by James Spada
Peter’s pursuit of prostitutes brought him perilously close to scandal a number of times. Fred Otash was then a member of the Los Angeles Police Department assigned to the administrative vice squad downtown, and one day he gave Peter some advice. “Look, asshole,” he told him, “knock it off, okay? Your name is in every goddamn trick book of every whore we ever busted. They’ve got you down as a fifty-dollar trick. You’d better cool it or you’re gonna get in trouble.”
He never did cool it, but he was discreet enough to avoid being busted on a morals charge or having his name make the papers when the girls were rounded up. Peter was so discreet, in fact, that he was able to keep this side of his life secret even from his closest male friends.
But despite his active sex life with women of all descriptions, from movie stars to beach bunnies to hookers, rumors that he also enjoyed the sexual company of men followed Peter most of his life. There are numerous reports of his involvements with men, and Lady Lawford supplied several of them. In her autobiography, she claimed that Peter had lived with a gay man to whom he gave a great deal of money, and she mentioned another affair Peter supposedly had had with a young actor.
There are stories from others as well. Actor Sal Mineo, in an interview published after his death, named Peter as one of his Hollywood affairs. Prince Franz Hohenlohe, a good friend of Lady Lawford’s, tells of a dinner he shared with Van Johnson in Johnson’s chalet at Vevey, Switzerland. “Van got to talking about Peter, and he told me more or less explicitly that Peter had had an affair with Keenan Wynn.”
Wayne Parks was a young beach boy who used to hang out at Will Rogers State Beach in the early fifties. “Some days,” Parks recalled, “I’d use the john on the beach and I’d see Peter in there. He’d loiter for hours, sitting on the toilet playing with himself. It was a notorious john for that sort of thing. I didn’t even want to go in there unless I had to go desperately. I’m sure Peter got picked up by guys in there.”
Peter Dye, who as the husband of Marjorie Post lived next door to Peter in Santa Monica years later, says that a number of people described Peter to him, crudely, as “the screaming faggot of State Beach.”
Richard Fielden, now a Lutheran Sunday-school teacher in Palm Beach, recalled an incident in Santa Monica in the late 1950s. “I was with my wife — this was before we got married. We were down by the beach, close to the Lawford house. I was lugging the beach umbrella and everything else and I really wasn’t watching where I was walking.
I guess we were trespassing on Lawford’s property at one point and I practically tripped over Peter Lawford and [another young actor] lying on the beach with their arms around each other. When they saw us it was too late to disengage. My wife couldn’t believe her eyes. I recognized both of them instantly. They giggled and were very embarrassed that they were discovered.”
Don Pack, a photographer for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook in the early 1960s, heard from gay friends that Peter had “attended a couple of all-boy parties in Hawaii in the midsixties,” and says that Peter made an awkward, abortive pass at him around the same time.
And yet, Peter’s closest friends and associates all say that they never saw the slightest hint that he was anything but completely heterosexual. No one knew Peter better than Milton Ebbins, his personal manager and best friend, and while Ebbins thinks Peter may have fought homosexuality all his life, “I never saw him make an overt move in over thirty years. We slept in the same bed one night in Spain when the hotel had only one bed for the two of us. Don’t think I didn’t sleep with one eye open. But he never showed that side, ever.”
Joe Naar saw no sign that Peter might have been sexually interested in men either: “If Peter didn’t want to get laid, he’d get a girl to suck his cock. Every night of his life. That doesn’t sound like a homosexual to me. I’d be with a girl, and the next thing I knew she’d be with him.”
There can be no question that Peter Lawford was turned on by women. Still, there is enough evidence to conclude that he occasionally sought out homosexual liaisons, and it isn’t surprising that he was able to keep them secret from his friends, just as he did his brothel visits. Surely he would have made every effort to keep his friends from finding out something that might have caused some of them to spurn his friendship.
