Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Peter was hired as an extra on George Sidney’s unusual war drama, Pilot #5, starring Franchot Tone, Gene Kelly, Marsha Hunt, and Van Johnson. Tone played a flier chosen for a suicide mission against the Japanese in Java. The story is told in flashbacks and it ends as he embarks on his final mission. Sidney decided at the last minute that he wanted the film to end more emotionally than with just a shot of Tone’s plane taking off. Noticing Peter, a beautiful boy barely out of childhood incongruously dressed in the vestments of war, the director saw his ending. He shot Peter in tight close-up, his angelic face etched with concern as his eyes follow the plane’s liftoff toward his fellow flier’s certain death. The young airman senses that he is watching his own future as well.

  George Sidney’s wife, Lillian Burns, was the head drama coach at MGM, and she remembers vividly the impact Peter’s close-up had on all who saw the film. “Peter’s face was just magical,” she says. “He had tremendous charisma in that scene. The look on his face, in that one shot, caused him to be put under contract to MGM.”

  An MGM contract! Peter was beside himself when he signed the document on June 7, 1943. He was still a teenager, and he could scarcely believe its terms: a one-year agreement with an option for a second year, it paid him one hundred dollars a week with a guarantee of forty weeks’ work a year and an increase to two hundred dollars a week if it was renewed. (It was a good contract; by contrast, Janet Leigh’s starting salary in 1947 was fifty dollars a week with three- month renewal options.)

  The other terms were all in MGM’s favor, and it was clear that Peter Lawford was now the property of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He could not do stage or radio work, or act for any other studio, without MGM’s permission, but MGM could lend him out to anyone else whenever it so chose without additional compensation to him. Should his appearance or his voice change in any substantial way, or should he become unable to work, or should he refuse to perform in any picture for any reason, he could be summarily suspended without pay. In fact, the contract could be terminated at any time, for any reason, at MGM’s whim.

  His private life was no longer his own; another clause informed him that if he committed “any act or thing that would tend to bring him into public hatred, contempt, scorn or ridicule or tend to shock, insult or offend the community,” he could be suspended or terminated. Even his name was on tenuous footing. Not only could the studio change it, they could change it as often as they liked: “We may advertise and/or publicize him under his true name, or under any fictitious, assumed, professional or stage name or names we may select from time to time.”

  But Peter paid no heed to the fine print. He was ecstatic to be an MGM contract player, guaranteed four thousand dollars a year, with the vast resources of the finest studio in the world at his disposal. He would receive acting lessons, dancing lessons, singing lessons. He would be taught to fence, taught to feign a fistfight, taught to use the lights and the cameras to his advantage.

  To Peter’s thinking, Metro was by far the best studio he could have signed with, and not just because it was the most prestigious and had the most facilities to help him become a success. Far more important, MGM was the perfect studio for Peter Lawford’s temperament. It was a fiefdom in which Louis B. Mayer’s serfs did whatever he demanded, and in return had all of their needs completely taken care of. Peter had grown up with maids, butlers, tailors, and valets; at MGM he had them all once again.

  For most of his life — lonely as it had been — Peter had been swathed in a cocoon of creature comforts. At MGM, he would enter another cocoon, one that sat on two hundred acres in Culver City and employed three thousand men and women to manufacture America’s dreams out of papier-mâché, makeup, paint, and tinsel. Now, in June 1943, many of these people, among the most talented artisans of their kind in the world, would begin to make their studio’s newest contract player’s dream a reality: they would turn Peter Lawford into a movie star.

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER PETER SIGNED his contract, he and his parents were taken to meet Louis B. Mayer. Sitting in the waiting room outside Mayer’s baronial office, Peter thought about the power the mogul now held over his life and trembled like the Tin Man waiting to see the Wizard of Oz.

  Mayer had risen from a scrap dealer to a theater owner to a film distributor by the age of thirty, when he made a fortune by obtaining distribution rights to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation in 1915. He then went into film production, and in 1924 he merged his Louis B. Mayer Productions with Metro Pictures and Goldwyn Pictures to form MGM.

