Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Location filming took place at Patricia Bay, near Vancouver, British Columbia, in August and September 1944. Peter did his own swimming in the treacherous, thirty-two-degree waters of the Columbia River, a task made more difficult by his limited use of his right arm. He pointedly did not ask for a double to swim for him, however, because he never wanted his bosses to feel he wouldn’t be up to the physical demands of whatever role they wanted him to play. He knew that such an attitude could severely limit his career.

  Peter found himself amused during filming by the star treatment accorded his canine costar. While he went without a dressing room, he said, “Lassie was checked into a two-bedroom suite, accompanied by a whole retinue — sort of like a small Frank Sinatra unit.”

  The amusement turned to anger, however, when he realized that the studio provided Lassie with safety measures not accorded him. Shooting the scenes in the rapids, Peter noticed that Pal had been securely tethered to shore with rope to make sure he didn’t drown, while Peter was left to his own devices. Neither was Peter pleased to learn that Pal had been insured for a million dollars. “I had the suspicion that if I was insured at all, it was for a substantially smaller amount.”

  There was no love lost between actor and dog; Peter nicknamed the film “Son of a Bitch.” Even while doing publicity for the picture, he expressed reservations about working with an animal: “As an actor you haven’t a dog’s chance when you act with a dog. You can be acting for all you’re worth, sure you have audience attention. Then the dog wags its tail, or tosses a soulful glance, and the spectators whoop and coo. The human actor might as well not be there.”

  Moviegoers, of course, knew nothing of the antipathy between Peter and Pal. They went to see Son of Lassie in droves, and even the critics approved. The film became one of the top-grossing movies of

  netting MGM a $1.5 million profit. Peter’s performance drew the highest critical praise of his career — he played the role with “boyish charm and simplicity,” summed up one reviewer. But Lady Lawford was unimpressed: her only comment to Peter was, “I couldn’t tell you apart — both with that long shaggy hair. He’s prettier in Technicolor, anyway.”

  The public responded strongly to Peter’s first full-length movie role. Shortly after Son of Lassie was released in June, his fan mail, which had amounted to dozens of letters a week, jumped to hundreds, and movie magazines started to pay attention to him. He won a Modern Screen readers’ poll as the most popular actor in Hollywood (and was awarded “a handsome engraved Gruen watch”). It was a remarkable feat considering the competition, and a sure indication that young female moviegoers, at least, had sat up and taken notice of him.

  3 Lockhart, of course, went on to play the mother on the 1950s TV show Lassie.

  NINE

  Another strong sign of Peter’s new box-office appeal came when Twentieth Century-Fox asked MGM to lend them his services for Ernst Lubitsch’s movie version of a bestselling novel, Cluny Brown. The director of Garbo’s Ninotchka, among other classics, Lubitsch’s “touch” was golden in Hollywood, and Cluny Brown was a top Fox title about a Czech author who falls in love with a plumber’s niece. With Peter offered third lead after Charles Boyer and Jennifer Jones, and with the studio receiving a thousand dollars per week for his services (they pocketed eight hundred dollars of it), Metro realized that they had a potential superstar in Peter Lawford.

  Fortuitously, Peter’s contract came up for renegotiation just as the Fox loan-out request came in. He had agreed to one six-month extension at two hundred fifty dollars per week in June, but it was now time for MGM to decide whether or not to make a real commitment to him. There was little debate. Even though the war was over and established stars and newcomers alike were again in abundance, Peter had proved himself more than just a draft-proof substitute. He was developing into an audience favorite, and MGM wanted to keep him.

  On December 5, 1945, Peter, at twenty-two, signed a seven-year contract beginning at five hundred dollars per week, with six yearly renewal options. Again, forty weeks of work a year were guaranteed. The first time Peter’s option was picked up, his salary would be increased by two hundred dollars, the next two times it would rise by three hundred dollars, and the last two by two hundred fifty dollars. If the studio exercised each of the options, by the end of the contract’s seven-year term Peter would be earning two thousand dollars per week. He was also given a ten-thousand-dollar signing bonus.

