Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  But May was nothing if not contrary. Should a young man express admiration for Peter, May would snap, “He’s a bastard! I haven’t seen him in I don’t know how long. He never calls me.” Almost invariably, the reaction would be, “Oh, you poor dear,” and the irrepressible Lady Lawford would have a new friend.

  Too many of these “friends,” however, were merely hucksters who saw a way to make a quick buck off a dotty old lady. She gave one young man she trusted a number of rings and silver pieces and asked him to have them appraised so that she could sell them and raise money — Peter was no longer paying her expenses at this point because he had so many debts of his own. Her friend returned a few days later, told her the items had been appraised for very little, and offered to sell them for her. He then gave May the pittance he had said the items were worth and pocketed the considerable difference. May lost all the diamonds she owned this way.

  The one bright spot in Lady Lawford’s declining years was her friendship with Buddy Galon, a twenty-five-year-old theater student at UCLA. May’s friend Thelma Keaton, the widow of Buster Keaton, had met Galon when he was speaking on the subject of reincarnation at a symposium in Beverly Hills in the summer of 1966. May’s interest in the occult had not waned; in 1968 her description of an encounter with a UFO appeared in newspapers across the country in a column of hard-to-explain occurrences. She had espied, she said, “a beautiful candelabra UFO with sparkling lights hanging all around it, which immediately sped away at terrific speed through a hole in the sky.” Thelma Keaton thought May might enjoy Galon, a boyishly handsome blond who had briefly been a “Mousketeer” on television’s Mickey Mouse Club in the 1950s. She was right. Although there was a nearly sixty-year difference in their ages, May and Galon hit it off immediately. “Within fifteen minutes,” he recalled, “there was that wonderful chemical reaction that happens between people. Having spoken an hour or so before on reincarnation, I believed I already knew this woman — that we had met in a previous life. And later on, we used it to explain our age difference, in that she arrived early on this Earth plane, whereas I arrived late.”

  Galon was amazed by Lady Lawford’s interest in him. “She knew that trick of making someone you’re with seem like the most important person in the world. Her whole concentration was on me, on the things that I was doing. And I thought, This woman knew Queen Mary and Louis B. Mayer and the Kennedys, and she thinks I’m interesting. That really attracted me to her.”

  The two of them saw each other almost daily for the next five years. As “the most exciting and fascinating woman I’ve ever met,” May mesmerized the star-struck Galon with stories of royalty and movie stars. They discussed mysticism during a drive up the California coast. She helped him with his homework, and “she was,” he noted, “no dummy when it came to Shakespeare.” They had “vociferous” debates about international politics. They collapsed into helpless giggling at a Santa Barbara dinner party when an elderly German ambassador fell asleep facedown in his soup. In Palm Springs, they went skinny-dipping after midnight.

  Nearly every day, they would have afternoon tea together at four o’clock. “It was a ritual,” Galon recalled, “a carryover from her past. In the later years, it was just the two of us, but in the earlier years we had company — Patrick Mahoney came quite often. Patrick is the half-brother of Sir Arthur Bliss, of the London Philharmonic. John Farquhar came, and so did Leo G. Carroll. Lady Victoria Stevenson, the queen’s cousin, would come in from Claremont. I might have been bowled over by these people with titles and everything, but I learned that they go to the bathroom just like we do. They’d come in with wrinkled, dirty clothes, dandruff on their shoulders. And some of them are bores.”

  Galon has said that he and Lady Lawford were married on Easter Sunday, 1968, in Tijuana. Because he has no proof of this (according to him, the marriage certificate was destroyed) and because they never lived together, Galon’s claim has aroused skepticism. But whether or not he and May were in fact married is irrelevant. What is clear is that the two were very important to each other. “I didn’t want anything from the woman,” he said. “I didn’t make any claims on the estate. I had more than she had, really. But I had grown to love her. It wasn’t a passionate love, but it was love nonetheless.”

  If their story is reminiscent of the Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon film Harold and Maude, it’s because, according to Galon, the film’s screenwriter, Colin Higgins, was told about his relationship with May. “That movie was based on us. Even the stuff about the young man being suicidal. I was fascinated by death when I first met May.”

