by James Spada
The clubs provided romantic intrigue galore, and gossip columnists got their scoops flitting from table to table. Ex-husbands rubbed shoulders with ex-wives and their new spouses; spurned lovers did a slow burn as they watched the object of their recent affection whirl around the dance floor with a sexy new paramour.
Lana Turner was one of the most regular — and glamorous — of the Mocambo revelers. Steve Crane, her second husband, considered the Mocambo “the perfect setting for a young man on the make,” and it certainly was that for Peter. There and in the other clubs, he charmed some of the most beautiful women in the world: Rhonda Fleming, Anne Baxter, Betty Grable, Judy Garland, Ava Gardner, and Marilyn Maxwell, among others. Witty, a marvelous dancer, his English manners and accent impressive to everyone, Peter soon became one of the most sought after dates in Hollywood. The things about him that had alienated the teenagers of Manhasset and Palm Beach were precisely what entranced the show biz set.
Hollywood adored the British. Like Louis B. Mayer, most of the actors, producers, writers, and directors had come from humble beginnings, and they fawned over anyone who seemed to possess the breeding and background they pretended to. The British community in Hollywood was assiduously courted, because their presence lent an aura of genuine sophistication and elegance to any function — just as Sir Sydney and Lady Lawford’s had to Palm Beach parties.
The British had mastered it all centuries earlier — the courtliness, the regal carriage, the precise speech patterns, the fastidious dress, the showy dinner parties. Hollywood was nothing if not a community in love with artifice and the trappings of “class,” and the surest signs of success were the purchase of a grand house, the hiring of a butler and a governess for the children, and the purchase of a Rolls-Royce. Then, a lavish party — to show everyone that the host and hostess were “to the manor born.”
Peter Lawford was to the manor born, and although his family was now relatively poor, he had what no amount of money could ever buy: genuine breeding. More than it had anywhere else in the world, Peter’s upbringing served him well in Hollywood.
PETER PURSUED STILL ANOTHER LIFE, one that many of his friends believe reflected his true personality: the life-style of the California beach scene. The beaches along the coast west of Los Angeles were uncrowded and pristine in 1942, dotted with small refreshment stands and a few umbrellas, and were the favorite spots of an athletic, sun-worshipping group of youngsters who glowed with vitality and golden tans.
Most of the boys at the beach either were too young to serve in the armed forces or were 4-F, and they put the war out of their minds except during the occasional blackout or when news of an injured or killed friend or relative intruded into their idyll. They had carved out a separate peace on the white sand along the warm and shimmering California coast, trying to hold on to the innocence of their youth as long as possible, playing volleyball, surfing, frolicking in the water by day, drinking beer and romancing girls on the sand at night.
As soon as he arrived in Hollywood, Peter sought out the friendship of these habitués of Malibu and State and Venice beaches who were having fun in the sun twenty years before the Beach Boys and Gidget and the surfing craze swept the country. They were attractive young people, down-to-earth and unpretentious. The friends Peter made “doing the beach scene” remained his friends for the rest of his life.
One of them was Peter Sabiston, who later became a Hollywood agent, who noticed Peter watching his volleyball team play at Santa Monica Beach. Peter approached Sabiston, introduced himself, and asked how he could get into the game. “I didn’t know who he was,” Sabiston recalled. “I told him that you had to put your name on a list. The guys who won would stay on the court and be challenged by the guys on the list. We played two-man teams, so you had to have a partner. We got him into the game that day. It’s not as easy as it looks, but he was reasonably proficient at it. Peter was a very good athlete. He was able to overcome the handicap of his bad arm because he had natural ability.”
Peter loved the informality of the beach; after a week of wearing makeup and the clothing of a Victorian gentleman, for instance, he liked nothing better than to throw on jeans and a sweatshirt and head for the beach. The movie magazines, of course, were quick to pick up on the “elegant Brit as beach boy” angle with Peter, and they ran innumerable photo essays about him and his friends at the shore.
