by James Spada
In a 1951 interview Peter said, “There are many girls with long blond hair and sexy figures whom men consider beautiful. But I don’t. To me a girl with a well-groomed look, not the flamboyant type, but a quiet beauty who radiates health and vitality is the greatest beauty of them all. I go for the typical college type, not movie sirens.”
Peter was initially attracted to Marilyn because at that time in her life she did have a wholesome, down-to-earth side. She loved the beach, worked out with weights to firm up her figure, and had an abundance of girlish high spirits. But the more he got to know and like her, the less interested he was in her sexually. Many aspects of the private Norma Jeane appealed to him: he loved her subtle, skewed sense of humor, her vulnerability, her tentative intelligence. But he was put off by the Marilyn Monroe persona she adopted publicly, the brassy blonde in skin-tight dresses and plunging décolletage. It was precisely this dynamic between innocence and wantonness that made Marilyn so fascinating to the public, but the wanton side left Peter cold.
He was put off, too, by what he saw as Marilyn’s lack of hygiene. Joe Naar recalled picking Marilyn up along with Peter and Joe’s date, the actress Barbara Darrow. “Peter went into her apartment and her dog had done something on the carpet and she didn’t seem to care. He was so disgusted he said to me, ‘You take her out.’ So we switched dates. He knew Barbara because I’d dated her before, so he took Barbara home and I took Marilyn home.”
Peter later said that he had stepped in the dog’s mess, and Marilyn poked her head out of the bathroom door and chirped, “Oh dear, he’s done it again!” The dog, Peter added, “turned out to be the smallest chihuahua I’ve ever seen. Heaven knows how it had produced such a pile!”
Peter did date Marilyn a number of times afterward, but the evenings never extended beyond “a hug and a kiss good-night.” On one occasion Peter would never forget, he went to pick Marilyn up and found two burly bodyguards standing on either side of her front door. They asked him what he wanted. “I have a date with Miss Monroe,” he told them warily.
“She’s not going out,” one of the men growled.
“But I have a date with her!” Peter replied, indignant.
“Forget it. She’s staying here tonight.”
Peter sensed he had better leave, but he called Marilyn the minute he got home. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked her. “It’s Howard Hughes,” Marilyn replied in a whisper. “I went out with him and he’s so jealous that he won’t let me out of the house at night. I’m a prisoner in my own home.” Luckily for Marilyn’s freedom, the eccentric billionaire’s attentions were soon diverted to other pretty starlets.
MARILYN AND PETER REMAINED casual friends throughout the fifties, but it wasn’t until the end of the decade that their relationship grew much closer. In the years between, Marilyn’s career at Twentieth Century-Fox took off like a Roman candle, while Peter’s fizzled at MGM. Now, instead of making “B + ” movies with “A” costars like Deborah Kerr and Janet Leigh, he was making “B movies with “B” costars like Dawn Addams and Jane Greer. In 1952 it was You for Me, a slight, TV-ish situation comedy with Greer directed by Don Weis in which Peter played a rakish millionaire. The picture was well reviewed as “light, escapist fare,” and Peter was delightfully boyish in it, but it lost money and served mainly to bolster Peter’s growing reputation as a Metro has-been.
Perhaps fittingly, Peter’s last film at MGM was his most ignominious. Rogue’s March cast him as a member of the Royal Midland Fusiliers who is sent to India (much like Sir Sydney) to put down uprisings against the British along the Afghanistan border. It was, in the sarcastic words of John Douglas Eames, “an Eastern. No cowboys, but lots of Indians.”
Showing emotion on film was still something that did not come easily to Peter, even in his forty-fourth motion picture role. The film’s director, Allen Davis, recalled that when Peter was required to cry for the camera — for the first time in his career — he couldn’t do it. “In a hopefully moving scene, the big set piece of the movie, he was to be drummed out of his regiment, stripped of rank, regimental insignia, buttons, et cetera. He could not give me the ashamed, silent but heartbroken tears I wanted. So we had to use a spray with onion juice in it to get the tearful effect.”
