Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  The Frances Goodrich-Albert Hackett script, extensively doctored by Sidney Sheldon, was again little more than a framework for the Berlin music. But it all makes for great fun; in Technicolor, the sets and costumes were ravishing, the performers all in top form, the songs matchless. The best among them: “Easter Parade,” “It Only Happens When I Dance with You,” “I Love a Piano,” “A Couple of Swells,” and “Steppin’ Out with My Baby.”

  Peter gives a strong, well-shaded, likable performance in Easter Parade. He sings one song, a duet with Garland, “A Fella with an Umbrella,” which he delivers with verve even if he occasionally fails to land squarely on a note.

  Easter Parade was a huge hit, and it received virtually unanimous raves. It became MGM’s highest-grossing musical of the year, taking in over $6.8 million at the box office — almost two and a half times its production cost — for a net profit of $864,000. Once again, Peter had been a major part of a highly successful motion picture for MGM, and no one could say he wasn’t earning his nine-hundred-dollar-a-week salary.

  AS 1949 APPROACHED, Peter’s career had been on a steady ascension for six years, and his popularity was stronger than ever. In a few months his salary would rise to twelve hundred dollars a week — an income which, if it was nowhere close to the highest in Hollywood, was nonetheless enormous: the average annual salary in America in 1949 was $1,320.

  Peter Lawford seemed to all the world a man without worries. The usually astute and skeptical Dorothy Kilgallen waxed expansive about how happy and well adjusted a lad he was: “His existence on this planet is unwrinkled and unblemished, every step on the upgrade, every day on the upbeat. . . . If you are delighted by swains who see their psychiatrist twice a day, he is not for you.”

  In truth, however, Peter was a troubled young man. Not only did he have ongoing worries about Sir Sydney’s welfare, and guilt about the dark side of his sexuality, but he harbored deep-seated demons as well, neuroses that persistently nagged at him and that he only vaguely understood. In a moment of remarkable public candor around this time, he told reporter Herb Howe that “I have frightening depressions. I have great days, then one like death. At one o’clock I may be on top of the world in the sun, then the thing starts rolling in and by six, I am ready for the hemlock. Why? I have everything. More than a man of twenty-five should have.”

  Years after it happened, Peter told his friend Dick Sargent, the actor, about a terrifying experience he had had while surfing. He was straddling a wave when suddenly a tremendous fear washed over him. The outdoors itself terrified him — the sky, the sea, the beach. He had fallen off his surfboard, swum blindly to shore, and driven frantically home, where he had locked himself in his room. He could not muster the courage to come out until the following morning.

  Peter didn’t understand these disturbing episodes, and he didn’t like to talk about them. His closest friends, those who knew him for forty years and more, agree on one thing: he never poured out his heart to them, never revealed his innermost feelings, and certainly never told them what his demons were. He had them, they all agree, but he never would tell anyone what they were — if he himself completely knew.

  They stemmed, as most do, from his childhood. Only he and Lady Lawford knew exactly what went on between them behind closed doors; but one needn’t have the imagination of a novelist to envision the scarring effect May’s personality had on her sensitive, impressionable, affection-starved son.

  Every now and then Peter would act so inexplicably that his friends could only shake their heads and wonder. By all accounts he adored his father, but a strange incident between Peter and Milton Ebbins casts doubt even on his childhood relationship with Sir Sydney.

  Ebbins had gone to Los Angeles International Airport to pick Peter up. He drove up in his car, a beautiful Jaguar Mark IX that looked like a Rolls-Royce, and Peter would not get into it. “He simply refused,” Ebbins recalled. “He took a taxi home. I said, ‘Peter, what is your problem with my car? It’s a beautiful car! Why won’t you ride in it with me?’”

  Quietly, Peter explained himself. “My father had a Rolls-Royce. I was brought up with it. I hated that car with a passion. Your car reminds me of that car and I will not ride in it.” What could have happened in his father’s Rolls-Royce that would make Peter refuse, twenty years later, to ride in a car that resembled it? “He never explained it to me any further than that,” Ebbins said. “We talked three times a day. He told me everything. But he never told me what his demons were.”

