Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Judy Garland sat at the head table next to the candidate; Frank Sinatra sat a few chairs down with some of the other presidential hopefuls — Senators Lyndon Johnson of Texas and Stuart Symington of Missouri, and the potential draftee Adlai Stevenson.

  The next day, Frank, Sammy, Dean, Peter, Janet Leigh, and Tony Curtis led the hundred thousand people jammed into the Sports Arena in a rousing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to open the convention. A few bars into the song, members of the Alabama delegation, seated close to the stage, began to heckle Sammy Davis with vicious racial epithets. His face burning with hurt and anger, Davis forced back tears. Sinatra tried to buck him up, whispering, “Those dirty sons of bitches. Don’t let them get to you, Charlie!” Davis finished the song, but he didn’t take his seat with the others once the convention was gaveled to order.

  Alabama was one of the uncommitted delegations that Jack needed to guarantee a first-ballot victory. It was left to Peter to swallow his anger two days later and try to charm a group of men he considered bigots. “I will leave the speechmaking to the politicians,” Peter said on air as TV cameras followed him into the delegation, “but I did want to shake hands with all these people and talk to them as friends.”

  Throughout the week, Sinatra and the Rat Pack roamed the convention floor, ignoring barriers and restrictions, and cajoled recalcitrant delegates to join the Kennedy cause. Conscious of the cameras, Sinatra painted his bald pate black so it wouldn’t be obvious under the TV lights.

  After the first convention session, Jack Kennedy retired to his suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and spent some time with Judy Campbell. (Jackie had stayed home because she was six months pregnant and had a history of problem pregnancies.) Apparently Jack had never compared notes with Sinatra about Judy, because he tried, as Sinatra had, to talk her into a three-way — “with a secretarial type in her late twenties,” as Campbell recalled it. “I know you,” Jack told her. “I know you’ll like it.” Just as she had with Sinatra, Judy refused.

  For the rest of the convention, Jack Kennedy’s sexual amusement was provided by Marilyn Monroe, who was preparing to begin work in Reno on The Misfits, written by her husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, and costarring Clark Gable. Miller and Monroe, dubbed “the Egghead and the Hourglass,” had wed in 1956, but the marriage had been in trouble for several years, and Marilyn was just emerging from an affair with the French singer and actor Yves Montand, the costar of her most recent film Let’s Make Love.

  Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe had continued to rendezvous occasionally in New York throughout the 1950s. Whenever a rift developed between Monroe and Miller, she would drive into Manhattan from their Connecticut farmhouse and stay at her East Fifty-seventh Street apartment. If Jack was in town, she would meet him in his suite at the Carlyle Hotel. Now, with her marriage on the rocks, Marilyn was in Los Angeles without Miller, and Kennedy’s large contingent of Hollywood supporters made her far less conspicuous in Kennedy’s company than she might have been. The second night of the convention, Marilyn dined with Jack, Peter, and Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell at Puccini.

  Before dinner, Marilyn and Jack had apparently been intimate, because Marilyn giggled to Peter that Jack’s performance earlier had been “very democratic” and “very penetrating.” According to Marilyn’s long-time maid, Lena Pepitone, Kennedy was “always telling her dirty jokes, pinching her, and squeezing her. . . . She told me that [he] was always putting his hand on her thigh.” This evening at Puccini, apparently, he continued northward, running his hand farther under Marilyn’s dress. “He hadn’t counted on going that far,” Marilyn laughed to Lena. When he discovered she wasn’t wearing any panties, “he pulled back and turned red.”

  If the candidate seemed confident and at ease, his advisers and family were less tranquil. He was within reach of the nomination, but until it was officially his, anything could happen. The greatest threat was the tremendous emotional attachment many of the delegates — even those pledged to Kennedy — still felt for Adlai Stevenson. When Stevenson said he would allow his name to be placed in nomination, the Kennedy camp verged on panic. Iowa delegate Arthur Thompson recalled seeing Pat Lawford just outside the convention hall during a thunderous demonstration for Stevenson. “She was walking back and forth in what I would describe as a very nervous manner, smoking a cigarette, and with further evidence of nervousness. She walked [into the hall] several times to take a look at the proceedings, then back out again to catch some of it, as I was, on the loudspeaker. I’ve called that since the ‘Kennedy faction’s moment of uncertainty.’”

