Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Ebbins returned to the room, where Peter was lying on the bed, dressed in a hospital gown, watching television. After a few minutes had passed, Milt got up and went into the bathroom. “I had a hunch,” he recalled. “I locked the door, took the top off the toilet tank, and there it was — a bottle of gin. I just put the lid back on and went to tell the nurse I’d found it. I didn’t say anything to Peter.”

  The doctors confronted Peter, and when he came back to his room he screamed at Milt, “You dirty rat-fink bastard!”

  Ebbins feigned innocence. “What are you talking about, Peter?” “You told them about the gin, didn’t you?”

  Ebbins denied it, but Peter knew better. “He didn’t forgive me for a long time, either,” Ebbins recalled. After three more days of tests, Dr. Norcross asked to speak privately to Peter about the results. “You might as well let Milt hear it too,” Peter said, “because I’ll just tell him two minutes after you leave.”

  Norcross sat on a chair next to Peter’s bed. “Mr. Lawford,” he began matter-of-factly, “your liver is twice its normal size. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll be dead in six months to a year of cirrhosis of the liver. It’s just beginning in you, and it’s a horrible death, believe me. The worst.”

  Peter looked stricken. “What do I have to do?”

  “You have to stop drinking alcohol. You cannot drink for the rest of your life. We don’t know why alcohol has this effect on the liver, but it happens to alcoholics.”

  Peter blanched. “Am I an alcoholic?”

  “Yes,” Norcross replied. “You’re not a falling-down drunk, but you are an alcoholic.”

  “Can I have a glass of wine with dinner?”

  “You can’t even have a piece of rum cake. You have to stop drinking. But there is good news. The liver is a very regenerative organ. And we can bring it down to normal size with a very simple drug.” “What’s that?”

  “Vitamin A. If you stop drinking and take vitamin A, you’ll be fine.” “That’s great — ”

  “But believe me, if you continue drinking, you’ll die.”

  Stunned by the severity of Norcross’s warning, Peter resolved then and there to stop drinking. A few days later, he and Ebbins left the clinic. The first thing Peter did on the way home was stop at a bar and have a martini.

  A FEW MONTHS LATER, Peter made plans for a trip to Hawaii. When he learned that Jackie Kennedy would be vacationing there at the same time, he wondered about the propriety of going. “Do you think it’s okay?” he asked Milt.

  “Why not?” Ebbins responded.

  “Don’t you think it’ll look bad?”

  “What are you talking about? Her kids will be with her.”

  Peter telephoned Jackie, with whom he had remained the friendliest of all the Kennedys, their bond as family outsiders still a strong one. He asked her if she would mind his being in Hawaii while she was. “Of course not,” she told him. “In fact, why don’t we fly there together?”

  And so the plans were set for Peter and Jackie, in essence, to vacation together. She didn’t seem to care about the inferences some might make about such an arrangement, and Peter put his own doubts out of his mind.

  “It probably never even occurred to Jackie that it might look bad for her to travel with Peter,” Ebbins recalled. “There was never any kind of an involvement between Peter and Jackie, other than that they genuinely liked each other. On the other hand, Peter told me that her sister, Lee Radziwill, made a big play for him once in the early sixties while they were strolling through Hyde Park in London. Peter said he turned her down because he had too much respect for her husband.” On June 5, Jackie flew from New York to San Francisco with her two children, Caroline and John Junior, and was joined there by Peter, Christopher, and Sydney. The next day a photograph was wired around the world showing Peter, Jackie, and the children descending an airplane ramp in Honolulu. Pat had given Peter permission to take the children on the trip, but she didn’t know Jackie was going to be with him until she saw the picture in the newspapers.

  Pat called Milt Ebbins on the telephone, very angry. “How dare he do that?” she shouted into the receiver.

  “Pat,” Ebbins replied, “Peter was planning to go there anyway and so was Jackie. They decided to go together. So what?”

