by James Spada
Including Chuck Pick when Peter asked him to join him once again in Tahoe. “To this day I don’t understand it,” Pick said. “My mother kept asking me, ‘Why is he doing that?’ But I guess everybody else goes back to work, why shouldn’t he? He just happened to be a performer. Peter wanted me to go back up there with him, and at that point I felt such a kinship to him — I want to say a love. There was a very special bond between us at that time because of what had happened in that house when we heard the news.”
Pick was told to meet Peter at LA airport in the Ambassador Room of TWA. “I got there and I saw Peter, with his back to me. I walked in and I was pretty shaken. He turned around and his first words to me were, ‘I’m sorry I had to leave you at the Santa Monica Airport.’ I can’t tell you what that did to me. After all he had been through, he was still concerned about leaving me at Santa Monica Airport. I broke down and cried.”
Peter completed the second week of the engagement, but things were very different. “It wasn’t easy for him to sing those songs and be amusing,” Pick recalled. “The show wasn’t always good; he’d miss lines. He cried a lot backstage. There were no more parties; he didn’t care about that. He’d just come home after the show, drink Jack Daniel’s, and go to bed.”
It took Chuck Pick a long time to get up the courage to ask Peter what had really happened that terrible day in Dallas. There were rumors of conspiracy, suggestions that the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, hadn’t acted alone. There were dark hints that the Kennedy murder had been a Mafia hit, retaliation for Jack and Bobby’s “betrayal” of the mob.
“You’ll never know the truth of what happened in Dallas,” Peter told Chuck. “You’ll never know the truth.” Pick tried to get him to explain himself, but he wouldn’t. “I interpreted it as meaning that he knew what happened and few other people ever would,” Chuck said.
Paul Wurtzel, the assistant director on Dear Phoebe and The Thin Man, remained friendly with Peter and became a student of the Kennedy assassination. Reluctant to query Peter, he nevertheless asked him to answer one question: “Did Oswald kill Kennedy or was it higher up?” “It was higher up,” Peter answered.
“I let it drop,” Wurtzel said, “and I never asked him what he meant. I’m sure he wouldn’t have said anything more to me. He still had kids and the family.”
“JOHN F. WOULD HAVE LOOKED ON too much grief as unproductive.” Still, Peter allowed his grief to overwhelm him, to affect every aspect of his life. His drinking now became virtually constant, his emotions often uncontrollable. He would break into sobs at the slightest provocation. He felt that his entire world had been snatched from him, and he didn’t understand why. His grieving was so intense and so protracted that some of his friends lost patience with him.
One of them was Bill Asher. “We spent a lot of time with him after the assassination,” the director recalled, “and it was very difficult. He was devastated — the crying jags! It was impossible to pull him out of it. Then he’d get belligerent. But mostly he would cry. I would stay up with him all night and talk to him. I said to him, ‘Peter, you’re not grieving for Jack Kennedy, you’re grieving for you. You can’t do that.’ But life had dealt him the final killer blow. It just destroyed him.”
Peter leaned more and more now on Chuck Pick, who frequently stayed at the beach house so that Peter wouldn’t be alone. “He cried on my shoulder a lot. He’d come home late at night, drunk, and start crying and say, ‘Why, Chuck, why?’ What do you say to a man who’s twice your age and he’s supposed to be the wise one? He kept asking me why his life was falling apart. First he lost his friendship with Sinatra, then Marilyn died, then Jack was murdered. And his marriage was over.”
Pick watched helplessly as Peter drank himself into a stupor night after night, sopped in alcohol and his own misery. “Sometimes he’d get nasty and I’d go home and think, ‘What am I doing this for?’ But he’d apologize the next day. I felt so sorry for him, after seeing what he went through that morning when Jack was killed, that there was nothing he could do to hurt me to the point that I would desert him. I wanted to be there for him, always.”
