Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Lawford had little time to grieve. A few weeks after Lilian’s death, fifteen years after his graduation from Sandhurst, Lieutenant Lawford was summoned to war. The British were fighting the Boers in South Africa, and he was called up to accompany General Horatio Kitchener into battle.

  The Boer War, prompted by Britain’s desire to gain governmental control over the Dutch Boers who had settled in the Transvaal region of South Africa — and the gold and diamonds that had recently been discovered there — lasted two years. The British won, but most observers considered their conduct of the war unbecoming and the cause unjust. The Crown, however, looked upon its victory as further proof of Britain’s world dominance and the righteousness of its imperial designs.

  However questionable the context, Sydney Lawford proved himself in battle as he had so longed to do. His repeated acts of valor won him the Queen’s Medal with three clasps and a promotion to colonel. In 1907, with Britain once again at peace, Lawford became the assistant commandant of the School of Mounted Infantry; he was named its commandant in 1912.

  By early 1914, rumors of a European war were sweeping the world. Britain and the continental powers all increased their military expenditures during the spring, and after the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria, war seemed inevitable.

  Sydney Lawford, by this time commander of the Essex Infantry Brigade, would certainly be called upon to serve, despite his age — he was approaching his forty-ninth birthday. While he waited, he decided to get married again. He had been a widower for fourteen years, and he was a lonely man.

  For several months he had discreetly courted Muriel Williams Watt, the beautiful thirty-four-year-old wife of Walter Oswald Watt. Fourteen years Sydney’s junior, Muriel was the daughter, from his first marriage, of Sir Hartley Williams, the present husband of Sydney’s sister Jessie.

  Muriel obtained a divorce from Walter Watt late in 1913, and on May 20, 1914, she and Sydney were married at the Register Office in London. The Lawfords enjoyed a three-month honeymoon, during which Muriel sat for the American painter John Singer Sargent. When Britain declared war on Germany on August 4, Sydney was made a brigadier general and named to command the 22nd Infantry Brigade, 7th Division. He was put in command of the 41st Division in 1915.

  It was in this, the Great War, that Lawford truly distinguished himself. Seven times he was dispatched to lead men into battle in various parts of the world, and stories of his bravery became commonplace. The tale of his ride atop the headless horse was always guaranteed to astonish.

  Lawford’s service to his country in World War I won him the French and Belgian Croix de Guerre and the Russian Order of St. Vladimir. At the end of the hostilities in 1918, he was promoted to the rank of major general and knighted for his valor by his friend King George V, who had ascended to the throne on the death of his father, King Edward, in 1910. Thenceforth, Sydney Lawford would be known as Sir Sydney Lawford — and his wife properly addressed as Lady Lawford.

  Sydney and Muriel, as May and Ernest Aylen had before them, repaired to India not long after the war ended. There, Sir Sydney was promoted again, to lieutenant general, and he was appointed the general officer commanding for the Lahore District. Shortly thereafter, Major Ernest Aylen was named his deputy assistant director of medical services May later claimed that she hadn’t purposefully become pregnant to ensnare.

  MAY LATER CLAIMED THAT SHE didn’t purposefully become pregnant to ensnare Sir Sydney into marriage and gain the title Lady Lawford. About her discovery that she was two and a half months pregnant, she said: “Oh, God! Even too late for an abortion. . . . Peter was an awful accident!”

  But there are strong indications to the contrary. According to Katharine Eden, “The great sadness for Uncle Ernest was that he was very anxious to have a child and she refused, all the years of their marriage. She must have known what precautions to take because she never had a child before. But she wanted very much to be Lady Lawford. She was a social climber, and to have that title was supremely important to her.”

  When May told her husband that she was pregnant by his commanding officer, Aylen was, as Katharine Eden understates, “very upset.” Still, May implored him to remain married to her until the baby was born in order to give the child legitimacy. Shattered, but a gentleman to the core, Aylen agreed.

