by James Spada
Sparks flew that night between Lawford and Hayworth, who had been separated from Orson Welles for over a year. But Rita needed to be circumspect — she had come to the party with someone else. Jackie Cooper recalled what transpired: “At one point in the party Rita surprised me by handing me a note. She said, ‘That’s my phone number. Tell Peter to call me. I’ll be home tonight around twelve.’ So I gave the note to Peter and evidently he was expecting it.
“My wife and I got him on the phone the next morning and he gave us a blow-by-blow description of their night together. He was naughty that way, just terrible. A lot of times just to get laughs he’d exaggerate, tell wild stories so he wouldn’t seem like someone who was just kissing and telling. You never knew if he was telling the truth.”
Rita Hayworth once said of herself, “Men go to bed with Gilda, but they wake up with me.” Peter was no exception. He told friends that Rita was “the worst lay in the world. She was always drunk and she never stopped eating.” After they’d have sex, he said, Hayworth would go into the kitchen, sit down in front of the refrigerator, open the door, and devour everything on the shelves.
The Hayworth-Lawford affair was short-lived, but Peter had better luck with another sex goddess, Ava Gardner, the North Carolina belle with green almond-shaped eyes and inviting lips who had been voted the most beautiful woman in the world. Peter first met her on the set of Pilot #5 early in 1943 and took her out shortly afterward when she separated from her first husband, Mickey Rooney. She was lithe and lean rather than voluptuous, traits that appealed to Peter, but she exuded a lush sensuality that could drive a man crazy. Still, the first time she went out with Peter, in June 1944, Ava had to compete for his undivided attention.
He had driven to her house in his new Mercury convertible, and as they sat on the couch Ava was disconcerted by Peter’s half-witted answers to her questions — he was quite obviously distracted. At one point he jumped up and looked out the front door, then returned with more abstracted snippets of conversation. The second time he did this, Ava asked him, “Is there something out there I ought to know about?” “It’s my new car,” Peter replied. “I just wanted to make sure she was all right.”
“She’s doing better than I am,” Ava grumbled.
Despite this inauspicious start, the two saw each other off and on for several years, particularly after Ava’s second marriage, to Lana Turner’s ex-husband Artie Shaw, foundered. She and Peter danced at Ciro’s, went to baseball games, and shared an interest in books and music. “You can really talk to Ava,” Peter said. “She has an insatiable thirst for knowledge.”
She also had an insatiable hunger for men. “She was sexually uninhibited, wild, all kinds of goodies and quick,” Phil Silvers’s wife, Jo-Carroll, has said. “You couldn’t get ahold of her. She was gone and off with somebody else before you knew where you were.”
Peter would soon learn the truth of this observation. On New Year’s Eve in 1946, Peter spent a romantic evening with Ava. They went to a party together, embraced and kissed each other as the clock struck twelve, and then went back to her place for a romp. For the first time, Peter sensed that their casual relationship was starting to get more serious.
As he prepared to leave at about three in the morning, however, his illusion was shattered. The young crooner Mel Tormé appeared at the door, and as Peter said his good-nights to Ava, Tormé settled down on the couch. Mel and Ava spent the rest of New Year’s Day on a romantic drive up the coast, and Tormé’s affair with Ava began.
Peter’s fling with Ava Gardner was over, but it would come back to haunt him because of his friendship with her future husband — the most volatile, emotional, jealous, and violent man he was ever to meet in his life: Frank Sinatra. Their paths first crossed in 1945, when Peter attended another of Louis B. Mayer’s command-performance gatherings at his Santa Monica beach house, this one, according to Peter, a “ferociously boring” dinner party for fifty in honor of Henry Ford II and his wife. Boring it may have been, but Peter and Sinatra hit it off famously. Sinatra had just signed a contract with MGM after three years of phenomenal success as a singer, during which he had become the highest-paid — and most swooned over — concert performer in the country.
