Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  When Dean asked the young woman if she’d like to have dinner with him after the party, she said, “I’m very sorry, but I have another engagement.” Peter left the gathering with the girl, and as the rest of the Sinatra party sat in the back of a limousine on the way to dinner, acrimony surfaced. “Your friend’s a real nice guy,” Frank said to Ebbins. “I don’t think that was too goddamn nice,” Jimmy Van Heusen piped up. And Dean Martin asked plaintively, “What ever happened to one for all and all for one?”

  Sinatra’s anger was aggravated the following night when he went to dinner with Peter, the President’s press secretary Pierre Salinger, and a few others at San Francisco, a posh Parisian restaurant. After a meal freely lubricated by alcohol, Salinger excused himself to go the restroom, and Peter went over to the bar to order another drink. When Salinger returned, he joined Peter at the bar, where they remained in a téte-a-téte for several minutes.

  Sinatra sat at the table and fumed. Finally he got up and confronted Peter and Salinger. “You guys having a private conversation? What are you talking about that you can’t say in front of me?” Peter tried to explain that they hadn’t meant to exclude him, they had just gotten caught up in a conversation, but Sinatra was not placated. He left a few minutes later.

  According to Bob Neal, “Frank had enough booze in him that he’d manufactured in his mind the idea that they thought he wasn’t good enough to be included in White House discussions or some nonsense like that.” The next day, Sinatra was scheduled to arrive in Nice for the yacht cruise, and Neal went to meet his plane. The singer wasn’t on it. When Neal called him in Paris, Sinatra yelled into the phone, “I’m not going on any goddamn cruise with that lousy bastard!”

  Neal, in the dark about the night before, asked, “Which lousy bastard is that, Frank?”

  “Fucking Lawford! To hell with him! I’m going to Germany with Dean!”

  Now Neal had a problem: Sinatra was supposed to have paid his share of the expense of the cruise: $5,870. He called Peter, who told him, “The son of a bitch has to pay, whether he comes or not. You call Jack Entratter in Paris. He’ll give you the money.” Neal called Entratter, the manager of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and a close associate of Sinatra’s, and he got hold of Frank. Sinatra’s reply: “Pay the son of a bitch!”

  Finally, the remaining merrymakers gathered to board the Hiniesta, and there was great consternation at the sight of it. To Bob Neal it was “the worst-looking damn vessel you ever saw. It looked like the Leviathan.” Once everyone boarded, however, they felt better, much to Neal’s relief: “It was beautiful inside. They’d really done a great job of refurbishing the thing.”

  Loaded up with “eight thousand million gallons of water,” as Neal put it, the yacht began its chug through the Mediterranean, picking up Pat and her father along the way. Bob Neal found Joe Kennedy a very amusing man. “We were coming up on St. Tropez, and I said, ‘Oh, look, Mr. Kennedy, those two girls on that boat over there have no bras on.’ He yelled, ‘Where? Where?!’ and almost went over the side trying to get a look at them.”

  On the second day, Peter, Pat, and friends were invited to lunch with Stavros and Tina Niarchos by their pool, which lay nestled among rocks in the Mediterranean Sea. (Their house sat atop a seaside cliff two thousand steps above the pool.) Pat didn’t want the Niarchoses to see the Hiniesta. “You can’t park this goddamn scow where they can see it,” she told Neal. The crew dropped anchor just out of sight behind a jutting cliff, and the passengers took a shore boat to the Niarchos dock. Tina kept asking, “Where’s your yacht?” Neal told her, “Tina, you won’t believe this, but the yacht had to go back to Nice to take on some more water.”

  “Water?” Tina said, frowning. “Why do you need water? You’ve got Perrier, Scotch, champagne — ”

  Niarchos interrupted. “What is the thing?”

  “It’s a steam yacht, Stavros,” Neal replied. “Built about 1902.” “What an interesting relic. What does it look like now?”

  “It looks great,” Neal told him. “It’s really beautiful inside.”

  To everyone’s relief, that ended the discussion. “Stavros never did see the thing, thank God,” Neal said.