THIRTY-THREE
On December 11, 1963, at eleven in the morning, an envelope was delivered to the Lawford house in Santa Monica. Peter was in New York, and Pat gave the letter to Milt Ebbins. Inside was a note, crudely scrawled and misspelled as if by a backward child: “Mr Lawfrod. Call Mr Sinatra at Mapas Hotel in Reno. Tell him to call you back on untapped phone. Tell him to play it cool because we have a spy. So if he don’t cooperate Jr. gets a 45 slug in his head.”
Along with the note to Peter was one for Frank Sinatra, in which he was told that his son, Frank Junior, who had been kidnapped on December 8, was all right and would be returned to him in exchange for two hundred thousand dollars in fives, tens, and twenties. The money was to be delivered by Peter at midnight on December 11 at the lifeguard station at Venice Beach.
Frank Junior was nineteen and aspiring to a singing career like his father’s, although his talents were more limited. Just before going on with his lounge act at Harrah’s, he had been abducted from his hotel room by two armed men who had stuffed him into the trunk of their Chevrolet and driven him through a blizzard to Los Angeles.
When the young man’s father got the news in Palm Springs, he telephoned Peter — the first time in almost two years the two men had spoken. Sinatra asked Peter to call Robert Kennedy and make sure that every resource of the FBI was committed to finding his son. “There was no hello, no apology, nothing like that,” Peter later said. Nonetheless, he called Bobby Kennedy, who had remained attorney general under the new president, Lyndon Johnson, and was told that the FBI would do everything within its power. Its agents would work around the clock; roadblocks had been set up at all state borders. “I know how Frank feels about me,” Kennedy said to Peter, “but please tell him that everything is being done, and we’ll get his boy back as soon as possible.”
Peter was frantic over the kidnapping. FBI files indicate that he telephoned the New York bureau office repeatedly, seeking news about the investigation. An internal FBI memo dated December 10 (its sender’s name is blacked out) noted that at around midnight on December 9 the New York office “received a call from Peter Lawford, who asked if there had been any developments in the Sinatra kidnapping case. Lawford called again about 3 A.M. and repeated the question. He appeared to have been drinking.
“Lawford called again this afternoon,” the memo continued, “and asked about developments in the case. I told [the New York supervisor] he should tell Lawford very firmly that while we are investigating, there was no information that could be furnished to him, so as to discourage any further inquiries from him.”
Alongside this last sentence, in the distinctive handwriting of J. Edgar Hoover, is the notation: “Right. Lawford is just a bum.” The ransom note mailed to Peter was postmarked before Frank Junior was released, but by the time it was delivered Frank Senior had received other word of the kidnappers’ demand, paid the ransom, and been reunited with his son. The next day, the kidnappers were captured and most of the money recovered.
Sinatra threw a lavish party to celebrate his son’s safe return. He invited the FBI men who had conducted the investigation, all the Rat Packers, Jimmy Van Heusen, Mike and Gloria Romanoff, his Palm Springs neighbors, and dozens of others. Peter was excluded, and Sinatra never again uttered a word to him.
FIVE MONTHS AFTER THE EVENTS in Dallas, the Lawford marriage remained in an uncomfortable state of limbo. Pat stayed in the East most of the time, returning to Santa Monica only when Peter was out of town. When she and Peter were together in California they would most often sit at home or in Matteo’s and share alcohol and sorrow. “After Jack’s assassination,” Dolores Naar recalled, “night after night Pat would cry in her bed. She was always taking these big red capsules to help her sleep. The poor thing was absolutely devastated — I didn’t know if she was going to survive.”
Pat was able to
pull herself together, but she didn’t have the same success with her marriage. The problems she and Peter had had for most of their life together were only worsened by the tragedy they’d been through. Peter drank more and sought comfort with other women more often. “It got so bad,” Bill Asher said, “that it was embarrassing to Patricia. He was doing dumb things — having affairs and drinking and taking drugs, and it got so that I knew there was no hope for the marriage.”
