Rat Pack Confidential

by Shawn Levy

  It would be seven years before Peter had another chance to act, and then only because of a freak accident that maimed and nearly crippled him. Returning to his parents’ French Riviera home after a game of tennis, he shattered a window-pane and sliced his right arm straight through to the bone. The first doctor to examine the arm declared it unsalvageable. Counseled to amputate, May responded with aplomb—“Fuck off, doctor!”—and found a physician willing to stitch Peter’s muscles back together. The arm was saved. To combat the lingering pain and stiffness, however, the Lawfords were advised to relocate Peter to a dry climate—Los Angeles, say. Although the arm would never fully heal (in its natural state of relaxation, Peter’s right hand was clawlike), it gave him, perversely, his ticket to success.

  He found bit parts right away, but it would take five more years of on-again, off-again work before Peter was granted a full contract by MGM. But when the deal was done, it was as near as a twenty-year-old could imagine to a golden ticket from God Almighty.

  May and the general thrived as well, becoming staples of the British expatriate community in Los Angeles and earning a reputation as grand old eccentrics among the Hollywood crowd: Frank once asked May about her son, and she responded in what she thought was perfect Hollywoodese—“Peter? That schmuck!”—bringing him to his knees with laughter.

  Aside from affording May a society in which she could act the grande dame, Hollywood gave Peter the opportunity to chase every famous skirt in the world: Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Anne Baxter, Judy Garland, June Allyson, Ava Gardner … you name her. His appetites weren’t necessarily orthodox: He had chances, for instance, to bed both Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, but refused the former because she had what he considered “fat thighs” and the latter because her living room was dotted with chihuahua poop when he rendezvoused with her. But he was always being floated in the gossip pages as some pretty young thing’s fiancé, and he was swain enough to travel with sexual gear—towels, blankets, mouthwash, changes of clothes—in his car.

  Despite this impressive record of cocksmanship, though, he was constantly plagued by rumors of homosexuality. He was chummy with Van Johnson and Keenan Wynn, and scuttlebutt put all three of them in bed together with Wynn’s wife, Evie (who, in fact, married Johnson within hours of getting a divorce from Wynn). Later on, stories circulated about trysts with other young actors, of loitering in notorious public men’s rooms, of all-boy parties in Hawaii, of Peter’s being “the screaming faggot of State Beach.” Most insidiously, May Lawford responded to her son’s growing apart from her by walking into Louis B. Mayer’s office and telling the prudish studio chief that Peter was a homosexual, a charge that Peter was forced to refute by soliciting the explicit testimony of Lana Turner; the canard drove a permanent wedge between him and his mother.

  At MGM, Peter was little more than an English pretty boy, but he had the good fortune of appearing on the scene just as Freddie Bartholomew’s career was in decline. He played light romantic roles well, didn’t shame himself out of the business when he essayed a bit of song and dance, could play gravely enough for small roles in serious drama: a good all-round B-movie lead, or nice support for an A production. He’d never make them forget Olivier, but he was a reliable asset for a studio at something like its height.

  Despite his lack of professional distinction, Peter was a highly sought-after invitee, an especially glittering extra in the diadem of Hollywood nightlife; he became known as “America’s guest,” as much for his habit of showing up at every noteworthy party as for his reluctance to pick up a dinner tab.

  There was, however, another social group with which Peter mingled and to whom he showed an especially generous and loyal side of his nature. Having been introduced to surfing as a young boy in Hawaii, Peter had a genuine love for beach life, and he spent all the time he could at the shore, catching waves, playing volleyball, and steeping himself in the lingo and rituals of beach bums—a cultish society whose vocabulary and attitudes would later be borrowed, in a fashion, by the Rat Pack. May hated the ne’er-do-well manner of this crowd—which, of course, attracted her son to it even more. Moreover, Peter relished mixing his surfing and acting cronies, watching the cultures clash with sophomoric delight.

  As he neared his thirties and seemed stuck on a treadmill of light comedy and dull drama at MGM, as his genteel parasitism grew wearying, two life-altering events befell him. At eighty-seven, General Lawford died contentedly in his garden, so deeply rattling Peter that he initially refused to return from Hawaii and endure the funeral. Nine months later, he found himself engaged once again, seriously this time, to Patricia Kennedy, the strong-willed sixth child of Irish-American Croesus and political dynast Joseph P. Kennedy.