  It was a star’s contract, and Peter was well on his way to proving himself worthy of it. Cluny Brown was released in June 1946, to good reviews and strong box office. The Variety critic praised Peter: “He shades his comedy with feeling.” Four days after the film’s premiere, another Peter Lawford film opened across America. Two Sisters from Boston was a lavishly produced light musical in which Peter played the love object of the sisters, June Allyson and Kathryn Grayson. Lauritz Melchior, the Danish heldentenor, performed light-opera duets with Grayson, and vaudeville veteran Jimmy Durante weighed in with “G’wan Home, Your Mudder’s Callin’.” Reviews for the film and for Peter were excellent, and box-office receipts were solid.

  During the filming, Peter found himself quite taken with June Allyson, whom he had met in passing on the lot a few times but had never gotten to know. One of MGM’s fastest-rising ingenues in the girl-next-door mold, she had captured the hearts of fans across the country with her marriage to the popular Dick Powell. (In the early forties, she had dated Joe Kennedy’s son Jack during one of what he called his “hunting expeditions” for girls in Hollywood. “I didn’t know his father was an ambassador and I certainly didn’t know I was being pursued by a future president of the United States,” Allyson later wrote. “We laughed a lot. He reminded me of Peter Lawford — both had the same charm and fun-loving ways.”)

  Peter worked his own magic on June early in the Two Sisters shoot, and he was a bit surprised when she responded to his advances, because her “perfect marriage” to Powell had been tremendously publicized. According to Jackie Cooper, “Peter was crazy about June Allyson. He really loved her.” June was attractive to him, Peter explained, because she was “helpless, completely” and acted “as a spur to the protective and resourceful male in me. She’s a little China doll, June is. She’s sweet, she’s nice, she’s intelligent.”

  The couple occasionally stole chances to be together at Cooper’s house. “Peter used to bring a number of famous married ladies over to my house,” Cooper recalled, “so they could keep company there. A little kissing and hugging, that was all. Peter felt very comfortable at my place, and I never embarrassed him about it.

  “Just so it would look good,” Jackie continued, “June Allyson would have her husband pick her up every so often — so that it would seem like she was just visiting me and my wife.”

  Whenever June and Dick had a party, Peter would be invited — but June insisted he bring a girl with him as a decoy. “Peter used to tell me how hard it was for him,” Cooper recalled, “to go to June’s parties and be there with her but not be able to touch her or hold her hand or talk to her the way he wanted to. Yeah, he was just crazy about her.”

  As discreet as Peter and June were, rumors about their romance did crop up, and soon blind items were appearing in the gossip columns: “Metro executives are worried about two up-and-coming stars who are seeing a lot of each other while her husband is out of town.” Peter’s bosses forbade him to make a trip to New York because June was going to be there at the same time. “This thing is out of hand,” Peter said they told him, “and it will explode and hurt you both if you are seen in New York at the same time.”

  In her autobiography, June would say only that she “was often over at Peter Lawfords house. I never was as close to him as I was Van [Johnson]. But I grew very fond of him in a mildly romantic way. We had a lot of fun. I loved his devil-may-care attitude, and his British accent fascinated me.”

  In any event, the romance was over before it had a chance to “explode” into the public eye a
s MGM had feared it might, and it ended with ill feelings on both sides. According to Peter’s later manager, Milton Ebbins, “Peter hated June Allyson. He used to say the most uncomplimentary things about her.”

  WITH THE VIRTUALLY SIMULTANEOUS release of Cluny Brown and Two Sisters from Boston, Peter was a “hot item” in the summer of 1946. In the latter film, a box-office hit, Peter was presented for the first time as a romantic leading man, a situation just about guaranteed to turn a good-looking young actor into a bobby-sox idol — and that’s exactly what happened. He appeared on his first two movie magazine covers that summer, and Photoplay ran articles on him in seven of the year’s twelve issues. His fan mail rose to over a thousand letters a week, surpassing that of Van Johnson, at the time considered the most popular teen idol on the MGM lot.

