Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Sometimes, Peter did “get involved” — he had a brief fling with Kim Novak in the late fifties and for a time kept a mistress in New York. If Pat found out about a particular dalliance, she would sometimes confront Peter angrily, but more often she simply let him know very coolly that she was onto him. She took the latter course one evening when Peter came home from filming. Pat fixed him a cocktail, and as she handed him the drink she said evenly, “You’ll have to get rid of that girl in New York.” Peter looked at her slack-jawed and she went calmly about her business.

  It was around this time that Peter began to suspect Pat of having an affair, and he paid a visit to Fred Otash, the former LAPD vice squad officer who had killed the Confidential magazine story about Peter’s penchant for prostitutes and who was now a private detective. “Peter came to me one day in 1959,” Otash recalled, “and asked if I had anything that he could use to make secret recordings. I gave him a Magnet-O-Phone and showed him how to use it.”

  Peter kept the eavesdropping device for over a month and told Milt Ebbins he thought Pat was “seeing other guys.” Ebbins recalled Peter telling him that he had “picked up the phone one time and heard her talking to one of them, telling him what she’d like to be doing to him and all that. But she made no bones about it. It was no big secret. She didn’t say she was going to visit an aunt. By that time the marriage was in trouble, so Peter knew what was happening.” Peter and Pat never seriously considered divorce at this time, for a variety of reasons, her Catholicism chief among them. A divorce not only would have damaged Pat’s position in the church, but could have affected her brother’s hopes of becoming the first Catholic president of the United States. And there were, of course, the children.

  Christopher was now four, Sydney three, and Victoria one, but Peter’s talent for fathering had not improved with time. “Peter didn’t know how to treat his children,” Dolores Naar said. “When they would come down from their naps, they would come up to him and kiss him and he’d rub their backs as he sat in his lounge chair out by the pool and give them a kiss. But that was it. I never saw them sit on his lap; I never saw him running or playing with them.”

  Peter’s upbringing had left him emotionally ill-equipped for parenting, and he was incapable of being a “pal” to his son. More often than not, it was his friends who did fatherly things with Christopher; Dick Martin, the comedian, recalls that he, not Peter, taught the boy how to swim in the Lawfords’ Olympic-size swimming pool. And it was Peter’s old Freed Unit friend Leonard Gershe who would regale Christopher with stories he’d make up on the spot.

  Both Peter and Pat had grown up in households in which children were raised primarily by governesses, and Pat shared Peter’s hands-off attitude toward the children. They had a nanny who took care of them; the children had their time with their mother and their father for an hour or so in the evening, and then it was up to bed. “To tuck the children into bed meant nothing to Pat,” Dolores Naar observed. “To be there when they took their naps meant nothing; she could go on a six-week trip around the world and that meant nothing. That’s how she grew up. Her parents traveled a lot.”

  When she was with her children, Pat sometimes seemed short on patience with them. Leonard Gershe recalled that “when the nannies weren’t around and Pat had to deal with the kids herself, she’d push the clocks ahead an hour so they’d go to bed an hour early. She couldn’t take them any more than that.”

  For his part, Peter did try to be a good father, Dolores Naar believed. “Peter was always very gentle with his children. They knew that he wasn’t the kind of dad that they could jump on his back or whatever. It was all very restrained. He would stroke their back or pet their hair. He had a softness and a warmth with the children. You knew that he really loved them, but he didn’t know what to do with them.”

  PETER DIDN’T SEE MUCH of his children in any event between the summers of 1959 and 1960. In quick succession, he’d made Never So Few and Ocean’s 11 — and his next movie, offered to him independently of Frank Sinatra, would take him to Israel, eight thousand miles from home, and put him under the direction of the formidably Teutonic filmmaker Otto Preminger.

  Preminger was one of Hollywood’s most flamboyant producer- directors, with Laura, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Anatomy of a Murder to his credit. His new film was the movie version of Leon Uris’s best-seller about the genesis of the Jewish homeland, Exodus, and Peter was to be part of an impressive all-star cast that included Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Sal Mineo, Ralph Richardson, and Lee J. Cobb. It was a motion picture “event,” and Peter didn’t want to do it.