Peter and Sabiston were part of a regular beach group that included Roy Marcher, whose family was prominent in the fine costume jewelry business; Joe Naar, a compact, pugnacious UCLA football player and boxer; handsome Charlie Dunne from USC and his sprightly wife, Molly, a movie extra who swam in Esther Williams’s pictures; and Dick Livingston, a friend of Charlie’s from USC. The beach was a major part of all their lives, Molly Dunne recalled. “That’s all we did was go to the beach. We’d go to bed early so we could get up early and make sure we got the right spot on the sand, and so they could get their names on the waiting list for volleyball.”
Peter sometimes slept on the beach so that he could wake up early enough to get in a few hours of surfing before he had to be at the studio. The boards in those days were enormous — about nine feet long — heavy and clunky. Built like a ship’s hull, they were more like paddleboards, were hollow, and had a drain. The first time a surfer used a smaller, more compact board — dubbed a “potato chip” — it caused a sensation.
Dick Livingston met Peter as he drove past the Comstock Avenue house in 1944. “I had a blue 1940 Mercury coupe with red leather interior,” Livingston recalled, “and I saw this man — boy, really — washing his car, and it was Peter. He had the same car as mine in the same colors. So I stopped and said, ‘God, your car is terrific!’ He said, ‘Mine is just like yours except mine is a four-door!’” They became fast friends. “Peter was such a regular guy. Not ‘Hollywood’ at all. The whole time I knew him, most of his friends weren’t movie people. He associated with us mostly.”
But Peter had fine-tuned a rare ability to compartmentalize his life, and he developed friendships with fellow actors as readily as with beach boys. In Hollywood, he was virtually inseparable from three fellow MGM actors: Van Johnson, a twenty-eight-year-old boy-next- door type Metro was grooming for stardom; Keenan Wynn, also twenty-eight, the son of vaudeville star Ed Wynn and a talented character actor; and the charismatic, emotionally unstable thirty-year-old leading man Robert Walker.
All three men loved motorcycles and zoomed around the Hollywood Hills at night on their machines. Peter rode his bike, an Enfield, to the studio every morning — until MGM put a stop to that. Robert Walker had had a minor accident on his motorcycle a few weeks earlier, and the studio wasn’t going to take any more chances. “You have a future with us,” an executive told Peter, “and we don’t think it’s an advantage for you to break your neck.”
Metro’s warning didn’t stop Peter from riding after hours, but a near-tragedy did. In March 1945 Keenan Wynn had a smashup with a car at Sunset and Hilgard in Westwood. He fractured his skull, sprained his back, and broke his jaw in five places. “That’s all, brother,” Peter said — and sold his Enfield.
Keenan and his wife, the former actress Evie Lynn Abbott, were friendly with most of the biggest stars in Hollywood, and Peter was eager to meet them. “We were always giving parties,” Evie remembered. “I gave one in particular that Peter wanted to come to, and I told him, ‘I can’t have you, Peter, because this party is for people we’ve known a lot longer than we’ve known you. It’s not your group.’” Peter begged Evie to invite him. “Oh, please, I’ll do anything. I’ll hide behind the curtains. Just let me be there.” Finally Evie agreed, but she told him, “You had better stay behind the curtains.” She made him do it, too — kiddingly. “Then of course he came out and started saying hello to people. We used to laugh about that a lot. And from then on our friendship really grew. He was a very funny fellow, had a great sense of humor, and he was a very open and honest guy. We liked him immediately.”
The closeness of Peter’s friendship with Van, Keenan, and Evie caused rumors around Hollywood. The more cynical gossips wondered aloud if Peter wasn’t involved in a sexual ménage à quatre. When Evie divorced Keenan in 1947 and four hours later married Van, the jokesters had a field day. For weeks, the most popular question in Hollywood was, “Who’s going to get custody of Peter?”
According to Evie Johnson, the rumors that Peter was sexually involved with Van and Keenan were untrue — but, she said, “Peter and I had an affair, in the late forties. It wasn’t an affair, just a quick thing one night on the beach. We had a few mint juleps or something and I got very relaxed, and the next thing I knew, pow!”
