Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  “Peter didn’t even come to see me in the hospital. That’s when I realized that there was no possibility that we’d ever be able to make a go of it.” She went home to Miami, and she and Peter continued their battles over the telephone. Peter refused to return clothes and some wedding presents she had left at his apartment. Moreover, he would not agree to a financial settlement with her. She asked for a modest monthly stipend — “I wasn’t trying to take him to the cleaners or anything” — but Peter refused. He told her, “No, I’m not giving you a penny and I’m not sending your things back. If you want them you can bloody well come out here and get them. Tell your father where he can go, too!”

  “What are you trying to do,” Deborah shot back, “get me mad enough so that I’ll come back out there, file for divorce, and take you to the cleaners? Because that’s what I’ll do.”

  “You do what you damn well please!” Peter shouted back.

  “I wasn’t in it for the money, although Peter thought I was,” Deborah said. “He didn’t have much money even though he always acted like he did.”

  For years, Peter refused to give Deborah a divorce. “He was living with Pat Seaton after I left, and as long as he was still married to me, he couldn’t marry her. He didn’t want to get into that trap again. Even when I wanted to marry somebody else, Peter kept putting me off. But I pushed it and finally we were divorced. I hated him for a long time. I called him one night and told him how much he had hurt me and how terrible he was to me and everything. He said, ‘Well, you don’t know how much you hurt me. How much I still hurt. I’m never gonna get over it.’

  “I said to him, ‘Peter, what did I do?’ He just said, ‘Think about it. Someday you’ll realize.’ I still don’t know what it was. But apparently to him I was awful.

  “I woke up one morning and I didn’t hate him anymore. When I stopped blaming myself for everything, I just wasn’t angry at him or myself any longer. I didn’t want to be enemies with him. I wanted to be friends. But it never happened.”

  17 Deborah Gould denied this: “Peter Lawford didn’t need me to get drugs for him. He had all the contacts in the world. How would I have had more contacts than he did? I’d been in Hollywood just about a year. He’d been there practically all his life.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Within days of Deborah Gould’s departure, Peter asked Pat Seaton to move in with him. She was overwhelmed. A victim of childhood sexual abuse, estranged from her family, she had been living with a girlfriend. “I had a tremendous need to be wanted by a man,” she said, and to her it seemed incredible that someone handsome, famous, sophisticated, and apparently wealthy wanted her to be a part of his life.

  Afraid her roommate would be angry at her, Patty moved out secretly while the girl was at work. She called her parents, who were divorced, to tell them the news. Her father threatened to kill Peter; her mother was delighted and impressed. For the first time, Seaton later said, she felt powerful, finally able to gain her parents’ attention — even, in her mother’s case, some grudging respect. She was involved with a celebrity, and she was ecstatic about it.

  Now that Patty was living with Peter Lawford, her mother thought of her as “somebody,” called her on the telephone, took her to lunch. “My mother would wonder what it was he saw in this ugly duckling daughter of hers when she was more beautiful, more worldly, and quite successful. Being with Peter got me . . . both her envy and approval.”

  The life Patty led with Peter Lawford thrilled her. There were, as usual, the limousines, the Playboy Mansion, the seemingly endless supply of drugs. It seemed to Pat Seaton that she had fallen into the proverbial tub of butter. But a week after her arrival at Cory Avenue, the idyll was shattered. Milt Ebbins came to the door, and when she told him Peter was in the bedroom, he said he’d come to speak to her. Peter had called Ebbins and told him, “You’ve gotta get rid of her.”

  Ebbins did so very carefully. He told her that Peter’s children were coming to visit with their mother and it would be inappropriate for her to be there. Patty looked at Ebbins in disbelief. Not only was her dream of life with a movie star shattered, but she had alienated her roommate and would be mortified to tell her parents what had happened. Peter avoided looking at her as she came into the bedroom to collect her things. Patty swallowed her pride, returned to her mother’s house, and took to bed, where she remained for eight days, unsure if she wanted to live.

