Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Jack Kennedy later used much of what he learned to great political advantage, but his main interest early on was sexual conquest. With his boyish good looks and keen mind, he had never had trouble attracting women, in Hollywood or elsewhere, but his sister’s marriage to Peter Lawford afforded him additional entree to moviedom’s most gorgeous females.

  Of all his in-laws, Peter got along with Jack the best. Jack had no problem with Peter’s being English; he had strongly supported his sister Kathleen’s decision to marry a nobleman, and remained an anglophile despite his father’s debacle as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. His first book, the highly acclaimed Why England Slept, chronicled the events leading to Britain’s entry into World War II.

  Jack admired Peter’s savoir faire, his cultured manner, his sartorial elegance, and he knew that Peter was someone he could learn from. The Kennedys lived up to the stereotype of the rambunctious, all- American Irish family (and provoked Lady Lawford’s disdain because of it), but of them all Jack was the only one who aspired to old- world sophistication. His decision to marry a debutante, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, the daughter of socialites Janet Lee and John “Black Jack” Bouvier, was motivated largely by her continental flair, her knowledge of French, her impeccable etiquette. She was just the kind of wife the ambitious Jack Kennedy wanted the world to see on his arm.

  The friendship between Jack and Peter, however, was based on more than that. Both men had a lusty appetite for women, and neither felt constrained by their marriage vows to curb their desires. Once Peter became a part of the Kennedy family, he was happy to help the newlywed Jack on his Hollywood “hunting expeditions.” One of the women Peter made sure Jack met was Marilyn Monroe.

  In the summer of 1954, Peter arranged for Jack and Jackie to be invited to the agent Charles Feldman’s home for a party. Peter knew that among the guests would be Marilyn Monroe, the most talked- about woman in the world that year, and her husband of six months, former New York Yankee baseball great Joe DiMaggio. Their marriage was already on the rocks, and it would end a few months later, destroyed by DiMaggio’s jealousy and Monroe’s unwillingness to give up her burgeoning career, as DiMaggio insisted, and be a housewife.

  DiMaggio’s mistrust of Marilyn’s fidelity was usually unfounded, but in the case of Marilyn and John F. Kennedy, his suspicions were justified. Bob Slatzer was a Paramount publicity and rewrite man. Marilyn told Slatzer about the party at which she first met Jack Kennedy, and a few weeks later Charles Feldman related essentially the same story to him. “She had to talk DiMaggio into going,” Slatzer recalled, “because he hated Hollywood parties. When she was introduced to Kennedy he said to her, I think I’ve met you someplace before,’ and she told me that she thought she might have met him in the forties when he used to stay out here with Bob Stack.”

  Marilyn said she felt uncomfortable at the party because Jack Kennedy stared at her the entire evening. “I may be flattering myself,” she giggled, “but he couldn’t take his eyes off me.” Charlie Feldman noticed that Jackie saw what Jack was doing, and she was getting angry. Joe DiMaggio was aware of what was going on, too. Every few minutes he would grab Marilyn’s arm and say, “Let’s go! I’ve had enough of this!” Marilyn didn’t want to leave, and Feldman recalled that “they had words about it.”

  The DiMaggios did leave early, but sometime before that Marilyn gave Senator Kennedy her phone number. The next day Jack called, and DiMaggio answered the phone. When he asked who was calling, Kennedy said, “A friend.” DiMaggio hung up in Jack’s face and started to grill Marilyn about who it was, because he hadn’t recognized Kennedy’s voice. The next time Marilyn saw Kennedy, he said, “I guess I shouldn’t call at certain times, huh?”

  Marilyn told Bob Slatzer that she and Jack Kennedy didn’t “get together” until after her divorce from DiMaggio early in 1955. She began to spend a good deal of time in New York during this period, and occasionally, when she and Jack were both in the city, they would meet.

  A few months after the party at Charlie Feldman’s, Jack was hospitalized for surgery to alleviate a chronic back problem. Visitors to his room were amused by a color poster of Marilyn Monroe he had taped to the wall, in which she wore blue shorts and stood with her legs spread widely apart. Kennedy had hung the poster upside down.