  With all this attention focused on him, Peter’s fans sought him out as never before. His phone number had been listed, but the number of fans’ calls became so great that May found herself on the telephone most of the day. Peter changed the number, and the telephone company agreed that it would be unpublished. The first day the new number was installed, the Lawford phone rang off the hook. Peter called information, asked for his own number, and was given it without hesitation. “That’s one hell of a confidential number!” Peter shouted at the startled operator.

  He was usually left unbothered at the beach, but one day as he waded into the surf he noticed a young girl following him. He went out a little farther; so did she. Finally both of them were up to their necks, and the girl held her arms aloft. When she got closer to him, Peter saw that she was carrying an autograph book. He watched her approach him, struggling to keep her head above water, and laughed out loud when she asked, “Do you have a pencil?”

  Peter Lawford was now bonafide movie star — and he was expected to act like one. With his signing bonus, he bought a new car, an enormous Chrysler convertible, maroon with wine-red leather interior and yards of richly grained wood. He spoke so proudly of it to columnist Dorothy Kilgallen during an interview that she wrote, “For a moment I expected him to whip out his wallet and show me a picture of it lying on a white fur rug.”

  His most lavish expenditure was for something no movie star could be without: a home of his own. The studio kept reminding Peter that it wouldn’t do for one of MGM’s top attractions to live in a tiny rental, and after a few weeks’ search Peter found a place he loved: a two-bedroom ranch-style home at 11571 Sunset Boulevard in West Los Angeles, near Barrington Avenue. The white, red-shuttered home offered a separate “apartment” for Peter (on the opposite side of the house from his parents’ bedroom), comprising a bedroom, bath, and den. There was a large flagstone porch in the front and a small garden where Sir Sydney could grow his beloved mignonette flowers. All three of the Lawfords fell in love with the house, and Peter agreed to buy it.

  MGM’s parent company, Loew’s Inc., offered Peter a mortgage on the house — a common practice, according to Jackie Cooper. “That was a trap that Mr. Mayer was very careful to see that everyone got into — they’d say, ‘We don’t want you to live in anything less than a lovely home befitting a star. We’ll take care of the mortgage and you’ll owe us.’

  “People were tickled to death that they could get a great house and appear very successful. The money they owed the studio kept piling up, and then they’d have to stay another year if the studio wanted them. If the studio didn’t want them, they took the house away.”

  But Peter wasn’t thinking in those terms in August 1946 — he was indeed “tickled” to sign a forty-five thousand dollar deed of trust with Loew’s Inc. at four percent interest (the going rate; no bargains here) in order to purchase the house.

  The payments on the mortgage were $162.50 a week for four years and two hundred dollars a week for the next four years, all to be deducted from Peter’s weekly paycheck. Thus, in the last five months of 1946, Peter’s salary was reduced by more than thirty percent by his mortgage payments. In 1947, when his salary rose to seven hundred dollars per week, the payments were more manageable.

  Peter was excited about the new house — the first he had ever owned — and he immediately set out to decorate it. He hadn’t been able to exercise his creativity through any channel but acting since his childhood stabs at drawing; now, he worked delightedly as a decorator, and exhibited a talent for it.

  In the ultramodern living room, Peter accented gray carpeting and walls with a maroon leather sofa and recliners. Lady Lawford wasn’t too happy with Peter’s choices (the gray, she complained, belonged in a mortuary), and she insisted on putting out things she’d had shipped from England after the war: autographed pictures of the king and queen of Belgium, the duke of Windsor and the king and queen of Sweden in ornate frames; small Oriental objets d’art; and antique wooden pieces. This compromise between two distinct tastes left the Lawfords with an extremely eclectic environment.

  Peter’s den, however, was entirely his own. His bookshelves contained an actor’s handbook by Stanislavski. His record collection was predominantly jazz. On the walls were photographs of surfers and military aircraft, and an autographed portrait of Frank Sinatra. There was also a preview reaction card mailed to MGM after a showing of Son of Lassie. It read: “Peter Lawford wonderful. Nuts to Van Johnson.”

