Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  “I got to the Hotel Australia,” she recalled, “and there must have been fifty bouquets of flowers in my room — Peter and Richard had taken them out of all the rooms and restaurants in the hotel — and there was a big banner that said ‘Welcome Waddle.’ That night we were in a restaurant and the orchestra stopped playing and the orchestra leader said he had an announcement: ‘Welcome Waddle.’ It was fantastic. It was like I was in a fairyland.”

  Jean got to know Peter much better in Sydney and, later, when the Kangaroo Company moved to Port Augusta. When Peter wasn’t filming, the couple went to movies, played charades, surfed, rode horseback, and took riverboat trips. Jean felt her attraction to Peter turning into love. “He had tremendous charm and a kind of brotherly- fatherly touch that was nearly irresistible,” she said. “My mother and father were divorced when I was young, and strangely enough Peter had a very fatherly image — a very kind, gentle manner. It wasn’t that it wasn’t a sexual romance, but it was a very gentle, big-brother kind of relationship.”

  The Kangaroo shoot was a difficult one. The Australian desert was in the grip of a drought that was integral to the plot, and temperatures ranged between 100 and 126 degrees during the day. Peter lost twelve pounds, thought he would go crazy from the flies that constantly buzzed around, and was shocked to discover that his hair had begun to fall out. No cause, except perhaps the heat and stress, was ever found for the phenomenon, which happily ceased once Peter returned to Hollywood.

  Milestone expected to have to film the movie’s climactic scene — a downpour that finally breaks the drought — on a set back in Hollywood, and it was with tongues firmly in cheeks that the cast and crew attended a native rain dance one Saturday night. The next morning at four-thirty, Peter and the rest of the company were roused from their beds by the production manager. “Get out of bed!” the frantic man shouted. “Get dressed, get ready to shoot! It’s raining/” Half asleep, everyone rushed to the set and worked for five hours in the drenching downpour.

  Kangaroo wrapped on February 15, 1952, and met with mixed critical reaction when it opened just three months later. Most critics panned its story while praising its breathtaking cinematography and locations, and agreed with Maureen O’Hara that she and Peter had been badly miscast.

  From Australia, Peter returned with Jean MacDonald to Honolulu, where he tried to convince her that she could advance her writing career more readily in Los Angeles. She knew Peter wanted to be close to her, and the prospect didn’t displease her, but she was hesitant. “I still didn’t know Peter that well,” she says, “and I was timid about leaving Honolulu.” For several months, she remained indecisive.

  AS PETER WAITED FOR JEAN MACDONALD to make up her mind about coming to LA, he made an insubstantial comedy with Janet Leigh, Just This Once, and began an affair with Dorothy Dandridge, the singer and actress. “He was very smitten with her,” Molly Dunne recalled, “and she was very taken with him. We used to go see her when she was performing at the Mocambo. Then we went to Vegas when she was there.”

  It was Peter’s first romantic involvement with a black woman, and it gave him his first taste of racial prejudice since his days as a parking attendant in Palm Beach. It was an era in America when black entertainers could perform on the stage of a nightclub, but after the show weren’t allowed to sit in the club with friends and have a drink; an era when the legendary Billie Holiday sang in a hotel lounge but had to take the freight elevator from floor to floor.

  Peter’s lack of bigotry didn’t extend to fighting the system and risking negative reaction. In some areas of the country, a white man risked physical violence for dating a black woman. Rocky Cooper recalled “playing the beard” when Peter and Dorothy visited her and Gary on a film location in a redneck area: “I had to sit in the front seat with Peter while he drove through town, and poor Dorothy had to crouch down in the backseat, out of sight.”

  Even in Hollywood, where the atmosphere was far less threatening, Peter wasn’t willing to risk the negative publicity the affair might cause. Peter Sabiston felt that “Peter didn’t have the courage to take Dorothy Dandridge to parties. He’d have me pick her up and I’d walk into the party with her; then she’d hook up with Peter. I remember once I took her to a party for him at Charlie Feldman’s house. He was a big agent and everybody was there. When we walked in every man in the room started paying attention to her — Richard Burton, William Holden, David Niven, all of them. She was a gorgeous woman and a very nice person.”

