Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  “Everything he went out of his way to do for them,” Jackie Cooper said, “they held against him. Then they didn’t want him around. They cut him off. If he had been at Chappaquiddick he probably would have gotten blamed for that, too.”

  The Monroe tragedy also marked the beginning of the end for the Lawford marriage. Pat had turned a blind eye to many of the excesses that Peter and her brothers had committed in her beach house; she had sometimes even participated in the drinking and merrymaking. Now, however, this life-style had claimed a victim, a woman Pat had genuinely cared about. The revelries that had allowed Peter and Pat to avoid their problems, that had made married life bearable for a deeply estranged couple, were finally seen for the destructive force they were.

  Peter was wracked with guilt and sorrow over Marilyn’s death, tortured by his insidious censure by most of the Kennedys, miserable at the approaching dissolution of his marriage. He now found his best comfort in alcohol. Until the summer of 1962, Peter had imbibed primarily to have a good time, to be one of the boys, to loosen up. Occasionally he would overdo it, but he hadn’t been using liquor as a crutch or an escape. Now he was.

  So was Pat. And with both partners drinking heavily, a tense marriage turned volatile. “They both became so dependent on booze,” Peter Sabiston said. “They accelerated their drinking tremendously.” This sometimes tore holes in the facade of public propriety they so assiduously tried to maintain. Matty Jordan owned the Lawfords’ favorite restaurant, Matteo’s, on Westwood Boulevard, and he remembered nights when Peter and Pat would sit at their regular table and “argue all the time. When they were drinking, they’d get into a discussion and then things would snowball and they’d wind up fighting. They’d try to keep it under their breath, but you could tell what was going on.” What did they fight about? Matty is succinct: “He was fucking around with broads.”

  That and so much else was wrong with the Lawford marriage by early 1963 that Peter and Pat realized it was unsalvageable, and they decided that their only recourse was to divorce — despite the fact that there had never been so much as a legal separation among the Catholic Kennedys.

  That spring, Peter and Milt Ebbins flew to Washington to break the news to Jack Kennedy. In the Cabinet Room, Peter sat on a window seat with his head in his hands and wept. He told the President that his marriage to Pat couldn’t be saved, that the last thing he wanted to do was cause embarrassment for the administration, that he was “sorry, Jack, so sorry.”

  Kennedy put a comforting hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Peter, listen,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. If it’s going to happen it’s going to happen. Let me tell you something — it’s not all your fault. I know Pat better than you do.”

  As Peter sat sniffling, Jack added, “You and I will always be friends, Peter. You’re not going to lose me.”

  “I’m worried about the publicity, sir,” Peter said. “For you, I mean — ”

  “Ah, it won’t be such a big deal.”

  At this point Ebbins, who had been standing silently by, spoke up. “Jack, I think you’re wrong about that.”

  Peter jumped to his feet. “Goddamn you, Milt! How dare you contradict the President of the United States like that?”

  “Wait a minute, Peter,” Jack said, raising a hand to silence him. “What do you mean, Milt?”

  “Jack, if we announce this tomorrow, there will be three pictures on the front page of The New York Times the next morning: Peter’s, Pat’s — and yours.”

  Kennedy glanced at Peter and turned back to Ebbins. Then he said quietly, “Maybe we’d better wait.”

  FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS, until after the 1964 presidential election, Peter and Pat Lawford were expected to remain married — in name only. It was a tremendous strain on both of them, especially since they decided not to tell anyone but their closest, most trusted friends of the decision, in order to avoid any leaks to the press. To keep the fiction of a solid marriage alive, the Lawfords often conducted elaborate charades of happiness, inviting their friends over for dinner and parlor games as they had for years.

  “They would put on a show for people,” Dolores Naar recalled. “She’d call him ‘honey’ and ‘sweetie’ and it was almost funny, because Joe and I knew that they hadn’t spoken to each other in private for two weeks. It was easier for them to have people around than be alone together in the house and not speak to each other.”

