Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  According to Dick Martin, “The problem with Mary and Dan was the road. We were on the road for a long time before we hit it big, from the time Mary was about three. From that time on, over the next ten years, Dan was home very little. He used to take his son Tom on the road with him, and I’d take my son. But it was harder with a girl, so Mary didn’t come along.”

  When Mary was in her midteens, Dan made up for his earlier absence in her life. “They became as close as I’ve ever seen a father and daughter,” Martin observed. “In fact, she lived with him on a barge scouting around France for two years.”

  Although Mary had dated a number of young men her own age and had been involved with a drummer in a rock group for two years before meeting Peter, she found mature men appealing. “Older men are so much more understanding,” she said. “They’ve been through it all. They can understand the things you are going through in your life where younger guys are on their own ego trips and just haven’t the understanding.”

  After a few months with Peter, Mary said, she had grown as a person. “He has taught me so much, gotten me interested in economics and sociology, what this country is all about, things I never really thought about before. This is an intellectual man and he’s involved, tremendously involved with what’s happening today. That’s good for me.”

  Within weeks of their meeting, Mary moved into Peter’s Sierra Towers apartment, but a short while later he decided to move — because of an earthquake on February 9, 1971, that killed sixty-five people in Southern California. Terrified by the way the Sierra Towers building had swayed in the temblor, Peter moved a few blocks away into a sprawling second-story apartment in a picturesque English-style complex on Cory Avenue near the Beverly Hills city line (“One block over and a thousand dollars less,” Peter said). He loved the feel of the place, from the center court garden to his “veddy British” landlord, Bill Noad, who had known May and who treated him as a very special tenant indeed.

  Shortly after the earthquake, Mary Rowan was called to Houston to take care of a sick friend. After a week’s separation, Peter traveled to Texas and spent two weeks with her. After he returned to Los Angeles, she wrote to him that she wanted to come home — but couldn’t. Once she did get home, she said, Peter wouldn’t be able to get rid of her. In another letter, she told Peter how much she missed him: “I can’t wait to make love to you — to see you — to kiss you.”

  At the beginning, Peter and Mary’s life together was close to idyllic. “We’re so in tune it’s ridiculous,” Peter said. “Finding someone I didn’t think existed has helped me a lot. . . . She’s an extraordinary, marvelous, endearing, kind human being. She’s magnificent.”

  Mary was dazzled: there were limousines, trips to Hawaii, accounts at Bergdorf Goodman, custom-made clothes, helicopter jaunts, stays at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, dinners at LA’s finest restaurants. Even as Dan Rowan’s daughter, Mary wasn’t used to a way of life this sumptuous.

  That summer, Peter went to Vancouver, British Columbia, to film one of the first made-for-television movies, The Deadly Hunt, for director John Newland. He brought Mary along with him, as well as his son, Christopher, now sixteen, who had flown to Los Angeles from New York in order to spend the summer with his father. Mary went to pick Chris up at the airport, but wasn’t quite sure what he looked like; her only reference was a picture of him at twelve, as a close- cropped little boy.

  At the airport she saw a thin, six-foot-two-inch young man with a backpack, hair down to his shoulders. “He had to be the cutest guy I’d ever seen,” Mary recalled, “and of course it was Chris.” In Vancouver, Mary and Chris visited Peter on the set, and the three of them smoked pot so much that John Newland became perturbed. “They did a lot of it, and Peter was always offering me some. Pot was kind of new then and I’d say ‘No, no, no.’ He’d never smoke during the shooting; it was always after work.”

  After they returned to Los Angeles in August, Peter nonchalantly said to Mary, “I want Chris to be my best man when we get married.” She just laughed, thinking it was a joke, but a few nights later he gave her a delicately twisted band of gold and asked her to marry him. “Peter, do you honestly know what you’re saying?” she asked him.

  “I’ve been thinking about it for months,” he replied — ever since that first late-night hamburger supper. Mary was surprised, first at him and then at herself for saying yes. “I guess when it happens, it happens.”