Peter’s date for this Mayer soirée was Marilyn Maxwell, the sexy blond perennial starlet he was seeing at the time. Maxwell knew Sinatra, and she introduced him to Peter. All three sat together at dinner and found that they shared a wry outlook on the proceedings and “the ever-present ass kissers, sycophants, court jesters, and a plethora of terminal egos,” as Peter put it. They laughed a lot under their breaths at what they saw going on around them.
Peter had been curious to meet this singing sensation who seemed to have “a built-in, smoldering, quiet mystique,” but he wasn’t prepared to be so beguiled by him. He found Sinatra in an expansive mood, brimful of marvelous tales, and with a brittle sense of humor very close to Peter’s own. Most surprising was that Sinatra seemed modest, completely unaffected by his great success. Peter and Frank became fast friends. They “did the clubs” together, played poker, met religiously every week to watch The Friday Night Fights on television. For the next seven years, Peter carried in his wallet a membership card from the “Sigh Guy Frank Sinatra Fan Club.”
In the fall of 1946, Peter received word that he had been cast in Sinatra’s third MGM picture, It Happened in Brooklyn, a musical romance with Kathryn Grayson and Jimmy Durante that was little more than an excuse to string together some terrific Sammy Cahn-Jule Styne musical numbers: Sinatra and Grayson were to duet on “Time After Time,” and Durante and Sinatra would perform a rousing number in a music store, “The Song’s Gotta Come from the Heart.”
There were no plans at first to have Peter sing or dance in It Happened in Brooklyn. He had never done either on film, but he had sung reasonably well and danced the jitterbug excellently at so many Hollywood parties that Brooklyn director Richard Whorf decided at the last minute to give Peter a number called “ ’Tain’t Right to Love You Like I Do.”
Sing in a movie starring Frank Sinatra? Peter wasn’t sure he wanted to try, but Whorf was insistent. Nervous, he practiced the song for hours, took advice from Sinatra, and performed it flawlessly in one take. As it turned out, the number practically stole the show. Not because of Peter’s singing — which was only adequate — but because of the furious jitterbug he let loose with in the middle of the song. An exciting bit of business, it showed Peter’s trim, long-legged physique off to great advantage and took audiences completely by surprise. They loved it. As columnist Sheilah Graham noted, “When the girls who squeal young men into fame saw and heard Peter’s number at a sneak preview, they screamed. For a few minutes they even forgot Frankie Boy and carried on fit to kill for Mr. Lawford. Now he’s a Star.”
Female moviegoers weren’t the only ones who were impressed. MGM executives, after gauging the preview audience’s reaction, increased Peter’s billing in the film’s ads from sixty percent of the title type size to one hundred percent. When the picture was released in March 1947, critics agreed that Peter was terrific. Jack D. Grant of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Peter Lawford, who has built up a swoon-following to rival Sinatra’s, is a sensation as the English kid.” The Los Angeles Times added, “His jive number is a show stopper.” The film, however, was a disappointment at the box office. Modestly budgeted, it took in only thirty-eight dollars more domestically than it cost to make, and after the expenses of advertising and promotion were added, lost $138,000.
In June, Peter’s second film of 1947 opened. My Brother Talks to Horses was an amusing but slight comedy, directed by Fred Zinnemann, that cast Peter as second fiddle to nine-year-old Jackie “Butch” Jenkins, a popular child star of the day who would retire three films later when he developed a stutter. The story had Butch as a boy able to converse with horses, and Peter as his older brother who uses Butch’s talent to win bets at the racetrack. The movie was promoted as “the most novel comedy ever filmed” and was w
ell reviewed as a “small picture,” but it fared abysmally at the box office, losing Metro nearly a million dollars.
IF PETER WAS ANXIOUS ABOUT singing one song and dancing a brief jitterbug in It Happened in Brooklyn, he was positively terrified by his next assignment: to star with June Allyson in a remake of Metro’s 1930 production Good News, a college musical originally presented on Broadway with a score by DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson that included “The Varsity Drag,” “Lucky in Love,” and “The Best Things in Life Are Free.”
This version of Good News was to be the latest production from MGM’s prestigious Freed Unit, headed by the studio’s resident musical genius, Arthur Freed. A lyricist turned producer, Freed’s credits included many of the finest musical films ever made in Hollywood, from The Wizard of Oz to Babes in Arms, Cabin in the Sky, Girl Crazy, Meet Me in St. Louis, Ziegfeld Follies, and Till the Clouds Roll By.