  What Mayer created was a virtual movie factory. There were a stable of actors, a stable of directors, and a stable of writers, all of whom were paid weekly salaries and had to be available at any time for any project.

  On its surface this structure seems incompatible with artistic accomplishment, but Mayer was able to produce some of the greatest films of the thirties and forties by this method. The reason was money. MGM was the only studio to show a profit during the early years of the Great Depression, when Paramount, Twentieth Century-Fox, and RKO went bankrupt. In 1937 its net profits were over fourteen million dollars, a success level the studio maintained for almost a decade afterward. Thus it had the money to create lavishly produced “event” movies with the finest talent available. Metro was able to pay such high salaries (some of its writers, directors, and stars were being paid five thousand dollars per week in the 1930s) that the studio — even at its dehumanizing assembly-line worst — could attract just about any talent it wanted.

  An emotionally complex man, Louis B. Mayer was a thick- skinned, hard-driving businessman who could summarily suspend a wayward employee, but who also took such a personal interest in all of his contractees that they might have been his children. Robert Taylor remembered Mayer as “kind, understanding, fatherly, and protective, always there when I had problems.” But the screenwriter and wit Herman Mankiewicz said of Mayer, “He had the memory of an elephant and the hide of an elephant. The only difference is that elephants are vegetarians and Mayer’s diet was his fellow man.”

  On that warm June day in 1943, all the nineteen-year-old Peter Lawford knew was that he was about to meet the most powerful man in Hollywood, a man in whose hands his future rested. Mayer’s environment certainly reflected his position. Just as MGM’s artisans and technicians built wondrous worlds for the movies, so had they created Mayer’s office as a monument to his power. It was so large that Sam Goldwyn quipped, “You need an automobile to reach the desk.” Furnished entirely in white — the walls, the carpet, the enormous round desk, the grand piano — it was designed to inspire awe of the man who sat behind the desk. And it did.

  The man himself was disconcertingly short, but one forgot that when confronted by his intense black eyes, which instantly sized up all who entered his domain. Now, he was appraising his newest contract player and his parents, and he liked what he saw. Mayer had been a poor Russian Jewish immigrant, and he was fascinated by the trappings of wealth and nobility. The Lawfords, of course, had nothing but the trappings, but Mayer didn’t know that. He heard the clipped accents and May’s liberal use of French phrases; he saw Sir Sydney’s regal bearing; he was told of the general’s valor in war and his knighting by King George. It was impressive stuff, and Mayer was duly impressed. He called May “the thoroughbred mare” and later told her — during an argument — that she was the only person in the world from whom he would take such verbal abuse.

  Now, however, all was pleasantries. Mayer startled Peter when he characterized his employment at MGM as an act of patriotism and told him that despite his 4-F classification, Peter could help the war effort by doing the best work he could in the war dramas in which the studio planned to cast him. Peter assured Mayer that he would do his best for MGM and world peace, and finally he and his parents were ushered out of Mayer’s office.

  He was scheduled for his first full day of employment the following Monday. For a week, he listened as May harangued him with her lists of dos and don’ts: Play by the ru
les. Do what the studio tells you. Don’t make trouble. Work hard. Don’t jeopardize this opportunity. Get along. Don’t let me and your father down. Don’t disgrace the family. And above all, Peter, make sure you do whatever you have to do to become a star.

  Peter Lawford was perfect fodder for the MGM personality manufacturers. He was pleasant, agreeable, and malleable: all the things May told him he must be to become a success. And Metro was primed to mold him. That first Monday on the lot, he was taken to Howard Strickling, MGM’s chief of publicity, who listened to his life story and knew instinctively that it was good copy. Was there anything, Strickling asked him, anything at all, that he was holding back? Anything that might prove, well, embarrassing if the press got hold of it? “If you tell me now, Peter, I can make sure that anything like that stays out of the press. Or if we can’t keep it out of the press, I can make sure it’s revealed in the most positive light possible. I don’t want any surprises when I open my morning paper.”