  Pat Kennedy was not a soft, obliging Hollywood gal. She was not as pretty as Peter’s other fiancées, nor as sensual, but she was sharp-witted and independent and spunky. She didn’t just throw open her legs for him because he was a handsome movie star who talked nice; she challenged his opinions and stood up for her own beliefs in a fashion that must’ve reminded Peter at least a little bit of May. Peter and Pat drew toward one another with surprising ease, not slaving over one another but respectful of their mutual independence. They were in their thirties and set in their ways; their relationship seemed as much one of siblings as of lovers.

  Everyone knew what Pat saw in Peter, but many observers, especially Pat’s very jaded father, Joe Kennedy, saw something suspicious in Peter’s commitment to the relationship: Pat, though smart and vivacious, was no beauty, so Peter’s affection tended to give off a mercenary vibe, at least at first blush; moreover, Joe was appalled at Peter’s baroque Hollywood manner—the actor wore red socks to their first meeting—which seemed to lend credibility to the gossip he’d heard about Peter’s catamitic proclivities.

  To satisfy himself as to the first matter, he had Peter agree to a prenuptial pact that protected Pat’s fortune (at the crucial moment, though, he forgave Peter from signing it, satisfied at his willingness to do so). As for the other, he importuned upon J. Edgar Hoover to open his infamous store of Official and Confidential files, which revealed that Peter was a well-known patron of Hollywood prostitutes. Rather than blanch at this evidence of Peter’s moral character, lascivious Old Joe, who approved of hearty sexuality, even in potential sons-in-law, was delighted. The courtship climaxed in a lavish April 1954 wedding. Peter Lawford had graduated from waning pretty-boy actor to American royal—a hot number all of a sudden.

  Frank, for one, took notice.

  Through the dusty haze kicked up by his killing schedule, Frank had begun to set his sights on something higher than mere success as a singer, actor, or even mogul.

  He had always seen himself as a representative man, a “little guy” whose ascent in the world was a vindication of his parents’ immigration to America and his own combative resiliency in overcoming ethnic prejudice, loneliness, and, if you could call it that, economic privation. It wasn’t enough for a guy like that to simply be busy at his job—Sammy, say, was at least as active. No, he had to have an impact on the world.

  So in 1958, when it looked like this handsome young senator from Massachusetts, Jack Kennedy, would make a bid for the presidency, Frank decided to become part of it the way he did everything else he was passionate about: both hands, feetfirst, no looking back.

  It was a sign of his own success. Into his forties, he had come to see himself as a man of station and discernment, a world-beater worthy of helping shape the future. But it was also a kind of inheritance: He had learned about politics by watching his mother work the ward system in Hoboken. Dolly Sinatra had the barest formal education and should’ve been kept from achieving any kind of power as a woman, an immigrant, as a midwife and abortionist. But she had spunk: She married a Sicilian against her Genoese parents’ will; she dressed up like a man to watch her husband box in men-only joints; she exploited her fair features to pass herself off as Irish; she drank; and she talked like a stevedore, cursing viv
idly even when, in her dotage, attended constantly by a nun.

  Such spirit distinguished her from other Italian mothers of her generation, but not so dramatically as did her political activities. In a corrupt little town run by an ironclad political machine, she won over the kingmakers by consistently turning out the vote and becoming the person to whom her neighbors came for jobs, food, and the sort of generic wheel-greasing and ass-saving they associated with Men of Respect. Dolly, of course, could never hold office, but she had the ears of men who could forgive crimes, erase debts, grant sinecures, and make life bearable or hellish as they chose. With her assistance, scores of Hoboken’s Italians made their way toward the better life they’d come to America to enjoy.

  Dolly didn’t achieve her station simply by virtue of gumption. She worked hard at her glad-handing and ward-heeling, and she was even willing to broker her only child for political advantage; as his godfather, she chose none of his five uncles or other male relatives but Frank Garrick, an Irish newspaperman whose uncle was a police captain. The choice proved strangely fateful. In a mix-up that marked the child forever, the priest at the baptism named the boy Francis—for Garrick, whom he somehow came to believe was the father—instead of Martin, the name Dolly and Marty had chosen. Dolly, still recuperating from the delivery, wasn’t at the ceremony to protest, while Marty stood there in characteristically mute impotence, saying nothing as his patrimony was diluted.

