Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Jean MacDonald had a similar but less pleasant experience with Peter in 1964. She was in Los Angeles with her young daughter, who had been admitted to Children’s Hospital, and had dinner with Peter at the beach house. They shared happy memories during the meal, but then things turned sour. “Peter made a move on me,” Jean recalled, “and it was unpleasant. I hadn’t expected it. I was upset by it. And the kind of sex he was interested in — that was a change! That was the first time I’d seen the side of him that I didn’t like. When I said I couldn’t do what he wanted he got real nasty.

  “I wanted to leave, but he wanted someone to stay with him until he went to sleep. He was taking Quaaludes. I sat downstairs in the living room and I didn’t know how to get out of there. I was a little frightened. Finally at dawn I got a taxi and left.”

  A YEAR OF IDLENESS since President Kennedy’s murder had not helped alleviate Peter’s grief. Everywhere he turned, there were reminders of Marilyn and Jack; magazine covers, newspaper articles, television documentaries. Even, sometimes, living embodiments. Chuck Pick recalled that before the November 1964 elections, Ted Kennedy was at Peter’s house for a political fund-raiser: “Peter and I were in the den, and Ted was in the living room. We heard Ted say something and it sounded just like Jack. Peter broke down on the couch and started crying.”

  Milt Ebbins hoped that having Peter come to the Chrislaw offices every day would take his mind off his sorrow, provide him with some immediate goals, give his everyday life some structure. It didn’t work. The duties at Chrislaw — the company was now producing a film for Patty Duke called Billie — could be handled well enough without him, and there was really no one for Peter to answer to if he didn’t show up. Bonnie Williams, now a Chrislaw secretary, recalled that “he was drinking a lot, and we had a great deal of difficulty getting him to come to work in the morning. Sometimes we had to go out to the house and help him get up.”

  A movie role, Ebbins hoped, would force Peter to pull himself together. In the fall of 1964, Martin Poll, the producer, hired Peter for his film Sylvia to play a wealthy man about to marry a beautiful, mysterious young woman played by Carroll Baker. The picture was unmemorable and unlikely to do much to further the careers of anyone involved in it. Luckily, by the time of its release, Peter, Carroll Baker, and their director Gordon Douglas had all been signed to reunite in a much more interesting project: Joseph E. Levine’s film version of Irving Shulman’s Harlow, the controversial best-seller about the life of MGM’s shimmering, sassy blond sex symbol of the thirties, Jean Harlow.

  Carroll Baker, who had created a sensation in 1956 playing the sultry child-wife in Baby Doll, was being strongly hyped as the successor to Marilyn Monroe, who had long been considered the only actress who could do justice to Harlow on screen. After Marilyn’s death, there was a vacuum in Hollywood that Carroll Baker and Carol Lynley were both trying to fill. Lynley, in fact, had been hired for a low-budget film of Harlow’s life that was intended to compete with Levine’s “official” version. Clearly, however, neither Baker nor Lynley had the complex allure of Monroe — or of Jean Harlow, for that matter.

  Still, casting Jean Harlow was much less difficult than casting her husband, Paul Bern. Shulman had shocked readers with the tawdry details of Harlow’s brief marriage to the forty-three-year-old MGM executive who — mortified and enraged by his sexual impotence — had first beat his bride with a cane on their wedding night and then, a few months later, killed himself after Harlow laughed at him when he entered her bedroom brandishing a dildo. (Five years later, Harlow herself was dead, a victim of uremic poisoning likely caused by a kidney injury she suffered when Bern beat her.)

  Bern would be a thankless role, and certainly not one that most producers would think of Peter Lawford to play. But when the idea came up, Joe Levine and Gordon Douglas agreed it was just quirky enough to work. They did wonder whether Lawford would be willing to take such a big career risk.

  He was. The drawbacks of playing so miserable a character were outweighed, in his view, by the sheer acting challenge of it. Acting challenges were not something Peter had been often asked to take on, and now that he was no longer concerned about being “a Kennedy” his options had expanded greatly. Most important, Harlow was a movie based on the most talked-about book of the year, produced by the hottest producer in Hollywood, and costarring the most publicized blond bombshell since Monroe. A major role in this film — even that of Paul Bern — could do nothing but bolster Peter’s flagging stock in Hollywood.

