Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  The truth was that Peter rarely paid attention to Ebbins’s often heroic efforts on his behalf; indeed, he sometimes actively prevented Milt from improving his affairs. The most vivid instance of this provided the coup de grace to their professional relationship.

  During the last few months of 1976, Aaron Spelling, the TV producer, hired Peter to appear in the pilot for Fantasy Island, with the possibility of a recurring role on the show if it were picked up for a series. After Peter filmed his part, Ebbins grabbed the seventy-five- hundred dollars for Peter’s services in person, foiling yet another garnishee, and met with Peter at Cory Avenue to decide which of his many overdue bills would be paid with the funds.

  “Listen, Milt,” Peter told him, “I gotta have twenty-five hundred of that money right now.”

  “You gotta be kidding, Peter,” Ebbins protested. “Look at these bills! You owe Bill Noad three thousand for back rent — ”

  “I don’t give a damn! I owe a pusher twenty-five hundred bucks and I gotta have that fucking money!”

  “I’m not gonna give you the money, Peter.”

  Peter’s voice became guttural. “Whaddya mean you’re not gonna give me the money?” He grabbed Milt and the two of them began to scuffle. Ebbins threw the money down and said, “Okay, Peter, it’s your money. I can’t hold it. Here it is.”

  As Ebbins started to leave, Peter continued to berate him. Milt got to the top of Peter’s stairs and said to him, “You know, I feel sorry for you. You’ve gone down about as low as you can get.” He walked down the stairs and Peter began to call him “every kind of dirty, vicious name you can imagine. I turned and looked up at him yelling down at me from the top of the stairs and I said to him, ‘Peter, why don’t you take a look at yourself in the mirror?’ I walked out the door and he ran out on his balcony and screamed epithets at me like you wouldn’t believe. I drove away.”

  Two hours later, Peter called Ebbins at home. “Do you know how badly you hurt me?” he asked quietly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you know how much you hurt me?”

  “I never intentionally hurt you in my life, Peter.”

  “You told me to look at myself in the mirror. Don’t you think I know what I look like?”

  “I wasn’t talking about your appearance, Peter,” Milt told him. “I meant you should take a good look at yourself and see what you’re doing to yourself.”

  With that, Peter reverted to form. “Aw, bullshit!” he spat, and hung up.

  FORTY-THREE

  Toward the end of the 1970s, Peter Lawford’s acting career reached a virtual dead end. He appeared in only three movies between 1977 and 1984, all of them low budget, and made nine appearances in episodic television shows or TV movies. His total income for 1977 was fifty thousand dollars, a paltry sum compared to his past earning power.

  Only a small fraction of this income derived from acting, but Peter was famous for being famous, and there were a number of other ways that he could make money. Peter’s agent was now Gene Yusem, who got him twenty-seven jobs in 1977. They included game show appearances (The Gong Show four times, Cross-Wits twice); commercials (for the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage and the Brown Derby Restaurant in Cleveland); and paid talk-show guest spots. His fees ranged from eleven thousand dollars (plus five thousand for expenses) for a Tayside Scotch commercial shot in Australia to $267.50 for his appearance on the Peter Lupus talk show.

  As the seventies ended and the eighties began, Peter’s stock continued to decline. He did print ads for the New Jersey Dental Association and appeared on the cover of a promotional brochure for Rodeway Inns. In 1981, his photograph appeared, uncredited, on page 12 of the mail order catalogue for Norm Thompson, a Portland, Oregon, men’s clothier. A company spokesman commented, “The nice thing is, he doesn’t charge very much.”

  Peter signed up with an agency for radio voice-over commercials. Richard Stanley, who handled Peter, tried his best to get him an assignment. “I thought Peter had a terrific voice, perfect for things like wine spots where they’d want someone who sounded sophisticated and sexy. Whenever there was something I thought Peter was right for, I’d call him into my office, along with a number of other people. He’d sit in the waiting room, sometimes for hours, and then I’d have him come in and make a tape of the client’s commercial copy. He was always polite and professional. I’d send out these tapes again and again, and do you know I never once had a client who would hire him!”

