Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  “Okay, Pat,” he yelled over a scratchy connection. “Please come home. April it will be.”

  Pat laughed. “I accept your eloquent proposal of marriage,” she told him — and took the next flight back.

  The couple spent a few days together in Los Angeles when Pat returned, and then flew to New York so that Peter could formally ask Joe Kennedy for his daughter’s hand. The ambassador, who could keep his nine children in line simply by giving them “one of Daddy’s looks,” was “bristling,” Peter recalled. The first thing Kennedy said as the intimidated Peter entered his study was, “If there’s anything I’d hate more for a son-in-law than an actor, it’s a British actor!”

  Then he recited Peter’s bank balance. “I’d been thoroughly checked out,” Peter said. “I could understand it. There were droves of fortune hunters sniffing around Pat. She was as rich as she was attractive.” But Joe Kennedy didn’t have much to worry about on that score; Peter had saved enough of his MGM income — nearly a hundred thousand dollars — to make it clear that he didn’t need Pat Kennedy’s money to live comfortably.

  What Peter never knew was just how thoroughly Joe Kennedy proceeded to check him out after this second meeting. Joe gave the couple tentative approval of their marriage plans but insisted they keep them secret for several weeks — enough time for him to find out if there was anything in Peter Lawfords past or personality that made him unsuitable as a husband for Pat.

  Kennedy first telephoned some of his old friends in the movie business, and he was disturbed by what he heard: Peter’s circle of friends at MGM had included several homosexuals, and there had been persistent rumors that Peter himself was bisexual. Joe decided to call Louis B. Mayer, whom he assumed would know the truth. Mayer, who had been convinced by Peter’s denials in his office years before, told Kennedy that the rumors were no more than that.

  Still, Joe took no chances. His next call was to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who agreed to supply Kennedy with any information he possessed that related to Peter Lawford. Hoover requested his staff to review the files, and the following day he received a three-page summary of FBI materials pertinent to Peter, which he passed on to Joe Kennedy.

  The document is headed, “Peter Lawford, also known as Peter Ernest Sydney Lawford, Peter Aylen, Peter Sydney Ernest Aylen.” It describes Peter as having been fingerprinted under Alien Registration in 1940, gives his 1941 Palm Beach address, and lists his occupation as “parking lot attendant at Peruvian and Coconut, Palm Beach, Florida. Previous employment in 1940 was at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Hollywood.” The file continues with a notation that “on October 10, 1947, the Los Angeles Office forwarded a letter which Peter Lawford had received from George Pepper, Executive Director of the Arts, Sciences and Professions Council of the Progressive Citizens of America. Lawford turned this letter over to the Bureau, writing on the communication ‘Oh so Red’ and decorating the outside of the envelope with a hammer and sickle — and the words ‘And how!’ with an arrow pointing to the return address of George Pepper.”

  The document’s lengthiest section contains information obtained about Peter during the FBI’s “investigation of White Slave activities in Los Angeles, California.” Kennedy read that the inquiry had discovered that Peter frequented prostitutes employed by a “well-known call house madam” and that another young hooker “was a frequent trick of movie actor Peter Lawford.”

  Such information would have turned most fathers against a prospective son-in-law, but not Joe Kennedy. To his way of thinking, the report cast Peter in a favorable light. Long a lusty, amoral man, Kennedy viewed prodigious sexual activity — even the extramarital kind — as normal for any red-blooded American male. The report set his mind at ease about Peter’s sexual preferences, and the accusation against Pepper proved to Kennedy that Peter was, like him, a dedicated anticommunist.

  The patriarch decided that the “British actor” would in fact make a perfectly fine husband for his daughter, and Peter soon cleared another major hurdle as well: Rose Kennedy. The formidable matriarch had at first balked at the marriage because of Peter’s Episcopal religious background. But when she realized that Pat and Peter would not be easily dissuaded, and when she reflected on the terrible sorrow she had felt at her alienation from her daughter Kathleen over the same issue,6 her opposition softened. Peter’s promise to allow his children to be raised as Catholics, and to take instruction in the religion himself, cinched it. Rose gave Pat and Peter her blessing.