  Peter might have sought psychiatric help, but he didn’t believe in it. He saw how little two hospitalizations had helped Judy Garland, and he told an interviewer who asked him that he had never been analyzed: “I’ve known people who have been and they end up more confused than ever. It’s better to leave certain things alone.”

  AS PETER WORKED ON HIS next picture, he got caught up in another romantic imbroglio — this one with a twist. Julia Misbehaves reunited him with Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon and was MGM’s attempt to lighten up Garson’s image with a mildly slapstick romantic comedy. Peter didn’t have much to do in the film, but he recalled it fondly as the production that brought him together with Elizabeth Taylor, the ingenue of the story. Had she and her mother had their way, she might also have become the first Mrs. Peter Lawford.

  Taylor turned sixteen during filming, on February 27, 1948. She was still a child, but she was a child quickly budding into womanhood, and she craved romance. The minute she saw Peter Lawford, she melted. “Peter to me was the last word in sophistication,” she later said, “and he was so terribly handsome.” She fell hard, and that caused her great embarrassment one day on the set.

  “The whole company knew I had a crush on him,” she later explained. “In the scene where he had to kiss me I was supposed to say, ‘Oh, Ritchie, what are we going to do?’ After the kiss I looked at him and said, ‘Oh, Peter, what am I going to do?’ And the whole company fell down laughing.”

  For his part, Peter couldn’t help but be stirred by this exquisite creature. “She was incredible,” he said. “You just couldn’t believe it. . . . The nose was perfect, the eyes, everything. I’d be awfully dumb if I said I wasn’t attracted to her sexually.”

  Young Elizabeth wasn’t shy, either. “She was coming on strong,” Peter recalled, “batting those beautiful eyes and saying things like, ‘You love the beach and I love the beach, so why don’t we go together one day?’”

  Sara Taylor, the actress’s strongly ambitious mother, encouraged the budding romance. She was very impressed by Sir Sidney’s and Lady Lawford’s apparently lofty social station, and she told MGM executives that there should be an announcement of an engagement between Peter and her daughter.

  Lucille Ryman, head of talent at MGM, knew that Elizabeth was very eager to get married. “Liz was chasing after everybody and trying to find a husband,” she said. “When Jane Powell announced that she was getting married, Liz came running into my office and stomped her foot and said, ‘Miss Ryman, you’ve got to stop that marriage!’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Because I’m the queen of this lot and I have to get married first!’”

  But the fervor of Taylor mere et fille put Peter off, and he asked to talk with Lillian Burns about it. “He was frightened to death,” Miss Burns says, “because she was sixteen years old, and he was afraid of any involvement. He really cared about Elizabeth as a friend, and he was aware that at that age she was really just in love with the idea of love.” If Peter had his own reservations about an affair with Taylor, the MGM brass made sure he was aware of theirs. “The word around the studio,” he recalled, “was that anybody who touched the girl would be banished forever. They didn’t want anything to befoul their investment. The joke was that anyone who took her virginity would be in violation of the Pure Food and Drug Act.”

  Peter did take her on a date to the beach — “against my better judgment,” he said. “In a bathing suit she was stunning. But it was an innocuous day. Because no matter how
beautiful she was, I had to stay on ice. I saw nothing but trouble in getting involved. I had the feeling we were being constantly watched.”

  Peter didn’t want to “foul up her head,” so he told Elizabeth as gently as possible that there was no hope of the relationship going any further. Devastated, she took to her bed and refused to leave it. Sara begged Peter to come and speak to her, but he felt that would only make the situation worse. After a few more days of this, he finally agreed and went up to her room, where they had a long talk. Peter has never said what he told her, but he apparently soothed her feelings enough so that, as he put it, “she got over it. It resolved itself without any bad things coming down.”

  Julia Misbehaves was a moderate hit, but a barrage of negative criticism greeted Greer Garson’s zany new persona. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times called the film “grotesque” and decried “the awkward spectacle of Greer Garson being a card — or, if you’ll excuse the expression, sowing another wild oat.”