  DURING PETER’S RISE IN HOLLYWOOD, he became friends with much bigger stars than his own position in the motion picture industry would have suggested. He attended so many parties in the midforties — and threw so few of his own — that he gained a reputation as “America’s guest.” Rocky Cooper, for one, didn’t mind. The wife of Gary Cooper, she had met Peter in 1944 at Keenan and Evie Wynn’s house in Brentwood, which was directly across the street from the Coopers’. Rocky and Gary took to Peter immediately. “Everybody was into tennis,” Rocky recalled, “and whenever he would visit we’d be playing. He played very well. So that was an entree for him right there. And those were the days that Gary and I would do a lot of entertaining, and gosh knows you couldn’t find a more attractive ‘extra man’ than Peter. He’d come and be beautiful and play tennis.”

  Rocky Cooper became a lifelong friend of Peter’s — so close in fact that rumors began of a romance. Peter did speak glowingly of Rocky in an interview in which he chose her as Hollywood’s most exciting woman. “One of the things that is exciting to me is adaptability,” he said, “and a woman who has it will always intrigue me. Such a woman is Rocky Cooper. . . . Rocky is the out-of-doors, athletic type by day, and a sophisticated, smartly gowned, well-informed woman by night.”

  Rocky Cooper’s athleticism, in fact, led her to become part of Peter’s beach scene, a world he usually kept separate from his Hollywood life. “Those were the glory years,” she recalled. “The days at the beach. It was really a Rat Pack down there. That’s where, I swear to God, Sinatra picked up the lingo. They set out those boards all day waiting for a wave. Some people we’d call ‘onshore’ — they were chicken and wouldn’t go into the water because some of the waves were really big, big, big. They were all beautiful people. Gary used to say, ‘God, they are the best-looking guys I’ve ever seen in my life. Better even than cowboys.’”

  Just as Peter had brought some of his movie star friends into the beach scene, he now tried to include the beach gang in his Hollywood social whirl — particularly pretty girls he’d met at the beach and wanted to woo. To his disappointment, the young women almost invariably acted differently on a date than they had at surfside.

  “As free and uninhibited and natural as Nature herself when on the beach,” Peter told a magazine reporter, “no sooner does [his date] step into my car than she is metamorphosed into a lethal cutie-pie, posturing, posing, batting her eyelashes, giggling, and also making — although she is an Amazon on the sand and in the sea — like Little Red Riding Hood at the mercy of the Big Bad Wolf! . . . Arrive at Chasen’s or Romanoffs for dinner, and the first thing cutie-pie does is order a double Scotch! When you ask her — as nervous, by this time, as she is — ‘
Are you sure you can take it?’ she brushes you off with a knowing smile. Fifteen minutes later she turns green on you and spends the rest of the evening in the powder room!”

  Peter stopped taking beach girls to the clubs, but he didn’t stop going — he just went with more sophisticated people. He had developed a taste for jazz, and he loved to bring his friends to see the latest singers on the Sunset Strip. Rocky Cooper recalled that “Peter taught both Gary and me a heck of a lot about music. Jazz and blues. He’d take us to see people like Eddie Heywood and Lena Horne, at one of the first gigs she did at the Mocambo on Sunset. She was really new on the scene, and Peter insisted that we go with him to see her.” It was on the club beat that Peter earned his reputation as a man who never met a check he couldn’t avoid. Rocky Cooper remembered that “Peter would always ask us to do the town with him — but guess who paid?” Peter’s beach friends, though, saw another side of him. As Molly Dunne recalled, “People said Peter was cheap, but with us he was more than generous. He always picked up the tab, because he knew we couldn’t afford it. When he went out with people richer than himself, he’d let them handle it. Otherwise, he’d pay for everybody.”

  TEN

  Early in December 1946, Peter was mingling with the celebrants at a Hollywood Christmas party. He chatted with the other guests for about an hour, but none of the young ladies there caught his fancy. Then Rita Hayworth arrived. For the rest of the evening he couldn’t take his eyes off the sultry redhead who was, at twenty-eight, a veteran of forty films, a World War II pinup girl, and the recent sensation of Gilda with her torrid song and dance number “Put the Blame on Mame.”