  Joe Kennedy asked the family lawyer to prepare a prenuptial agreement “three miles long,” Peter said. The document was meant to assure that Peter’s and Pat’s assets would remain separate, but when it came time for Peter to sign the papers, Joe pulled them away and handed them back to his attorney. “We won’t be needing these,” he said. “Apparently,” Peter later mused, “I had passed the test.”

  NOW, PETER HAD TO GET PAT an engagement ring — but the Kennedys swore him to secrecy until they made the official announcement. He called his beach friend Roy Marcher, whose family was in the jewelry business, and asked him to help him buy an engagement ring “for a friend.”

  “I said, ‘Sure,’” Marcher recalled, “and asked him what size it should be, what does the guy want, all of that. He went into this whole routine, had all the information, and I said, ‘A friend of yours, huh? Peter, this is me, don’t give me that “friend of yours” crap.’” But Peter was too afraid of offending the Kennedys to admit the truth, even to a friend as close as Marcher, so he decided instead to wait until the announcement was made before buying the ring.

  Despite Peter’s efforts to keep the engagement secret, items popped up in gossip columns by early February, and Louella Parsons broke the story several days before the announcement was scheduled to be made. The Kennedys still didn’t want Peter to confirm the story until then, a situation that caused him some embarrassment. On February 12, he was cornered by a reporter who asked him if the rumors were true. He replied, “There definitely is no romance between Patricia Kennedy and myself. I love my freedom. I’m not adverse to the idea of getting married, but not for a long time.”

  The comments were incorporated by most newspapers into their stories the next day reporting the Kennedy family’s announcement of the engagement. Confronted about his lack of candor, Peter sheepishly explained himself. “I had promised the Kennedys not to say anything to anybody. I guess I was just nervous, and I had said all those things so many times about preferring freedom to marriage that it was easy to repeat them.”

  The betrothal made headlines across the country; May Lawford’s scrapbook of the wedding contains hundreds of newspaper clippings of the news. Some papers ran pictures of Jean Kennedy instead of Pat (oddly, this happened most frequently in Massachusetts), and some of the pictures of Pat had been taken while she was in England at the age of fourteen, which made Peter seem like a cradle robber.

  It Should Happen to You had opened less than a month earlier nd was doing excellent business, which made the story even more newsworthy. The New York society columnist Cholly Knickerbocker called the Kennedy-Lawford engagement “one of the great romances of the year — a romance that has been serialized on the front pages of the world.” For weeks, newspapers feuded about which columnist had broken the story first, then published rumors that the engagement had been either postponed or called off. Much was made of May Lawford’s huffy comment that “we would have preferred Peter to choose a bride from court circles.” Reporters and photographers followed the couple as they strolled through Central Park, and gleefully reported Peter’s discomfort when his former fling Rita Hayworth and her husband Dick Haymes crossed their path. On March 5, reports came out of Florida of Peter and Pat “padding around” the Palm Beach Country Club holding hands, she in pigtails and pedal pushers, he in dungarees.

  At this point Peter still hadn’t given Pat a ring, but his friend Bob Neal, the Maxwell House heir, came to the rescue. He told Peter that he had bought an eight-carat diamond from Van Cle
ef & Arpels and given it to a nurse. When they broke up he took it off her finger and put it in a bank vault. It had cost Neal over twenty-two thousand dollars, but he would let Peter have it for thirteen thousand. Peter bought the ring, and as Milton Ebbins recalled, “He was making payments to Bob for a year!”

  AS WAS TRUE SO OFTEN in the past, the one glitch in Peter’s happiness was his mother. Peter insisted that May give some gracious comments about Pat to the press to counter her “court circles” remark; she did so, but they were typically self-serving: “I used to pray — as mothers do pray — that Peter would find the right girl,” she purred. “I didn’t care whether she had money, or worked in a bank, or whether she was a gardener’s daughter. Just so she was a decent, God-fearing girl. But, if I could have made her with my own hands, I couldn’t have made anybody who’d suit Peter better.”

