Peter Lawford

by James Spada

May couldn’t control Peter’s career, so she tried to control his personal life. She was cold and rude to any young ladies he dared befriend. Molly Dunne once phoned Peter before she had met May and said, “Hello, Mrs. Lawford, may I speak to Peter?”

  May replied, in her stiffest English manner, “Mrs. Dunne, it is Lady Lawford. Peter is not here. I will put you on the list.” Then she abruptly hung up.

  If Peter dated a girl more than a few times, May would give her the cold shoulder when he brought her to the house, and after she left May would harangue Peter about all her bad qualities. Peter, according to one girlfriend, soon learned the value of reverse psychology: after three dates and much vitriol from May, he told her he didn’t like the girl at all. “We figured the best way to get May to lay off me was for her to think Peter wasn’t interested,” the woman recalled.

  May resented all of Peter’s close friends, not only the women, and she could be just as rude to his male pals. When Peter introduced Joe Naar to May, he told her, “This is my friend Joe Naar. He’s in television.” May said to Naar, “Would you mind taking a look at my set?” Naar despised her: “She was the worst person I ever met. She knew I was Jewish, and she didn’t like that. She made anti-Semitic remarks — not in front of me, but to Peter. She was racist, the kind of person who is quick to label people — gays, Jews, you name it. She was a bad human being.”

  Sometimes May’s superior airs were laughable. Dick Livingston came to the Lawford house one afternoon with a friend. The Lawfords had a spinet piano in the hall, and Dick’s companion sat down and started to play it. After a few moments, Lady Lawford walked over and said, “Please, I don’t mean to insult you, but that’s a very special piano and we only let very special people play it. Would you mind stopping?” The man at the keyboard was André Previn.

  May’s self-righteousness often brought her to heights of hypocrisy; when she learned that Evie Wynn planned to divorce Keenan, she stopped speaking to her. Peter’s friends took their revenge by tormenting her. They would telephone and say, “Hi, Mrs. Lawford! Is Peter there?” Then the conversation would progress like this:

  “It’s Lady Lawford.”

  “Oh, okay, Mrs. Lawford. May I speak to Peter?”

  “It’s Lady Lawford!”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. Well, thanks, Mrs. Lawford.” Then they would hang up.

  May’s rudeness to Peter’s friends and lovers had the opposite effect from the one she intended: it pushed him farther away from her. He now avoided her at all costs, hated to go home, and barely spoke to her when he was home. Her fear of losing him grew stronger, worsened by her increasingly frequent drinking bouts. When her mind was clouded by alcohol, May’s paranoia knew no bounds; she alternated between self-pitying despair and anger.

  Anger won out. Late one night, boozy, maudlin, May made up her mind to punish her son for the way he had hurt her, to hit back at him for abandoning her. What she did next to Peter made every indignity to which she had ever subjected him pale in comparison.

  IT WAS AT THE HEIGHT of Peter’s affair with Lana Turner that May telephoned Louis B. Mayer and asked to see him. Mayer had learned to avoid May whenever possible and asked if they couldn’t discuss whatever was on her mind over the phone. “No, Mr. Mayer,” she replied. “This is a highly important matter and I must see you in person as soon as possible.”

  Mayer agreed to see May the next day, and when she and the general sat down in front of the studio head’s huge circular desk she did all the talking. Dispensing with pleasantries, she came immediately to the point. “Mr. Mayer, there is no use to beat about the bush. I’m concerned that my son is a homosexual.”

  More than May realized, her remark touched a sore spot with L. B. Mayer. The mogul was vociferously homophobic, suspicious of any unmarried actor who didn’t “chase skirt.” He was prudish about all sexuality and woefully ignorant about same-sex attractions. But while May’s suspicions about Peter disturbed Mayer, they didn’t surprise him. There were a number of actors on the lot he knew to be homosexual or bisexual; the studio routinely sent them on arranged dates, even into arranged marriages, to keep their sexual preferences secret. If someone got into trouble with the vice squad — Lucille Ryman, head of talent at MGM, recalled being awakened in the middle of the night because a famous actor had been caught in flagrante delicto with an eight-year-old boy — the studio was right there to hush things up and keep a lucrative career from being destroyed.

