by James Spada
Finally, Peter asked his old friend Henry Ford for a loan. Ford agreed to have his foundation pay off the Kennedys and hold the mortgage on the house. The original terms of the agreement were that Peter would make monthly payments and the balance would be paid back in one year. “Every year they came to us wanting their money,” Milt Ebbins recalled, “and I’d tell them, ‘No, we can’t do it.’ So they kept giving us one-year extensions.”
All this time, Peter was trying to sell the house. He listed it for $250,000 and — incredible as it may sound to anyone familiar with Santa Monica beachfront real estate today — found no takers. The tremendous surge in Southern California’s population had not yet begun, and the meteoric rise in real estate values in and around Los Angeles was still a number of years off. In 1969 beach houses in Santa Monica — as they had been in 1956, when Peter bought the L. B. Mayer house — were still a drag on the market.
Peter had rented out the house sporadically — to Warren Beatty and Leslie Caron for three thousand dollars a month at the height of their affair during the summer of 1966, and to Abby Mann, the director, for twenty-five hundred dollars in 1969 — and Ebbins wanted to continue to do so. He suggested that Peter lease the house to a handyman, charge him just enough rent to pay the mortgage, and have him renovate the house — which was falling into disrepair — a little at a time. Its value as an investment would increase, Ebbins reasoned, and it would be not only maintained but improved. Peter said no, he wanted to sell — because, as he put it, the place held “too many memories.” Unless the house was being rented, Peter had trouble making his monthly mortgage payment to the Ford Foundation. They were willing to be lenient largely because of Peter’s friendship with Henry, but he soon alienated his benefactor. For years, Ford had given the heads of studios and production companies in Hollywood new cars every year for one dollar. Because Peter and Ebbins had Chrislaw, Ford had given them both gleaming new Lincoln Continentals annually. When a new team of financial watchdogs was installed at Ford, the policy was changed and the company demanded that the cars be returned. Peter was furious. He wrote Henry Ford a bitter letter, as he was wont to do. “Peter was a great writer of vicious letters,” Ebbins said. “So that was the end of Peter with Henry Ford. The company threatened foreclosure unless we repaid the entire loan immediately.”
Peter still couldn’t sell the house, and Ford twice instituted foreclosure proceedings that Ebbins was able to forestall through litigation. But that only bought time; Peter was sure to lose the house eventually if he couldn’t pay Ford off. Finally, Peter’s real estate agent found a buyer, and Peter agreed on a sale price of $207,500. It looked as though a messy financial problem would have a neat ending. But from that point on, matters just got messier and messier.
Peter entered into an escrow on December 12, 1969, with a woman named Alma Mason, who put $40,500 down. Later it was alleged that Mason was actually acting as an “agent” for Lynn Wood, a neighbor of Peter’s. Unconcerned about this, Peter allowed Wood to move into the house before escrow closed.
But Wood was unable to come up with the additional funds required to close escrow, and the deal fell through. Later it was charged in court documents that Wood had borrowed twenty thousand dollars of the down payment from a woman named Gertrude Feldman with the promise of a share in the equity of the house. When the escrow fell through, the down payment was forfeited, and Gertrude Feldman went to court to recoup her money. She charged that Peter, Alma Mason, Lynn Wood, and her husband, Ward Wood, had conspired to defraud her.
Peter knew nothing about any arrangements among Wood, Mason, and Feldman, but the collapse of the sale left him once again vulnerable to foreclosure. With no more legal remedies available to Milt, the house was put up for auction at a trustee’s sale on June 4, 1970, and was sold to another neighbor of Peter’s, Louis Herson, for $142,961.
After payment was made to Henry Ford for the balance of the mortgage, a settlement of seventy-five hundred dollars was paid to Gertrude Feldman, and several liens attached to the house were satisfied, Peter’s share of the sale amounted to forty thousand dollars.