  When Mary told her father the news, she recalled, “he just kind of sat there looking at me stunned. He said, ‘I thought you told me you’d never get married.’ And I had to laugh because of course it was true. He was in a state of shock. All he did was try to talk me out of it. He thought it was a big mistake — that I shouldn’t be marrying a man a year younger than my father. He wasn’t exactly thrilled with Peter.”

  When the announcement of the October wedding plans made the newspapers in early September, reporters converged on Dan Rowan for his reaction. “I’ve known Peter Lawford for a number of years,” Rowan said, measuring his words carefully, “and I’ve always found him to be a gentleman. He and Mary have been going steady for a year now and seem to know each other very well. I’d rather see her marry a man closer to her age than to mine. But they are in love.” Told of Rowan’s remark, Peter quipped, “Well, I was hoping for a younger father-in-law.”

  Peter and Mary were married in a small private ceremony in Puerto Vallarta on October 30, 1971, the day before her twenty-second birthday. Chris Lawford served as best man, and the entire wedding party — composed only of Peter’s newer friends — wore jeans. Mary arrived at the ceremony aboard a yacht, wearing an antique lace blouse over her dungarees. Puerto Vallarta’s municipal president, Luis Fabela Icaza, performed the ceremony, and everyone toasted the beaming couple after they were pronounced man and wife. There was now a new Mrs. Peter Lawford.

  LESS THAN THREE MONTHS AFTER her son’s wedding, on January 23, 1972, at two-ten in the afternoon, May Lawford died. The death certificate lists the causes of death as cardiac failure, arteriosclerosis, and heart disease. Under “other significant condition” a doctor added by hand, “senility.”

  Within hours of her death, May was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea. According to Buddy Galon, when he learned that Peter planned no memorial service for his mother, he went ahead with plans for one on his own. He notified May’s friends and family, and the media, that there would be a service at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church. “Within twenty-four hours,” Galon recalled, “a notice of the service came out of Milt Ebbins’s office. They took over the arrangements from me. I didn’t mind that as long as we got together.”

  In March, May’s will was probated. The document, handwritten on October 26, 1961, named her friend Paul Simqu as executor and asked that her cat, Amber, be put to sleep “and not buried for twenty- four hours to prevent drugging for vivisection.” May also stated that Paul Simqu “has my wishes regarding the disposal of my remains” and stated that “my body is to be kept the maximum time permitted by law.” She had bequeathed all of her personal effects and any money left after her bills were paid to her sister Gretta, but since Gretta had died of arterial sclerosis in South Africa in the midsixties and May had not updated her will, she was without an heir except for Peter. She had expressly omitted him from the will and stipulated that anyone contesting its provisions should receive “the sum of $1 — one dollar only”

  The will, however, was ruled out of force because Paul Simqu was unable to provide the original or explain its absence. Peter, as May’s closest living relative, was deemed executor and required to put up an eleven-thousand-dollar bond while the will was settled.

  May’s personal effects in 1961 (jewelry, furs, and objets d’art) had a total value of approximately twenty thousand dollars; by the time of her death so much of the best had been sold that when Milt Ebbins had thirty-seven pieces of furniture and artifacts that May had claimed were antiques appraised, their value was revealed to be just
$1,097. There had also been several valuable oriental rugs and the eighteen thousand dollars in cash Ebbins had found in various bank accounts, but that had been consumed by the thirty-four-hundred-dollar monthly cost of May’s care at Monterey Park Convalescent Hospital, her medical bills, and miscellaneous expenses.

  After the bills were paid, Lady Lawford’s estate totaled $221. The court awarded that amount to Peter to help offset his legal expenses as executor.

  THE REALIZATION CAME GRADUALLY to Mary Rowan. There were apparently insignificant hints at first, then more and more clear signs that the effulgent life she was leading with Peter Lawford was little more than a house of cards. Nearly everything she admired about Peter, she had begun to see, had either been illusory from the start or was slowly disappearing. He was, she now realized, a man beset as no one she had ever known by problems and demons.