Peter’s relationships with women were usually as partitioned as the rest of his life. He dated many of the college girls and beach bunnies he met at the shore, girls who were thrilled to be with a budding movie star. And he dated beautiful actresses, of whom he was frequently in awe. “Everybody had a crush on him,” said Molly Dunne. “He was taking out every girl in town.”
It was hardly surprising. Peter Lawford at twenty-one was one of the most attractive and charming young men to be found in Hollywood since Errol Flynn had become a star in 1935 — and his success with women would soon be almost as legendary as Flynn’s. Few could resist his boyishly open face, dazzling smile, and tight physique, or his endearing English accent, impeccable manners, and quick wit.
Molly Dunne was Peter’s closest female confidante at this time. She first met him in 1943 and remained a lifelong friend. Married to Peter’s best beach buddy, Charlie Dunne, Molly was strictly a friend to Peter at first. “Everybody thought that Peter and I had an affair while I was married to Charlie, but we didn’t. Later, when I got divorced, Peter and I did have a thing, and no one knew about it.”
Almost from the beginning, Molly was privy to Peter’s sex life. Most of his relationships were sexual, she knew, but he never took any of the girls home because of his parents. “They’d go someplace else — to her house, usually. Or sometimes they’d just stay in his car. He used to keep a bottle of Cepacol in the backseat. I remember the first time I asked him, ‘What is this for?’ and he gave me one of those know-it-all looks and said, ‘Oh, you’re so dumb.’
“He was into oral sex. He could and did do the other, but he preferred oral sex. That’s what the Cepacol was for, because most girls of my generation thought oral sex was dirty. I flatly refused to do it when we were together. That’s what ended our physical relationship. And a lot of other girls wouldn’t do it either.”
PETER COULDN’T FIND LANA TURNER, and he was frantic. For eight months, since early 1944, they had been involved in an affair, and every morning she picked him up in her jeep so they could ride together to the studio. This morning she had not shown up, and when Peter called her house, she wasn’t there. He waited an hour, then hopped in his own car and sped to the studio. He barely made the first setup.
Lana wasn’t at the studio either, and nobody knew where she was. Peter was beside himself with worry, because by this time he was deeply in love with her. They had met at Keenan and Evie Wynn’s. “God, she was a beautiful woman!” Peter said years later. “She was already a heavyweight among stars, but her own weight was distributed perfectly.”
She was one of the loveliest women ever to grace a movie screen, and she affected men the way Peter affected women. She had, since her arrival in Hollywood in 1937, dated just about every eligible bachelor in town, including Victor Mature, Robert Stack, Howard Hughes, Frank Sinatra, Buddy Rich, and Tony Martin. In 1940, at nineteen, she had eloped with the bandleader Artie Shaw. Less than four months later, she filed for divorce and underwent an abortion.
Two years later, Lana eloped again — this time with a businessman, Steve Crane. They divorced six months later, then remarried in March 1943 with Lana six months pregnant with his child. Less than a year after their daughter, Cheryl, was born, they were divorced again. It was at this point that Lana met Peter Lawford. She was twenty-four and a full-fledged leading lady opposite the likes of Spencer Tracy (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Clark Gable {Somewhere I’ll Find You).
Peter, not yet twenty-one, was at first intimidated by Turner’s attraction to him. “But I soon found out,” he said, “that she was not one of those stars who won’t mix with lesser beings. She never gave me any of that movie star bull. I was a man and she was a woman, and we really hit it off.”
For the first eight months, they were inseparable. They took drives in Lana’s light-blue 1939 Lincoln Continental out to Malibu, “where it was deserted and private,” Peter recalled. They talked, laughed, made love on the sand as the sun set on the Pacific Ocean. Weekends, they made the rounds of nightclubs and parties, ensuring that their names were in the columns and their pictures in the newspapers.
After their nights on the town, they’d go back to Turner’s. “We couldn’t go to my place,” Peter recalled, “because my mother would eat alive any girl that even called there, acting like they were all out to get their hands on her precious son.”
