Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  There, what was supposed to have been a joyous wedding celebration quickly disintegrated into a debacle. Peter downed more vodka and popped more Quaaludes throughout the evening; by the time the wedding guests gathered to watch reports of the marriage on the eleven o’clock news, he was on the verge of a blackout.

  The television accounts of his wedding upset Peter. He looked tired and haggard in the newsreel footage, closer to sixty than fifty- two, especially next to his fresh-faced young bride. “Christopher was complimenting me,” Deborah recalled. “We were very close, Chris and I. We were like buddies right off the bat. He looked so handsome in his tuxedo, like Prince Charming. Somebody made the stupid comment that I should have married Christopher instead of Peter. Peter did not like that at all.”

  His ego bruised, Peter began to flirt with one of the guests, a sexy girl about Deborah’s age, and now it was the new Mrs. Lawford’s turn to get upset. “Here it was my wedding night, I’m in love with this man, and he’s flirting with another girl.” Deborah pulled him aside. “What’s wrong with you?” she hissed. “How dare you flirt with that girl. What are you, drunk? Stoned?”

  “How dare you!” Peter spat back. “Who do you think you are?”

  “I’m your wife, remember?”

  “Oh yes. Boy do I remember.”

  Deborah thought it could have been a bad movie. “I told him, ‘Act appropriately in front of people, okay? I don’t go for this.’ He was furious because I was asserting myself for once. I was like his mother, criticizing his bad manners. Our roles had reversed.”

  Peter refused to apologize, and about an hour later, Deborah, herself now intoxicated, confronted him again. “I knew him well enough to know that he was coming on to this woman. He didn’t even try to hide it. He kept saying, ‘Isn’t she sensuous?’ And we had just gotten married. My pride was hurt. But it didn’t register with him. I said, ‘What did we get married for?’ I was trying to talk sensibly to him but he couldn’t comprehend. He was incoherent. I had never seen him that bad before. He was functioning, but he must have been in a blackout by this time.”

  Their argument escalated, and the bride became hysterical. “Oh, now you’re gonna throw a temper tantrum, aren’t you?” Peter taunted her. “You’re not a very good actress.” She took off her wedding ring and threw it across the room. “Don’t do that!” Peter screamed. He fell to his hands and knees, scrambling across the floor to retrieve it, and became frantic when he couldn’t find it. Deborah saw where it had gone, but she didn’t tell him. “Never mind, Peter, it’s over,” she said, shaking with anger. “This isn’t going to work out and you know it. This whole thing is ridiculous.”

  Peter stopped crawling and slumped into a sitting position on the floor. He looked up at Deborah, tears in his eyes. “Don’t do this, Debber. Please don’t do this.” She looked at him, steely-eyed. “Well, you’re gonna have to change. You can’t keep on this way. We have to straighten things out somehow. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  With that, the wedding reception was over. The mortified guests left, and Peter staggered downstairs to the basement. After she had had some time to cool off, Deborah followed him. She found her bridegroom spread across a mattress on the floor, an outside door wide open, fireflies whizzing in and out. She closed the door and lay down beside him. “I wanted to make love — we still had never done so — but there was no way he could have done it. I thought, Well, there goes my wedding night. I knew he hated to be alone, so I just held him in my arms until he passed out.”

  The next morning, Peter couldn’t remember a thing about the previous day, including the fact that he’d gotten married. Assured that he had, he called Milt Ebbins. “I just got married,” he told him. “How do I get out of it?”

  Milt was dumbfounded. “Peter, I want you to tell me what went through your mind when you decided to marry a twenty-five-year-old girl you’ve known for three weeks? What could have possessed you?” “She’s a pusher,” Peter replied. “She gets me drugs.”

  “You married her because she’s a pusher?”

  “Yeah, that’s why I married her.”17

  THE MARRIAGE OF PETER LAWFORD and Deborah Gould didn’t end that day. Peter begged his bride’s forgiveness, and their relationship was at last consummated. “We had a fairly normal sex life at first,” Deborah recalled. “When it was possible, when he wasn’t drinking or using.

