Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  The company returned to Hollywood to complete principal photography, and the production wrapped in late July. Peter and Judy continued their affair, and Judy suggested they put together a nightclub act. When Peter seemed intrigued, she arranged a meeting for them with Betty Comden and Adolph Green and sent out feelers to the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas about a November opening. But Peter soon lost interest, and he showed even less enthusiasm for Judy’s idea that they appear together in regional theater.

  On August 13, Louella Parsons wondered in print why Judy still appeared to be keeping company with Peter when filming on It Should Happen to You had ended weeks earlier. She had spoken with Judy the day before and quoted her denial that she was having an affair with Peter: “If you ever saw my husband, you would know how nice he is and that I am really in love with him.” Parsons quoted herself as replying, “Okay, Judy, any girl who talks as sincerely as you do must mean it.”

  By this time, however, Peter had tired of Judy Holliday. According to Milt Ebbins, it had never been a serious romance for Peter, but rather a conquest, and after the Parsons item appeared, Peter felt it was time to end the affair. To do so, he simply stopped speaking to Judy. She couldn’t figure out what she had done wrong. Hurt and confused, she telephoned Ebbins. “What happened, Milt? Ask him what happened.”

  “Peter just wouldn’t talk to her,” Ebbins recalled. “I couldn’t understand it. He had been intimate with this woman, it was a fullblown affair, and he just dumped her. He avoided her like you wouldn’t believe. He and I went to the Latin Quarter one night and Judy found out about it. She got somebody to take her there, and she met us in the lobby as we were leaving. Peter walked right by her! I stopped and she said to me, ‘What is this, Milt? What did I do?’” Ebbins met up with Peter on the sidewalk in front of the club and refused to get in the cab with him. “You son of a bitch!” he shouted. “How could you treat the woman that way?”

  “What did you stop and talk to her for?” Peter shot back. Milt retorted, “Because I’m a gentleman, which you’re not!”

  While the cabdriver waited, Peter explained himself. “Listen, Milt, these things, when they’re over they have to be over. The only way to do it is to make the break. It’s much kinder that way in the long run.” Ebbins replied that Peter had acted badly and no amount of rationalization would change that. “Peter didn’t know how to handle the breaking off of relationships,” he recalled. “Normally, he was a gentleman, but when it came to ending affairs, it was like he was Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde.”

  PETER WOULD SOON SEE the demonic side of a man who had remained one of his closest friends, Frank Sinatra, whose talent, cool, and magnetic personality he idolized. Sinatra, after a career slump, was back on top with his starkly dramatic performance as Maggio in From Here To Eternity, and there was talk of a best supporting actor Oscar nomination. But his private life wasn’t going as well. Late in 1951 he had married Ava Gardner, by all accounts the love of his life, but in October 1953 Ava announced that the volatile union was over and unsalvageable. After one of the couple’s frequent fights during the marriage, Frank had pretended to shoot himself while talking to Ava on the phone, sending her into a frenzy; after another, he took an overdose of sleeping pills. Frank was devastated by the divorce, “torching like mad” for Ava, as a friend put it.

  Peter found himself pulled into this maelstrom after he and Milt Ebbins ran into Ava having lunch with her business manager at Frascati’s, in Beverly Hills. When they stopped to say hello, Ava explained that she was in the middle of a business meeting, and invited them to join her at The Luau restaurant for drinks later that afternoon.

  Peter was afraid to go. As he took his seat at Frascati’s, he whispered to Ebbins, “Jesus, Milt, what about Frank? I’m gonna get in trouble!”

  “What trouble could you get in?” Ebbins asked him. “You’re gonna have a drink with her, that’s all. I’ll be with you. What’s the big deal?” The two of them met up with Ava and her sister Bea at The Luau, laughed, caught up, and reminisced a little, and left after forty-five minutes.

  An hour later, Ebbins got a call at home — from one of Louella Parsons’s legmen. “Hey, Milt,” he said, “I hear Peter had a date with Ava Gardner.”

  “Yeah, he did,” Ebbins replied.

  “Well, what do you think’s gonna happen?”

  “What do you mean, what’s gonna happen? They just had a few drinks, that’s all!”

