by James Spada
It took Sharman Douglas a long time to get over Peter Lawford. Immediately after the breakup she wrote him a letter, by turns plucky and desolate, saying that she would always love him because he was “fine and thoroughly nice.” She would measure all her future relationships, she admitted, against her romance with Peter, who had made her realize exactly what it was she wanted from “love and life.”
AT THE SAME TIME PETER had first entranced Sharman Douglas, early in 1949, he was working his special magic on millions of other girls in movie theaters across America with his most appealing performance since Good News. MGM had considered no one else to play Laurie, the lonely young man who lives across the street from the March girls, in the studio’s sumptuous Technicolor version of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
Producer-director Mervyn LeRoy, who had produced The Wizard of Oz, spared no expense to re-create the nostalgic world of the March family in Civil War America. June Allyson was cast as the high-spirited tomboy Jo (a role Katharine Hepburn had made her own in RKO’s black-and-white 1933 version), Janet Leigh as level-headed Meg, Elizabeth Taylor as vain, silly Amy, and Margaret O’Brien as earnest, doomed little Beth. Leon Ames played their father, and Mary Astor their mother, Marmee.
Spirits were buoyant on the set. All four of the girls — even June Allyson, who, as Peter might have pointed out, was playing a teenager at thirty-two — giggled a lot, often to the distraction of Mary Astor, who wasn’t amused. The respected Oscar-winning veteran of over seventy films later wrote: “The girls all giggled and chattered and made a game of every scene. Taylor was engaged, and in love, and talking on the telephone most of the time (which is fine normally, but not when the production clock is ticking away the company’s money). June Allyson chewed gum constantly and irritatingly, and Maggie O’Brien looked at me as though she were planning something very unpleasant.
“In the scene where Jo got her hair cut, Peter Lawford was supposed to arrive at the house and say, ‘What have you done?! You look like a porcupine!’ Except that for some reason the pronunciation of porcupine eluded him. It came out ‘porkypine.’ It took an entire afternoon [for Peter to get it right], and everyone, even Mervyn LeRoy, was doubled up with laughter. . . . My sense of humor, my sense of fun, had deserted me long ago. And it just wasn’t all that funny.”
Most reviews of Little Women were positive, although some critics compared it unfavorably to the Hepburn version. Ironically, whereas Hepburn’s version was praised for restoring “old-fashioned family values” to movies, this version was criticized for doing the same. One reviewer wrote, “The story of the genteel Marches is a long, sentimental one, not exactly geared to our streamlined age. [It is a] souvenir of granny’s day.” Moviegoers didn’t seem to mind. Little Women was an “event film,” and its box-office receipts pleased exhibitors mightily. Some credit for that was given to Peter’s appealing presence, which reportedly prompted young girls to see the picture two and three times. Peter Lawford’s career had taken another leap forward.
IN EACH OF HIS LAST TEN MOVIES, Peter had played light, charming roles, parts he later derisively called “those ‘Tennis, anyone?’ bits.” He wasn’t being asked to play “real people,” he complained, “the kind who if you cut them with a knife, you could believe would bleed.” He wanted more challenges as an actor and let it be known that he would “give anything to do a remake of Night Must Fall, which Bob Montgomery did so brilliantly.”
His next picture wasn’t in that league, but The Red Danube was a serious-minded melodrama with a first-rate cast that gave him a complex character to play. Its story, taken from the novel Vespers in Vienna, by Bruce Marshall, concerned a British colonel (Walter Pidgeon) and his junior officer Major John “Twingo” McPhinnister (Peter), whose job it is to repatriate Russian citizens in post-World War II Vienna. McPhinnister falls in love with a beautiful ballet dancer (Janet Leigh), who turns out to be a Russian citizen so terrified of being returned to her native land that ultimately she kills herself.