Ironically, it wasn’t indiscretions with men that started the rumors about Peter’s sexuality in Hollywood. Questions were being asked about him long before May went to L. B. Mayer with her own suspicions. The rumors started — and persisted — mainly because of Peter’s demeanor. As Fred Otash put it, “People from England have that effete air about them; they have kind of a feminine way of talking and acting.”
Leonard Gershe, the writer and composer with the Freed Unit who befriended Peter, had another observation. “There were rumors about a lot of actors. They were young, good-looking, single. A lot of women who couldn’t get to bed with Peter, rather than accept that he wasn’t attracted to them, would start saying, ‘Well, he’s obviously gay. Why else wouldn’t he want me?’ I’ve heard women say that.”
Sometimes, it was Peter himself who caused tongues to wag about him, and eventually this got him called into Mayer’s office yet again — after he and Peter Sabiston returned from an East Coast publicity junket in the late forties. “We were doing five or six shows a day,” Sabiston says, “and you get punchy after a while. Peter could do a pretty convincing gay guy act, and so could I. We did that sometimes when we got back to our hotel room, just for laughs. In every city we went, there was always an MGM executive who would hook up with us. One of these guys heard us fooling around like that and he made a complaint to Mayer. Mayer called us into his office when we got back to LA and wanted to know if there was any credence to this. We assured him there wasn’t, that it was only a lark.”
ELEVEN
After the success of Good News, MGM handed Peter a lemon of a role in an Esther Williams aquatic extravaganza called On an Island With You — that of a Navy lieutenant who kidnaps his favorite movie star (Williams) and flies her to a desert island to show his love for her. Peter knew he was playing second fiddle to Williams’s swimming sequences, which were always the raison d’etre of her movies (“Wet, she’s a star,” said Fanny Brice), and he grew to dislike her and the film. His scenes are curiously flat; he seems, for the first time, to have walked through a picture.
When the film was released in June 1948 most critics dismissed it as “cute” and “predictable.” Still, it did bang-up business at the box office and earned a profit of $816,000. The Hollywood Reporter was kindest to Peter: “Lawford has the appeal to make his starry-eyed character convincing.”
Peter’s next movie experience was far more enjoyable for him, and the results were classic. Easter Parade was MGM’s top Freed Unit production of the year, a lavish showcase for a score of Irving Berlin tunes. It was scheduled to be directed by Vincente Minnelli and star his wife, Judy Garland, with Gene Kelly. Peter was assigned the third lead, and Ann Miller and Jules Munshin rounded out the cast.
The production got off to a rocky start in December 1947. Judy Garland had just been released from a sanatorium where she had been treated for emotional disturbances and drug dependency. Her doctors thought it risky for her to be directed by her husband, with whom she was having marital problems, and Minnelli was taken off the picture. Crushed, he sought psychiatric help, but within a few weeks he had turned his attention to a new project. At home, he and Judy never discussed his removal from Easter Parade.
Garland’s fragile emotional state weighed heavily on Peter during filming. The two had had a brief affair in the early forties, and he had remained very close to her. “She was one of the most honest people I’ve ever known,” Peter later said. “She was marvelous fun, with a brittle, delicate humor. I’d have her sing for me — I’ve never heard ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ without feeling a pang and a bang.”
But there was the other side of Judy, the troubled, emotionally floundering side. Peter often drove
her to her psychiatric sessions, and he always got an earful on the way there and back: “She unleashed on me the torrents of emotion that built up in her relationships with the studio and the men in her life. She grew up with a mother thing and every man tried to be her father. I really went all the way ’round the mulberry bush with her.”
Judy Garland’s life at MGM was a paradigm of the downside of movie stardom. Viewed by millions as a wonderfully talented, carefree young girl reveling in the pleasures of stardom, Garland was in fact one of the first and worst victims of the studio system. Her seemingly effortless performances were achieved at great personal sacrifice. She worked eighteen-hour days on some of the gargantuan musicals she and Mickey Rooney were expected to carry on their diminutive shoulders, always at such a fever pitch that when she was allowed to rest she couldn’t sleep.