Rogue’s March did not turn out well; MGM executives had so little regard for the film that they never released it in New York. It did have a short run in Los Angeles and elsewhere around the country, where it lost $247,000 at the box office despite a total budget of only $659,000.
Peter was now in the final year of his contract, and Metro was paying him two thousand dollars a week to appear in third-rate productions. Clearly, something would have to give. In December, when his contract was up for renewal, the word came down from Nick Schenck, head of Loew’s Inc., that Peter Lawford’s employment at MGM would be allowed to lapse.
The studio’s financial problems had worsened in the early fifties, when television was making deep inroads into the American entertainment audience. When families could stay at home and watch — for free — Milton Berle or I Love Lucy or first-rate live drama, it took more than flimsy comedies or sluggish melodramas to get them to leave the house and pay for cinema admission. More than ever, movies had to be “events” to score big at the box office, and theaters needed super- star names on their marquees. The films that Peter Lawford made after Little Women, with the exception of Royal Wedding, were the hardest hit by the drop in movie attendance: entertainment not much better (and in some cases, worse) than what most people could now get at home on television.
MGM’s profits in 1952 were its lowest in twenty years, and Loew’s Inc. cut costs by dropping the contracts of many of their highest-paid players. Peter wasn’t alone. Some of their brightest lights were let go — Greer Garson, Esther Williams, George Murphy, Clark Gable, Van Johnson, Deborah Kerr, Kathryn Grayson, Lionel Barrymore, and June Allyson, among others. (In some cases, the break was cruel. The day June Allyson left, a studio executive accompanied her to make sure she didn’t steal anything. “He had a long inventory sheet of things in my dressing room that were studio property,” the actress recalled. “He told me he just couldn’t do that to me, so I took the sheet myself and went around checking things off — all the ashtrays and the pictures off the walls.”)
With his employment at MGM ended, Peter saw the chance to get away from second-rate pictures. He had heard about the huge amounts of money actors could make by producing their own movies and television shows, and he was intrigued. Television executives, he was told, were eager to use established names in their shows, and many stars could pretty much write their own tickets. Peter promised himself he’d look into it.
ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1953, eighty-seven-year-old Sir Sydney awoke and complained of abdominal pain. Lady Lawford called the general’s doctor, who, she claimed, informed her between drunken hiccups that Sir Sydney suffered from a double hernia and should be operated on. “Absolutely not,” May replied. “Do you want him to die? He probably wouldn’t even survive the anesthetic. If he must die, he will die in peace.”
May shooed the doctor away and walked Sir Sydney out to his mignonette garden, where they sat and talked. The general told her, May said, that she had been a good wife to him: “You’ve always gone beyond the call of duty.” He then asked her to make sure that Peter took care of their cat, a stray he had found in an alley eight years before. Then Sir Sydney Lawford nodded off, seemingly to sleep. He was dead.
Peter had gone to Hawaii to visit Jean MacDonald and other friends, and May telephoned him there with the news. She later claimed that Peter told her he didn’t want to cut his vacation short for his father’s funeral and she should “keep him on ice” until he returned the following Friday. She further claimed that when Peter arrived in Los Angeles he joked about his father’s death and went out nightclubbing after his funeral.
May hoped to show with these anecdotes that Peter was unmoved by his father’s death, that he disliked Sir Sydney as mu
ch as he disliked her. But the opposite was true. Jean MacDonald was with Peter when he got the news, and she saw him react “with shock and sadness” to his father’s death: “One of Peter’s strengths was his great pride in his father. That gave quality and meaning to his life; it was a strong side of his personal character. He felt tremendous loss at Sir Sydney’s death.” Peter was reluctant to come home for the funeral, but only because he wasn’t sure he could bear the emotional ordeal of burying his father, and he dreaded having to cope with his mother at the same time. Milton Ebbins, who had just become his manager, told him, “You’ve gotta come back.”
“I don’t think I can handle it, Milt,” Peter replied. Finally, however, he did agree to return. As he said to Ebbins, “It will look bad if I don’t, won’t it?”
