by James Spada
Joe Kennedy’s introduction to England was a happy one. He was viewed by most Britons as “refreshingly blunt” and “typically American,” his country’s “Nine-Child Envoy.” His eldest daughter, Kathleen, became the darling of English society; fourteen-year-old Patricia was dubbed “an Irish beauty.” Photos of the children appeared in the newspapers almost daily: Teddy taking a picture of the changing of the guard while holding his camera upside down; Kathleen riding a bicycle through the streets of London; thirteen-year-old Bobby speaking shyly with twelve-year-old Princess Elizabeth.
But the honeymoon didn’t last long. Kennedy’s earthiness soon came to be considered gaucherie by the likes of Lady Lawford, who was infuriated by what she learned of the Kennedys’ behavior. “Those barefoot Irish peasants!” she huffed when she read accounts of a Joe Kennedy faux pas with the queen. Tradition dictated that the new ambassador approach the queen, take her proffered left hand and lead her into a waltz once around the ballroom. Kennedy had told her, “Wrong hand!” and shaken her right hand, then spun her into a spirited polka. The queen had smiled valiantly through a few whirls before she snapped, “That is sufficient!” and returned to her throne.
Worse was to come. What finally destroyed Kennedy’s ambassadorship and caused him to leave England in disgrace was his unshakable commitment to appeasing Adolf Hitler, on the grounds that Britain would be unable to win a war with Germany. That position seemed vindicated when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from his Munich conference with Hitler with a nonaggression pact. “It is peace in our time,” Chamberlain declared as he waved the agreement above his head before a cheering crowd. But the Nazi conquests proceeded. Hitler’s armies invaded Czechoslovakia in March and prepared to attack Poland.
Aghast at the thought of a war in Europe and of American involvement in it — a possibility that posed a threat to the lives of his beloved sons Joe and Jack — Joe Kennedy continued, in the face of mounting evidence of the Nazi threat, to support appeasement. He would, he said, “sell ten Polands down the river in order to save the life of one British soldier.”
In March 1939, Chamberlain announced that if Germany invaded Poland, Britain would go to war against the Nazis. On September 1, Hitler’s tanks stormed across the Polish border. The world waited to see if Britain would keep its pledge. When Secretary of State Cordell Hull asked Joe Kennedy that question, he replied, “No.” But Kennedy was no longer privy to inside information. On September 3, Neville Chamberlain, telling friends that everything he had devoted his life to was in ruins, declared war on Germany. Joe called President Roosevelt and cried, “It’s the end of everything!”
By July 1940 the Nazis had begun a devastating air war against London and nearby areas, killing fourteen thousand civilians in the first three months. The English held up under the blitz, stubbornly refusing to allow the Germans to destroy their resolve. Few fled London for safer terrain — not even the royal family, who remained in Buckingham Palace as an example to the British people.
But Joe Kennedy left. He had sent his wife and children home shortly after the declaration of war, and within a month of the first attack, he rented a seventy-room country mansion, spending more and more time there as the bombings increased. Criticism of Kennedy mushroomed. He was accused of using strong-arm tactics to gain scarce shipping space for his liquor cargo on transatlantic transport, and of having made a hundred-thousand-dollar profit by selling Czech securities on the London exchange in anticipation of the German invasion. He was denounced as a coward on the floor of Parliament, and Winston Churchill, the new prime minister, urged Roosevelt to recall Kennedy. As England’s valiant struggle rallied more and more Americans to the British cause, Roosevelt saw no recourse but to do so. In November, he accepted Joe Kennedy’s resignation.
After he returned home, Joe told associates that Britain had better get used to living under German rule, and he said publicly that “democracy is finished in England.” His obstinate defeatism made him the object of British ridicule for years, and it left May Lawford with a bitter hatred for him and his family that she carried the rest of her life: “The fire of hell,” she spat, “isn’t too hot for old Kennedy!”