  As the months went by, Galon began to see the less enchanting side of May Lawford. “I noticed the liquor around the house, I experienced the mood changes. She could be impossible, she was awful, she was insulting. It would be enough to make you cry. It would happen so quickly, I wouldn’t be prepared for it. Sometimes a phone call would trigger these episodes, sometimes nothing at all. I called them her ‘black moods.’ I’d have to leave her place, and if I came back in an hour, she’d be fine.

  “I’m not a psychiatrist, but it seemed to me she was manic- depressive. That makes some pieces of the puzzle fit into place. She could be so energetic, almost manic, when she was entertaining. She’d go into a frenzy. When you got her on a particular subject, she’d be like a motormouth.

  “And then she’d turn. She showed me the Sports Illustrated piece about her accident and she sat there and roared about how humorous it was; then all of a sudden, she started to cry. It had been traumatic for her. And she worried, Will the same thing happen again?

  “She would say, ‘They really do want me dead. They are not going to let me stay alive.’ In the beginning, I thought she was paranoid, that she was having delusions, hallucinations. But maybe because I was with her every day, I lost my objectivity. At the end, I came to believe her. Some of these things were real. I saw bruises on her that I don’t believe she could have inflicted on herself in any way.”

  By March 1971, May, eighty-seven years old, seemed no longer able to function safely without constant attention. “She kept getting progressively worse,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “She always thought people were coming to kill her.” Peter and Milt conferred with May’s doctor, and he told them that in his opinion May would be best off in a nursing home.

  It was left to Ebbins to break the news to her. “Look, May,” he told her, “you don’t feel well. You’ll be much better taken care of there.”

  May had feared institutionalization. She often told friends, “They’re going to put me away. I can’t stand the thought of that.” She asked Ebbins, “They’ll be nice to me there, won’t they?” He reassured her, describing the Monterey Park Convalescent Hospital as “palatial, a wonderful home, with a beautiful courtyard — very highly recommended.” It was expensive, he added, and one of the best in Southern California. A private room in the facility cost thirty-four hundred dollars a month (equivalent to twice that in 2011 dollars). “And of course you’ll have a private room, May. Don’t worry about it.”

  “She trusted me,” Ebbins recalled, “and she agreed. A few days later, he and Peter’s maid, Erma Lee Riley, drove May to the home on Garfield Avenue in Monterey Park. “They put her in her room and she was a martinet. She drove them crazy. She complained about everything: ‘Where’s my soup?’ she’d yell at them. ‘The bacon’s cold!’”

  When Ebbins brought Peter to see May for the first time, they entered her room and Milt said, “May, look who’s here.” She stared at Peter and said, “Who are you?”

  “May, it’s Peter, your son,” Ebbins said.

  “No it isn’t!” May insisted.

  “Yes, May, it’s Peter.”

  “No! That’s Alan Mowbray.”

  Peter bolted out of the room, leaned against the corridor wall, and began to cry. Finally, Milt convinced May that Peter was indeed her son, not Mowbray, the elderly English character actor who had passed away in 1969. “Peter looked so much older than May remembered him look
ing,” Ebbins said. “They hadn’t seen each other in years. His hair was long and gray.”

  When Peter went back into the room, May looked at him closely and said, “Are you Peter?” He said, “Yes.” She then adopted a regal attitude and said, “How are you?” Ebbins recalled that “she started to act like a queen talking to her son.”

  May remained in the Monterey Park Convalescent Hospital for almost a year. At first, the expenses of her hospitalization were paid from a conservancy account that Ebbins had set up with the nearly eighteen thousand dollars he had discovered in May’s several savings accounts. Peter had joint access to the account, and Ebbins soon discovered that he was writing checks to prostitutes and drug dealers. “I told him, ‘What are you, nuts? You could go to jail for that!’ He said to me, ‘Who’s gonna know?’ I told him a lot of people could find out and he was asking for trouble.” When Peter didn’t stop, Ebbins took access to the account away from him.