  Which isn’t to say that Peter wasn’t embarrassed to be playing Bern when the announcement was made. He felt it necessary to tell the press at a party Joe Levine threw to kick off the picture, “Thank goodness nobody can doubt me — I’ve got four kids.”

  What few could have suspected at the time was that enacting Paul Bern would be one of the most emotionally trying experiences of Peter’s professional life. For the past several years, he had been grappling with impotency himself, a problem exacerbated by his drinking binges and anxieties. Playing Paul Bern was so deeply resonant an experience for Peter that it kept him in a fragile emotional condition throughout the filming in the early spring of 1965. Frequently he arrived on the set late, hung over, unable to remember his lines. Assistant director David Salven recalled that there was little sympathy for Peter when scenes had to be reshot again and again before he was able to recite the dialogue correctly. “At one point he needed cue cards. Everybody would say, ‘If you drank sixty-five quarts of vodka every day, you’d have trouble remembering where to find the studio.’ Some people would try to make excuses for him, and the usual reaction was, ‘The fucker’s drunk, that’s all.’ Nobody knew that he was impotent; nobody knew what he was going through.”

  Ken DuMain, who hadn’t worked with Peter for several years, was his stand-in again for Harlow, and he was shocked at his condition. “When I came in, they were doing a scene in a restaurant with Carroll Baker and Peter, and he was in bad shape. He had been drinking, and he was hung over and his face was puffy. I felt very sorry for him. It’s embarrassing when an actor blows his lines again and again.”

  The director called a break, and DuMain walked over to Peter. “Give me your script,” he told him. “I’ll go over your lines with you.” The two men went outside and walked around the lot, rehearsing the sides of dialogue. “When we finished,” DuMain recalled, “Peter told me that of all the telegrams he and Pat had received after President Kennedy’s assassination, mine had touched them the most deeply. When we got back to the set, Peter went through the scene again and it was perfect. They printed it.”

  HARLOW, ALTHOUGH SUMPTUOUS to look at, was not a good film and was widely panned. It was a box-office hit, however, primarily because of the avalanche of publicity that surrounded it. Joseph Levine once said, “You can fool all the people all the time if the advice is right and the budget is big enough.” Few critics were fooled by Harlow because although the budget was huge, the advice was abysmal. Rather than tell the Harlow story as it actually happened, Levine, Douglas, and screenwriter John Michael Hayes opted for the clichéd Hollywood yarn of a virginal young girl thrown to the show- business wolves who triumphs on-screen but, in life, experiences tragedy and early death.

  Because Joe Levine knew that Carol Lynley’s rival version was in the works, Harlow was a very rushed production. John Michael Hayes had been brought in to “de-sexify” the original script by Sydney Boehm, and Carroll Baker was so grateful for his rapid rewrite that she gave Hayes one third of her fifteen percent profit participation in the picture. Editing was done on scenes that had already been shot at the same time that other scenes were still being filmed, and on the last day of production Neal Hefti, the composer, had already scored nine reels of music for the film. There was virtually no postproduction work.

  Many of Harlow’s shortcomings can be attributed either to this rush or to the censorship restrictions of the day. Presenting Jean Harlow as the salty-tongued, sexually profligate woman she w
as would have created problems with the Catholic Legion of Decency that Joe Levine preferred to avoid. And certainly Paul Bern’s sexual problems presented a thorny issue. The producers grappled with whether to show the events that preceded Bern’s suicide — the centerpiece of the book — or merely refer to them.

  Douglas did film Peter and Carroll in what the crew dubbed “the dildo sequence,” but the scene ended up on the cutting-room floor, along with any other explicit evidence of the characters’ sexual problems. According to participants in the filming, the sequence contained some of the best acting Peter Lawford had ever done. “The performance Peter gave as Paul Bern was brilliant,” Carroll Baker recalled. “What I saw him do in that scene was really magnificent. He was touching, he was real. I was knocked out.”