  She was hit first by the fact that Peter was living far beyond his means. He worked fairly steadily; he made seven guest appearances on episodic television in 1971, played a small part in an MGM-reunion movie, They Only Kill Their Masters in the spring of 1972, and began a recurring role on The Doris Day Show in the summer.

  But the pay for these jobs was often minimal, and Peter spent money as though he were still commanding seventy-five thousand dollars a picture and married to Pat Kennedy on top of it. Mary was forced to intercept dunning calls from an array of creditors, all of whom demanded immediate payment of long-outstanding bills. She was perplexed at first; surely Peter Lawford had the money to pay his bills. When she asked Peter about it, he blamed his business manager, as he was wont to do, but it was soon clear that no business manager in the world could have paid bills that his client didn’t have the money to pay.

  By 1971, Peter’s financial situation was little short of disastrous. Between 1971 and 1973 alone, he was either threatened with legal action or taken to court by two dozen creditors for unpaid bills ranging from $203 to $18,000. Many of the lawsuits resulted in judgments against him.

  Just a partial list of Peter’s long-unpaid debts reveals a man living a life he could not afford. He owed $341 to the Surrey Cadillac Limousine Service; $241 to Steuben Glass; $4,348 to Grosvenor House, a London hotel; $2,183 to the Waldorf-Astoria in New York; $485 to Cartier of London; $203 to TWA; $545 to MacRane restaurant; and $455 to the interior decorator who had refurbished his Sierra Towers apartment.

  Judgments against Peter included one that Clayton Plumbers won in 1970 for $8,974 in repairs to the beach house in 1969; by 1972 Peter still had not paid them, and Clayton was awarded another judgment, this one for $9,935 (the additional amount was interest). Peter finally settled with Clayton by paying them $7,000 in June 1977.

  Other judgments, sought in 1973 after all other attempts at collection had failed, were for $1,318 to the Credit Research Corp., a collection agency (which Peter settled for $400); $920 to Bergdorf Goodman; and $2,499 to Sy Devore, the most fashionable men’s clothier in Los Angeles.

  Mary might have been able to live with Peter’s financial problems, might even have been able to help out, cut corners, live on a budget. But she knew now that Peter had a myriad of other problems that threatened to destroy their marriage. He had become increasingly dependent on marijuana, and he was now also using both Quaaludes and cocaine, which produced opposing effects. His oldest friends were drifting away from him because of the drug use; and a lot of strangers were suddenly on the scene, people from whom Peter could easily obtain drugs. They were people Mary didn’t trust.

  Drugs were a staple of the new “youth culture,” and Peter felt using them was “hip,” that it kept his image young, kept him from seeming twenty-six years older than his wife. “To Peter,” Milt Ebbins recalled, “drugs were a badge of honor. He always wanted to be ‘with it,’ be in the vanguard, be a part of ‘what’s happening now.’ And drugs were it in the early seventies. Plus, he convinced himself that drugs wouldn’t harm his liver and thus weren’t as bad for him as alcohol. Of course, after a while he started drinking and doing drugs, which was the worst thing he could do.”

  The combination caused his sexual performance to suffer once again. His impotence recurred, and he started to suggest sexual activities to Mary that she found distasteful and offensive. She was hurt, confused, crushingly disillusioned. She found herself thinking about calling it quits on the marriage and going home to her father.

  In November 1972, however, the last thing on Mary’s mind was leaving Peter Lawford — for he lay in a hospital close to death.

  FORTY

  He had noticed something was wrong that August, when he started having twinges of pain in his stomach. At first he tried to ignore them, attributing them to tension. But the spasms got worse. They began first thing in the morning and continued throughout the day. The stabbing pain would immobilize him, and he was unable to sleep at night without sleeping pills. Finally, in mid-September, he saw a doctor. Immediately, he was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital for diagnostic tests. The doctors determined that the problem wasn’t Peter’s liver, as they had suspected at first. Although they were unable to come up with a definite diagnosis, they told him that an ulcer was the most likely culprit.

