THIRTEEN

Marilyn Monroe and her girlfriend, Jeanne Carmen, couldn’t figure Peter Lawford out. Both of them had dated him, and both of them had had the same disappointing experience. “Marilyn and I used to talk about Peter,” Jeanne said, “and we’d say, ‘What is it with him? Do you think he’s gay?’ We were the sexiest things on two feet, and Peter wasn’t making plays for us.”

Peter met Marilyn in his agent’s office in 1951. She was, he said, such an “alarmingly pretty” girl that “it really made me sit up.” The twenty-five-year-old Monroe, a voluptuous, sexy-but-innocent blonde with a feathery voice, was born Norma Jeane Baker to a mentally unstable mother. The identity of her father was never firmly established; her birth certificate lists her mother’s husband at the time, Edward Mortensen, but it was more likely C. Stanley Gifford, a coworker of her mother’s at Consolidated Film Industries, where she worked as a film cutter.

Abandoned by Mortensen when she told him she was pregnant, Norma Jeane’s mother, Gladys, struggled for several years to provide for her baby, but she suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized. (Gladys’s mother had died in an institution, and her maternal grandfather had committed suicide.) The sensitive, quiet little girl was shuttled from foster home to foster home, living with families that took her in only because the government paid them to do so.

She grew up confused and psychologically battered. One family insisted she read the Bible constantly and harangued her about the evils of sex and drink; another gave her empty liquor bottles as playthings. At eight she was raped by a man who lived in the boardinghouse run by her foster parents. When she attempted to tell them what had happened, the woman slapped her and told her not to tell lies. Shortly afterward, she began to stutter.

By sixteen, she had developed into a curvaceous beauty who turned the heads of boys at school, and she loved the attention. She married the young man next door, primarily to avoid being returned to an orphanage when her foster family could no longer keep her. But there were deep scars within her psyche; she had a nearly pathological need for the attention and adoration of as many people as possible, to make her feel, if only for a time, like a worthwhile person.

She went into modeling and, when she achieved a measure of success at it, divorced her husband and went into the movies. By 1951 she had worked steadily in Hollywood for four years and appeared in over a dozen films, but she was only now on the verge of the phenomenal success that would propel her to the top of the entertainment world and put her every public move on the front pages.

Peter and Marilyn dated a few times that spring of 1951, both alone and in foursomes. She was taken with him and puzzled by his lack of sexual interest in her. A close friend of Marilyn’s, recalled her telling him that “when she had a date with Peter, he was more interested in having a girl as a showpiece than in doing anything with her. It was always just a hug and a kiss good-night.” Jeanne Carmen, herself an attractive, buxom blonde, had no clue as to why Peter didn’t respond to her or Marilyn the way most men did. “Neither of us really cared all that much about sleeping with Peter, but we tended to be surprised when men didn’t want to sleep with us. We would wonder, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Or, more often, ‘What’s wrong with him? ”

In a 1951 interview Peter said, “There are many girls with long blond hair and sexy figures whom men consider beautiful. But I don’t. To me a girl with a well-groomed look, not the flamboyant type, but a quiet beauty who radiates health and vitality is the greatest beauty of them all. I go for the typical college type, not movie sirens.”

Peter was initially attracted to Marilyn because at that time in her life she did have a wholesome, down-to-earth side. She loved the beach, worked out with weights to firm up her figure, and had an abundance of girlish high spirits. But the more he got to know and like her, the less interested he was in her sexually. Many aspects of the private Norma Jeane appealed to him: he loved her subtle, skewed sense of humor, her vulnerability, her tentative intelligence. But he was put off by the Marilyn Monroe persona she adopted publicly, the brassy blonde in skin-tight dresses and plunging décolletage. It was precisely this dynamic between innocence and wantonness that made Marilyn so fascinating to the public, but the wanton side left Peter cold.

He was put off, too, by what he saw as Marilyn’s lack of hygiene. Joe Naar recalled picking Marilyn up along with Peter and Joe’s date, the actress Barbara Darrow. “Peter went into her apartment and her dog had done something on the carpet and she didn’t seem to care. He was so disgusted he said to me, ‘You take her out.’ So we switched dates. He knew Barbara because I’d dated her before, so he took Barbara home and I took Marilyn home.”

