Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  AS HIS COUSIN VALENTINE LAWFORD has said, “Peter wasn’t brought up, he was dragged up.” During his adolescence, he traveled with his parents to India, Australia, Tasmania, Tahiti, Colombia, Brazil, Hawaii, Spain, Portugal, Ceylon, Bermuda, Panama, Cuba, Nassau, and the United States.

  Peter remembers this nomadic existence fondly. “I loved it and it never occurred to me that it might be an odd way of growing up.” In India, he rode elephants and haggled with merchants in the bazaars of Bombay. In Ceylon, the family stayed at the opulent Grand Oriental Hotel and May showed him the cinnamon gardens and Buddhist temples that had captivated her as a girl.

  The boy’s most vivid memories of this period were of Tahiti, where the family settled for six months in 1933, living in a thatched hut on the Blue Lagoon. “It is a beautiful spot,” Peter recalled. “I’ll never forget the coal-black sand glistening in the sunlight. We had a place right on the ocean. The water was so clear you could see the coral underneath. I lived in shorts, had my own canoe, and swam from dawn to dusk. It was a boy’s paradise.”

  He was thrilled with Hawaii as well. In October 1934, the Lawfords sailed into Los Angeles harbor aboard the Italian liner California and spent a week in LA before embarking again for Hawaii. They remained in Honolulu for nine months, living in the sumptuous Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the “Pink Palace” on the still-pristine, uncrowded sands of Waikiki Beach. One evocative photograph shows Peter sitting at a table beneath a huge umbrella, with Diamond Head behind him in the distance. Dressed entirely in white, two-tone oxfords on his feet, his hair slicked back, he calls to mind a boy Jay Gatsby.

  Hawaii enchanted Peter, and he returned there again and again throughout his life. It was in Waikiki that he first learned to surf, a sport that was to obsess him as a young man. He learned the hard way: “The surfboards tip up if you’re not careful, and one day mine tipped, hit me over the head and knocked me out.” He was saved from drowning by a companion.

  The Lawfords were in Nassau, the Bahamas, in December 1936 when the newly crowned King Edward VIII abdicated his throne in order to marry the American divorcée Wallis Warfield Simpson. Lady Lawford saved until her death a one-sheet bulletin from the Nassau Guardian that announced the abdication, and she — like many other Britons — never forgave Mrs. Simpson for stealing her sovereign. For years she referred to the woman who became the Duchess of Windsor as “that whore” and added gleefully, “She was a prostitute. One officer who had slept with her said that she was quite good, but not that good!”

  The family’s travels kept them on shipboard almost as much as on land. At sea they lived in palatial staterooms, often given to them gratis by captains who were friends of the general or by the shipping line, since their arrivals usually made news in the local papers and provided free publicity for the ocean liner.

  Sir Sydney and May ate at the captain’s table and dressed in tuxedoes and ball gowns for elegant receptions. Sometimes, May and Peter performed skits for the amusement of the other passengers. On a return trip from Australia in 1937, Peter learned of a father-and-son talent contest. When Sir Sydney refused to participate, an undaunted Peter persuaded May to allow him to masquerade as a girl and enter the mother-and-daughter contest with her. They donned Tahitian grass skirts and coconuts from their luggage trunks, performed as Lady Lawford and her little girl, and won the contest. Then Peter grandly announced that he was really a boy, and was nevertheless allowed to keep the first prize. (What that was remains unrecorded — as does Sir Sydney’s reaction to all this.)

  His family’s travels did nothing to dilute Peter’s dreams of getting back into the movies. The day after they arrived in Tahiti, May noticed a movie crew on the sand about three quarters of a mile from their hut. As she walked closer along the beach, she saw cameras, lights, reflectors, and microphones. When she got close enough to recognize faces, sure enough, there was Peter, bustling happily amid the confusion, delighted to do anything the crew needed him to do.

