Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  So was Peter, especially about the demands of television and its lack of coddling. “This is TV, it isn’t Metro” was Wurtzel’s favorite phrase. When Peter would ask, with perhaps a little more British clip in his voice than called for, “What scene is this, my good man?” the reply might easily be, “The scene where you go down on your head.” Peter would reply with exaggerated dignity, “Thank you so much” — and a few minutes later fall head over heels for retake after retake, until his knees and knuckles were bleeding. “Already a casualty, and the day yet so young,” Peter would murmur — and then, before anyone else could pipe up with it, he’d add, “I know — this is TV, it isn’t Metro.”

  Dear Phoebe debuted on Friday evening, September 10, 1954, opposite stiff competition: Our Miss Brooks on CBS and Boston Blackie on ABC. It won favorable reviews; TV Guide said the show “boasts what is probably the most absurd situation of any situation comedy on TV, and we use the word boasts advisedly. The show is good fun, thanks to a fine cast, spritely dialogue and some zany plot lines. Lawford is wonderful. . . . ”

  Philip Minoff in Cue opined that “the fastest and cleverest of the myriad situation comedies on the channels continues to be the Peter Lawford starrer Dear Phoebe. Reminds us strongly, in zip and flavor, of the movie His Girl Friday, which, as you’ll recall, had Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell speaking at an average of 200 words per minute to make the film the fastest-paced in history.”

  The show did well in the ratings; Peter said they expected a thirteen rating and got a twenty-two. “That was a happy surprise, because Our Miss Brooks has a twenty-two. Then we went up to twenty-five. I Love Lucy has a fifty-two.” Alex Gottlieb was pleased. “I think we’re proving that viewers, as well as sponsors, don’t necessarily insist that every show on the air be patterned after the most successful show. My hunch is that Pete is going to wind up as a real TV matinee idol.”

  He didn’t, and Peter blamed Gottlieb. The show was doing well enough to keep the network and the sponsor happy, and could have been renewed beyond the forty episodes and reruns aired between September 1954 and September 1955. Peter, however, endured a worst-case scenario of the problems a TV producer can face, and he decided to call it quits after one season.

  “Gottlieb was Billy Rose’s brother-in-law,” Milton Ebbins explained. “When we were in the midst of negotiating the deal, Peter and Pat put up their share of the money for the pilot, but Gottlieb never put up his share. I kept pressing him. He’d say, ‘Goddammit, my brother-in-law’s got more money than Joe Kennedy!’ I’d say, ‘Alex, where’s your money?’”

  According to Ebbins, Gottlieb raised part of the money by borrowing it from the owner of the film lab hired to process Dear Phoebe episodes, and this didn’t sit well with Peter. “He wanted out of the commitment, because things had gotten off on the wrong foot. The network persuaded him to stick it out. But when we started filming, Gottlieb was terrible. We finally barred him from the set.”

  Joe Naar and Peter soon found themselves in a confrontation with the producer. “Peter had a fight with Gottlieb,” recalled Naar, “and the next thing I knew I was in a fistfight with him myself. I really didn’t do anything except protect myself. I reached out my left hand and I dropped him. I’m an ex-fighter. There was going to be a lawsuit and I almost lost my job over it.”

  So Peter decided to let Dear Phoebe die after one season. Pat bought out Alex Gottlieb’s interest in the show for fifty thousand dollars, and she and Peter owned the rights to the tapes, but nothing was done with them except for one season of afternoon reruns in 1957. Peter dabbled a bit more in television over the next few years, appearing on Jimmy Durante and Esther Williams spectaculars and in episodes of dramatic series. Before the decade was out he would make another venture into series television.

  First, however, there was a new, unaccustomed — and uncomfortable — role for Peter: fatherhood.

  PAT DISCOVERED FOUR MONTHS after the wedding that she was expecting a baby — a happy occasion for most people, but especially so for a woman to whom family ties were so important. Joe and Rose had only one grandchild by a daughter, Eunice’s son, Robert Sargent Shriver III, born four days after Peter and Pat’s wedding. Thus, the reaction among the Kennedys to Pat’s pregnancy was joyous.

