by James Spada
The newlyweds and their parents stood for half an hour in a receiving line to welcome the three hundred guests. Then Peter took his bride’s hand and walked her to the center of the dance floor, where they whirled to the strains of “Stranger in Paradise.” Joe Kennedy then danced with his daughter, while Peter led first Rose Kennedy and then his mother across the floor.
As was traditional at Kennedy weddings, each member of the wedding party made a toast to the bride and groom. All were touching and tasteful, and Peter Sabiston was the last to rise. “Now, I had about nine dollars to my name,” Sabiston recalled, “and that included the value of my car and the money I had in my pocket. And here I am staying at the Plaza and hobnobbing with all these multimillionaires. I raised my glass and said, ‘Captain, please bring me the check for this party.’ Well, I thought Peter and the Kennedys would fall on their faces laughing, because they knew how poor I was. All except Joe Kennedy — he didn’t think it was funny at all.”
After the toasts were completed, the three Kennedy brothers stood on the dais behind the bride and groom and sang to them, their Irish tenor voices lilting lyrics written especially for Peter and Pat by Sammy Cahn. Then the guests ate, drank, and danced away the remainder of the evening.
Years later, May claimed that Jack Kennedy got very drunk the night of the wedding and, despite being on crutches because of an injury, insisted on dancing with her. She refused, she said, and told him, “This is a wedding. You’re going to turn it into your funeral.” According to Molly Dunne, this was nonsense. “I didn’t see Jack on crutches, and I didn’t notice him drinking too much. She was obnoxious, and she was shunted off to the side. There was a dinner the night before the wedding and it was just Peter and Pat, Peter Sabiston and myself, and Joe and Rose. Nobody wanted her around at all.” (Photographs of the wedding show Jack and May dancing quite normally, crutches nowhere in sight.)
After the reception, Peter invited Bob Neal, Peter Sabiston, and Molly Dunne back to his suite. He got out of his tuxedo and felt comfortable enough with Molly to walk around the room in his undershorts, sipping champagne. “There was a knock on the door,” Molly recalled, “and there were all the Kennedy men — including Joe the father. Peter became totally unglued. He was terrified of the Kennedys. He was so embarrassed to be in his undershorts that he grabbed a towel to wrap around his waist. So now I’m feeling like an idiot — he doesn’t cover up for me but he does for the Kennedy men!”
Toward the early morning hours of Sunday, Peter and Pat were finally able to steal a few hours alone as man and wife. They ensconced themselves in the bridal suite at the Plaza for the day and then left for a two-week honeymoon in Hawaii, with an overnight stop in Chicago en route. Their plane arrived in Honolulu at six forty-five Tuesday evening, and they were greeted by Jean MacDonald, her mother, and Jean’s friends Rab and Alice Guild. A large crowd of well-wishers stood behind a fence that separated the airstrip from the terminal, and the Lawfords walked along it shaking hands — “just like a politician and his wife,” one observer noted. Pat was heaped with leis — six in all — and photos show her smiling broadly above a mass of flowers.
“We were astonished,” Jean MacDonald recalled, “because the first thing Pat said after ‘Hello’ was ‘The Hawaii state legislature session opens tomorrow. How do I get there?’ And my mother said, ‘Huh?’ Here Pat was on her honeymoon and her first thought was politics.”
The Guilds found Pat “happy and warm” most of the time, but thought that she could be “a little aloof.” Alice recalled that she was “reserved. I don’t know that she would have chosen any of us as friends, but because we were a given, she accepted us.”
Peter was pretty much on his own the first few days of the trip, while Pat attended the legislature sessions (“It was a pretty unconventional honeymoon,” one of Peter’s friends observed), but afterward he and Pat went sailing, swam in the crystal-clear azure waters of Waikiki, and played tennis. Pat tried her hand at surfing the big waves along Oahu’s northern shore, but she didn’t much like it; she had more fun playing golf. (If she and Peter couldn’t agree on a recreation, they went their separate ways. This puzzled Peter’s friends, but the couple in question didn’t seem to give it a second thought.) On May 6, Peter threw his bride a surprise birthday party in a teahouse, to which he invited all his friends. “Pat was wonderful that night,” Alice Guild recalled. “She was funny and fun and I realized I liked her.”