  Jack Kennedy seemed unfazed. “Don’t worry, Dad,” he told his father. “Stevenson has everything but the votes.” He was right. By the time the roll call reached Wyoming, Jack was within a few votes of a first-ballot victory. Ted Kennedy pushed his way through the crowd to the chairman of the Wyoming delegation and shouted above the din, “You have in your grasp the opportunity to nominate the next president of the United States. Such support can never be forgotten by a president.” The gambit worked — the chairman announced all fifteen of Wyoming’s votes for John F. Kennedy.

  The hall erupted once again, this time in acclamation for the nominee of the Democratic Party. Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack celebrated wildly, patted each other on the back, glad-handed strangers. “We’re on our way to the White House, buddy boy,” Sinatra yelled to Peter, a smile beaming from his face like a sunburst. “We’re on our way to the White House.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Democratic nominee began his race for president as a distinct underdog. His opponent, Vice-President Richard Nixon, had served for eight years under one of the most popular presidents in history, had traveled the world as Dwight Eisenhower’s representative, had debated Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Although he was just four years older than Kennedy, Nixon was viewed by many Americans as far more experienced, far more to be trusted with the great power of the office he sought.

  Kennedy needed to prove himself as qualified for the presidency as Nixon was, and he was given a golden opportunity to do so when the Vice-President agreed to a series of nationally televised debates. The encounters would put Kennedy on an even footing with Nixon before either uttered a word, and they would give him and his campaign themes the kind of exposure he couldn’t have bought for millions of dollars. If Kennedy merely held his own in the debates, he would come out ahead.

  In preparation for the first confrontation, Jack Kennedy turned to the person close to him who had had the most experience in the medium he needed to conquer — Peter Lawford. Peter was thrilled that there was finally something he alone could offer the campaign. He gave his brother-in-law some general advice — “make sure you wear a dark suit, a blue shirt, and the darkest makeup that still looks natural” — and then he told Jack something that may well have won him the election: “Don’t be afraid of the camera. Look directly into it, as though it were a friend across the dinner table. You’ll be making contact with millions of people at the same moment, but each one will feel as though you’re talking only to him.”

  Kennedy’s skillful use of the TV cameras in the first debate was, arguably, more important than any other single factor in the election. His self-assured good looks and his cool, steady eye contact with viewers contrasted starkly with the ill-at-ease, sweaty uncertainty of gaze from Nixon that made him appear shifty-eyed. The Vice-President’s gray suit blended into the background and tended to wash him out; Jack Kennedy’s dark blue suit, as Peter had told him it would, made him appear vivid, more forceful. Radio listeners scored the debate a draw; TV viewers gave the contest handily to the Democrat.

  The debates helped Kennedy overcome the odds against him and draw even with Nixon in the public-opinion polls. And Peter was able to help Jack in another small way using television. Throughout the primaries and the general election campaign, Peter made frequent guest appearances on shows like Frank Sinatra’s and Perry Como’s, often getting in a good word for the K
ennedy campaign. There had been some controversy about the issue of equal time over the airwaves, and a lot of people wondered how he got away with it.

  “You can’t ask me how I ‘get away’ with plugging Kennedy on TV,” Peter told a reporter, “because in all honesty I have never taken it upon myself to do so. In every instance, the Kennedy lines were written in for me by the show management. I could easily understand how this would happen on the Sinatra show, but I must say I was a little surprised when it came up on the Como show. I thought it was marvelous nevertheless. After I did the show I went home and wrote a note of thanks to Perry. I said, ‘If ever our man gets into the White House, I’m sure he’ll make you ambassador to Rome.’”

  Kennedy’s conquest of television notwithstanding, there was still great uncertainty about the outcome of the election, and the Hollywood contingent of the campaign didn’t let up. In September, Frank Sinatra left for Hawaii to film The Devil at 4 O’Clock, costarring Spencer Tracy. Peter joined him there for a series of Kennedy fund-raising concerts at Waikiki Beach, at Hilo on the big island of Hawaii, and on Maui, where Sinatra was filming. “We hit all the islands,” Peter recalled, “just the two of us. I’d smile and Frank would sing, picking up local bands along the way.”

