Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  But then they fired me two weeks after we finished shooting. I was so angry at Peter at that point that if I’d found him it would have made the papers.”

  Despite everything, Donner and Peter remained friendly and later went into business together, with a group of other partners, in The Factory, an exclusive, trendy discotheque in West Hollywood. “There was a bit of hero worship in my feelings for Peter,” Donner recalled. “The women just flocked to him. It was unbelievable. I always wanted to be a pilot fish to Peter’s shark — you know, the little fish that hangs on to the shark and eats up anything that falls out of its mouth? Peter had so many gorgeous girls around him I was content with his overflow. I did very well through him.”

  Critical reaction was mixed when Salt and Pepper was released in September 1968. Most reviewers thought the film a waste of Sammy’s talents, and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner was hard on Peter for never seeming “quite sure as to whether he is supposed to be James Bond, Mr. Lucky or Peter Lawford.” Variety summed things up by noting, “This is not a picture for thinking audiences.”

  But Salt and Pepper did well at the box office. It was number nine nationally its first week and set attendance records in some theaters — so good a showing that a year later Peter and Sammy were given the green light by United Artists for a sequel, One More Time, again written by Michael Pertwee and again produced by Milt Ebbins. In this version, Peter would play not only Chris Pepper but his wealthy, snobby twin brother, Lord Sydney, as well.

  Richard Donner was never considered to direct One More Time, because Peter had someone else in mind — Jerry Lewis, who had been a friend since his days as half of the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy team and who had recently used Peter in his picture Hook, Line and Sinker.

  Milt Ebbins’s reaction to the suggestion, Ebbins recalled, was “Jerry Lewis?” United Artists was equally against hiring Lewis, who hadn’t directed a successful movie in years, but Sammy and Peter were adamant, and in the end the UA executives relented — after warning Ebbins, “You’re gonna have trouble.”

  The trouble began immediately. “Lewis came in to work on the script,” recalled Ebbins, “and he brought in a writer who he paid to completely rewrite it. Then he threw out the rewrite and hired Michael Pertwee, who wrote the first script, to write another one. And all the time the cash registers were ringing.”

  When the company arrived in London to begin shooting, Lewis told the producer he wanted to use three cameras. Although Ebbins knew that Jerry’s idea would cost the production three times the expense of one camera in film alone, he agreed when Lewis promised to stay within budget. Then the director wanted to use the television system whereby it is possible to look at each take as it’s filmed. “That’s gonna cost us eighty thousand dollars!” Ebbins exclaimed. Milt called a meeting with UA executives over the issue, and when Lewis promised to pay any cost overruns out of his own pocket, UA approved the review-as-you-go system. Once the cameras were installed, Ebbins asked Lewis to test them before he began to shoot. “Milt,” he replied, “you’re telling me about my business.”

  “Jerry,” Ebbins pleaded, “just test the cameras. That’s all I ask.” Lewis finally agreed that he would, but he never got around to it, and shot for half a day before he realized that there was something wrong with the lenses and he hadn’t gotten a single foot of usable film.

  A few days later, as Lewis was setting up to shoot a fight scene, the art director asked to speak to Milt. “Mr. Ebbins,” he said. “I must tell you that Mr. Lewis insists on using antique furniture in this scene. Antiques cost a fortune and we can’t insure them for what they’re really worth, only what it would cost to buy newly manufactured furniture. I can make new furniture right here at the studio that will look just like antiques and nobody will know the difference.”

  Ebbins spoke to Jerry about it, and Lewis was furious. “Christ, Milt!” he exploded. “You’re telling me how to do my goddamn job again!” Finally, after much cajoling, Ebbins convinced Jerry to let the art director make the “antiques.”

  “So he did the fight scene,” Ebbins recalled. “In the first thirty seconds, a guy threw a punch and the other guy fell down and broke a table and three chairs! Luckily, the art director had made up some extras. Jerry Lewis didn’t say a word to me.”