THE LAWFORDS HAD BEEN TOLD in August 1939 that the villa they lived in would soon no longer be available to them, and they were looking for alternate accommodations when word came that Sir Sydney’s bank accounts back home had been frozen. Because of the war, no sterling was allowed to leave England; the only way the Lawfords could have access to what little money they still had would be to return to London.
Sir Sydney strongly wanted to do so. A military man to his marrow, he longed to be in some way a part of Britain’s war effort, despite his approaching seventy-fourth birthday. May refused. She was still loath to face the whispers and disapproving glances she was sure awaited her because Freddie Bartholomew had cast doubt upon Peter’s paternity. And she didn’t want to endanger her family — especially the son who, clearly, was the best hope for her to retain anything like the grand style of living to which she was accustomed.
May, as usual, got her way. The Lawfords remained in Palm Beach, but were unable to convince anyone else to put them up or lend them a house, and they had no luck borrowing money. According to Louise Barker, May wrote to Louise’s mother, a casual acquaintance, to ask for a loan, which Mrs. Barker was unable to make. May did manage to borrow a few hundred dollars, and the Lawfords moved to a lesser section of Palm Beach’s considerably poorer neighbor, West Palm Beach. Their new home was a small, shabbily furnished Spanish-style bungalow near a railroad track on Avenida Hermosa that they rented for forty dollars a month. It was drafty and in need of repair. The plumbing leaked, the heating system was temperamental, and every few hours the walls would rattle with the deafening rumble of a passing freight train.
It was the first time he had experienced “the other side of the tracks,” Peter said, and it was a shock for the whole family. May reacted to her reduced circumstances more emotionally than she had to anything since her nervous breakdown twenty years earlier. She was, she said, in a “terrible condition.” She would drink too much and burst into tears at the slightest provocation. Her hands shook so badly she dropped teacups; if one of them broke, “I would just go all to pieces.”
When she wasn’t crying in her bedroom she was “crabby and irritable” — especially so because, for the first time in her life, she had no servants and had to do household chores herself. It was a major problem for her. As a child, she hadn’t been allowed in the kitchen;Victorian ladies of a certain station were not expected to toil over a stove. Thus, at fifty-six, May Lawford had no idea of how to cook.
Her first attempt to light the oven almost ended in tragedy when gas fumes ignited, spewing a fireball out of the oven that seared off her eyebrows and some of her hair. She was hospitalized with second- degree burns. When she came home she decided to try again, and made a chicken. It was an unforgettable meal, Peter later said. “I think she boiled it. It was like rubber. You could have bounced it from the floor to the ceiling. But we ate it. Most of her other dishes were pretty bleak, but we ate those, too. We didn’t have much choice.”
May’s culinary skills improved, but the family’s financial situation didn’t. Peter had just turned sixteen and hadn’t been tutored for several years. He should have enrolled in Palm Beach High School, but he was the only possible breadwinner, and he instead went to work pumping gas at a filling station in West Palm Beach. Friends who had looked on the Lawfords as “some kind of royalty” were appalled. “When I heard he was peddling gas,” Muriel O’Brien recalled, “I almost had a stroke. I felt very badly for him. He was very embarrassed, I’m sure.”
He was, but on another level working brought him satisfaction. To hold down a job was a way for Peter to make a first tentative step toward independence from May, a start toward becoming more than a mama’s boy. At the same time, ironically, it was a way to please his mother and win her approbation, something he craved as much
as he craved freedom from her clutches. She made it clear to him that the family’s financial welfare was now his responsibility, and he took it very seriously. As he had all through his childhood, Peter would do everything it took to keep his mother happy, calm, and on firm emotional footing.