  Once the baby was born in September 1923 the painful reality of May and Sydney’s adultery could no longer be avoided. A month after the delivery, the child’s birth certificate was registered in the county of London. Major Ernest Vaughan Aylen was listed as his father, and his full name was given as Peter Sydney Ernest Aylen. (May at least gave the general top billing!)

  The next day, October 9, 1923, Aylen sued May for divorce, charging her with adultery and naming Sir Sydney as correspondent. On November 2, Muriel Lawford sued Sir Sydney for divorce on the same grounds. Less than a year later, both divorces were final.1

  At that point, details of the divorces became a part of the public record, and it was then that May’s worst fears were realized. “There it was, splashed across the center pages of one of the tabloid newspapers,” Katharine Eden recalled. “Pictures of Uncle Ernest, awful pictures just after he’d come out of prison, and a picture of Aunt May in a fancy dress. It was a tremendous scandal because Sir Sydney Lawford was a very famous war hero and it just wasn’t done for a senior officer to seduce a junior officer’s wife.”

  In matters of sexual mores, the England of May and Sir Sydney’s generation and social strata had raised hypocrisy to the level of art. It was less important to be faultless than to appear so, and discretion was admired, even rewarded. But once a scandal surfaced, once adultery was charged in court, the participants became social pariahs. A divorce ruined a man’s career, destroyed a woman’s reputation. Even the innocent parties in divorce cases were routinely shunned, no longer received at court or invited to “proper” receptions.

  Thus was May Aylen’s dream of a new life among the highest level of society washed away by the purple ink of London’s scandal sheets. Sir Sydney was forced to retire from His Majesty’s army. He and May were certain to be ostracized by all the best Londoners, their son branded a bastard. May couldn’t bear the thought of it.

  There was only one thing to do. On September 11, 1924, a week after their respective divorces were final, May — nearly forty-one but listing her age as thirty-nine — and Sir Sydney — soon to be fifty-nine — were married in a civil ceremony at London’s Caxton Hall. Immediately afterward, they bundled up one-year-old Peter and sailed across the English Channel to France.

  THEY SETTLED INTO A LARGE SUITE of rooms in an exclusive residence hotel in Deauville, an elegant watering place just across the Channel in northern France. They hired a married French couple who served as valet and maid, and a German governess for Peter.

  May was devastated by the vilification she had suffered in London, and she sought solace in alcohol more than she ever had before. Sir Sydney, who never drank to excess, stayed clear of his wife when she was drunk and let the episodes pass. There was no help to be had for alcoholism in this era or for long thereafter; it was a family secret to be kept at all costs. It was easier to live with May’s problem than it might have been because long periods passed when she wouldn’t touch a drop. But then something might set her off and she would drink herself into a stupor.

  Peter’s care had been left to nurse Hemming for the first year of his life, and after that almost exclusively to his governesses. Miss Hemming had strapped Peter’s good right arm down occasionally to force him to use his underdeveloped left one, and as a result he grew up ambidextrous.

  May avoided the more unappetizing aspects of infant care; she refused to hold her son until he was bathed, talcumed, and perfumed. “I never wanted Peter,” she said, and she made the general promise that there would be no more babies. Because Sir Sydney was so much older, May said, he “did not bother me much,” and the couple never had sex after Peter reached age three.

/>   If May Lawford had to have a child, she would have preferred a daughter — and she often treated Peter as though he were a girl. By the time he was three, he was a beautiful child with brilliant blue eyes and thick eyelashes. It was a lingering Victorian practice to dress male toddlers in girls’ clothes, and May followed the custom publicly until Peter was four or five. She then continued it privately until he was eleven. May later claimed that Peter “used to fancy himself a girl” and enjoyed wearing female clothing. If so, the seed had been planted by May herself.

  Peter was raised to respect his parents, but there wasn’t an excess of love in the Lawford household. The little boy never ran to his father for a kiss, never threw his arms around him, never climbed on his shoulders for a piggyback ride. Peter felt great affection for his father — “I adored him” — but he showed it in the only way he could: he saluted the general.

