Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  A Democrat, Sinatra had performed at the party’s national convention in 1956 and was well aware of John F. Kennedy’s political potential. Jack was already the front-runner for the 1960 nomination, and as Peter put it, “Frank could see a bandwagon coming.” Access to political power was very important to Sinatra, the son of Italian immigrants. Insecure, emotionally scarred by his childhood tauntings as a “dago” by playmates in Hoboken, New Jersey, Frank wanted nothing more than to “show them.” It wasn’t enough that he had been the idol of millions of bobby-soxers and had won an Academy Award. That was just show business. To be an associate — maybe even a friend — of the president of the United States, that was real achievement. The prospect of it was enough to move Sinatra to a very uncharacteristic action — he swallowed his pride and set things right with Peter Lawford.

  At the Gary Coopers’ on a hot, dry August evening in 1958, Pat, six months pregnant, sat next to Sinatra at the dinner table. Peter was held up with Thin Man shooting, and when he arrived about an hour late he saw that Pat and Frank were engaged in convivial conversation. “Pat and Frank hit it off beautifully,” Peter said. But when he took his place at the table, Sinatra looked at him and said to Pat, “You know, I don’t speak to your old man.”

  That was enough to break the ice, and the rest of the evening progressed pleasantly. Pat followed up the next week with a dinner invitation to Sinatra, which he accepted, and before long the three were fast friends. Pat was now completely smitten with “Ol’ Blue Eyes.” As Peter said, “There’s no one in the world who can be more charming than Frank when he wants to be.”

  When the Lawfords’ third child, a girl, was born on Tuesday, November 4, she was named Victoria Francis — Victoria because her uncle Jack had been elected to a second term in the U.S. Senate that day, and Francis after Francis Albert Sinatra. The reconciliation was complete.

  It would take another year, though, before Frank apologized to Peter for his behavior over what he now realized was a misunderstanding about Ava Gardner. In Monaco with Peter and Pat for a benefit thrown by Princess Grace, Frank persuaded the Lawfords to follow him to Rome, where he hoped to be reunited with Ava — he was still carrying a torch for her. “Ava very effectively dodged him,” Peter said, and Frank found himself in his hotel room in the middle of the night drinking with Peter and Pat. “Frank and I were pretty drunk,” Peter recalled, “and about three in the morning Pat said, ‘I give up on you guys,’ and went to bed.

  “Frank was hurt as hell about the way Ava had been ducking him. I don’t know whether he sensed the compassion I felt for him, but suddenly he looked up from his drink bleary-eyed and said, ‘Charlie’ — which was the nickname he always used for me — ‘I’m sorry. I was dead wrong.’” This rare display of Sinatra humility touched Peter, and he responded, “Hey, I know it takes a lot for anybody, especially you, to say that. Let’s not do that again. What a waste of time!”

  “We got on like a house on fire after that,” Peter said. “But even as close as we got, I never had a feeling of permanence. I knew you could never rely on this impulsive, explosive, gregarious, generous, charming, petulant man for a real friendship.” For the next four years, however, Sinatra became one of the vortexes of Peter’s life. He deeply admired him and was fascinated by his talent, his charisma, his scrappy street-fighter courage, his power in Hollywood.

  “This is such an enormous talent,” Peter told a reporter about Sinatra at the time. “[His] energy is some kind of magic that a lot of us wish we had. We’re all attracted to him because of that.” To another journalist, Peter said, “I don’t want it to sound phony, but I consider it a privilege to live in the same era Frank’s in. I do. I think he’s a giant; a fantastic human being. Apart from that vast talent — we don’t have to talk about that — he’s got qualities of energy, imagination, kindness, thoughtfulness, awareness, all those qualities you try to find in yourself and hardly ever do.”

  Clearly, Peter had passed the litmus test for membership in the Rat Pack — total obeisance to its leader. “I used to feel kind of sorry for Peter,” Arthur Julian, the producer friend of his, recalled. “He felt that being accepted by Sinatra was so important. He always had an acceptance problem.”

  Just as Sinatra’s rejection of Peter had been total, his reacceptance of him was all-encompassing. In the next few years they made movies together, appeared onstage together, played together, drank together, drove matching Dual-Ghias, enjoyed women together, traveled together, relaxed together. They became partners in the Cal-Neva Lodge, a Lake Tahoe hotel and casino, and in a Beverly Hills restaurant, Puccini.

