by James Spada
Ebbins’s face went white. “Oh, Jesus Christ, Jack! He’s all set to go, he’s got the cables, the equipment — ”
“Jackie won’t let him in here,” Kennedy explained. “She doesn’t want all those cables lying around. It’s out of the question. You’ve gotta tell him. You and Pierre talk to him.”
Salinger and Ebbins went down to Pierre’s office to call Preminger. Neither of them wanted to be the one to break the news, but Salinger did so. “Vat?” Preminger exploded. “You must be crazy! I am hready to shoot! Vat iss diss, a joke?”
Ebbins took the phone from Salinger. “Listen, Otto, this is Milt. Forget it, it’s off.”
“Who iss diss?”
“It’s Milt Ebbins. You can’t shoot — ”
“Get off diss telephone! Who vants to talk to you?”
“Otto, it’s out, finished, over — ”
“Vat do you mean — you have de authority to tell me diss? You are hrepresenting de President?”
“Yes, I have the authority to tell you . . . it’s out!”
“Do you know vat you are doink to me?”
“It’s not me, Otto, it’s Jackie; she doesn’t want you to shoot in the White House.”
“Let me talk vit her — ”
“No, Otto, it’s out, finished, kaput.”
Preminger was furious, and from that point on his attitude toward Peter changed markedly. In the middle of Helen Markel’s interview with Peter on the set, Preminger thundered across the Senate cafeteria, “Mr. Lawford, ve are vaiting for you. Vy must you alvess be answering qvestions, qvestions, qvestions?”
Once Peter began the scene, an exchange with Charles Laughton, Preminger instructed Laughton to hold his hand higher during an angry gesture. Laughton told the director that if he held his hand that high it would cast a shadow across Peter’s face.
“Dot iss not your problem, Mr. Laughton,” Preminger sneered. “But Mr. Lawford has pointed out to me that it is his,” Laughton replied in his best House-of-Lords baritone.
Later, when an actor sought the director’s help in conveying an air of haughty disdain, Preminger told him: “Simply take lessons from Mr. Lawford.”
Preminger didn’t just make the working atmosphere chilly for Peter; he took a director’s ultimate revenge and edited him out of the picture. After an early establishing scene that leads a viewer to expect that Peter will be a major character in the film, he is seen only fleetingly, his part so truncated that one comes away wondering why the character exists at all.
Advise and Consent was a popular picture, well reviewed as a political soap opera produced for the masses with a veneer of weightiness that made it seem like an “important” movie. As critic Dwight MacDonald observed of Preminger, “No one is more skilled at giving the appearance of dealing with large controversial themes in a bold way, without making the tactical error of doing so.”
The success of The Longest Day and Advise and Consent, and the barrage of publicity he received over his participation in them, were Pyrrhic victories for Peter. He was uncomfortable with the knowledge that he had been hired for both films primarily because he could provide the producers with something they needed. None of the press reports alluded to this specifically, but there was a widespread perception that Peter’s new status as “First Brother-in-Law” was responsible for the resurgence of his career.
Peter bristled whenever a reporter broached the subject. One British reporter observed scathingly, “Peter Lawford, well known now as the actor husband of President Kennedy’s sister, may inspire drama students with a new dictum: if you want to get ahead, get a head of state.”
“People seem to forget,” Peter responded, “that I have been in this business for twenty years. I had a career before I ever met Pat Kennedy.” But then he muttered an aside that seemed to prove the reporter’s point: “If you could call it a career.”
But Peter couldn’t win. Even with the power of the White House behind him, he wasn’t offered starring roles, and his willingness to open doors might just as easily blow up in his face, as it had with Preminger. He was not the man who made the decisions; rather he was at the mercy of forces and personalities beyond his control.
Despite some solid performances in a variety of roles, Peter wasn’t able to shake the general impression that he was a lightweight. Joe Kennedy had turned to Bill Asher some months earlier and said, “Peter’s not a very good actor, is he?” Asher protested that he thought Peter was a very good actor indeed, but Kennedy didn’t seem to buy it.
Once again Peter Lawford was one of the smallest fish in a very big pond, and reporters wouldn’t let him forget it. One woman journalist said to him, “Your pictures are getting bigger.” As he started to offer a gracious thank-you, the woman interrupted: “But your parts are getting smaller.”