  The filming proceeded through one stressful confrontation after another, with Ebbins struggling to keep costs down and Lewis continually threatening to send them sky-high. After the principal photography was completed, Lewis insisted on editing the film without showing anyone a working print for review. The result, Ebbins remembered, was “awful. He had Peter and Sammy doing Martin and Lewis. Peter left the screening room, went into [United Artists executive] Herb Jaffe’s office, and started to cry. Jaffe wanted to burn the negative.” The studio gave Ebbins the chance to recut the film himself, and he spent three weeks holed up with the editor. One More Time was finally released in June 1970, and at least one critic found it a “perfectly respectable, oddly endearing little film.” The Los Angeles Times thought Peter’s performance in the dual role his “best . . . in quite some time.” But the overriding reaction was summed up by the critic for the London Sunday Mail: “One More Time has one of those excruciating plots where everyone on screen is killing himself trying to be funny, and everyone in the audience is dying with embarrassment, disbelief and boredom.”

  IN THE FALL OF 1967, immediately after completing Salt and Pepper, Peter traveled to Rome to appear with Gina Lollobrigida, Shelley Winters, Janet Margolin, Phil Silvers, and Telly Savalas in Melvin Frank’s Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, a romantic comedy that would receive mixed reviews.

  The shooting in Rome went without incident for Peter, but offscreen he became involved in romantic misadventures straight out of an Italian sex farce. The first of these involved his costar Gina Lollobrigida, who at forty had lost little of her voluptuous sex appeal or fiery Latin temperament.

  During filming, the buxom seductress made a strong play for Peter. She invited him to her home for a romantic candlelight supper and made it quite clear that she was interested in more than just a friendly dinner. Nervous, Peter made a beeline for the door the minute he finished his dessert, leaving Lollobrigida to wonder what had gone wrong. Gina extended several more invitations to him, which he declined. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked friends. “Or is there something wrong with me? What is it?”

  Princess Ira von Furstenberg was more aggressive, but no more successful. Another formidable, lusty woman, she was the ex-wife of the Spanish prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe. During the 1960s, she made twenty-six Italian films, and a friend described her as a woman who would “rather be Marilyn Monroe than the queen of England.” The princess invited Peter to her palatial villa in Rome for dinner, and when he arrived, there was nothing but candlelight illuminating the entire house. After dinner, as Peter later told Milt Ebbins, “she went after me like a hawk. She got me on the couch and I couldn’t get out of there!”

  According to Ebbins, Lollobrigida and Furstenberg had scared off their prey. “Peter was petrified of strong, aggressive, larger-than-life women. He was afraid of not performing well. He could have had Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollobrigida, but he was afraid. He couldn’t risk going to bed with those women and having them get up and say, ‘What the hell was that?’”

  Younger, more submissive, star-struck girls who were likely to be impressed with Peter’s stature and less likely to humiliate him in an awkward situation — these were the women who appealed to him. And Janet Margolin filled the bill on all counts. Pretty and slim, her long straight brown hair parted in the middle, Margolin had created a sensation in 1962 in her screen debut as an emotionally disturbed adolescent who falls in love with another troubled youth (Keir Dullea) in Frank Perry’s David and Lisa. Her career would never fulfill that initial promise, but she would remain a well-regarded actress.

  Peter was very taken with her, and the two were photographed holding hands during late-night s
trolls along the Via Veneto, he in a Nehru jacket and turtleneck sweater, she in a plaid skirt, sweater, and leather jacket. He was also seen about the same time (and wearing the same outfit) doing the town with the black singer Lola Falana, but Margolin was the girl who captured his heart.

  Soon Peter was on the phone to Ebbins. He said that he was in love with Janet Margolin and was going to marry her. “Are you crazy?” Milt asked.

  “This is the real thing, Milt!”

  “Have you slept with her?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “You must be nuts wanting to marry a twenty-four-year-old girl!” “Well, maybe — but that’s what I’m gonna do.” Peter did propose to Margolin, and afterward he again called Ebbins. “Do you believe it?” he asked via transatlantic telephone. “She turned me down.” “What reason did she give you?”