  Peter wasn’t exactly sure what Strickling was talking about. He knew nothing about his questionable paternity, so that issue was never raised. He did tell Strickling that his family was very low on money, that their funds had been frozen in England because of the war. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Strickling told him. “We’ll play up the sacrifice for the war effort angle. By the way, why aren’t you in the service?” Peter told him about his arm injury, and Strickling instructed him to bring that up in every interview. “We don’t want people wondering why you’re not fighting this war.”

  Confident there weren’t any skeletons in the Lawford family closet, Strickling assigned one of his thirty-five minions to take Peter around to the various studio departments for his introduction to the MGM star-making machine.

  The first stop on Peter’s rounds was the wardrobe department, where he was outfitted for his first studio portrait session. The wardrobe woman took one look at him and knew he’d be easy to fit. He had by now filled out into a perfectly proportioned young male — he was over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and slim hips — and clothes would hang well on him. She took his measurements (fifteen-and-a-half-inch neck, thifty-five-inch sleeve, twenty-nine-long pant, thirty- eight-regular jacket), created a file on him for future reference, and dressed him in a light tweed, double-breasted brown suit with a subtle plaid pattern, a light blue shirt, and a dark maroon tie with a tiny brown print.

  Now he was ready to be photographed. In Clarence Sinclair Bull’s studio, some of the world’s most glamorous people had been made to seem even more beautiful. Some needed to have their hairlines changed with electrolysis, their teeth fixed, their noses bobbed, or their hair dyed. One of Bull’s staff photographers looked Peter over approvingly from top to bottom — there was very little that would have to be done with this young man. His hair was thick and lustrous, his hairline perfect. His eyebrows were full but they didn’t meet over the top of his nose as some heavier brows did — no need to trim them. His teeth were straight and white, his smile engaging. “What about my nose?” Peter asked self-consciously. “It’s a little big, isn’t it?”

  The photographer assured Peter that his nose was no problem, and told him that his flawless skin reflected light beautifully. (May’s strict dietary rules had paid some dividends.) It was obvious that Peter’s face was made for the camera. He posed with delight for a series of portraits, acting for the still camera as he might for the motion picture — now thoughtful, now happy, now sullen, now boyish. When the photographer saw the results of one of the “looks” he had tried on Peter — his hair severely slicked down, his expression pouty — he quickly rejected it, and the surviving portrait shows why: he looked much better with his wavy hair left natural and his engaging smile allowed to shine.

  After a quick lunch at the commissary, Peter was whisked away to meet Lillian Burns, MGM’s drama coach, who usually coached actors only for specific roles, but who often made herself available on Friday afternoons to anyone who wanted her to critique a scene they had prepared. Miss Burns — as everyone on the lot called her — was favorably impressed with Peter. “Peter was talented,” she recalled. “He had a real personality, and ability. He was charming and likable. But he was also the most insecure of the many young people that I’ve known — he had almost an inferiority complex.”

  Miss Burns didn’t feel that Peter needed her help very much. “I don’t think you can teach acting. You can teach the fundamentals — voice, diction, speech, body movement — the technical things. But Peter didn’t really need that. He had good diction, a good voice. What Peter needed was self-development; he needed help in becoming his own man.”

  With its extraordinary policy of producing one picture per week, MGM had plenty of movies in which to place a neophyte contract player. They put Peter to work immediately as a last-minute extra in Girl Crazy, but they viewed him as valuable chiefly for productions requiring Brits, and there weren’t any of those on the lot at that time.

  And so, after appearing in just one MGM picture as an extra since he’d signed his contract, Peter was lent out to other studios. It was a common — and lucrative — practice: if Metro didn’t have enough work for one of its players, his services would be provided to another studio, usually at considerably more per week than MGM was paying him. The studio, of course, pocketed the difference. Over the next few months, Peter worked at Columbia in Sahara, starring Humphrey Bogart; at Universal on Flesh and Fantasy, with Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson; and at Twentieth Century-Fox in Paris After Dark, with George Sanders.