  Buddy Galon, according to his account in his “as told to” autobiography of Lady Lawford, had gone out of town on family business, and when he returned he found May gone and her apartment bare. He did not know where she was and spent weeks trying to find out, telephoning a score of her friends without success. (He apparently never thought to ask Milt Ebbins where May was.) Six months later, he quite by accident discovered May’s whereabouts and — pretending to be her grandson — went to see her.

  He described her as “emaciated,” her hair “hacked off” so closely that she looked like a concentration camp victim. She wore a thin muslin shift stained with urine and fecal matter. She was, Galon wrote, restrained at her ankles, waist, wrists, and mouth.

  Milt Ebbins refuted the implications of Galon’s description of May’s condition. “She got excellent care. It was a very good hospital. I saw her from time to time. She wasn’t shaven, she didn’t have excrement on her. Now, toward the very end, she might have. But if you have somebody who can’t take care of themselves, that happens. She might have been incontinent. And they might have shaved her hair very short to help keep her groomed.”

  He never saw May restrained in any way. “But it is possible that she had become violent. If the hospital felt that May might harm herself, they would have had to restrain her.”

  Ebbins paid May a visit toward the end. “She was lying down. I didn’t notice if her hair was shaved because I couldn’t see the back of her head. She didn’t know anybody. She had grown quite feeble. She rambled. And then she went into a coma. They told me she probably wouldn’t last very long. Peter wouldn’t go to visit her. He didn’t want to see her like that.”

  In his alarm over May’s condition, Buddy Galon tried to reach Peter in the hope that he could do something to help her. After a series of fruitless phone calls, he finally tracked Peter down in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on October 29. His emotions about to get the better of him, Galon pleaded with Peter to do something about the “horrors” he’d seen May subjected to. He expected Peter to be shocked and concerned about his mother and offer immediate help.

  Instead, it was Galon who was shocked. He encountered a drunken, belligerent Peter on the telephone. When Galon said how concerned he was about May, Peter grunted. “Why don’t you just shoot her in the goddamn leg and be done with it?” he spat. “Now leave me alone — I’m getting married!”

  THIRTY-NINE

  He had vowed not to do it. In July 1968 he had told a journalist, “I won’t marry again. . . . My friends’ marriages are all breaking up. Sammy’s and Frank’s marriages both broke up in the same week.” His attitude changed, however, on the set of the television phenomenon Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, the irreverent Monday night variety hour that starred comedians Dan Rowan and Dick Martin and seemed to shoot up from nowhere to become the number-one show in the country in 1968. Along the way, it changed the face of TV comedy.

  Helped along by a brilliant young cast of comics headed by Lily Tomlin, Goldie Hawn, Henry Gibson, Judy Carne, Alan Sues, JoAnne Worley, Ruth Buzzi, and Arte Johnson, Laugh-In epitomized “hip” with its lightning-fast blackouts, its devastating political commentary, and its frequent double entendres.

  The cast and crew enjoyed nothing more than keeping the NBC censors in a constant state of bewilderment while they stretched the limits of what could be done — and said — on television. As Dick Martin recalled, “Up until our show, you’d send the standards and practices department a script and they’d blue-pencil it — ‘you can’t say this, you can’t say that.’ With our show, they had to have someone come down and sit on the set. And they would pick a real yo-yo. We had, I think, seven pot jokes in the first show and they never caught any of them. One was, ‘My boyfriend is so dumb he thinks a little pot is Tupperware for midgets.’ The censor comes up to us and says, ‘You can’t say that!’ We learned early on to feign ignorance. ‘Why not?’ we said. He said, ‘Because it’s a plug for Tupperware’!”

  Another joke proved equally obscure to the censor: “For the first time in thirty years, everyone at the United Nations has agreed on everything. And they’re still trying to figure out who put the grass in the air conditioner.”

  “The guy came down,” Martin remembered, “and said to me, ‘What’s funny about grass in an air conditioner?’ And we said, ‘Well, you know, some guy mows the lawn and puts the grass in the air conditioner and people see all this green flying around and they don’t think right.’ He says, ‘Oh. Well, that’s not very funny.’ And about eight weeks later he comes to me and says, ‘You son of a bitch!’ because by then he’d figured it out.”