  Peter took every opportunity to see movies as well. Everywhere the family traveled, he went to the pictures as often as possible, sometimes three or four times a week, sometimes in a primitive hut with a generator to run the projector. He would sit, completely absorbed in the fantasy world that flickered to life in front of him, fascinated by the performers, the sets, the costumes. But he couldn’t enjoy the films completely; watching movies only reminded him that he wanted to be appearing in them himself. Still, he went back again and again because, he said, he hoped he might somehow see himself up on the screen again.

  WHEN PETER WAS AROUND NINE, he began to receive a new kind of attention that had nothing to do with acting, one that both excited and frightened him. He was an eye-catching lad, his brown hair thick and wavy, his blue eyes captivating. Fair, smooth skinned, and slim, he had a sweet, sad shyness about him that charmed many of the adults he encountered and drew some of them to him in sexual arousal.

  The first such advance, according to May, occurred when the famed British war correspondent Ward Price encountered Peter in a deserted hotel hallway, pulled the boy close, and tried to kiss him. Peter resisted and went back to his parents’ room to complain: “He thinks I’m something I’m not.” Lady Lawford wasn’t too concerned. She said of Price, “Even though he did run on two currents — AC and DC — I couldn’t help but like him.”

  Soon thereafter, Peter was molested by a friend of the family, a man he had come to know as his “uncle.” Peter was never comfortable talking about the incident; all he would say later was that a pillow had been pushed over his face to silence him and that the experience traumatized him.

  He had more ambivalent feelings about his first sexual encounter with a woman, when he was ten. While staying in the south of France, Peter’s beautiful thirty-five-year-old German governess took him on a picnic. After their lunch, as they sat in the cool shade of a sprawling tree surrounded by wildflowers fluttering in a soft breeze, the woman pulled Peter toward her and put his head in her lap.

  Deeply contented, Peter began to drift into sleep when he was roused by the woman’s hand under his shirt. She rubbed his stomach, then worked her way down into his shorts and began gently to caress his penis. Peter recalled that the sensation was highly pleasurable — “and for some reason, most natural.”

  The governess then asked Peter to kiss and suckle her breasts. He began clumsily and she stopped him. “Doucement,” she told him. “Gently.” He resumed in a dreamy slow motion. After a few moments, the woman became aroused and held Peter’s head against her bosom, more insistent now. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he later surmised that the woman soon reached orgasm, because she suddenly lifted herself up, turned Peter on his back and started “eating me alive.” The woman fellated Peter to climax — his first.

  He later said that this experience had not been an isolated one, that several of his nannies had taken sexual advantage of him around this age. He found himself deeply confused by the experiences, his emotions a jumble of pleasure, guilt, and fear.

  Sexual relations with a governess — or any mother substitute — can be as disturbing to a child as incest, and Peter transferred his deeply conflicted feelings about them to his mother. Speaking of his parents years later, Peter said, “I adored him and loathed her, from a very early age.”

  It wasn’t as simple as that. Peter’s third wife, Deborah Gould, remembers him telling her about these early sexual experiences: “Peter said that he resented his mother leaving him with these women who took advantage of him. But he really didn’t know what to think about it at that age. He loved his mother and hated her at the same time.”

  2 Because Peter later returned to acting, he never did receive an inheritance from Ethel, and Frank Bunny, who died in 1940, omitted May from his will for the same reason.

  FOUR

  On a cool cloudy day in the early spring of 1937, Peter romped among the huge spreading magnolia trees that dotted the lush grounds of an exclusive French spa hotel at Aix-les-Bains. Several t
imes a year when they were in Europe, May and Sir Sydney checked into the spa for rest and rejuvenation. They ate health foods, drank mineral water, dropped some excess weight, and cleansed their bodies of the toxins that red meat and too much alcohol had left in their systems. Their stay was usually about six weeks — or, as Peter later said, however long it took “to clean the liver.”

  Peter loved the spa’s grounds, where he could cavort freely, bicycle through tree-lined paths, swim in natural spring waters, and play tennis on grass courts. He had developed a passion for the sport at around ten, and now that he was thirteen he displayed real talent for it — talent he had inherited, Sir Sydney proudly insisted, from his uncle Herbert Lawford, who was the third Wimbledon champion in 1879.