  As in Victorian England, appearances were much more important than reality in the Hollywood of the forties. Studios demanded that their stars adhere to the morality clauses in their contracts, but if they didn’t, their transgressions could be covered up with payoffs to newsmen and even to police officials. If a star’s peccadilloes couldn’t be kept from the public, his or her career was usually over, without so much as a helping hand from the studio.

  Double standards were rampant. William Randolph Hearst destroyed any number of promising careers with the sensationalistic coverage his newspapers gave to Hollywood scandals, yet he expected everyone to turn a blind eye to his affair with Marion Davies, the mistress he tried valiantly to turn into a movie star. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, and Darryl Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century-Fox, were among the most vocal moralizers and most notorious womanizers in Hollywood, often demanding sexual favors from the very women they expected to convey virginal public images. Even Louis B. Mayer wasn’t able to resist the temptations of the flesh when his wife, Margaret, took ill; he had several extramarital affairs.

  Homosexuality, however, was truly taboo. If an actor was caught in a lewd act with another man, the studio would attempt to cover it up only if he were a big enough or promising enough Star. Then he would usually be forced to enter into a sham marriage to preserve appearances. Sometimes, there was a cynical exchange program between a studio and the press. In the late 1950s, when reporters wanted to reveal Rock Hudson’s homosexuality, Universal Studios convinced them to lay off Hudson by offering up another handsome young gay actor; the revelations about him effectively ended his career.

  The intimations May Lawford was making about her son were thus very serious ones. Mayer listened to May’s suspicions and replied, “What makes you think that, Lady Lawford?”

  “Because of some of the actors he’s been hanging out with. He’s constantly with them. And I know that several of them are homosexual.”

  “What would you like me to do?”

  “There must be something you can do! Can’t you find out if he is or not? Send him to the Menninger Clinic and have his glands tested. Then you’ll have your answer — yes or no!”

  Mayer assured May that he would call Peter in and have a talk with him. The next day, Peter sat in front of Mayer, nervous and puzzled by the summons. He and L.B. had had a touchy relationship ever since the last time Mayer had called him into his office, to dress Peter down for ignoring Mrs. Mayer in the commissary. “But Mr. Mayer,” Peter had protested. “I’ve never met your wife and I didn’t know who she was.” Mayer wasn’t placated — any employee of his, he reasoned, should take the time to learn who his wife was.

  At this next confrontation, Mayer was too embarrassed to be direct. For the first few minutes, Peter had no idea what he was talking about.

  “We know about your problem, Peter,” Mayer stammered. “It’s okay. We can help cure you.”

  “Cure me of what, Mr. Mayer?”

  Mayer remained oblique. “We have other young men on the lot who have your problem, Peter, and we’ve been giving them hormone shots to help them — extract of monkey glands, I think it is. We can do that for you, too — and we can fix you up with some beautiful women, and — ”

  Suddenly, Peter understood. His face burned with anger but he remained as controlled and polite as possible. “Mr. Mayer, if you’re suggesting that I’m a homosexual, you’re very much mistaken. I’ve been seeing Lana Turner for months. How could I be homosexual?” Mayer wasn’t convinced. “I think you should take th
e injections, Peter. We have several actors on the lot who are taking them and they seem to be working — ”

  Now Peter let his voice rise. “Mr. Mayer, I’m telling you I don’t need any hormone shots. Call Lana Turner and ask her if you want to. If you insist on this, I’ll go to work for another studio. Good day.” He rose and walked out of the office.

  The strength of Peter’s indignation impressed Mayer favorably, and his intuition told him that Peter was being truthful. Still, he did call Lana. When she told the boss that Peter was a perfectly good lover, Mayer relented. He apologized to Peter, but refused to tell him who or what had stirred his concern.

  A year later, Peter found out. Although May always maintained that Mayer had asked to see her, and not the other way around, Peter knew better. He was appalled, and he never forgave her. He couldn’t believe that his mother would jeopardize his career at MGM — and the family’s livelihood — just to get back at him for some real or imagined injustice. After this incident, Peter’s feelings against May hardened. Molly Dunne soon realized that “Peter hated his mother. He really intensely disliked her.”

