Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  OFTEN NOW, PETER TRIED TO recapture his glory days. He had never let go of the memories, to the point where his Cory Avenue apartment was a virtual shrine to them. “Every spare inch of wall space had pictures on it,” Bill Asher remembered. “It was like wallpaper. I said to him, ‘Take down those pictures, Peter. You can’t live in the past. Who gives a fuck about Sinatra and those guys? And for that matter, Jack Kennedy? They’re no longer a part of your life. The present is what matters, the future.’ Peter said, ‘Those are my memories.’”

  He tried to make his memories his present again. In 1978, he wrote to Frank Sinatra complimenting him on the fact that he appeared to have “mellowed tremendously, grown about ten feet.” He expressed the hope that should they ever see each other again, they could simply shake hands. That, Peter concluded, was something that would prove valuable to “the tranquility of my being.”

  When Sinatra did not respond to the overture, Peter decided to go to Las Vegas with Patty and take in one of Sinatra’s shows. He was sure that once Frank saw him in the audience, all would be well again. The reality could not have been worse. When Frank was told that Peter Lawford was in the room, he refused to take the stage until Peter and Patty were escorted out.

  Some ghosts were stirred for Peter in 1980 when Ted Kennedy ran for president, challenging — as Bobby had — an incumbent president of his own party. Unlike earlier Kennedy efforts, however, Peter had to watch this one from afar. He admitted to a reporter that he “hadn’t been asked” to participate in Teddy’s campaign, and added that the senator’s election wouldn’t restore Camelot because “too much has changed.”

  Peter was saddened by the news that Ted’s wife, Joan, had been struggling against alcoholism. She had felt overwhelmed and alienated by the Kennedy family, inferior when confronted by their tremendous energy and intelligence, unable to rise to the demands of being a dutiful Senate wife. At least, Peter recalled thinking, he wasn’t the only one who had found it difficult to be married to a Kennedy.

  Teddy’s quest for the Democratic nomination failed by a few hundred votes. In the November election, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter and became the thirty-ninth president of the United States. Peter was furious — Reagan was the antithesis of everything the Kennedys stood for. And Peter’s mood wasn’t helped by the specter of Frank Sinatra performing at the Reagan inaugural. Frank had done a 180- degree political turnabout, working as hard for Reagan as he had for Jack Kennedy. Peter gleefully reminded reporters that when Reagan was governor of California, and Frank was still a Democrat, he used to sing a parody of “The Lady Is a Tramp” with the revised lyrics “Hate California, it’s Reagan and damp.”

  Now, whenever he saw President Reagan on television, Peter would throw things at the screen.

  THE LONGEST-LASTING EFFECT of Peter’s back problem in 1976 was his addiction to the drug Talwin. At first, he needed it to ease the pain of his herniated disk. Once the pain had gone, however, he continued to use it for pleasure. He injected himself in the buttocks with the drug around the clock, carrying syringes with him whenever he left the house so that he could shoot up in the nearest available restroom.

  Patty knew nothing about this until she discovered a bag under the bathroom sink filled with dozens of hypodermic needles. Later Peter suggested she take the drug for her menstrual pain. Before long, she too was addicted. “It gave us pleasure just to use it,” she explained. “There was no need for us to have pain to be ‘killed.’” Now, both of them carried syringes wherever they went.

  Peter could never be without at least one drug to see him through the day, and this made international travel a problem for him. When he and Patty flew to Australia for the Tayside Scotch commercial job, they took several grams of cocaine along with them. Peter was worried that the coke might be discovered by customs, and the penalties for bringing drugs into Australia were harsh. He told Patty to hide the plastic packets inside her vagina. She protested, but he convinced her that there was no better way to assure that the drug wouldn’t be discovered, and the prospect of being without it during their stay worried her as much as it did him: “I did not think we could function for a prolonged period without being able to get high.”