  DURING THE CRUISE, Pat and Peter received word via cable that Robin, five weeks old, had been rushed to the hospital after choking. The baby, they were told, was doing fine, and they decided not to cut their trip short. Three days later, another cable came: Robin had been readmitted to the hospital with an intestinal blockage that might require surgery. The Lawfords decided to return home immediately and caught the first flight from Nice to London, where they could make the fastest connection with a flight to Los Angeles.

  When a reporter at Heathrow Airport told Pat that Robin was about to go under the knife, she gasped. “That’s news to me!” She and Peter were taken to a private lounge where they placed a call to the White House. They spoke to presidential physician Dr. Janet Travell, who was in close contact with Robin’s pediatrician, Dr. Gilbert M. Jorgenson. Travell informed them that Robin suffered from pyloric stenosis, an overgrowth of muscular tissue that had blocked her intestine. It was not an uncommon ailment in infants, Travell said, and shouldn’t be a problem if it was removed immediately. Both she and Dr. Jorgenson agreed that surgery was necessary, and Pat gave her consent.

  When she left the lounge, reporters noted that Mrs. Lawford was near tears. “My baby’s going to have an operation in five or six hours,” she told them. She was asked how serious it was. “Serious enough,” she replied.

  On the twelve-hour flight from London to Los Angeles, the Pan American pilot kept the Lawfords informed of Robin’s progress. They heard in midflight that the operation was a success, and when the plane landed at Los Angeles, Milt Ebbins (who had returned from Paris a week earlier) confirmed that “the baby is doing beautifully.” Peter told the press, “I guess you can realize how worried Pat and I were, and we are pleased and happy that Robin is all right.”

  There was a great deal of criticism, particularly in the British press, of the Lawfords’ decision to leave a month-old baby and go on vacation (much as there would be years later when the Duchess of York left newborn Princess Beatrice for a vacation in Australia). Peter and Pat never answered the criticisms, and things weren’t made any better by a White House announcement on August 18 — with Robin still hospitalized — that Pat planned to join her sisters Jean and Eunice for a private visit to communist Poland “if the baby continues to make progress.”

  Pat decided against the trip to Poland, even though Robin’s recovery appeared to be complete. Instead, she joined Peter on August 26 as he flew back to France for the start of principal photography on The Longest Day.

  11 Rubirosa, an international playboy and race-car driver, was the former son-in-law of Dominican Republic strongman Rafael Trujillo. In 1953 he married Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, his fourth wife, and left her fifty-three days later. The divorce netted him millions.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The filming of The Longest Day began on a resonant note for Peter. As he flew in a helicopter between locations along the French coastline, he noticed a partially sunken ocean liner near the shore, listing at a forty-five-degree angle, waves lapping against its main deck. He stared silently down at the sight for a few moments as the chopper’s blades whirred above him. Then he asked the pilot to swoop lower and hover above the ghostly hulk. “See that ship down there?” he asked Milt Ebbins, who was seated beside him.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty big,” Ebbins replied. “Must have been sunk in World War II. Do you know which one it is?”

  “Yes,” Peter said quietly. “It’s the Champlain. My parents and I sailed across the Atlantic on that ship once, when I was a kid.” The pilot lowered the helicopter as close to the water as possible, and the vessel’s name became visible despite the heavy buildup of barnacles on its side.

  “Sure enough,” Ebbins recalled, “there was the name — Champlain. It was an eerie experience. Peter was very quiet a
s we got back up in the air and proceeded down the coast. It was almost as though the condition of that ship symbolized his childhood in some strange way.”

  Even more uncanny was the experience of British actor Richard Todd, who worked beside Peter for Zanuck’s re-creation of the D- Day crossing of the Orne river that created a crucial linkup with airborne forces and helped the Allies to victory. Todd had taken part in the actual battle. “As the film unit gathered for the first shots around Pegasus Bridge,” Todd recalled in his autobiography, “I had a distinct feeling of déja vu. Here I was, dressed and equipped exactly as I had been seventeen years before, on ground that would forever be stamped on my memory, and surrounded by young British soldiers indistinguishable from those who had been with me on D-Day.”