  He remained in the hospital under observation for five weeks, anesthetized with regular shots of morphine that dulled the pain but couldn’t disguise the fact that something was still very wrong. “One day I realized my arms were like a skeleton’s,” Peter later said. “I got up and looked in the mirror. I was shocked to see my whole body was emaciated.”

  His weight had dropped from 172 to 120 pounds. Mary, alarmed, insisted that he consult other doctors and enter a different hospital. He agreed, and on November 5 she drove him directly to the Scripps Clinic, one of the country’s top diagnostic centers, fifty miles south of Los Angeles. Within minutes of his admission the doctors knew what was wrong with him: he had a cyst on his pancreas, the organ that helps the body digest fat and also secretes insulin — and without which one cannot survive.

  Peter didn’t immediately realize the seriousness of the situation. “I was thinking of cysts from childhood,” he said, “the tiny things you get on your eyelid. How bad could that be?” But the Scripps doctors told him that he required immediate surgery, and he found himself lying on a stretcher in an ambulance speeding back to Los Angeles and the UCLA Medical Center. “Why do I need an ambulance?” Peter remembered wondering. He was upset that the vehicle’s curtains weren’t drawn, because when the ambulance reached UCLA, it was surrounded, he said, by “gaping ghouls” craning their necks to get a glimpse of him.

  Surgeons labored over Peter for six hours to remove the growth, which turned out to be the size of a grapefruit and perilously close to bursting. “I could have died on the operating table,” he later said. “Or even in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The doctors said that just the slightest bump could have been enough to burst the cyst.”

  If the mass hadn’t been removed, the doctors told Peter, he would have died within two or three days. “I can truthfully say that Mary saved my life,” Peter said. He remained in the hospital for two weeks and then returned home for another ten weeks of recuperation, most of it spent resting in bed. “Mary was incredible, the greatest of all nurses. She resolved to bring me back, and she accomplished it through patience, care, and deep love.”

  In mid-February 1973, Peter was well enough recovered to travel to Hawaii, where the Lawfords remained for six weeks as guests of Peter’s friends Gordon and Sue Damon. It was there that the marriage finally fell apart as Mary came to realize that the problems that had been nagging at her had not been mitigated by Peter’s illness, only postponed. In Hawaii, Peter — despite his fragile health — smoked pot, popped Quaaludes, took painkillers that he no longer needed, and drank at a time when his digestive system could least deal with alcohol.

  Mary shared many of the drugs with Peter because he wanted her to, but she didn’t like doing it. She could see what was happening to him, and feared it might happen to her.
“Peter was into drugs and he got me into them,” she later recalled. “It’s a period of my life I’d rather forget. The marriage was a mistake. I don’t have anything good to say about Peter Lawford.”

  She made the decision to leave him during a shopping trip to Hong Kong with Sue Damon while Peter returned to Los Angeles from Hawaii. “While I was away, I realized I wasn’t happy with my life anymore. When I got back from Hong Kong, I wanted a separation.” In early April, she moved out of Cory Avenue and back into her father’s house in Holmby Hills. Peter wrote her a letter in which he apparently asked her to come back to him and promised that if she returned he would give up his drug use and his search for sexual variety.

  She wrote him a reply on April 30, telling him that she did not believe his promise to give up “those two things.” She closed the letter saying that she had loved him very much, and that he had given her a great deal — he had made her a woman. But, she concluded, she needed to have her own identity, not be a part of Peter Lawford’s.

  On June 16, the separation was made public. A few weeks later Peter gave an interview in which he said he would “fight like a tiger” to get Mary back. “I am not willing to accept the thought of a divorce,” he said. “I will fight it. I need her and love her.”

  If there was any hope for a reconciliation, it was only on the condition that Peter change. Mary asked him to seek help for his addictions and get psychiatric counseling for his sexual problems — in other words, work toward removing what she saw as the obstacles to their marital happiness. When he wasn’t willing to do that, she realized that there was no hope for the marriage, that he was too set in his ways to change. “I felt Peter could have done something to save the marriage,” she said, “but he didn’t. I was very bitter.”