  The next day, the Parsons column reported the “date” and hinted that Peter and Ava were rekindling their earlier romance. That night, at two in the morning, Frank Sinatra called Peter. “Do you want your legs broken, you fucking asshole?” Sinatra screamed at him. “Well, you’re going to get them broken if I ever hear you’re out with Ava again. So help me, I’ll kill you!”

  Without allowing Peter a word of explanation, Sinatra slammed down the phone. “I was panicked,” Peter said. “I mean really scared. Frank’s a violent guy and he’s good friends with too many guys who’d rather kill you than say hello.” He telephoned Ebbins for advice, and Milt decided to call Jimmy Van Heusen, with whom he knew Sinatra was staying in New York.

  When Ebbins got Van Heusen on the phone, the songwriter told him in exasperation that Sinatra was driving him to distraction. “This goddamn son of a bitch, he’s gone crazy! And that fucking Englishman of yours — he’s got a monocle up his ass. Will you talk to Frank, Milt, please, because he’s driving me nuts!”

  Sinatra agreed to speak to Ebbins. “Frank,” Milt began, his tone of voice as reasonable and soothing as he could make it, “Peter didn’t have a date with Ava. I was there. It was no date. We had a drink at The Luau, that’s all. Her sister was there, too. There was nothing to it, Frank.”

  “Are you sure?” Sinatra sputtered.

  “I was there, Frank. Peter has no intention of seeing Ava. He’ll never see her again.”

  Frank seemed placated. Still, he refused to speak to Peter Lawford for the next five years.

  PETER TURNED THIRTY in September 1953, and as far as he was concerned the birthday was a watershed for him. Ever since he had first arrived in Hollywood, he had told interviewers that he didn’t plan to get married until he was thirty.

  He had flirted with the idea of marriage to Lana Turner, only to have his hopes dashed. He had proposed to Sharman Douglas and Jean MacDonald, but in the first case got cold feet and in the second allowed the engagement to end through sheer inertia. He wasn’t ready.

  Now he was. And that was the main reason he cut Judy Holliday out of his life so abruptly. What he saw as Sharman Douglas’s attempts to interfere in his relationship with Jean MacDonald had infuriated him, and he didn’t want to risk a repeat with Judy Holliday — especially since he had now met the woman he wanted to make his wife.

  PART THREE

  AMONG THE KENNEDYS

  “He ruled the roost. She looked up to him, did everything he said. Boy, did that change!”

  — Milton Ebbins, on the early years of Peter’s marriage to Pat Kennedy

  FIFTEEN

  It was almost as though he’d planned it. Peter had insisted for ten years that he wouldn’t marry before he was thirty, and his oft- repeated litany of appealing female characteristics could have been tailor-made to describe Patricia Kennedy. As early as 1944, he had told a reporter who asked him what he looked for in a girl, “I’d want her to be attractive and have something on the ball mentally. I’d want her to be all things at all times — serious when the occasion arises and very gay and mad at other times. I’d want a girl who likes everything; who is a gracious hostess inside her own home and who also fits into any occasion, a dance at a night club, swimming at the beach, or talking about world affairs!”

  The sixth of Joe Kennedy’s nine children, Pat was born on May 6, 1924. Her father, in New York on business, didn’t see her until she was three months old. (When he stepped off the train in Boston, his other five children, ages nine to three, ran up to him yelling, “Daddy, Daddy, we
have a new baby!”)

  Of all the Kennedy girls, Patricia was — in the words of Pearl S. Buck — “the most attractive, the least dominating, the most yielding and gentle.” As she grew to adulthood, she wasn’t conventionally beautiful (the Kennedy looks sat much better on men than on women), but she was tall and slender and had a vivacity and intelligence that drew men to her. She was educated at the finest convent schools and graduated from Rosemont College, a private women’s liberal arts school in Pennsylvania.

  The Kennedys were all film fans, and none more so than Patricia. Joe installed a movie theater in their Hyannis Port compound and was usually able, with his Hollywood contacts, to show the latest pictures before their release to the public. Throughout her girlhood, Pat had collected the autographs of all the celebrities to whom her father introduced her. One of her favorite stars was Peter Lawford; her friends recall that when she saw him in Good News she murmured, “Isn’t he divine?”