But still the Lawfords were forced to remain married. President Kennedy’s reelection, of course, was no longer a consideration in the timing of a Lawford divorce, but now there was a new factor: Bobby’s decision to seek election as a U.S. senator from New York. He had stayed on as attorney general purely for the sake of continuity; he had long despised Lyndon Johnson and looked on his succession as a usurpation of his brother. Now, after a reasonable amount of time had passed, Bobby felt ready to move on.
Early in 1964, he began to reconnoiter for a suitable Senate seat. Massachusetts, the most likely state for him to represent, was out of the question because Teddy had succeeded Jack as a senator there in a 1962 special election. New York was the next clear choice; the Kennedys had lived there for many years, and despite a Democratic majority among registered voters, the state had two Republican senators. Still, the race wouldn’t be an easy one, even with the groundswell of sympathy and affection for the Kennedys. New York wasn’t Massachusetts, where the Kennedys were shoo-ins for just about any office they wanted. Bobby had never been elected to anything. And he would be running against a popular incumbent, Kenneth Keating.
Even if Bobby were to win, he would have to prove himself effective in the Senate as his own man, not merely as Jack Kennedy’s younger brother. There was no question but that an announcement of the Lawfords’ estrangement would have to wait until Bobby was solidly in place in Congress.
Constrained to stay in a marriage that had become untenable for her, Pat tried to put as much distance between her and Peter as possible. In March she began shopping for a cooperative apartment in Manhattan for herself and the children, and she soon found a place she liked: a sprawling sixteen rooms in a fifteen-story building on East Seventy-second Street. In order to keep the facade of a happy marriage intact, Pat made the purchase offer in both her and Peter’s names, and the contracts were signed.
The sale, however, was subject to the approval of all five members of the building’s board of tenants. One resident, Francis Masters, turned thumbs down on the sale because, as the apartment’s owner, Charles Amory, put it, “Peter Lawford is an actor and Mrs. Lawford is a Democrat.”
Amory insisted that the board reconsider, and it did so at a stormy two-and-a-half-hour meeting the evening of April 6. Masters, however, wouldn’t budge. Amory then appealed the rejection to New York City’s Commission on Human Rights, complaining that the Lawfords were victims of discrimination. But the commission’s chairman, Stanley Lowell, said that nothing could be done. “No one can deny living quarters to a person because of the applicant’s religion, color, or national origin,” he explained. “However, there is nothing in the law that would allow us to enter a case where the applicant is denied living quarters because a person was either an actor or a Democrat.”
The New York press turned the story from a molehill into a mountain, and Peter endured a good deal of ribbing from his friends: “Sidney Poitier told me, ‘Listen, you can come live in my neighborhood anytime,’” Peter said. “And Sammy Davis — he just wouldn’t let up on me.”
Three months later, Pat found another apartment a few blocks away on Fifth Avenue, and this time the sale went unchallenged. The $250,000 apartment featured five master bedrooms, a library, a huge dining room, and three servant’s rooms. The building’s maintenance fee alone amounted to fifteen hundred dollars a month. The sale was soon final, and Pat made plans to move herself and the children east. Later, when rumors of a Lawford estrangement began to crop up, Peter described the situation as a “geographical separation” caused by the fact that he needed to remain in California for his work and Pat wanted to educate the children in New York.
Pat, while preparing to leave the beach house and move to New York, agreed to meet Peter at Matteo’s the Sunday evening before her departure for a friendly farewell drink. When she arrived at Matty Jordan’s place in the company of Lenny Gershe and Roger Edens, she was shocked: Peter had taken over the restaurant for a surprise going- away party. Fifty of the Lawfords’ friends were there, and Pat was furious.
Milt Ebbins had tried to talk Peter out of it. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked him. “Pat will flip when she finds out!”
But Peter wouldn’t be swayed. “She’ll flip for a few minutes, but then we’ll all have a good time. I want to say good-bye to her, that’s all.”