Peter was worried about whether he was up to the emotional demands of playing McPhinnister, and he sought help from Lillian Burns, whose husband, George Sidney, was directing the film. Lillian was able to help Peter call up the proper emotions by tapping her own feelings about the Holocaust. But Janet Leigh noticed that Peter wasn’t comfortable with strong emotionalism, and she recalled an incident that sheds some light on his limitations as an actor. “During the scene when I jump out the window, I got very emotional. It was a very difficult scene for me. I was really very overwrought — I had burst into tears and I couldn’t turn it off after the cameras stopped rolling.
“Peter said, ‘Now, Janet, what’s that all about?’ It was like he was saying, ‘Just do it and forget it. This is only a movie.’ But I couldn’t turn it off that quickly. I guess it was his British inwardness, that reserve, where you don’t show your emotions that readily. Maybe he didn’t feel as comfortable in a dramatic situation as other people. He was more comfortable playing the sophisticate or playboy.”
The Red Danube was a box-office dud when it was released in December 1949 (it lost almost a million dollars), and its reviews, positive and negative, were usually based on the critic’s opinion of its anticommunist message. To bolster the film’s poor box-office receipts, MGM sent Peter, Walter Pidgeon, and Janet Leigh on a ten-city promotional tour. Sometimes all three went to a city together, sometimes they split up. They made appearances at supermarkets, gave interviews to local newspapers, attended luncheons with reporters, and sometimes, at theaters that still had vaudeville stages, put on a show before the movie started.
Peter brought Peter Sabiston and Joe Naar along. His main job, Naar recalled, “was to get pretty girls together and have a party.” Sometimes, Naar and Sabiston took part in the improvised stage shows, during which they trotted out the routines they had often done at Hollywood parties. As Peter gave thoughtful, serious answers to a reporter’s questions in front of a theater full of fans, Sabiston would stand up and begin to heckle him: “Pardon me — is that your nose or are you eating a banana?” Nervous laughter would erupt as Peter ignored the jibe.
Then Naar would call out, “There’s a train leaving in ten minutes, we’d like you to be under it.” Audiences would catch on that Sabiston and Naar were plants when Peter would turn and shoot back, “If you don’t behave, I’ll have the manager take you out,” and Naar would reply, “Sorry, I don’t go out with managers.”
There was a bit of the college fraternity boy in Peter, something Joe Naar and Peter Sabiston liked and helped draw out. Together, they could act like adolescents — whether it was Peter and Sabiston mimicking feminine gay mannerisms or the three of them tormenting unsuspecting people on the phone. “There used to be a man named Chipp in the Chicago phone book,” Peter recalled. “We’d call him up and say, ‘Hello, is this Mr. Chipp?’ He’d say yes it was, and then we’d say, ‘Well, good-bye, Mr. Chipp!’”
Sophomoric to be sure, but these were innocent high jinks that Janet Leigh looked back on with nostalgia. “We had a great time,” she said. “Those days were a lot of fun.”
4 May appeared in two MGM movies, Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948) and Hong Kong (1952), which featured Ronald Reagan.
TWELVE
For years after he left MGM, Peter told stories about the ways the studio could find to waste money. One of his favorites concerned a spider web: “In the late forties, MGM built an enormous cobweb about twenty-five feet across on Lot 2 that they were going to use for a picture. Well, they had a twenty-four- hour guard sitting there next to it to ensure that no one either walked or drove through it. Finally, after about a year, Eddie Mannix, who was then number three in the Metro hierarchy, came down to Lot 2 and noticed it. So he asked around about it, and it finally turned out that the picture that the huge cobweb was to be used for had been canceled almost a year before!”
It was because of extravagances like this, among other reasons, that MGM’s seemingly perfect financial health
took a sharp turn for the worse as America entered the decade Peter called “the dreary fifties.” At what should have been the apex of his career, he and many other top stars were caught in the middle of immense changes in the studio system that had molded their careers and controlled their lives over the last decade.
It wasn’t only waste but changing audience tastes that threatened to destroy the spun-sugar castle that Mayer had created in Culver City. The world had been through a devastating six-year war, during which MGM’s lighthearted musicals had helped the women on the homefront cope with their loneliness and fear. But now their husbands and sons and brothers were back. The nightmare these men had shared had changed them forever, and movies like Good News and Little Women seemed to them like so much silly fluff.