  The one scene in the released version in which Peter is given free rein to emote — his final appearance in the picture — shows Bern begging Jean to give him another chance. “Help me over this,” he pleads. “I’ll go to a psychiatrist. Give me a chance — give me time.”

  Jean Harlow did try to help Paul Bern. She urged him to see a doctor, and she agreed to remain under the same roof with him so that he could save face. In the film version, she is not only unsympathetic but cruel. “Fifty million men, and I had to marry you,” she snorts. When he pleads for her help she tells him, “I’m just an ordinary woman with the same ordinary fears and problems — ”

  “Then you should understand my problem,” Bern says.

  “I said ordinary!”

  Now in tears, Bern says, “I couldn’t live if I couldn’t make it up to you.”

  “It’s all so sick!”

  “Please, Jean,” Bern sobs. “Don’t expose me to people for what I am.”

  Peter’s performance of this exchange, enormously touching, caused the crew to burst into spontaneous applause when it was over. Milt Ebbins watched the scene being shot. “Peter wasn’t acting,” he recalled. “He was really feeling all those emotions.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  As late as the winter of 1965, Peter harbored hope that his marriage could be salvaged. To him, a divorce from Pat would signify the end of his association with the Kennedys, would mark, with awful finality, the end of Camelot. Peter knew, of course, that those days were over, but something within him refused to accept fully that the glory was unrecoverable. Maybe, if he and Pat could reconcile, and Bobby ran for President . . .

  But Pat pressed on with the divorce plans. With Bobby having been elected by a wide margin to represent New York in the Senate and having quickly established a national constituency, there was no longer, in her view, any reason to delay. She notified Peter that she wanted to draw up a separation agreement and then proceed with a divorce.

  Jackie and Barbara Cooper were visiting Peter at the beach house when he telephoned Pat in Hyannis Port to ask her to reconsider. According to Jackie, “He wanted to get back together with her, and it was like, ‘Wait until you see what I’m gonna say to her’ — he was pretty sure he could convince her.”

  He never got the chance. Bobby intercepted the call, and the Coopers will never forget the one-sidedness of the conversation. “You mean, I’m never to see her again?” Peter said into the phone. “I’m never to call or come there? And she’s never coming back here?” When the conversation was over, Peter’s eyes were filled with tears. Astounded by what she had heard, Barbara asked Peter, “How can you let your brother-in-law talk to you that way?”

  Wiping his eyes, Peter softly responded, “When that family tells you you’re not going to do something, you’re not going to do it.” “Why?”

  “Because you’ll suffer sooner or later. You learn that very quickly. If they say don’t do it, you don’t do it.”

  On December 17, Peter and Pat signed a legal separation agreement. The document, never made public, granted “sole and exclusive” custody of the children to Pat, but allowed Peter to consult with her on the choice of schools they would attend — with the stipulation, “final selection of such schools shall be made by wife.” Peter’s visitation rights were limited to one Saturday or Sunday per month, with prior notification, if he was “living far away.” If he lived nearby, he was allowed to visit the children one day every weekend. Once the children reached age sixteen, they would be permitted to visit their father, with “transportation expenses to be paid by husband.”

  All property belonging separately to Peter and Pat remained their own, and each waived any right to the other’s estate. The Santa Monica house and contents were to be sold, and twenty-five thousand dollars of the proceeds, after the first mortgage was paid, was to be given to Peter, with the balance applied to a fifty-two-thousand-dollar second mortgage Peter had borrowed from Pat. Until the sale of the house, Peter was required to repay the debt to Pat in installments of three thousand dollars per year.

  The agreement called for no alimony from either party and no child support payments from Peter. After he signed the document, however, Peter felt that he should have some financial obligation to his children. Pat told him that wasn’t necessary, that she had enough money to take care of their every need. But he insisted, stressing that it was important to him that he contribute in some way to their wellbeing. Pat finally agreed that if Peter really wanted to he could pay four hundred dollars a month in child support.