  “She didn’t really say. I guess I’m too old for her.”

  Peter turned forty-four in September 1967, but he wasn’t too old for many other younger women. His sexual and romantic involvements for the rest of his life were to be almost exclusively with girls half his age or younger — as young as seventeen in one case. This new predilection of Peter’s may have begun as still another emulation of Frank Sinatra, who in 1966 married twenty-one-year-old Mia Farrow, the close-cropped, sylphlike star of TV’s Peyton Place. (“I always knew Frank would wind up in bed with a boy,” Ava Gardner sniffed.)

  But there was clearly more to it than that. By now, Peter’s sexual tastes had taken a distinct turn toward the kinky. Because of the ever-present threat of impotence, he preferred watching two women have sex to performing intercourse with either of them and risking embarrassment. He found that he could reach orgasm only after prolonged fellatio — sometimes several hours. And he had begun to experiment with sadomasochism. He feared that he could not broach these sexual activities to women like Gina Lollobrigida or Ira von Furstenberg without risking ridicule.

  Young girls were a different matter. Everywhere he went, they buzzed around him like hummingbirds. They’d stare at him in restaurants and slip him their numbers as they walked by his table. Back in shape, still marvelous looking, he was attractive to women who had no idea who he was. For those who did know, the attraction was often irresistible.

  When he made his choice the young woman usually felt very special indeed. Here she was, on the arm of a handsome man who had been next to greatness, one who treated her like a queen, was solicitous of her every whim. But what would begin as the biggest thrill of her life more often than not ended in disillusionment.

  Arthur Natoli, a bluff, street-smart man, had replaced Chuck Pick as Peter’s chauffeur-companion in 1967, and he was puzzled by Peter’s sex life. “I used to call Peter’s bedroom the Rocky Horror Room,” Natoli recalled. “I always wondered just what went on in there.”

  Natoli got his answer when he introduced a young woman to his boss on the condition that if she slept with Peter, she tell Arthur what went on. She promised she would.

  The next morning, Natoli picked the girl up. “Boy, that was an experience,” she said as she hopped into his car.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know if I should tell you,” she said.

  “Hey! We had a deal!” Natoli protested. “Tell me!”

  “Well,” the girl began haltingly. “The first thing he did was put his pecker between his legs and close them, so it looked like he didn’t have one. Then he told me to lick him there and pretend he’s a girl.16 Then he wanted to watch me make it with another girl. That I didn’t mind, but when he told me to tie him up and whip him, I walked out of the room. I’m not into that kind of stuff.”

  16 In notebook/diary entries of Marilyn’s published in the 2010 book Fragments, Marilyn wrote, “Peter wants to be a girl — he wants to be me.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  There was about it a distinct aura of déjà vu. The handsome bushy-haired young senator named Kennedy stood in the Senate Caucus Room and said simply, “I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.”

  With the exact words his brother had uttered eight years earlier, Robert F. Kennedy embarked on a challenge to Lyndon Johnson, a quest that had seemed, for the past four years, somehow inevitable. Jack Kennedy had said that he ran for president only because his older brother Joe had been killed. Now that Jack was dead, it was Bobby’s turn, and after Bobby, Teddy would step in. The Kennedy family had nothing if not a sense of destiny.

  In many ways, however, Bobby’s run for the presidency was anticlimactic. As Peter tellingly put it to a reporter, “With Jack, it was like going to your first prom. It was wonderful working for someone you really believed in. I’m afraid your second prom will never be as exciting.” It may have been his “second prom,” but at least Peter was invited to it. Bobby knew that his former brother-in-law was still capable of rustling up celebrity support for his campaign just as he had for Jack’s, and he asked for Peter’s help. Despite the chilliness of their relationship, Peter agreed. He had long hoped in a nebulous, wishful sort of way that Camelot might be recaptured and that he might once again be part of the magic.