  KENNEDY ALMOST DIED after the surgery; he was given the last rites of the Catholic Church while lying in a coma. But he rallied and emerged from the ordeal a stronger, more ambitious man — and a more impatient politician. While recuperating in Palm Beach he wrote Profiles in Courage, and the rise in his national political star prompted by the book’s critical plaudits made him think seriously about higher office.

  That one of his sons would achieve the presidency had long been a dream of Joe Kennedy’s; when Joe Junior was killed, Kennedy transferred his expectations to Jack. The odds were long: not only had a Catholic never won a presidential election, but Jack Kennedy was a freshman senator with little experience in international affairs and was barely above the constitutional minimum age to hold the office. By 1960, the Kennedys felt, Jack could overcome these disadvantages, and their master plan was to orchestrate the rise in his reputation and popularity until his nomination had become a virtual inevitability.

  At the 1956 Democratic convention in Chicago, which was poised to nominate Adlai Stevenson for a second race against President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jack was scheduled to narrate a documentary that would open the convention, The Pursuit of Happiness. The film was produced by Dore Schary, and for the first time, John F. Kennedy was able to utilize his brother-in-law’s show business ties to further his career. Schary remembered that Kennedy flew to Los Angeles to confer with him about the film: “I went down to call for Senator Kennedy at the Lawfords’ home [in Malibu]. We ran the film alone for Senator Kennedy, and he thought it was wonderful.” With input from Pat and Peter, Jack suggested some changes in the narration script, which Schary made.

  The film and Jack’s narration were so well received that Kennedy was asked to make the principal nominating speech for Stevenson. His brilliant oration — he rewrote a draft by Arthur Schlesinger that Stevenson’s aides had supplied to him — catapulted him into the national spotlight, and suddenly the talk was that Jack Kennedy would make a splendid vice-presidential nominee.

  He agreed. He decided to fight for the nomination, which he saw as a stepping-stone to the respectability he would need to run for president in 1960. Joe Kennedy argued against the race, afraid that Stevenson’s all but certain loss to the popular Eisenhower would damage Jack’s reputation as a winner. Jack felt that a second Stevenson defeat would not be blamed on him and that a well-fought national campaign would gain him tremendous name recognition and temper him for the 1960 battle as nothing else could.

  Kennedy hoped Stevenson would take the traditional route and choose him as his running mate, thereby making his nomination by the delegates a mere formality. Instead, Stevenson threw the decision to the convention floor without a recommendation, allowing the Democrats to choose for themselves among Kennedy, Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, who had a strong political organization forged in his primary campaign against Stevenson, and Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey, a bright new face in the party’s liberal wing.

  Stevenson’s action earned him Kennedy’s enmity and left Jack with only twelve hours to campaign. Jack and Bobby surged into action, but they were unprepared — so much so that when Jackie walked into the Kennedy headquarters early the following morning, Bobby looked at her balefully and asked, “Do you know anybody in Nevada?”

  She didn’t, but she suggested Bobby call Peter in Malibu — Peter knew Jimmy Durante, and didn’t Durante perform in Las Vegas? Bobby called the Lawford house and woke up Peter and Pat, who was eight months and three weeks pregnant. Peter told Bobby that he knew Wilbur Clark, the owner of the Desert Inn. Clark, it turned out, was the chairman of the Nevada delegation, and Bobby asked Peter to give Clark a call because “We need Nevada’s votes, and
I don’t think we’ll get them unless you can persuade Clark to change his delegates’ minds.”

  Peter called Clark, and that evening thirteen of Nevada’s fourteen votes went to Kennedy on the second ballot, putting him within thirty- eight votes of the nomination. Jack ultimately lost to Kefauver, but afterward he made an eloquent appeal for unity and left the convention a much stronger — and more famous — politician. He campaigned hard for Stevenson, all the while gaining more recognition and collecting political IOUs that he could cash in for the 1960 campaign. With Stevenson’s defeat in November, John F. Kennedy quickly became the front-runner for his party’s next presidential nomination.