  Few observers wondered what it was Pat saw in Peter, but some suspected that his interest in her centered on the Kennedy family’s extraordinary wealth. He had often told his friends that he wanted his wife to be a woman of some importance and high social standing; implicit in that desire was that she be rich. The Kennedys, of course, had long been among America’s most monied families; Joe’s net worth was estimated at between one hundred million and four hundred million dollars, and the trust funds he had set up for his children had made them extremely wealthy as well. By her thirtieth birthday, in 1954, Pat Kennedy would have a personal fortune of ten million dollars.

  But Peter wasn’t interested in Pat Kennedy because of her money; he might have married any number of girls for that. His friends have no doubt that Peter genuinely fell in love with her, because she was precisely the kind of girl he was looking for. “Pat’s a tremendous person,” Peter said. “She has a terrific mind. A great sense of loyalty. She’s so honest — there’s no pretense about her at all. And she has such a wonderful outlook on everything.”

  By the 1950s, the Kennedys were accumulating political power as well as money and social status. Jack Kennedy was elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts in 1952 at the age of thirty-five, and was being touted as a possible Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1956. His younger brother Robert had made a name for himself as assistant chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations and would soon be named by Senate Democrats as their minority counsel.

  Despite his mother’s vociferous aversion to the Kennedys, Peter had retained fond memories of Joe, the “heavy cat” as he had called him in Palm Beach, and he had taken an instant liking to Jack when he met him at the Gary Coopers’ early in 1944: “I thought he was rather an extraordinary fellow,” Peter said. Jack, it seemed, had been equally impressed by the young British actor — intrigued by his international background, his easygoing style, and especially his magnetic appeal to the opposite sex. They had stayed in touch and saw each other occasionally when they were in Palm Beach, but Peter had been too embarrassed to tell Jack that he had parked Joe Kennedy’s car as a teenager. When Peter read about the death of Jack’s younger sister Kathleen in a plane crash over France in 1948, he sent off a note of condolence to the family, just as he had done after the death of Jack’s older brother Joe in a fighter plane explosion in August 1944.

  In 1949, during one of his trips to London, Peter met Pat Kennedy at a party. The starstruck woman was thrilled to meet Peter Lawford, but he — involved with Sharman Douglas — was little more than pleased to meet Jack Kennedy’s sister. Later that year, Pat came to Hollywood to work as a production assistant on Kate Smith’s radio program; she did the same for Father Peyton’s Family Rosary Crusade, the show that coined the phrase “the family that prays together stays together.” Peter and Pat ran into each other again at the NBC studios, and he asked her if she’d like to join him for a party that night. She agreed, but they went their separate ways before the evening was over.

  It wasn’t until 1952, when Peter and Pat saw each other again — at the Republican National Convention in Chicago — that anything resembling a spark flew between the movie star and the heiress. It was probably the least likely spot on earth for John F. Kennedy’s sister to get to know her future husband; she was there only as “an enemy observer.” Peter, apolitical, attended the GOP bash because he was a houseguest of Henry Ford’s. “He was going to the convention,” Peter said later, “and I went along.”

  A staunch Republican, Ford knew the Kennedys from Palm Beach and liked them despite their politics. He and Peter sat with Pat and her sisters Jean and Eunice to watch the convention, and Peter was much amused by Pat’s repeated outbursts: “Oh! Those Republicans! Who are they kidding!” she’d grumble during every speech. To play devil’s advocate, Peter argued with her, reciting complaints he’d heard Henry Ford and his other Republican friends make about the Democrats. Pat fired back volleys of countercomplaints, and the arguments frequently became “terrible,” Peter said, “but always friendly.” He was more than willing to give in to Miss Kennedy because of his merely passing interest in the American political system; Peter wasn’t a citizen and couldn’t vote.

  Still, he found Pat’s political passion stimulating, and he was surprisingly drawn to her. At a dinner party on the closing night of the convention, he saw Pat’s more sophisticated side and enjoyed her knowledgeable and enthusiastic discussion of her experiences in radio. But once again, they lost contact with each other. He returned to Hollywood and she to Massachusetts, where her brother Jack, then a congressman, was running for the Senate. The Kennedy women held a series of homey teas, during which they discussed Jack’s boyhood and his World War II heroism and occasionally touched on an issue or two. When Jack won the election handily, the “Kennedy teas” were given much credit.