If there was any flippancy on Peter’s part once he did get back, it was clearly directed at May; she chose to interpret it as callousness toward his father’s death. There can be no doubt that Peter was deeply affected by Sir Sydney’s passing. Molly Dunne recalled, “I went with Peter to the mortuary to help pick out his father’s coffin. He was devastated by Sir Sydney’s death. You couldn’t mention his name for months afterward that Peter wouldn’t well up with tears.”
Lieutenant General Sir Sydney Turing Barlow Lawford was laid to rest on February 21, 1953, in a service conducted by the Canadian Legion of the British Empire Service League at Inglewood Park Cemetery on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Peter, Lady Lawford, and nearly fifty others watched as his casket, draped with Britain’s Union Jack, was lowered into the ground amid the sounds of a lone bagpipe. The British consul-general in Los Angeles, Sir Robert Haddow, eulogized the general: “Sir Sydney was the embodiment of a soldier and a gentleman. Here his body lies among his comrades in the Canadian Legion plot, but his spirit has been promoted to a fellowship with God.”
IN THE SPACE OF A FEW short months, Peter’s life had fundamentally altered, and his mind was awhirl with mixed emotions. He was pleased to be free of the MGM shackles, but the cessation of his weekly two-thousand-dollar paycheck was less pleasant. He had saved a hefty nest egg, but he was loath to dip into it any more than he had to. It was for this reason that Peter continued to live in the Sunset Boulevard house with his mother for more than a year after Sir Sydney’s death, although he had considered moving out so often in the past. He knew that to set either himself or May up in a separate residence would be a drain on his finances that he couldn’t afford.
When Peter’s contract was dropped, Loew’s Inc. demanded immediate payment of the balance on his mortgage with them, which was $18,573.28. He took out a new mortgage for that amount, with monthly payments of $250, less than one-third of the eight hundred dollars MGM had been deducting from his paycheck each month.
Peter sold the house fourteen months later for eighty-five thousand dollars, netting a smart profit of forty thousand dollars in seven years’ time. He set May up in a small apartment in Westwood, and she was heartbroken at having to leave the Sunset house. The day she moved, she pried the address plaque off the clapboard to keep as a souvenir. “I was so happy here,” she said to a friend. “Why do I have to leave?”
FOURTEEN
Shortly after his release by MGM, Peter met Milton Ebbins, a pleasantly full-faced native of Springfield, Massachusetts, in his late twenties. Ebbins had been the road manager of Count Basie’s band for several years and then turned to personal management, handling Basie, Billy Eckstine, and others. Ebbins knew Joe Naar, who had just become a television agent, and Joe introduced him to Peter. Joe knew that Peter needed career guidance now that he was no longer with MGM, and in the course of the conversation he piped up, “Why don’t you hire Milt? You’re floundering. You gotta get somebody to help you.”
Peter took Ebbins to lunch and asked him, “Do you think you can do something for me?” When Ebbins replied that he did, Peter agreed to sign on with him. “I didn’t get paid anything for the longest time,” Ebbins remembered. “But I didn’t care at that point about getting paid. I didn’t think I was going to be with him very long anyway, because Peter was a very strange guy.”
Ebbins was wrong about the longevity of the relationship — he remained Peter’s most intimate associate for most of the next thirty- two years, involved in every aspect of his career and most aspects of his personal life. When Peter went on location, he and Ebbins traveled together and shared hotel suites. If Peter was too tired to drive all the way home, he’d crash at his manager’s place. If the two didn’t see each other during the day, they would talk on the phone half a dozen times. Ebbins was Peter Lawford’s best friend, his confidant, his adviser, his champion, his protector, his conscience. If ever a man was all things to another man, it was Milt Ebbins to Peter.
IN THE SPRING OF 1953, the director George Cukor signed Peter to appear in his new picture It Should Happen to You, a comedy written by Garson Kanin about Gladys Glover, an unsuccessful New York model who purchases a billboard, plasters her name over it, and becomes an immediate celebrity. Judy Holliday was cast as Gladys, Peter as an advertising executive who woos her in order to wrest away the coveted billboard space, and Jack Lemmon, a newcomer to the screen, as a documentary filmmaker who loves Gladys for herself.