Pat didn’t appreciate what Peter considered a thoughtful gesture. “Is he crazy?” she snapped at Ebbins. “I’m leaving!”
“Cmon, Pat,” Ebbins said cajolingly. “The guy just wants to do something nice for you. What’s the big deal? All your friends are here.” Roger Edens, who was bisexual and romantically interested in Pat, was incensed; he thought Peter had organized the party in an attempt to win Pat back. He pulled Milt Ebbins aside and berated him. “How dare you do this?” he shouted. “This isn’t gonna get her back. He’s finished, he’s out!”
“Oh shut up, Roger,” Ebbins replied. “He wanted to throw a surprise party for her, that’s all. I think it’s in good taste.”
“Well I don’t. I think it stinks!”
As Peter had surmised, Pat’s pleasure at seeing her friends soon softened her anger. She had a few drinks and got into the swing of things, but she left in the middle of the festivities.
The next day, after a morning of filming, Peter asked Chuck Pick to drive him, Pat, and the children to the LA airport. They all piled into a station wagon, and Chuck noticed that everyone was very quiet on the way. He waited in the parking lot while Peter put his family on the plane; then he drove Peter back to Santa Monica.
During the return from the airport, Peter broke down. Pick asked him what the matter was. “Chuck, that’s the last time my family’s going to be together,” he replied. “Pat and I are getting a divorce.” Pick didn’t know what to say. He could only try to comfort Peter as he sat next to him and sobbed.
When Peter arrived home, his jaw dropped in astonishment. Pat had taken a good deal more from the house than she had said she would, including some items he treasured. What upset him most was that she had removed most of the mementos of Jack Kennedy and his presidency. He called Jackie and Barbara Cooper to express his amazement, exaggerating wildly. “She took everything. Even the wire hangers. Can you imagine? The wire hangers’.”
But Peter made sure he had the last word. A few days after Pat had settled into the Fifth Avenue apartment, she was notified of a delivery from California. Outside her building, three burly, sweating men worked to unload a truckload of five-gallon plastic containers of water — fifty in all. When Pat protested that she hadn’t ordered any water, one of the deliverymen handed her a note that had come with the shipment. It read: “Dear Pat: You forgot to drain the swimming pool.”
BUT PETER’S WIT WAS AN inadequate buffer now. He was an unhappy, lonely man, and rattling around in that enormous empty house threatened to undo him. He had never liked being alone, and now he hated it. He would drink himself insensate nearly every night, trying to relieve his crushing grief, and the friends who stuck by him found themselves tested to the limit by his drunkenness, his constant melancholy, his frequent bitterness. He found himself no longer able to get people together for the dinner parties and the poker games that had in the past allowed him to pretend that everything was fine. Bill Asher recalled, “I must have gone to his house for dinner a half dozen times when he said a group of people were going to be there, and when my wife and I arrived he’d be alone. You’d sit there with him and watch him go, watch him drink himself into oblivion and start to cry.”
Molly found that the carefree athlete she had known at the beach was now letting himself go, wracked with fear, terrified of being alone. He wasn’t able to sleep. He would call out to Molly soon after she had retired in an adjoining bedroom, “Please come and watch TV with me.
“Peter, go to sleep, would you?” Molly would call back to him. He would say “Please!” and Molly would go into his room and sit in bed and watch television with him. Finally he would fall asleep and Molly could tiptoe out. She learned not to turn off the set because whenever she did Peter would wake up.
He expressed great bitterness to Molly about Pat. “He used to say all kinds of terrible things about her,” Molly recalled. “What a drinker she was, and that she was gonna marry Roger Edens, which was very confusing because Roger was predominantly gay.”
Molly was surprised when Peter “made a few overtures” to her, as though he were trying to recapture some of the youthful romance they had enjoyed twenty years earlier. She turned him down because, she said, “I just wanted to remain good friends, and Peter accepted that.”