Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  With people she knew and liked, Pat sometimes let her hair down to the point of childishness. “One night, there were eight of us sitting around the dining room table at Pat’s house,” Dolores Naar recalled. “We helped ourselves at the buffet, then sat down at this beautifully set table with wine, and the meal was wonderful. Then for dessert the girl came in with a platter of ginger snaps and something struck Pat funny. She took a bite out of one of the cookies, then she threw it at Peter. Soon we were all throwing these cookies at each other. Pat used to do things like that.”

  The one performer Pat was most eager to meet, Frank Sinatra, never accepted an invitation from Peter Lawford. Pat begged her husband to patch up his rift with Frank, but Peter had already made a number of unsuccessful attempts and didn’t want to subject himself to the humiliation of Frank’s cold rejection again. So Pat took matters into her own hands. She was having lunch with Molly Dunne one afternoon, and when Molly mentioned that she had a date with Frank Sinatra that night, Pat’s eyes lit up. “Call him and tell him I want to invite him over for dinner!”

  “Call him yourself,” Molly replied. Pat did — and pretended to be Molly in order to get through to him. When he got on the line and found out it was Pat, he was furious. He not only refused her dinner invitation, but shouted at her before hanging up, “Tell Mrs. Dunne that I’m busy tonight!”

  Molly did try to intervene between Peter and Sinatra. “Frank would have me in tears because he would refuse to have anything to do with Peter, who was my best friend. I asked him why and you know what he said? ‘Any guy who would stiff a hooker is a real jerk.’”

  PETER BECAME CONCERNED about money in the second half of the fifties; he was doing only sporadic TV work, and his finances were tight. It was these worries, ironically, that led him into a serious blunder that probably cost him once and for all the major stardom that had always seemed just one step ahead of him — and the financial independence that would have come along with it.

  In 1958 the producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli offered Peter the leading role in a series of films he planned to make based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond spy novels. Broccoli thought Peter would be perfect to play the handsome, soigné Englishman with an eye for beautiful women, a love of gadgetry, and a distaste for criminals. But the idea of playing a British spy reminded Peter uncomfortably of all those cloak-and-dagger scripts he had rejected before Dear Phoebe, and the success of the films was by no means guaranteed. Broccoli was not a powerhouse producer; he’d done just seven unmemorable films to that point.

  Worse, Broccoli was able to offer Peter only twenty-five thousand dollars per picture and wanted him to commit to the entire Bond series he planned — at least five films. Peter’s minimum asking price at the time was seventy-five thousand, and he didn’t want to take such a severe cut in pay. The five-picture stipulation, Peter said later, would have given him pause at any price. “I thought it would have tied me up too far in the future.”

  It seemed like the right decision at the time, but in retrospect it was the worst of Peter’s several professional missteps. When the first Bond film, Dr. No, was released in 1962, it became an enormous boxoffice hit and spawned an endlessly lucrative Bond series that made a legend of Sean Connery, a young Scottish actor with three minor films to his credit. There’s no reason to assume that the picture would not have been as big a hit with Peter in the lead role; and if it had been he would have been in a strong position to renegotiate his contract with Broccoli for far more money and a share of the profits in the subsequent films. Most important, it would have made a superstar of Peter and allowed him to carve out a niche for himself quite distinct from the rising Kennedy phenomenon. It was a missed opportunity that remained one of his great regrets.

  At the time, however, Peter’s best course of action appeared to be another television series. In a wry twist, it was MGM that approached him with the idea. Of all the Hollywood studios, Metro had disdained television the longest, but early in 1958 the studio was in deep trouble. At the end of its fiscal year in August 1957, it showed a loss for the first time in its history. Now, MGM looked on television as its salvation, and with good reason: when Peter began work on his series it was the only production on the lot.

  Metro’s idea was for Peter to do a small-screen version of their famous series of six Thin Man movies that had starred William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, an urbane couple who solve crimes, bicker wittily, and drink heartily. (In one of the films, Nora enters a bar where Nick has been imbibing for some time. She sits down next to him and asks, “How many has he had?” The bartender replies, “Six.” Without missing a beat Nora says, “Set ’em up.”)