  Still, the Kennedys knew of May’s low opinion of them, knew that she referred to them as “barefoot Irish peasants,” called Pat “a bitch,” and complained that Peter had been “trapped” into the marriage. She snipped that she always knew Peter would marry beneath himself “and now, God help him, he has.” Once when Pat came to the Lawford house to visit Peter, she brought with her Francis Cardinal McIntyre. Why did Pat need a chaperone, May wondered: “Do you think Peter will rape you?”

  It was an inauspicious start to the in-law relationship. May decided to throw an engagement party for “my friends” in honor of Peter and Pat, but by the time it was held, Pat had had her fill of Lady Lawford. She arrived two hours late for the gathering, dressed in sports clothes. According to May, her future daughter-in-law claimed illness and insisted that Peter leave with her immediately. They then went out to dinner. “That bitch!” May exclaimed.

  May succeeded equally well in alienating Pat’s parents. She was invited to dine with Joe Kennedy and then, separately, with Rose; she complained that this was improper etiquette and was annoyed that their secretaries had called with the invitations instead of the Kennedys themselves. At his luncheon with May, Joe reiterated in jest his horror at his daughter’s marrying a British actor. May took great offense. “I didn’t like old Kennedy’s appearance, his background, his manners, or his speech,” she said. She stood up, called Kennedy “an old fogey,”7 told him she wanted nothing more to do with him, and stormed out of the restaurant.

  For the rest of her life, May complained about her treatment by the Kennedys. Her friend Prince Franz Hohenlohe recalled that May “started saying all these horrible things. That they didn’t really want her at the wedding, that they were ashamed of her, that they hated her, that Peter tried to eliminate her from the guest list.”

  An impartial observer might conclude, however, that the Kennedys (and Peter) showed great magnanimity toward May in view of her treatment of them. She, needless to say, didn’t see it that way. Her every slight by the Kennedys, prompted by her sarcastic contempt of them, was further proof to her that she was correct in that contempt. It was a vicious cycle that only worsened as the years went by.

  But there was little time for Peter to worry about his mother. The wedding was barely two months away, and Peter told all of his beach buddies that they were expected to be at St. Thomas More’s Church in Manhattan on April 24 to lend him moral support on the most important day of his life.

  PETER GREW EDGY AS HIS wedding date approached, and by the week of the ceremony he was a wreck. He had asked Milton Ebbins to be his best man, but Milt was having some health problems and couldn’t attend. Peter turned to Bob Neal, who headed up a “beach delegation” that included Molly Dunne, Peter Sabiston, Joe Naar, and Dick Livingston. The Kennedys flew Peter’s friends into New York on April 21 and put them up at the Plaza Hotel. (All except Molly, who chose instead to stay with Jean Kennedy.)

  Peter’s anxiety mushroomed when Neal didn’t show up until an hour and a half before the four P.M. ceremony after some bacchanalian revelry the night before. “We got into separate cars,” Neal recalled, “and went to the church. Peter gave me the ring and said, ‘Now look, don’t fuck this up. When they ask for the ring, that means you’re supposed to bring it up to the altar. Now really, don’t fuck this up!”

  As it turned out, Peter was himself a few minutes late. Inside the beautiful church on East Eighty-ninth Street between Fifth and Madison avenues. Pat stood with her father next to the baptismal font and waited along with the 250 guests for her intended to arrive. She looked resplendent in a gown described by a reporter as “simple yet magnificent.” Designed by Hattie Carnegie with pearl-white satin, it had a portrait neckline, tight-fitting bodice, and three-quarter-length sleeves. Her skirt was form fitting in front, its fullness flowing to the back to form a modified train. A single strand of pearls and a bouquet of orchids offset a voluminous tulle veil that cascaded from a small satin cap down her back to the floor.

  Ushers were Pat’s brothers Jack, Bob, and Teddy, their close friend LeMoyne Billings, and Peter Sabiston. Eunice Shriver, pregnant, did not attend, and Jean Kennedy was her sister’s only bridesmaid. She wore a Christian Dior silk taffeta dress covered with pink-and- blue hydrangeas and a large blue picture hat trimmed in purple velvet ribbon. “Quite incorrect,” Lady Lawford sniffed. “A true lady never covers her face from cameras. . . . I wore a small off-the-face chapeau just like the queen wears.”

