Goldwyn was my biggest ally. But I also thought he could have told Cary Grant he couldn’t play the angel. It sounds childish, I know, but I really needed that role, and Cary Grant bullied Goldwyn into giving it to him, and I thought Goldwyn had more backbone than that. And I thought Cary Grant had more humanity.
Loretta Young, who played the bishop’s wife, was probably one of David’s greatest allies. She said, ‘When Cary Grant got the role of the angel, David was deeply ups
et. I sat him down and said, “Do you believe in God?” He said, “I’m not a religious man. I feel that if there is a God He’s let us all down by allowing Germany to kill millions.” I said to him, “I do believe in God and I believe in angels and I believe in men of God. But you don’t have to play the part as a man of God. You just have to play the part as a man who has asked God for His help and is disappointed when he believes his prayers are unanswered. You can do this, David.” And he did. It’s one of his best performances.’
She also scolded Cary Grant for taking David’s role. ‘I told him he was selfish, and he said, “Yep, you’re right, I am.” Then I said, “You’re also heartless.” He said, “Guilty!” Then I said, “Don’t you care about how David feels right now?” and he said, “Of course I do, but we’re making movies. We’re not doing missionary work in the Congo.” And then he said, “Just you wait and you’ll see David give a wonderful performance, and the three of us will make this movie the best it can be.” And he was right.’
Filming such a modest little story didn’t go well. Two weeks into the shoot, Goldwyn fired William Seiter and replaced him with Henry Koster and filming had to start all over again at some cost, but from then on it proceeded smoothly. David, however, was in a bad mood, especially with Cary Grant. Loretta Young recalled, ‘In many scenes David had to look daggers at Cary. Oh my, those daggers were very real at times. I said to David, “You really do look at Cary as though you’d like to knock his block off,” and he said, “That’s because I do.” David wasn’t happy.’
Niven had another gripe about Grant. ‘I went back home to fight for my country,’ he told me. ‘Grant stayed in Hollywood to get rich and famous. I wasn’t too sympathetic towards him when Goldwyn told him he wasn’t masculine enough in the part of the angel. He went into a sulk about that. I’m sorry that Cary and I didn’t get along on that picture.’
The Bishop’s Wife has the reputation of being a failure. It wasn’t. It was a huge success when released in 1947 and was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar and selected for the Royal Command Film Performance in Britain. But the critics hated it. The Daily Herald complained, ‘Mr Niven’s jaunty, moustached bishop and Cary Grant as an angel are equally unbelievable.’ The News Chronicle said, ‘It is the Protestant comeback to the deadly successful R.C. propaganda of Going My Way and The Bells of St Mary’s. The Bishop’s Wife surpasses in tastelessness, equals in whimsy and in technique falls well below those crooning parables. It is really quite a monstrous film.’