  May hired a succession of governesses and tutors to mold Peter into a perfect little boy who would not embarrass her in front of the society people she had begun to court in France. She carefully interviewed Peter’s prospective guardians to screen out those whose manner or diction did not meet her standards and who, she suspected, would not be diligent in teaching Peter the points of etiquette that, she said, “are the hallmark of a cultured gentleman.” Among the infractions Peter was punished for over the years were licking his fingers, failing to take off his hat indoors, eating between meals, interrupting someone else’s conversation, and going through a door ahead of a woman. (May dismissed one governess who allowed Peter to do this, and then made him write “Ladies First” fifty times.)

  As Peter grew older, his life became very regimented. May’s dietary rules were strict; she was an early proponent of “health foods,” and Ernest Aylen’s specialization in dermatology had taught her what foods to avoid for clear skin and general good health. Peter was fed “plenty of vegetables and fruit,” May said, and “only one hundred percent whole wheat bread.” He was allowed meat just three times a week and was forbidden to eat pastry, sweets, or canned food of any kind. When he was a little older, May did allow him white wine with lunch and dinner, in keeping with the continental custom.

  Taught that “cleanliness is next to godliness,” Peter bathed in the morning and the evening and gargled twice daily (and after every swim in a pool or the sea) with a mixture of salted water, bicarbonate of soda, and a mild disinfectant. He also had to wash his hands with disinfectant before each meal. Peter never suffered from the normal childhood illnesses, May said, because of this regimen.

  With clothes that were handmade by King George V’s tailor, Peter was, by five, a perfect Little Lord Fauntleroy. Sailing with his parents aboard the ship Bremen, Peter walked up to the queen of Spain, bowed low, and asked her, “Would Her Majesty deign to dance with me?” Charmed, the queen consented.

  Carefully, Lady Lawford was re-creating her life and her family for maximum social stature. During Peter’s childhood, the Lawfords traveled extensively, first throughout Europe and then around the world. Everywhere they went, May corrected people who called her Mrs. Lawford: “It’s Lady Lawford.” She never corrected anyone who called her Lady May — a form of address she would have been entitled to only if she had been born to a father who held a title by heredity — because that mistake elevated her standing. After May’s marriage to Sir Sydney, Peter was referred to only as Peter Lawford, although Aylen remained his legal surname.

  Late each fall, as winter’s cold enveloped northern France, the Lawfords left Deauville and traveled south to the warmer climes of the Riviera, where they rented villas in Monte Carlo, Nice, Cannes, and Menton. With his first five years spent mainly in France, Peter’s native language was French. Both his parents spoke it fluently; May, in fact, called him “Pierrot” for most of his childhood. Later, it was a struggle for him to master English.

  The little boy also grappled with loneliness. He had no brothers or sisters to play with, and his family’s nomadic life-style made it difficult for him to make or keep friends. His personality didn’t help the problem. Surrounded almost exclusively by adults, and well aware of his mother’s obsession with etiquette, Peter was quite unlike most other children his age.

  May remembers sailing from the Bahamas to Australia when Peter was six, accompanied this time by a French maid for May, Peter’s tutor, and Sir Sydney’s manservant. May had taken advantage of a half fare for Peter that required him to eat with the other children aboard ship rather than with his parents. When the time came for his first meal, Peter donned a suit and silk stockings up to his knee breeches. Proud of his outfit, he twirled three times for his mother’s inspection, then was off to the children’s dining room.

  In a matter of minutes, he returned. He refused, he announced, to eat with the other children because of their appalling manners. They were playing with their food and talking with their mouths full, he said: “I’d rather not eat than have dinner with those little barbarians.” Pleased by her son’s good taste, May arranged to pay full fare for Peter, and he joined his parents at the captain’s table. May later said, “The captain was both annoyed and amazed at Peter’s proper manners.”