  The affair faced too many obstacles to last, Peter and Dorothy both realized, and they ended it amicably. But by then another problem in Peter’s romantic life had turned up, one he hadn’t remotely anticipated. Sharman Douglas had moved to Los Angeles and was staying in an apartment owned by Elizabeth Firestone that was only a few blocks from Peter’s house. She professed a desire simply to be friends with Peter, a declaration he found suspect, especially since she tended to show up at just about every function he attended. Before long she was a member of his most intimate circle of friends.

  Sharman’s presence caused a number of unpleasant scenes, one of them between Peter and Peter Sabiston. At a dinner party at Lewis and Kendall Milestone’s, Peter was taken aback to see Sabiston arrive with Sharman on his arm. Glaring at his friend, Peter reached into his pocket, pulled out a few dollars, stood up, and handed the money to Sabiston. “What’s this for?” Sabiston asked. “Go out and buy yourself some good taste and manners and come back and try again,” Peter replied. The remainder of the evening was, to put it mildly, strained.

  Several months later, Jean MacDonald finally made up her mind to join Peter in Hollywood. As soon as she arrived, she discovered that Sharman Douglas was someone with whom she would have to deal. “It was a shock because I didn’t know that much about her relationship with Peter,” Jean recalled, “and I learned that it had really been a big thing.”

  Sharman went to great lengths to show Jean that she harbored no hard feelings. She threw a party in Jean’s honor with a Polynesian theme, complete with beachboys strumming guitars, pineapples, and coconuts. The elaborate gesture managed mostly to make Jean feel more uncomfortable, and Peter complained to friends that he wished Sharman would just leave him alone. “I’m reserving judgment on her ‘Let’s be friends and buddies’ attitude,” he told Jean, “until she really proves it. I fell for that one before!”

  Jean was a houseguest of the Milestones’ when she first arrived. Then she got her own apartment, and she and Peter grew closer. “Peter used to drive a Jeep, and I drove a Jeep, and we’d both go to work at MGM with surfboards tied to the roofs.” They double-dated with Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, who were not yet married, but whose relationship was already tempestuous. “Ava would read something about Frank and another woman in a movie magazine and she’d go off,” Jean recalled. “And he was the same way. They had a great romance, but neither of them had the self-confidence to handle it. Peter and I would go out on dates with them and we would always wind up with the check because they’d get into a terrible fight and storm out in the middle of dinner.”

  It wasn’t long before Peter and Jean’s romance made the newspapers and magazines. In an August 1951 interview, Peter said, “Jean is my steady. We have a sort of unofficial understanding. After all, I wouldn’t be going with her for almost a year just to pass the time away.” The reporter asked Jean if she planned to marry Peter Lawford. “I have no engagement ring as yet, and the question of marriage hasn’t been broached.” Before the year was out, it would be.

  IN AUGUST 1951 PETER WAS aboard the Queen Mary, sailing to England to film his next movie, and he was miserable. The entire trip, he later told Jean MacDonald, had been a disaster. His steward had taken a “violent dislike” to him the very first day and refused to speak to him for the duration. In the middle of the Atlantic, a storm had blown up and buffeted the ship for thirty-six straight hours — leaving all the passengers, Peter said, “looking like death at Southampton.”

  Th
ings didn’t improve much on English soil. Peter arrived in London with “a monster cold” at one-thirty in the morning, only to learn that his room wasn’t ready. The hotel put him in a dubiously furnished “hole on the eighth floor,” as he put it, where he slept restlessly and tried to shake off both his cold and his loneliness. He was so desperate for company, he said, “I set traps for anyone who came in . . . whether they were waiter, valet, or busboy.”

  Just when he thought nothing more could happen to add to his misery, Peter’s back went out and he had to remain in bed for two days. It was a sure indication that he was unhappy about the picture he was in England to do: a grade-B potboiler called The Hour of Thirteen that co-starred English newcomer Dawn Addams and cast Peter as a suave jewel thief unjustly sought as a murderer.