  Peter liked the idea, especially when MGM agreed to give him twenty-five percent ownership of the show. The Colgate-Palmolive Company signed up as the sponsor, and statuesque, stylish Phyllis Kirk joined the cast as Nora. John Newland got the nod to direct the first ten episodes.

  According to Peter, now 34, the studio wanted him to be a replica of William Powell. “Once I had signed for the part,” he said, “I got a call from makeup. I couldn’t imagine what it was. When I got there they put a homburg hat on me, grayed my hair a bit, added a small mustache, and even suggested I add a little padding to my beltline. They were actually trying to get me up like William Powell!” He balked loudly. “Get Powell if you want!” he shouted at MGM executive Eddie Mannix. Later he said, “I wasn’t about to follow William Powell. I’m not that crazy. Besides, I wanted some identity of my own.”

  So did Phyllis Kirk, who made it a point not to watch the Thin Man movies so she wouldn’t pick up any of Myrna Loy’s characteristics. She and Peter were, on and off the screen, never anything but themselves: Peter the light, devil-may-care leading man, Phyllis the sophisticated New Yorker, a former model and stage actress just a tad disdainful of Hollywood. From the beginning, the impression was that they mixed about as well as oil and water, and a number of people believe to this day that he intensely disliked her.

  Indeed, Phyllis Kirk was an acquired taste for Peter. They had met in 1950 when Phyllis, just put under contract to MGM, did a few scenes in Please Believe Me. “Peter was the star of this film,” she recalled, “and he was terribly kind to me. He was so gentle and gave me little tips — he was wonderful. I will never forget that first encounter with him, because he was so generous. The best part of Peter was very kind.”

  On the Thin Man set, however, Kirk’s reserved demeanor often rubbed Peter the wrong way, and it brought out some unpleasant behavior on his part. Except for Kirk, it was an all-male company, and Peter led the cast and crew in continual razzings of her that sometimes drove her to distraction. Eventually, everyone joined in. Bill Asher was a well-regarded TV director (I Love Lucy) who took over from John Newland, and he remembered that he once needed a frightened reaction shot from Kirk and did “a terrible thing. She was supposed to react to someone coming through the door, and I told her to reach behind her at the same time into a cigarette box. I put a mouse in the box, and everybody knew it except her. She reached back and what a reaction! She let out a scream and got so mad, she was throwing things at us.”9

  Peter enjoyed doing wicked send-ups of his costar’s more distinctive characteristics. He would hold a comb across his forehead to mock her signature bangs or walk across the soundstage in the tiny mincing steps she was forced to take in her stylish but confining midcalf-length skirts. His tauntings rarely let up. During an interview with a TV Guide reporter, Phyllis mentioned that her birthday was coming up soon and said, “I’ll be twenty-eight.” Peter glanced at her and said, “Around the waist you’ll be twenty-eight.”

  Whenever the script called for Peter to do a scene holding Asta, the couple’s famous terrier, Kirk recalled that “he would, on the fourth word of the scene, hand me this forty-five-pound mass of muscle and sinew and bone and I would have to hold this monster throughout the scene. Like a trouper, I would do the whole scene holding this dog.”

 
; She was a good sport about all this and she harbored no ill will. “It was like having a group of pesky brothers who were always trying to upset my dignity a little bit. I was probably terribly proper in their view. I was also somewhat separated, in the sense that I did not party and my personal life was my personal life. That used to drive Peter crazy. He couldn’t understand anyone who had this sort of other life that didn’t have to do with everything that was going on in Hollywood.”

  The main reason many people feel that Peter disliked Phyllis was a curious conversation he had with John Newland a few episodes into the series. Newland was directing Peter in a bedroom scene with Phyllis, and he asked them to kiss. Afterward Peter approached Newland and said, “I’m not going to do this. I don’t want to kiss Phyllis. I like her, but I don’t want to do that. And I don’t have to.”

  Newland looked at him blankly. “What are you talking about, Peter?”