  Part of the problem was Peter’s new reputation for unreliability. In the past, no matter how badly out of it he was, he was able to pull himself together for a job. No longer. During one commercial spot that Gene Yusem arranged for him, taped at ten in the morning, Peter slurred his words and was incapable of reading the sixty-seconds of copy straight through. There were so many retakes that it took ten hours of editing to turn out a usable commercial.

  This kind of irresponsibility cost him; his burned bridges littered the Hollywood landscape. In December 1977 he went to Honolulu to appear on Hawaii Five-0, the Jack Lord series on CBS. As was the custom, the network paid for Peter’s stay at the Kahala Hilton, but any incidentals (phone calls, room service, liquor, dry cleaning) were his responsibility.

  During his nine-day stay at the hotel, Peter ran up an incidentals tab of $1,653 — and never paid it. After the hotel dunned Peter for a year they revoked CBS’s credit and threatened to sue the network unless they paid the bill. They did, and Peter agreed to repay CBS $1,819 (including interest) in payments of $150 a month. Not surprisingly, Peter never worked on a CBS series again.

  When he wasn’t able to make enough money working, Peter borrowed from the few friends he still had. Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Lemmon, Robert Wagner, and Bill Asher each lent him around ten thousand dollars. But, as Asher recalled, “Giving Peter money wasn’t helping him. We thought we were helping him, but it just made it easier for him to buy drugs.”

  One evening while Peter was in New York, he did the very unusual and invited Christopher, Sydney, and Victoria to an exclusive restaurant for dinner. At the end of the meal, he told Chris he didn’t have the money to pay the check. When Chris said he didn’t either, Peter asked his son to put the tab on Pat Lawford’s credit card. Reluctantly, Chris did so. As he dropped his children off at their apartment, Peter pulled his son aside and asked him if he could “score some cocaine” for him. Chris replied that he could, but that it would cost three hundred dollars. Peter pulled out his wallet and handed Chris three one-hundred-dollar bills. It was all Chris could do, he later related, to keep from decking his father.

  When Peter was literally broke — and had borrowed from every friend he could — he scrounged up money wherever he could find it. He sold a box of his memorabilia to a cinema collector’s shop on Hollywood Boulevard for one hundred dollars. He sent the National Enquirer a reminiscence of Judy Garland and was paid $62.50 for it. Photographer Don Pack, who had taken pictures of Peter with President Kennedy, ran into him at a supermarket near his apartment and lent him fifty dollars when Peter told him he didn’t have enough money to pay for his groceries.

  Matty Jordan, the owner of Matteo’s, was the only one of Peter’s restaurateur friends to remain loyal to him until the very end. As early as 1970, Jimmy Ullo, the owner of La Dolce Vita, had refused to send a plate of spaghetti and meatballs over to Peter’s Sierra Towers apartment until he paid the fifteen-hundred-dollar tab he’d run up. Peter called Milt Ebbins, who suggested he go to the restaurant and talk to Ullo. Peter did and was refused in person: “You got a bill here, Lawford. Why don’t you pay it?”

  Peter again called Milt, who then went to La Dolce Vita himself. “How can you do that to him?” Ebbins asked Ullo. “Peter Lawford brought in so much business to you when you first opened. He made this place. So what if he owes you fifteen hundred dollars? Why don’t you just wipe it off the books?”

  But Ullo was intransigent, and Ebbins finally said, “Listen, I’m not gonna argue with you
. Give me the spaghetti. I’ll pay for it.” He brought the dish up to Peter’s apartment. “Some of the guys weren’t loyal to Peter,” Ebbins said. “He helped make those places. He got the biggest names in Hollywood to go into those restaurants, and he spent a fortune in them when he had money — he never got anything off the tabs, I’ll tell you that.”

  Matty Jordan, on the other hand, allowed Peter to run up a five- thousand-dollar tab, which after several years he did pay. One night, Pat Seaton told Peter she wanted to go to Matteo’s for dinner. They didn’t have any money, but they went anyway and ate a big, expensive meal. When the check arrived, Peter told Matty he was embarrassed: he’d left his wallet at home and didn’t have any money with him. Jordan told him it was no problem, he could sign for the tab. As he was leaving, he asked Matty for ten dollars to tip the parking attendant. Matty slipped him ten ten-dollar bills.

