Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  She wrote vicious notes to Peter about the Kennedys. She sent him a May 20, 1961, press clipping from the Irish Times about two cousins of President Kennedy’s who had met America’s ambassador to Ireland, E. G. Stockdale, when he visited New Ross. She typed above it, “Rumor has it that these ladies were found living on a dirt floor in the most primitive aboriginal Irish condition. . . . I always knew the Kennedys were bogtrotters, but never dreamt they were as low on the social scale as these Irish cousins suggest! I understand they have frothy brogues which they spit out between their false teeth!”

  Drinking, angry, she fired off “To Whom It May Concern” letters to columnists, reporters, politicians, and movie-industry people berating Peter and the Kennedys for “giving money to dirty, filthy niggers” while she was without enough food to eat. She charged that her telephone had been tapped, that the Kennedys were keeping her a virtual prisoner, and that her life was in danger.

  She told Hedda Hopper, in an interview the gossip columnist never published, that she had been having some “trying” experiences. She didn’t know who was behind them, but she hinted it might have been Sinatra’s “hoodlums.” Ambulances had been sent to her door, she said, and one medic told her that she’d been reported dead. She had received threatening phone calls in the middle of the night, May concluded, telling her “We are coming over to cut your throat.”

  How much of this was fact and how much the ravings of an embittered, alcoholic woman? It’s certainly possible that any number of people might have wanted to suppress Lady Lawfords more vengeful impulses by stealing an inflammatory manuscript, or even to harass and intimidate her until she agreed to leave the country. But the credibility of many of her charges is made suspect in light of the increasingly fanciful scenarios she had begun to create.

  “She was saying such crazy things after a while,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “She said the Kennedys abducted her and took her to a motel, where she was beaten and injected with drugs.” Late one night Ebbins was jarred awake by the shrill jangle of his telephone. It was May. “They’re on my lawn, Milt,” she shouted, extremely agitated, “and I’ve got a shotgun! So help me God I’m gonna kill them!” Ebbins sat bolt upright in his bed. “Who’s on your lawn, May?” “Frank! And Sammy! And Dean! And if they come in here and try to hurt me I’m gonna kill them! I killed people in India and I’m gonna shoot all three of them!”

  “May, please, calm down,” Ebbins pleaded. “Don’t do anything until I get there.”

  He dressed quickly and drove over to May’s. There was no one on the front lawn. He looked around the grounds and saw nothing out of the ordinary. When he knocked on May’s door, she wouldn’t open it. He soothingly told her that no one else was there. “Are you sure?” May asked him.

  “Yes, May. It’s only me. Open the door.”

  After she let Ebbins into her living room, May stood in front of him, stock-still, holding a twenty-two-caliber pistol in her hand. “If they come in here,” she said, “I’m gonna shoot them. My husband gave me this and I know how to use it.”

  Ebbins tried to calm her. “May, relax. There’s nobody there.” “They must have gone, but they were there.”

  “I believe you, May. Give me the gun, okay?”

  “Why?” She peered at him suspiciously.

  “Just let me look at it.”

  Warily, she handed Milt the gun and he uncocked it. There were no bullets, there was no firing pin. He handed the firearm back to May.

  “She wasn’t insane,” Ebbins concluded. “She was an alcoholic and I think it just burned a hole in her brain. Don’t forget, here’s a woman who lived the good life. She had money, she hobnobbed with royalty. She had been a creative woman who had written and acted. Then she finds herself without a husband, on the dole, unable to work, her son and daughter-in-law wanting nothing to do with her. It all combined to send her over the edge.”

  10 Of course, she never did so, but this is one of those stories that both she and Peter exaggerated over the years until, in the retelling, her threat had turned into an action.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  For almost a year, since the completion of Exodus, Peter had not worked, either in movies or on television. This was entirely by choice. First he had been preoccupied by the election, then the preparations for the inaugural, and then simply the heady enjoyment of his singular position as brother-in-law of the President and all the “perks” that came with it.