Peter gave her a sharp look. Then he smiled wanly and said, “Touché.”
ONCE PETER COMPLETED principal photography on Advise and Consent in mid-December, he flew directly to Palm Beach to spend the Christmas holidays with the Kennedys. An extended visit with his in-laws was not one of Peter’s favorite pastimes, but now that Jack was President, Peter enjoyed being in his company more than ever. Bob Neal observed that “Peter was very impressed with the office. Everyone was, of course, but Peter more so. He was in awe of Jack.” Being with the Kennedys, however, caused Peter no end of ego battering. Driving off the Kennedy grounds, he saw a crowd of people wave from across the street. He waved back — only to hear what they were really interested in when they shouted: “Where’s Jackie?”
AMONG THE KENNEDYS
Peter and Patricia Kennedy celebrate their marriage in New York on April 24, 1954.
(UPI/BETTMANN)
The enormous crowd outside St. Thomas More’s Church threatened to turn into an unruly mob as the Lawfords emerged after the nuptials.
(UPI/BETTMANN)
Christopher Lawford, Peter’s first child, is christened, 1955. With Peter and Pat are (left to right) Joe Kennedy, Francis Cardinal McIntyre, Peter Sabiston, and May Lawford. May’s expression sums up her deep disdain for the Kennedy family.
(UPI/BETTMANN)
Peter’s two 1950s TV series met with mixed success. Dear Phoebe, a sitcom with Marcia Henderson in which he played an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist, was well reviewed but lasted just one season in 1954.
(PICTORIAL PARADE)
In The Thin Man, Peter and Phyllis Kirk played Nick and Nora Charles, husband-and-wife detectives seldom without their dog, Asta. The comedy-drama was panned by critics, but found an audience and lasted two seasons between 1957 and 1959.
The “Rat Pack,” 1958. As John F. Kennedy’s political star ascended, Frank Sinatra (center) deigned to allow Peter into his “clan,” which also included (left to right) Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, and Dean Martin.
(PHOTO BY DON PACK)
Between the filming of Ocean’s 11 and the sold-out Rat Pack “summit” shows at the Sands Hotel in Vegas, the Clan hung out in the steamroom, where they drank and ribbed each other constantly.
(PHOTO © 1960 BOB WILLOUGHBY)
Father’s Day, 1959: Peter poses with his children in the playground of their beach house in Santa Monica. Top to bottom: Victoria, seven months; Christopher, four; and Sydney, three.
(COURTESY W. NOAD)
On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected President. The next day, at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Peter and his sisters-in-law Eunice, Ethel, and Joan (left to right) celebrate.
(PAUL SCHUTZER/LIFE MAGAZINE © TIME WARNER, INC.)
Peter chats with Jacqueline Kennedy before the inaugural gala, January 20, 1961. He and Frank Sinatra coproduced the event, which was rife with problems.
(PAUL SCHUTZER/LIFE MAGAZINE © TIME WARNER, INC.)
Peter and the President sailing off Hyannis Port, 1961. When Jack Kennedy saw this photo he kidded Peter that no one would believe it because “it looks like I’m listening to your advice.”
(SANDERSON/SH
OOTING STAR)
Peter and Pat on the French location of The Longest Day, 1961. Peter played the British war hero Lord Lovat, and was hired for the part mainly because Darryl Zanuck, the producer, knew he would be able to help get the U.S. Army’s permission to use military personnel and equipment in the film.
The Lawford beach house (center) often served as the Western White House. This photograph was taken August 20, 1962, during a presidential visit.
(UPI/BETTMANN)
On May 19, 1962, Peter introduced “the late Marilyn Monroe” at a birthday party for the President at Madison Square Garden. Marilyn’s sexy rendition of “Happy Birthday” left the crowd cheering — and Kennedy grinning.
(UPI/BETTMANN)
November 22, 1963: Peter and Milton Ebbins rush from a helicopter to the Lawford house after hearing the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated.
(AP/WIDE WORLD)
“MORE THAN HE COULD BEAR”
Peter comforts his seven-year-old daughter Sydney as they join (left to right) Lady Bird Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Jean Smith, President Johnson, Pat, Caroline Kennedy, and Jacqueline Kennedy at President Kennedy’s funeral on November 25, 1963.