  After they landed, Patty joined him in greeting the executives of the whiskey company “with several grams of coke between my legs.” It hadn’t been necessary, though — their hosts had already cleared them through customs. By the time they reached their hotel, Patty was unable to remove the packets herself and Peter was forced to call a “sympathetic” doctor to do so — “an extremely painful and embarrassing procedure,” Patty recalled.

  ON MARCH 5, 1982, John Belushi, the comedian, was found dead in a bungalow of the Chateau Marmont Hotel above the Sunset Strip, a few miles from Peter’s apartment. He had died of a combination of heroin and cocaine that he had asked a female companion to inject into his veins.

  Belushi’s death shocked his young fans and again turned the national spotlight on drug excesses in Hollywood. Two years earlier, the comedian Richard Pryor had nearly burned to death when a preparation of ether and cocaine he was concocting caught fire and blew up in his face.

  Such news jarred many junkies out of their habits; some checked themselves into drug rehabilitation centers. No longer was cocaine seen as a harmless panacea. The rash of drug-related deaths, injuries, and arrests in the early 1980s resulted in a new wave of health consciousness, and although drugs were still a part of the Hollywood scene, they were no longer seen as a prerequisite for “hipness.” The “fans” and sycophants who dropped five packets of cocaine into John Belushi’s pockets at a single party no longer bragged about it. That was no longer “the LA way to send greetings,” and drugs soon became a less destructive force in Hollywood.

  This change in attitude, however, did not affect Peter Lawford, who was too far along in his addictions to be able to shake them off when they became unfashionable. Now nearly sixty, he spent most of the early eighties in a stupor, the only change in him being a new honesty about his problems. Although he had said in 1981 that it was “absolutely untrue” that he had a drinking problem, in 1983 he admitted to the British journalist Ian Brodie not only the problem, but its awful extent: “I can’t stay away from the vodka bottle, and it’s destroying me. Doctors say I’ve ruined seventy-five percent of my liver and that I won’t live much longer if this nightmare of booze continues. I’ve reached a point where the days all merge into one long drunken haze. Things have got so bad I rarely leave my apartment.”

  His deteriorating condition led Peter to pretend not to be home rather than let even his closest friends see him. While Elizabeth Taylor was in Los Angeles touring with the play The Little Foxes early in 1982, she and Tony Geary, the TV soap-opera star, came to visit Peter at Cory Avenue around one o’clock in the morning.

  When Peter didn’t answer their knocks, Liz and Tony went to the back courtyard of the complex and stood under his bedroom window yelling his name. “Suddenly there was this tremendous hullabalo beside my garden,” his downstairs neighbor Isabel Heyel recalled. “Screeching and running around. The two of them were absolutely snockered and Elizabeth was yelling, ‘Peter! Peter!’ I knew he was home, but he wouldn’t let them in, because he never let anybody in at that point.” Part of the “tremendous hullabaloo” was caused when Elizabeth wandered into the toolshed. “She got all caught up in the rakes and hoes,” Bill Noad remembered, “and started screaming and swearing. Then she was banging on the garbage cans, trying to get Peter to come to the window. But he never did.”

  Peter could no longer afford most drugs, so he concentrated on booze, drinking the cheapest available champagne most of the time. His daily routine consisted of watching game shows and soap operas, sleeping, and taking whatever drugs and alcohol he could afford that day. Sometimes, his behavior seemed insane.

  When Patty returned to the apartment after a short while away following an argument, he came up behind her and put a loaded revolver against her head. He
accused her of having had a sexual rendezvous and threatened to blow her brains out for leaving him. She was able to talk him into putting the gun down. “When his mind sufficiently cleared hours later,” she said, “[he] was horrified by what had almost happened.”

  In the spring of 1982, Patty said, she was raped by her gynecologist. When Peter wondered whether she had encouraged the man, Patty left him again, this time for five months. She changed her name and went to live in Hawaii. When she came back to the mainland in October, she went to Las Vegas for a while. Then she returned to Los Angeles, where she found Peter in his most horrific condition yet. His hair and fingernails had grown so long that he resembled Howard Hughes toward the end of his life. He had been incontinent and had not bothered to change the sheets. Rotting food and cat feces were all over the apartment.