  His income from the box-office receipts of Ocean’s 11 would have allowed him to coast for at least another year, but by the spring of 1961 he was ready to get back to work. Frank Sinatra was set to go with Sergeants 3, the second of a proposed five pictures to star the Rat Pack boys. Each film would grant the highest profit participation to one of the members, beginning with Frank, then Dean, Peter, Sammy, and Joey Bishop.

  Sergeants 3, a comedic remake of Gunga Din with a western setting, was filmed in the rugged desert of Kanab, Utah. In sharp contrast to the bacchanalian nightlife Las Vegas offered during the filming of Ocean’s 11, Kanab provided Sinatra and company no nocturnal entertainment whatsoever. They played cards, watched Laurel and Hardy movies, imported hookers, and complained about how bored they were. “There was a Dairy Queen that was open until eleven o’clock,” Joey Bishop recalled. “My advice to everybody was to get two scoops, because after that there wasn’t a goddamn thing to do!”

  So that his group could entertain each other more handily, Sinatra had the hotel install a door between each of the rooms on the floor they occupied. The considerable expense of this construction was charged to the film’s budget.

  Peter’s year of leisure had left him heavier than he had ever been in his life. He was now thirty-eight, and food and booze turned into fat on him much more readily than they had when he was younger. He had stopped the more vigorous athletic pursuits like surfing and volleyball that had burned calories, and when he arrived in Kanab he was thirty pounds overweight. Ken DuMain, who once again was hired as Lawfords stand-in, was shocked when he first saw him: “His face was very puffy and full, and his body was much heavier than I had ever seen it. He was drinking and partying all the time, and it showed.” Even the President had noticed it. “You’ve really let yourself go,” Jack told Peter. “I’d hate to see you eat your way out of show business.” Every evening, the cast would gather with director John Sturges in the basement of the local schoolhouse to view the day’s rushes. “Whenever Lawford came on-screen,” DuMain recalled, “Frank would say, ‘There’s fat boy.’ Well, Peter wasn’t happy about it. He started taking Dexedrine to lose that weight, and it worked. After the first third of the picture, he was back to looking like the Peter Lawford of old. So he looks both heavy and slim in the movie.”

  Peter’s bad arm caused him some problems. As DuMain recalled, “there were a couple of scenes that I had to do for him where he runs and climbs a ladder on the side of a building. He said, ‘I can’t do that — my arm’s not strong enough.’ So I’d climb the ladder and they’d use long shots or shots from behind.”

  A few days into filming, Peter told DuMain that he had spotted a “pretty little extra girl” he was eager to meet, and since DuMain knew her, could he introduce her? The next day, walking with the girl, DuMain saw Peter studying his script and brought the girl over to him. “I introduced them and they started talking, at which point I discreetly walked away and left them alone.” At the end of the filming, Peter sent DuMain a note: “Dear Kenny: Thank you again so much for all the little extras — and I don’t mean people!”

  DuMain was soon to learn that the “pretty little extra girl” wasn’t Peter’s only sexual divertissement during the filming of Sergeants 3. Early one morning, a call came through for Lawford, and DuMain took it. Jackie Kennedy was on the line. “I raced across the compound to Peter’s cottage,” DuMain recalled, “and rapped on his door. He opened it and I saw that there was a girl in his bed. It was Joan Arnold.”

  Joan Arnold was the lovely blond daughter of the h
ead of MGM’s camera department. She worked as a secretary for Peter at Chrislaw, the production company he and Milt Ebbins had formed earlier that year, and she had come to Kanab to spend the weekend with him. They had been sexually involved intermittently for several years. According to Ebbins, “There was an alliance whenever he wanted it.

  She was a terrific girl, a great secretary. She liked to drink, and she’d pour drinks for Peter and herself at lunchtime.”

  Ebbins feared that Joan’s “alliances” with Peter put her in jeopardy. “I used to say to her, ‘Joan, you’re gonna get your ass in a sling.’ But she was very closemouthed. She never once admitted to me that she and Peter were involved. But I knew for sure because once Joan came with my wife and me and Peter up to Tahoe. I couldn’t sleep one night and I went into Peter’s bedroom. There they were in bed together.”