Peter later said that he had stepped in the dog’s mess, and Marilyn poked her head out of the bathroom door and chirped, “Oh dear, he’s done it again!” The dog, Peter added, “turned out to be the smallest chihuahua I’ve ever seen. Heaven knows how it had produced such a pile!”

Peter did date Marilyn a number of times afterward, but the evenings never extended beyond “a hug and a kiss good-night.” On one occasion Peter would never forget, he went to pick Marilyn up and found two burly bodyguards standing on either side of her front door. They asked him what he wanted. “I have a date with Miss Monroe,” he told them warily.

“She’s not going out,” one of the men growled.

“But I have a date with her!” Peter replied, indignant.

“Forget it. She’s staying here tonight.”

Peter sensed he had better leave, but he called Marilyn the minute he got home. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked her. “It’s Howard Hughes,” Marilyn replied in a whisper. “I went out with him and he’s so jealous that he won’t let me out of the house at night. I’m a prisoner in my own home.” Luckily for Marilyn’s freedom, the eccentric billionaire’s attentions were soon diverted to other pretty starlets.

MARILYN AND PETER REMAINED casual friends throughout the fifties, but it wasn’t until the end of the decade that their relationship grew much closer. In the years between, Marilyn’s career at Twentieth Century-Fox took off like a Roman candle, while Peter’s fizzled at MGM. Now, instead of making “B + ” movies with “A” costars like Deborah Kerr and Janet Leigh, he was making “B movies with “B” costars like Dawn Addams and Jane Greer. In 1952 it was You for Me, a slight, TV-ish situation comedy with Greer directed by Don Weis in which Peter played a rakish millionaire. The picture was well reviewed as “light, escapist fare,” and Peter was delightfully boyish in it, but it lost money and served mainly to bolster Peter’s growing reputation as a Metro has-been.

Perhaps fittingly, Peter’s last film at MGM was his most ignominious. Rogue’s March cast him as a member of the Royal Midland Fusiliers who is sent to India (much like Sir Sydney) to put down uprisings against the British along the Afghanistan border. It was, in the sarcastic words of John Douglas Eames, “an Eastern. No cowboys, but lots of Indians.”

Showing emotion on film was still something that did not come easily to Peter, even in his forty-fourth motion picture role. The film’s director, Allen Davis, recalled that when Peter was required to cry for the camera — for the first time in his career — he couldn’t do it. “In a hopefully moving scene, the big set piece of the movie, he was to be drummed out of his regiment, stripped of rank, regimental insignia, buttons, et cetera. He could not give me the ashamed, silent but heartbroken tears I wanted. So we had to use a spray with onion juice in it to get the tearful effect.”

Rogue’s March did not turn out well; MGM executives had so little regard for the film that they never released it in New York. It did have a short run in Los Angeles and elsewhere around the country, where it lost $247,000 at the box office despite a total budget of only $659,000.

Peter was now in the final year of his contract, and Metro was paying him two thousand dollars a week to appear in third-rate productions. Clearly, something would have to give. In December, when his contract was up for renewal, the word came down from Nick Schenck, head of Loew’s Inc., that Peter Lawford’s employment at MGM would be allowed to lapse.

The studio’s financial problems had worsened in the early fifties, when television was making deep inroads into the American entertainment audience. When families could stay at home and watch — for free — Milton Berle or I Love Lucy or first-rate live drama, it took more than flimsy comedies or sluggish melodramas to get them to leave the house and pay for cinema admission. More than ever, movies had to be “events” to score big at the box office, and theaters needed super- star names on their marquees. The films that Peter Lawford made after Little Women, with the exception of Royal Wedding, were the hardest hit by the drop in movie attendance: entertainment not much better (and in some cases, worse) than what most people could now get at home on television.

MGM’s profits in 1952 were its lowest in twenty years, and Loew’s Inc. cut costs by dropping the contracts of many of their highest-paid players. Peter wasn’t alone. Some of their brightest lights were let go — Greer Garson, Esther Williams, George Murphy, Clark Gable, Van Johnson, Deborah Kerr, Kathryn Grayson, Lionel Barrymore, and June Allyson, among others. (In some cases, the break was cruel. The day June Allyson left, a studio executive accompanied her to make sure she didn’t steal anything. “He had a long inventory sheet of things in my dressing room that were studio property,” the actress recalled. “He told me he just couldn’t do that to me, so I took the sheet myself and went around checking things off — all the ashtrays and the pictures off the walls.”)

