Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  A few minutes after Bobby left the podium, television cameras remained trained on the Ambassador ballroom as reporters began to interview Kennedy supporters. Suddenly, there was commotion, confusion. No one was quite sure what had happened. Some people thought they’d heard shots. Someone shouted, “He’s been shot!” And suddenly the dread possibility of another disaster whipped Peter’s attention back to the television screen.

  He watched as the confusion grew into shouts of dismay. A commentator cried, unbelievingly, “Is it possible? Is it possible that Senator Kennedy has been shot?” The news cameras zoomed in again on the podium as Bobby’s brother-in-law Steve Smith shouted frantically into the microphone, “Is there a doctor in the house?”

  When he heard that, Peter turned to Milt and said, “He’s had it.” He then stood up and walked out of The Factory.

  ROBERT KENNEDY, HIS HEAD shattered by two bullets police said were fired by Sirhan Sirhan, an Arab angered by Kennedy’s pro- Israel positions, lingered for twenty hours at LA’s Good Samaritan Hospital. Jackie Kennedy, sedated and musing aloud about the church and death, flew in from New York; Lee Radziwill’s husband, Prince Stanislaus, came all the way from London and joined the Kennedy family vigil.

  Peter, who lived only a few miles from the hospital, did not. Instead, he went to Palm Springs to see a girlfriend, and Milt Ebbins was aghast. “Jesus Christ, Peter! How can you not go?”

  “I just can’t, Milt,” Peter replied. “There’s no place for me there.” Kennedy died at one forty-four A.M. on June 6, and a funeral mass was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York on June 8. One hundred thousand ordinary citizens lined up for blocks outside the church for the chance to pass Kennedy’s bier and pay their respects; during the service President Johnson and dozens of other dignitaries heard Teddy Kennedy deliver an eloquent and moving eulogy. “My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life,” Teddy said, his voice breaking, “[but] remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world.”

  Peter was invited to the funeral service, but his bad judgment on that occasion would result in his irremediable alienation from most of the Kennedy family. As he and Milt Ebbins checked into their hotel, Peter met a sexy young woman he wanted to impress. Despite the fact that the invitation to the funeral had been explicitly designated for only one person because of space constraints, Peter invited this young woman, a stranger, to accompany him to the rites.

  Ebbins recalled what happened. “This girl went out and bought a black miniskirt, a black hat, and black gloves. Christ, the dress was so short it was obscene!”

  As the three of them got into a cab to go to St. Patrick’s, Ebbins said under his breath, “Peter, you’re crazy — this broad — you can’t! This is a mistake.”

  Peter saw that Ebbins was right. “You get out with her,” he said. “No way!” Ebbins replied.

  When they reached the cathedral, Peter tried to distance himself from his companion, but she clung tightly to his arm, leaving no room for misapprehension about whom she was with. “She wouldn’t let go of him,” Ebbins recalled. “It was awful. The Kennedys were absolutely furious with him.”

  Pat Lawford was mortified by her former husband’s behavior. She and the rest of her family looked on it as a deliberate insult to Bobby’s memory, and they never forgave him. It was the final straw. If Peter had hoped ever to be accepted back into the bosom of the Kennedy family, the hope was now forever dashed.

  That fact was made harshly clear to him a few months later, when he tried to place a telephone call to Ethel at her home in Hickory Hill and was informed by the operator that the unlisted number had been changed. He asked Milt Ebbins to call Sargent Shriver at the Kennedy Foundation offices in New York and get Ethel’s new number for him. When Ebbins called and explained that he was inquiring for Peter, Shriver refused to give him the number.

  EVEN JACKIE KENNEDY BECAME unavailable to Peter, in October, when she left the country to marry the Greek shipping billionaire Aristotle Onassis. The former First Lady’s decision to marry the often vulgar tycoon was viewed by many in America and abroad as a betrayal of her martyred husband, but Peter — though he did not attend the wedding on the island of Skorpios — was vocal in her defense. “What do people expect of her?” he said to a journalist. “To be a widow for the rest of her life? She’s a human being, and she needs companionship and happiness just like all the rest of us. Wherever she finds that happiness, I’m all for it.”