  A WEEK AFTER THE CONVENTION ended, on August 25, Pat gave birth to the Lawfords’ second child, a girl they named Sydney, after Peter’s father, in the unisex British tradition Peter favored. A month later, Peter purchased the home that he, Pat, and their children would share for the next eight years. It was a house with a celebrated past, and within a few years the Lawfords’ occupancy of it would make it one of the legendary houses in show business history.

  The dwelling was Louis B. Mayer’s Santa Monica beachfront mansion that Peter had first visited as a wide-eyed fifteen-year-old during one of Mayer’s Sunday brunches. Mayer had purchased it in 1932 and spent nearly a million dollars to turn it into a surfside Xanadu. A ten- thousand-square-foot neo-Spanish building on two lots, it featured a dozen rooms, four bedroom suites, an elevator, a theater-sized projection screen that pulled down from the ceiling in the living room, a guest house, and an enormous swimming pool yards from the Pacific Ocean.

  Mayer had spent seventy-five thousand dollars on imported Italian marble that he installed around the pool and fireplaces and throughout the master bedroom. The Mayer house became one of the social centers of Hollywood, a fitting den for the MGM lion and his cubs, and a “second home” to such movie greats as Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, and Katharine Hepburn.

  When Mayer’s wife, Margaret, divorced him in 1947, she won a three-million-dollar settlement that included the mansion. Ill and a recluse, Margaret was unable to keep the place up; when she died in 1955 it was badly in need of repair.

  The photographer Don Pack remembered walking along the beach with Peter in the early fifties when Peter pointed to the Mayer house and said, “Someday I’m going to buy that.” On September 27, 1956, he did, from the estate of Margaret Mayer — for a purchase price of ninety-five thousand dollars.

  The enormous amount of money Mayer had put into the house over the years meant little to its resale value. In the fifties the population of Southern California was still relatively small, and there wasn’t the kind of frenzied competition for housing that later developed with the area’s population boom. Most wealthy home buyers didn’t want to live in Santa Monica, even at the beach; they preferred Beverly Hills or Malibu. Property values around the Mayer house kept its value low, and because its upkeep had been neglected, it was something of a white elephant, a “fixer” in today’s real-estate parlance. After he bought the house, Peter spent twenty-two thousand dollars to repair the plumbing alone.

  The house gave the Lawfords the kind of privacy they could never have had in Beverly Hills, where their house would have been one of the stops on the bus tours of movie stars’ homes. Most of the houses like Peter’s that fronted on the ocean along the Pacific Coast Highway looked modest from the street; it was only once one was inside that their lavishness became apparent. Peter’s neighbors were doctors, lawyers, and other professional people with enough income to afford big houses in Santa Monica, but without the wherewithal to live in the “better” neighborhoods of Malibu and Beverly Hills. Although Pat did have that kind of money, Peter was more comfortable here — because the house was right next to State Beach, where he could surf and play volleyball with his friends.

  Peter made the mortgage payment every month, but Pat paid for most of the renovations. (In the late fifties General Electric installed a completely new kitchen in exchange for a commercial endorsement from Peter.) Within a few years the house was both palatial and comfortable, both elegant and lived-in. Pat installed a playground and built a playhouse for the children and furnished the bedrooms in art deco and the den with cozy overstuffed sofas. The living room served as a sprawling entertainment center.

  Bonnie Williams, a secretary to Joe Kennedy who later worked for Peter, recalled the house as “typically Kennedy. Kennedy homes are all big and beautifully done, but comfortable. Peter loved it. He spent a lot of time in that large formal living room, and I can just see him on the couch with his feet up, talking on the telephone.”

  After the November election, Jack Kennedy came to spend a few days with Peter and Pat in their new home and recover from the rigors of the campaign. As he sat on the patio at twilight, the ocean waves lapping gently at the shore just yards away, Jack spoke to Peter about what an exhilarating experience it had been to travel from state to state in support of various Democratic candidates and how encouraged he had been by the public’s reaction to him.