There then ensued five years of lawsuits to determine the disbursement of that money. Finally, six thousand dollars of it was paid to Peter’s attorney for handling these matters, sixty-six hundred dollars went to City National Bank in payment of a judgment against Peter for a defaulted loan (he hadn’t made the monthly payments of one hundred fifty dollars), and fourteen thousand dollars was used to satisfy a variety of liens against him for unpaid state taxes in the years 1969 and 1970 and for unpaid federal taxes in 1970, 1971, and 1973.
Peter came away with less than fourteen thousand dollars to show for the sale of his showplace home, over which the presidential flag had flown. Milt Ebbins was heartbroken. “One hundred and forty-two thousand that house sold for! Do you know what that house is worth now [in 1989]? About eight million dollars. If Peter had taken my advice and rented it, he could have wound up a millionaire. And you know what — he blamed me for it later! He said, ‘If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t have lost my house.’ That was Peter.”
Bob Slatzer was a friend of Ward Wood’s, and before the deal to buy Peter’s house fell through, Slatzer and Wood took a tour through it. “It was in terrible, run-down condition,” Slatzer recalled. “The carpeting was stained, the walls had scribbling on them — dirty sayings, like you’d find in a men’s restroom. The rooms were cluttered and trashy — there were old bedspreads thrown into the corner. The pool was covered with algae, all green and scummy. Ward and I went into one of the bedrooms and he pulled out a drawer from the dresser and a huge swarm of termites flew out around us. It was like a horror movie. We got out of there fast.”
BETWEEN LATE 1968 (when he left the beach house permanently) and 1971, Peter was something of a nomad. He first rented a garden apartment in the flats of Beverly Hills, then a large, furnished, 1920s Hollywood house with a swimming pool on DeLongpre Avenue in West Hollywood. When he moved from the DeLongpre house in January 1970, its owner, Tom Douglas, threatened to sue him for $2,508 for damages to the premises and missing furniture, glassware, and objets d’art. Peter disputed seven hundred dollars of the claim, but agreed to pay the rest.
From DeLongpre, Peter moved into a penthouse apartment in the Sierra Towers, a modern high-rise at Doheny and Sunset on the border between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. The apartment belonged to a friend of Peter’s, Bob Beaumont, who leased it to Peter for a rent far below market value.
No matter how badly his life was going, Peter was always able to turn on the charm for a woman. He shared all of these residences with Geri Crane, a striking, rather androgynous-looking twenty-one-year-old model whom he had met in 1968. Crane thought of herself as a “sobering factor” on Peter, and indeed the period they were together was one of the better times in his life. He limited his alcohol consumption, and he used no drugs except for some occasional marijuana. It appears, in fact, that for once his life was close to conventional. “We had a very subdued, quiet life,” Crane recalled.
At the beginning of their relationship, according to Crane, sex between them was “very normal,” and she remembered no instances of impotence. Later, though, things began to change; although Crane said there was never any sadomasochism in their relationship, Peter did begin to require “different heights” in their sex life. “There would be one or two lesbian girlfriends or a hooker always hanging around,” she recalled, “and it was a constant fight because he was always trying to convince me to go to bed with them.”
Peter respected Crane’s wishes most of the time, a fact to which she attributed their relative longevity together: “I tried to establish a normal one-on-one relationship with him. But having two women in bed with him was something he had been involved with for years. It didn’t just start with me or a couple of years before me. I seem to recall that it might have been part of what broke up his marriage to Pat Lawford. And in the end it was the reason we broke up.”
; Crane tried to save the relationship, but she couldn’t. In February 1970 she wrote him a note after their final rift, saying that she no longer wanted to “mess up” his head and apologizing for being “selfish” in her refusal to share him with other women. She concluded by telling him that he would always remain the love of her life.
It wasn’t just Peter’s sexual quirks that forced Geri into her unhappy decision to leave him, but also what she saw as the constant competition for his love and attention. “We couldn’t go anywhere that women weren’t slipping him their telephone numbers — on planes, in nightclubs. I became very jealous of these suspected relationships, which he claimed didn’t exist. I think now my jealousy was unjustified. But it was just something I couldn’t deal with — it was making me sick. I made the decision that it wasn’t healthy for me and that we should separate. He didn’t want to.”