There had been a steady decline in the box-office receipts of MGM’s patented musicals since 1945, and in July 1948 Loew’s Inc. chairman Nick Schenck brought in a new head of production, Dore Schary, a forty-three-year-old writer-producer who had been production chief at RKO since 1945. Schary’s charge was to produce harder- edged films, streamline MGM’s overall operations, cut production costs — and, presumably, clear away some cobwebs.
Schary’s films were successful, and L. B. Mayer’s paeans to old- fashioned values were less and less so. Clearly out of step with the times, Mayer was forced out as head of the studio in June 1951 — to his lasting embitterment. But to replace Mayer was to put a Band-Aid on a hemorrhaging wound. The studio system was by now outmoded and had been abandoned by the other majors years before MGM saw the light. Since MGM’s practice of the system had been the most all- encompassing, its transition was the most protracted and debilitating.
All the worst flaws of the studio system were present at MGM, along with its best advantages. Great talents were discovered and signed, but often for the wrong reasons. Young singers were brought on the lot to scare a recalcitrant Judy Garland back into line; young dancers were signed just to keep Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly looking over their shoulders. Sometimes, these young players made names for themselves; more often the studio didn’t know what to do with them and their careers foundered.
Peter Lawford’s tenure at MGM is one of the best examples of how an MGM contract could both elevate and sabotage a performer’s career. Peter’s association with the studio put him in some of the best, most expensive, most popular films produced in the United States in the 1940s. With few exceptions, however, his roles were secondary and demanded little more of him than that he look handsome and act charming.
Peter was undeniably talented, and he showed promise when forced to stretch himself. But MGM had so many extraordinarily gifted performers that someone with relatively modest abilities, like Peter, was expendable. “Most of the time [I spent] sunbathing in my backyard,” he said. “Every now and then the postman would throw a new script through the front door which I’d be obliged to do whether I wanted to or not.”
Please Believe Me, Peter’s one 1950 release, and Royal Wedding, his one 1951 release, pointed up his dilemma at MGM. In the former, a pleasant enough little comedy starring Deborah Kerr, Peter is fourth- billed behind Kerr, Robert Walker, and Mark Stevens (his lowest billing since Two Sisters from Boston), he plays a millionaire competing for the romantic favors of Kerr with the two other men. Although Peter is thoroughly engaging in the film and displays the lightest comic touch of the quartet (the Los Angeles Examiner said he “gives up camera posing to turn in a top-notch performance”) his assignment as the least important element of an ensemble was a definite comedown after Little Women and The Red Danube.
Royal Wedding was a much better movie, but it presented another kind of problem for Peter. A lavish Freed Unit musical, it starred Fred Astaire and Jane Powell as a brother-and-sister dance team in London during Princess Elizabeth’s November 1947 wedding to Prince Philip. Peter played a young lord with whom Jane falls in love, and Sarah Churchill, the daughter of Sir Winston, enacted a chorus girl who captures Fred’s heart. The film boasted a series of remarkable production numbers, including the musical question “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I’ve Been a Liar All My Life?” and Astaire’s now legendary dance routine up a room’s walls and across its ceiling.
It was all quite wonderful, but unfortunately for Peter, he had very little to do. His one musical number — “Every Night at Seven,” a duet with Jane Powell — was cut, and he was left with surprisingly little screen time. As he had in On an Island With You, Peter gives a lackluster performance, again because of his disappointment with his assignment. By casting him in Please Believe Me and Royal Wedding, MGM had made it plain that it no longer had any idea what to do with Peter Lawford.
At another studio with lesser talent resources, Peter might have been given the chance to follow up on a first-rate star turn like Good News; at MGM he never got another role that approached it. He might also have had the opportunity to stretch himself as an actor outside musicals — in something like Night Must Fall — as he continually expressed a desire to do. But another negative by-product of MGM’s rigid system was that its actors were pigeonholed, typecast. A young English lord? Peter Lawford. A wide-eyed ingenue? June Allyson. Rarely were contract players given a role that went even slightly against type.
