Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  The third week of May, the Lawfords boarded the liner Bremen from a dock in Le Havre and crossed the Atlantic to New York. From there they would take another ship down the Atlantic coast of the United States, through the Panama Canal, and up the Pacific coast to Los Angeles. They remained in New York for a few days before boarding the ocean liner to Los Angeles, and Peter begged his parents to take him to Radio City Music Hall to see the latest Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical, Shall We Dance? As they walked along Fifty- seventh Street, with Peter in a suit with short pants and white socks, a group of about ten “street urchins” (as Peter later called them) threw a rock at him and yelled, “Hey, white socks!”

  Instinctively, Peter picked the rock up and threw it back. The youths threw several more objects at the Lawfords, and things nearly got out of hand before his parents pulled Peter away. “It was ten to one,” Peter said. “They would have eaten me alive.” When they got back to their hotel, Sir Sydney said to Peter, “Good work,” proud that his son had defended himself. Then he told May that Peter was too old to wear shorts and white socks. He never had to again.

  On June 2, the Lawfords embarked from a dock on the Hudson River for the voyage to Los Angeles. Aboard ship, they met pretty, eighteen-year-old Louise Barker, who had just completed her freshman year at Radcliffe and was traveling to the West Coast with her mother.

  Louise retained vivid memories of Peter Lawford: “I was enjoying the company of the ship’s young purser, Charles Stuart, and Peter was definitely cramping my style because he kept following me around like a puppy dog. He had a crush on me, I guess, and it seemed that whenever Charlie and I were looking for a little privacy (respectable as it was!) Peter was always around. Our main conversation with him was to tell him to walk aft until he heard a big splash!”

  Louise remembered Peter as “a good-looking boy, but pale and thin, with a very fragile manner about him. He was very shy, and seemed sad and lonesome. I felt sorry for him, but I didn’t have much time for anyone else because I was so preoccupied with Charlie Stuart.”

  Distracted though she was, Louise could readily discern the relationship between Peter and his mother. “She didn’t let him have any independence. She never seemed to take her eyes off him. She dominated him so thoroughly that he was afraid to call his soul his own. She was just smothering him.”

  To the other passengers aboard the ship, the Lawford family group presented a curious tableau. As Louise recalled, “We didn’t know what to make of them. Here was this frail little boy, who seemed much younger than fourteen, dressed in blue blazers and gray flannel pants and looking like he’d just got out of Groton or Middlesex, and these two older people who looked more like his grandparents than his parents. We all thought they were his grandparents at first.”

  Louise’s mother was skeptical of the Lawfords’ aristocratic airs, because of May’s constant talk about Peter’s becoming the next Freddie Bartholomew. “My mother had the feeling that nobody with a legitimate title would be pushing her child to Hollywood. But she liked the Lawfords, and she said that if they were phony they were putting on a great act because they spoke so well and were so well mannered.” Louise never saw Peter Lawford again, although her mother and May kept in touch through letters. Years later she still felt guilty about the short shrift she gave Peter during their passage together. “He wanted companionship more than anything else,” she said. “I felt very sorry for him.”

  WHEN PETER AND HIS PARENTS ARRIVED in Los Angeles, they stayed at the Ambassador Hotel for several weeks before settling into a flat in the Coronet Apartments on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. May wasted not a day before she telephoned every agent in Hollywood, explaining that her son had been called “the Jackie Coogan of Britain” and was now available for films in the States. Most of the agents were unresponsive. One who agreed to see Peter was Ruth Collier, a woman who had met Lady Lawford in London.

  The Lawfords took their son to Ruth’s office. After introductions were exchanged, May told Peter to play his ukelele for Mrs. Collier. Peter took the instrument out of its black case and began to strum, but his gnarled fingers became entangled in the strings and he stopped, his face burning with embarrassment.

  Despite his poor musical performance, Collier thought Peter had potential and she made inquiries on his behalf at the studios, without immediate success. Several months later, however, she learned that MGM planned a film entitled Lord Jeff, about an orphaned British boy disguised as an aristocrat by a gang of thieves as part of a robbery. The boy is caught and sent to Dr. Barnardo’s, a home for wayward youths, to prepare him for service in the British Merchant Marine.