  Pat Lawford, on the other hand, was never able to find marital happiness again. Although she had been tempted to revert to her maiden name, she kept the name Lawford, mainly for the sake of her children. After the divorce, she moved to Paris to be near Walter Sohier, a State Department lawyer she had been intermittently involved with since the early 1960s.

  Leonard Gershe remembered his and Pat’s interaction with Sohier after a party, when they went back to Walter’s Georgetown home for a nightcap. The men were in black tie, and Sohier went upstairs to change clothes. Leonard and Pat loved practical jokes, and while they waited for Walter to come back down, Gershe hit on an idea. He scurried into the kitchen and got a bottle of ketchup. “I lay down on the floor,” Gershe recalled, “and Pat poured the ketchup over me and stood there with her hair all a mess holding a knife over her head. He came down and saw us and didn’t think it was at all funny. We were crying with laughter, and he was annoyed. So when I think of Walter Sohier all I can think of is his great sense of humor.”

  Nothing ever came of Pat’s relationship with Sohier, and the same was true of Roger Edens. Leonard Gershe was Edens’s companion, and he recalled that “Roger was very much in love with Pat. She was crazy about him, too — I don’t know if she was in love with him, but she loved him.”

  Early in 1970, Pat and Edens were in New York to attend the opening of Gershe’s play Butterflies Are Free. The night before, Edens told Pat that he was terminally ill with cancer. “She went mad,” Gershe recalls. “She just lost all control. Her father had just died, and Jack and Bobby were dead, and she screamed, ‘I’m losing another one!’ Roger had to slap her to calm her down.”

  PETER MADE THREE MOVIES in 1968, one of them abysmal, one mediocre, and one quite good. This last was The April Fools, Stuart Rosenberg’s acerbic comedy of corporate morals and suburban marriages. Working opposite Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve, Peter played — very well — a smug, smooth tycoon whose beautiful but neglected wife has a bittersweet affair with one of her husband’s more hapless employees. It was Peter’s best movie role in years. Variety thought that “Lawford is excellent in an unsympathetic part as the too-busy-to-bother husband of Miss Deneuve.” And Time noted cleverly, “As played by Mr. Lawford, he is an untruthful narcissist with hair of chestnut brown and sideburns of Dorian Gray.”

  The April Fools should have led to further good film offers for Peter. It didn’t, possibly because of the other two films he had in release at about the same time — Hook, Line and Sinker, a Jerry Lewis clinker in which he plays a doctor who convinces a patient to fake his own death for insurance purposes, and Otto Preminger’s Skidoo, a disastrous all-star “mod” comedy about LSD, gangsters, and swinging hippies.

  In December, Peter wrote to his agent, Abe Lastfogel, of the William Morris agency, to complain that very little had been done to get him quality work since his last letter on October 5, 1967. At that time, Peter wrote, he had felt encouraged by Lastfogel’s reaction and was confident that the agent’s belief in his potential would “seep down through the ranks. It makes me sad to report that this was far from being the case.”

  All his films since then, Peter pointed out, had come to him independently of William Morris, as had several TV shows and a four- day stint as guest host of the To
night show. “I bore you with the aforementioned data,” Peter went on, “simply to illustrate ‘where it’s at’ and from whence the bread is coming!” He felt the “desperate need,” he went on, for another agency to put an “imaginative force” to work for his benefit. He then informed Lastfogel that he was switching agencies.

  The fault, however, lay not in the William Morris agency but in Peter Lawford. He had rarely been a box-office draw, and he had not — with the exceptions of Salt and Pepper and One More Time, which he had produced himself — been an “above the title” star since 1954.

  Peter wasn’t, of course, alone among notable MGM alumni in his career tribulations. With a few exceptions — Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and John Wayne among them — most of the stars of the “old days” were considered has-beens, relegated to occasional television work. The question “Whatever happened to?” became the cliché prelude to most mentions of the names June Allyson, Van Johnson, Cyd Charisse, Jane Powell, Kathryn Grayson, Gloria De Haven, and others.

