Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Peter’s membership in the Rat Pack had whipped up bad press, and he was continually forced to defend himself against criticism that his Hollywood antics were beneath the dignity of a brother-in-law of the President of the United States. “There is no ‘clan,’” Peter protested. “There is only a group of people who enjoy getting together. I mean, it makes us sound like children — like we all wear sweatshirts that say ‘The Clan’ on the back and Frank with a whistle around his neck. They make us sound so unsavory.”

  The problem, of course, was that many of Sinatra’s associates were unsavory, a fact that hit very close to home with Peter when Puccini failed for that very reason. Among the restaurant’s regular clientele was Sinatra’s friend Mickey Cohen, who had been the head West Coast mafioso since Bugsy Siegel’s murder in 1947. One evening in 1961 the squat, glowery Cohen walked into Puccini and saw comedian Red Skelton’s manager dining with actor George Raft.

  “Mickey Cohen was very good friends with Red Skelton,” Milt Ebbins recalled, “and there were rumors that Red’s manager was having an affair with Red’s wife. Cohen saw this guy, walked over to his table, jumped up on the booth, and started kicking him. Raft tried to stop him and Cohen hissed, ‘You shut up, Raft, or you know what you’re gonna get.’”

  Skelton’s manager wound up in the hospital, and the incident made the newspapers. “From then on,” Ebbins says, “the restaurant was filled with police department undercover guys every night, and nobody wanted to eat there anymore. It was a terrific restaurant, but now everybody looked on it as a hangout for Sinatra’s Mafia friends and they were scared to come to it.”

  Bobby Kennedy saw that Sinatra’s links to the mob had become uncomfortably public and that assumptions could be made about the President’s relationship with Sinatra. At a staff meeting, one of the Justice Department’s young attorneys complained to Bobby, “We are out front fighting organized crime on every level and here the President is associating with Sinatra, who is in bed with those guys.”

  The attorney general asked the lawyer to prepare a full report for him, but he was well aware of Sinatra’s associations, and he knew that the time had come to sever ties with the singer.

  TWO MONTHS EARLIER, in January 1962, Peter had made a request of Sinatra: the President was coming to Southern California on a political trip in March. Could Jack stay at Frank’s Palm Springs house for a few days?

  Could he? Sinatra immediately began a massive construction project designed to make the property suitable as the Western White House. He built separate cottages for the Secret Service men, installed a communications bank with twenty-five extra telephone lines, poured a huge concrete heliport, and had a solid gold plaque inscribed “John F. Kennedy Slept Here.”

  “It had been kind of a running joke with all of us in the family,” Peter later said. “He even erected a flagpole for the presidential flag after he saw one flying over the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. No one asked Frank to do this.”

  A few weeks before the trip, Bobby prevailed on the President to break off his public ties with Frank Sinatra once and for all. “Sam Giancana has been a guest at that same house,” the attorney general told his brother. “How is it going to look? There are too many people who know about Sinatra’s ties to these guys. We can’t take the risk, Jack.”

  Jack liked Sinatra and thought Bobby was being an alarmist. “What difference does it make?” he asked. Bobby argued forcefully about the sensitivity of the situation, and the President finally was convinced that it would be better for him to stay elsewhere. Bobby telephoned Peter and told him to let Frank know that the President’s plans had changed.

  Peter could feel the blood drain from his face as he listened to Bobby’s words. He knew what Sinatra’s reaction would be, and he didn’t want to witness it. He tried to persuade Bobby to keep the President’s plans just as they were; when he could not he called Jack and tried to appeal to the President’s affection for and gratitude to Sinatra. It didn’t work. “I can’t stay there while Bobby’s handling the investigation [of Giancana],” Jack told the frantic Peter. “See if you can’t find me someplace else.” Peter protested that Frank would be extremely upset. “You can handle it, Peter,” Jack replied. “We’ll take care of the Frank situation when we get to it.”

  Given an unenviable task, Peter was, he admitted, frightened. He telephoned Sinatra with the news, using as an excuse the Secret Service’s concerns about security shortcomings on his property. Sinatra was devastated. After Peter’s call he muttered to himself again and again, “What am I gonna tell my kids?” He put a call through to Bobby, hoping to change the decision. The attorney general bluntly told Sinatra the truth — that his questionable associations made it impossible for the President to stay at his house.