That weekend, Peter and Pat planned to spend time in the mountains of Oahu. Peter asked to borrow Rab Guild’s car for the trip. “I had a red Oldsmobile convertible that was the love of my life and I lent it to Peter,” Rab recalled. “Afterward, we were headed up to visit them and it was very difficult to get to where they were staying, so Peter said he’d come down to Waipahu and pick us up. Well, we waited and waited and finally they showed up about an hour and a half late. He said, ‘I’m sorry we’re late, but I wrecked your car.’ I said, ‘Ha ha ha.’ He said, ‘No, really, I wrecked your car.’
“So he drove us up the mountain and showed me where he’d lost the brakes on a twenty percent downward grade and laid the car into a ditch. Here was my beautiful convertible lying on its side. I was heartbroken, and all Peter could say was, ‘You’re lucky I didn’t get killed.’”
Toward the end of the honeymoon, Jean MacDonald, her husband, Bob Anderson, and the Guilds took Peter and Pat to a movie. They arrived late, after the film had begun. When it was over, some members of the audience filing out of the theater recognized the Lawfords. A few stopped to congratulate them on their marriage, and that’s when they learned that they had missed a newsreel about the wedding that had preceded the film.
Rab approached the manager and asked him to run the newsreel again, and he agreed. The lights went down as the six of them sat alone in the theater, all anticipation. When the newsreel started, a blazing white headline flashed across the black screen: “Pat Kennedy Marries Actor.”
“Peter was crushed,” Rab Guild recalled. “He was just crushed. They hadn’t even used his name.”
6 In 1944, Kathleen had married William Cavendish, the marquess of Hartington and a British Protestant. Rose had never forgiven her, and their relationship had been badly strained for the rest of Kathleen’s life — a fact that Rose deeply regretted after her daughter’s death.
7 At sixty-four, Joe Kennedy was six years younger than May.
SIXTEEN
From the outset, the Lawfords were an unconventional couple. Neither Pat nor Peter had ever been hidebound about the way to live, she because of her wealth and he because of his decade in the Hollywood community, where, as Liza Minnelli has said, “We don’t live like other people.”
As they had at times on their honeymoon, Peter and Pat acted independently of each other far more than most newlyweds. Soon after the wedding, she began a marriage-long practice of taking trips without Peter, and he spoke to the reporter Maxine Arnold early in 1955 about the very “laid back” quality of his marriage.
“We have a wonderful, easy relationship,” he said. “This thing about henpecked people — of having to account for every hour — I believe this has been fostered a lot by gag men. You know, the where-were-you-last-night routine. I call Pat when I’m working, as a matter of courtesy, but she wouldn’t say anything if I didn’t call her. And if I should call now and say, ‘I’m not coming home for dinner,’ she wouldn’t say a word. I wouldn’t have to say why — or where I was going.”
When Peter’s friends learned that he and Pat had separate bedrooms, some of them worried that the Lawfords were a little too unlike traditional newlyweds. Peter pooh-poohed their concerns, pointing out that he and Pat were both thirty and more set in their ways than a lot of young marrieds. He assured his friends that he and his wife’s mutual independence would be no problem whatsoever in their marriage.
But Pat’s wealth hovered over the Lawfords like an enormous carnivorous bird, always threatening to peck away at Peter’s self-esteem. He was sensitive to whi
spers that he’d married Pat for her money, and he knew that he would have to steer very carefully to keep the marriage on an even keel. A reporter said to him, “If your wife has fourteen million, or whatever she happens to have, why should you take a desk job just to prove you can earn your own way?” In agreement, Peter offered this anecdote:
“I know a woman who was so rich she had her own DC-3. The works. She married a man without any money. One day he told her that he couldn’t stand living on her money any longer, that they would have to live in keeping with his salary. They got divorced. She went and married some other cat, and he’s a swinger, and he said, ‘Okay, baby, it’s your money, let’s go!’ She was delighted, and the marriage has been a great success.”