  “She was a dreadful woman,” recalled the producer Arthur Julian, another of Peter’s friends. “She combined all the worst elements of Jewish mothers and Italian mothers, and all the classic bad mothers were in her.”

  Peter continued to live with May and Sir Sydney for the next eight years — unusual for a single, sexually active young film actor with a good income, but particularly so for a man who (he later admitted) “loathed” his mother. The reason Peter remained at home was his concern for Sir Sydney, who turned seventy-nine in November 1944.

  Peter was disturbed by the general’s dependence on May, principally because he felt she didn’t treat him well. She was a youthful, sprightly sixty-one, and her attitude toward her husband, in Peter’s view, was one of “having to put up with that old man,” as though she resented the fact that taking care of him tied her to the house and restricted her socially. Whenever May treated Sir Sydney in anything less than the patient, respectful, and loving way Peter thought she should, he fumed at her and agonized for his father.

  He tried to convince the general to move with him into another house — without May. Sir Sydney refused. However badly May treated him, she was his wife and his caregiver. And Sydney knew that no matter how much Peter loved him, no matter how concerned he was, he would never be able to give him the time and attention that May did, even if resentfully.

  The situation gnawed at Peter. Jean MacDonald, a girlfriend, remembered him “sitting in my house teary-eyed because of his mother’s unkindness to Sir Sydney. He said he wished things were better at home for his father, wished that he lived in a happier house. He felt that in his old age Sir Sydney was a captive of Lady Lawford and governed by her whims. It weighed on him pretty heavily, but there was only so much he could do.”

  THAT WAS ESPECIALLY TRUE in 1944 and 1945 because MGM kept Peter very busy. He played a juicy role as Lord Thornley, a young man enmeshed in an affair with an older woman in Mrs. Parkington, an immensely popular reteaming of Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, but his part was close to eliminated in the cutting room. “I could have fallen through my seat at the preview,” he said.

  He fared better as Anthony de Canterville in the comedy The Canterville Ghost, with Robert Young, Charles Laughton, and the precocious moppet Margaret O’Brien, but the picture was a flop. Late in 1944, MGM assigned Peter his most important picture since The White Cliffs of Dover: a lavish screen adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s brilliant, epigrammatic Victorian morality tale The Picture of Dorian Gray.

  The studio had paid $849.87 for the screen rights to the book, a modern classic since its publication in June 1890. As Wilde described Dorian — a destructive hedonist whose youthful beauty is “a form of genius” — Peter would have been perfect for the title role. But the producers opted instead to give Dorian an otherworldly quality and cast screen newcomer Hurd Hatfield in the part. Among a distinguished group of actors that included George Sanders and Angela Lansbury, Peter was given a part written into the script by the director, Albert Lewin — that of a young suitor to Donna Reed.

  Dorian Gray was a difficult shoot, especially for Hatfield, who was in just about every scene and spent five months working on the film, a very long time in those days. The intensity of his role caused him to blow up at Peter one afternoon. “Peter was always happy-go-lucky, joking on the set,” Hatfield later recalled. “I came out of a very rigorous theater training, and Peter just didn’t seem serious enough about the work to me. He was always on the telephone, making dates or whatever.”

  Finally, Hatfield got short with him. “Peter!” he shouted. “Get off the phone, for God’s sake! We’re starting a scene and it’s very difficult unless we all pull together.” Peter shaped up after that, but when Hatfield later asked him out to lunch, Peter declined. Thereafter, said Hatfield, “he treated me like I was a leper.”

  The Picture of Dorian Gray was released on March 1, 1945, more than a year after it began production. MGM, worried about its commercial appeal, tried to sell it as a thriller, and its ad copy screamed: “Behind his fascinating face lived the soul of a killer!” In fact, the picture turned out to be first-rate, with a daring enough script for the time (although the novel’s homoerotic undertones were suppressed), lavish production values, and strong performances. Peter’s role as the young suitor was decidedly secondary, but he played it perfectly — and he looked so handsome in the film that Hatfield suffers in comparison.