  The film’s director, Sam Wood, had already cast Freddie Bartholomew as Lord Jeff and Mickey Rooney as an antagonist who becomes a friend. But he still needed a group of boys behind the two stars to play lesser roles as their classmates. Wood hired fourteen-year-old Peter on the spot. Peter remembered thinking, Mickey Rooney — wow!

  Although Peter’s part was a small one (he had only a few lines and received seventh billing), the MGM publicity department immediately took him under its wing. They made much of his tender age (twelve, according to one press release), his war-hero father, his English pedigree (his parents were usually called Lord and Lady Lawford), his flawless manners, and his world travels.

  Peter was a colorful young man, and profiles began to appear long before the release of the film. On Christmas Eve, he was brought to a party at the Beverly Hills home of Louella Parsons, the formidable Queen of Gossip with the power to make or break movie stars. She was holding court that holiday eve and made a lasting impression on Peter. “I was terribly frightened,” he said years later.

  He was intimidated too by the enormity of the MGM studios. The sprawling production facilities in Culver City dwarfed anything he’d known in England or France, and so did the giant studio’s reputation. Louis B. Mayer’s personal fiefdom, MGM was the most successful manufacturer of movies in the world; its oft-quoted boast was that its roster contained “more stars than there are in heaven.” With contract players like Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Norma Shearer, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, and Spencer Tracy, its claim wasn’t just braggadocio. And its profits, more than those of the other eight major film companies combined, made it a behemoth, the most desirable employer for any aspiring actor, director, or craftsman. Metro, everyone knew, could afford the most impressive talent in the business.

  Peter was as starry-eyed and starstruck as any young newcomer to Hollywood had ever been. He asked every actor he met for an autographed photo and carefully pasted the pictures in a scrapbook that he kept among his valuables for the rest of his life.

  When the Lord Jeff shoot began in February 1938, Peter’s nervousness was eased by Sam Wood, who had directed Jackie Coogan in his first starring film, Peck’s Bad Boy, in 1921 and knew how to soothe the fears of juvenile actors. He was also helped by Mickey Rooney, who at seventeen was the number-four box-office Star in America. (He reached the number-one position the following year.) Rooney coached Peter with his few lines and taught him how to act natural as part of a scene’s background. The two became inseparable friends, and Peter was soon emulating the high-spirited, mischievous Rooney.

  May, checking on Peter once after midnight, peered in his bedroom and found him gone, the window wide olpen. She telephoned Mickey’s mother, and when she checked, Mickey wasn’t in his room either. The next morning both showed up on the set on schedule; that night Peter got a stern reprimand from May and a lecture about showing more responsibility now that he was making an MGM picture.

  Toward the end of filming, Freddie and Mickey brought Peter to one of the Sunday brunches Louis B. Mayer often gave for his actors at his sprawling, hacienda-style mansion on the beach in Santa Monica. If one was invited, one had to attend; the gatherings featured a groaning board of bagels and lox, herring in sour cream, and other Jewish noshes. There might be a few songs
or a skit, and often an unreleased MGM picture was screened.

  Peter stayed in the background, too frightened to introduce himself to the MGM paterfamilias, but he did meet fifteen-year-old Judy Garland, who would remain one of his closest friends, and twelve- year-old Jane Withers, on whom he developed a crush. (When he and Jane went on a chaperoned “date,” Peter couldn’t take his eyes off Jane’s gun-toting bodyguard.)

  Peter was exhilarated to meet these young actors who were doing what he had yearned to do for so long, and he knew that he belonged with them, that he wanted to stay in Hollywood the rest of his life. As he looked out the windows of the Mayer house at the Pacific Ocean waves crashing against the shore just a few yards away, the thought crossed his mind that this was exactly the kind of house he’d like to live in someday.