  The largest of the events was a “Koncert for Kennedy” at the Waikiki Shell on October 2, where Sinatra sang fourteen songs to an audience of over nine thousand. Peter spoke briefly to the crowd, offering mostly wisecracks: “It’s not true that I’m for Kennedy because I want my brother-in-law out of the house.” He introduced Sinatra as “our next ambassador to Italy,” but the singer demurred, saying, “I just want to run the Miss Universe contest.”

  As Kennedy’s campaign rolled along, Democrats began to smell victory, and the crowds at his public appearances swelled to sometimes unmanageable sizes. On October 26, Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis, Sinatra, and Peter joined the candidate at a huge rally in New Jersey, Sinatra’s home state. Nearly forty thousand avid Democrats attended. Peter was the master of ceremonies, Sinatra sang, Leigh said a few words. Then the candidate delivered a stirring oration, and the throng grew so frenzied that fifteen women fainted and a man had to be carried out of the arena over the heads of the crowd.

  ON ELECTION DAY, November 8, Jack Kennedy received at least one vote that no other candidate before him ever had — Peter Lawford’s. In order to vote for his brother-in-law, Peter had studied to become a citizen of the United States in the early spring of 1960, and on April 23, as Kennedy campaigned in West Virginia, Peter stood along with six hundred other people in Los Angeles, raised his right hand, and pledged his loyalty to America. “It’s the one thing in the world I wanted most,” Peter said afterward. “I was never so frightened in my life as when I took the examination. I kept saying to myself, ‘Suppose I fail?’”

  A few hours after his swearing-in, Peter got a telegram from his sisters-in-law Joan and Ethel: “Congratulations and welcome to America. However, hold your passport till after West Virginia, and if Hubert wins, we’ll all go back to England with you.”

  Now, Peter was able to vote for Jack in the general election, and he did so by absentee ballot because he planned to be in Hyannis Port to wait out the election results with the rest of the family. He joined Jack for the last Kennedy rally of the campaign in Boston Garden on Monday night, November 7. Jack introduced several members of his family before getting to Peter, who elicited the loudest response of all. “You’re very popular in Boston, Peter,” the candidate commented as he heard the crowd cheer for his brother-in-law.

  At four A.M., when Peter and Jack went to bed at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, the election results were still in doubt. CBS News had projected Nixon the winner early in the evening, then changed its mind. At five forty-five Bobby Kennedy got word that Michigan had finally gone for Jack and put him over the top in the electoral college. When the candidate arose at nine o’clock he was told he was the president-elect.

  By then the press had descended on the compound, and so had the Secret Service. When Jack took a stroll along the beach that fronted the Kennedy property, he was trailed by armed guards — protection he would come to hate and try to elude whenever possible. Then Vice-President Nixon conceded the election and dozens of Kennedys and their friends piled into a caravan headed for the Hyannis Armory to see Jack meet the press for the first time as president-elect.

  The 1960 presidential election had gone to Kennedy by a mere 118,574 votes out of more than sixty-eight million cast, and some observers felt that the Democrats hadn’t won it fair and square. Peter’s FBI file contains a copy of a letter sent anonymously to President Eisenhower shortly after the election by a disgruntled New York Republican.

  “My suspicions concerning possible election fraud on a national scale by organized crime grow stronger and stronger,” the correspondent wrote. “When I first saw Frank Sinatra and his well-known ‘Rat Pack’ on the Kennedy bandwagon, I didn’t like the ‘odor of things.’ Sinatra is well known in show business as being buddy-buddy with the syndicates of crime throughout the world, and these people stop at nothing. . .. They treated the last election as they would a horse race with very heavy betting. Peter Lawford who is Kennedy’s brother- in-law had $50,000 bet on his winning . . . this is peanuts [compared] to what the mob had bet on a Kennedy victory. These include the top juke box operators, pinball game specialists and the like — you see, machines are their business. Therefore, could it be possible that in addition to ‘fixing’ votes in other ways, they could do something to voting machines that would register only one out of every three or four votes for Nixon? In Chicago they really went all out, as you can tell by looking at the returns in that city. . . . ”