  A staple of Laugh-In was the special guest star, and here again the show strived for the unusual. “We didn’t want the ordinary names,” Martin said. “Or, if we got Sonny and Cher, we’d put Sonny on one show and Cher on the other — we’d split ’em up. We’d get Sammy Davis but we wouldn’t let him sing — we’d drop him through a trapdoor.”

  The first guest star was John Wayne — who did nothing during the taping but say, “Well, I don’t think that’s funny,” a dozen times in front of the camera, without knowing what he was supposed to be reacting to. The comments were then interspersed throughout the finished show, usually after double entendres having to do with sex or drugs.

  “John Wayne was the first big star who broke the barrier,” Martin recalled. “Once Wayne did it, it was okay for Jack Lemmon and Kirk Douglas and all the other big stars to do it too. Peter Lawford was one of the unusual names we came up with who was adorable to be around but wasn’t a big star. But we didn’t need big stars for ratings. We already had the ratings.”

  Peter appeared on Laugh-In once or twice a season between 1968 and 1972. He would do brief song-and-dance routines, deliver one- liners in the “cocktail party” sequences, and do blackout sketches. Often the sketches were a parody of Peter’s family background. As Martin recalled them, “He and I would be two British lords in India with the pith helmets and the queen’s chairs. I don’t remember what we said but it was probably ‘How long have you been with William Morris?’”

  Peter loved the atmosphere of Laugh-In, loved the camaraderie he established with the show’s sharp young performers. Late in December 1970, while shooting a cocktail party sequence late one morning, he noticed a willowy dancer with long blond hair, about twenty-one.

  “Who’s that girl over there?” he asked Ian Bernard, the show’s musical director. “She’s beautiful.”

  “That’s Mary Rowan, Dan’s daughter,” Bernard replied. “And Dan still thinks she’s fifteen.”

  Peter laughed and left the set for lunch. When he returned, he became aware of Mary’s constant stare — she had noticed Peter at the same time he noticed her. “I just stood there gasping,” she recalled, “because this had to be the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen — all this thick hair with the gray at the temples, a great physique, groovy personality. I came back after lunch, although I wasn’t needed, just to stick around and watch him. And it seemed to me he kept looking at me.”

  Wh
en her father came back to the set from his lunch break, Mary asked him to introduce her to Peter. His response was curt: “He’s too old for you.”

  “I don’t care,” she protested. “I just want to meet him.”

  Rowan pretended he hadn’t heard her and walked away. But Ed Hookstratten, Rowan’s attorney, couldn’t help but notice that Peter and Mary barely took their eyes off each other for the rest of the day. At about seven-thirty, Hookstratten took Mary by the arm, guided her down a corridor, and deposited her amid a crowd of people in Peter’s dressing room. “There was no introduction, nothing,” Mary recalled. “I was so nervous, I couldn’t talk. I didn’t know anyone in the room. I was so scared and then Peter rescued me. He was charming. ‘Please sit down,’ he said, and handed me a glass of wine.”

  When Peter was called back to the set, he asked Mary to come along and watch the scene. When the day’s shoot wrapped, about ten o’clock that night, he invited her to join him for a hamburger. They remained in the burger joint and talked until early morning. From that point on, they were inseparable.

  Dick Martin recalled that “Mary and Peter were very cute together. Of course, when they started going together, we started making jokes. But Dan had less and less of a sense of humor about it as things went on.”

  “I’m sure that Dad thinks I fell in love with Peter because he is a movie star, the whole glamour bit,” Mary said at the time. “But that was just the first two or three weeks. I was constantly nervous. I was always wondering, What am I doing with Peter Lawford? He was still, in my mind, a movie star, former brother-in-law of the former President, gorgeous, super. And all the girls kept calling him, his phone never stopped ringing, and all the while I’m wondering: What am I doing here?”

  Dan Rowan’s concern wasn’t just that his daughter was falling in love with Peter because he was a glamorous celebrity, or even that at forty-seven Peter was too old for her. What worried him most was that Mary, immature for her age, saw in Peter a substitute for the father that Dan hadn’t always been able to be. With that as its basis, he feared, the relationship was bound to fail.