The film put Peter in top-notch company. Holliday had won the 1950 best actress Oscar playing the not-as-dumb-as-she-seems blonde Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday, also written by Kanin and directed by Cukor, who had been one of the most highly respected talents in Hollywood for twenty years. Peter was pleased with the opportunity to work with an artist of Cukor’s caliber, and he was thrilled to be able to choose a project rather than be assigned to one. He told a reporter on the set, “As a free agent, an actor has to be on his toes. . . . His next assignment will be the result of the merits of the performance he gave in the last one. And since the actor has taken the part because he believes in it, he is likely to give a punchier show.”
It Should Happen to You was a big improvement over the films Peter had done his last few years at MGM, but the role wasn’t. The picture belonged to Judy Holliday, and Jack Lemmon’s character was flashier and more interesting than Peter’s. Lunching in Hollywood with Peter the first day of rehearsals, Lemmon said to him, “It’s a marvelous script, isn’t it? The parts are so good.”
“Yours is,” Peter replied.
“He said it with a smile,” Lemmon said, “but it was a better part . . . and there was more of it. It had a little more depth than Peter’s part.”
Lemmon recalled that Peter was gracious and helpful to him. “And I think it was out of his good nature, period, not because he felt, ‘Oh, I’ll help this kid because he’s getting his feet wet and he doesn’t know.’ I think it was just his nature. He was a hell of a nice guy.”
Not long into the shooting of interiors in Hollywood, Peter and Judy Holliday began an affair. She was a pretty, perky blonde with a cute figure, and Peter liked her sprightly personality, unaffected manner, and wry humor. Judy was married and having domestic problems; she wasn’t separated from her husband, but she allowed Peter to believe that she was. She had been under tremendous strain for a long time, besieged by a lengthy court case, her mother’s breakdown, a difficult pregnancy, a blacklisting for alleged Communist ties, a large weight gain, and then dieting to restore her figure. She needed a diversion, needed reassurance that she was still a desirable woman. She welcomed Peter’s attentions, and it wasn’t long before she found herself in love with him.
In June, the company was given a week off before everyone had to report to New York for location work. Peter and Judy decided to take a train across country, and Peter asked Milton Ebbins to accompany them. As the train glided through small towns and wheat fields, Peter and Judy played poker, challenged each other with word games, and practiced their scenes together. Judy hung on Peter’s every word as he described his childhood travels and regaled her with stories of his father’s heroism, and Ebbins realized for the first time just how much in love Judy was: “Her eyes wo
uld bulge out every time she looked at him.”
Exterior filming in New York went smoothly in spite of a heat wave that left everyone exhausted by noon and led Judy to take a cold bath between takes with her makeup and hat still on. Peter got along well with George Cukor, who seemed relieved that Peter was giving him just what he wanted without prodding. After the first week of filming, Cukor made an overture to get closer to Peter. The director telephoned him at his hotel room Friday night and invited him to dinner the following evening aboard the boat Cukor was living on during the shoot.
“Who else is going to be there, George?” Peter asked.
“Just you and I, Peter. We’ll have a little dinner, then we’ll go sailing up the East River. It’ll be very nice.”
Politely, Peter lied to Cukor that he already had a dinner engagement he couldn’t break, and refused the offer. When he hung up he turned to Ebbins, who had heard Peter’s end of the conversation. “I knew that was going to happen,” Peter said. “If I go over there, he’ll be all over me like a tent.” Despite Peter’s turndown of Cukor’s subtle pass, things remained cordial between the two men and there were apparently no hard feelings.
Ebbins shared a two-bedroom suite with Peter at the Madison Hotel for the two-week shoot, and it was there that he saw signs of strain in Peter during filming. One morning about seven he heard Peter stirring in the living room. He got up, but didn’t want Peter to know he was awake because he wanted to get some more sleep. He opened the door just a crack and saw Peter drinking from a bottle of Tanqueray gin: “It was like he was drinking soda — gulp, gulp, gulp. Then he put some drops on his tongue to disguise the smell of the alcohol and rushed out of the suite. He didn’t even put the gin bottle back.”