Lana was precisely the kind of girl Peter most responded to: one equally at home with sophistication and outdoorsy athleticism. “Lana has been publicized as a tremendous glamour girl,” Peter said at the time. “Few people realize that she really has very simple tastes. She loves to go to the beach, she plays tennis, she rides beautifully. She is one of those amazing girls who does well everything she tries.” Another thing he liked about her, he said, was that she was the kind of woman “you can call up and say, ‘Come and help me bury Dad — I just shot him,’ and she would be there without question.”
Before long the sight of Peter’s car parked in front of Turner’s house had become a Beverly Hills fixture, and one day Keenan Wynn and the young actor Jackie Cooper decided to play a joke on Peter. When they noticed his car in Lana’s driveway at one A.M. they let the air out of all four tires. “It was just a stupid, mean, terrible thing to do,” Cooper now admits. “He had to call a service station, and she was screaming at him.”
Peter wanted to marry Lana Turner, but his friends’ kid stuff like the trick with his tires caused her to reconsider the romance. Then she disappeared on him, and he heard nothing from her for three days. He called every friend of hers he knew — no one could say where she was. He didn’t want to raise the alarm with the studio, but by the fourth day he was ready to do something desperate. Then, out of the blue, she called him. Peter was shaking, but he kept his cool. “Hi, baby, how are you?” he said to her. “Where ya been?”
“I took a trip. I’m in Boston.”
“Boston?” Peter tried to keep his voice even. “When will you be coming back?”
“I don’t know. Whenever the studio wants me back.” Then there was a long pause and Lana said, “Oh, by the way, Peter, it’s over between us.”
“What?”
“It’s over, Peter.”
He felt his stomach lurch, but still he maintained his composure. “Oh” was all he said. “Is there someone else, then?”
“Yes. Gene Krupa.”
Peter later told Milton Ebbins, who would become his personal manager and closest friend, that Lana Turner broke his heart. “She went to Boston with Gene Krupa and dropped Peter cold!” Ebbins recalled. “He said to me, ‘Milt, she hung me out on a tree and I couldn’t come down for a year’ ”
Lana Turner’s affair with the famed dummer Krupa didn’t last long, and when she returned to Hollywood she began a publicized romance with Turhan Bey, a dapper Turk who had appeared in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Privately, Peter took out his anger at Lana on Bey. He referred to him snidely as “Turban” Bey, and when he found a publicity still of Bud Abbott in Arab robes in the just-released picture Lost in a Harem, he recaptioned it “Turban Bey’s father, Oi Bey.”
Peter’s breakup with Lana Turner changed the way he treated women. “After that,” recalled Milton Ebbins, “he started to just drop women when he was finished with them. He could be cruel, heartless. It was Lana w
ho taught him that.”
EIGHT
May Lawford wasn’t the least bit pleased by her son’s carefree ways off the movie set. She disapproved of his long weekends playing volleyball and surfing, and she was upset by his late nights spent wining and dining Lana Turner. May was indeed, as Peter had put it, terrified of losing her “precious son” — not only to a woman, but to his career as well. As she saw it, what she had so long pushed her son to achieve had driven a wedge between them, and she tried everything she could to insinuate herself into his career. He actively discouraged her efforts at every turn — and so did everyone else at Metro whenever she tried to meddle.
Lillian Burns was one of her targets. Whenever they saw each other, May told her, “You must come to tea” or “I’ll come and have tea with you.” Lillian was afraid May wanted to give her advice on how to coach Peter, and she demurred. “I told her, ‘I really don’t have time for it.’ And I didn’t. She always wanted me to know that she was Lady Lawford. I was not impressed.”
When May learned that Elizabeth Taylor’s mother, Sara, received a weekly paycheck from MGM, she went to Louis B. Mayer. “She thought she should be put under contract and be on the payroll,” Lillian recalled. Mayer turned May down and pointed out that because Elizabeth was still a child, her mother’s presence on the set was important for her welfare. Just the opposite was true of Peter.