  Todd was portraying John Howard, who had led the glider attack on Pegasus Bridge. “At one point in the film I (as John) was seen in brief conversation with an officer of the Parachute Regiment who was meant to be me, so I was in effect standing beside myself talking to myself.”

  This eerie verisimilitude was exactly what Darryl Zanuck wanted. Ken Annakin, who directed these sequences, recalled that “I’ve never known a producer so anxious to have a film made with as much truth as possible.”

  The attitude rubbed off on Peter in his portrayal of Lord Lovat, the man who had led the British forces across Pegasus Bridge. Lovat was a somewhat comic figure who had a bagpiper follow him into battle, wore turtleneck sweaters and berets, and used a hunting rifle instead of an army rifle. He was an oddball, but he was also completely fearless. In the course of the war he had his stomach blown out but survived; and he became one of Britain’s most beloved World War II heroes.

  Zanuck invited him to advise the production, and Peter gladly accepted advice from Lovat, who watched the filming from the sidelines. “Peter did try to imitate Lovat’s mannerisms,” Annakin said. “Lovat was a great traditional Scottish chieftain, a man who clearly had a natural power over people, and I think Peter fell into that very well.”

  Lovat nodded in approval as he stood beside Annakin and watched Lawfords performance unfold. “Yes, he looks fine,” Lovat said, “but he doesn’t walk like me at all.” Annakin told him he shouldn’t expect an actor to be a perfect duplication of him, but that all of the action Lovat had described to the filmmakers was being replicated exactly.

  Lovat’s attention, though, wasn’t always on Peter. Milt Ebbins and Pat were standing beside him one day watching a take. Milt watched Lovat “make a play for Pat you wouldn’t believe. He was so overt, it was ridiculous. She was laughing. He said, ‘Say, Pat, let’s you and I go have a drink somewhere, quietly. We can send Milt back with the car.’ Pat said, ‘Are you kidding? I have a husband! Remember him?’ Lovat replied, ‘So what? I’m married, too.’ Nothing ever came of it, of course. Pat thought it was just hysterical.”

  Less amusing was a near tragedy on the Ile de Ré in France’s Bay of Biscay, where the film crew re-created the British landing at Normandy Beach. American troops were conducting landing maneuvers there, and — thanks to Peter’s influence — Zanuck had received permission to join the exercises, saving his production a great deal of time and money.

  It was a very involved shot for Ken Annakin. “Everything was going on. A German plane was to pass down the beach, strafing people, there were about four thousand troops on the beach doing various things, fires had to be started, shells were bursting, and amid all this these landing craft had to come in.”

  Zanuck had instructed Annakin that he wanted the soldiers to jump off the landing craft’s ramp into waist-high water, holding their rifles aloft, “so that you could clearly see them coming gallantly ashore.” Annakin huddled with the landing craft’s sergeant in command to find out how long it would take after the craft started toward shore for the ramp to be lowered enough so that the men could jump safely into the correct depth of water.

  They ascertained that it would take sixteen seconds, and rehearsed it six times. Each time it took exactly sixteen seconds from Annakin’s cue until the landing craft came close enough to the shore for the men to step off the ramp as it was lowering. Annakin set up the final take — a process that took five hours. Finally, they were ready to go and Annakin gave his cue and began to count from one to sixteen. When he reached three, the ramp abruptly lowered. Peter and a hundred commandos went straight down and vanished into eight feet of water.

  At first, Peter later told Annakin, he expected little trouble getting back to the surface. But he hadn’t pulled the zipper of the wet suit under his clothes all the way up to his neck because he thought he’d be wading through water only waist-high. The rubber suit began to fill with water, pulling him down, and his frantic efforts to reach the surface were hindered by his weak right arm. He couldn’t see a thing and started to panic. After a few seconds that seemed like an eternity, Peter got close enough to the shore to lift his head above the surface of the water.