  “I couldn’t get Peter to sign the contracts for Exodus,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “He’d agreed verbally to do the picture, and Preminger kept asking me for the contracts back. He’d call me and say, ‘Milt, vere are ze contracts? I’ve got to have ze contracts!’”

  When Ebbins asked Peter why he was so reluctant, he replied that he didn’t want to go on location to Israel, a new country where even the best hotels offered few amenities. Worse, he had heard that it was forbidden to light a match on Saturday. A heavy smoker, Peter shuddered at the thought.

  His manager reminded Peter that he had already told Preminger he would do the picture, and he couldn’t back down. He persuaded Peter to sign the top pages of each of the four copies of the contract. After he initialed the inside clauses on the first contract, he refused to do so again on the other three. Ebbins had to do it for him.

  Peter was wary, too, of Preminger, an autocratic taskmaster often referred to as “der Führer.” He asked his friend David Niven, who had worked with Preminger, for advice on how to handle him. Over lunch at Romanoffs, Niven spelled out his formula for a successful working relationship with Otto: “There is only one way to handle Preminger. If you get into an argument with him, walk up to him, put your face right up against his — nose to nose — and scream, ‘Fuck you, Otto!’ And you’ll win. But remember, it’s gotta be nose to nose. Stand right in his face and yell as loud as you can, ‘Fuck you, Otto!’ Then you’ll have no problems with him.”

  Peter never had to use Niven’s advice; he and Preminger got along well. The director, in fact, seems to have been a pussycat when it came to Peter. When Preminger chartered an airplane to transport the cast and crew from one location to another, Peter sat in the first- class section with his erstwhile best man, Bob Neal, who had agreed to accompany him when Ebbins came down with the flu. Neal, who by now had quite a reputation as a fun-loving millionaire, sat in the last remaining first-class seat while Preminger, who had paid for the plane, sat in the tail section.

  Finally the director came up front and said to Peter, “Vy do you bring zis playboy vit chou?” In his usual flip manner, Peter responded, “For laughs, Otto. You wouldn’t know.” Preminger spent the rest of the flight in the rear of the plane.

  Although Preminger didn’t live up to Peter’s fearful expectations, the location shooting did. Most of Peter’s scenes were filmed on Cyprus, and his hotel room featured a bare light bulb hanging by a cord from the ceiling and enormous black bugs in the closet. But the filming of Exodus was uneventful. Peter played an English officer he described as “a real stinker. He’s anti-Semitic and does a lot to keep the Jews from getting into Israel.” The rare opportunity to play a heavy did have its appeal for Peter despite the thankless nature of the role.

  The film racked up an impressive seven million dollars in box-office grosses and three Oscar nominations (Ernest Gold’s sweeping musical score won). But it was panned by most critics. Although some of the performances were singled out for praise (notably, Sal Mineo’s), Ronald Bergan’s comments about the film were typical. He called Dalton Trumbo’s script “simplistic” and “all-things-to-all-men” and thought the movie contained “little passion, depth or sweep. What it had were stereotypes, sanctimony and schmaltz.”

  And it was long. The stand-up comic Mort Sahl provided what has remained the last word on Exodus at an industry screening in the fal
l of 1960. Three hours into the film, Sahl stood up, turned to Preminger, and pleaded, “Otto, let my people go!”

  Peter returned to Los Angeles in late June 1960. He had had a clause inserted in his contract that guaranteed he would be able to return to the United States by July 1 — in time for the Democratic National Convention. He wanted to make sure to be on hand when, if luck continued to smile, John F. Kennedy would be nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president.

  TWENTY-ONE

  On January 2, 1960, forty-two-year-old Jack Kennedy stood under television and newsreel lights in the Senate Caucus Room and declared, “I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.”

  He had spent most of his life preparing for that moment, wearing the mantle of presumption to greatness that had been his since the death of his brother Joe. But Kennedy found that presumption and reality were two different things when he began his campaign for the Democratic nomination. He was the youngest man ever to seek the presidency; many observers viewed him as callow and inexperienced. Moreover, Catholicism had proved an insurmountable barrier to winning the nation’s highest office.

