Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Frank Bunny had inherited a sizable estate from his father, the distinguished general Arthur Courtney Bunny, who had served forty-one years in India. It was more than enough to keep his family — which eventually included a son, Brice, and three daughters, Kathleen, Gretta, and May — comfortably well off. They lived in London in a spacious four-story house in a fashionable area, and their country house shared its dozens of acres with a carriage house, stables, and enormous manicured gardens abrim with flowers. Both residences were staffed with several household servants and personal maids, a governess, a butler, a cook, a gardener, and a “knife boy” whose job it was to clean knives, black boots, bring in coal, and chop wood for the fireplaces.

  May, the youngest daughter, was a pretty, dark-haired girl with coal-black eyes, and from an early age she exhibited a feisty temperament that frequently got her into trouble. On one occasion when she was four, May went out in search of the family cat. Fourteen hours later she returned to a frantic mother and an angry father. When she was asked where she had been, she exclaimed, “That bloody cat ran away!” She was promptly spanked for swearing, and sent directly to bed.

  On its surface, May’s childhood seems to have been close to idyllic. She was educated at an exclusive finishing school run by Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Helena. She had her own horses as a girl, expensive ball gowns as a young woman. At eight, she lived in Ceylon with her family, and she remembered it vividly: “What a beautiful cinnamon garden there was! It was at least forty acres of wonderfully scented blossoms among which there were religious statues and a particularly lovely Buddhist temple.”

  Frank Bunny’s wealth made his life comfortable, but it was his family’s military accomplishments that put him among the highest echelons of English society. Next to the aristocracy, no one was more accepted into royal circles in the Victorian and Edwardian eras than military heroes. As such, Frank Bunny was in a position to befriend Queen Victoria’s son and heir to the throne, Prince Edward, and — when May was eight — have his three daughters presented at court to Princess Alexandra, Edward’s wife. With a single ostrich feather in their hats to signify that they were unmarried (married women wore three feathers), their billowy satin skirts rustling, the Bunny girls curtsied slowly and gracefully, just as their mother had rehearsed them, and paid homage to their future sovereign’s wife. Wide-eyed at the opulence around her — the gentlemen of the palace household were in full court dress, the yeomen of the guard in scarlet and gold — the nervous young May could manage only a mumbled pleasantry as she shook Alexandra’s hand. Then the princess spoke, and May had several of her illusions shattered: “Never have I heard such an awful voice. It was worse than a peahen!”

  Like the prickly voice beneath Alexandra’s fluid elegance, the harsher aspects of Victorian attitudes and taboos lay just below the surface of May Bunny’s girlhood. In the upper classes of Victorian society, the primary care of children was delegated to governesses, with whom a child’s first meaningful bonding took place. Parental visits to the nursery were confined to bedtime visits for a good-night kiss. On rare occasions, children were “presented” to their parents, dressed and groomed, while their governess made her report on their behavior. Until she was fourteen, May Bunny ate her meals with the maid or her governess.

  Youngsters were not to speak unless spoken to; many Victorian fathers refused to converse with their children until they were capable of carrying on an “intelligent” conversation. Winston Churchill — born nine years before May Bunny — recalled a conversation with his father when he was a teenager after which Lord Randolph said to his son, “I have talked to you more in this holiday than my father talked to me in his whole life.”

  When Caroline and Frank did spend time with the children, it was to teach them athletic skills so as to instill in them strength of character. At the age of five, May was practicing high jumps on her mother’s horse when the animal reared up and threw her. Slammed to the ground but not seriously injured, the terrified child began to wail. Caroline slapped her daughter hard across the backside, mocked her tears, and immediately put her back on the horse to try the jump again.

  Such methods may have been harsh, but the English saw their end results — perseverance and fearlessness — as admirable traits in a child. And Caroline set herself up as an example. May recalled an afternoon when her mother rode her horse into the stable after a gallop with both her collarbones broken in a fall. When her children rushed to help her off the horse, she shooed them away. “Pshaw,” she said as she dismounted, “what are collarbones for if not to break?”