  In the meantime, Peter took a flight to New York to celebrate his daughter Sydney’s twentieth birthday. It was unusual for Peter to go to so much trouble for one of his children; often he would travel to New York and not let them know he was in town. When he did, it was usually Milt Ebbins who picked them up and brought them to a restaurant to see their father. According to Ebbins, “He never wanted to go upstairs into Pat’s penthouse. One time he did, and when he walked into the kids’ rooms he saw that they had his movie star pictures pinned up all over their walls. Sydney adored Peter. Her eyes would open up like balloons when she saw him. She looked at him like he was a god. He knew it, too.”

  At twenty, Sydney had developed into a tall, striking beauty with long luxuriant hair, chiseled features, and compelling dark eyes. She had remained out of the public eye for most of her life; the only press attention she had ever received was when she was seven and she and her cousin Maria Shriver set up a lemonade stand in Palm Beach that was closed down by the police because it was “dangerous” and “causing a traffic jam.” She had been educated at the Foxcroft School in Virginia, at the University of Miami, and at Franklin College, in Lugano, Switzerland. At this point in her life she was interested in a fashion career and was about to begin study at the Tobé-Coburn School, in New York.

  For Sydney’s birthday on August 25, Peter took her and Christopher, who had turned twenty-one in March, to Trader Vic’s for dinner. He gave Sydney a piece of jewelry from Van Cleef & Arpels. He also had a present for Christopher and a lapis lazuli choker for the other person at the dinner, Amy Rea, a model-actress in her early twenties.

  Peter had met Amy a few days earlier when she had come to a dinner party he’d given in his Waldorf-Astoria suite, and he later told her it was love at first sight. “He sang ‘Once in Love with Amy’ for me,” she recalled, “and he said that the song’s range was one of the most difficult to achieve.”

  The two spent most of the evening discussing their mutual interest in sexual experimentation. “That was when he confessed to me that he had derived his greatest pleasure from having his nipples lacerated with razor blades, which one woman had done to him. He loved having his nipples pinched, squeezed, hurt. He could orgasm through the pain.” That was a little beyond her tolerance, Amy told him, but she did enjoy some pain during sex, as well as bondage and “light S&M.”

  After the last guest had departed, Amy and Peter retired to the bedroom, which was lit only by candlelight. Peter took off his shirt and Amy removed her silk blouse and skirt, leaving on her black garter belt, red panties and hose, sheer bra, and gold-tipped high heels. “I shot onto the bed like a diver,” she recalled. “We laughed and laughed and he showered me with compliments. He told me I was beautiful. His hands touched my waist and the curve of my hip bone so delicately that my skin became highly sensitized. I felt like a Persian cat, rolling over for my owner as he touched me. I assumed a posture like Marilyn Monroe’s famous nude calendar shot on red velvet.

  “I saw a look of recognition in Peter’s eyes. ‘My God,’ he exclaimed, ‘you remind me so much of Marilyn. The way you act, the way you move. You’re like her reincarnation.’ He showed me his goose bumps in the candlelight. Halfway naively, I asked him, ‘You knew her?’”

  Peter then went into a long dissertation about his relationships with Monroe and the Kennedys. As Amy recalled it, he didn’t reveal anything he hadn’t before, but he did subtly aggrandize himself as he spoke. After a good deal of this, she excused herself, saying she had to go to the bathroom.

  “Can I watch?” Peter asked.
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br />   Amy laughed. “If you want.”

  Peter scrambled onto the floor and followed her on all fours into the bathroom. When she was finished, Amy saw that Peter had slumped against the wall. “Slap me,” he begged her. “Please!” “What?”

  “Slap me. Slap me! Really hard. As hard as you can!”

  “But you have glasses on,” Amy protested.

  Peter took off his glasses and began to hit his own face, as if to prepare himself for Amy’s blows. She thought to herself, If there was ever a time for me to experience this, this is it. She raised her hand to hit Peter, but her arm felt like a heavy slab of stone.

  She let her arm drop to her side. “I can’t, Peter! I want to love you, not beat you. I could never hurt you like that! Please don’t make me.”

  “But I enjoy it!”

  “No, Peter, please. I can’t — I just can’t!”

