Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (23 page)

At the end of March Primmie, Pinkie and the boys arrived in Portland, Maine, on an old freighter after a dreadful transatlantic crossing that took eighteen days instead of seven. Primmie fell in love instantly with California and the house, which she could hardly wait to refurbish and furnish. ‘She spent a lot of time with the boys,’ said Pinkie Rogers. ‘She was a very good mother but didn’t spoil them, and David was a great father. The children used to shout with glee when he came home.’ The Nivens employed two other staff at the rented house: a woman housekeeper and a male gardener who was also responsible for Niv’s clothes. ‘They went out a lot,’ said Pinkie, ‘and I met a lot of film stars.’

In April Goldwyn lent Niv to Universal Pictures to make his second movie with Ginger Rogers,
Magnificent Doll
, and
did such a good deal – he was paid $100,000 for just six weeks of David’s time – that he voluntarily gave him a bonus of several thousand dollars. David was grateful but beginning to feel twitchy because once again he was being lent to another studio instead of making a film for Goldwyn himself. ‘Please remember that I shall not be
really
happy till I start work at my “home” studio!!’ he wrote to Goldwyn. He was right to be reluctant to play the part:
Magnificent Doll
was historical garbage in which he played the traitorous nineteenth-century American Vice-President Aaron Burr and Ginger Rogers his lover Dolly Payne. Niv later described the picture with a shudder as ‘gibberish’ and ‘a stinker’, but he needed the money.

Until he started work on
Magnificent Doll
at the end of April he and Primmie enjoyed a hectic social life. He bought a big black Packard car off Laurence Olivier and they were invited constantly to parties and dinners where the guests played games or charades afterwards. Niv loved taking her to all his favourite places and showing her off to his famous friends and she was quickly accepted by them. ‘Primmie was unique, quite lovely,’ said Pat Medina, ‘and she said she’d never been happier in her life.’ Phyllis Astaire took her under her wing and showed her around town, and she was welcomed by the Goldwyns, Colmans, Fairbankses and Charles Boyers – even Lilli Palmer and Rex Harrison, who described Niv at this time in his book
A Damned Serious Business
as ‘a lovely man, very amusing, and great fun to be with’ whom he saw ‘a lot’, which seems odd since it was only nine months since David had told Goldwyn how much he disliked and despised Harrison, and how he would never be able to work with him. Perhaps Niv’s natural good manners overcame his revulsion, for Harrison was one of a small group who went with Niv, Primmie, Gable, Nigel Bruce and Ida Lupino to Monterey and Pebble Beach in mid-May for a week of golf and fishing while Pinkie looked after the children in Beverly Hills. While they were away Primmie wrote to her father to say that she had
never dreamed that she could ever be so happy.

They returned to Hollywood on Sunday, 19 May for a party at Tyrone and Annabella Power’s house. Many of Niv’s friends were there – Bob Coote, Pat Medina, Richard Greene, Lilli Palmer, Rex Harrison yet again – and Niv wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon:
‘as I looked around at them and at Primmie’s radiant face, I wondered how it was possible for one man to have so much.’ It was a lovely, warm evening and they enjoyed a barbecue by the pool and went indoors afterwards to play a new game that Cesar Romero had played recently at another party, the children’s hide-and-seek game Sardines, which was played in the dark. The lights were switched off and ‘I was hiding upstairs with Ty Power,’ Pat Medina told me, ‘when we heard a thud. Ty rushed to put the lights on and we found that Primmie had mistaken the door to the powder room or closet and had fallen down all the stone steps into the cellar.’ She had fallen twenty feet, head first, and was lying unconscious on the stone floor at the bottom.

Romero and Oleg Cassini carried her up to the living room where they laid her on the carpet, Lilli Palmer cradled her battered head and Annabella Power dabbed her forehead with icy water. A doctor was called, and while they waited Primmie opened her eyes and murmured, ‘I feel so strange. Even when I had babies I never felt so …’ She closed her eyes. ‘We’ll never be invited again,’ she said. The doctor arrived, reported that she was badly concussed but would be fine after a few days, and he and Niv took her in an ambulance to St John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, where more doctors assured him that there was nothing to worry about and told him to go home and relax. He returned at six o’clock the next morning and although she was still unconscious and very pale he was told yet again that she would be fine after a few days’ rest. He went to work on
Magnificent Doll
and returned that evening to the hospital, where the doctors told him once again that she would soon recover. He sat beside her bed for a Jong time, holding her hand, gazing at the face he loved so much,
praying for her recovery, and suddenly she opened her eyes, smiled and weakly squeezed his hand. Delighted that she had come round at last, he returned home to Pinkie and the boys, but at eleven o’clock there was a call from the hospital: she had developed a clot on the brain and they would have to operate. Bob Coote accompanied him back to the hospital and they waited for two hours while the operation went ahead, but Primmie never recovered. She died of a fractured skull and brain lacerations. She was only twenty-eight and had been in California for just six weeks.

It was 2 a.m. and the world was suddenly impenetrably dark. His beloved Primmie was dead. He wandered the streets in a daze. In the early hours of the morning, said Pat Medina, ‘he came running up our drive crying and screaming. I don’t for a second think that he ever recovered from that.’ He telephoned her parents in England and Coote took him to the Colmans, who insisted that he should stay with them for several days while Phyllis Astaire took charge of Pinkie, David Jr, who was three and a half, and Jamie, who was six months old. He never returned to the house in Chevy Chase Drive.