(UPI/BETTMANN)
Peter returned to work immediately after the funeral, rejoining Jimmy Durante on stage in Lake Tahoe, and was criticized.
(JOHN LOENGARD/LIFE MAGAZINE © TIME WARNER INC.)
Carroll Baker as Jean Harlow and Peter as Paul Bern in a scene from Harlow, 1965. The filming was an emotional strain on him.
(PICTORIAL PARADE)
A harrowing moment in Dead Ringer (1964) when Peter, playing Bette Davis’s conniving lover, is attacked by a vicious dog.
(PHOTOFEST)
Peter’s joint Hawaiian vacation with Jackie Kennedy in June 1966 sent his ex-wife, Pat, into a fury. With them (top to bottom) are John Kennedy, Jr., five; Christopher, eleven; Caroline Kennedy, eight; and Sydney, ten.
(SANDERSON/SHOOTING STAR)
Sammy Davis, Jr., was the only Rat Packer who remained close to Peter after his final falling-out with Sinatra in 1962. Here they do a soft-shoe routine on TV’s
The Hollywood Palace, 1967.
(PICTORIAL PARADE)
Peter attempts to escape the clutches of Gina Lollobrigida in their 1968 movie Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell. Off the set, Peter said, the scene was repeated for real in Gina’s Rome villa.
(PHOTOFEST)
Model Geri Crane accompanies Peter to London for the filming of Salt and Pepper, 1967. Their relationship lasted three years.
(POPPER PHOTO/PICTORIAL PARADE)
Peter, forty-eight, and Mary Rowan, twenty-one, are married in Puerto Vallarta, October 30, 1971. Flanking them are best man Christopher Lawford, sixteen, and bridesmaid Toni Stabile. Peter’s drinking, drug use, and womanizing quickly put the marriage in trouble, and the couple separated in 1973.
(AP/WIDE WORLD)
Peter’s flagging career in the mid 1970s left him with little choice but to do silly TV shows such as this one with Dick Clark, Las Vegas Celebrity Secrets, in September 1974.
(PICTORIAL PARADE)
June 26, 1976: Stoned on vodka and Quaaludes, Peter, fifty-two, takes his third wife, Deborah Gould, twenty-five, in Virginia. The next day, he couldn’t remember getting married, and within a few months Deborah had returned home to Miami.
(UPI/BETTMANN)
Christopher Lawford, twenty-eight, was graduated from Boston College Law School in 1983. Flanking him (left to right) are Sydney, twenty-seven; Pat; Victoria, twenty-five; and Robin, twenty-two.
(PHOTO BY BRIAN QUIGLEY)
Later in 1983, Peter gave Sydney away in marriage to Peter McKelvy. He hadn’t wanted to attend the wedding, and fell down, drunk, during a rehearsal.
(PHOTO BY BRIAN QUGLEY)
Pat Seaton, twenty-five, and Peter, sixty, in April 1984. Companions since Seaton was seventeen, they were wed in July 1984. Peter died five months later, on Christmas Eve.
(PHOTO BY GEORGE RICHARDSON/ BORSARl)
A debonair portrait of Peter from his last picture, a European TV movie entitled Where Is Parsifal? The film was shown after Peter’s death.
The Kennedy family’s holiday joy was short-lived. One week before Christmas, Joseph Kennedy felt faint while playing golf and could barely walk back to his car. At home, he took to his bed, where he lay ashen faced, unable to move. Rose Kennedy told the servants she was sure he’d be all right — and that in any event, “there is nothing I can do but pray.” She then kept an appointment for a golf game of her own. A few hours later, Kennedy’s niece Ann Gargan called an ambulance and Joe was rushed to St. Mary’s Hospital.