  “She was so angry,” he recalled, “that she just kind of growled. She thought that he was doing it for publicity or that people would misconstrue Peter’s being with Jackie on vacation. She hung up and then she called me back and yelled some more. She was livid”

  In Hawaii, Peter went to great lengths to see that Jackie enjoyed herself. He acted as her tour guide around the islands, took her and the children on camping trips, introduced her to his friends, and acted as her protector throughout her stay. A few days into the trip, he arranged a lavish garden party for Jackie at the Kahala Hilton, to which he invited his island friends and some of the most important people in Hawaii.

  Jackie was hours late for the party, and one hundred and fifty of Honolulu’s finest milled around under a broiling sun anticipating her arrival. “We were all dressed to the nines,” Alice Guild recalled. “We waited and waited for her and started to sink into the grass with our high heels.” When Jackie and her children arrived by helicopter, she was wearing sandals, a scarf, and a light shift, the kind a young woman might wear to the beach. According to Alice Guild, “Instead of her feeling embarrassed, one hundred and fifty guests were embarrassed because we were inappropriately dressed.”

  What surprised Peter’s friends most about Jackie was that in private her voice was completely different from the soft, whispery voice that had fascinated the country during her televised tour of the White House early in 1962. Jean MacDonald was astonished that “she talked like you and me. I heard her with her children and it was so weird, because here was this totally normal mother’s voice.”

  During the Hawaii trip, Jean and her husband, Bob Anderson, spent an evening with Peter at the beachfront house he had rented on Oahu. They talked late into the night, and Peter poured his heart out to them about the distress he felt at the recent events in his life. When Bob Anderson had to leave, he asked his wife to stay behind and “talk with Peter.” She did, until seven in the morning.

  They sat outside on a seawall in front of the house as the first rays of the sun started to appear over the water and talked about everything that had happened to Peter over the last few years. “I was struck by how concerned he was about what he had to offer his children,” Jean recalled. “He was afraid that there was no role for him to play in their lives. He felt inadequate and overwhelmed by the Kennedys and their visibility and success. Everything his children needed could be provided for them by the Kennedys. He was afraid that his children wouldn’t respect him because of that.”

  Jean tried to reassure Peter that there were a great many things he could offer his children. “I kept telling him what I had found in him that I thought was simply wonderful. I felt that he was an innately kind and good person. He was a great friend, understanding, someone you could sit down with and talk to and have a very meaningful, caring conversation. I felt that he had a solidness underneath that he could impart to his children.”

  Jean left Peter’s house just as the sun cleared the horizon, uncertain whether her pep talk had made the impact she hoped it would. “I think he wanted to believe it, and he somewhat believed it. But he was losing confidence in himself as a person.”

  ‘‘I FOUND OUT WHO MY true friends were after my divorce,” Peter later said. “When I wasn’t a part of the Kennedy family anymore, a lot of people I thought were my friends didn’t come around anymore. I can’t say it didn’t hurt.” Professionally, he discovered that the same thing was true. He had enjoyed some residual goodwill and sympathy after Jack’s assassination, but it had faded by 1966, and the divorce eliminated the Kennedy connection that had buffered much of the enmity many in the business felt toward him. By then, Milt Ebbins found, Peter had become highly unp
opular in Hollywood. “He burned

  bridges big time while Jack was President by adopting such a superior attitude. He stepped on a lot of toes, insulted important people in this town — and a lot of them wouldn’t forgive him.”

  Peter found good film offers rare now — the combination of Sinatra’s blackballing and the store of ill will against him proved a damaging one. What work he did get was provided by friends in the industry who remained loyal to him. He did two television guest shots in 1966, and had two minor film roles.

  Sammy Davis was one of the few Rat Pack members willing to buck Sinatra and associate with Peter, and he cast him in A Man Called Adam in a small role as the agent of a trumpet player addicted to drugs. “It was not a good movie and Peter was terrible in it,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “He was fat — stomach out to here. He never should have done that movie. He got fifteen thousand dollars for it, I think. God.”