  Despite these warnings, Joan continued to dally with Peter “whenever he wanted it” because she was in love with him, and she told DuMain she felt Peter would someday marry her. But the relationship came to an abrupt end some months later. While Pat was away, Peter gave a dinner party, and among the guests were Joan Arnold and Joe and Dolores Naar. That Joan was present wasn’t surprising; she frequently worked at the house. What raised Dolores’s eyebrows was that when she and Joe left, Joan Arnold was the only guest still there.

  When Pat returned from her trip, she paid an unannounced visit to the Chrislaw offices. Ebbins remembered it vividly. “She came in and she had a face like Peter’s when he gets angry — like a lion. She didn’t even look at Joan or say anything to anybody — she just stormed into Peter’s office.”

  The minute Pat left, Peter went into Milt’s office and told him to fire Joan Arnold. Ebbins was aghast. “You’re crazy! Fire her? She’s the best secretary in the world. Why should we fire her? For what reason?”

  “I don’t need to give you a reason,” Peter growled. “Just fire her.”

  “Yes you do need to give me a reason, because otherwise I’m not going to do it.”

  “My wife’s gonna drive me crazy unless we fire her.”

  “Yeah,” Ebbins shot back, “and it’s your fault! What the fuck is the matter with you? Why didn’t you just deny it? You’ll destroy this woman if you fire her.”

  “Do you want me to do it?”

  “Yes!” Ebbins shouted — and walked out of the room.

  Of course, it ultimately did fall to Milt to let Joan go. “It was hard for me, and it was a terrible blow for her. She’d been there for years; she was his lover.” Milt told her she’d been stupid. “You go to a party with Dolores Naar, who’s a pipeline to Pat, and you’re the last person to leave? Why didn’t you pretend to leave and come back?” But even at this point, Joan wouldn’t admit to anything. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “Nothing happened!”

  “Getting fired from Chrislaw destroyed Joan Arnold,” Ebbins recalled. “Her heart was broken. Peter just sat there and let his wife destroy this woman, who was a great secretary and a great friend. She died of cancer several years later.”

  SERGEANTS 3 DIDN’T ADVANCE the careers of anyone involved in it. The public was indifferent, the critics hostile. Typical were Thomas Wiseman’s comments in the London Sunday Express: “‘Sergeants 3 gives the impression of having been made for the private amusement of members of Sinatra’s Hollywood clan, the Rat Pack — which has the motto: ‘If you’re in you’re very, very in, and if you’re out you’re dead, Daddyo.’ The Clan may find it all quite hilarious. But to an audience that is not ‘in,’ the joke looks almost as thin as Mr. Sinatra. . . . The film works neither as a straight Western, nor as a ‘spoof of the genre. To string together all the corniest situations from previous Westerns does not in itself constitute satire. This time the Rat Pack is very, very out, not to say dead, Daddyo.”

  Happily for Peter, his next two movies were far better received. But both of them slapped him in the face with a new and unpleasant realization: he was being hired not for his talent or box-office draw, but for what his brother-in-law could do for the production. It was easy to dismiss the offers from fly-by-night producers, Peter said. “You know, the kind of thing where the picture is shot in Siam and the music recorded in Greece and the voices dubbed in New York and then the producer puts up a billboard: ‘Starring the President’s brother-in-law.’ So you ignore those deals, right?”

  Harder to ignore was the formidable Darryl F. Zanuck, who for seventeen years had been the head of production at Twentieth Century- Fox and was now an independent producer. The Longest Day was to be his epic saga of D-Day, the decisive Allied invasion of Nazi-held France. Zanuck had hoped to use American servicemen stationed in France as extras, and he wanted access to the Army’s tanks and landing boats. Permission, however, was denied him. Again and again, he asked for special dispensation. Again and again the Army turned him down. Then, he hired Peter Lawford to play Lord Lovat, a flamboyant Scottish commando leader.

  Shortly after he signed for the role, Peter had dinner with Zanuck, whose favorite expression was “Don’t say yes until I’m finished talking!” The mustachioed, cigar-chomping mogul wasted no time telling Peter about his problems with the Army. It was a situation, he said, that threatened the very production of The Longest Day. “The soldiers and equipment are already there, Peter, and I’m willing to pay for everything, but they keep turning me down.”