  On the first Sunday after his arrival, Peter spent the morning on the courts and then joined a group of children about his age as they frolicked under a magnolia tree that stood at the top of a grassy sloping hill. It was the favorite tree of the resident kids, because they could climb it, jump off its low-hanging limbs, and roll all the way down the hill.

  Bored after an hour of this, he ran back to the Lawfords’ bungalow. It was around three-thirty. May was shopping, and Sir Sydney was playing golf. Peter scrambled up the steps to the entrance, a large multipaned French door, and grabbed the handle, expecting it to be unlocked as usual. But a maid had latched the door, and when it didn’t open Peter slammed into it. His right arm smashed through one of the panes and he instinctively pulled it back out. “That’s when the damage was done,” he said.

  A jagged shard of glass sliced through his upper arm, slit muscles and tendons, and severed an artery. As blood gushed from his arm in a pulsing stream, spreading a deep scarlet stain over his tennis whites, his first thought was, I’m going to get the devil for this. He decided to bandage the wound himself so his parents wouldn’t learn what had happened to him. He bolted to the bathroom and grabbed some gauze from the medicine cabinet, but even as he wrapped it around his arm he realized, This ain’t gonna handle it.

  The bandage slowed the bleeding but didn’t stop it, and by now Peter felt queasy. He knew he needed help. He ran fifty yards through the gardens to the hotel lobby and stood before the concierge’s desk. The man looked down at him. “What’s this? Blood all over my carpet?” Peter mumbled an apology just as his legs gave way. He fell to the floor and the concierge realized the boy was seriously hurt. He put a pillow under Peter’s head and yelled for a doctor. As Peter lay on the floor, he could see the five landings of the hotel’s Open staircase rising above him to the top floor. At the fifth level, a white-haired man leaned over the railing to see what the commotion was.

  When the man saw Peter prostrate on the floor in the middle of a spreading stain of scarlet, he yelled down, “Je suis médecin!” (“I’m a doctor!”) and bounded down the stairs. The elderly retired physician tore off his tie to make a tourniquet, wrapped it around Peter’s arm and asked for some ice. He then told the concierge to call for the hotel bus to take Peter to a clinic about a mile away.

  By this time someone had summoned Sir Sydney, and when he saw his son he exclaimed, “Good God! What did you do?” Peter, who had lost nearly two pints of blood, weakly explained what happened. Then he asked, “I’ll still be able to play tennis, won’t I, Father?” Lady Lawford stepped through the gates of the hotel complex just as the bus carrying Peter and Sir Sydney passed by. The driver stopped and Sir Sydney got out to tell May what happened. When she climbed into the bus she said, “Couldn’t you have done this another day, Peter? You knew I was dining out tonight.” It was exactly the right thing for him to hear, Peter later said. “If she had carried on over me I wouldn’t have been able to take it. Sometimes the stiff upper lip business really does work.”

  At the clinic, the doctor confronted a deep, long gash in Peter’s arm. He picked up a metal instrument and was able to pull back the muscle far enough to see bone. “What am I to do with this?” he asked his nurse. Peter, falling into shock, was wheeled into an anteroom as the doctor told his parents that there was no way he could save Peter’s arm. Gangrene was sure to set in, he said, and the only alternative was to amputate at the shoulder.

  May was appalled. Peter heard her tell the physician that she would not give him permission to cut her son’s arm off. “Do the best you can,” she cried. “At least try!” Peter later said, “I will always remember her for this. She was good in this kind of situation.”

  When the man continued to insist on amputation, May pulled herself up to her full height, looked him squarely in the eye and said, “Va te faire foutre, monsieur le docteur!” (“Fuck off, doctor!”) The Lawfords then called in a surgeon who told them he thought he could save Peter’s arm, and they gave him permission to operate. As Peter slid in and out of consciousness, the doctor painstakingly labored over the wound, applying thirty-seven tiny stitches to the layers of muscle, tendon, and skin. “He did a damn good job,” Peter said years later.

  The Lawfords were warned that gangrene was still a danger; there was nothing they could do but wait. During the night, a nurse brought stone hot water bottles to Peter’s bed to warm him. She wrapped them in towels and placed them around his ankles and lower legs. Peter was unconscious and did not feel the burning stone next to his skin when one of the towels fell away from a bottle. He awoke with third-degree burns on his ankles and feet.