  A more important movie but an equally small part followed in The Oscar, another glitzy Joe Levine drama purporting to show the raw underbelly of Hollywood. Stephen Boyd starred as an over-the- hill actor who finds himself Oscar-nominated and attempts to assure his victory — and his comeback — by ruthlessly spreading lies about his competitors. Art once again imitated life as Peter, who had just one scene, played an actor whose glory days were far behind him. When Boyd enters a restaurant, he is shocked to see that Lawford, an old friend who had once been on top of the heap, is now working as a maitre d’. Boyd offers his friend a small part in his next picture, and Lawford replies, “Look, I made the money. I blew it. New kids were arriving on every bus. So I died. I don’t want to be dug up like some corpse and have to die all over again.”

  NOW, EVERY DAY HELD little deaths for Peter. He coveted film roles but did not get them. He was offered such insultingly small parts in minor pictures that whenever anything remotely reasonable came his way he accepted it in order to meet the bills.

  And prodigious bills they were. Peter couldn’t completely give up the trappings of wealth and power he had so enjoyed as John Kennedy’s brother-in-law, and they were expensive. The most visible were the helicopters that landed on the beach in front of his house to shuttle him to and from the soundstages in Hollywood or to and from the airport. “I was chopper happy at the time,” Peter later admitted, and he didn’t like the drive out to the beach now any more than he had when he stayed in town weeknights to avoid it during Pat’s pregnancy with Christopher.

  It was more than that, though. Having a helicopter transport you was the ultimate status symbol in 1966, and for Peter it was a vivid reminder that he had been, for a while, a confidant of the most powerful man in the world. “He wanted to put a helicopter pad outside his house,” recalled Leonard Gershe, “until all the neighbors complained. It wasn’t for the President, it was for him. For him! So he wouldn’t have to drive to Warner Brothers.”

  Yet even this symbol would be snatched from him. In June, copter pilot Hal Connors had landed amid swirling sand in front of Peter’s house and picked him up for the trip to Los Angeles Airport and his flight to San Francisco on the way to Hawaii. When Connors returned, Santa Monica police arrested him for violating a city ordinance against such landings in residential areas. Connors protested that he had picked Peter Lawford up dozens of times before this with no problem. Why, Connors asked, were they all of a sudden forbidding him to transport Peter as he had for years? A policeman replied, “Because Lawford isn’t a Kennedy anymore.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  In October 1967, Peter and Sammy Davis roared through the streets of London’s Soho on matching minibikes, dodging traffic and waving to gawking onlookers. Sammy’s license plate read “SALT 1”; Peter’s read “PEPPER 1.” They were on their way to Alvaro’s, a trendy discotheque on King’s Road in Chelsea, and the club was having to turn away dozens of neck craners every week once the word got out that Lawford and Davis were regulars.

  The pair were in London to Star in Salt and Pepper, a James Bond takeoff developed by Peter for Chrislaw, and they set the English capital on its ear. “Swinging London” was the epicenter of the “youth- quake” that was radically transforming the world’s tastes in fashion and popular music. Peter and Sammy were much taken by all the experimentation with drugs, sexual freedom, and personal style. “It’s stimulating, frightening, fun,” Sammy told a reporter.

  It was ironic that Peter and Sammy — old enough at forty-three and forty-one to be the parents of most of the “revolutionaries” — had become such a media rage. As one journalist noted, “Every newspaper from the Sunday Times to the Daily Sketch has come out with details of Salt and Pepper. . . . The entertainment columns of the daily press and feature pages of the color magazines are having a scoop day.” The excitement was created largely by the formidable reputations of the pair as former Rat Pack swingers and by Peter’s aura as the former brother-in-law of a martyred U.S. president. But there was another reason why Peter’s presence caused a stir — as Graham Stark, one of Salt and Pepper’s British costars, recalled: “I always rather held the boy in esteem. He was a young Englishman who had gone to Hollywood, and anyone at MGM was a star to us. We grew up on Judy Garland, anything by Arthur Freed — and Lawford was involved. He actually kissed June Allyson on-screen — I could have killed him!” At Alvaro’s — where the two went every Saturday for lunch — Peter and Sammy were surrounded by some of the would-be hippest young people in London, who hung on their every word and treated them as entertainment icons. Before long the two men had co-opted the mod look for themselves. They wore their hair long, grew pork-chop sideburns (Peter’s were gray), and donned Nehru jackets, bell-bottoms, and love beads. Peter had slimmed down again and wore blue jeans with a patch on the back that read, “Get your shit together.” Peter and Sammy thought it all made them look more youthful and “with it,” and many of their London admirers agreed. Others thought they were making fools of themselves.