  Peter listened quietly and then said simply, “Let me see what I can do.” Within a few days, all of Zanuck’s requests had been granted. Zanuck had sensed that if Peter wanted to, he could intercede with the Kennedy administration to help Zanuck get what he needed — and he was right.

  Peter was due in France for the filming of his sequences late in August 1961. On July 2, Pat gave birth, a week overdue, to a five- and-a-half-pound baby girl. “Well, it finally arrived,” she wrote to her parents, who were vacationing on the French Riviera. “Red hair and the longest fingers I’ve ever seen. So maybe she’ll have Dad’s brains, too!”

  Friends of the Lawfords had barely had time to get used to the fact that Pat was pregnant. Leonard Gershe recalled with some wonderment that on Sunday, June 25, he was playing tennis with Pat at Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis’s house. After the game, they sat around the pool and discussed plans for dinner the following week. “I can’t come,” Pat said. “I’m going into the hospital Thursday.”

  “What do you mean you’re going to be in the hospital?” Lenny asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m having a baby,” Pat replied nonchalantly.

  Gershe thought she was kidding. “She hadn’t said anything; she wasn’t showing. She was playing tennis, for God’s sake. Maybe her clothes were a little loose, but when a woman’s going to have a baby in a week, you can usually tell. But none of us, her closest friends, even knew. I mean this was kind of pathological really — a psychotic need for privacy.”

  Robin Elizabeth Lawford was christened on July 8 at St. Monica’s Church. Peter and Frank Sinatra met Robert Kennedy at LA International Airport that morning and drove him to the church, where he served as Robin’s godfather. Her godmother was Rocky Cooper (“Pat ran out of Catholic friends,” Rocky said). May Lawford was invited to the christening, she said, only because there had been such “bad publicity” over her exclusions from the previous two.

  At the end of July, with Robin not a month old, Pat flew to Washington to stand in for Jackie as hostess at a White House function. She then spent a week at Hyannis Port before flying to Nice to join her parents at their home in Antibes for several weeks of vacation.

  Peter had left a week earlier for Paris with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Mike Romanoff, and Milt Ebbins. Dean was en route to Germany; the rest of the group planned to rent a luxury yacht and meet up with Bob Neal, Porfirio Rubirosa, and his wife, Odile.11 The group would then join Pat and her parents for a Mediterranean cruise.

  Bob Neal was charged with finding a suitable yacht — big, Peter told him, with at least four stateroo
ms — which Neal, Peter, Sinatra, and Rubirosa would share the expense of renting. Neal found one “particularly suited,” he thought. “It had four double master staterooms, so nobody could scream about being in the crew’s quarters or something. It was 110 feet long and had a crew of seven. I cabled the name of the boat and the information to Paris, and I got a wire back from Frank: ‘Get a big boat, will ya?’”

  Neal went back to the rental agent and asked for the biggest yacht available. He was told that would be the Hiniesta at 175 feet. “She’s old,” Bob was told, “but she’s been redone beautifully. The problem is, she’s a steam yacht.” The agent went on to explain that the boat ran on water and that every two days or so they’d have to take it back to port and reload it. Bob said that didn’t matter and reserved the yacht, leaving an eight-thousand-dollar deposit. He then ordered the finest food and liquor — Dom Pérignon champagne, caviar, the thickest steaks, and the freshest seafood — for a cruise that might add to its cargo of VIP passengers Stavros Niarchos, the Greek shipping tycoon and his wife, Tina, the ex-wife of Niarchos’s rival Aristotle Onassis.

  The plans started to unravel in Paris when Peter, Frank, Dean, Mike Romanoff, and Milt Ebbins attended a cocktail party in honor of the publicist Henry Rogers. Among a plethora of beautiful women was a particularly striking young model, and Dean Martin, dazzled, homed in on her immediately.

  Then Ebbins saw Peter start to make a move on her. “I knew Martin was dead. If Peter wanted a woman, he got her. He told me he was going to take the girl home. I said, ‘You’re kidding! You’re gonna take her away from Dean?’ He said, ‘I’m not taking her away if she wants to come with me.’”