  “Frank was livid,” Peter said. “He called Bobby every name in the book and then rang me up and reamed me out again. He was quite unreasonable, irrational really. [Frank’s valet] George Jacobs told me later that when he got off the phone, he went outside with a sledgehammer and started chopping up the concrete landing pad of his heliport. He was in a frenzy.”

  Sinatra’s anger grew when he learned that Jack had decided to stay at Bing Crosby’s nearby estate. “He felt that I was responsible,” Peter said, “for setting Jack up to stay at Bing’s — the other singer and a Republican to boot. Well, Frank never forgave me. He cut me off like that — just like that!”

  Although he had had nothing to do with either decision, Peter took the brunt of Sinatra’s fury. The singer refused Peter’s phone calls, told associates that he wanted nothing more than to punch him in the face, and wrote him out of two upcoming Rat Pack movies, 4 for Texas and Robin and the 7 Hoods. (For the latter film, Frank hired Bing Crosby!)

  Sinatra did agree to see Milt Ebbins, who went to Frank’s office and spent three hours pleading Peter’s case. Ebbins told Sinatra that Peter was “innocent,” that it was Bobby who had made the initial decision that Jack shouldn’t stay at his compound, and that it was Jack’s golfing partner Chris Dunphy, not Peter, who had arranged for Jack to stay at Bing Crosby’s house. He also leveled with Sinatra and told him the reversal of plans had been prompted by the fact that Bobby was investigating some of the singer’s friends.

  “None of it worked,” Ebbins recalled. “Frank just wrote Peter off. And Peter was destroyed. He loved Frank. He loved being a part of the Rat Pack. And all of a sudden he was on the outs. Not only did he lose the Rat Pack movies, but a lot of other opportunities as well — I know we lost a couple of Billy Wilder pictures.” Peter tried desperately to get back into Sinatra’s good graces. When the President arrived in Los Angeles, Peter asked him to “give Frank a call.” Ebbins put the call through, and Sinatra’s valet thought it was a joke. “Ebbins has gone off the cliff,” he told Frank. “He says the President wants to speak with you.” Ebbins put Jack on the line and he had a pleasant, inconsequential chat with Sinatra. There was no mention of what had transpired, and Sinatra wasn’t much mollified by the call. A few months later, Peter and Milt were at the White House, and Ebbins suggested that Peter ask Jack to invite Sinatra for a visit. “I can’t go to the President of the United States and say, ‘You gotta invite Frank Sinatra to the White House,’” Peter protested. “All right,” Ebbins replied, “we’ll both do it.”

  Ebbins did the talking. “Jack,” he began, “would it be possible to invite Frank here for lunch? He was such a good friend.”

  “Okay,” the President responded. “We’ll have a big Italian dinner here on Monday.” Ebbins relayed the invitation to Frank, who was hesitant at first but agreed to fly into Washington for the soiree. Ebbins made arrangements to have Sinatra picked up by helicopter at Dulles International Airport and flown to the White House. Sinatra had been there before, but always secretly; he used a back entrance to avoid reporters. The same precautions would have to be taken this time — and the dinner was possible only because the First Lady was out of town. “Jackie hates Frank and won’t have him in
the house,” Jack had told Peter.

  In Sinatra’s honor, Kennedy flew in an Italian chef from New York who prepared veal piccata and fettuccine Alfredo. But the afternoon of the dinner, the singer’s secretary, Gloria Lovell, called Milt Ebbins to say that Frank was ill and couldn’t attend. “Isn’t there some way he can make it?” Milt protested. “This is the President of the United States. If he’s dying he’s gotta come.” No, Lovell said, Frank had the flu and was really too ill to make it.

  The dinner party went ahead without Sinatra. A few days later, Lovell told Ebbins the real reason Frank hadn’t been able to come: Marilyn Monroe, with whom he was having an affair, was depressed and had wandered out of his house and disappeared. “He spent the whole day looking for her,” Lovell said. “He was worried sick that she was going to hurt herself. That’s why he didn’t go to the dinner.”