  “Peter could have drowned,” Annakin said, “but he managed to struggle ashore, as did the queen’s bagpiper, and they went onto the beach in ragtag form — probably just as the soldiers had done in wartime. I wanted to use that first take because I thought it was more realistic, but Zanuck wanted it filmed in exactly the heroic fashion he’d planned. So we redid it two days later, again taking five hours to set the whole thing up — but this time we used a different guy to lower the landing ramp.”

  The Longest Day was exactly what Zanuck promised it would be — an “event” picture, a “gigantic and fascinating film,” as Tony Thomas put it. London’s Sunday Express gave Zanuck his most treasured compliment with the observation that “It’s so realistic a stalls seat feels like a fox hole.” The film received five Oscar nominations, including best picture, and won twice, for best black-and-white cinematography and best special effects.

  Peter’s performance was singled out by American critics as one of the best in the film, but their British counterparts were unimpressed; most felt Peter had played Lovat “badly.” About the kindest observation to be found in Britain was offered in the Sunday Express by Leonard Mosley, who as a reporter during the war had parachuted onto Normandy Beach alongside Richard Todd: “Mr. Lawford has never been my idea of an actor. He has not so much a poker face as a cast iron face. This, curiously enough, makes him just right for the part of Lovat, an imperturbable hero if ever there was one.”

  Ken Annakin felt that the criticism directed at Peter was sour grapes. “Even though the Americans looked upon Peter as British, the British looked upon him as American. Traditionally, when an American plays a revered British figure, none of the Brits like it very much. I think Peter was very good. He captured Lord Lovat’s spirit.”

  PETER RETURNED HOME in October 1961, just in time to begin work on his second picture for Otto Preminger, Advise and Consent, based on Allen Drury’s controversial best-seller about sex and chicanery in Washington. Still another “event” picture, it featured an extraordinary cast: Henry Fonda, Don Murray, Charles Laughton, Walter Pidgeon, Franchot Tone, Burgess Meredith, George Grizzard, and Lew Ayres.

  Once again it was a production that needed assistance from Peter, and he had no illusions about why he was hired to portray a playboy senator. “I know the reason they want me on the picture,” he told Ken DuMain. “They want to do some shots inside the Senate building and they figure I can be instrumental in getting it done.”

  Actually, Preminger had higher hopes than that. What tremendous publicity for his film, he reasoned, if his scenes of a President in the Oval Office and the private White House quarters could be filmed on location — in John F. Kennedy’s office and living room. Once again, one phone call from Peter to Jack was all it took to smooth the way. The President — still such a movie buff that he would call Peter to discuss the British box-office receipts of Ocean’s 11 — thought it would be fun to have a movie crew around for a few days, and he granted Preminger permission to film in the White House.

  Peter’s casting as a young, goo
d-looking, womanizing senator “more interested in coos than bills” (as Helen Markel slyly put it in Good Housekeeping) raised a few eyebrows among reporters, who knew Jack Kennedy’s reputation and thought the character a little too close for comfort to Peter’s brother-in-law. Was the President, Peter was asked insinuatingly, upset by his latest role? “It’s a lot of rubbish,” he replied testily. “I just don’t know how people can say things like this! That role couldn’t possibly reflect on the President. I saw him over the weekend, and he had just started reading the book on which the film is based. He asked me in a friendly way if I had a good script. That didn’t sound as though he were displeased.”

  Quite the contrary; Kennedy was delighted. After the first week of filming in the basement of the Senate Office Building, he invited Preminger and the entire cast to lunch at the White House. It was a memorable afternoon for everyone. They would have been excited under any circumstances to dine with the President of the United States, but they were particularly so because of their immersion in a movie about the presidency and congressional politics. Some observers noted wryly that Franchot Tone, playing the President, seemed more “presidential” than the youthful Jack Kennedy.

  The day was memorable for Otto Preminger for another reason altogether. After the luncheon, Kennedy asked Milt Ebbins to come to his office. Pierre Salinger was with the President, and the first thing Jack said was, “I know you can do this, Milt.”

  “Do what, Mr. President?”

  “I want you to tell Otto Preminger that he can’t shoot in the White House.”