Freed had been given virtual carte blanche, both artistically and financially. He attracted the finest musical talents in the country to MGM, and by the midforties the Freed Unit was as much a family as it was a well-oiled movie production machine. Freed surrounded himself with sophisticated New York talents like musical supervisor Roger Edens, writers Leonard Gershe, Kay Thompson, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green, and directors Vincente Minnelli, Charles Walters, and Busby Berkeley. And he had, of course, the creme de la creme of performers at his disposal — Judy Garland, the star of fifteen of his first twenty-four films, Mickey Rooney, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, and Ann Miller, among others.
Peter was nervous about being in this kind of company, and so intimidated by the reputation of the Freed Unit that he doubted he’d be able to pull off what the producer expected of him. Not only would he have to carry a musical motion picture by singing and dancing in half a dozen elaborate numbers, but he was to play Tommy Marlowe, an all-American college football hero — a part originally planned for either Van Johnson or Mickey Rooney!
Moments after he received notification of the assignment, Peter telephoned Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who had been hired by Freed and the film’s director Charles Walters to write the screenplay and some new songs. “You’ve got to get me out of this picture!” he screamed into the phone. “I’ll make an absolute ass of myself!”
As the writing partners listened patiently on the other end of the line, Peter rattled off the reasons why he couldn’t possibly play the part. “I’m English. I have a British accent. I’m not your all-American ‘Joe College.’ I’ve never played football in my life!” He took a deep breath and concluded, “I’m stupefied.”
Comden and Green just giggled at Peter’s frantic state. “Of course you can do it,” they told him. “You were fine in It Happened in Brooklyn. You’ll be fine in this picture too. You’ll just have to work on your American accent, that’s all. It’s all part of acting. It’ll be a good experience for you.”
Still, Peter later said, “I wasn’t at all sure it would be good news for me.” But if he refused to do the film, MGM would put him on suspension, as they had Gloria De Haven when she refused one of the film’s lesser roles, and that was something he couldn’t afford. He reported for work on February 11, 1947 — his nerves raw, his back muscles in spasm — for the most challenging assignment of his career.
Peter worked harder on Good News than he had on anything before it. He took singing and dancing lessons daily both before and during the shoot, worked on his musical numbers with the film’s associate producer, Roger Edens, who had long been Judy Garland’s musical supervisor, and studied with a vocal coach to perfect an “American accent.” Peter’s days of goofing off and making telephone calls on the set were behind him. For Good News, he frequently worked from seven in the morning until nine at night, virtually nonstop.
The plot of Good News was formulaic: Tait College’s football hero can play in the big game only if he passes astronomy, his weakest subject. He’s tutored by Connie (June Allyson), a bookish girl who’s mad for him. He pursues a gorgeous coed (Joan McCracken), who pays attention to him only because she thinks he’s a millionaire. He passes, wins the game, gets the right girl, and all live happily ever after.
Comden and Green wanted to write a song for the tutoring scene, but thought to themselves, astronomy? They decided to change Tommy Marlowe’s weakness to French, and they and Roger Edens developed a wonderful piece of special material, “The French Lesson,” in which Connie teaches Tommy the rudiments of the language.
Peter coached June in French for hours so that she would sound reasonable teaching him the same thing on-screen. “My French accent was atrocious — his was superb,” June later wrote. Finally Peter told her, “This is the most ridiculous part I’ve ever had or hope to have.”
Tommy, as played by Peter, picks the language up in absurdly short order, responding to Connie’s cues with a flawless accent. Later in the film, Peter sings the entire second verse of “The Best Things in Life Are Free” in beautiful French. It’s all very silly, but no one seemed to mind — because the numbers, and Peter and June’s performances of them, were charming.