  Caroline and Frank reserved their harshest treatment for their son, Brice. He followed his father into a military career, and during one of Britain’s skirmishes in India in 1907, was shot in both arms. He remained shell-shocked and hospitalized for eighteen months. Never once did any member of the family visit him. When he died without leaving the hospital, his mother said only, “He gave his life for his country. Is there a better death?”

  Then there were the sexual repressions and taboos of Victorian England, which were brought home to the impressionable young May when she was sixteen. Fascinated by the glamorous images of actress Lillie Langtry that she had seen in the newspapers and magazines, May begged her mother to take her to see Langtry’s latest play, The Degenerates.

  The sensation of the 1899 season, the piece was about an abandoned society woman. Caroline wanted to see it, but she was wary of bringing May to so adult a drama. The girl pleaded, threw temper tantrums, wheedled, and cajoled until she got her way. Caroline was less rigid in these matters than her husband; she reasoned that at sixteen May was probably old enough, and she certainly understood her daughter’s desire to see Lillie Langtry. But under no circumstances, Caroline told her daughter, were they to let Father know. Within a fortnight, mother and daughter took a carriage into London for a matinee performance at the Prince of Wales Theatre.

  Lillie Langtry, the mistress of Prince Edward, had completely charmed London a decade before when she had been introduced into society. “How can words convey the vitality, the glow, the amazing charm, that made this fascinating woman the center of any group that she entered?” asked Daisy, Countess of Warwick, who would replace Langtry in Edward’s affections.

  Langtry had as strong an effect on the impressionable young May as she sat in the theater that afternoon. As she rode home with her mother in their carriage May couldn’t stop chattering. “I want to be just like Lillie Langtry!” she proclaimed.

  “Oh pshaw,” replied Caroline. “Forget such absurd notions.”

  At dinnertime May was still bubbling. Old enough now to eat with her parents, she dressed prettily in an embroidered blue dress with a blue sash, and a blue satin ribbon in her hair. She later said: “As a well-mannered young lady, I waited to be addressed, although I was brimming over with excitement. Finally my father said, ‘And you, dear, what did you do today?’”

  Forgetting her pact with her mother, May told him, then burst forth with her desire to follow in Lillie Langtry’s footsteps. “She is so thrilling and beautiful, Father! Can I please give up some of my lacrosse and tennis and take dramatic lessons?”

  There was, May said, a “dead cold silence.” Caroline began to sniffle into her handkerchief and asked to be excused from the table. “No!” Frank replied. “I want to talk to you.” He then ordered May to go up to her room: “I want you to memorize every Bible verse about Jezebel, young lady, and then come back down at ten P.M. and recite them!”

  When Spencer, the butler, brought May’s dinner upstairs, he said to her, “Blimey, girl, you really have torn it this time! The colonel is going to bite your head off!” After May finished her ten o’clock Bible recital, her father lectured her about the wickedness of the theater: “All the women on the stage are Jezebels!” he bellowed.

  “Oh, Father,” May protested. “Do you think that about Mrs. Langtry? She’s so beautiful.”

  “She’s the worst of them all,” Fran
k responded, doubly offended that Lillie, the daughter of an elder in the Church of England, had chosen to lead such a sinful life.

  In spite of her father’s admonitions, May’s fascination with the theater never waned. She was a vivacious young girl, verbally clever, who adored the dramatic and clearly possessed an actress’s temperament. But it was unthinkable that her father would ever allow her to pursue a stage career. She was crushed, but never was there any question in her mind that she would obey her father.

  When May turned eighteen in 1901, the same year Queen Victoria died and Prince Edward ascended to the throne, her parents began to search for a suitable husband for her — in order, they said, “to take her mind off such foolish ideas.” But May’s unpreparedness for marriage cannot be overstated. A Victorian girl had little chance to acquire the most rudimentary knowledge of sex, much less a healthy attitude toward sexuality. She was separated from boys at school from the age of ten; at no time was there any discussion of sex, or even of intimate hygiene, with an adult. Modesty was valued in a young woman above all else, and it was assiduously preserved, especially in matters of dress: at a ball, a maiden might carry half a dozen layers of clothing around the dance floor.