MGM executives, thinking they had a new panacea at their disposal, gave Garland sleeping pills to help her rest, even if only for a few hours between scenes. When the cameras were ready for her again, she was given amphetamines to help her get back up to top form. It was a vicious cycle, and it turned the teenager into a drug addict.
Metro treated its younger contract players like children, then became hostile when they acted like children. Many of the young people who grew up at MGM suffered arrested emotional development, while others rebelled against the studio’s strictures as they would a parent’s. Some felt the world owed them a living, and entered real life woefully unprepared to face its everyday demands. Elizabeth Taylor didn’t learn how to write a check until after her second marriage ended.
Peter wasn’t affected by the system as badly as Judy Garland was, but it did leave him with absolutely no business sense and a constant need for a strong steadying influence in his life. He said years later that in the forties, he was the steadying influence for other actors, such as Judy and Robert Walker: “It’s funny, Judy and Bob were both very disturbed people and they were my best friends. They always would seek me out. I was probably the level-headed one.”
THE DARK SIDE OF GENTILITY
May Lawford with two-month-old Peter in Beaulieu, France, November 1923. May later said, “I hate babies. . . . Peter was an awful accident.”
(COURTESY MILTON EBBINS)
The Lawford ancestral home, in Toddington. While in England, Peter and his parents divided their time between this house and a flat in London.
(COURTESY W. NOAD)
Lieutenant Sydney Lawford (seated, center) of the Royal Fusiliers regiment, circa 1900. Lawford’s heroism in World War I led King George V to knight him.
(COURTESY W. NOAD)
Four-year-old Peter at play in Hove, England, in 1927. By this age he had decided he wanted to be an actor, not a soldier. His father wasn’t pleased.
(COURTESY M. EBBINS)
On the beach at Deauville: with his parents in 1928. The Lawfords had fled to this French watering spot in 1924 when the scandal of their divorces erupted in London.
(COURTESY M. EBBINS)
May and Sir Sydney attend a polo match at Le Touquet in 1929. He was sixty-four; she, forty-six. Peter later said of his parents, “I adored him and loathed her, from a very early age.”
(COURTESY M. EBBINS)
Peter at Vichy in 1928. His first language was French, and his mother called him “Pierrot.” Privately, she dressed him as a girl until he was eleven.
(COURTESY M. EBBINS)
Peter makes his film debut at seven with Leslie Fuller in Poor Old Bill, 1931 His acting career was derailed when his relatives threatened to disinherit him.
(COURTESY ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES)
The Lawfords traveled around the world several times before Peter was fourteen. Here, he and Sir Sydney wear identical bathing suits in Ceylon, circa 1932.
(COURTESY M. EBBINS)
Peter and his father prepare to ride an elephant in India, circa 1933. Because May Lawford’s father and grandfather spent a combined eighty years in India, her in-laws suspected she had some Indian blood.
(COURTESY M. EBBINS)
In Tahiti in 1933, Peter tried his hand at canoeing. He loved the months he spent there: “It was a boy’s paradise.”
(COURTESY M. EBBINS)
At the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, November 1934, the Lawfords pose in their tropical whites during a nine-month stay in Honolulu. The islands remained a favorite vacation spot for Peter all his life.
(UPI/BETTMANN)
During the family’s long sea voyages, Peter would appear in shows and skits. Once, he disguised himself as a girl and won a mother-daughter talent show with May.
(COURTESY M. EBBINS)
By nine, Peter had developed into a beautiful boy, and around this age he had the first of a series of sexual encounters with adults — both male and female.
(COURTESY M. EBBINS)
THE MGM YEARS
Peter’s studio ID card, issued in 1941 when he was seventeen.
(WARDER HARRISON COLLECTION)
MGM experimented with “looks” for Peter at the start of his career. An attempt at slicked-back ultrasophistication in 1942 (left) quickly made way for the more natural boy-next-door look of 1943.