  Peter Lawford, on the other hand, wasn’t entirely thrilled. He admitted at the time that the thought of himself as a father gave him “a very strange feeling.” It made him feel older and less independent, and he found both sensations unpleasant. His bosses at MGM had pounded into his head the notion that to marry too young would adversely affect his career and that fatherhood would do it even greater damage.

  Phyllis Kirk, the actress, who had known Peter during his last few years at MGM and remained a lifelong friend, explained the thinking. “It was the Hollywood idea of what a leading man was. The role of fatherdom connoted age. That’s all part and parcel of that whole Hollywood thing: that you were forever young, forever good, forever handsome, forever the hero, and therefore you must never take parts — much less a life — that had to do with being other than that. For all those reasons, Peter probably didn’t want to be a father.”

  This may be why it was so difficult for him to cope with Pat’s pregnancy. It had been a hard enough adjustment for him to be married, to accommodate a woman into his everyday life. The pregnancy made it all the worse. Peter spent long hours away from home working on Dear Phoebe, and at night he often slept alone in his own bedroom. He forgot his and Pat’s six-month anniversary until she brought out a cake in front of some friends she’d invited over. “It’s our anniversary?” Peter asked, puzzled.

  “Yes,” Pat replied. “Six months!”

  “It seems like thirty years,” Peter muttered.

  As Pat entered her seventh month, Peter went to Milt Ebbins with a startling request. The Lawfords were renting a two-bedroom redwood house on the beach at Malibu, with both a farmhouse feel and a twenty-four-foot window facing the ocean.8 It was a forty-five- minute drive to and from the Dear Phoebe soundstage at American National Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, and Peter decided he didn’t like making the trip every day.

  Ebbins and his wife, the former singer Lynne Sherman, were renting a house on Outpost Drive above Hollywood Boulevard, just a few minutes from the studios, and Peter knew that it had a separate suite of rooms on the first floor that Milt and Lynne didn’t use. Peter asked him if he could sleep there whenever he was filming Dear Phoebe.

  “Peter started staying with us during the week,” Ebbins recalled. “He only went out to Malibu on the weekends. Now here’s a man who has a pregnant wife at home, right? She was very upset, but he wouldn’t change his mind. I said to him, ‘Dammit, Peter, you’ve gotta go home. This is terrible.’ He just dismissed it and said, ‘I don’t wanna go all the way out there.’

  “He couldn’t cope with the fact that she was having a baby. He was a strange duck, Peter. I don’t think he liked children. My wife and I would prepare dinner for ourselves and we’d give some of it to Peter — he was like a boarder.”

  Finally, Pat showed up at the door. “If you’re not going to come out to the beach,” she told Peter, “I’m going to move in here.” She did so, then and there. But only for a while; she soon took off on a skiing trip to Canada. Peter’s friends were alarmed — wasn’t he worried about the baby? “Certainly not,” he replied. “Pat’s very good on skis.” When he was reminded that even the best skier can fall down, Peter responded, “You can fall down anywhere.”

  Pat’s trip didn’t cause her pregnancy any problems, but she did go into labor early, and on March 29, 1955, she gave birth to a six- pound-thirteen-ounce boy. Peter had long wanted to name his first child Christopher whether the child was a girl or a boy. “It’s being done in England,” he explained. “They call girls ‘Christopher’ over there.” Pat concurred. On April 25, the child was christened Christopher Kennedy Lawford by Francis Cardinal McIntyre.

  Christopher’s birth gave Peter
his first real taste of the insularity and protectiveness of the Kennedys. Of her twenty-eight grandchildren, Rose Kennedy related in her autobiography, the family nurse, Luella Hennessey, had been on hand “to take care of twenty-seven of them from birth” — meaning that an emissary of Rose Kennedy’s was present at every one of her grandchildren’s births save one.

  The exception was Christopher Lawford — but in his case it was Rose herself who was in attendance. “Christopher . .. came a few days early,” Rose wrote, “and I was visiting Pat and Peter at that time, so I took charge and took care of him.”

  Rose Kennedy “took charge,” apparently, whenever she came to visit the Lawfords. Dolores Naar, then married to Joe Naar, became quite close to Peter and Pat. “There was no question that Peter was no longer the head of that household when Pat’s mother was there,” she recalled. “It was not a situation designed to make a son-in-law happy, and Peter was no exception.”