  When she reached “marriageable age” — usually eighteen — the Victorian girl, naive and woefully ignorant, was expected to marry and “fulfill her wifely duties” — which she most often assumed meant cooking and taking care of the house. For May, the realities of sex would come as a terrible shock; after her marriage, she said, she would lie awake at night thinking up excuses “to keep from having to endure that horrible, messy, unsanitary thing that all husbands expect from their wives.”

  ONE OF THE POTENTIAL HUSBANDS mentioned to May was Lord Berry, an elderly millionaire confined to a wheelchair. Frank’s rationale for this match was that Berry’s money would serve his daughter well; his infirmity wouldn’t matter because, as May claimed he told her, “you aren’t very sexy.”

  May protested and the notion was dropped, but before long a far more attractive prospect appeared: Henry Ashley Cooper, a handsome thirty-four-year-old captain in Britain’s India Army, known to his friends as Harry. The son of the late William Marsh Cooper, who had served as Queen Victoria’s consul to China, Harry was a neighbor and friend of the Bunnys’ and was of a class and profession well suited to win Frank and Caroline’s approval as a son-in-law.

  Harry Cooper, born in China, had been educated in British schools there, and then in the English public school system. He had attended a military academy and been commissioned an officer in Her Royal Highness’s army in 1885, at the age of eighteen. Two years later he was appointed to the India Army, and in 1902 made captain. At that point he was granted one-year leave out of India, during which he courted and wed May Bunny.

  All the Bunny girls married high-ranking officers of the British army. Cooper was a bachelor who cut a dashing figure in his uniform, and May was attracted to him — not least of all because he flattered her. “He told me I was pretty. Nobody else ever did.”

  May Bunny at eighteen wasn’t exceptionally pretty, but the men who were attracted to her rarely noticed that. Her vibrant inky eyes and raven hair drew attention away from her too-sharp nose, and so did her petite figure. It was her vivacity, though, her intelligence, her wit, her outspokenness and sense of fun that her suitors found most appealing. She loved to dance, and when the party was her own, she was, in the words of a friend, “a gay little bird of a hostess.”

  Many men found her exciting to be around, and she responded to their attentions with a coy flirtatiousness that fascinated them even further. Harry Cooper was no exception. After a few months of courtship, Cooper asked May to marry him. She wasn’t in love with him, but she liked him and thought he was nice looking. She accepted his proposal — mainly because her parents expected it of her.

  After a two-month engagement, during which Cooper didn’t so much as kiss his fiancée, Harry and May were married, on July 1, 1902, at their families’ parish church, St. Peter’s in Ealing. They had a fine wedding, May recalled, “with white horses, white ostrich feathers in my hair, and a mile-long train.”

  The reception was a gay affair at which May drank champagne for the first time, got a little tipsy, and danced merrily for hours with her husband and most of the other men. Afterward, Cooper brought his bride back to his home at 13 The Grove in Ealing and asked her what she would like to do for the rest of the evening. “Go dancing,” she replied. Cooper said he thought she must be tired. “Why don’t you go upstairs and get undressed?”

  Trembling, vaguely fearful of what was to come, May climbed the stairs to Harry’s bedroom and got herself ready for sleep by donning a dainty blue nightdress and nightcap. Cooper followed a few minutes later, climbed into bed next to his bride and kissed her. “He kissed me on the lips!” May recalled. “It was the first time for me. Then he started some other shenanigans!” She jumped out of bed, awash with tears, and ran downstairs.

  For the remainder of the night, the new Mrs. Cooper sat in an overstuffed wing-backed chair and sobbed; she didn’t stop even after Harry placed a Bible next to her, opened to a passage about a wife’s duty to submit to her husband. When dawn broke May went home to her parents.

  Later, she blamed them for her horrible wedding night. “They should have prepared me for what was to happen. . . . I just assumed God sent [babies] somehow.” The Bunnys tried to explain to their inconsolable daughter that what Harry wanted was “a natural part of marriage.” An aunt and the family doctor were also called in to help put May’s mind at ease.

