Peter Lawford

by James Spada

During the first week of November 1963, Milt Ebbins telephoned Chuck Pick, the personable young valet car parker who frequently worked parties for Peter, and asked him to come immediately to the Chrislaw offices in the William Morris Agency building to “discuss something important” with Peter. Pick was reluctant to go, because he was studying for his classes at UCLA, but Ebbins stressed that the summons was an urgent one. Once Pick got to Chrislaw, he sat on a couch across the room from Peter’s desk and waited to hear what he had in mind.

  “I’m going to Tahoe,” Peter told him, “and I need someone to go with me.”

  Pick was puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “I need a person to take care of my needs.”

  The young man frowned and said nothing. “Over the years,” he explains now, “you hear stories about people — everybody’s gay, everybody’s this, everybody’s that. So I’m sitting there and I had that question in my mind — what is he really saying? I guess I had a look on my face like, ‘Uh, thanks a lot but I don’t think I could do that.’ And he said to me — I’ll never forget it — he said, ‘It’s okay.’ He knew exactly what was on my mind and I knew what he was saying — ‘There’s not going to be any hanky-panky.’ We really didn’t have to be explicit about it.”

  Relieved, Pick asked Peter what exactly it was that he would be expected to do. “Well,” Peter replied, “I just need someone to help me, like with my tuxedo, making sure everything’s all right.”

  Pick hesitated. “I valet park, Peter, but I’m not a valet.”

  “No, I dress myself. I just need someone to be there.”

  Pick agreed to make the trip, even though he still wasn’t quite sure what would be expected of him. “I never asked him why me, why there was no one else to go with him. At that point I think I became a paid friend. He lost a lot of friends when Sinatra wrote him off, but still I thought it was very odd that he needed me — a college kid — to go to Tahoe with him.”

  Peter had signed to appear with Jimmy Durante for two weeks at Harrah’s in a revue the pair had staged sporadically at clubs around the country over the past few years. Peter had appeared with Durante at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas the previous December, and one reason they didn’t return there is contained in Peter’s FBI file. A memo dated January 2, 1963, quotes a Desert Inn official that Lawford “had run wild, had signed numerous charges that were not authorized, such as gifts, railway tickets, food, and etc., and that the hotel was now stuck with the bills. Durante brought Lawford into the show over the objections of the Desert Inn, and now Durante is very embarrassed about Lawfords actions.” In May 1964, the hotel sued Peter for twenty thousand dollars.

  Chuck Pick met Peter in the lounge at Harrah’s on Sunday, November 17. Pick had a room in the hotel; Peter planned to stay in one of the guest houses of the hotel’s owner, Bill Harrah. But after the first night Peter told Pick, “I don’t like this arrangement, me in the house and you in the hotel. You’re coming in with me.” Pick thought the house was “a fabulous place. It was right on the lake, with maid service, a cook, the whole shot. We had a Rolls-Royce that I drove. It was incredible for me.”

  Monday evening, Peter brought the young man backstage to his dressing room before the first show. Pick had never seen Peter act, had never watched him rehearse, had never seen his TV shows. “I had no idea what it was he did. I heard the music come up onstage, and the show started. Jimmy Durante began the show by himself, then we heard, ‘Mr. Lawford, you’re on in a few minutes.’”

  When the cue came, Peter stuffed a big silk handkerchief in his vest pocket and bounded onstage. “When he got out there,” Pick recalled, “he just lit up. He and Durante did ‘The French Lesson’ and some comedy shtick and then they did a few dance steps together and seemed to have a great time. It was a fun show.”

  After he had seen the act a few times, however, Pick was struck by the fact that everything was rehearsed to the letter. It had all seemed so spontaneous to him that first night, but now every word was the same, over and over again: “Every gesture, every chuckle, was identical. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Sharing a house with Peter Lawford, Chuck Pick got to know him very well — and he started to see the less sunny side of the man, traits in Peter that disturbed him. “He got up with a beer. Every morning I had to be sure there was a beer bottle by his bedside — I figured it was to settle his stomach. He’d have Bloody Marys in the morning, Tanqueray in the afternoon, Jack Daniel’s at night. He’d get drunk, and that’s when he’d get a little nasty. I’d have to say, ‘C’mon, Peter — ’ But he didn’t do it too much to me, because he liked me a lot. He wasn’t sloppy, he’d be under control. I always thought a drunk would be falling down and drooling. I never saw him like that.”