  If Peter had found the idea of fatherhood disquieting, he admitted that “the feeling is even stranger now that the event has occurred.” He was edgy and short with Pat; the baby’s lusty crying so upset him that Pat rented an apartment two doors away for Christopher and his nanny to stay in.

  AT FIRST, PAT DIDN’T KNOW about Peter’s adulteries. With hindsight, however, she might have suspected them earlier, because their sex life hadn’t been good from the start. Pat had been raised by her obsessively religious mother to believe that sexual intercourse was a sin except within marriage, and even then that its sole purpose was procreation. She was a virgin when she married Peter, a man who had had sexual relations since the age of ten, had frequented call girls, and whose preferred sexual satisfaction was not achieved via the missionary position. The Lawfords had sex far less frequently than Peter would have liked, and when they did it wasn’t completely satisfying for him. He later told Arthur Natoli, an associate, that Pat would cross herself before each and every sexual encounter they had.

  His response to these frustrations — worsened by Pat’s unavailability to him during her pregnancy — was to dally with other women. According to Milt Ebbins, “Peter had alliances while Pat was expecting. Fast ones, not with anybody famous. He wouldn’t get involved in anything serious. He was too smart for that. He wasn’t gonna take any chances with the Kennedys around — he was scared to death of the Kennedys.”

  With good reason, Jeanne Carmen discovered. Marilyn Monroe had fallen out of close touch with Peter, but her friend Jeanne was still quite friendly with him. “Peter would come by my house or I’d meet him for coffee, things like that,” she recalled. “He’d call me from his car phone and tell me to look out the window — that was when telephones in cars were very rare. He’d sit there and wave to me like a kid.”

  Peter and Jeanne never did have a sexual relationship — she was still bemused by the fact that Peter had never made a pass at her — but someone suspected they might be having an affair. “I guess Pat thought we were getting too friendly,” Carmen said, “because I got a call from the Kennedys’ attorney. He told me, ‘I’ve been asked to tell you to stop seeing Peter Lawford. If you don’t, you’ll live to regret it.’

  “Well, I knew the Kennedys were tough and that my ass would be grass if I continued the relationship with Peter. You don’t go up against the Kennedys. I knew that because I knew people who had tried to go up against them. So at that point I stopped seeing Peter.”

  Peter was furious when Jeanne told him why she could no longer see him. He was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the enormous Kennedy presence in his life as it was, and now he felt as though Big Brother — or Big Father — was watching his every move. He didn’t like the feeling that he was slowly, inexorably losing control over his life.

  He sometimes felt suffocated by the sheer number of Kennedys and the intensity of their loyalty to one another. “I had never known a family like the Kennedys,” he said. “The rough-and-tumble of a large gregarious family was completely foreign to me, and I became — by marriage — an outsider in an almost overwhelming situation.”

  He was particularly so because, unlike Joe Kennedy’s other sons- in-law, Peter never became part of the family business. Eunice’s husband, Sargent Shriver, and Jean’s husband, Stephen Smith, both became involved in the Kennedy financial and political empires; Peter couldn’t have cared less about the former and played only a peripheral role in the latter. But it was more than that; Peter felt himself alienated even from the family’s recreation. “The secret,” Peter said, “was participation. But I’d never played touch football in my life. And that family had a team in and of themselves.”

  “Peter hated to go to Hyannis Port,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “He stopped going alone after a while — he wanted me to come with him. Because otherwise he felt totally isolated. He just didn’t like that atmosphere — that big family. At one time they rang a bell for dinner. And we’d sit down at this long boardinghouse table, the women would come out with pitchers of milk and big tubs of butter and hot bread and creamed fish and mashed potatoes, and they’d all jump on it. Peter couldn’t take that. It seemed almost barbaric to him. He just sat there.

  “Jackie introduced Jack to French cuisine, and of course Peter loved that. She and Peter both felt like outsiders in that family. That’s why they got along so well. They were close all his life. They understood each other.”

  The power the Kennedys generated was awesome, Peter found. “When it was in full swing it was like a juggernaut. I used to find excuses not to go.” Joe Kennedy, though, was sympathetic: “The old man watched this, and later he said to me, ‘I know what you were going through.’”