  A separate set of problems attached to Peter Lawford. He had made a lot of enemies in Hollywood; a number of directors, producers, and stars had refused to work with him under any circumstances for years. Now, as a tumultuous decade in Peter’s life came to an end, he found himself looked upon by the “new Hollywood” as little more than a superannuated MGM second banana who had never had an excess of talent and whom they didn’t much like anyway. If there had ever been a glimmer of hope that Peter could recapture the kind of power by association he had enjoyed while Jack Kennedy was President, it had been buried with Bobby.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Throughout the 1960s, Peter had watched with growing alarm the steady decline of Judy Garland, his closest female friend in the mid-1960s. She was the only one of his MGM cohorts with whom he had maintained so close an emotional bond, and for millions she was the embodiment of the best that fabled studio had had to offer.

  But her long descent into drug and alcohol addiction, her series of unsuccessful marriages, her personal and professional disasters, her weight gains and losses, and her suicide attempts were all emblematic as well of the stark reality behind L. B. Mayer’s sugarcoated vision of the world. Judy was more an MGM product than Peter; her heights were more spectacular, her depths more devastating. And yet every time Peter looked at Judy Garland now, he saw something of himself in her.

  She had, like him, a wry wit that could turn in a flash into a lacerating rapier. As with him, her drinking and drug taking made her unpredictable, apt to turn on a friend with frightening ferocity over the slightest offense. Molly Dunne remembered an occasion when Judy lit into Peter after they had exchanged a few sharp words. “Judy had been drinking, and she jumped up and started screaming at Peter. She said, ‘You’re a lousy actor! You were never a good actor! The only reason you were at MGM was that all the good actors were in the war! ’

  “Peter just sat there and took it. He never raised his voice. And of course that angered Judy all the more. She picked up her purse and hit him with it — whacked him across the head — and stormed out. The next day she called me and said, ‘If you ever get tired of him you’re always welcome to be my friend — you don’t have to take this shit.’ I think, though, that she finally did call and apologize to him.”

  Peter took a lot from Judy, as did many others; he knew that her mind had been warped by years of drugs and booze. In 1966, Joe and Dolores Naar had thrown a party for Pat to which Peter, at Pat’s request, was not invited. It had created a rift between Peter and the Naars that lasted for years, but Dolores remembered it vividly for another reason as well: Judy’s bizarre behavior.

  The Naars had erected a huge tent behind their house and filled it with dozens of round tables; Roger Edens had strung small lights and orange blossoms from post to post within the tent and throughout the trees in the Naars’ backyard, giving it a fairyland aura. The party was festive, with drinking and dancing followed by a sit-down dinner.

  “Judy was seated at one table with her back to Pat, who was sitting at the next table,” Dolores Naar recalled. “They hadn’t exchanged two words all evening, but immediately after dinner, Judy stood up, picked up a glass of ice water, turned around, and poured it right down the back of Pat’s dress.

  “Pat never said a word. She just got up, turned around, saw who did it, and walked away. She went upstairs and we dried her dress with a hair dryer. To this day I don’t know why Judy did it. Maybe she’d been stewing all night about Peter and Pat’s divorce — who knows? You could never tell what was going through Judy’s mind.” Judy’s behavior grew more and more bizarre. One evening in the spring of 1966, she telephoned Peter, frantic and sobbing, and begged him to help her — something terrible had happened. Peter scrambled into his pants, jumped in his car “half in my pajamas,” and sped to Judy’s house. When she opened the door his heart almost stopped — her face was covered with blood. His legs feeling like rubber beneath him, he wrapped his arms around her and walked her over to a lamp, where he could see dozens of tiny cuts all over her face. “My God, Judy, what happened?” Crying again, Judy managed to say, “Mark went after me with a razor.” (Mark Herron was her much-younger husband of less than six months.)

  Peter helped Judy into the den and searched for antiseptic to dab on the nicks. He went through all the bathrooms but couldn’t find a Band-Aid or antiseptic anywhere. “So I washed her face off with vodka,” Peter said. “Then I found some BFI surgical powder and I put Judy’s head back on the bar and put this powder on her face so that the cuts would coagulate.”