  What happy memories Garson took away from Julia Misbehaves she attributed to Peter: “One day Pete mentioned that he was off the next day and was going to shoot skeet with some man from Texas who was in Hollywood for a visit. He planned to bring him to lunch in the commissary at MGM and then take him on a tour of the studio. Would it be okay to bring him over to our set? I said, ‘Of course.’ “It was better than okay, as the visitor was none other than E. E. ‘Buddy’ Fogelson.”

  Garson married Fogelson shortly thereafter and remained his wife until his death nearly forty years later. All their life together, she said, “Buddy and I always felt a very special affection for our Cupid.”

  BY 1949, PETER HAD NOT ONLY his two distinct social lives among the beach scene and the Hollywood crowd, but a third as well. He now mingled with New York, Palm Beach, and London society. He had befriended the Henry Fords, hobnobbed with millionaires Ned McLean and Bob Neal (heir to the Maxwell House coffee fortune), and dated the highly publicized socialites Elizabeth Firestone and Melissa Weston.

  The novelist Dominick Dunne, who befriended Peter about this time, recalled that Melissa was “the most dazzlingly beautiful girl in New York society. Bar none. She and Peter had a hot romance.” It didn’t last very long, however, and Peter soon turned his attentions to one of Melissa’s best friends: Sharman Douglas, the blond, twenty- year-old daughter of the then American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Lewis Douglas.

  Sharman Douglas had taken London by storm when her father was named ambassador in 1947. Then eighteen, pretty, and vivacious, she was the “deb of the year.” She became best buddies with seventeen-year-old Princess Margaret, whom she nicknamed “Magget,” and frequently slept over at Windsor Castle. She was the star attraction at what she called “gay balls,” constantly surrounded by “devastating swains” eager for her attentions. She was linked romantically to a marquess (Blandford) and an earl (Westmoreland). More than a few times she and Margaret competed for the same young men.

  But it wasn’t until the spring of 1949, when she met Peter Lawford in New York, that Sharman Douglas fell in love. Peter found himself beguiled in return. He told Gladys Hall, the journalist, that he liked Miss Douglas because she was “young and fresh and witty and gay, and reflects the college girl. I’m partial to college girls. Sharman loves the beach.” She also, Peter said, fulfilled one of his chief requirements in a girl — she was adaptable. “Sharman has acclimated herself to any place or situation she’s been put in — and these have been more than varied, in view of her family’s social and political position.”

  One of the original jet-setters, Sharman Douglas flitted constantly from London to Paris to New York to Los Angeles. Then, to recover from the rigors of all this travel, she’d alight at her family’s cattle ranch in Arizona — where, not coincidentally, Peter could easily make a quick jaunt from Los Angeles and spend time with her. During one memorable visit he arrived at the Douglas ranch late one afternoon, flew back to Los Angeles the following morning, bought Sharman a diamond- studded bracelet, and then returned immediately to give it to her.

  Most of their courtship, however, was conducted via long-distance telephone calls and letters between Los Angeles and the ambassador’s residence at 14 Prince’s Gate in London (which the Kennedys had overrun in 1938). The pair talked by telephone almost every night, and Sharman sometimes wrote Peter twice a day or more. When the letters didn’t rhapsodize about how much she loved Peter and missed him, they were chatty and gossipy, filling him in on every detail of her daily activities — all-day shopping sprees, jazz-club parties, canasta games with friends, high tea with the queen and Princess Margaret at Buckingham Palace.

  Her activities with the princess when the queen wasn’t present, Sharman admitted, weren’t always so sedate. One week her usually quiet night out at the movies with “Magget” became “hysterical” and wound up at twelve-thirty A.M. with the two of them racing up and down the halls of Buckingham Palace and creating “chaos.” They spent the better part of the next day in the princess’s bedroom, gossiping.

  Sharman became impatient with the continual grilling about Peter to which Margaret subjected her. She kidded him in a letter that she had told the princess about his “twitch” and other appealing characteristics. As a result, she averred, Margaret had decided that Peter wasn’t all he was cracked up to be. And that was fine with her, Sharman concluded, because “I know that girl” — and Sharman wanted to keep Peter all to herself.