  Jordan was happy to help Peter out. “I’ll never forget Peter to the day I die,” he said. “That’s how much I liked him. He was a classy, beautiful man. Some people buy class, but Peter had it. And then all of a sudden he got fucked up and everybody turned their backs on him. I felt sorry for him. Who wants to be a bum?”

  ANOTHER WAY PETER THOUGHT he could raise money was through lawsuits, and in the late seventies and early eighties he filed two major ones. The first was a $2.5 million action against Twentieth Century-Fox, Aaron Spelling, and Carol Lynley in 1977, following an injury he suffered while filming the Fantasy Island pilot in October 1976.

  In the story, Carol Lynley was supposed to throw a five-inch crystal goblet at Dick Sargent in a moment of high emotion during a dinner party scene. Sargent and Peter sat in high-backed antique Spanish chairs with finials rising on both sides to about eye level. For the master shot, Lynley threw a “breakaway” sugar glass which hit Sargent’s chair and harmlessly shattered. (Later, sound effects would be added to make it appear that a real glass had broken.) But according to a statement Peter gave in connection with the case, the prop man did not have another sugar glass for the next shot, a close- up of Lynley performing the same action. Peter said that the director, Dick Lang, then decided that since the schedule demanded the scene be completed that day, a real glass would have to be used.

  Although they would not be on camera during Lynley’s close-up, Peter and Dick Sargent remained in their chairs in order to speak the lines that Lynley was supposed to react to. For the close-up, Lynley planned to aim the glass midway between Peter and Sargent, and according to Peter, Lang positioned two prop men behind them to hold up a blanket with which to catch the glass. But when Lynley threw it, the heavy leaded crystal struck the chair finial to the left of Peter’s head — and shattered.

  Peter felt “a sharp pin prick” at the top of his left thigh just before director Lang yelled “Cut — that’s a print!” He looked down and noticed a tear in his trousers about three inches long, “as if someone had taken a razor blade and made a small, clean incision in the cloth.”

  As blood began to gush out of the wound, Peter jumped up and pulled down his pants. Many of the cast and crew had no idea he’d been injured; one asked him, “What are you doing, trying to get laughs by taking your pants down?” But it soon became clear that Peter was bleeding badly, and the makeup man raced across the soundstage, pulled a cameraman’s belt off, and wrapped it around Peter’s leg, fearful that an artery had been cut.

  Patty and Milt Ebbins took Peter to UCLA Medical Center, where doctors there found a 3½-inch long, 2½-inch deep laceration in his thigh. They closed the wound with twenty-two stitches through both muscle and skin and discharged Peter “with analgesic medication.”

  As he, Peter, and Patty were leaving, Ebbins asked the nurse to give Peter crutches. “What for?” Peter asked. “Peter, put the crutches on,” Milt said. “And why don’t you stay here for a couple of days? This is Twentieth Century-Fox you’re talking about — and you’ve got one hell of a lawsuit.” Peter took the crutches, but when he arrived home he discarded them. “Peter,” Ebbins pleaded, “stay in the house a couple of days.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Milt,” Peter replied. “You and the fucking crutches.” The next day, he attended a Bob Hope charity benefit in Malibu, walking normally if carefully, signaling to everyone that his injury was not that serious.

  A month later, Peter strained his back, aggravating a herniated disk, and experienced excruciating pain down his left leg. It was followed by numbness in his lower leg and foot. This time, he was admitted to UCLA, where he spent nine days. He told the doctors that he had been on crutches for three weeks following his leg injury and that he believed the use of the crutches and a limp he’d developed afterward had aggravated his back problem.

  When Peter was discharged, his pain was “ninety-five percent improved;” he was able to walk and bear his own weight. He was given, according to his discharge summary, “a firm admonition in respect to the protocol of management at home” and a prescription for the painkiller Talwin.

  On December 23, Peter filed the $2.5 million lawsuit against Twentieth Century-Fox, Spelling, and Lynley, charging that negligence, carelessness, and recklessness on their part caused his leg injury and that the injury led to his aggravated back problem. He claimed emotional and mental damage, loss of economic advantage, and loss of income.