  Ovid Demaris, a Mafia specialist, analyzed the 1960 Illinois results and found that although Nixon had won 93 of the state’s 102 counties, he lost Illinois by 8,858 votes — because of a huge Kennedy majority in Cook County, which includes Chicago. A partial, unofficial Republican recount of the Cook County vote reportedly turned up an extra 4,539 votes for Nixon, but an official recount was blocked by Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Richard Daley. Indeed, the Chicago Mafia boss, Sam Giancana, boasted that he had been responsible for Kennedy’s victory.

  Eisenhower urged his Vice-President to contest the election results, but Nixon declined. In his memoirs, Nixon wrote that he did so to avoid dividing the nation, but he may have had less noble motives. A careful investigation would surely have uncovered local fraud that benefited the Republican ticket as well. And Nixon was aware that Bobby Kennedy knew but had decided not to leak the fact that Nixon had sought psychiatric counseling in the 1950s.

  That was the Kennedy camp’s ace in the hole. Not only did it make Nixon think twice about demanding a recount, but it kept him from releasing information during the campaign that would have destroyed his opponent’s candidacy — that Jack Kennedy was an adulterer. Had he chosen to use it, Nixon had more than enough information on the Kennedys — information obtained through wiretaps that Fred Otash had installed in the Lawford home in 1959. Otash had been approached, by his own account, by “some people within the Republican Party who were trying to find things out about the Kennedys. It was a political bugging to try to develop a derogatory profile on the Kennedys. Not regarding women, that came later. Just some inside information about what they were doing generally, their strategy for the 1960 campaign, that sort of thing.”

  IT WAS SOMEHOW FITTING that one of the first controversies surrounding John F. Kennedy as he prepared to take office swirled around Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford. The imbroglio, a tempest in a teapot if ever there was one, erupted when the two men arrived in a cold, blustery Washington the second week of January 1961 to begin preparations for a fund-raising gala to be held the night before Kennedy’s inauguration. They had flown in from Los Angeles on the President-elect’s private plane, Caroline, and as they stepped off the aircraft along with a dog wearing a black sweater, they were met by a uniformed airman and whisked off in a maroo
n limousine to the National Guard armory.

  This riled Iowa Republican congressman H. R. Gross, who lambasted the Pentagon for providing “taxi drivers and handmaidens” for Sinatra and Lawford. “If there is nothing more important for some of our military than to serve as lackeys and wet nurses,” Gross huffed, “we had better give immediate attention in Congress to a reduction of personnel in the military establishments.”

  A Defense Department spokesman assured Gross that it wouldn’t happen again. Sinatra and Peter, after muttering a few choice words about the congressman, set about planning a star-studded event that would, in Peter’s words, bring in “the biggest take in show business history for a one-nighter.”

  The chief purpose of the gala was to raise two million dollars to erase the Democrats’ campaign debt, and there was little doubt that it would succeed. By December 7, all seventy-two available boxes had been sold — at ten thousand dollars apiece; one of them was bought by Joe Kennedy. And the fourteen thousand additional armory seats were going fast at a hundred dollars each. “We will net more than 1.9 million,” Peter said. “It will be the first time in history a man has gone into the White House out of debt after a campaign. Adlai Stevenson still is five hundred thousand dollars in debt from his last campaign. He’s been trying to pay it back with speaking engagements. The show we’re putting on may also pay up Adlai’s expenses.”

  The revue, Peter said, would comprise “songs, dances, sketches, and comedy. Almost everything will be new material.” Set to appear were Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin, Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Shirley MacLaine, Harry Belafonte, Milton Berle, Nat King Cole, Red Skelton, Bill Dana, Alan King, Mahalia Jackson, Bette Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Gene Kelly, Juliet Prowse, Louis Prima and Keely Smith, and Nelson Riddle’s Orchestra. Joey Bishop would serve as master of ceremonies.