  Later, Sinatra got another invitation to the White House, this time for lunch, and things went off without a hitch. But he never again had a good word for Peter Lawford. It was clear that while Sinatra had forgiven all his other cronies their trespasses, he was not going to allow Peter back into the inner sanctum. Beyond all else, it was clear that Frank Sinatra no longer liked Peter Lawford.

  The Sinatra debacle sent Peter reeling into a depression, one punctuated by bouts of heavy drinking. The whole sordid incident reinforced in him the feeling that his life was out of his own control, and it impressed on him anew the negative aspects of being related to the President. He felt diminished by the loss of so central a relationship in his life, felt his financial security undermined by the career roadblocks Sinatra had already begun to set up against him, and felt his physical safety threatened by the mob’s fury against the Kennedys and the Rat Pack.

  Matters went from bad to worse. Added to Peter’s myriad of troubles was a new one: just as Sinatra had been weeks before, Peter soon found himself “worried sick” about Marilyn.

  13 Judy Meredith has denied that she ever slept with Jack Kennedy.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Marilyn Monroe emerged from the bedroom of her Spanishstyle home on Fifth Helena Drive in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles before nine A.M. on the morning of Saturday, March 24, 1962. Normally, she slept past noon, but this was an important day. Marilyn had asked her housekeeper- companion, Eunice Murray, a who had been recommended to her by her therapist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, to tell the workmen who were renovating the house not to come on the twenty-fourth. “I’m going on a trip,” Marilyn offered by way of explanation, “and my hairdresser’s coming to help me get ready.”

  At eight A.M., the plumber arrived unexpectedly with a crew of men to install a new hot-water heater. Mrs. Murray told them to proceed, not expecting Marilyn to arise for hours. When she was up less than an hour later, Eunice was certain Marilyn would be angry, but she was in too good a mood for that. “I’ll go over to the Greensons’ to have my hair washed,” she chirped. “It’s all right.”

  Several hours later, Marilyn returned and dressed for the trip. At noon, Peter Lawford arrived to pick her up. “Peter paced back and forth,” Mrs. Murray recalled, “while Marilyn put the finishing touches on her attire.” Nearly an hour later, she was ready — and wearing a black wig over her new hairdo. Peter and the disguised Marilyn drove to Palm Springs — to spend the weekend with John Kennedy at Bing Crosby’s house. The President planned to relax and throw a party Saturday evening to meet some of the Southern California Democratic politicos. It was a semipublic occasion, but Marilyn Monroe was a somewhat more private guest.

  Philip Watson, later the Los Angeles County assessor, was invited to the Crosby compound that night, and he soon discovered that there were in fact two parties — one at poolside and a smaller, more exclusive one in the President’s cottage. Watson, running for assessor, was invited to the smaller gathering and saw that Marilyn Monroe was there. He wasn’t particularly surprised; he had seen Marilyn with the President at another party at the Beverly Hilton Hotel the previous November. What astonished him now was how little effort either made to disguise their intimacy.

  As Watson remembered it, “The President was wearing a turtle- neck sweater, and she was dressed in kind of a robe thing. She had obviously had a lot to drink. It was obvious they were intimate, that they were staying together for the night.”

  On Sunday, Marilyn telephoned her masseur, Ralph Roberts. During Marilyn’s rubdowns, she and Roberts often discussed anatomy, a subject Monroe had studied while developing her body with weights as a young starlet in the late 1940s. The last time they’d met, Marilyn had asked Roberts to give her a refresher course in preparation for her sojourn with the President. She was giving “my friend” a massage, Marilyn told Roberts when she called him from Palm Springs, and they disagreed about the position of certain muscles in the body. “I’m going to put him on the phone, and you can tell him.”

  Roberts soon heard the unmistakable Boston twang of John F. Kennedy. “I told him about the muscles, and he thanked me,” Roberts recalled. “Of course, I didn’t reveal that I knew who he was, and he didn’t say.” Later, Marilyn told Roberts that she had told the President that Roberts could give him a better massage than she could. “He said that wouldn’t really be the same, would it?” Marilyn recalled. Then she giggled. “But I think I make his back feel better.”