  Young Peter’s attitude was not one to endear him to potential playmates. He had an artistic bent and could spend hours by himself drawing finely detailed pen and crayon renderings of the ships he sailed on and the sights he had seen (the Arc de Triomphe was his favorite). He composed rhymes and performed little skits in front of a mirror in his parents’ stateroom.

  To Sir Sydney’s disappointment, the boy expressed no interest at all in the military; he had announced at age three that he wanted to be an actor and a dancer. Even at four, Peter had been aware that he was a general’s son, and one day he had asked his parents and the servants to gather around to hear a recitation: “There was a boy/Who was born to fight war/But he wanted to become an Actor/Because he didn’t believe in wars.”

  Insulated, withdrawn, young Peter was shunned by most children his age, and he sought closeness wherever he could find it. While his family was staying in Monte Carlo, Peter’s parakeet died. He was devastated, and he gently buried the bird under a tree on the grounds of the villa the Lawfords had rented. Thirty years later, he astonished his manager during a trip to Monaco when he showed him exactly where he had put the bird in its final resting place.

  The Lawfords spent a good deal of time in Monte Carlo, principally because Sir Sydney had developed a taste for gambling, which was illegal in France and Italy but was practiced amid pomp and elegance in Monaco. He liked nothing more than to play golf during the day and roulette in the evening in the vast Belle Epoque game room with its ornate crystal chandeliers that dropped sixty feet into the room. After one particularly successful turn at the tables he handed May a diamond bracelet he had just won; another time he collected twelve thousand dollars on one spin of the wheel.

  Peter was fascinated by the casino and its patrons, all dressed in formal evening clothes, especially since as a child he wasn’t allowed in. “I used to stand outside,” he recalled, “and the glimpses I caught as the doors opened and closed made it all seem so exciting, gay, and glamorous.”

  The boy’s travels — the Lawfords made three trips around the world before he was fifteen — gave him a priceless education in the diversity of cultures and in languages (he could speak French, English, Spanish, and some German). He was quick-witted and intelligent, but his formal education was spotty. He never attended school; rather he was taught the rudiments of writing, reading, and mathematics first by his governesses and then by a tutor who sometimes traveled with the family. He longed for knowledge; at six, in Deauville, having just learned English, he met a boy his age who could speak French, English, Italian, and Spanish. Dejected, he went to his parents and asked to be taught Spanish and Italian.

  May long maintained that Peter’s education was superior to any he could have received at an institution. “I do not send him to school,” she said, “because I do not think any school I
have heard of pays enough attention to languages or religion — I once heard an Oxford don get the worst of an argument with a Paris porter.”

  But May was deluding herself, and Peter knew it. Because he never went to school, he said later, he always felt inferior. At seven, he couldn’t read as well as other children, and his skills remained so poor that he finally tried to teach himself. He kept a dictionary by his nightstand and studied two new words every evening before going to sleep.

  When Peter was about ten, May decided that he was “quite unfitted for any career except art,” so she ordered his tutor to cut mathematics and Latin from his lessons and substitute dramatics. These and other gaps in his education made Peter feel inadequate for the rest of his life.

  His mother, Peter later said, was “cotillionesque, easily swayed by other people.” She believed in astrology and reincarnation, and wrote of seeing UFOs in the skies and ghosts in her bedroom. For a time, she embraced a series of religions, among them Christian Science and Zen Buddhism. “Naturally, I was dragged along,” Peter said — and, impressionable as he was, he became fanatically religious.

  When May sent him to a Christian Scientist practitioner to be cured of hay fever, he returned after the sixth visit carrying a bouquet of flowers. Aghast, May braced herself for a night spent listening to Peter’s sneezes. “Oh no,” he told her. “We’ve trodden on the devil and no more hay fever.” He then recited a Scientific Statement of Being and buried his face in the flowers. He was, May professed, never again troubled by allergies.

  Somewhat later, Peter refused to play with a little girl aboard ship because she was wearing denim slacks. “She’s an abomination unto the Lord!” he cried. “It says so plainly in the twenty-second chapter of Deuteronomy!”