  She fell into his arms, sobbing, and he carried her back to the bed. “We lay there basking together in our newfound level of intimacy. We watched the candle and waited for daylight before speaking.”

  According to Amy Rea, Peter proposed marriage to her, but she declined. Despite what she saw as their “spiritual affinity” she insisted that Peter “scared the bejesus” out of her. “I could not fathom what a world of weirdness I would embrace by becoming his wife.”

  PAT SEATON HAD NO SUCH MISGIVINGS when Peter called her on his return from New York and asked her to come back to him. He sent a limousine to pick her up and she moved once again into his apartment. But before long she realized just how much degradation she would have to accept in order to change her life.

  She and Peter had not had any sexual relations beyond “extensive touching and intimate fondling” in the two interrupted weeks they’d been together, which Patty assumed was because of her wired jaws. When the wires were cut at the end of the second week, she expected that she and Peter would begin “a normal intimate relationship.” It didn’t happen. Three months passed, and Peter never made any overtures. All he was interested in was oral sex; he no longer even attempted traditional intercourse, and could reach orgasm only after several hours of fellatio. He had become primarily a voyeur, and he began to request things of Patty that she found “repugnant.”

  But unlike so many of the women who had passed through his life over the past decade, Pat Seaton was willing to do anything to please Peter Lawford, and she acceded to his every sexual demand — including, as she later wrote, that she have sex with another woman while he watched. She subjugated herself to him and got as involved with drugs as he was; she called herself “Captain Doper.”

  Excited by the private jet flights to Las Vegas, the limousines, Peter’s famous friends, an occasional picture of herself and Peter in the newspaper, Patty was starry-eyed — and very likely terrified that Peter would tire of her. She didn’t want to lose him, her glamorous new life, or the newfound respect of her mother and friends. As long as she did everything Peter wanted she could make sure that didn’t happen.

  The two continued an on-again, off-again relationship for the next eight years, interrupted by Patty’s sojourns in London and Hawaii. When she was gone, there was always a steady flow of women willing to have sex with other girls while Peter watched, willing to stay with him until he reached orgasm. But Peter told Patty that he loved her, left her affectionate notes every day, bought her little gifts — and that seemed to be enough for her.

  JUST ABOUT EVERYONE who had been close to Peter thoroughly disliked Pat Seaton, and his relationship with her drove another wedge between him and them. Fairly or not, they blamed her for his accelerating descent into drug abuse. “I had a genuine hatred for that woman,” Bill Asher recalled. “She professed to help him. She’d tell me how she was going to straighten him out, but she was worse than he was. She was a doper, a major hitter when it comes to alcohol and pills, whatever it was they were doing.”

  Erma Lee Riley, who remained Peter’s maid for twenty-five years, had a difficult time discussing this period of Peter’s life without breaking down. “People didn’t know the real Peter Lawford,” she said. “In the later years, he wasn’t himself. He was a gentle man. A shy man. A lot of people made him what he turned into. Some people in his life were out for themselves. He didn’t have a chance with these people around and he knew it. They took such advantage of him. I was there one day and he sent Patty out of the house and when she left, he just put his head on my shoulder and cried — like a baby. He was someplace he didn’t want to be.”

  Peter’s friends are still astounded by the way Patty got Peter to finance her trip to England. According to them, she told him that her father had died and that he had left her millions of dollars. She had to take his body to England, she said, in order to claim the inheritance, and needed eight thousand dollars to make the trip.

  Peter borrowed the money from several friends, including Bill Asher, and he promised to repay them as soon as she got her money. When she was ready to go, Peter later said, a hearse she claimed contained her father’s body pulled up in front of their apartment and she drove off in it to the airport.

  Patty told Peter she would wire him a hundred thousand dollars as soon as she could. According to Bill Asher, “Peter would call me up and say, ‘She’s going to the bank today.’ Then he’d call up and say, ‘She’s going to the bank tomorrow.’ I’d say, ‘Peter, get real here — she’s not telling you the truth.’ He’d say, ‘Oh yeah, she’s gonna get the money.’ The money never came. Peter wasn’t in on this, he had just deluded himself into thinking it was true.”