  Just as Peter and Sammy had adopted the self-conscious hipness of the Rat Pack, they now embraced the sixties mod style wholesale, complete with swinging parties, flower-child jargon, and experimentation with LSD and marijuana. Peter considered marijuana a godsend, a way to get high without drinking and further damaging his liver. Earlier, he had been adamantly opposed to any kind of drug use and had lectured Molly Dunne about its evils. “I was smoking marijuana long before Peter was,” she recalled. “He didn’t want me to smoke in the beach house. He’d say, ‘Don’t you smoke that stuff in here. Go outside!’ And then he becomes this drug addict!”

  Graham Stark went to some wild parties thrown by Peter and Sammy. “Sammy took up residence at the Mayfair in the Maharajah’s suite and we were all invited up there at various times,” Stark recalled. “There was a lot of action, girls falling out of cupboards. And why not? They were both big film stars and all those little darlings just loved them.”

  The “free love” aspects of the mod scene appealed mightily to Peter. Among the many pretty young women who “fell out of the cupboards” was one who belonged to Sammy. “Sammy had found this beautiful little model, a white girl,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “He fell in love with her, and they were living together while they were filming Salt and Pepper. Peter stole her away. Sammy came to me and said, ‘That fucker, I’ll never talk to him again.’ I asked Peter, ‘What did you do?’ And Peter replied nonchalantly, ‘I stole his girl.’”

  Peter and Sammy patched it up, and in between all the swinging, there was a movie to make. The idea for the film had come to Peter after a friend had referred to him as “salt” and Sammy as “pepper.” He decided to turn it around and commissioned a script in which he would play Chris Pepper and Sammy would be Charlie Salt, a couple of nightclub owners in London who get involved in Bondlike intrigue, replete with comic bobbies, a car with a machine gun for an exhaust pipe, and all the requisite chases. Milt Ebbins got the go-ahead from United Artists executives for Chrislaw to produce the project after Michael Pertwee wrote a script they liked. Ebbins was named t
he film’s producer, his first such assignment, and Sammy and Peter were named executive producers.

  It was a difficult baptism for Ebbins. With a relatively small budget, he had hoped to film the London street scenes in Soho. But the congestion caused by sightseers prompted London police to ban the shooting and forced him to reconstruct Soho on the back lot at Shepperton Studios in Boreham at a cost of sixty thousand pounds ($144,000).

  Ebbins was soon confronted with another, more serious problem. “Peter was the world’s worst businessman,” he recalled. “He always made decisions based on his emotions. He hired people because he liked them, not because they were necessarily right for the project.” When it came time to hire a director for Salt and Pepper, Peter wanted Richard Donner, who at that point had directed only one minor film and some episodic television. Peter and Sammy had appeared in a Wild, Wild West episode Donner had directed, and Peter liked him.

  Ebbins was skeptical, but when Peter insisted he agreed to hire Donner. “He’s an incredibly successful director now,” Ebbins recalled. “He’s made Superman, Lethal Weapon — but in 1967 he wasn’t ready. When the UA executives saw Donner’s cut, they decided to reedit the film without his input. It cost us fifty thousand dollars to fix it.”

  According to Donner, the fault was not his. “I had a bad time on that film,” he recalled. “Sammy and Peter were very undisciplined and there was a lot of cutting up. We’d have an eight o’clock call and they’d show up at noon, hung over from whatever it was they had ingested the night before. It was terrible for me, and I had no way of controlling them because they were the producers. What was I going to do, fire them?”

  Donner quickly discovered that when Peter and Sammy did show up they usually didn’t have much of an idea of what was in the script for the day’s shooting. Instead, they would improvise conversations, do bits of business that had little to do with the plot. Donner decided to let them go off on as many tangents as they wanted. “I figured when I cut the picture I could just take all that extraneous stuff out.