  Jack Kennedy had been fascinated with the entertainers he’d met in Hollywood, and he became convinced that they could make a real difference to his prospects. They were, of course, extraordinarily wealthy and thus highly attractive from a purely fund-raising point of view. More important, Kennedy sensed that the charisma he’d found so magnetic in them, their popularity and larger-than-life images, could be used to enhance his own appeal.

  Kennedy wasn’t the first presidential candidate to attempt to woo Hollywood stars to his cause. But he was the first to do it to such an extent — and, as Peter Lawford’s brother-in-law, the first to do so from an insider’s vantage point. One of Jack’s earliest campaign strategies was to utilize Hollywood celebrities, not just to raise money behind the scenes but to campaign publicly to get out the Kennedy vote.

  Two years before he announced his candidacy, he had made his first overture to a celebrity for support. Visiting the set of The Thin Man, he had spent several hours in discussion with Phyllis Kirk. Director Don Weis thought that Kennedy was “really in heat for Phyllis,” but she recalled their discussions as purely political: “My theory at the time was that actors should not stump for candidates, because it was unfair. There are a lot of people in this country who are very influenced by their idols saying jump through this hoop or vote for Genghis Khan. I felt you could work behind the scenes, but you don’t have to go out and hogwash the country into thinking that they should vote for the candidate you’re voting for.”

  Kennedy listened to Phyllis’s argument and said, “I disagree. I think someone like you should become very actively involved.” After hours of discussion, Kennedy swayed her to his way of thinking, and four months later she decided to lend her name to an advertisement — for Adlai Stevenson for president. The day the full-page newspaper ad appeared, Kirk got a phone call from Senator Kennedy. “I want to congratulate you for joining the fray,” he said. “I think it’s wonderful that you’re putting your name on the line. This, however, is not exactly what I had in mind.”

  Phyllis Kirk eventually came around to Kennedy, as did almost all of Peter’s Hollywood friends. Sammy Cahn remembered running into Jack at a party before he’d announced his candidacy. Kennedy asked him, “Could you write me a campaign song?” Cahn replied, “What are you running for?” When Kennedy told him, he offered to write new lyrics for his Oscar-winning song “High Hopes,” which Frank Sinatra had sung in the 1959 film A Hole in the Head. The reworked ditty became the Democrats’ 1960 theme song:

  K-E-double-N-E-D-Y,

  Jack’s the nation’s favorite guy Everyone wants to back Jack,

  Jack is on the right track.

  And he’s got HIGH HOPES,

  He’s got HIGH HOPES,

  He’s got high-apple-pie -in-the-sky hopes.

  A series of Los Angeles fund-raisers, at which contributors were entertained by Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis or Judy Garland and then heard the candidate speak about his vision for America, netted hundreds of thousands of dollars for the primary campaign. Evie Johnson remembered one at the Lawfords’ beach house: “Peter had rounded up quite a good group, and they entertained. Judy sang.

  Teddy Kennedy was there, and he did a belly dance for us, kind of like a hula. We all got sort of crazy.”

  Frank Sinatra committed himself totally to the goal of making John F. Kennedy the next president of the United States. He rechristened his group of followers the “Jack Pack,” sang about “that old Jack magic,” and worked tirelessly to raise money for the Kennedy campaign. “Frank snapped his fingers, and people fell into line,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “He’d get on the phone to somebody and before you knew it he’d be saying, ‘Gotcha down for ten thousand,’ and that would be the end of it. Frank was fantastic. Peter didn’t do as much for Jack’s campaign as Frank did, but it was Peter who brought Frank to Jack in the first place.”

  Sinatra offered to round up the Rat Pack and sweep into West Virginia to do the same thing for the Kennedy primary campaign there that he’d done in Hollywood. But Jack Kennedy was nothing if not a savvy politician. He knew that Sinatra’s personality and manner would go over far less well in a small, parochial state than it did in Beverly Hills and Las Vegas, and he’d heard stories about the last time Sinatra and his band of merrymakers had descended on a small town.

  Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Shirley MacLaine had spent several months in Madison, Indiana, for the filming of Some Came Kunning in 1958. Martin and Sinatra were rarely without a drink in their hand, and on one occasion Sinatra roughed up a sixty-six-year-old hotel clerk for getting a hamburger order wrong. Another time, riding a bus, Sinatra smiled and returned the townspeoples’ waves of greeting through a window — all the while muttering things under his breath like “Hello there, hillbilly!” . . . “Drop dead, jerk”! . . . “Hey, where’d you get that big fat behind?”

  And so Sinatra was kept out of the West Virginia campaign — but only in person. FBI wiretaps reveal that he apparently disbursed large mob donations in West Virginia that were used to pay off election officials. And in a more indirect but no less important contribution, Sinatra introduced Jack to one of Frank’s recent conquests, Judith Campbell, a vivacious twenty-five-year-old Irish brunette with limpid blue eyes — a “nicer” Liz Taylor, as Jimmy “the Weasel”, a Los Angeles mafioso, called her.

  A recent divorcée, Judy Campbell had run into Sinatra at Puccini one night in November 1959. They’d met once before, but this time Frank showed strong interest in the young woman. He invited her to join him on a trip to Hawaii a few days later with Peter and Pat, and it was in Honolulu on November 10 that their affair began. At first Judy found Frank charming and attentive, but his mercurial temperament soon gave her second thoughts. She called off the romance when Sinatra invited her to his Beverly Hills home and expected her to participate in a ménage a trois with him and another woman.

  They remained friends, however, and Frank invited her to Vegas to see some of the “summit” shows during the filming of Ocean’s 11. It was there that Sinatra introduced her to Jack Kennedy and his twenty-eight-year-old brother Teddy, who was western states coordinator for the campaign.

  Teddy Kennedy made a pass at Campbell, which she rejected, but one month later, on the night before the New Hampshire primary, she began a sexual affair with the candidate. “It was amazing to me that he could be so relaxed on the eve of the first primary of his presidential campaign,” Campbell later said, “but unbelievably, he didn’t mention New Hampshire once during our entire night together.”

  Jack Kennedy was certain he’d win New Hampshire, but he was deeply concerned about his chances in West Virginia, and when Campbell told him that Sinatra had just introduced her to Sam Giancana, Kennedy asked if she would arrange a meeting between them. When Judy asked why, Jack replied, “I think I may need his help in the camp
aign.”

  Kennedy and Giancana met at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, and although the subject of their conversation remains unrecorded, Giancana apparently agreed to use his “influence” with West Virginia officials in order to ensure a Kennedy victory there. Kennedy may or may not have offered anything concrete in return, but it soon became clear that Giancana expected that if Jack won the presidency, the federal government would “go easy” on organized crime. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption.

  Giancana sent one of his cronies, Paul “Skinny” D’Amato, into West Virginia to “convince” the sheriffs who controlled the state’s political machine to “get out the vote for Kennedy.” D’Amato did so by agreeing to forgive gambling debts many of the men had incurred at his 500 Club in Atlantic City, and he handed others cash from a fifty-thousand-dollar war chest set up for the purpose with Mafia donations.

  Jack Kennedy beat Hubert Humphrey handily in West Virginia, ending the Minnesotan’s candidacy and defusing the religion issue once and for all by winning in an overwhelmingly Protestant state. In July he came into the Democratic National Convention with victories in all seven of the primaries he had entered, and he was just sixty-one votes short of the nomination. Serendipitously, the convention was held in the Los Angeles Sports Arena, putting Kennedy’s show business supporters smack in the middle of the action. The night before the convention’s July 11 opening, the Democratic party staged a hundred- dollar-a-plate fund-raiser at the Beverly Hilton Hotel attended by twenty- eight hundred people. The Rat Pack and other of Hollywood’s biggest names were present — Judy Garland, Angie Dickinson, Milton Berle, Joe E. Lewis, George Jessel, Mort Sahl, Janet Leigh, and Tony Curtis among them.