  IN THE FALL OF 1976, Christopher Lawford paid his father a visit. Chris and his cousins frequently stayed with Peter, and Bill Noad, Peter’s landlord, wasn’t always happy about it. “Chris and Bobby Junior used to come and stay in my cabana,” Bill recalled, “I knew they were smoking pot and doing drugs in there. Sometimes they’d stay a long time and Pat Kennedy would send me money to pay for them — she’d send one dollar a kid! I’d get a check for ten dollars from her!”

  On this visit, Chris was alone at the Cory Avenue apartment with a friend; Peter was in Palm Springs. In the middle of the afternoon, Bill Noad heard screaming and rushed out of his apartment. He saw Chris’s friend standing nude on Peter’s balcony, “freaked out” on drugs and threatening to jump off.

  Chris Lawford called Milt Ebbins and Noad called the police. When Ebbins got there, Chris was gone and the police were hauling out Peter’s marijuana plants, seeds, glass pipes, and other drug paraphernalia. “Hold it!” Ebbins demanded. “Where are you going with that?” “We’re taking this stuff as evidence.”

  “Have you got a search warrant?” Ebbins asked.

  “We don’t need one.”

  “Oh yes you do,” Ebbins said.

  Finally one of the officers said, “Better do what he says.” They left empty-handed, and Ebbins told Erma Lee Riley to throw out all the incriminating evidence. But Chris’s friend had been arrested, and when word got to Peter about the incident he was frantic. Chris offered to take the rap for the marijuana plants, but Ebbins told him, “No, you keep your mouth shut. We’ll take care of it.” He called a lawyer who had worked in the Justice Department, and the matter was dropped. Peter was lucky: possession of marijuana was a felony in 1976, and he could well have ended up in jail.

  Peter could hardly blame Christopher for the incident, because he had encouraged his son’s drug use. On Chris’s twenty-first birthday Peter had given him cocaine as a present. Chris sent him a thank-you note: “Dear Pedro: Thanks for making it cross-country for my birthday. You were a surprise and the most honored guest of the evening. You made the party and I thank you. Oh, thanks for the gift. Unfortunately it was not one I could hold on to for very long.”

  Because he did not share his interest in drugs with them, Peter often avoided his daughters, embarrassed to have them learn about the life he was living. When they came to Los Angeles he pretended to be out of town, feigned illness, or — on a few occasions — sim
ply didn’t answer his door if he knew it was Sydney or Victoria.

  In 1978, Peter received a letter from Victoria, then twenty, complaining that he hadn’t responded to any of her letters. “Dear Daddy: I really don’t know how to tell you this or how many times I’ve said this and meant it, but I love you. I don’t know if you believe this but I hope to God you do. I’ve never really had a chance to sit down and talk to you as father to daughter, but I guess I feel just as close to you as if I had. I guess the circumstances leave it difficult to get to know one another, but I hope this changes in time, Daddy. . . . I didn’t understand what’s going on this year when you sent us all a typed letter trying to explain that you were happy, busy and in good health. All of that makes me happy, but I still don’t understand it. I love you, Daddy, and I never want you to forget it.”

  PETER AND PATTY BECAME more and more isolated as his behavior continued to drive away the few people in his life who still cared about him. Finally even loyal, stalwart Milt Ebbins couldn’t take it anymore. Ebbins had put up with a great deal from Peter Lawford. He’d been called in the middle of the night to handle situations Peter should have handled himself. He’d been available at a moment’s notice to step in and do Peter’s dirty work, whether it was to get rid of a girl or put off a creditor. He again and again had gone far beyond the call of duty to help Peter, years after the glamour and excitement of Camelot had dimmed to a hazy memory.

  In return, Peter had spent money he didn’t have, and when the situation reached a point where Ebbins could no longer placate the creditors, Peter had blamed him for the ensuing problems. When Peter lost the beach house, he blamed Ebbins. When Peter lost his Tamarisk Country Club membership after falling a year behind in his dues, he blamed Ebbins.