  When they did speak to each other now, it was usually to argue — and their fights sometimes turned violent. After one, Pat threw Peter out of the house. “He was crying, it was real bad,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “He took a few bags and checked into the Beverly Hilton Hotel. He was at the hotel for a while and he called up this girl he’d been seeing, a former dancer from Vegas. She came and stayed with him.”

  After a few days, Ebbins called Pat. Icily, she told him she didn’t want to talk about it. Ebbins persisted. “Just let me tell you something, Pat. If you don’t do something, you’re gonna see headlines you wouldn’t believe. If this gets out — and you know it’s bound to — you’re gonna see such a scandal your head will spin.”

  The line went silent for a few seconds. Then Pat said, “Tell him to come back.”

  A few months later, however, Pat tossed Peter out again — and this time her resolve was firm. Peter remained at the Beverly Hilton for several weeks, and it was during this period that he met Scottie Singer, who accompanied Judy Garland to a gathering in Peter’s suite. They joined him and “five or six guys” who were playing poker. Singer didn’t play but sat on the sidelines, chatting and catching up on her knitting. As the evening progressed, several of the men got angry with Peter for not paying attention to the game — he kept talking to and flirting with Scottie Singer. She was thrilled. “When I was a girl I cut Peter’s picture out of Modern Screen and put it on my bedroom wall. Now here I was sitting across from him — and he was still a gorgeous man.”

  Later, as everyone got up to leave, Peter made a signal to Singer. He put his hand up to his face and used his thumb and pinky to mime a telephone receiver in order to get the point across that she should call him later. When Judy turned around and saw what he was doing, he pretended to be scratching his head. Singer called when she and Judy got home. “Peter wanted me to come back that night, but I told him I couldn’t leave Judy alone in the middle of the night. I told him it would have to be some other time.”

  A few nights later, Singer excitedly drove to the hotel for a rendezvous with her girlhood heartthrob. The evening started off like a fairy tale. A romantic candlelight dinner, witty conversation, warm compliments from a man “I still had a huge crush on.” After dinner, as though in a glorious dream, she found herself wrapped in the arms of Peter Lawford. “We were on the bed, just kind of hugging and kissing, and Peter turned off the lights. I was ready for the most wonderful night of my life.”

  After a few minutes, she heard the bedroom door open and looked up to see the silhouette of a woman standing in the doorway.

  The shadowy figure, moving slowly and sensuously, approached the bed and Singer discerned that she was a beautiful black girl. “I didn’t know who she was or what she was doing there. Then she started to stroke my thigh and I figured out what was going on.”

  Singer had never been involved in a ménage a trois. “I was hurt and astounded and offended. I wanted to make love with Peter, not with Peter and some stranger. I was hurt that he didn’t seem to think I’d be enough. At first I was afraid to say anything. I kind of closed my eyes and hoped that woman would go away. Finally I said, ‘Peter, I can’t deal with this. I want to be alone with you.’”

  Peter realized he had made a mistake. “It’s no problem,” he said, and told the girl that Scottie wasn’t comfortable with the situation. He thanked her and walked her out of the suite. When he returned to the bedroom, he apologized profusely. “I’m sorry. I should have asked.” Singer was so flustered she cannot remember whether or not she and Peter resumed their lovemaking.
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br />   Singer saw Peter several more times, always in a one-on-one situation. A few months after their first date, he brought her to the beach house when Pat was out of town and proudly showed her photographs of himself with President Kennedy. Then the two sat and talked until far into the morning.

  Toward daybreak, they lay together in bed. She held his hand as he tried to fall asleep. “It wasn’t a sexual relationship that Peter and I had at this point,” she recalled. “It was past that. He knew I cared a great deal about him, and he cared about me. He knew he could ask me to do whatever he wanted without feeling that I would think he was weird for asking me to do it.