Peter went to neither of the extremes illustrated by his little parable. He insisted on holding up his end of the monetary bargain to the best of his financial ability, but he never denied Pat the right to give the two of them the life she wanted. The Lawfords agreed that she would pay for their travel, any parties they gave, the food and utility bills, and most of the servants; Peter would pay for the gardener, the maid, and the mortgage.
The first two years of the marriage, the Lawfords rented houses on the beach in Malibu, because when Joe Kennedy offered to buy them a house as a wedding present, Peter refused. He wanted to buy their residence himself, in order to have a major financial responsibility in the marriage and thus keep things on something approaching an equal footing.
Although Joe Kennedy had torn up the prenuptial agreement keeping Peter and Pat’s assets separate, Peter never did know exactly how much Pat was worth, and he was never made privy to any of the details of his wife’s finances. Each year at tax time, he was given a blank 1040 form to sign and handed it over to Pat’s accountants with his financial information for the year. He never saw the return again. When Milton Ebbins complained about this to Peter’s business manager, Bob Schiller, he was told, “What are you worrying about? Peter gets a big refund every year.”
One year a copy of the return was sent to Peter in error. Curious, he looked it over and discovered that Pat had paid $286,000 in taxes for the previous year. The tax had been levied solely on her interest income.
IF PETER WERE TO HAVE any hope of holding his own financially in a marriage to Pat Kennedy, he would have to get back to work. The success of It Should Happen to You had been credited mostly to Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon, and to Peter’s deep chagrin, he received no further movie offers, despite his enhanced renown as the groom of the year. He finally had to admit that it looked as though his movie career was over.
Peter had no interest in theater work, so his only alternative was television. He had mixed feelings about the medium. It was clearly a cultural phenomenon; the number of sets in America had mushroomed from an estimated ten thousand in 1946 to more than fourteen million in 1953. In just a few years, television had altered the world’s notion of what constituted a night of entertainment. No longer did Americans have to leave their homes and pay admission to a theater to see their favorite performers. Shows like Milton Berle’s variety hour, Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, George Burns and Gracie Allen’s sitcom, Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners, and, most spectacularly, Lucille Ball’s I Love Lucy kept people happy within the womb of their own living rooms every night.
A movie might attract hundreds of thousands of people to the box office, but a single television show might be watched by ten million. So many people tuned into the episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy and Ricky’s baby was born, New York City officials reported, that during the commercials water pressure in the city dropped to dangerously low levels.
But most people in the Hollywood community looked down their noses at television as second-rate, a poor stepchild of theater and the movies. Few stars with strong movie careers considered doing television; those who did were often mocked as “washed up in Hollywood.” Specials — then called “spectaculars” — were rarely anything but showcases for musical performers.
Drama anthologies such as Ford Theatre, G.E. Theatre, and Schlitz Playhouse of Stars did carry a certain amount of prestige, and Peter appeared on all three in 1953 and 1954, in five separate teleplays. But series television remained problematic for many actors concerned about their public images. Peter dragged his heels for a long time before he decided to Star in and produce a situation comedy. What made up his mind — as it did many another actor in the same quandary — was the money.
“I tried to get Peter to commit to it but he wouldn’t do it,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “He was gun-shy. He never could make a decision. Peter and Pat and I had a meeting and she said to him, ‘This sounds good, Peter, why don’t you do it?’ He hemmed and hawed. Pat said, ‘You’re gonna get paid, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Sure he is — five thousand dollars a week.’ Pat said, ‘What! Peter, you have to do this!’ So he did it. She was the one who made him do it.”
Peter had read through two dozen scripts when he came to Dear Phoebe. He saw that it was about a male advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist (or, as the British call them, an agony aunt) and put it unread at the bottom of the stack. But most of the other scripts called for him to play a British spy, he said, “in a trench coat with fog swirling around my head.” When Alex Gottlieb, the writer-producer of Dear Phoebe, insisted that Peter read the script or send it back, he read it — and discovered that Dear Phoebe had some real comic possibilities. “Then I got excited.”