  (He wasn’t alone in that. When it looked as though Bobby’s campaign might well be successful, Jackie Kennedy enthused, “Won’t it be wonderful when we get back in the White House?” But when she overheard Jackie’s remark, Ethel — who for years had resented the way her sister-in-law overshadowed her — gave her an icy look and said, “What do you mean we?”)

  Peter did his job. He brought dozens of celebrities into the Kennedy campaign, among them Lauren Bacall, Shirley MacLaine, Eddie Fisher, Natalie Wood, and Gene Kelly. He organized fund-raisers at The Factory, the West Hollywood discotheque he co-owned with Sammy Davis, Dick Donner, Paul Newman, Pierre Salinger, and Tommy Smothers, among others. (Newman, however, was an active supporter of another hopeful, Eugene McCarthy.)

  Still, Peter was not involved as deeply with Bobby’s campaign as he had been with Jack’s. His efforts were limited to private California fund-raising; he did no traveling, made no speeches, never appeared with the candidate at whistle-stops. There were several reasons for this. One, of course, was Peter’s uncomfortable association with the Hollywood excesses that Bobby wanted to forget and prayed would remain secret.

  Another was the fact that Peter’s presence was a reminder of the only divorce in the Kennedy family, a factor that could do nothing but hurt Bobby in a close election. A third reason was made evident by a full-page color photograph of Peter run by Life magazine in its May 10, 1968, article on the primary campaign. The photo, taken at a Kennedy fund-raiser at The Factory, showed Peter wearing shaggy Beatle-esque bangs, a black turtleneck sweater, and Indian beads, sitting at a table with a cigarette in his hand and both a mixed drink and a glass of white wine in front of him. It was a poor image even for a youth-oriented campaign; Bobby’s advisors winced when they saw it and suggested that Peter’s involvement be further limited.

  Two weeks after Bobby announced his candidacy, President Johnson, beleaguered by protests against the Vietnam War, announced that he would not run for reelection — a wholly unexpected development that transformed the political landscape overnight. “I felt that I was being charged on all sides by a giant stampede,” Johnson told his biographer, Doris Kearns. “I was being forced over the edge by rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing I feared from the first day of my presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets.”

  Bobby Kennedy’s run for the presidency soon turned into what one reporter called a succession of “feeding frenzies.” Much of the ardor stemmed from his brother’s legacy, to be sure, but more and more of it was directed at him by people who saw in his face and heard in his words genuine c
ompassion for them and their struggles.

  Those around Bobby worried about the emotionalism of his public appearances, his vulnerability to harm symbolized by his bleeding hands at the end of a day’s campaigning. The candidate was fatalistic. “If they want to get me, they’ll get me,” he said. “They got Jack.”

  It soon became clear that Kennedy’s quixotic quest for the Democratic nomination might very well succeed. Whether or not it would rested largely on the outcome of the California primary election on June 4 between Bobby and Eugene McCarthy. Bobby chose to spend election day at the beachfront home of John Frankenheimer, the director. This apparent slap in the face to Peter raised a few eyebrows, but Peter understood Bobby’s need to steer clear. He proceeded instead with plans for a celebration at The Factory that would follow Bobby’s hoped-for victory speech at his Ambassador Hotel election headquarters.

  Around midnight, a contest that had been close all evening finally swung Bobby’s way. He had won the most important primary in the country, and he now had the strongest possible momentum going into the Democratic convention in Chicago. Before he made his victory speech, he took a telephone call from his aide Kenny O’Donnell. “You know, Ken,” he said, “finally I feel that I’m out from under the shadow of my brother. Now at last I feel that I’ve made it on my own.”

  Peter and Milt Ebbins watched Bobby’s celebratory speech on television at The Factory. There would indeed be a victory party, and Peter couldn’t help but feel pangs of the old excitement as hundreds of supporters cheered Bobby’s last line — “Now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there!”