  The restaurant offered great Italian food and live entertainment at the piano, and it became very popular with celebrities who wanted to associate themselves with Sinatra’s show business power and Lawford’s potential political power. Peter never put up any money for his share of the business. To Sinatra, the cachet that Peter’s class and in-laws brought to Puccini was investment enough.

  THEY CLAIMED NEVER TO HAVE called themselves the “Rat Pack” and professed distaste at the term, blaming it on Time magazine. Nominally, at least, Sinatra’s crew had its genesis in Humphrey Bogart’s “Holmby Hills Rat Pack” in the early fifties. Bogart’s group had been far less stylized than Sinatra’s; according to Bogie, they existed “for the relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence.” Bogart’s wife, Lauren Bacall, said they were devoted to nothing more than “drinking a lot of bourbon and staying up late . . . and you had to be a little musical.”

  Sinatra had been a member of Bogart’s group, along with Judy Garland and her third husband, Sid Luft; the literary agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar; the restaurateur Mike Romanoff; Jimmy Van Heusen; David Niven; and the singer and author of the “Eloise” books, Kay Thompson. Kay later said of the group, “We were all terribly young and terribly witty and terribly rich and old Humpty Bogus was the head of it.” When Bogart — whom Sinatra worshipped — died in 1957, Frank took over as leader. Most of the original members dropped out (Lauren Bacall among them after Sinatra broke off an engagement to her) and Sinatra brought in Dean, Sammy, and Joey as the stalwarts of the new group. Soon, Peter became the “fifth Musketeer.”

  Asked about Sinatra’s version of the Rat Pack, Thompson said, “Oh Lord! I’d love to be in it. I’d be devastated. They’re darling people, adorable people, and I adore them. I adore Peter and I’m mad for Frank. Anybody who doesn’t respond to Frank is a nut!”

  Peter not only responded to Sinatra, but to the whole idea of “belonging” that the Rat Pack offered him. It gave him entree into a whole community of performers he admired, which had been off-limits to him when he and Sinatra were on the outs. His closeness to Sinatra gave Peter a certain aura, made him a more important figure in the industry. And that helped him hold his own in his struggle for identity within the Kennedy family. As Jack’s political star rose, and Peter’s career floundered, Peter needed a buoy to keep his head above water. The Rat Pack was it.

  Before long, the intense interest of the press and public in “The Clan” again elevated Peter to star status in America. Articles syndicated in newspapers around the country analyzed every aspect of its members — their style, their language, their latest high jinks, their latest feuds, who was “in” last week, who was “out” this week. Richard Gehman, who authored a book on the subject, wrote of the Rat Pack in the American Weekly: “For some reason that perhaps only a social historian of the future will be able to explain, no group of male human beings . . . excites, fascinates and dazzles — and at times exasperates — the American public quite as much as Frank Sinatra and his friends.” Even their detractors had to admit that the Rat Pack was a colorful group. They developed a style distinctly their own, the hallmark of which was “cool.” They’d carry a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other, putting either down only long enough to snap their fingers when a jazz beat moved them. They drove expensive cars with telephones, flew in private planes for weekends in Palm Spr
ings, stayed in penthouses in hotels that only they knew even had penthouses. And always they were surrounded by beautiful young women who hung on their every word, laughed at all their jokes, and gave the distinct impression that they were there to serve.

  They developed a mode of expression all their own. Women were “broads,” a term that could be derogatory but was usually a compliment — “She’s a great broad.” Anything boring was “dullsville,” anything exciting “a gas.” Close friends were always called “Charlie,” usually with a descriptive modifier. Milton Ebbins was “Charlie Bluecheese” because he never had a tan, and Peter was alternately called Charlie the Seal, because of a cigarette cough, and Charlie Pentagon or Charlie Washington because of his wife’s family. (Later Sinatra dubbed him, more cleverly, “Brother-in-Lawford.”)