  “My contract says that I don’t have to get involved in any kind of overt sexual level in this show.”

  Newland replied, “Well, Jesus, okay,” and went to talk to one of the producers. “Peter tells me that he has a clause in his contract that he not be required to kiss and touch Phyllis Kirk,” Newland told the man. “Now, how can I do the show like that?”

  “Oh, you know Peter,” the producer replied. “Just do the best you can.”

  Newland asked if there really was such a clause in the contract. There wasn’t. But rather than go back to Peter and confront him about it, Newland tried to choreograph the ten episodes he directed so there would be no physical contact between Peter and Phyllis.

  Why did Peter make such a strange demand, that actors playing man and wife never kiss each other during a series? Phyllis Kirk believed the only explanation was that Peter had a very bizarre sense of humor: “Depending on what day of the week it was and what time of day, Peter was apt to say anything.” It could also have been that Peter overreacted in a desire to avoid doing anything in front of millions of television viewers that would embarrass his wife or her family in an era of strict morality codes. Paul Wurtzel recalled that “we had one scene where they had to be in bed together, discussing something. Because of the network censor we had to reshoot it with them in separate beds.”

  Later in the run of the series, the code restrictions were loosened, and Peter and Phyllis kissed whenever it seemed appropriate. Phyllis recently viewed a Thin Man episode that “showed me and Peter sitting on the same bed, kissing. Now, on television in those days you did not do passionate, slobbering, current-day kisses. But it was certainly a kiss and it didn’t look to me as though either one of us abhorred what we were doing.”

  THE TROUBLESOME CHEMISTRY between the two stars, it developed, was only one of the problems that plagued The Thin Man once it debuted over NBC on Friday, September 20, 1957, in the nine- thirty P.M. time slot. Critical reaction was scathing. Jack O’Brien’s comments in the New York Journal American were typical. Under the headline “A Fat Chance for Thin Man,” O’Brien complained that “everyone connected with the TV version of The Thin Man seemed to have absolutely no notion what its old effervescent movie joke was about. Its writing was dogged and dull, the performance of Phyllis Kirk ditto, the direction sluggish, the mood leaden and dense. Peter Lawford, a practiced and recognized professional at light comedy, enjoyed neither lightness nor comedy in his script this time, for whatever the high proficiency of even so effective a light romantic comedian as Lawford, the play still is the thing, and this thing was not a play, not a comedy, nor even a farce, except for being a joke on its own self. It will have to improve.”

  Peter had complained from the beginning that the show didn’t have enough comic elements. “I screamed for comedy,” he said, “but they insisted on making mystery the most important thing. Then, the notices came out pointing up that we were short on whimsy.” Even when comedy was added, however, the scripts often left a lot to be desired. “Peter and I were dreadful in script conferences,” Phyllis Kirk recalled. “We’d sit with the writers and be terribly insulting. My feeling was — it can be as cute as they want it to be, but if it ain’t actable, fellas, forget it.”

  Advice started to come in on how to improve the show, in one instance from no less an authority than William Powell himself. Peter told the story of asking Powell what he thought of the series: “Mr. Powell’s theory — and I agree with it wholeheartedly — is that what’s lacking in the Thin Man as I play him is his quality of tipsiness. The original character was half stiff all the time. He went through life on a pink cloud and Powell played him that way. But we’re limited because of TV. In the premier episode, I mixed martinis and we got over four hundred letters, mostly from the South, some demanding that we drink milk! Can you see me mixing a chocolate milk?”

  If Peter was compelled not to tipple on the show, he felt no such constraints offscreen. Paul Wurtzel recalled that “every day when we’d break for lunch, Bill Asher and I would go up to his dressing room and we’d call the commissary and they’d bring whatever you wanted. We’d drink gin and Dubonnet, straight. Nobody would get smashed, but you’d have a couple of cocktails and eat lunch and you’d go back to the set and you could hardly move.”

  John Newland and Don Weis, who also directed some episodes, had found themselves unable to join the lunchtime drinkers. “I went once,” Newland says, “and never went again. I never drank during lunch because it made me too slow. Peter drank a lot. And what amazed me about him was that he could drink three or four martinis and later not miss a mark or a beat. It never affected one moment of any shoot on any day.”