  A YEAR EARLIER, LIVING in New York, Marilyn had hit rock bottom. She was depressed over the failure of her marriage to Arthur Miller and the death of her girlhood idol Clark Gable, with whom she had just starred in The Misfits. She had suffered from severe insomnia and had been taking ever-increasing doses of barbiturates to help her sleep. “She took so many pills to get to sleep at night,” recalled John Huston, the director of The Misfits, “that she had to take wake-up pills to get her going in the morning — and this ravaged the girl.”

  She had fallen deeper and deeper into a maelstrom of drugs and alcohol. As the grip of depression tightened around her, she became convinced that at thirty-five she was too old to continue as a sex symbol, that two box-office disappointment in a row meant her career was over. She despaired of ever having a happy marriage after three divorces — or a much-wanted child after three miscarriages.

  Just before Christmas 1960, Marilyn had read that some of Clark Gable’s associates blamed her for his death, citing the delays and headaches her emotional and marital problems had created on the Nevada Misfits location. Gable, in fact, had said a few days before filming ended, “What the hell is that girl’s problem? God damn it, I like her, but she’s so damn unprofessional. I damn near went nuts up there in Reno waiting for her to show. Christ, she didn’t show up until after lunch some days. I’m glad this picture’s finished. She damn near gave me a heart attack.”

  The day after the picture wrapped, Gable had suffered a massive coronary. As a girl in an orphanage, little Norma Jeane Baker had fantasized that Clark Gable was her father, and the thought that she might have hastened his death was devastating. One evening Lena Pepitone, Marilyn’s maid, came into her bedroom and found her, disheveled and wearing only a terry cloth bathrobe, leaning out of her high-rise apartment window. Pepitone rushed across the room, grabbed Marilyn around the waist, and pulled her back in. “Lena, no,” Marilyn sobbed. “Let me die. I want to die. I deserve to die. What have I got to live for?”

  Pepitone persuaded Marilyn to call Joe DiMaggio, with whom she had remained friendly. They talked for an hour, and Marilyn’s mood improved. “Gee,” she said to Lena, “how could I have been so crazy? I just lost control for a second. I didn’t know what I was doing.” When Lena teased her about looking too sloppy for a suicide attempt, Marilyn laughed. “I thought about dressing up. I did . . . really. But my hair’s a mess anyway, so I figured, what the hell?”

  Marilyn had soon fallen once again into a downward spiral, and less than two months later, her New York psychiatrist, Dr. Marianne Kris, persuaded her to enter the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in Manhattan. Expecting a cushy rest cure designed to wean her f
rom alcohol and sleeping pills, Marilyn was shocked by her treatment after she signed in as Faye Miller.

  What Marilyn didn’t know was that she was being admitted as a potentially self-destructive patient. When she was brought to her room, all her personal property, including her clothes, was confiscated. There were iron bars across the windows; all sharp objects had been removed from the room. The bathroom had no door, and the mirror over the sink was made of polished chrome rather than glass. There was, in short, nothing in the room that she could use to injure herself.

  The door to her room locked from the outside, and in the middle of it a small shatterproof pane of glass covered by iron bars allowed passersby to check on her at will. No visitors were permitted to see her. She felt like a caged animal, abused and abandoned; she knew that orderlies and janitorial staff were peeping through the window to gawk at the most celebrated sex symbol in the world.

  As Marilyn sat in her stark room and stared at the iron bars on the windows, her worst nightmare — the fear she had fought all of her life — seemed to be coming true. Her grandmother had died in a mental hospital. Her mother had been institutionalized for most of her life. Was she going insane, too? The thought soon sent her into a paroxysm of hysteria.

  She began to pound on the door, screaming, “Open this door! Let me out! Please! Open the door!” Finally she stripped herself nude and stood screaming in front of the window. She was taken to a maximum security ward, where she threw a chair through a window and was put into a straitjacket. “They had me sedated,” she later told a friend. “At night there was a steady procession of hospital personnel, doctors and nurses, coming to look at me. There I was, with my arms bound. I was not able to defend myself. I was a curiosity piece. . . . ”