  Frequently used Rat Packer terms were “bird” and “clyde,” the former referring to a man’s frontal anatomy and the latter to his posterior. “How’s your bird?” was a greeting much enjoyed, and “I’m up to my clyde in work” was a frequent complaint. The Rat Packers loved to use these code words in the presence of outsiders who had no idea the boys were talking dirty. Tom Allen, in the Sunday edition of the New York Daily News, pointed out, “Child psychologists would note that kids like to do this, too, but they usually grow out of it by the time they’re teenagers.”

  There were other bizarre locutions. At Sammy Davis’s 1961 wedding to May Britt, Pat asked him, “How do you feel, Chicky Baby?” Davis replied, “Man, I’m electric!”

  Peter soon adopted this self-consciously hip language himself. In an interview with Stephen Birmingham, Peter spoke of his annoyance at constant questions about the Rat Pack and described an encounter he’d had with a French journalist: “Like, we were getting off the boat the other day in Le Havre, and this French dame — this French reporter — comes up to me and says, ‘Êtes-vous un Rat?’ Luckily, I speak French, but I don’t dig ‘Êtes-vous un Rat?’ She’s asking me, am I a Rat? I don’t dig. Then I dig. She’s asking me about the Rat Pack, you dig? But there’s no word in French for Rat Pack, you dig?”

  “I told him I dug,” Birmingham commented wearily.

  It was clear that Peter had taken up many of Sinatra’s mannerisms — and there were those who wished Peter had chosen someone a bit more deserving of such slavish emulation. For in addition to the admirable qualities about the man that Peter enumerated so dutifully, there was Sinatra the boozer, gambler, barroom brawler, and womanizer.

  Peter wasn’t much of a gambler himself, and he always avoided a fight, but he admired Sinatra’s pugnacity, and he felt more secure when Frank was around. It was his efforts to keep up with Sinatra’s drinking, however, that most harmed him. Sinatra always had a drink in his hand, but keen-eyed observers noticed that he would sip it slowly, put it down three-quarters full, take another drink, then do the same thing with that one. Peter, on the other hand, would drink an entire glass quickly and then reach for another.

  There were other negatives about Sinatra that Peter was aware of but glossed over in his desire to be “in” with the Rat Pack. Sinatra cultivated friendships with the most notorious gangsters in the country. Theirs was the bloody flip side of the power that Jack Kennedy coveted in Washington, and Sinatra was equally impressed with it — impressed by the dons’ wealth, their power, their fearlessness, the respect they commanded even from powerful members of legitimate society.

  Sinatra grew especially close to Sam “Momo” Giancana, the head of the Chicago Mafia — a man who had, by 1960, ordered two hundred torture-murders of men who had crossed him or gotten in his way. Giancana controlled virtually all of the bookmakers, prostitutes, loan sharks, and extortionists in Chicago and owned interests in the Riviera, the Stardust, and the Desert Inn hotels in Las Vegas.

  Arrested over seventy times, Giancana had served time in prison on a variety of charges, among them murder, assault with intent to kill, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, burglary, and bombing. He was a small, dapper man who wore sharkskin suits, fedora hats, silk shirts, alligator shoes — and a star sapphire pinky ring given to him as a gift by Frank Sinatra.

  Peter lived with this aspect of Sinatra, but he didn’t like it. “Frank never called [Giancana] or any of his killers Mafia,” Peter told Sinatra biographer Kitty Kelley, “but they were Mafia all right. . .. Because of Giancana, he kowtowed to the Chicago mob. Why do you think Frank ended every one of his nightclub acts by singing ‘My Kind of Town Chicago Is’? That was his tribute to Sam, who was really an awful guy with a gargoyle face and weasel nose. I couldn’t stand him, but Frank idolized him because he was the Mafia’s top gun. Frank loved to talk about ‘hits’ and guys getting ‘rubbed out.’ And you better believe that when the word got out around town [Hollywood] that Frank was a pal of Sam Giancana, nobody but nobody ever messed with Frank Sinatra. They were too scared. Concrete boots were no joke with this guy. He was a killer.”

  Giancana’s tough-guy persona impressed Sinatra mightily, and he tried his best to emulate it. With his temper already dangerously violent, an angry Sinatra could now be a fearsome sight indeed — and his rage might be directed at anyone, anytime.