  Peter, for reasons known only to himself, didn’t invite any of his Hollywood friends to the wedding (with the exception of Jackie Cooper, who didn’t attend because “I didn’t think Peter belonged in that Kennedy milieu”), and the only movie stars there, Greer Garson and Marion Davies, were friends of the Kennedys. Among the other guests were Prince Christian of Hanover; Hugh and Nina Auchincloss; Prince Franz Hohenlohe and his mother, Princess Stephanie; Justice William O. Douglas; Bernard Baruch; Melissa Weston Bigelow; Prince Mahmoud Pahlevi, younger brother of the Shah of Iran; Igor Cassini; Madame Louis Arpels; Lawrence Spivak; and Mr. and Mrs. Morton Downey, Sr. “The people I brought to the wedding,” Lady Lawford stressed, “were the only titled people there.”

  After a few minutes’ wait for the tardy Peter, a great roar from the street signaled to everyone in the church that he had arrived. Three thousand people had gathered outside, filling the entire block from stoop to stoop and avenue to avenue, most of them “screaming women and uninhibited bobbysoxers,” as one reporter put it, who had come to catch a glimpse of Peter. They didn’t get much of a chance; the groom-to-be sprinted from the limousine into the church without so much as a sideward glance after a flying wedge of policemen cleared a path for him. There was such bedlam after he disappeared from sight that “fifty housewives” — as the press described them — were able to sneak in and watch the nuptials from the rear of the church.

  The ceremony, performed by former Notre Dame president the Reverend John J. Cavanaugh, was not a high mass (again because Peter wasn’t Catholic) and it lasted less than ten minutes. Cavanaugh spoke of the couple’s obligation to “have faith in each other” and to “surrender individuality” for the sake of marriage, and when he called for the ring, Peter glanced anxiously at Bob Neal. “I concentrated on what I had to do and I produced the ring without incident,” Bob recalled. “Peter looked at me and smiled with a mixture of surprise and appreciation.”

  Pat pronounced her vows calmly and forthrightly, but observers could barely hear Peter, who appeared “very nervous.” The press made much of the fact that after Cavanaugh pronounced them man and wife, Peter “forgot” to kiss his bride. But May later said he never intended to kiss her because “he knew it would be in poor taste.”

  When Peter and Pat appeared in the doorway of the church, squinting into the brilliant sun, the crowd roared and surged toward them. This time, Peter’s fans would not be denied a close look. The couple struggled to get into their limousine as the mob closed in; they were so badly jostled Pat almost lost her cap and veil. Once they got into the car the pandemonium grew worse as reporters and photographers grappled with fans for a good vantage point from
which to peer through the car’s windows.

  As flashbulbs popped and fans screamed Peter’s name and cried, “Isn’t he gorgeous?!” the limo started to rock back and forth as hundreds of bodies pushed against it on either side. Peter and Pat grew frightened as minute after interminable minute passed with the car unable to move. It took nearly a half hour for twenty-three policemen to clear a path so that the chauffeur could make his way down Eighty- ninth Street to Fifth Avenue and deliver the Lawfords to the Plaza Hotel, where another large but more dignified crowd waited to greet them and the other celebrities as they filed into the hotel for the wedding reception.

  First the wedding party gathered in Joe Kennedy’s suite, joined by Peter’s fellow in-laws Jacqueline and Ethel Kennedy and Sargent Shriver. “Everybody kissed each other and sipped champagne,” Bob Neal recalled, “and then we went down to the ballroom, which was beautifully decorated.”

  The Plaza’s Grand Ballroom was a lovely sight — each table covered entirely in pink, with candles and centerpieces holding pink snapdragons, tulips, and delphiniums. A hedge of white hydrangeas ran the full length of the wedding party’s table, which held candelabra at each end. A similar hedge, of pink hydrangeas, led to a stage where Emil Coleman’s orchestra played.