Why didn’t Peter fight for the better, the more dramatic roles he professed to covet? Part of the reason has to be his insecurity about his ability to pull them off. His position in the MGM hierarchy of talent wasn’t lost on him; the more closely he observed the company he was in, the more he realized that his own talents were modest at best.
Lillian Burns considered Peter “the most insecure of the many young people I have known.” His lack of self-confidence was a legacy from his mother, who taught him that he wasn’t good enough to demand more, wasn’t strong enough to survive without her. There would be no compliments from May after one of Peter’s performances; she didn’t, she said, want “his head to swell.” And she constantly reminded him of the family’s financial misfortunes, of how much she and his father depended on his weekly paycheck. He was to toe the line, do as Mr. Mayer said. “As quickly as all this came, Peter, it can be taken away just as quickly,” she would tell him.
While a part of Peter wanted to rebel, wanted to be rid of May’s suffocating presence, another piece of him felt great guilt over his ambivalent feelings toward his mother. That and his concern for Sir Sydney’s welfare kept Peter in line. May knew exactly what she was doing.
AT THE END OF OCTOBER 1950, Peter was handed a strong dramatic opportunity — by Twentieth Century-Fox. MGM lent the rival studio Peter’s services to play a crook who swindles a rancher and romances his daughter in the drama Kangaroo, set in the outback of Australia and costarring Richard Boone and Maureen O’Hara, a major Fox Star. Set to direct was Lewis Milestone, a highly respected two- time Oscar winner who had created such fine films as All Quiet on the Western Front, The Front Page, and Of Mice and Men.
The cast and crew set off for Sydney via Hawaii, where they enjoyed a six-day stopover in Honolulu. It was Peter’s first visit to the islands since his boyhood, and he was determined to make the most of it. He and Richard Boone played beach bums, grew beards, and drew crowds as they played volleyball or surfed the Waikiki waves. Boone wasn’t used to the gawkers. “Everywhere we go we get mobbed by teenagers,” he told a reporter. “Of course, they’re after Peter, and I get the backwash. I don’t care so much for being hugged, kissed, petted, and squeezed by hundreds of screaming youngsters.”
Peter kept an eye out for available local girls, and he soon met raven-haired, earthy Jean MacDonald, a twenty-year-old Finch College alumna and a society reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Jean remembered the period with great fondness. “We went out and danced the hula, went body surfing and board surfing, played volleyball, sunbathed on the beach. We had so much fun.” Soon, a romance blossomed. “There was a little something between me and Peter,” Jean recalled. “It just sort of came out of that daytime fr
iendship.”
Characteristically, Peter found Jean’s combination of finishing- school poise and “great gal” earthiness very appealing. On his last night in Honolulu, the two of them drank “a few too many fogcutters” and Jean had difficulty walking in her high heels. Peter nicknamed her “Waddle,” and he loved the fact that she laughed as much about it as he did.
Peter didn’t want to leave this appealing girl, and he urged her to follow him to Australia. “I can get you a job working on the picture,” he told her. “Please come.” She wasn’t at all sure she could, but she told Peter she’d try, and the two said their good-byes. No sooner did Peter arrive in Sydney than he began a telegram campaign to persuade Jean to follow him there. On November 1 he and Boone cabled her, “Stop ignoring us. Are you crazy? Get your passport lover. Clyde and Homer.”
Peter found Jean very much on his mind in Australia, even though there was no dearth of attractive women Down Under. On November 22, he wrote to Robert Walker that he had been in Australia for three weeks and had been “drunk and disorderly” for only nineteen days: “I’m getting better, don’t you think?” He told Walker that the girls in Australia were in keeping with their particular tastes and that Walker would “go crazy” there.
Jean, however, was foremost in his mind. She was intrigued by Peter’s offer to join him, but she was “scared to death” of flying off to so remote a country to see a man she barely knew. Her mind was made up, however, when Lewis Milestone’s wife, Kendall — at Peter’s urging — asked Jean to join her on a tour of the Orient. The trip was to begin with a few weeks in Australia, and in the middle of December, Jean arrived in Sydney.