Peter’s stint as a gas jockey didn’t last long; it soon led to a much better position parking cars at Carl Brukenfeld’s lot behind Worth Avenue, the fashionable shopping center of Palm Beach. Peter didn’t have a driver’s license, but he had known how to drive since the age of eight, when his father had taught him as he sat on the general’s lap behind the wheel. Brukenfeld found Peter polite, energetic, and able to take initiative, and after just a few weeks asked him to manage the lot and supervise two other boys his own age. They parked cars and occasionally washed them as well; Peter collected the monthly rents from the customers who worked in the area and parked there every weekday. His pay was twenty-five dollars a week plus tips. Peter later said, “I felt lucky to get it.”
The tips were very good, because many of Brukenfeld’s clients were among Palm Beach’s wealthiest residents. The biggest tipper, the “heavy cat,” as the boys called him, was Joe Kennedy, who regularly handed them a quarter when he claimed his car. (The standard gratuity was ten cents.)
But Peter’s initial meetings with Joe Kennedy weren’t all pleasant. Peter’s fellow workers were both black, and when business was slow the three of them would sit under a tree at the side of the unpaved lot to cool off, eat ham and tomato sandwiches, and play penny ante poker.
The Kennedy patriarch wasn’t pleased when he saw Peter fraternizing with his co-workers. He complained to Brukenfeld, “It doesn’t look good to see the niggers sitting under the tree with the white boy.” Brukenfeld held no prejudices but realized that in a southern city a reaction like Mr. Kennedy’s wouldn’t be an isolated one. Embarrassed, he told Peter it wasn’t a good idea for all three of them to take their lunch break at the same time. “But we jump up when a car comes in,” Peter replied, puzzled. Finally Brukenfeld told him the truth, that his friendliness with “the Negro boys” was hurting business. “I didn’t understand,” Peter later said — but he did as he was told.
It was Peter’s first taste of racism. He harbored no prejudices himself; his world travels had exposed him to dozens of races, different skin colors, and exotic cultures. Although May was racist and anti- Semitic, she gave Peter free rein in his choice of playmates, “providing they had clean noses and no spots.” In Nassau, Peter’s friends were exclusively black. He learned at an early age to judge people by who they were and not by their religion or nationality or skin color.
Ironically, Peter suffered discrimination himself in Palm Beach, simply because he wasn’t like most of the other kids. Muriel O’Brien’s picture of him as “some kind of English idiot, the Earl of Clownsville” wasn’t an isolated opinion. Connie Savage, a girl about his age whom he befriended in West Palm Beach, recalled that Peter didn’t have many close friends. “The Palm Beachers aren’t the easiest people to get friendly with,” she said, “especially if you’re a little different.” The local girls adored Peter, who seemed to grow better looking by the day, but his shyness kept him from getting close to most of them. The boys resented him, according to Connie, “because he had this British demeanor and he was an aristocrat.” They taunted him, sniggered behind his back about his bum arm. They hid his motor scooter and waited until he had walked home to give it back to him.
Peter tried to fit in; he played tennis and gave rides to the other kids on his scooter, which his relative in New York had sent him. Tennis was a struggle. He had not been able to master using his left hand to serve, and his face flushed with embarrassment whenever he delivered a weak, inaccurate lob or lost a game to an inexperienced player. But he had a piece of luck: one of the professionals who tutored the wealthy kids asked him if he were related to Herbert Lawford. When Peter said, “Yes, he’s my uncle,” the pros started treating him like a celebrity — Herbert Lawford, originator of the “Lawford stroke,” was one of their idols. From then on the instructors gave Peter free lessons, working with him every day to teach him how to compensate for his handicap.
The first time he played really well, he ran all the way home and called out to his parents from the front yard. When May and Sir Sydney came out on the porch, Peter threw a ball in the air with his right hand and delivered a sizzling serve that sent the ball crashing through the living room window. Sir Sydney only laughed, delighted by his son’s progress. “Break every window in the house if you like,” he cried. “Good boy!”