The Los Angeles police said that there was no need of an inquest because ‘we are satisfied no one was to blame. There had been very little drinking, and we understand that Mrs Niven herself had not had any alcohol.’ Primmie was cremated and David flew back to England with her ashes, which he, her parents, her brother and his wife buried just to the left of the entrance to the graveyard of the church in Huish where they had married less than six years previously. Her ashes lie opposite a farmyard under a badly mottled slab of cement that reads barely legibly: ‘Here lies Primula, loved wife of David Niven, died at Los Angeles 21st May 1946, aged 28.’

Niv, incoherent with grief, flew back immediately to Los Angeles for a memorial service on 29 May, and another was held the same day in London at the Grosvenor Chapel in South Audley Street, where Grizel, Joyce and her husband
were among the mourners and the list of the others read like an extract from
Debrett’s Peerage
and included two dukes and duchesses, a marchioness, two earls, a countess, a viscountess, six knights, and twelve titled ladies.

Perhaps Primmie had a premonition that she did not have long to live because on 5 March, just a few days before she had sailed for America, she had made a will leaving everything to David: just £381 19s 9d, the equivalent of little more than £9000 in 2003.

David was utterly devastated by Primmie’s death. Grizel, Andrew Rollo, and every one of Niv’s friends told me that he never got over it and that the tragedy haunted him until his own death thirty-seven years later. ‘He thought he would have been happier if she had lived,’ Grizel said, and Jamie said, ‘It never went away. He didn’t talk about my mother very much, but lots of people wrote to him after she died and he kept their letters in a shoe box in his office where he could go and look at them if he wanted to.’ Roddy Mann said that even twenty and thirty years later ‘it came up again and again when we’d had a few jars. He’d say how much he’d loved her and how cruel it was, and he was never happy again.’

‘He was so sad after she died,’ said Pinkie. ‘He cried a lot, but never in front of me, and he couldn’t bear to be near the Pink House, so I didn’t see much of him.’ The boys could not, of course, understand but little David must have picked up the atmosphere of misery and wondered where his mother was. ‘He loved her but he never cried or said “where’s Mummy?” ’ said Pinkie. One evening he suddenly asked his father if Mummy had gone to heaven. ‘Yes,’ said Niv. The little boy looked up at a twinkling star. ‘I can see Mummy’s eye,’ he said.

Niv heard that Ann Todd was in New York and although she was married to Nigel Tangye he called her and asked her to fly out to Los Angeles to be with him for a couple of weeks. ‘He became very bitter against life and fate,’ she said, ‘and he was in a very, very bad state.’ He moved in with the
Fairbankses for several weeks and it was Mary Lee Fairbanks who answered all the letters of condolence because he could not bring himself to do it. ‘He was terribly distressed,’ said Fairbanks, ‘and remained so for a very, very long time.’ For decades Niv could not bring himself to tell his sons where their mother’s ashes were buried and let them think that her grave was in California until Jamie went to his aunt’s funeral at Huish and was startled to discover his mother’s grave there.

Work helped a little, even though
Magnificent Doll
was such a dreadful movie. Clark Gable was a rock, having gone through similar misery after Carole Lombard’s death. Fred Astaire took him golfing, and the despised Rex Harrison gave him a Boxer puppy called Phantom and visited him at weekends. Phyllis Astaire and Lilli Palmer tried to cheer up the boys by painting Mickey Mouse and Dumbo the elephant on their nursery walls, and Joan Crawford took them and Pinkie in for a while before they moved to Ronnie Colman’s ranch up the coast at Montecito until the Pink House was ready for them. Niv ‘had the door to the cellar at the Pink House permanently locked and he would never let anybody go down there’, said Pat Medina, and although it seems surprising that he did not sell the house immediately, it had no insupportable memories for him since Primmie had never lived there and maybe it comforted him a little to be somewhere that she had loved so much. Work began on it and when one room and the kitchen were finished he moved in, but when the container full of furniture and china that Primmie had chosen so carefully arrived from England almost everything had been smashed – and then somebody stole a little case containing a few of her most precious possessions: childhood mementoes, bits of jewellery, photographs, the letters he had written to her during the war. ‘That night I nearly gave up,’ he said.

Eventually he, Pinkie and the boys moved into the house and Bob Coote into the cottage. ‘The house wasn’t very big, so the boys slept with me,’ said Pinkie, ‘but there was a lovely pool, beautiful gardens, and a view across the sea. And
everything was pink – the house
and
me!’ To try to dull the awful pain of being a widower Niv rose early, worked late and the boys saw little of him. He dreaded going home to their eager, trusting little faces and would walk on the beach in the dark for hours, tormented by loss and memories, hoping that the pounding Pacific surf might wash them away, and he lay awake sleepless for much of the nights. ‘I looked after the children for two years after she died,’ Pinkie told me. ‘They were lovely boys. Young David was full of fun and tried to be naughty, but I was strict and made him behave and have table manners. Jamie was my baby, my favourite. They were absolutely different: David was inclined to know it all whereas Jamie was more a baby and a bit clingy.’