  “He asked me if I would squeeze his nipples. I said, ‘Sure,’ and as I was doing it he started to tell me that he felt guilty about sex. He said that ever since he was a little boy it had been drilled into him by his mother that sex was dirty, dirty, dirty. He said that having his nipples stimulated aroused him and gave him pleasure but he didn’t feel guilty about it because that didn’t involve his genitals. Those were the dirty parts.”

  IN MAY 1963, MILT EBBINS attended a birthday celebration for John Kennedy in Washington. The President sat on the dais, and in the audience were a dozen Secret Service men and over a hundred politicians eager to be photographed with the President for the next day’s papers in their home states. Milt found himself pushed by the throng against a brick wall at the back of the room.

  Jack spotted Ebbins from the stage, and as he stood up to leave he motioned for Milt to join him. Secret Service men cut a path through the crowd for him, and Jack put his arm around him as they started walking together amid a crush of bodies. “Then Jack stopped,” Ebbins recalled, “which he wasn’t supposed to do, because then he’d be a target for a shot. He turned to me and said something, and everybody started asking, ‘What did he say? What did he say?’”

  What the President said to Ebbins was, “When are you gonna get Peter a job?”

  It wasn’t up to Ebbins to get Peter a job — he had an agent for that — and he was too polite to point out to the President that the fact that Peter hadn’t worked for nearly a year and a half was primarily because of his relationship to the White House. Frank Sinatra’s subtle blacklisting of Peter over the Palm Springs issue had been very effective — a number of producers in Hollywood would not use him under any circumstances. Others, unconcerned about Sinatra but appalled by the situation surrounding Marilyn Monroe’s last months, were also unwilling to hire Peter.

  Of course, there were producers happy to use him, but even when he was offered work, he sometimes couldn’t accept an interesting role because of his sensitive position as “First Brother-in-Law.” This had happened early in 1962 when director Robert Aldrich wanted Peter for a costarring role in the Bette Davis and Joan Crawford thriller Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

  The script and cast appealed to Peter, and he agreed to make the picture. But two days later, he had second thoughts about the part: a sleazy, pasty, whining mama’s boy, eventually played in a brilliant if off-putting performance by the character actor Victor Buono. It’s hard now to imagine anyone but Buono in the role, and especially not Peter Lawford. It would have been, Peter realized, far too great a stretch for him — and the character’s unsavory quality would have embarrassed the Kennedys.

  In July 1963, though, Peter got another chance to work with Bette Davis in an equally intriguing film, Dead Ringer, this time in a role much more within his range: a manipulative gigolo and blackmailer. Peter was paid forty thousand dollars for five weeks’ work, and brought to the role not only his patented good looks and charm but just the right dollop of malice. It was one of Peter’s more effective performances, but it was not achieved without some difficulty. For the first time in his career, Peter’s personal problems affected his professionalism, and Bette Davis, for one, wasn’t pleased.

  “It was a very tight shooting schedule,” she said. “There were times when Peter was late in the morning, and sometimes he didn’t know his lines. I knew he was having problems in his marriage and I knew he was drinking. But I wouldn’t stand for that kind of unprofessionalism.”

  According to assistant director Phil Ball, Bette remained silent for a while, then she spoke to Peter about the matter. “He was tardy very few times after that,” Ball recalled. For his part, Peter remembered Bette Davis only as “understanding, kindly, patient — even maternal, if that’s the word. I suspect she felt sorry for me.”

  He was right. “Peter was a better actor than he got credit for,” Davis said. “I thought he was very good in the film. But I could see that he was having some kind of trouble.” Shortly after filming she confided in a friend that she was “sad” about him. “He’s unfortunate, and it’s too bad.”

  ALTHOUGH PETER HADN’T ACTED for a long period before Dead Ringer, he hadn’t been completely idle. In 1961, with the help of William Peyton Marin, the Kennedy family attorney, Peter and Milt Ebbins had formed a production company called Chrislaw, so called after Peter’s six-year-old son. Ebbins was named executive vice president.