In September 1940 Peter turned seventeen, and May realized that he was past the point of aspiring to be the next Freddie Bartholomew. Seventeen is an awkward age for an actor — too old to play adorable little boys and not old enough to be a leading man. Peter, although handsome, was thin, gangly, and uncoordinated. May would have to wait for her son to become the dashing movie star she was sure he was destined to be. Peter himself clearly felt that he was in a holding pattern in Palm Beach. He joined a small theater workshop to practice his craft until he could get back to Hollywood. And for the first time, he risked ridicule by telling one of his Palm Beach friends about his dreams of stardom.
Connie Savage never forgot the day Peter invited her to the house on Avenida Hermosa. As they sat alone in his living room, he showed her his scrapbook and told her that he had been in Lord Jeff and had done some movie work in England.
“Let me tell you what I’m going to do,” he said. “I’m going to go to Hollywood and become a star.”
“Peter!” Connie exclaimed. “How could you do that? Who do you know out there?”
“I know three people,” he replied. “I know Mickey Rooney, Freddie Bartholomew, and Jane Withers.”
Connie was awestruck. “It seemed like an impossible dream or something to me, but Peter said it like there was no question about it. I’m going to go to Hollywood and become a star,’ he told me. Just like that.”
ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, three months to the day after Peter’s eighteenth birthday, Japanese bombers attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Within twenty-four hours, America was at war, and any able-bodied male between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five who didn’t volunteer was soon drafted. In Hollywood, many of the leading male stars volunteered for service, either in Britain or in the United States — and there were few young actors available to take their places. Lucille Ryman was head of talent at MGM when America entered the war, and her orders were to “sign up any man who was six feet tall and 4-F. If we signed someone who had no talent, we just used him for background.”
Peter heard about the shortage of men in Hollywood and recognized a golden opportunity. His arm disqualified him from military service, he was over six feet tall, he was extremely good-looking, and he had talent. Now there was no way, he thought, that he wouldn’t make it big in Hollywood, just as he had bragged to Connie Savage that he would.
But how was he to get there? His income from the parking lot barely kept him and his parents in food and lodging. When he told the Palm Beach socialite Mary Sanford that he was going to Hollywood, she asked him how much money he had. “Ten dollars,” he replied. “You’re going to Hollywood with ten dollars?” she asked incredulously. “I have enough money,” Peter insisted, “and I have a lot of friends out there if I need money in California.” Mary offered to give him a few dollars, but he refused it.
Then he got a lucky break. One of the girls he played tennis with, Gloria Butler, told him that she and her mother were planning to drive to California but couldn’t find a chauffeur willing to take them that far. “How about me?” Peter asked.
“You’re joking!” Gloria responded.
“Certainly not,” he replied. “I want to move to California anyway. Once we get out there you can hire someone to drive you back.” Mrs. Butler would have preferred a round-trip driver, but she liked the idea of making the trip with someone she and her daughter knew. Sh
e said Peter would be fine. Now he’d have to run the idea by May.
She was all for it and told Peter that she and Sir Sydney would follow in a few weeks — it was time to get Peter back to Hollywood and on track toward a movie career. Sir Sydney, seventy-six, was reluctant to uproot himself yet again, and even less excited by the fact that he and May would have to drive themselves across country. But he knew that in Hollywood, Peter could make a great deal more money, even in bit parts, than he could doing anything else in Palm Beach.
The day after Christmas, Peter and the Butlers embarked on their journey, which Peter recalled as “interminable.” The threesome stopped at every conceivable landmark or point of interest along the way, and by the time they reached the Petrified Forest, Peter said, “we looked like we belonged there.” Finally they arrived in Santa Barbara, where they checked into the Biltmore Hotel for a two-week stay, during which Peter and Gloria swam, played tennis, and sunbathed. It was his first taste in more than two years of the kind of life he had been used to, and he had to admit he had missed it.
Back in Palm Beach, May was able to borrow a few hundred dollars and buy a questionably reliable 1929 jalopy for thirty-seven dollars. She loaded it up with as many of the family’s possessions as she could fit in the trunk and backseat, made sure that Sir Sydney was as comfortable as possible in the passenger seat, and started out on a trek to California that took them through northern Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.