  “He kept telling me how much he loved me and that he wanted us to have a child. He was going to get away from the drug scene and the Hollywood scene. We were going to move to Hawaii and he was going to write a book about his life and I was gonna take it all down because I had secretarial skills.”

  But nothing changed, and the more Deborah got to know Peter, the more disquieted she became. “He was so strange. He had this phobia about being locked in a room. Once I locked our bedroom door and played around at hiding the key. He freaked out. He insisted that I give it to him and then he jammed the door trying to unlock it and we really were locked in. Well, talk about a panic attack! I said, ‘What’s wrong with being locked in your bedroom with your wife? Erma will let us out in the morning.’” Still, Peter struggled with the door until four in the morning, when he was finally able to open it.

  Other fears gnawed at Peter, some concrete, some nameless and vague, shifting and replacing each other like shards of color in a kaleidoscope. He was afraid Deborah would come to feel he was too old for her. She woke up one morning while he was still in bed, and when she turned to put her arms around him, he pulled away from her, bolted out of bed, and ran into the bathroom. “He stayed in there for an hour, primping, getting himself ready for me to see him. He would do this every morning. He was afraid of me seeing him not looking his best.”

  Peter feared losing Deborah to a younger man. “If a young, good- looking guy paid attention to me, he’d be furious. His friends were always hitting on me. Nobody had any respect for anybody’s wife or who anybody was with. One guy used to come over and I’d take a ride on his motorcycle with him. Peter would get very mad about that. I felt, at least he cares. I used to do things to get him jealous.”

  Peter’s drug use magnified his terrors — and what Deborah had begun to suspect was a manic-depressive syndrome. She saw that he became very depressed when he came down from highs, would start to cry and shake. “He’d be terrified. He was afraid of death, but he toyed with it all the time because of the way he lived.

  “He used to tell me that somebody was trying to kill him. He got paranoid. Nobody was trying to kill him. It was in his mind. But he wouldn’t answer the phone, wouldn’t go to the door. I had to take all the calls. He wouldn’t talk to anyone.” After a drug-and-alcohol- soaked night in which Peter had exposed his fears to his young wife, had cried his heart out in her lap, he was so embarrassed that she’d seen him so vulnerable that he wouldn’t talk to her for most of the next day.

  Impotence was another demon. Drunk, stoned, he was unable to get an erection. “He’d feel bad that he couldn’t perform sexually,” Deborah said, “and I’d try to reassure him that it wasn’t that big a deal to me, but he didn’t believe me. So it just put another wedge between us, because he thought he wasn’t living up to the manly image I had of him.”

  Before long, Peter broached the subject of sadomasochistic sex to Deborah, and the idea disturbed her. “I was very turned off by it. He used to ask me to hurt him when we were making love. Either hit him as hard as I could on his face or tie him up, inflict pain on him any way I could.

  “I couldn’t do it. I said, ‘Peter, this is not normal.’ Then he’d get all upset. ‘Who are you to say what’s normal?’ He’d get very angry whenever anybody suggested that anything he was doing was wrong.”

  When she further refused to engage in three-ways with Peter and another woman, he would taunt her about it, try to goad her into agreeing to do what he wanted. “You and I are cut from the same cloth, Charlie,” he’d tell her.

  “What do you mean by that?”
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  “You’re just like me. You don’t think you’re bisexual, but you are. You love women.”

  “What are you saying? That you like men? That you’re gay?”

  “I like anybody who’s beautiful,” Peter replied.

  But Deborah was adamant: “I will not have another woman in our bed!” A few weeks after the wedding, Peter began to seek sex outside the marriage. “He had to go with strangers, because people close to him like me wouldn’t do what he wanted. He’d go up to the Playboy Mansion and stay there all day — he could get kinky sex over there, anything he wanted. I was bothered by all that mainly because I didn’t want to get any diseases. I didn’t know where he’d been.” After little more than a month of marriage, Deborah went back to sleeping in the guest room, and neither she nor Peter made any further attempts at sexual relations. In late July, Peter announced he was taking a trip to New York. Deborah wanted to accompany him, but he wouldn’t let her. A few days later, Peter called her from his hotel room late at night. He sounded frightened. “He told me that there were some weird friends of his there, and he was scared because they were into necrophilia. I nearly died when I heard that. I said ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Yes, I know, it’s awful. I can’t handle it.’ That was too much, even for Peter.”