  The reviews were mostly glowing, and the picture received three Academy Award nominations (Harry Stradling’s moody cinematography won). But the studio’s concerns about its box-office potential were well founded. American audiences did not respond to it, and while it did better overseas (particularly in Britain), it lost money.

  Dorian Gray was very nearly the start of still another Lawford acting career: Sir Sydney’s. When the general visited Peter on the set one day, Albert Lewin spotted him and told him he’d be perfect to play a minor character in a party scene. Would he be interested? The general harrumphed a few times, but said he might be. That night, Peter was touched by his father’s admission that he had hesitated because he was afraid he would offend his son. “I thought you might not like it,” he said. “Sort of like barging in on your territory.”

  Peter replied that he thought it was a wonderful idea, and the general spent two days filming his part. At a preview of the film in Pasadena, Peter and his parents waited to catch sight of Sir Sydney. “We sat on the edge of our seats so we’d be sure not to miss him,” Peter recalled. “It was great excitement. But we never did see him.

  The sequence he was in had been cut, and nobody thought to tell him. Poor thing, he was crushed.”

  Sir Sydney did appear in small roles in several films after that, among them The Amazing Mr. Nordill, The Suspect, and Kitty. “He’s very puffed up about the whole thing,” Peter gleefully told a reporter. “He even has an agent. He spends his days sitting by the telephone waiting for a call from the studio.”

  ON MAY 7, 1 945, GERMANY SURRENDERED under the relentless onslaught of British, American, and Russian troops, and the European war was over. On August 15, the conflict that had killed fifty million people ended when Japan unconditionally surrendered after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two weeks later, Peter, Keenan and Evie Wynn, Kay Thompson, and Chill Wills put on a variety show for returning fliers at a Santa Ana, California, Air Force base. The hour-long show featured Kay singing “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe”; Keenan as a country boy trying to direct draftee Peter to mythical Floogle Street for his army physical; Chill Wills demonstrating the “super-deluxe, aromatic, acrobatic potato peeler” that denudes defenseless spuds until they’re “naked as Gypsy Rose Lee”; Peter and Keenan as politicians who rifle each other’s pockets as they pass on the street; and the whole company in a finale — “M-O-T-H-E-R spells ‘Sergeant’ because he’s been mo
re than a mother to me.”

  The guys loved it, the performers had a good time, and Peter felt a real sense of accomplishment in entertaining men who had been through the horrors of hell defending their country.

  “LASSIE WAS A VICIOUS BASTARD!” Peter said years after he made his next picture, Son of Lassie, a wartime saga set in England with the canine superstar. “You want to know how we did those scenes [of affection between man and dog]? I had raw meat stuck under my arms and under my shirt and rubbed on my face and stuck up my clyde, and that animal was eating me alive! What you saw on the screen, what you thought was the true love of a dog for his master, wasn’t that at all . . . no, it was sheer animal hunger!”

  When Peter first found out that MGM had assigned him to the picture, however, he was thrilled. The studio was giving him an extraordinary opportunity: for the first time, he would be the topbilled star of a motion picture, the actor on whose shoulders the film rested. It was a prospect that both excited and frightened him; he began to suffer from back pain, a problem he would frequently have in the future when under stress.

  The box-office appeal of Son of Lassie was virtually guaranteed. Producer Sam Marx had scored a huge hit in 1943 with Lassie Come Home, the heartwarming story of the beautiful collie’s struggle to be reunited with her owner, the young Roddy McDowall. Eleven-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, in her second movie, played a moppet who sets the animal free.

  For the sequel, Peter’s first Technicolor production, he and June Lockhart were cast to play the adult versions of Roddy and Elizabeth.3 Pal, a male dog who was called “the only Star who could play a bitch better than Bette Davis,” played the dual roles of Lassie and her pup, Laddie.

  Peter played Joe Carraclough, a strapping young man strongly attached to Laddie, an adorable if none-too-bright animal. When Joe leaves home for RAF training, his girlfriend (Lockhart) promises to take care of Laddie, but the dog runs forty miles to follow Joe. After battles with Nazi soldiers and raging rapids, man and dog are reunited, Joe returns to his girl, Laddie rejoins his mother, and everyone lives happily ever after.