  After a few nights in Lake Tahoe, Peter announced that he wanted to have a party and told Pick to invite as many chorus girls and dancers as he could. “That was one of my jobs — to go around and say, ‘Hey, we’re having a party tonight.’ Peter hated to be alone. And he liked women, liked having them around. There was never anybody specific. But after a party, he might end up with a lady.”

  Occasionally, Peter would ask Pick to approach a young woman for him and say, “Peter Lawford would like to see you,” but more often Pick would simply notice that Peter and one of the girls had discreetly slipped into a bedroom. Always, the next morning, Peter would not want the girls to stay. “He was nice about it, I never saw him treat any of them badly. But he made it clear that they were expected to go.”

  On Wednesday, November 20, Peter got a call from President Kennedy. During the conversation, Jack delightedly told Peter that Jackie had agreed to accompany him on a political fence-mending trip to Texas. She rarely made such trips, but this was a particularly important one, with the next presidential election less than a year away, and Jack knew that his wife’s presence at his side would help make it a success. He had pleaded with her to come, and she had finally agreed. “Isn’t that great, Peter?” the President said. “We leave tomorrow morning.”

  After Peter’s show the following night, he and Pick threw “a little get-together with some people” that lasted until four in the morning. Peter didn’t have a girl stay over that night; instead he sat up with Chuck until seven A.M. Friday and talked about Jack Kennedy.

  “The sun was coming up,” Pick remembered, “and Peter was telling me stories about the President. We just sat around talking, and Peter spoke about how much he loved Jack and how overwhelmed he would get sometimes just thinking that his brother-in-law was the President of the United States. I was really touched by how much Peter loved the man. He was so excited that he was going to be at the White House for Christmas.”

  Chuck and Peter finally went to bed at seven in the morning. About three hours later, Pick heard the doorbell buzz. “I thought, ‘Where’s the maid?’ Then I figured she must have forgotten her key and it was her buzzing.” He got up, opened the door to let the maid in, and groggily turned around to go back to bed. But then he realized that it wasn’t the maid at the door but a man in a suit and tie he recognized as one of the vice presidents at Harrah’s. “You have to wake up Mr. Lawford,” the man said.

  “I can’t wake up Mr. Lawford,” Chuck snapped. “What is it you want?”

  Pick and the man from Harrah’s argued back and forth a few times about disturbing Peter until, finally, the man said, “The President was just shot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The President has been shot. You’d better wake up Mr. Lawford.”

  Chuck went into Peter’s bedroom. “He was lying there. He was a very heavy sleeper, and normally, when I woke him, I’d have to shake him and yell, ‘Cmon, Peter, wake up!’ But this time I just kind of stood over him and put my hand on his shoulder and he opened his eyes and it was almost like he knew. He looked at me and I said, ‘Peter, the President’s been shot.’”

  Peter cried, “Oh my God!” and leaped out of his bed. “There wasn’t a second of disbelief,” Pic
k recalled. “Just ‘Oh my God!’ and up. I ran out of the room and the guy from Harrah’s was standing there. I said, ‘We gotta go to Los Angeles immediately.’ The man said, ‘Mr. Harrah’s plane is at your disposal. Whatever you need.’”

  Peter came out of the bedroom and said, “Chuck, we’ve gotta leave now.”

  It seemed to Pick that the phone was ringing constantly, that everything was happening very fast. “We put the TV on and heard that the President had been shot in a motorcade in Dallas, but there was nothing about how badly he’d been hurt. Peter started making phone calls. He called Mrs. Lawford and Rose Kennedy, but the lines were busy and he couldn’t get through. Reporters started gathering outside, and the police came and blocked off the house.”

  Peter rushed from room to room, trying to make telephone calls, stopping only long enough to listen to a few minutes of television news. But there was none; the commentators knew nothing of what was happening at Parkland Memorial Hospital, where the President had been rushed. Peter finally got through to Pat and then to Rose, but they too were in the dark about Jack’s condition.