(MGM)
On the set of A Yank at Eton (1942) Peter pals around with Freddie Bartholomew (left) and Mickey Rooney. Peter knew nothing about an indiscreet Bartholomew remark to the British press about Peter’s parentage that had kept the Lawfords from returning to England in 1938.
(MGM)
Peter’s portrayal of Irene Dunne’s dying son in The White Cliffs of Dover in 1944 won him critical praise.
(MGM)
An eight-month affair with Lana Turner in 1944 left Peter hopelessly in love — and heartbroken when she suddenly broke it off.
(PICTORIAL PARADE)
There was no love lost between Peter and his Son of Lassie costar. “Lassie was a vicious bastard!” he said.
(MGM)
Peter was one of the most sought-after escorts in Hollywood in the 1940s. Here, he and Lucille Ball make the scene at the Clover Club, November 1944.
(UPI/WIDE WORLD)
Peter seems smitten as he and Anne Baxter look into each other’s eyes at the Hollywood Palladium, December 1943.
(UPI/BETTMANN)
Ava Gardner was one of Peter’s brief affairs. Here the couple attend the opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case, January 1948.
(CULVER PICTURES)
A romance with Judy Garland evolved into a volatile, lifelong friendship. Here, they dance at the Mocambo, circa 1948.
(CULVER PICTURES)
When Peter wasn’t on a set or in a nightclub, he was at the beach, where he surfed, exercised, and played volleyball.
(UPI/BETTMANN)
The Lawfords at home, 1945. Although this was a posed gag shot, the expression on Peter’s face was similar when he learned that May had told Louis B. Mayer she feared Peter was a homosexual.
(MGM)
June Allyson kisses Peter in a Good News publicity shot, 1947. Peter’s feelings toward the actress weren’t always so affectionate.
(MGM)
Peter gave 16-year-old Elizabeth Taylor her first real screen kiss in Julia Misbehaves, 1948. She adored him, and her mother wanted them to marry. But Peter was nervous about her age and resisted her charms.
(CULVER PICTURES)
Frank Sinatra and Peter became pals in the forties, but in 1953 the singer broke off the friendship when he suspected that Peter had rekindled his affair with Ava Gardner, Frank’s estranged wife.
(PHOTO BY LEO BORR)
Sporting a mustache he grew for Kangaroo, Peter escorts socialite Sharman Douglas to a Hollywood party, 1950. He broke off their engagement after only four days.
(MOVIE STARS PARADE)
On the way to film Kangaroo, Peter met Jean MacDonald, a society columnist, in Honolulu. They too became engaged, but once again the romance fizzled.
(PHOTOFEST)
Judy Holliday and Peter had an affair
during the filming of It Should Happen to You, in 1953. He dumped her abruptly — because he had met the woman he wanted to marry.
WITH MINNELLI OUT OF EASTER PARADE, making the movie was a positive experience for Garland despite her emotional problems. Arthur Freed chose Charles Walters, who had done so well with Good News, his first directing job, to take over Easter Parade, much to Walters’s astonishment and delight.
Although she liked Walters, his inexperience made Garland skeptical. “Look, buster,” she told him, “you’re in the big time now. You’re not doing a little college musical here. This is a big picture, an ‘A’ picture, and I ain’t no June Allyson. Don’t get cute with me — none of that batting of the eyelids bit or fluffing the hair routine for me, buddy! I’m Judy Garland and you just watch it!”
After a few days’ work, she relaxed. She knew she was in good hands; Walters was no Minnelli, but he was very talented. Then, just as she and Peter became convinced that everything would go swimmingly, Gene Kelly broke his ankle and had to bow out of the production. This could have been a disaster, but the cinematic gods were smiling on Easter Parade: Fred Astaire agreed to come out of a brief retirement to play opposite Garland. She and Peter were ecstatic. Their film was now an even more important, more noteworthy movie than before. Filming proceeded from this point on without incident; by all accounts it was a very happy production.