  “You have no idea of that temper,” Peter said years later. “He can get so mad that he’s driven to real violence, especially if he’s been drinking. I know. I’ve seen it. One time at a party in Palm Springs, he got so mad at some poor girl that he slammed her through a plate glass window. There was shattered glass and blood all over the place and the girl’s arm was nearly severed from her body. Jimmy Van Heusen rushed her to the hospital. Frank paid her off and the whole thing was hushed up, of course, but I remember Judy Garland and I looking at each other and shivering in fright at the time. I did everything I could to avoid setting off that temper.”

  Peter had “set off that temper” with the Ava Gardner misunderstanding, and no one, not even Sinatra’s closest friend, was safe from it. If anyone failed to accord him the proper respect — which usually meant hoisting him on a lofty pedestal — he was sure to be ostracized from the group. “Frank is not a forgiving person,” Joey Bishop said. “There was a time he didn’t talk to Sammy, didn’t talk to Dean, didn’t talk to me. I was able to make up with him after he almost drowned in Hawaii. I sent him a wire — ‘You must have forgotten who you were. You could have walked on the water.’ I got a call from him the next day, like nothing had happened between us.”

  It took Sammy Davis, Jr., almost a year to get back into Sinatra’s good graces after he gave an indiscreet radio interview in Chicago in 1959. “There are many things [Frank] does that there are no excuses for,” Davis told Jack Eigen on the air. “Talent is not an excuse for bad manners. . . . It does not give you the right to step on people and treat them rotten. That is what he does occasionally.”

  Davis didn’t stop there. He was asked who he thought was the number-one singer in the country, and he replied that he was. “Bigger than Frank?” Eigen asked. “Yeah,” Davis replied.

  Sinatra was livid, not only about Sammy’s remarks but because he had made them in Chicago in front of his Mafia cronies. Milt Ebbins recalled that “Frank had made sure Sammy got hired for a World War II film he was planning for MGM, Never So Few, for seventy-five thousand dollars. It hadn’t been easy to get him in the picture in the first place. Frank met with the producers and they told him, ‘Frank, there were no Negroes in the Burma theater.’ Frank told them, ‘Now there are.’ So Sammy got hired. The studios wanted Frank so badly they’d agree to practically anything. He had that kind of power.”

  The Never So Few script was rewritten to include Sammy, but after the Chicago interview Frank, at another meeting with MGM executives, told them, “Davis is out.” They didn’t ask him why. When he suggested that Steve McQueen replace Sammy, they agreed, and the script underwent another revision.

  “You wanna talk destroyed?” Ebbins said. “Sammy Davis cried from morning to night. He came to see us when Peter was at the Copacabana, appearing with Jimmy D
urante. He said, ‘I can’t get Frank on the phone. Can’t you guys do something?’ Peter told him, ‘I talked to Frank but he won’t budge.’ Sammy never did the picture, never got any money. He could have sued because he had a contract, but he didn’t dare. You don’t sue Frank Sinatra.”

  “Sammy was quite lucky,” Peter said. “Frank let him grovel for a while and then allowed him to apologize in public a few months later.” But by then Davis was irrevocably out of Never So Few. As the film’s start date neared, Sinatra added Peter to the cast, handing him his first big screen role in more than six years.

  NINETEEN

  “When Sinatra, the king of Hollywood, makes a movie,” Tom Allen wrote in 1960, “he is producer, star, and — as self-appointed casting director — personnel man for his pals.” Sinatra’s influence in the casting of Peter Lawford in Never So Few is a good example of the kind of power he wielded in Hollywood.

  The picture was a World War II adventure set in the Burma theater. The ravishing Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida provided Sinatra’s love interest, and Frank wanted Peter to play the relatively small part of Captain Grey Travis, a medic. Peter was eager for the role and told Milt Ebbins, “Go make a deal.” Ebbins and Peter Shaw, who worked with Peter’s agent at William Morris, set up an appointment with Benny Thau, a vice president and head of talent at MGM. “Thau was a low-key executive,” Ebbins recalled. “Very soft-spoken. He’d say, ever so gently, ‘How are you, Milt? Is everything okay? How’s Peter doing? Is he all right?’ But you had to watch out for guys like that, because they’re the ones who’d kill you in a negotiation.”