  May berated the nursing staff the next day and summoned Miss Hemming — “a competent nurse!” — from London. The blisters on Peter’s feet took several days to drain. “The funny thing,” Peter recalled, “was that my feet were killing me but I had no pain whatsoever in my arm. All my nerves had been severed so I didn’t feel a thing.” Within a few days, the danger of gangrene had passed, but it was clear that Peter would never again have full use of his arm. He spent a week in the hospital, then six weeks back at the hotel in bed with his arm in a sling. As the nerves healed, Peter remembered, he started to feel the pain. Like a dull headache at first, then like a stabbing migraine. After the stitches were removed, the pain was sometimes unbearable.

  Once the wound had healed, the arm remained limp. Peter couldn’t use his hand, which had curled into a half fist like a claw. He tried again and again to open it, but the effort was too painful. Afraid that the arm would atrophy, May brought him back to the doctor who had performed the surgery. As the man examined Peter he took hold of the arm and twisted it slightly to test its responsiveness. The stab of pain that shot through Peter made him throw up all over the doctor’s shoes.

  The physician told Peter and his parents that the nerves leading to the lower arm and hand were damaged irreparably — Peter would never again have sensation in his arm and hand or enjoy full use of either. He gave Peter a tennis ball to squeeze to prevent his muscles from withering and told him to try to use the arm and hand in other ways as much as he could.

  That he had been ambidextrous proved good luck for Peter, but he did have to relearn everything he’d done with his right hand before the accident — writing, playing tennis, eating — and painstakingly become a total southpaw at the age of thirteen.

  The injury left Peter’s psyche nearly as scarred as his shredded arm. He feared that he was now “a gimp” and would be an object of ridicule — or worse, of pity. He worried that he might never work in films or play tennis again. He fell into a depression; some days he was so deeply enclosed he wouldn’t respond when spoken to.

  There was no counseling in 1937 to help Peter cope with this disaster and his reactions to it. His parents, he said, “didn’t know from psychiatrists,” nor did they attempt to sit down and talk things out with him at any length themselves. Sir Sydney did give his son a few words of solace. The general reminded Peter that there were people in much worse straits than his and told him he was extremely lucky that his arm didn’t need to be amputated. “That did help me,” Peter recalled.

  May, on the other hand, “didn’t take the time or trouble to find out what was going on [with me],” Peter
said. She did urge him to use his hand whenever possible and prodded him to play the ukelele in front of guests — insensitive to the fact that he couldn’t play as well as he had before the accident and felt ashamed. Sometimes he couldn’t control his fingers at all and they’d become entangled in the strings, but still May continued to insist that he play.

  Peter began to keep his hand in his pocket almost all the time, and he came to dread shaking hands, something one can do only with one’s right hand. He was afraid, he said, that people he greeted would think, What is that? He’s not whole.

  BY EARLY MAY, PETER’S WOUND had completely healed and his continual squeezing of the tennis ball had restored some of his muscle strength. But he still had a great deal of pain in his upper arm and shoulder, made worse by the cool damp weather at Aix-les-Bains.

  His doctor recommended that the family move to a warmer climate and suggested either Florida or Southern California.

  May wanted to go to Los Angeles, and Sir Sydney agreed — he had found the area pleasant when the family visited it on their way to Hawaii in 1934. May and Peter were thrilled. Now that it seemed he would regain at least some use of his arm, his dreams of acting had freshened in his mind, and May, more solidly behind his ambitions than ever, knew that if he lived near Hollywood there would be ample opportunity for another movie role. It was the era of the child star; Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney were among the biggest box-office attractions in the world. So too was Freddie Bartholomew, a British boy one year younger than Peter who had created a sensation in MGM’s film version of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. MGM specialized in filming British classics (Bartholomew had starred as well in Little Lord Fauntleroy, Captains Courageous, and Kidnapped), and May was sure they would need an English lad of her son’s qualifications for future projects.