  In November 1953, Peter encountered Pat again, this time walking down Madison Avenue in New York. Working in television now, again for a Catholic family show, Pat had taken an apartment on East Fifty- fifth Street and was shopping for groceries — in a mink coat. This time, Peter asked her out on an official date. “I had always felt drawn to her,” Peter said. “I admired her complete honesty. She was one of the purest people I’d ever met.”

  The couple went to dinner twice in the next week, and they found themselves more and more intrigued and attracted. When Pat mentioned that she would be spending the Christmas holidays with her family in Palm Beach, Peter said that he too planned to be there, to visit Henry Ford. “Neither of us likes to fly alone,” Peter said, “so we decided to fly to Florida together.”

  On the flight, Pat and Peter spent more time focused on each other than they ever had before, and Peter later told Jean MacDonald that it had been a revelation to him. “Peter kept talking about this wonderful person and how exciting it all was,” Jean recalled. “He was just caught up by her intelligence, her intellect, her personality. He was attracted to her strength.”

  And he was touched by her vulnerability. As the plane flew over Tampa, a fierce electrical storm came up, “the roughest” he’d ever been through, Peter recalled. He was frightened, but Pat was terrified, visions of her brother Joe’s and sister Kathleen’s deaths flashing in her mind. “We were clutching each other,” Peter later said — and the experience brought them still closer together.

  During the ten days they spent in Palm Beach, Peter and Pat were virtually inseparable. They dined out almost every night, played tennis, met each other’s friends. Peter showed Pat the modest house on Avenida Hermosa he’d lived in — “that was a nice Democratic touch,” he said. They laughed when he drove past Carl Brukenfeld’s parking lot and told her that her father had been his biggest tipper thirteen years earlier.

  Peter finally got a proper introduction to old Joe at the Kennedys’ palatial hacienda-style mansion at 1095 Ocean Boulevard on the beachfront. The meeting was brief but memorable — not least from a sartorial perspective. Peter recalled that he wore white pants, a blue blazer, and brigh
t red socks: “Mr. Kennedy couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the socks.”

  Kennedy pére found Peter polite and pleasant enough, and was amused by the hubbub his presence aroused among Pat’s sisters and the female house staff. But once Peter left, Joe was wary in his response to Pat’s imploring queries about his reaction to her latest beau. “He seems like a nice young man” was all the cautious patriarch would allow. In any case he knew that his daughter would soon embark on a trip around the world during which she planned to be reunited in Tokyo with Frank Conniff, a correspondent with the International News Service, who had been her most serious suitor for several years. Pat’s plan, according to a Kennedy friend, was to “talk him into coming back and marrying her.”

  Pat’s blossoming feelings for Peter complicated matters, but she was unsure of the actor’s intentions and proceeded with her travel plans. She and Peter shared another airplane trip, this time from Palm Beach to Los Angeles, where Pat planned to stay for a few days before hopping a shuttle to San Francisco for her flight to the Far East.

  On Pat’s last night in LA, Peter took her to Frascati’s and in the course of a romantic candlelight dinner told her, “I’m crazy about you. I’d like to marry you eventually.”

  “How about April?” Pat replied.

  Hearing that, Peter drew back and stammered that he didn’t really want to make definite plans right now. Amused at his discomfort, Pat then told him why she was going to Tokyo, and hinted that if he made his intentions more concrete, she might cancel her plans. Peter didn’t do that, and the evening ended on a strained note. Pat left the next morning for San Francisco.

  Overnight, Peter realized he had made a mistake. If Pat and Frank Conniff decided to marry, he would lose her forever. Whether she had consciously used reverse psychology or not, Pat had succeeded in making Peter want something he wasn’t sure he could have. As Joe Naar had earlier told a reporter, “As soon as a girl pursues Peter, he loses interest. Any girl who gets him is going to have to give him a hard time.” Peter telephoned Pat at her hotel first thing in the morning, but he was too late: she had already checked out. Frantic to head her off, he booked the next flight to San Francisco, but by the time he got there Pat’s plane had departed. He waited what seemed an eternity until he could reach her at her Tokyo hotel.