  Peter had just said once again to Chuck, “We gotta get going,” when the words from the television set caught his attention: “Here is a bulletin from CBS News.” He turned to the screen and saw Walter Cronkite, looking stricken, make the announcement: “President Kennedy died at one P.M. Central Time in Dallas.”

  “Peter got up,” Chuck recalled, “went into the kitchen, and threw up all over the floor. Just threw up, everywhere. Then he fell apart. He was lying on the floor, sobbing — he was crying so hard I didn’t know what to do. I never witnessed anything like that in my life. I never saw a man break down the way he broke down. It was a terrible thing to watch. It scared me. I went over to him and he said, ‘Leave me alone.’

  “I was just a kid. I didn’t know what was happening. I started crying, as much because of what I was seeing happen to Peter as because the President was dead. But I had to be okay because he was so bad. One of us had to be strong and keep it together, and I was it. I was the only person he could really hold on to.”

  Within an hour, Chuck and Peter were on the way to the airport. Later, Chuck didn’t remember getting dressed. “I don’t even think we brought our luggage. We just left. Peter didn’t want to go through the crowd out front, but the police escorted us through it and took us to Tahoe airport and we took Bill Harrah’s plane. There was a lot of crying and sobbing on that plane.”

  When they arrived at Santa Monica Airport, a helicopter awaited them. “We got out of the plane and ran to the helicopter and Milt Ebbins was there. It was just a three-person helicopter — there was only room for Peter, the pilot, and Milt. I said, ‘Peter, I’ll take a cab home. I’ll be okay.’

  “He said, ‘No, no, I can’t leave you like this.’ I said, ‘Just go.’ Peter asked me if I’d call him when I got home. I said I would. And then they took off. I took a cab home and I called the house and told someone that if Peter needed me I’d be available.”

  BY THE TIME PETER AND HIS manager arrived at the beach house, it had been overrun by reporters, curiosity seekers, and friends who had come to pay their respects. A priest and two nuns had been to see Pat, as had Dr. Charles Sturdevant, the chief of psychiatry at St. John’s Hospital, who had put her under sedation.

  Leonard Gershe wasn’t sure if it would be appropriate for him to go by the Lawford house, but when he did he was told he was expected. “It was frantic,” he remembered. “The phone never stopped — the White House calling, this person calling. The Naars were there, and the Dyes from next door, and people just kept coming in and out. Judy Garland was there. She was drinking and carrying on, going, ‘Oh my God, I’ll never sing “Over the Rainbow” to him again.’” “Pat didn’t cry. She couldn’t cry. She looked at you like she was almost autistic. But who could blame her? Your heart just went out to her. Peter was very strong. I remember him being in control. I think the fact that Pat was there made him keep it together.”

  While Peter made arrangements for the flight back to Washington for the funeral, Ebbins took a call from LeMoyne Billings, the Kennedy confidant. Billings told Ebbins to let Pat know that he would be flying out to escort her back to the capital. Apparently, the Kennedys were prepared to exclude Peter from the funeral. “Lem,” Ebbins told him, “let me call you back.”

  Ebbins went upstairs to talk to Pat. “She was in her bed, just lying there, staring straight ahead, everything drained out of her.” He told her, as gently as possible, about Billings’s call. Softly, she replied, “I’m going back with my husband.” Ebbins called Billings back and no mention was made of the matter again.

  At ten fifty-five that night, Peter, Pat, Milt, and seven-year-old Sydney boarded an American Airlines flight to Washington. (Eight- year-old Christopher didn’t want to make the trip.) Ebbins could see that “Pat was so destroyed, she was like a zombie. She’s not the kind of woman you ever think you’ll see cry, but she cried on that plane. It was only a few seconds of tears every so often, though, and then she’d buck up and force herself to stop and her face would be strong again.”

  Purely by coincidence, Peter’s frequent director Don Weis was on the same plane. Peter knew that Don’s wife was seeing Dr. Max Jacobson, known as “Dr. Feelgood,” a New York physician who had developed what he called a vitamin pill (sometimes an injection) that gave his patients energy and a sense of well-being. Both the President and Jackie had been regular “Feelgood” patients; Peter had had one injection and didn’t like it. “There’s something else in those shots besides vitamins,” he had complained, and had never taken another.