But he agreed, and he paid the rent for her to live in Marilyn Monroe’s old apartment on Doheny Drive for several months. Early in 1971, Crane permanently severed her relationship with Peter and returned to New York.
PETER MAY NOT HAVE indulged in anything heavier than marijuana during his years with Geri Crane, but even that cost him an important personal and professional relationship in 1970, the first of many he would lose because of his growing dependency on drugs.
Johnny Carson and Peter had become friendly in the latter half of the sixties, and Peter was a frequent guest — and occasionally a guest host — on Carson’s Tonight show. Peter enjoyed subbing for Carson; it was not only lucrative but offered him a chance to display his wit and charm before a national audience of millions.
Things fell apart, however, at a party in Peter’s thirtieth-floor penthouse. Peter and Geri Crane had invited Johnny and a few other friends for a late dinner, during which they drank a variety of liquors and smoked pot. At two in the morning, Milt Ebbins was awakened from his sleep by a phone call from Carson’s producer, Rudy Telez.
“Jesus Christ, Milt,” Telez began, very agitated. “I just got a call from Johnny. He was over at Peter’s and he smoked something and got so fucked up he went out on the balcony and almost jumped off!” “What?”
“He came this close to jumping, Milt, and he’s furious now — he wants to know what Peter put in that cigarette. He says it had to be something other than marijuana. Like LSD or something.”
Ebbins immediately called Peter. “Jesus Christ, what did you do to Johnny Carson?”
“What do you mean?” Peter replied. “I didn’t do anything to him.”
“Cmon, Peter, the guy was gonna jump off your goddamn terrace on the thirtieth floor. What did you do to him?”
“We had some grass, that’s all.”
“And what did you put in the grass?”
Peter hesitated. “Uh, nothing.”
Milt didn’t believe him. “Peter usually put something extra in his grass, so I think it’s quite possible that’s what happened.”
Geri Crane denied it. “Nobody ever gave him anything. We only smoked grass. But if you smoke and drink at the same time you can get pretty stoned. Johnny got real high. And he wasn’t accustomed to it. Johnny was a very odd bird. He would come to parties and just be very quiet and laid back. Everybody thought he was shy, but I think it was because he was always alone in a corner, drinking. That night, he was just really out of it and he freaked, that’s all.”
Carson could not be convinced that Peter or Geri hadn’t laced the pot with something else. “So that finished Peter Lawford with Johnny Carson,” Ebbins recalled. “Johnny never saw him again, never used him on his show. That was the end of him.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Robert D. Franks was not likely to forget Lady Lawford. On April 1, 1967, the automobile salesman sold the eighty-three- year-old woman a brand-new convertible Ford Fairlane GT. Four days later, he heard the news that May had backed the car out of her driveway at forty miles per hour, shot across the street, run over a sapling, and hit a car parked in another driveway. Her car had then lurched forward, screeched across the street again, missed a baby in a carriage by inches, and crashed into a brick wall.
Her face a bloody mess, May was rushed to the Beverly Hills Emergency Clinic. She refused treatment and tore up her medical chart — “that awful clinic, nothing but niggers.” She saw her own doctor, who surgically removed nine of May’s teeth from the back of her throat and sewed her nearly severed lower lip back on.
Police sergeant C. O. Lewis wanted to file a hit-and-run complaint against May, which incensed her. In response to his questions she barked, “I’m not a Yank, and I don’t have to tell you a bloody thing. I’m a British subject and immune.” She told friends she would like to forget some of the other things she said to Sergeant Lewis.
May claimed that the accelerator was faulty and had stuck, and later hinted at a conspiracy designed to kill her and make her death look like an accident. She convinced the Ford dealership to replace the car, and on May 10, salesman Franks delivered a replacement, a shiny new six-cylinder Mustang. The next day, he got a call from May. She’d lost the keys; could he bring over a new set?