  Peter telephoned Jean almost every day, telling her that in all his twenty-seven years he had never felt as lonely as he had his first few weeks in London and that being without her was “the most terrible emotional experience I think I have been through.” His first three nights there, he told her, he had cried himself to sleep. He admitted that he felt quite lost without her — an unpleasant sensation that aroused a good deal of jealousy in him. When he read in a gossip column that Jean had gone to a Hollywood function with a young actor named Clay Randolph, he asked her testily, “What do you call him? ‘Randykins’ or ‘My little Clay-pigeonface’?”

  He assured her of his own fidelity to her, insisting that he had “not been naughty once” since leaving Los Angeles. He sensed that she didn’t believe him, “but as God is my judge it’s true.”

  Often, Peter regaled Jean with gossip. He told her that Elizabeth Taylor and the English actor Michael Wilding were “having a torrid affair!” and suggested that Jean cook dinner for Taylor when she returned to Los Angeles because Wilding would be unable to accompany her and she’d be lonely and unhappy. He asked Jean to treat her well because “she is a very confused little girl and a nice friend wouldn’t do her any harm.”

  A few days after Peter’s arrival in London, Sharman Douglas turned up in town. Peter was angry at what he considered Sharman’s continual meddling in his romance with Jean. When he heard that Sharman had told a friend that Jean had said she and Peter would soon be married, he confronted Sharman because he knew it wasn’t like Jean to do that. Sharman, he told Jean, “pulled a quick switch” and said that she had not heard this directly from Jean but rather from someone very close to Jean. When Peter asked her who that someone was, Sharman told him she didn’t want to betray a secret. “It sounded like a complete cock-and-bull story to me,” Peter told Jean, “so I let it drop. Do you believe that girl? She never gives up!”

  After several months, Peter felt guilty about his treatment of Sharman, and he asked her out to dinner and a movie. He was pleased, he told Jean, that Sharman hadn’t tried to get “possessive or ‘for old times sake’-sy once. I think maybe she is finally getting over it and is settling down to the fact that I am in love with you. I hope so!”

  During one conversation, Jean complained to Peter about his mother’s cold and discourteous treatment of her while he was away. May was distressed by the apparent seriousness of Peter’s relationship with Jean, and she had begun to write him what he called “subtly nasty” letters “full of anti-marriage propaganda.” He assured Jean that he was composing a reply to May that he would have to wrap in asbestos because that was the only way it would get through the mail.

  He had expected a sharp answer, and he got it. “She naturally took the stand of the downtrodden, long-suffering martyr,” he told Jean. In the meantime he had found out about his mother’s checkered background. He had picked up “some very interesting information,” he said, that proved his mother was “not quite the ‘saint’ she sets herself up to be.” He added that his new knowledge “really gives me an ace in the hole!”5 He pleaded with Jean not to let the problems she was having with May upset her: “I’ll handle it when I get home. I swear I think my mother is losing her mind.”

  Clearly, Peter had had it with May. He stopped corresponding with her and decided to move out of the house on Sunset when he returned to Los Angeles, despite his concerns for Sir Sydney. He asked Jean to look for a place for him quickly so that he could move as soon as he got back.

  The Hour of Thirteen was an MGM throwaway. It wound up $424,000 in the red, and the only thing Peter liked about it was the way he looked. He praised the talents of cinematographer Guy Green: “He even managed to make my nose look halfway human, which is a fantastic feat in itself!”

  Peter arrived home just in time for Christmas of 1951. He and Jean spent a romantic holiday together, and it wasn’t too much later that he asked her to marry him. “We were going to a movie one night with Joe Naar,” Jean recalled, “and Peter told Joe that he had proposed to me earlier in the day. Joe fell on the floor in the middle of the theater lobby.”