  Peter was right. The formula Jacobson had devised included amphetamines, “speed” drugs now known to be addictive and to cause mental and physical deterioration with prolonged use. In 1963, however, Jacobson’s pills seemed like nothing more than a panacea. Peter drank heavily on the plane, but Pat abstained, afraid alcohol wouldn’t mix with her sedative. Peter asked Weis if he had any of Jacobson’s pills, and Weis gave him one for Pat, who welcomed the release. “She got very happy on it,” Weis remembers. “It was shocking. She acted silly. It was not the trip back you would expect from Pat Lawford. But it wasn’t her fault. I gave her the pill.”

  THE LONG WEEKEND OF John Kennedy’s funeral was like a surrealistic dream. Two hundred dignitaries from a hundred countries attended the rites, which were televised by satellite to virtually every country in the world — the first time in history that an event had been viewed simultaneously by the entire planet.

  It was a majestic ceremonial good-bye to the man who had become, in less than three years in office, one of the most beloved presidents in history. A horse-drawn caisson bore his body to the Capitol rotunda on Sunday. On Monday a twenty-one-gun salute was fired, fifty jet planes flew overhead, and Air Force One dipped a wing in tribute. A requiem mass was celebrated at St. Matthew’s Church, and an eternal flame was lighted over the grave into which he was lowered in Arlington National Cemetery. The First Lady, a widow whose dignity touched the world, was given the flag that had draped her husband’s coffin.

  What moved Milt Ebbins the most amidst all this pageantry, however, was a small moment he witnessed in the East Room, where the President’s casket lay in state, flanked by guards representing the branches of the United States military. “Bobby came in,” Ebbins recalled, “and threw his arms over the coffin and started talking to Jack. It broke my heart.”

  But the overriding motif of Jack Kennedy’s funeral was of an Irish wake. “We had dinner in the White House every night,” Ebbins recalled. “Jack’s friends, Rose Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy. You’d never know it was a funeral. Jokes were being told at the table. Ethel was very funny. I tried to tell Pat about seeing Bobby in the East Room and she curtly cut me off — ‘We don’t want to hear about that.’”

  Peter was astonished by the merrymaking. “Everybody was up,” he said, “drinking, smiling, and trying to make the best of it. There were even bad jokes ab
out the costumes we were wearing. Not being Irish, I tried to get into the swing of it, but I was thoroughly destroyed. Looking back, I realize the way President Kennedy’s death was handled was really the best way, even with the bad jokes. I think John F. would have looked on too much grief as unproductive.”

  THE TRAGEDY THAT BROUGHT much of the world together in grief didn’t have the same effect on Peter and Pat. Publicly, they were united, walking alongside each other behind Jackie, Bobby, and Ted as they followed the President’s horse-drawn caisson. Privately, there was an impenetrable wall between them. They slept in separate bedrooms in the White House, and when Peter needed a woman’s comfort, he didn’t turn to Pat.

  On Sunday night, at two in the morning, Peter asked Ebbins to come with him to get some air. He summoned the White House car and he and Milt went for a drive. After a few minutes, Peter told the driver to take them to the Shoreham Hotel. When Ebbins gave Peter a quizzical look, he told him, “I’m going to stop and say hello to Layte — she’s in town overnight, switching planes.”

  Layte Bowden was a beautiful young stewardess who had worked on the Air Force One press plane and had the Secret Service code name “Mrs. Black.” For over a year, she and Peter had had a sporadic affair, and it would continue for several more years.

  “Do you think that’s a good idea, Peter, going to see her in the White House car?” Ebbins asked.

  “They don’t know what the hell I’m doing,” Peter replied. “How would they know? Pat’s in the White House.”

  The car pulled up in front of the Shoreham. Peter got out and told Ebbins, “I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  “That son of a bitch!” Ebbins recalled. “He kept me sitting in that car for an hour!”

  On Tuesday, the day after the funeral, the Kennedy family repaired to Hyannis Port for their Thanksgiving holiday. All except Peter. With his estrangement from Pat, he couldn’t see any reason to accompany them. Instead, he decided to resume his show in Lake Tahoe, where he had a contract at Harrah’s and felt an obligation to Jimmy Durante. The Kennedys were displeased. The press criticized his action as unseemly. Many observers were puzzled.