  Finally, in September, Metro went into production with exactly the kind of film they had hired Peter Lawford for. On his twentieth birthday he was added to the cast of a prestige war picture, The White Cliffs of Dover, featuring Irene Dunne, one of Hollywood’s top stars, and Alan Marshal. Peter grew excited as he read the script. The role was an important one, his biggest and most challenging since A Yank at Eton: he would play John Ashwood II, the adult son of an American woman and an English nobleman killed in World War I. Young Ashwood is now fighting in World War II and his mother fears she will lose her son to this war as she did her husband to the earlier conflict.

  Peter found working with Irene Dunne a rewarding experience. Forty-three and the veteran of such classics as Cimarron, Magnificent Obsession, and Show Boat, Dunne took a liking to the young Englishman playing her son. She later recalled him as “a dear, dear sweet person,” and — as he freely admitted — she helped his performance tremendously. “Miss Dunne would take me to the rushes each evening,” he told an interviewer in 1945. “She’d have me watch a scene I’d worked in. Then she’d point out my mistakes. . . . Afternoons, while we were working in the picture, she’d rehearse with me. She was so patient and kind. No young actor has ever been helped so much by a star.”

  In the film’s final scene, Ashwood, wounded in a battle, lies in a hospital as his mother, a nurse, comforts him. The scene, Peter knew, would require a good deal of dramatic skill, and he did turn to Lillian Burns for help before the filming began. The coaching he received from both Dunne and Burns paid dividends; Peter is very touching as the dying soldier.

  When The White Cliffs of Dover was released in May 1944, it met with tremendous critical acclaim and netted MGM a healthy profit of $1.7 million. More important to Peter, he got the kind of notices young actors dream about. The Los Angeles Examiner critic’s comments were typical: “The news of the picture is an English newcomer, Peter Lawford, who heads straight for the top in his role as the son grown to manhood. Peter is a different and interesting personality who possesses all the qualities that contribute to eventual stardom.”

  He kept the clipping in his wallet and walked on air for a week after it was published. But he was brought rudely back down to earth when he went to see the film at a local theater. He was surrounded, he recalled, by a group of noisy children. “Just as I was dying on screen I heard the sound of popcorn rattling out of bags. Then a voice behind me called out, ‘He’s not so
hot.’”

  SEVEN

  On June 7, 1944, Peter’s contract was picked up for another year, and his salary was raised to two hundred dollars per week. This translates to nearly two thousand dollars a week in 2011 dollars, and for the Lawfords, who just three years earlier had been living on twenty-five dollars a week and tips, it was real affluence. To celebrate, Peter bought a 1940 Mercury convertible four-door sedan, blue with red leather interior, and began the systematic purchase of a sparkling new wardrobe. The Lawfords moved a few blocks, to a much nicer but still “tiny” house on Comstock Avenue.

  There were no other major expenditures. May didn’t trust the money to keep coming, and she didn’t want to risk their future security. Most of Peter’s salary went into a savings account, and the Lawfords continued to live almost as frugally as they had for the past five years. They were still without servants, and each member of the family had specific chores to do around the house. May usually prepared supper, but Peter often cooked breakfast. He also mopped floors and made the beds. Sir Sydney, seventy-eight now, was spared anything heavier than dusting and helping to dry the dishes.

  Peter’s life at this point was a study in dichotomy. On the one hand he was a young man who still lived with his parents, hadn’t cut his mother’s apron strings, and was responsible for household chores. On the other, he was a rising young star beginning to make an impact in the glamour capital of the world. He had quickly become a staple at Hollywood’s swell night spots — such as the Mocambo, the Trocadero, and Ciro’s — where he was never refused a drink although he wasn’t yet twenty-one.

  Hollywood’s nightlife was confined to the weekends, but what weekends they were! The biggest movie stars in the world partied to the hilt, their merrymaking as much business as pleasure. It was important for stars — both fledgling and veteran — to be seen by fans and photographed for movie magazines. Couples the studio wanted to promote as romantic pairs would dance cheek to cheek at Ciro’s; a long- married celebrity who wanted to scotch separation rumors might dine with his wife by candlelight at “the Troc.”