  Patty tried to save his life. She cleaned him and the apartment; she threw out most of his booze and drugs; she made certain he ate properly. She attended meetings of Al-Anon, an Alcoholics Anonymous offshoot for people living with alcoholics. With Patty’s new determination to help him, Peter took an interest in life again. He cut back on his drinking and regained many of the qualities that had made her fall in love with him — “he was his old charming self,” she said.

  He felt able to work again, and he reestablished his relationship with Milt Ebbins. Early in 1983, Ebbins got Peter an acting assignment in a European TV movie, Where Is Parsifal?, at an excellent salary of forty-five thousand dollars (from which Peter gladly paid Milt a commission). The picture, a zany comedy about a man who invents a sky-writing machine that can bring peace to the world, starred Tony Curtis and featured Orson Welles and Erik Estrada.

  Peter and Patty traveled to England for the filming, which took place at Hamden House, an ancient mansion that had been used for a number of horror movies and that served as both set and housing for the cast and crew. The house was magnificent in its faded glory but uncomfortable. The toilet seats were wooden and prone to splinter; the bedrooms were cold and illuminated by bare light bulbs hanging from cords.

  Orson Welles, his first day on the set, greeted Peter with his booming, resonant voice: “So there you are, Lawford, a man who knows no shame.” He looked at Patty and asked what Peter was doing with such a young girl.

  “I’ve been with her now for about seven years.”

  “Oh dear God help us!” Welles cried.

  The filming proceeded smoothly. Peter was still taking drugs and drinking, but in manageable amounts. Victoria Burgoyne, a young British actress with a small part in the film, recalled that “Peter seemed completely together. His timing was good, he was alert. I wasn’t aware that he was taking anything, and it certainly didn’t affect his work. He had this wonderful charm and relaxed manner that relaxed everybody around him, and everyone liked him tremendously.”

  Peter had little to do in Where Is Parsifal? One funny bit in which he enacted a faded matinee idol making a TV commercial pitch was intercut with other scenes and lost a lot of its effectiveness. During a dinner-party segment, he seemed slow and tired; there was very little spark left. The movie was shown on European television and occasionally turns up on cable TV in the United States. When Peter and Patty returned to Los Angeles, he resumed his heavy drinking and drug use. He went through the money from Parsifal quickly, and soon found himself once again desperate for cash, borrowing small sums from anyone who would help him.

  ON SEPTEMBER 17, 1983, Sydney Lawford married Peter McKelvy, a television producer in Boston, and the wedding was followed by a reception at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. The Kennedys did not want to invite Peter; Pat Lawford was prepared to have her brother Ted give Sydney away. But Sydney insisted that she wanted her father there, and so he was invited.

  He told Milt Ebbins he didn’t want to go. “You idiot!” Ebbins screamed at him. “What do you want to do, insult your daughter?

  You bet your ass you’re going.” Sydney paid for Peter’s airfare, and his room at Dunfey’s Hyannis Hotel was provided gratis. The night before the wedding, Peter, Christopher, “and several of Robert Kennedy’s sons,” according to the Boston Herald “partied long and hard at the hotel.”

  The next day, Steve Connolly, a Herald reporter, corralled Peter in the hotel bar and reported that he was drinking triple vodkas to fortify himself for the wedding ceremony. Peter, who looked “pale and dissipated,” told Connolly, “I wish I could dry out and kick this stuff. It’s taking its toll, isn’t it?”

  Finally he told Connolly, “No one’s sent a car for me,” and when the reporter saw Bobby’s twenty-five-year-old son Michael rushing out of the hotel he told him that Peter needed a lift to the church. As Michael directed Peter to a limousine waiting outside, Peter whispered to Connolly, “I need a drink.”

  As the Kennedys feared he would be, Peter once again was a public embarrassment to them. Tipsy at the rehearsal, he tripped and fell while walking Sydney down the aisle. The wedding itself went off without a hitch, but at the reception Peter drank too much and was accompanied by a young black girl who wandered around with a champagne bottle in her hand.