Franks drove over and gave May the keys, but before he could get back to his own car she had started the Mustang. “I heard the car accelerate at a great rate of speed,” Franks recalled. As he watched in horror, May roared backward out of her driveway and crashed into a house across the street, then roared forward toward Franks’s car. “The Mustang hit my car,” Franks said, “and continued accelerating. It pushed my car up on the parkway. Finally I reached her car and turned the ignition off.”
May wasn’t hurt this time, but the damage to the house and the two automobiles amounted to thirty-two hundred dollars. Sergeant Lewis conferred with the city attorney’s office, but no charges were filed. The press made light of the incidents; a typical headline read, “Lady May Goes for Another Spin.” Sports Illustrated told its readers, “Los Angeles residents who lack the time or money to make it out to the Indy 500 this month might just go and stand around Lady May Lawfords garage. . . .”
To Milt Ebbins, it wasn’t a laughing matter. May had had other accidents, and when her license came up for renewal, Ebbins stepped in. He told the California Department of Motor Vehicles, “Don’t give this woman a license. She can’t drive. She’s gonna kill somebody. She almost killed that baby — it was inches.” May did no further driving.
By the end of the decade, when she was eighty-six years old, May’s mental health had severely deteriorated. Just about everyone, she believed, was conspiring against her, everyone was a threat to her life. After a fall down a flight of stairs, which she blamed on a doctor overmedicating her for a cold, she was taken by ambulance to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. There she was X-rayed and sedated, and spent a quiet night. The next morning, the doctors told her they were studying her X-ray films and said she would have to remain in the hospital for a few days.
As soon as she was alone in her room, May put the wool dress she’d been wearing back on and walked, shoeless, out of the hospital. “She thought they were trying to kidnap her,” her friend John Farquhar recalled. She commandeered a taxi that had come for someone else and had the driver — drunk, she claimed — take her home. There, she locked herself in.
His mother’s erratic behavior left Peter at a loss. He tried to keep as much distance as possible between them, both physical and emotional, but her recurring crises made that very difficult to do. He was in St. John’s Hospital, on his way to visit her, when she walked out. She had seen him and made sure he didn’t see her, convinced as she was that he was part of the plots against her. More and more her inexplicable behavior weighed on him. “She’s in bad shape,” Peter said to Milt Ebbins. But what could be done?
During another of May’s hospitalizations, Peter asked the doctors to perform psychiatric tests on her. May was typically pigheaded. She refused to cooperate and wrote to a friend, “I am incarcerated in UCLA psycho ward. Drs. have made sanity tests of me. This torture o
f a British subject cannot continue without active trouble.”
The psychiatrists at UCLA told Peter that May was suffering from advancing senility and some paranoia, but they did not advise that she be institutionalized. When May was released from the hospital, she wrote her son a letter begging his forgiveness for the way she had treated him over the years: “Today for the first time I realize how very harsh and unkind I have been. My dear Peter I can’t blame you for your past actions — Thank God I am a new woman.”
But Peter found May’s new attitude suspect, and in any event it was too late to mend fences. He continued to avoid her as much as possible and left it to Milt Ebbins to help her in day-to-day situations, pay her expenses, and send her flowers on Easter and Christmas.
May’s isolation and loneliness were relieved only by the continual flow through her life of impressionable young men who were fascinated by her title, her regal bearing, her caustic wit, her stories of world travel and friendship with royalty, her connections to Hollywood and the Kennedys. Always, May made efforts to intrigue anyone who might come to her door. When a new boy from the local liquor market delivered her Southern Comfort, she would introduce herself grandly: “I’m Lady Lawford, Peter Lawford’s mother. Would you like to come in?” If he did, she would regale the young man with stories of her husband’s military exploits, of her friendships with kings and queens, of the young Duke of Windsor’s drunkenness, of Joe Kennedy’s chicanery, of her son’s last telephone call to Marilyn Monroe.