  Jean accepted the proposal, and she and her friends started to plan the wedding. But once again, when Peter was confronted with the reality of marriage instead of its romantic fantasy, he began to back down. “Once he had said it and a few people knew about it,” Jean said, “he just kept putting it off. It was kind of like what happened with Sharman, except that this time it just wore itself down naturally. My mother was saying, ‘You’ve gotta get married,’ and Peter kept going back and forth. We’d break up over it and get back together and then Peter would waffle again and I’d say, ‘Okay then, we won’t get married.’ You can only do that for a certain period of time, and then things wear out. That’s what happened to us. Our relationship just kind of wound down.”

  Peter and Jean remained friends for the next twenty-five years, and although there were bumpy stretches later in their relationship, Jean kept only fond memories of her first few years as a friend of Peter Lawford. “He was a wonderful man, an innately kind and good person,” she said. “He was warm, gracious, and sensitive. Those were the things that attracted me to him.”

  5 When Peter found out, upon his first employment at MGM in 1938, that his real surname was Aylen, May told him that a legal technicality had forced her to give him the name of her previous husband. Fifteen and naive, Peter believed her. In London in 1951, Peter learned of the Aylen-Lawford divorce scandals — and of his “illegitimacy.”

  THIRTEEN

  Marilyn Monroe and her girlfriend, Jeanne Carmen, couldn’t figure Peter Lawford out. Both of them had dated him, and both of them had had the same disappointing experience. “Marilyn and I used to talk about Peter,” Jeanne said, “and we’d say, ‘What is it with him? Do you think he’s gay?’ We were the sexiest things on two feet, and Peter wasn’t making plays for us.”

  Peter met Marilyn in his agent’s office in 1951. She was, he said, such an “alarmingly pretty” girl that “it really made me sit up.” The twenty-five-year-old Monroe, a voluptuous, sexy-but-innocent blonde with a feathery voice, was born Norma Jeane Baker to a mentally unstable mother. The identity of her father was never firmly established; her birth certificate lists her mother’s husband at the time, Edward Mortensen, but it was more likely C. Stanley Gifford, a coworker of her mother’s at Consolidated Film Industries, where she worked as a film cutter.

  Abandoned by Mortensen when she told him she was pregnant, Norma Jeane’s mother, Gladys, struggled for several years to provide for her baby, but she suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized. (Gladys’s mother had died in an institution, and her maternal grandfather had committed suicide.) The sensitive, quiet little girl was shuttled from foster home to foster home, living with families that took her in only because the government paid them to do so.

  She grew up confused and psychologically battered. One family insisted she read the Bible constantly and harangued her about the evils of sex and drink; another gave her empty liquor bottles as playthings. At eight she was raped by a man who lived in the boardinghouse run by her foster parents. When she attempted to tell them what had happened, the woman slapped her and told her
not to tell lies. Shortly afterward, she began to stutter.

  By sixteen, she had developed into a curvaceous beauty who turned the heads of boys at school, and she loved the attention. She married the young man next door, primarily to avoid being returned to an orphanage when her foster family could no longer keep her. But there were deep scars within her psyche; she had a nearly pathological need for the attention and adoration of as many people as possible, to make her feel, if only for a time, like a worthwhile person.

  She went into modeling and, when she achieved a measure of success at it, divorced her husband and went into the movies. By 1951 she had worked steadily in Hollywood for four years and appeared in over a dozen films, but she was only now on the verge of the phenomenal success that would propel her to the top of the entertainment world and put her every public move on the front pages.

  Peter and Marilyn dated a few times that spring of 1951, both alone and in foursomes. She was taken with him and puzzled by his lack of sexual interest in her. A close friend of Marilyn’s, recalled her telling him that “when she had a date with Peter, he was more interested in having a girl as a showpiece than in doing anything with her. It was always just a hug and a kiss good-night.” Jeanne Carmen, herself an attractive, buxom blonde, had no clue as to why Peter didn’t respond to her or Marilyn the way most men did. “Neither of us really cared all that much about sleeping with Peter, but we tended to be surprised when men didn’t want to sleep with us. We would wonder, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Or, more often, ‘What’s wrong with him? ”