  Unconvinced, but once again eager to please her parents, May returned to her husband’s home, where Cooper promised to help her “learn the art of love.” She learned it — but, she professed, she never did like it. “It was so messy. It was the only part of marriage I couldn’t stand.” May agreed to “submit” to her husband barely once a month.

  Harry Cooper returned to India about six months after the wedding, having had sexual relations with his wife only a handful of times — during each of which she had lain stiffly still “while he mauled me over.”

  Cooper rejoined his regiment a disturbed and unfulfilled man. He was devastated by his wife’s frigidity and brooded about whether he was in any way responsible for it. When further visits home saw no improvement in May’s responsiveness, he sought sexual satisfaction elsewhere — but this brought him little except guilt.

  Increasingly troubled, Cooper threw himself into the military career at which he excelled: he made major in August 1903, and by the end of 1904 he was third in command of the 62nd Punjabis in India. By then, Cooper had started to receive puzzling reports: his wife had become involved in amateur theatricals, had been seen dancing and flirting with other men. She was gaining a reputation, Harry was told, as a “fast” young lady.

  The reports were exaggerated: there was nothing sexual in May’s flirtatiousness. Only twenty-one, she enjoyed the attentions of men and loved to arouse jealousy in other young ladies. It was little more than a girlish game, but Harry Cooper couldn’t know that, and the gossip ate away at him. Brooding night after night alone in his bedroom, he convinced himself that he was being cuckolded by a woman who made his most basic human needs seem dirty and loathsome.

  It was all too much for him. On Thursday evening, January 5, 1905, Harry Cooper stood alone in his office, cocked the trigger of his revolver, put the barrel to his temple, and fired a bullet through his brain.

  TWO DAYS LATER, MAY RECEIVED a telegram in London from Lieutenant Colonel R. M. Rainey-Robinson, commandant of the 62nd Punjabis, informing her of Harry’s suicide. No reason for his action was mentioned.

  May felt less sorrow over her husband’s death than shock and shame at the manner of it. The Victorians loathed and feared suicide, and many ancient superstitions about it still lingered in an Edwardian society on the verge of a more modern age. It had been only a few generations in England since suicides were routinely buried with a stake throug
h their hearts under a crossroads, where it was hoped the traffic would keep their tortured souls from rising and wandering about.

  A soldier’s suicide brought dishonor to his regiment and to his family; Cooper’s obituaries in both the local Indian newspaper and the London papers omitted the cause of death. But friends and neighbors of the Coopers and Bunnys knew the truth, and May felt disgraced. She declined to travel to Bengal for Harry’s funeral, and within a few days she moved back into her father’s house.

  Frank Bunny treated his daughter no differently as a young widow than he had when she was a child. He continued to dictate her behavior and wouldn’t allow her to read in her room after ten o’clock or leave the house unescorted. “I was virtually held captive,” May said.

  She mourned Harry Cooper for a very short time; soon after his death she once again became involved in amateur theatricals, danced at balls, and flirted with handsome young men. She had liked her first taste of champagne, and every so often she’d drink too much of it. Frank was appalled at his daughter’s unwidowlike behavior and tried to keep her in line. But May was now “used to freedom,” as she put it, and she bridled at her father’s restrictions. The only way for her to be free of his “tyrannical orders,” she knew, was to find another husband.

  It didn’t take long for a prospect to appear: Ernest Vaughan Aylen, a twenty-nine-year-old captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. May found the trim, pleasant Aylen “good-looking, clever, and quite bright.” The attraction was mutual.

  Later May would inflate Aylen’s stature and describe him as “a fine doctor in Harley Street” who had paid the equivalent of sixty thousand dollars for his exclusive practice. Aylen, however, had gone directly from his hospital internship into the army and never had a Harley Street practice. May would claim that Aylen showered her with gifts — diamonds, horses, ball gowns — but he had no independent means, and such extravagances would not have been possible with his moderate army pay.