  There was a lot of pressure on Peter filming The Thin Man. The production schedule was grueling — two shows every eight days with only Sundays off — and workdays were so long Peter complained that “I meet myself coming home every night.” He was worried about the scripts and worried about the ratings, which were mediocre despite weak competition. Still, he always kept an eye out for the girls. He often asked Paul Wurtzel, “You know any dames? Let’s get some dames.” Wurtzel told him he didn’t know any dames — “My life and the studio, I kept them separated” — but tried to help Peter round somebody up. “Here’s Peter Lawford, the great romantic guy who can get any woman he wants, and one night I sit there for an hour trying to figure out who might know some hookers for him.”

  By now, Peter was convinced that the problem with The Thin Man was a lack of on-screen chemistry between him and his costar. Before the second season began, he spoke to an executive of Colgate- Palmolive: he wanted to replace Phyllis Kirk with the British actress Hazel Court, whom he thought more sensuous than Phyllis. “Everybody else thought Phyllis was sensational on the show,” Milton Ebbins recalled. “She got a lot more publicity than Peter ever did, and the sponsor told Peter that without Phyllis there’d be no show. So he had no choice. He backed off.”

  A number of attempts were made to save The Thin Man. The show had already used three talented directors when its desperate producer, Sam Marx, suggested that George Cukor try his hand at a few episodes. Cukor, intrigued by a medium he’d never worked in, was interested. “George came to help us and he was marvelous as always,” Phyllis recalled. “He was such a master at getting people to loosen up and extend themselves, and that’s what that was all about — just to get us out of a kind of rut.”

  Paul Wurtzel recalled that “George did try to help. He never directed a whole episode, though, only a couple of shots. He said, ‘I don’t know how to help this show.’”

  There was the rub — The Thin Man was beyond help. It faced much stiffer competition its second year when 77 Sunset Strip was scheduled against it on ABC and became not only a hit series but a pop trendsetter. When Colgate-Palmolive withdrew its sponsorship at the end of the second season, NBC canceled the show.

  Despite the indignities she was subjected to on the set, despite everything, Phyllis Kirk harbored no regrets. Often approached by fans who remember the show fondly, she recalled that “I had a wonderful time
doing The Thin Man. Peter was a marvelously generous actor. He taught me a lot; he never hogged a scene. We had a lot of fun doing that series. We had bad days, too. Peter could be cranky, even bitchy. So could I. There were days when we would snarl at each other, like a brother and sister — which, incidentally, was always how I viewed our relationship. I was very fond of him.”

  Peter was galled by his second failure in what many still considered a third-rate medium (so called, according to Ernie Kovacs, “because it is neither rare nor well done”), but he had little time to be depressed. His movie career was about to be revived at an unlikely studio, MGM, and by an unlikely benefactor — Frank Sinatra.

  9 PhylIis Kirk wasn’t alone as the victim of practical jokes. At a wrap party at the end of The Thin Man’s first season, everyone exchanged presents. When Peter opened his, he found a chicken claw inside the box. “It was cruel to make fun of his bad hand like that, but he laughed harder than anyone,” assistant director Paul Wurtzel recalled. “He could take it as well as dish it out.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Frank Sinatra had not spoken to Peter Lawford for almost five years. He would decline an invitation if he knew Peter was expected at a party; if he somehow found himself at a function with Peter, he’d do fancy footwork to avoid running into him. But despite his rude rebuff of Pat’s attempt to meet him, she hadn’t given up. “Like most women,” Peter said, “she was mad about Frank.”

  It was Rocky and Gary Cooper who set the stage for the rapprochement between Sinatra and Peter that made Peter a member of Sinatra’s celebrated “Rat Pack,” the mainstays of which were Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Joey Bishop. More sporadic participants included Shirley MacLaine, Juliet Prowse, Angie Dickinson, Tony Curtis, and Janet Leigh. Also known as “The Clan,” the group became the focus of inordinate public attention in the late 1950s.