  Deborah begged him to come home immediately, and he said he would. “He fell asleep talking on the phone to me. He was afraid and I had to keep talking to him until he nodded off.”

  Close to the end of her rope, Deborah had become edgy, depressed, nearly suicidal. Her life with Peter had become a nightmare. “I was a mess. I was so disillusioned. Things were not at all as I had fantasized they’d be. And I thought it was my fault. He was always criticizing me for everything.”

  The marriage began to unravel precisely where Peter had first mentioned the idea to Deborah — at Hugh Hefner’s. During a pool party, Deborah grew incensed at Peter when he got badly stoned, and she said loudly in front of others, “You’d better get it together, Peter, because I’m sick of being your nursemaid.”

  “Well, that set him off,” she recalled. “He stormed out and got into his car. I yelled after him that he couldn’t drive in that condition, but he drove away anyway.” Deborah stayed at the mansion about an hour longer and then took a taxi back to Cory Avenue. When she fumbled through her purse for her house keys, she realized that Peter had taken them. She rang the bell and rapped on the door, but Peter wouldn’t respond. She considered calling the police, but then decided to let him sleep it off and went to a girlfriend’s for the night.

  The next morning she returned, but Peter was still fuming. Deborah pounded on the door and “he just kept sending down this strange girl he had up there with him to say he wasn’t going to let me in. But I told her to tell him that I was going to stay there until he either let me in or someone came to get me. I just sat on the steps crying. I felt displaced, like the icing was melting off the cake and everything had turned bad. I wanted to go up there and strangle him. I really wanted to kill him. If I ever could have murdered somebody in my life, it would have been right then.”

  Peter telephoned Milt Ebbins, who went over to Cory Avenue immediately. “She was standing outside with a bag in her hand with a comb, a brush, and a hair dryer,” Ebbins recalled. “She said, ‘He threw me out. He told me to get lost.’”

  Ebbins liked Deborah Gould. He thought she was “a nice little girl” and that Peter treated her terribly. “He could be vicious when he wanted to get rid of someone. He’d get really mean. No compassion at all. I think he wanted them to hate him.” Milt went upstairs to talk to Peter, but he just screamed, “Ahh for crissakes, let her get lost!” Ebbins recognized Peter’s Mr. Hyde side again and tried to reason with him. “Listen to me, Peter,” he said evenly. “She’s still your wife. Her father’s a lawyer. You keep this up and you’re gonna pay through the nose.”

  Peter fell silent. Then he said, “Well, what do you want me to do?” Ebbins told him to take Deborah to the Hamburger Hamlet up the street on Sunset Boulevard. “Sit down, be nice to her, tell her you want to rethink the relationship, you might have gone into this too fast, you need some space.” Peter grumbled a bit but finally agreed.

  The “summit meeting” consisted of Peter asking Deborah, “Are you sorry for what you did?” and Deborah replying, “Yes. I was wrong and you were right.” She was so agreeable only because she wanted to get back into the house and retrieve her belongings, but once she got there she remained a few more days in a shaky reconciliation — until Peter locked her out again after another spat.

  When he let her back into the apartment this time, she grabbed her keys and went to Henry Wynberg’s house. Wynberg, a used-car salesman and photographer who had romanced Elizabeth Taylor, had a coterie of young girls in residence at his Beverly Hills home most of the time and was one of the first of Peter’s friends Deborah had met. “He seemed like a very nice guy,” she recalled, “but I wasn’t attracted to him. He said if I ever needed a place to stay I could use his. He had no designs on me; he had so many girlfriends — I mean, there were just too many of them around.”

  Still hopeful that she could patch things up with Peter, Deborah invited him to a large dinner party at Wynberg’s a few days later. She knew she’d made a mistake when Peter got into an argument with Henry. “How cozy, you and Debbie cooking together, making dinner,” Peter sneered at his friend. “Maybe you two should be married.” Wynberg calmed Peter down, and he stayed at the party. But he paid less attention to Deborah during the evening than he did to Patty Seaton, one of Wynberg’s occasional housemates, a plump-faced seventeen-year-old with, as Henry crudely put it, “great boobs and a great ass.” Peter complimented her on the gold-plated Quaalude she was wearing around her neck and told her, “There’s something about you that I like.”