  Even in his own home, Peter was made to feel like an outsider by the Kennedys. “When anyone from the family was there,” Dolores Naar remembered, “everybody else in the room was excluded — including Peter. He was always trying to find a way to work his way into that family. But he was the outcast. If Peter had had more self-esteem, that could have been a good thing. He could have retained his individuality. But it worked the other way for him. He felt the Kennedys looked down at him. He always felt inadequate because he wasn’t as well educated as they all were. They were as sharp as tacks, those people. It really was a constant struggle for Peter — just to keep his head above water.”

  Peter hated these feelings of inadequacy, and one way he could assert himself was by having extramarital affairs. It was a pattern that would repeat itself again and again in the Lawford marriage: Peter’s self-assurance would be worn down by the Kennedys, and he would attempt to bolster it by accepting many of the sexual invitations he constantly received from women.

  Pat Lawford tolerated much more from her husband than most women would have; she had learned her mother’s lessons well. Rose Kennedy had been aware of her husband’s infidelities, but had chosen to ignore them. “In all the years that we have been married,” Joe said of Rose, “I have never heard her complain. Never. Not even once. That is a quality that children are quick to see.”

  The Kennedy girls had been taught through the relationship of their parents that the man was the master of the house, that his will was law, and that any breaking of the marriage vows was to be silently acquiesced to by the wife. Pat had been too young to comprehend what was happening when Gloria Swanson had visited Hyannis Port in 1929, but she surely realized at some point in her life that Rose had welcomed her husband’s mistress into her home without protest.

  At the beginning of her marriage, Pat was every inch her mother’s daughter. As Dolores Naar recalled, “Pat was so in awe of Peter. He was a movie star and a beautiful man and she got him. She really wanted to look up to that man.” At that point, Milton Ebbins saw, Peter ruled the roost. “She looked up to him, did everything he said. Boy, did that change! Peter was essentially a weak man, and the minute Pat saw that, pow! You show weakness to the Kennedys and you’re in trouble. The larger she and her family loomed in Peter’s life, the weaker he got. And the weaker he got, the stronger she became. The guy never
had a chance.”

  Ultimately, Pat Kennedy was far less willing to be a long-suffering wife than her mother had been, but she stuck it out with Peter, as much because of her Catholicism and their children as because of her love for him.

  There were good times along with the bad, of course. When Pat and Peter were getting on well, were on the same wavelength, they were able to recapture some of the heady romance of their courtship. And Pat still harbored deep in her heart the belief that Peter would come around, would be more faithful, would become a better father. She convinced herself that she and Peter would grow more compatible as their marriage evolved, that they could triumph over every obstacle thrown in their way.

  But over the next few years, Pat’s hopes sagged under the weight of reality. The Lawford marriage floundered; their relationship became more and more strained. Then, in 1956, John F. Kennedy’s political star began the meteoric rise that would lift him to the summit of world power four years later. Peter and Pat’s lives became so exciting that it was possible for them to ignore for long periods of time the fact that their marriage wasn’t working.

  8 As they were shown the house, Pat learned that her father had rented it in the 1920s — as a love nest for him and Gloria Swanson. She took it anyway.

  SEVENTEEN

  If Peter Lawford’s public eclipse by the Kennedy family can be said to have begun at any one moment, it was when Jack Kennedy decided to run for the 1956 Democratic vice-presidential nomination. Kennedy had been one of the party’s brightest young stars since his election to the Senate in 1952, and the publication of his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of biographical essays, Profiles in Courage, had singled him out as one of that rarest of breeds — an intellectual politician.

  Jack Kennedy had long been intrigued by Hollywood — by the business of it, the art of it, and the sexuality of it. He often made what he called “hunting expeditions” to Los Angeles, where he would woo beautiful women, from aspiring unknowns to major stars like Gene Tierney and June Allyson, He was fascinated by how sexual dynamism in Hollywood translated into power — and vice versa. His friend Chuck Spaulding recalled that “‘charisma’ wasn’t a catchword yet, but Jack was very interested in that binding magnetism these screen personalities had. What exactly was it? How did you go about acquiring it? Did it have an impact on your private life? How did you make it work for you? He wouldn’t let go of the subject.”