  LORD JEFF WAS RELEASED to uniformly good notices in June and earned MGM a tidy profit of $360,000. Peter was mentioned in several reviews as part of a strong supporting cast, and he should have moved on to additional roles, but that didn’t happen. There was no work for a British boy in any film in the months after Lord Jeff wrapped. Ruth Collier was able to find some radio work for him, but within weeks catastrophe struck: Peter’s voice started to change. Its pitch would alter alarmingly at the most inopportune times, often in the middle of a line of dialogue; sometimes he sounded most like Alfalfa in the Our Gang comedies. Acting assignments were out of the question until Peter’s voice settled down again. Crushed, Peter realized that his budding “stardom” would have to be put on hold.

  One of the reasons May was so eager to push Peter into movies was that the Lawfords were once again in financial difficulties. Sir Sydney had invested a good deal of his money in several highly questionable business ventures (one was to use sugar beets in the construction of houses), and now he could no longer afford to keep his family in Hollywood unless Peter brought in some money. Since he couldn’t, the general decided to take his family back to England.

  They had booked their transatlantic passage on the Rex when May and Sydney got very bad news in a letter from a friend in London: Freddie Bartholomew, in a magazine interview, had spoken of the 1924 scandal surrounding Peter’s parents. The article strongly implied that Peter was illegitimate. May had thought this unpleasantness long behind her, and she was shattered. She had been treated as nobility, she had been accorded respect. Peter seemed destined, within a few years at the most, for a bright career in movies. Now, if the family returned to London, everything threatened to fall apart.

  Depressed and angry, May had a few drinks and canceled their booking without telling Sir Sydney. When he found out, he confronted a drunken May and she grew furious. Sydney tried to convince her as soothingly as possible that her reaction was too extreme, that they didn’t have the money to stay in America, but she would not be swayed. Sobbing, frantic, she screamed at him that she couldn’t bear the thought of hearing snickers behind her back. “I hate England! I hate all those awful snobs! Go back yourself if you want to! I’ll never set foot in England again!”

  Peter would lie in his bed and “listen to them fighting, night after night.” He heard things that confused and puzzled him. He thought they were talking about him sometimes, but he couldn’t be sure. He knew that if his mother had been drinking, the row could last all night, and he would hear the angry words until suddenly there was silence. He would sleep fitfully and arise the next morning to find his mother passed out in her wing-backed chair. After a week of such arguments, Sir Sydney finally gave in — they would stay in America. What won him over to May’s side was when she told him — sober, when Peter was out of the house — that she never wanted their son to find out that there was any question about his parentage.

  If they were to stay in the United States, there was little recourse for the family but to spend the summer on Long Island, where they could save money by staying with a relative of Sir Sydney’s. They moved to Manhasset, and it was there that Peter Lawford, for the first time, lived among average American teenagers for an extended period. He found it very difficult.

  Muriel O’Brien was a perky, athletic seventeen-year-old who lived across the street from the Lawfords in Manhasset. A year later, she would be an ice-skating star at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and she conducted a jitterbug dance school for the neighborhood kids. For thirty-five cents they could come and spend the whole afternoon in Muriel’s class. Soon after his arrival in Manhasset, Peter became one of her pupils.

  Harry McNaughton, an actor who had inscribed a photograph of himself to Peter in Hollywood, was a friend of the O’Briens’, and he told Muriel that Peter was poised for a career at MGM. Muriel, however, was unimpressed with his talents. She told her mother, “This kid’s never going to make it. He has no rhythm, he can’t sing, he’s off key, he can’t dance. He’s just never going to make it — I don’t care what MGM does with that guy.”

  But Peter worked hard for Muriel and improved under her tutelage. “He would do anything I wanted,” she recalled, “because he had a case for me, although I didn’t know that at the time.” Years later, after Peter became a star, he told a reporter that his first love was an ice-skater on Long Island. Muriel hadn’t realized he felt that strongly about her. “When I read that I thought, ‘You loved me?’”

  If Harry McNaughton and Muriel’s parents had had their way, she would have become Mrs. Peter Lawford. “They had me set up for a relationship with Peter before I even met him,” Muriel said. “Harry would talk as if Peter was close to the king of England. Everyone was impressed with that. My family were social climbers extraordinaires, and they wanted to see me marry Peter and become part of British royalty. They wanted me to be Mrs. Lord Fauntleroy or something.” Muriel could not have been less interested. “It wasn’t my thing. I was a jitterbugger, and I liked that kind of guy, not some English idiot. That’s the way I thought in those days.”