Peter’s singing presented more of a problem. During a preview of the film, an audience “reactograph” was prepared to monitor scene by scene whether the audience liked or disliked what they were seeing. At the point when Peter began to sing his first solo number, the graph registered the strongest negative reaction, and it improved only after four other singers joined him. But once audiences grew accustomed to the fact that Peter wasn’t really a singer and was, as one critic later pointed out, “sensibly talking his lyrics rather than singing them,” no one seemed to mind that he wasn’t going to threaten Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby.
Despite Peter’s efforts to Americanize his speech, Tommy Marlowe’s “A”s were suspiciously long every now and then. “When I’d slip,” Peter recalled, “Chuck Walters would nudge me and urge, ‘Cut the Back Bay stuff.’”
Peter found it a strain to work with June Allyson after the breakup of their romance. His stand-in, Ken DuMain, recalled that Peter took some petty snipes at her. “You know,” he told Ken, “June is considerably older than we are, although she doesn’t profess to be.” (Allyson was thirty, Peter and DuMain both twenty-three.) But the filming went along uneventfully, and the two stars were completely professional in their deportment.
Good News was released in December 1947, and it was an immediate hit, netting more than two and a half million dollars domestically. Collier’s chose it as “picture of the month” and “musical of the year.” It was, the magazine said, “a youthful, tuneful, joyous shot in the arm in the form of the gayest, fastest-paced film ever brightened by Technicolor’s magic. . . . The cast couldn’t be improved upon. June Allyson gives an acting, singing, and dancing performance which makes us remember how she first caught the public eye. Peter Lawford . . . fulfills his promise as the most personable romantic lead on the screen.”
Peter is delightful in Good News. He’s believable as Tommy Marlowe, and his dancing is so vigorous, athletic, and exciting in numbers like “Be a Ladies’ Man” and “Varsity Drag” that the viewer is willing to forgive him a few flat and raspy musical stretches. Muriel O’Brien, the young woman who had tried to teach Peter to sing and dance back in Manhasset before she gave up in despair, was amazed by his performance. “I kept watching him singing and dancing and thought, Oh my God! They really had a splendid school at MGM and it showed. Anybody who could teach that boy to sing and dance in time has got to be a genius!”
PETER’S CAREER WAS AT ITS PEAK as 1948 unfolded, and he was a man who seemed to have it all. He was “impossibly handsome,” had a great physique, was world famous, was making nine hundred dollars a week, and had women throwing themselves at his feet. But he was also a man haunted by demons, not the least of which was his sexuality.
His mother had handed down to Peter an unfortunate Victorian legacy: the conviction that sex was dirty, something to be got over with as quickly as po
ssible. Peter had a strong sex drive, but he rarely enjoyed the act in any truly romantic sense. To him, it was purely a physical release, something to satisfy his baser animal needs. And because Peter was such a sensitive man, his painful rejection by Lana Turner made it difficult for him to give of himself emotionally again.
Both of these elements had combined by 1948 to make Peter Lawford — to all appearances one of the world’s most desirable men — an unsatisfactory sex partner. “Peter was not the best lover in the world,” Molly Dunne recalled, “because he was not a tender, loving type when he was involved with his sex. He mostly just wanted oral sex. He didn’t have an impotence problem — he could and did have intercourse — but he preferred oral sex.”
This created a problem for Peter, because most of the women he took out refused to perform fellatio on him. And they were sorely disappointed in him as a lover; his partners soon lost their romantic visions of languid lovemaking with Peter Lawford. “His relationships didn’t last very long,” Molly Dunne recalled.
To achieve the kind of sexual release he desired, Peter began a furtive activity that he kept secret from even his closest friends, but that the FBI discovered during an investigation of “white slave traffic” in Los Angeles. According to the FBI file on Peter, “on December 17, 1946 [he] had contacted [a] well-known call-house madam in an effort to talk to one [of her] call girls. [She] was not in at the time and Lawford requested that she call him at the Mocambo Night Club. On another occasion, information was developed that a call house girl . . . was ‘reportedly a frequent trick for movie actor Peter Lawford.’ Another Los Angeles prostitute reportedly ‘bragged’ that she knew the movie star, Peter Lawford, and on several occasions (our informant) had overheard her attempting to reach Lawford by phone.”