  “You have no idea, Peter,” he said, “how nice it is to hear people say, ‘There goes John Kennedy.’ They don’t say, ‘There goes Peter Lawford’s brother-in-law’ anymore. I’m really getting an identity of my own.”

  WHILE PETER FELT ALIENATED from the Kennedy family, Pat had problems of her own with Peter’s close network of friends. Dolores Naar felt that “it was tough for Pat, having Peter’s buddies running through her living room all the time with their surfboards, yelling, ‘Surfs up!’ Peter was very close to these men. Every Saturday and Sunday he was out on the beach.

  “Joe and Peter and the rest of the guys had their own little dialogues going on. I used to go with Joe when we first got married, but after a while I stopped because I realized it was just a gang of guys who wanted to be together. Pat didn’t participate; she’d just do whatever she wanted to do.”

  Peter Sabiston thought that Peter’s reluctance to “cut the cord” with his bachelorhood friends stemmed from his unfulfilling relationship with his wife. “He would always try to include some friends, whether it was me or Joe Naar or Dick Livingston, in whatever he did, because he didn’t have much fun with Pat in a one-on-one situation.” Pat disliked Peter’s beach friends, and they, for the most part, reciprocated her ill will. They saw her as cold, aloof, difficult to get close to. Dolores Naar’s recollection of her first exposure to Pat was fairly typical. On her first date with Joe he took her to Peter’s house — but she didn’t know that’s where they were going. Just before they arrived, Joe told her who his friend was and warned her, “He and his wife will probably ignore you, but it doesn’t mean anything.”

  Dolores braced herself, but she found Peter charming. “He was in his swim trunks. What a beautiful man, with such a warm smile! But Joe was right about Pat. She was reading the newspaper when I came into the room, and she didn’t even look up at me.” Dolores would become one of only a handful of Peter’s friends who managed to get close to Pat, but even she never fully understood her. “Pat was so complex. She could be the warmest, she could be the most hostile, she could be the most indifferent. And you had to kind of read her. She never sought my advice — she’s not that kind of woman. She’s very private.”

  Peter Sabiston never forgot an incident with Pat, one that left a bitter taste in his mouth. “Pat wanted to buy Peter a diving board for his birthday, so she asked me if I knew anyone who could lend her a station wagon so she could go out to the [San Fernando] Valley and pick it up. I borrowed a friend’s car and let her use it. On the way out there, she was involved in an accident. Did about eight hundred dollars’ damage. And she refused to pay for it! She said I should have my friend pay for it. I said, ‘How dare you! What do you mean have my friend pay for it? He was nice enough to lend you the car. The least you can do is return it to him in the same condition it was in when you borrowed it!’ She didn’t see it that way. She simply wouldn’t pay. I almost ended our friendship over it. Peter
finally wound up paying for it.”

  When Pat did show her warm, friendly, generous side, it was usually to Peter’s Hollywood friends. Still an enthusiastic movie fan, she loved meeting Judy Garland, Jackie Cooper, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Martha Raye, Jimmy Durante, and dozens of other celebrities who were close to Peter. If Pat wanted to meet a movie star or two, all Peter had to do was invite them to dinner. Usually, they accepted.

  Several nights a week the Lawfords had a small group for dinner and games — sometimes poker, sometimes charades, sometimes a board game. Usually there was a current-events quiz, something Pat had been brought up with; she and her siblings had been questioned about world events by their father every evening at dinner.

  Meals were prepared by the cook, but sometimes Pat or Peter would give it a go. “Pat made one of the all-time great beef stews,” Milton Ebbins recalled. “She’d serve a salad, some crusty French bread, and this terrific stew, and boy, nobody complained. She was a great hostess, too.”

  Peter wasn’t a bad cook either, his friends agreed, although he had a maddening habit of making whatever he wanted to eat whether his friends liked the dish or not. On one such occasion, Martha Raye watched him put a plate of food in front of her, then stood up and screamed, “Jesus Christ! Are we having liver and bacon and Brussels sprouts again! Don’t you realize we think it stinks!’