  For all that she fussed over her boy, for all the clothes and spending cash and good words put in with people who could get him jobs and, later, gigs, Dolly nevertheless found it more exigent to leave him to the care of others and pursue her political work. Frank was fobbed off on relatives and neighbors. Politics, in effect, was the sibling from whose charms he could never divert his mother’s eye; naturally, it came to seem to him an extension of family life, a way of linking up with his absent mother and creating a community around himself.

  Plus it had perks. Dolly got Marty a well-paying job in the city fire department despite his inability to pass a written test, and she eventually got him promoted to captain—though few of his colleagues reckoned him worthy of the honor. Comfort and largesse flowed from political power, Frank could see, and when he was old enough to court it he did.

  Frank’s political instincts weren’t entirely mercenary. He genuinely felt compassion for the underdog and championed civil rights as soon as he had a platform from which to be heard. In 1945, virtually the moment his career as a solo artist granted him a public profile, he spoke out against prejudice at a high school in Gary, Indiana, where black students had recently been admitted to a hostile reception from whites.

  He also godfathered a curious little film project, The House I Live In, a ten-minute docudrama in which he preached a lesson in ethnic harmony to a mixed-race gang of street kids. “Look, fellas, religion makes no difference except to a Nazi or somebody as stupid,” he explained. “My dad came from Italy, but I’m an American. Should I hate your father ’cause he came from Ireland or France or Russia? Wouldn’t that make me a first-class fathead?” Then he launched into the title song, a syrupy ode to American equality, and ended by admonishing his audience of converted Schweitzers, “Don’t let ’em make suckers out of you.” (The film won Special Academy Awards for its creators, including Sinatra, director Mervyn LeRoy, and screenwriter Albert Maltz, a future member of the famous Hollywood Ten group of blacklisted authors.)

  And Frank practiced what he preached. He was among the earliest and most visible proponents of civil rights in all of show business. He worked and traveled with black musicians, always insisting that they get treatment equal to that afforded him in restaurants and hotels, and he did what he could to give a boost to such acts as the Will Mastin Trio.

  Frank’s political liberalism even led him to a deliberate reprise of the accident that gave him his own name. His only son was always known as Frank Jr., but the kid was actually named Franklin Wayne Emmanuel Sinatra in tribute to, among others, his father’s hero Franklin Roosevelt.

  And he didn’t merely communicate his convictions in symbols. On the night in 1944 that FDR beat Thomas Dewey, Frank, in New York for a series of concerts at the Waldorf-Astoria, celebrated with a bar crawl in the company of Orson Welles. The two decided to cap their gambols by razzing right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler, also resident at the hotel. They rowdily pounded the door to Pegler’s suite to no satisfactory response, then returned, discouraged, to their debauch.

  Four years later, Frank won $25,000 on a bet that Harry Truman would be reelected. In 1952, Frank campaigned for Adlai Stevenson, and then again in 1956, when he sang the national anthem at the opening session of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and stuck around to get a close-up look at the action. (He caused some of his own as well. After he sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Frank was on his way offstage when he was grabbed by Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, who asked him if he’d also be performing “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” “Get your hands off the suit, creep,” Sinatra replied.)

  It was there that his eye was first caught by Jack Kennedy, then a dazzling, photogenic young senator with a pretty wife and a baby on the way. After Stevenson had secured the presidential nomination, he’d thrown the vice-presidential slot to the convention without naming a candidate of his preference; Kennedy, against his father’s wishes, sought the spot and was locked in battle for it with Tennessee’s Mafia-baiting senator, Estes Kefauver. Frank hung close to the Kennedys as the convention progressed, impressed with the amount of money and degree of organization the family applied to the campaign. When Kefauver won the nomination, the Kennedys were briefly stunned.

  Then Frank noticed Bobby, the senator’s younger brother and campaign manager, telling folks around him, “OK, that’s it. Now we go to work for the next one.” The stubborn will in those words was invitingly familiar, an echo of Dolly’s gumption. Frank determined to keep tabs on Jack Kennedy.