Phoebe also gave Peter the opportunity to own a piece of a production and potentially earn a great deal more than his weekly salary. He and Pat each put up $12,500 for a combined one-half share of the series; Alex Gottlieb was to put up $25,000 for the other half. When Gottlieb found a network, NBC, and the network found a sponsor, Campbell’s Soup, Peter went to work filming the pilot.
The comedy in Dear Phoebe stemmed from the employment of Bill Hastings, a former college professor, to write an advice column under the byline “Phoebe Goodheart” for a Los Angeles newspaper. To further challenge sexual stereotypes and add grist to the battle-of- the-sexes mill, Hastings’s love interest, Mickey Riley, is one of the paper’s sportswriters. Gottlieb hired Marcia Henderson, a Universal International Studios starlet who’d made a hit in 1950 as Wendy in the Broadway production of Peter Pan, to play Mickey. Peter’s friend Don Weis was set to direct.
The plots usually involved jealousy — romantic or professional — on either Bill’s or Mickey’s part: Bill gets an exclusive interview with one of the victims of a kissing bandit — Mickey is unhappy. Mickey befriends an athlete she writes about — Bill is unhappy. Bill gets psychiatric help from a shapely blond doctor — Mickey is unhappy.
Although silly in the way only a TV sitcom can be, Dear Phoebe appealed to Peter, the producers, and NBC executives not only because the scripts were bright and funny, but also because they were more sophisticated than most of the fare flooding the airwaves. As TV Guide put it, ever since the debut of I Love Lucy in 1951, “the medium has been overwhelmed with situation comedies based on American family life as it is rarely, if ever, lived. It has remained for a former MGM glamour boy, British-born Peter Lawford, to take the play away from his elders with a role once dear to the heart of the American movie-goer but in recent years as hard to find as a kind word in Hollywood — the romantic young man with an infinite capacity for getting in and out of more-or-less adult trouble. . . . It could be that in Dear Phoebe NBC has come up with the new show of the year.”
Optimism suffused the set of Dear Phoebe as production began. Despite the fact that the schedule called for the filming of two episodes a week, spirits were high — and the only problems were caused by Peter’s sense of mischief. As a producer for the first time, he apparently felt unconstrained about behaving himself, and the Dear Phoebe set sometimes resembled a college dormitory. The show’s assistant director, Paul Wurtzel, remembered that “for some reason everybody had a water pistol. You always tried to get the other guy with the water pistol — even while they were filmi
ng scenes. Someone would be doing a close-up and Peter would squirt him and water would be running down his face. Lots of takes got ruined. The production guys were going crazy — they were trying to make this thing cheap. It just got out of hand. The electricians started doing it, and everybody wanted to get the biggest pistol that would shoot the farthest. The wardrobes were getting soaked. This went on for weeks.”
It got so that the crew members were throwing buckets of water at each other, and finally a lens and a light globe were shattered, prompting studio executives to issue a simple directive: “All right, that’s it.” But the gags didn’t stop, they simply became more sedate. The show’s sponsor was Campbell’s Soup, and the crew filmed the commercials at the same time as the shows. For one ad spot, Campbell’s executives came on the set and built a huge display, stacking fifty cans of Campbell’s vegetable soup in a pyramid. The next morning — the day the spot was to be filmed — Peter arrived before anyone else, stealthily pulled out the center can, and replaced it with one of Heinz soup. The Campbell’s people never caught on.
Pat, who was thrilled to be involved in television production again, even if only peripherally, spent a lot of time watching from the sidelines and had a couple of walk-on bits in the show. Her brother Jack, who was fascinated by the inner workings of show business, visited several times and asked questions incessantly. The cast and crew liked Pat, and on her first visit to the set they gave her a wedding present — a money clip. “We were always kidding Peter about how much money the Kennedys had,” Wurtzel recalled. When Pat opened the box, she didn’t know what it was. When she was told she went around to everybody on the set and said, “Okay, put some money in it” — and they did. She’s a good sport, Wurtzel thought.