  The only member of the Kennedy family who didn’t shun Peter was Jackie Onassis. Still fond of him, still feeling an outsider’s kinship with him, Jackie went over to Peter as he sat alone and engaged him in conversation for over half an hour.

  WHEN PETER RETURNED TO Los Angeles, Bill Noad began to pressure him for payment of almost three thousand dollars in back rent. Noad had been the picture of patience with Peter for years, and his request was polite. But Peter fired off a blistering letter to his landlord about everything that was wrong with the apartment and threatened to report what he called “building code violations.” As he had many times before, he told Noad that he was going to move, and for the first time Noad didn’t try to talk him out of it. Once Peter and Patty left, Noad said, he found that the apartment was a wreck: “The filth! And the stench! I don’t blame Peter for that. I blame Pat Seaton. He was ill.”

  Isabel Heyel added, “I cannot imagine how they ever lived in that house. It was just so appalling. Disgusting. Nothing was maintained.

  The cat had peed on the sofa a million times. Everything smelled. Everything was trashed. I don’t know how Pat Seaton could have lived there and not done something about it.”

  Peter and Patty moved into a tiny apartment in a complex on Havenhurst Drive in West Hollywood, and Peter was once again near rock bottom. He looked dreadful, a decade older than his sixty years. Despite what he had told the Boston Herald reporter about wanting to dry out, he refused to seek help — until December 1983, when he got a telephone call from Elizabeth Taylor. She had been waging her own battle against alcohol and prescription drugs and had decided to check herself into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, an alcohol and drug rehabilitation clinic known for its tough detoxification and recovery program.

  Elizabeth had finally admitted to herself — after an intervention by her family — that she needed professional help. She told Peter that it was time he got help as well. “You must follow my example,” Taylor pleaded. “I’d hate to see anything happen to you. We’ve come to a crossroads in our lives. It’s time to change before it’s too late.”

  She convinced him that he had to follow her into the Betty Ford Center, and he did so on December 12. First, however, he made a telephone call. According to Milt Ebbins, Peter called up one of the supermarket tabloids and spilled the beans about Elizabeth’s being in the Betty Ford Center. “He would have done anything for money at that point, and he knew they would pay very well for that story. And they did. He got something like fifteen thousand dollars.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  Peter and Patty flew from Los Angeles to Palm Springs on December 12, then drove to the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage. On the flight, Peter downed enough one-ounce bottles of vodka to get drunk. In the car, he wasn’t sure where they were going. When Patty told him, “Betty Ford’s,” he seemed pleased. “I’ve always liked Betty Ford
,” he replied — and Patty realized he thought they were going to her house for dinner.

  Once he arrived at the center, Peter understood where he was and why, and he agreed to go through a program designed to save his life. His first week there was a harrowing one of cold-turkey detoxification; his body sweated and shook and burned for more drugs, more alcohol. Once he got through it, he was far from a model patient. He rebelled against the strictures of the center, refusing to make his bed, vacuum his room, or do his laundry. (He had Patty do it when she visited him.)

  His days were spent in group and private therapy, which he hated. He described his therapy sessions as “someone expressing an authoritarian spasm.” He finally began doing chores his second week there and played bridge during leisure hours with the other celebrities at what he called “Stalag 17” — Elizabeth Taylor (who knew nothing of his tip-off to the tabloid), Johnny Cash, and Desi Arnaz, Jr.

  His therapy regimen included writing responses to questions about his feelings and attitudes. He expressed resentment over having been forced to move from Cory Avenue “because of lack of funds. It makes one rather frustrated watching one’s life going down instead of up — especially at my age.” In response to the question, “Who do you think you may have hurt by your drinking or drug use?” Peter replied, “I only hurt myself, not others that I am aware of.”

  Another part of the therapy was to write letters to loved ones (dead or alive) that he may have hurt with his addictions and apologize for his behavior. Since he felt he hadn’t hurt anyone, he wrote only to Jack Kennedy and Sir Sydney.