  He told Judy to stay put and headed down the hall to the bathroom to wash his hands. As he walked past Judy’s maid Alma Cousteline’s room, the door opened and she called him over. “I think I ought to tell you, Mr. Lawford,” she whispered, “it wasn’t Mr. Herron who did that — she did it herself. She was standing in front of the mirror in the hall with a razor blade in her hand, and she was cutting her face with it. She kept saying, ‘Just look what that thing did to me!’ I said, ‘What thing?’ and she said, ‘Mark Herron,’ and cut herself again.”

  “That was the kind of desperation she had,” Peter said. “She wanted to let you know what kind of trouble she was in.” But as with Marilyn Monroe, there was little Peter could do but watch the disassembly of someone he loved. “A lot of people I know who were terribly close to Judy washed their hands of her — they walked away. I several times would really get angry at her — anger out of sadness for her.”

  Peter did try to help. Early in 1969, he was in Philadelphia to cohost the Mike Douglas Show, and he asked Judy, who was there on a concert tour, to appear on the show. At this point, Judy’s addictions had ravaged her, although she was not yet forty-seven. She was painfully thin, frail, and often unable to call up her voice; her audiences were never sure what they were going to see.

  “Do they really want me?” she asked. “Of course they do,” Peter assured her. Even so, he practically had to drag her out of her hotel to the studio. “She was in tears, all burned out,” Peter said. “It destroyed you to watch all that talent dissolving into nothing. Poor, dear Judy.”

  During the filming of One More Time in London, Peter got a call from Milt Ebbins around noon on June 22. “Did you hear about Judy?” Milt asked.

  “I hadn’t heard,” Peter said later. “Judy was dead. And I was devastated.” Her husband of six months, Mickey Deans, had found her in the bathroom of their London hotel room, sitting on the toilet, her head down on her chest. She had not tried to kill herself; the sleeping pills and alcohol had simply overwhelmed her tiny, emaciated body. She looked almost skeletal sitting there, as though the life had been ebbing out of her for years. And of course — as anyone would have seen who had stopped to take a long, hard look — it had been.

  JUDY’S DEATH WAS DEVASTATING to Peter. He felt as though everything he valued was being cruelly snatched from him until he would have nothing left at all. He was bereft, wracked with survivor guilt.
He both feared his own mortality and courted death with a what- the-hell attitude about drinking and drug-taking that his friends feared was his own slow, subconscious suicide. He began acting in ways that were explicable only as the result of a desire to hasten his decline and justify his lifelong feelings of worthlessness.

  There was nothing anyone could do — not even Milt Ebbins, who by now was constantly struggling to keep Peter Lawford’s life on an even keel. Throughout 1969, Milt tried desperately to prevent the loss of another major part of Peter’s life: the Santa Monica beach house.

  The house had become a white elephant for Peter after the departure of Pat and the children. It was expensive to maintain, and Peter was having money woes. It was far too big for one person, even two. Peter hated to be alone, and he constantly urged friends to stay the night, if only in the guest house.

  After Pat moved to New York, Layte Bowden, the stewardess Peter had visited the night before President Kennedy’s funeral, moved into the house with him. “She was a very pretty girl,” Milt Ebbins remembered. “As usual, after she moved in Peter got tired of her, and he asked me to tell her that it was over. I said, ‘You gotta be kidding! I’m not gonna do it. There’s no reason for me to do it.’ But she knew what was happening, and she left pretty soon after that.”

  And then Peter felt crushingly lonely in this rambling house that had once been alive with children and parties and movie stars, had once served as the Western White House. Now it was filled only with memories — “bad memories,” Peter said. He wanted to be rid of it.

  After the divorce from Pat, the Kennedys insisted that Peter immediately repay about a hundred thousand dollars that remained on a loan the family had extended to him with the house as collateral. Peter was desperate. Without Pat as part of his financial picture, he was a poor credit risk. Although he was still capable of making large sums of money, his work was sporadic, and his expenses were far beyond his means. There were the hotel lawsuits and a number of others on his credit record for nonpayment of debts. He doubted he could get a conventional mortgage.