  After a few minutes of conversation, Peter offered to drive Seaton home. Although she had a car of her own, she agreed, and he went off to tell Wynberg he was leaving. Patty sat down next to Deborah, who had been watching Peter’s moves. “What are you doing?” Deborah asked her.

  “I’m leaving,” she said. “I’m just waiting for someone.”

  When Peter returned, he coolly asked Patty if she was ready to go. Deborah stood up and glared at Seaton. “You’re leaving with my husband?” Seaton said nothing, and neither did Peter. As Deborah watched, dumbfounded, they left.

  He was taking her to the Playboy Mansion, Peter announced grandly to Patty as they got into his car. Along the way he leaned over to kiss her, and it was only then that he realized her jaw was wired shut. She had had recent surgery for a degenerative bone condition, and although the wiring allowed her to talk fairly normally, she could not open her mouth widely enough to take in solid food. “Oh, this is great,” Peter said. “I find a girl and her jaw’s wired shut.”

  Still, he took her to Hefner’s, where they shared a Jacuzzi and spent the night in Peter’s room, where he had wooed Deborah Gould just weeks before. He saw Patty the next three nights as well, but during the day his interest was elsewhere. A few days after Wynberg’s party, Deborah drove up to her best girlfriend’s apartment to pay her an unannounced visit. Peter’s car was parked in front of the building. “I knocked on the door — I didn’t have any pride left at this point — and said, ‘It’s Debbie.’ My friend said, ‘I can’t come to the door right now.’ I said, ‘I can imagine why not. Just tell him that I’ll be back at the house and I want him there in ten minutes!’”

  When Deborah got to the apartment, she found that her key no longer worked — Peter had changed the locks. A few minutes later, he drove up with Deborah’s friend and the three of them went upstairs.

  “He acted like nothing had happened and said, ‘Hi, sweetheart.’ I asked him why he’d changed the locks and he said it was to keep some crazy girl away from him. She’d stolen money from him and he was afraid she was going to kill him or something.”

  “I’m moving out of here,” Deborah declared, and stalked around the r
oom pulling pictures off the walls and stuffing wedding presents into shopping bags. The pronouncement elicited no response — Peter and the girl were making out on the couch. As Deborah went from room to room “getting my things together,” Peter began to mock her. “I was badly hurt and I got very angry,” Deborah recalled. “My heart was being broken and here these two were clowning around and thinking it was a joke.”

  Peter got up and started playing pool. Deborah grabbed the cue from him and cracked it in half across the tabletop, unintentionally smashing his finger. “I’m going to call the police!” he screamed at her.

  “Go ahead, call the cops,” Deborah yelled back. “The more the merrier!” But within a few minutes, her anger and defiance had turned to desolation, and she opened a bottle of Courvoisier cognac. “I hate the stuff, but I wanted to get to him. He was getting mad that I was drinking his best liquor. I drank the whole bottle; then I headed for the medicine cabinet. He tried to stop me but I was too fast for him and I locked myself in. He banged on the door and shouted that he was going to call the police.”

  Deborah popped into her mouth whatever drugs she could find — tranquilizers, Librium. “I was trying to get attention from him, or sympathy. I told him I was going to kill myself. I said, ‘I love you, the marriage is gone, I’m gonna end it all.’ What got me was how cool he was. He said, ‘When are you gonna do this?’ I said, ‘Today, tonight sometime.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s fine, but do me one favor — don’t leave any notes. I don’t want to have to come over and clean up the note.’ That hit me like a punch in the stomach. I thought to myself, Marilyn Monroe.”

  Sobbing, she left the town house and went to Henry Wynberg’s, where she consumed more alcohol and more drugs. She wound up at a girlfriend’s house, where she drank even more and dissolved into hysterics. Her friend gave her some tranquilizers to calm her down, and the next thing she can remember is lying in an emergency room after having had her stomach pumped.