He had suffered a massive stroke and was, in the words of family friend LeMoyne Billings, “one breath away.” Joe was hooked up to life-support systems, and his doctor told the family that even if he recovered, his body would be useless to him. Briefly, that first night, the family considered pulling the plug on the life supports. It was Bobby who finally vetoed the idea. “No, let him fight for his life.” Joe’s condition remained stable through Christmas Eve, when he developed pneumonia. Doctors performed a tracheotomy the next day to relieve congestion in his throat and chest. While the children’s Christmas morning was kept as normal as possible, the adults attended mass in the chapel at St. Mary’s Hospital, where they prayed for the patriarch’s recovery. The Associated Press wired a photo across America of a doleful Peter and Pat leaving the hospital after a visit to her father’s bedside.
Joe Kennedy lived another eight years, but he remained completely incapacitated. This once powerful, vibrant man was confined to a wheelchair, completely paralyzed on his right side. He drooled from the corner of his mouth, he was no longer able to speak intelligibly, and the muscles of his right arm contracted until his hand had tightened, much like Peter’s, into a claw. His grandchildren were so frightened by this apparition that had once been their imposing grandfather that they ran away from him in tears.
Now, Rose Kennedy packed mourning clothes for herself when ever she traveled, just in case. Frank Saunders, the Kennedy chauffeur, said that whenever Rose entered Joe’s room, he became visibly upset. “Before, he had been the Supreme Being in the Kennedy house,” Saunders said. “But after the stroke it was like a little smile came over her face, as if to say, ‘Gotcha now!’”
AFTER A SUBDUED NEW YEAR’S EVE celebration in Palm Beach, Peter flew to New York to rehearse and tape his starring role in an NBC-TV Theater 62 version of The Farmer’s Daughter, the 1947 RKO film that had won an Oscar for Loretta Young. The charming fable concerned a simple Swedish farm girl from Minnesota who joins the household of an urbane congressman and tries to influence his political views. Eventually she runs successfully for Congress herself, and wins her employer’s heart in the process.
Lee Remick, cast to play the farmer’s daughter opposite Peter’s congressman, was a highly touted twenty-seven-year-old newcomer with six prestigious movies to her credit. In The Farmer’s Daughter, which was aired on January 14, Remick looked like a petite version of Marilyn Monroe.
Peter and Lee hit it off instantly. “He was very nice and funny and charming,” Lee remembered. “We had a lot of laughs making it. Peter had that lovely kind of easy charm. I remember being a teenager and seeing him in movies. I thought he was terrific.”
Peter found himself equally taken with Remick, who was married to Bill Colleran, a director, and had two small children. Much to the surprise of Milt Ebbins, Peter told him that his feelings for Remick were “serious,” and it wasn’t long before those feelings became so obvious that Hedda Hopper ran a thinly veiled “blind item” in her nationally syndicated column that her personal files confirm was about Peter and Lee: “The big news in Hollywood is a romance that can’t be put into print. I don’t like blind items, but I guarantee if this one hits the papers it will curl hair from Washington to Santa Monica.”12 Four days later, Hopper wrote, “Regarding my blind item of the other day about Hollywood’s most hush-hus
h romance, the two parties evidently don’t seem to care who knows. They dined in a popular restaurant, and if he’s not careful he may lose his million dollar baby.” Peter soon confided in Bill Asher, as he had in Milt Ebbins, about his feelings for Lee. “Things got pretty heavy,” Asher recalled. “He told me he was thinking of asking Lee to marry him. I got on him about it. I said, ‘You must be a lunatic. Cool it!’ But he didn’t want to cool it — not at all.”
Peter, according to friends, began to press Lee to marry him. Again and again he asked her, but she remained noncommittal. Peter later said that when he posed the question once more on the telephone, Lee told him she would give him an answer — in person. Peter booked a room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and Lee made a date to meet him there the following evening.
“This is the big day,” he told Ebbins the next morning, clearly confident that Lee’s answer would be yes.
“He and Lee were up in his suite for a couple of hours,” Ebbins recalled. “Then he called me to come up. Lee had gone, and Peter was crushed. He said she had told him that she could never break up her family.”
As she had with so many of Peter’s infatuations, Pat became aware of the one with Lee Remick. A few weeks after Hedda Hopper’s “million dollar baby” item Peter and Pat threw an extravagant party at the beach house and invited Lee Remick and Bill Colleran. As the guests began to arrive, Pat remained near the front door so that she could greet everyone. When she opened the door to the Collerans, Lee put out her hand and said, “Hello, Pat. I’m Lee Remick.”