  Peter made the first two monthly payments and then never made another one.

  ON DECEMBER 20, PAT and her four children joined Jackie, Caroline, and John Junior, along with Bobby, Ethel, and most of their children, for a Christmas ski holiday in Sun Valley, Idaho. The national press sat up and took notice, because rumors of an impending Lawford divorce had been swirling for months, and Sun Valley, with its short six-week residency requirement, had become the divorce mecca of America’s socialites.

  Pat would not confirm the rumors until she was ready to make an official announcement. To help shield her sister-in-law from reporters, Jackie Kennedy made herself uncharacteristically available to the press. One British journalist commented, “It was obvious that Jackie, who doesn’t grant interviews, had done so to steer us away from the story we were really digging for.”

  The Kennedys left Idaho on January 5, 1966, but Pat stayed behind and took a suite at the Sun Valley Lodge in order to wait out the residency requirement. Now there was no denying it, and the Kennedy family attorney, William Peyton Marin, made the announcement of an “amicable separation.” He said nothing about a divorce, but one clearly was imminent.

  The encroaching finality of it unsettled Pat’s resolve. She called Peter several times a day to ask him, “Why am I here? What am I doing?” Again and again she wavered; according to Milt Ebbins, Pat didn’t really want to divorce Peter. “She still loved him. But in the end she had no choice. She knew that she couldn’t live with Peter anymore. She hated hearing all those things about him all the time.”

  The day after Pat met the minimum residency requirement, she spent eight minutes on the witness stand in the courtroom of Judge Charles Scoggin to explain why she should be granted a divorce. Dressed in a simple black suit and black leather gloves, she sat with her head lowered most of the time, looking up only occasionally to answer questions. She charged Peter with mental cruelty and testified that her differences with him were irreconcilable. After testimony from the owner of the Sun Valley Lodge established Pat’s residency, the divorce was granted.

  The next day, Pat was back in New York — and having dinner with Peter. The New York press ran front-page photographs of the couple leaving the Colony restaurant and wondered if there was a reconciliation in the works. Peter simply said that he and Pat had gotten together “to discuss matters that involved the children.”

  What they actually discussed was the state of Peter’s health. He had been having stomach cramps for over a year and had been told by a New York doctor that his liver was enlarged and he would have to stop drinking. He hadn’t, and the cramps had grown worse. All the time, Peter had refused to undergo a full batter
y of diagnostic tests, but his discomfort was now so great that Milt Ebbins and Pat urged him to check into the Lahey Clinic in Boston, a Kennedy-endowed medical center within the New England Baptist Hospital. There, he would receive some of the best treatment in the world, all of it free.

  Peter, worried about what the doctors might find, was reluctant, but he agreed to check into Lahey if Ebbins would accompany him.

  Dutifully, Ebbins went along, expecting to have a room of his own. Instead, Peter insisted that a second bed be brought into his room for Milt. “C’mon, Peter, you’re a grown man,” Ebbins told him. “I’ll be nearby.” But Peter wouldn’t budge. “If you don’t stay in my room with me, I’m leaving.” Milt stayed, and when Ted Kennedy came by to visit one day he commented, “This doesn’t look too good. Aren’t people talking about you two guys in this place?”

  At Lahey, Peter was under the care of Dr. John W. Norcross, one of the top liver specialists in the world. For three days he ran diagnostic tests on Peter to ascertain the cause of his stomach pain. When the tests were completed, a nurse approached Peter’s roommate and asked to speak to him privately. “Mr. Ebbins,” she said, “there’s something awry with Mr. Lawfords tests. They’re not coming out the way they should.”

  “What do you mean? What’s wrong?”

  “We think he’s still drinking.”

  “He can’t be,” Ebbins said. “I’m with him all the time, and I haven’t seen him touch a drop.”

  The nurse was insistent. “That’s the only possible reason for the way the tests are turning out.”

  “Well, where are the bottles?”

  “We looked for them in his room, but we can’t find any. Would you see if you can find them? We’re absolutely certain he’s been drinking.”