  Almost immediately, the company had a major production deal with United Artists, whose head, Arthur Krim, was a close friend of Joseph Kennedy’s. “Joe made a couple of phone calls,” Ebbins said, “and we had a deal with UA. They gave us a suite of offices and a couple of secretaries, paid all our expenses, and agreed to finance our television and movie productions. It was a very lucrative arrangement.” By 1963, Chrislaw had developed The Patty Duke Show for television, starring the 1962 best supporting actress Oscar winner in a dual role as “identical cousins.” Bill Asher, under contract to Chrislaw, directed the first thirteen episodes of the series, a hit that lasted four seasons.

  Unsurprisingly, Peter wasn’t deeply involved in the business aspects of Chrislaw; he left most of that to his partner. What intrigued him was finding interesting projects and casting them with compelling actors. “Peter was very active in the creative elements of Chrislaw,” Bill Asher recalled. “He had ideas, he contributed. I brought everything to Peter for his input.” Also involved was Joe Kennedy, who, even after his stroke, was kept abreast of things. Asher was often “summoned to Hyannis Port to show Mr. Kennedy what we were doing. I’d show him a book we wanted to option, a script we were doing, just so he would know what was going on.”

  Chrislaw’s first big-screen production was a well-received crime saga, Johnny Cool, about a mob hitman known as “the delivery boy of death.” Directed by Asher and starring Henry Silva in the title role, the film was praised by many critics as a stylish throwback to the golden age of gangster movies. It featured a gallery of Peter’s friends in supporting roles: Sammy Davis, Brad Dexter, Richard Anderson, Joey Bishop, and Elizabeth Montgomery, who was married to Asher at the time. It was the opportunity to utilize good actors that brought Peter the most pleasure from producing. “It’s wonderful to give actors jobs,” Peter said, “to bolster them and bring back their faltering confidence. As an actor I know that when you get out on that stage, you expose you. And the older you get, the worse it gets; you’re not sure of yourself.”

  In the case of Johnny Cool, Peter made a choice of leading man that seemed ill-advised. Henry Silva had appeared in small parts in Ocean’s 11 and Sergeants 3, but he had never carried a movie, and Johnny Cool required him to be on-screen for just about the entire film. It was a risk to cast him, and there was dissension, but Peter won out. “It was a low-budget movie, and I wasn’t a star, so they could get me inexpensively,” Silva recalled. “But there were a lot of other inexpensive actors he could have chosen. Peter believed in me, and gave me this extraordinary opportunity. I will always be grateful to him for that.”

  Peter’s instincts about Silva proved correct. He was terrific in the movie, and when Johnny Cool opened on October 2, 1963, it did very well during its first seven weeks of release. A publicity stunt around the opening created some controversy. United Artists placed an ad in the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner inviting any past or
present members of the Cosa Nostra to write for information about a special screening of the picture and received thirty-two responses.

  UA refused police requests to see the replies and would not allow plainclothes detectives to attend the screening. Variety reported that “about 25 persons showed up, mostly jokesters but two or three who might have been for real. . . . At any rate, the combination of the teaser ads and all the news coverage created quite a local stir and a nifty plug for the picture.”

  Chrislaw’s first foray into film production was on its way to being a big moneymaker — the picture went on to play at one Paris theater for over a year — and Peter and Milt couldn’t have been more delighted. But seven weeks after its opening in America, the bottom fell out of Johnny Cool’s domestic box-office receipts. As Ebbins recalled it, “After November 22, Americans were in no mood to watch movies in which people were being shot.”

  PART FIVE

  “MORE THAN HE COULD BEAR”

  Rose Kennedy used to say,

  “God never gives us more than we can bear.” God gave Peter Lawford more than he could bear.

  — Leonard Gershe

  THIRTY-TWO