  So did the other teenagers in Manhasset, who mocked Peter’s manners, his accent, his impeccable grammar. “Peter tried to be one of the guys,” Muriel recalled, “but he was teased terribly, and he was very sensitive about that.”

  The fall of 1938 hardened into winter and New York’s weather turned icy, so May and Sydney decided to move to the warmth of the exclusive enclave of Palm Beach, Florida, one of the winter playgrounds of the wealthy. A friend of Sir Sydney’s offered them his sprawling villa for the season, complete with servants and a chauffeur, at no cost. As Muriel O’Brien later put it, “They didn’t have much money, but you know how royalty always gets put up and never pays for anything? It was like that with the Lawfords.”

  Palm Beach was a spot the Lawfords could never have afforded without the largesse of their friends — and the more socially conscious of their acquaintances, who hoped to become their friends. The winter “season” at Palm Beach consisted largely of debutantes’ coming-out balls, holiday balls, and balls-just-for-the-sake-of-balls. Invitations were voraciously sought to the best parties; one’s inclusion on a select guest list could make one’s social status — and exclusion could spell disaster.

  Sir Sydney and Lady Lawford joined the ranks of desirable invitees immediately upon their arrival. Ambitious hostesses loved to stress their titles as they introduced them to the other guests, because their presence elevated the proceedings. During their first year in this rarefied atmosphere, the Lawfords made the acquaintance of some of America’s most monied families — the Mellons, the Fords, the Vanderbilts. But they didn’t have a chance, that season, to meet the most talked-about local clan of all. The Kennedys had begun to winter in Palm Beach the year before, but in 1938 they were three thousand miles away in London, where their patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, was serving as America’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.

  FIVE

  Ever since her arrival in the United States a year earlier, May had kept herself abreast of events in England through letters from friends and relatives and with subscriptions to London newspapers and magazines. Now, as she sat under a huge st
riped umbrella on the veranda of her friend’s elegant Palm Beach home, the Atlantic Ocean glistening before her, her temper became as hot as the Florida air. She had received a letter from her sister, and what Gretta was telling her about America’s new ambassador to Great Britain was the catalyst for her lifelong hatred of Joseph P. Kennedy and his family.

  One of the great American success stories of the age, Joe Kennedy had attained everything but what he craved most: political power and social position. The son of poor Irish-Catholic immigrants, he had amassed a huge fortune through businesses that ranged from bootlegging to movies (acquiring, in the process, one of Hollywood’s legendary stars, Gloria Swanson, as a mistress). Now, thanks to a hundred-thousand-dollar contribution to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s successful campaign for the presidency in 1932, a four-year stint as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and some hard lobbying on his part, Joe Kennedy had won the appointment he hoped would finally assure his arrival at the very top: the ambassadorship to Great Britain.

  Now he would dine with King George VI; his advice would be sought by politicians on both sides of Parliament; his invitations to the homes of dukes and earls would be envied; his daughters would be presented at court during the most lavish social events in the world. It was the most prestigious position in the diplomatic sphere, and no Irish-American had ever held such a lofty post in England. How better for Joe Kennedy to thumb his nose at the Boston Brahmins who had looked down on him and his family than to have their counterparts — in many cases their relatives — in Britain paying him homage?

  In March 1938 Joe Kennedy arrived in England, followed shortly thereafter by his wife and seven of his nine children (the two eldest, Joe Junior and Jack, stayed behind to finish their college terms). Immediately, the Kennedy clan took London by storm. They moved into the six-story, thirty-six-room embassy mansion at 14 Prince’s Gate in fashionable Knightsbridge, which had been donated by J. P. Morgan as the American ambassador’s residence. The rooms were decorated in the French grand style; the great reception hall was a duplicate of the hall at the Palace of Versailles; the Pine Room — Mrs. Kennedy’s personal reception area — boasted rare English and French tapestries on the walls. An enormous marble staircase led from the reception quarters to the ambassador’s study.