  Sharman wasn’t aware of the reason behind Margaret’s intense interest: Peter had dated the princess before he met Sharman. As Milton Ebbins recalled, “Princess Margaret was crazy about Peter. He could have continued it, but he didn’t. He was too young, he didn’t want to get involved. He was a movie star, he didn’t want to be married to a princess. He knew what it was going to entail. So he didn’t pursue it.”

  In January 1950, Sharman paid a visit to Peter in Los Angeles, a trip that excited a good deal of press attention. The Los Angeles Times ran a story bannered “Peter Lawford’s Parents to Fete Sharman Douglas” and reported that “Sir Sydney and Lady Lawford today will give a cocktail party honoring the international dazzler.”

  The soirée was not, in fact, in honor of Sharman, but rather a celebration of a one-year contract May had just signed with MGM as an actress and a consultant on all things British.4 Sharman attended as Peter’s guest, although May wasn’t any more fond of Sharman than she had been of any of Peter’s other girlfriends. “That Sharman Douglas threw herself at Peter,” she later said. “I never cared for her.” Although they constantly denied romance rumors, Peter and Sharman made little effort to hide their feelings for each other, even in public. They dined at Ciro’s seven nights in a row. One night they nibbled at the same sandwich, all the while gazing into each other’s eyes. By the time the sandwich was gone, observers related, their lips had come together in a kiss.

  In March, they met in New York, where they made the rounds of nightclubs. After Sharman returned to London, she wrote Peter of a dinner out with Van and Evie Johnson. She hadn’t wanted to go, she said, but she missed Peter so badly that the Johnsons provided her with her only link to “my little private wonderful world.”

  In April Peter flew to London, which prompted further headlines (“Peter Lawford Flying Over to His Charmin’ Sharman”) and speculation that they would soon wed. The engagement rumors were fueled by a report in London’s Daily Mail: “Actor Peter Lawford, who has already proposed several times to Sharman Douglas, will propose again this week. . . . Peter has told friends, ‘Sharman is the nicest girl I’ve ever met.’ Who invited him to London? Sharman’s parents.”

  Peter didn’t pop the question, but he and Sharman did spend two romantic weeks together. After he left she wrote him that she would never forget the “heavenly memories” he had given her. A few weeks later, they decided to become engaged, and her parents gladly gave their blessing. Ecstatic, Sharman told her friends and Princess Margaret, who, according to Milton Ebbins, pr
omised to throw them “the biggest party anyone had ever seen. Sharman was walking on air.”

  Fortunately the betrothal was never officially announced, because four days later Peter saw Sharman in New York and backed out. Not just out of the engagement, but out of the romance as well. As fond as he was of her, he told her, he wasn’t in love. Sharman was devastated and told him that she didn’t believe him. He had, she said, broken the romance out of fear and out of lack of confidence in his own judgment.

  She may have been correct. Several of Peter’s closest friends made no secret of their feeling that she wasn’t “right” for him, and it is likely that he allowed their view to become his own. “I think I talked him out of that engagement,” Molly Dunne recalled, “because I knew that it wasn’t going to be right for him at all. I liked Sharman and she did try to be one of us, but it wasn’t easy.

  “She invited us once to her family’s ranch in Arizona. I didn’t go, but Peter Sabiston and Peter went. Peter got bored. He called me and said, ‘You’ve got to come here.’ So I flew out. And you know, Sharman Douglas was the kind of a gal who’d come out in the morning and have her hair in curlers and be wearing a tatty old slip, and I said to Peter, ‘Peter, you’re not marrying this girl. That’s it, you’re just not!’ Peter Sabiston and I kept teasing him about her and finally he went, ‘Oooh, I think you’re right.’”

  One might have thought that Peter would have appreciated Sharman’s lack of vanity, especially since he was confronted with so much artifice in Hollywood. But he was very particular about the women he dated. He liked them to look their best at all times, to be tanned, to be slim, to be athletic. He had overlooked those shortcomings in Sharman, but after Molly’s comments he began to look at her more closely.