  He just needed an in.

  And what do you know: At a dinner party at Gary and Rocky Cooper’s house in the summer of ’58, there was Peter.

  Frank had seen Lawford among his in-laws at the Democratic convention two years earlier; he was working, incongruously, with Bobby, trying to gain support from the Nevada delegation, which was run by Peter’s sometime Desert Inn boss, Wilbur Clark.

  At the time, even though they’d been chummy at MGM in the forties, Frank was carrying a grudge against Peter—a misunderstanding about a woman. In late ’53, after she and Frank had split, Ava Gardner had a drink with Peter at an L.A. nightspot. When Louella Parsons reported the little tête-à-tête, Frank went bonkers, calling Peter at two in the morning and shouting at him, “Do you want your legs broken, you fucking asshole? Well, you’re going to get them broken if I ever hear you’re out with Ava again. So help me, I’ll kill you.”

  Peter was terrified: “Frank’s a violent guy and he’s good friends with too many guys who’d rather kill you than say hello.” He asked a friend to intervene, and when Frank realized that it really was just an innocent drink, he cooled off. But he didn’t bother with Peter until he’d become a Kennedy, and even then grudgingly. Pat Kennedy, presuming with some reason to install herself as a society queen in Hollywood, had tried for years to have Frank attend some or other event; he had always brusquely refused her.

  But as her brother’s star rose, and as Frank’s interest in politics merged subtly with his naked ambition, Peter’s near-trespass didn’t seem so awful. So it came to pass that on that fateful night at the Coopers’, with Peter working late at the studio on his Thin Man TV series, Pat found herself rapt in conversation with Frank, who had gone out of his way to break the ice with her. Dolly Sinatra’s boy, ever aware of who held the power, knew that she could provide quite a high level of access to what was clearly a growing political concern.

  When Peter arrived at the party—bandaged after an injury on the set—he was amazed to discover his wife and Frank amiably chatting. He quietly t
ook a seat at the table, not knowing what sort of greeting to expect. Frank looked at him, then looked back at Pat and said, “You know, I don’t speak to your old man.” The two of them laughed, and Peter did, too, a beat later, when he realized he’d been forgiven.

  Within a few months, a suddenly intimate relationship formed between Peter and Frank. When Pat had a daughter that November, the child was christened Victoria Francis—the first name in recognition of her Uncle Jack’s reelection to the Senate that day, the second in recognition of Frank.

  The following year, vacationing together in Rome, Frank actually apologized to Peter for the way he’d blown up over Ava: “Charlie, I’m sorry. I was dead wrong.” It was the rarest of moments: another smile of fate upon Peter Lawford.

  He and Frank became fast pals, frat brothers with nicknames, booze, broads, matching cars. He got work: the Pacific theater war movie Never So Few, his first picture in six years, came his way strictly because Frank insisted on it—and at a price that made MGM choke, also at Frank’s insistence. The two became partners in a Beverly Hills restaurant, Puccini, and served spaghetti and chops to the stars; Frank was so glad to have Peter on board that he put up both halves of the seed money.

  And Frank had his avenue to Jack Kennedy. Peter admitted that he and his wife “were very attractive to Frank because of Jack.” Sure enough, once he was connected, Frank leapfrogged over the guy he came to call “the brother-in-Lawford” and ingratiated himself with both Jack and Old Joe.

  Indeed, though his cavorting with Jack was famous, Frank may have been closer to the father, the primary source of money and power in the family and the one most familiar with the courtship of disreputable outsiders, whether they were mobsters, corrupt politicians, larcenous power brokers, or temperamental pop stars. Joe had, it was said, prevailed on Sam Giancana to help erase public records of Jack’s annulled 1947 marriage to a Florida socialite; he called upon the Chicago don again in the late fifties to smooth things between himself and Frank Costello when Kennedy’s reluctance to recognize his obligations to the New York mobster almost resulted in a contract on his life; later, during the 1960 presidential campaign, he was seen dining at a New York restaurant with a select group of top mobsters from around the country. Jack may have had all the buzz, but Joe was, in Frank’s eyes, the real man of the world in the family.