  Fox’s lawyers petitioned the court to release Peter’s medical and psychiatric records in an attempt to prove that other factors might have caused his back problems, but the judge refused.

  The legal haggling dragged on for years, and it became clear that Peter didn’t have much of a case; too many witnesses had seen him walking without crutches for him to claim that his leg injury caused his back problem. Eventually, Peter agreed to a twenty-five-thousand- dollar settlement, and the case was dismissed. “I was stupid, wasn’t I?” Peter said to Ebbins. “You’re usually stupid,” Ebbins replied.

  In 1981, Peter filed another lawsuit, this one prompted by an embarrassing incident aboard an airplane. On an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Little Rock in April 1980, Peter was asked to leave the plane during a stopover in Dallas because of intoxication and obstreperous behavior.

  An account Peter gave of the incident is disjointed and disturbingly reminiscent of Lady Lawford’s descriptions in her later years of the many indignities and injustices visited upon her. It affects a tone of righteous indignation over the “completely unwarranted” treatment of him by a stewardess he calls “Miss Charm.” Nowhere in Peter’s retelling does he mention that he was anything but stone-cold sober during the incidents he describes. Adding drunkenness to the equation puts an entirely different cast on his version of events.

  According to Peter, his only infraction was to walk forward in the aircraft to get a copy of Newsweek. The stewardess told him, “You’ll have to be seated, sir. We are preparing for takeoff.”

  “Yes, miss, I know that,” Peter replied. “I was just getting a mag —

  The next thing he knew, Peter said, the stewardess was “propelling” him back to his seat, all the time muttering how embarrassing this was to her in front of the other passengers. After he sat down — “cogitating the rather brusque occurrence which I had just experienced more with a reaction of amusement than anger” — the stewardess came back up the aisle to him, leaned on his armrest, and said, “Sir, I thought I’d better tell you that we will not be serving alcohol on the flight today.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Peter replied. “I guess the booze wagon must have blown up.”

  “No, sir, I think you misunderstood. I cannot serve you any alcohol on this flight.”

  Peter asked her to “run that by me again.” When she did, he demanded to know why. “I don’t have to tell you,” the stewardess replied.

  “At these prices I feel I am entitled to a logical reason for your provocative and unqualified position,” Peter announced loudly. “Did I vomit in the wing? Did I stumble coming aboard? Why wasn’t I stopped at LAX for any irregularities in my personal behavi
or? Please explain that to me if you can!”

  The woman repeated that she did not have to give a reason and asked Peter if he would like to deplane right then. He refused. He did not want, he said, to become involved in “some strange juvenile entrapment surrounding me” begun by a stewardess who was “in the advanced stages of paranoia as anyone could plainly see.”

  Throughout the flight, Peter repeatedly demanded a full written account from the stewardess and the captain of what had ensued, before the plane landed in Dallas. He didn’t get it; instead, when the flight arrived, he was met by “a small bevy of men in dark suits looking suspiciously like security” and an agent from the airline. Peter was taken off the flight and took a private plane to Arkansas.

  When the original flight arrived in Little Rock, Peter’s host, who had come to meet him, was informed that he had been requested to deplane in Dallas because of “passenger misconduct.” To him, Peter said, this represented “a most insidious, incriminating and damaging statement.” He sued American Airlines, charging that the airline officials “did treat plaintiff in an outrageous manner” and falsely accused him of intoxication. “Said words and statements were made with reckless intent to injure plaintiff’ and were overheard by Peter’s fellow passengers, causing a defamation of his character. “Plaintiff has suffered general damages to his reputation in a sum in excess of $100,000,” the complaint concluded.

  Peter dropped the suit a year later without any monetary settlement from American. Proving that he had not been intoxicated and that the stewardess’s actions were unwarranted and a result of “paranoia,” of course, would have been difficult, especially with an airplane full of witnesses. Diplomatically, Peter’s attorneys suggested to him that he drop the suit only because he would be unable to show any real damage. “The law requires an out-of-pocket loss in a case like this,” they told him, “not just your natural feelings of frustration, anger and indignation.”