With his employment at MGM ended, Peter saw the chance to get away from second-rate pictures. He had heard about the huge amounts of money actors could make by producing their own movies and television shows, and he was intrigued. Television executives, he was told, were eager to use established names in their shows, and many stars could pretty much write their own tickets. Peter promised himself he’d look into it.

ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 1953, eighty-seven-year-old Sir Sydney awoke and complained of abdominal pain. Lady Lawford called the general’s doctor, who, she claimed, informed her between drunken hiccups that Sir Sydney suffered from a double hernia and should be operated on. “Absolutely not,” May replied. “Do you want him to die? He probably wouldn’t even survive the anesthetic. If he must die, he will die in peace.”

May shooed the doctor away and walked Sir Sydney out to his mignonette garden, where they sat and talked. The general told her, May said, that she had been a good wife to him: “You’ve always gone beyond the call of duty.” He then asked her to make sure that Peter took care of their cat, a stray he had found in an alley eight years before. Then Sir Sydney Lawford nodded off, seemingly to sleep. He was dead.

Peter had gone to Hawaii to visit Jean MacDonald and other friends, and May telephoned him there with the news. She later claimed that Peter told her he didn’t want to cut his vacation short for his father’s funeral and she should “keep him on ice” until he returned the following Friday. She further claimed that when Peter arrived in Los Angeles he joked about his father’s death and went out nightclubbing after his funeral.

May hoped to show with these anecdotes that Peter was unmoved by his father’s death, that he disliked Sir Sydney as much as he disliked her. But the opposite was true. Jean MacDonald was with Peter when he got the news, and she saw him react “with shock and sadness” to his father’s death: “One of Peter’s strengths was his great pride in his father. That gave quality and meaning to his life; it was a strong side of his personal character. He felt tremendous loss at Sir Sydney’s death.” Peter was reluctant to come home for the funeral, but only because he wasn’t sure he could bear the emotional ordeal of burying his father, and he dreaded having to cope with his mother at the same time. Milton Ebbins, who had just become his manager, told him, “You’ve gotta come back.”

“I don’t think I can handle it, Milt,” Peter replied. Finally, however, he did agree to return. As he said to Ebbins, “It will look bad if I don’t, won’t it?”

If there was any flippancy on Peter’s part once he did get back, it was clearly directed at May; she chose to interpret it as callousness toward his father’s death. There can be no doubt that Peter was deeply affected by Sir Sydney’s passing. Molly Dunne recalled, “I went with Peter to the mortuary to help pick out his father’s coffin. He was devastated by Sir Sydney’s death. You couldn’t mention his name for months afterward that Peter wouldn’t well up with tears.”

Lieutenant General Sir Sydney Turing Barlow Lawford was laid to rest on February 21, 1953, in a service conducted by the Canadian Legion of the British Empire Service League at Inglewood Park Cemetery on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Peter, Lady Lawford, and nearly fifty others watched as his casket, draped with Britain’s Union Jack, was lowered into the ground amid the sounds of a lone bagpipe. The British consul-general in Los Angeles, Sir Robert Haddow, eulogized the general: “Sir Sydney was the embodiment of a soldier and a gentleman. Here his body lies among his comrades in the Canadian Legion plot, but his spirit has been promoted to a fellowship with God.”

IN THE SPACE OF A FEW short months, Peter’s life had fundamentally altered, and his mind was awhirl with mixed emotions. He was pleased to be free of the MGM shackles, but the cessation of his weekly two-thousand-dollar paycheck was less pleasant. He had saved a hefty nest egg, but he was loath to dip into it any more than he had to. It was for this reason that Peter continued to live in the Sunset Boulevard house with his mother for more than a year after Sir Sydney’s death, although he had considered moving out so often in the past. He knew that to set either himself or May up in a separate residence would be a drain on his finances that he couldn’t afford.

When Peter’s contract was dropped, Loew’s Inc. demanded immediate payment of the balance on his mortgage with them, which was $18,573.28. He took out a new mortgage for that amount, with monthly payments of $250, less than one-third of the eight hundred dollars MGM had been deducting from his paycheck each month.

Peter sold the house fourteen months later for eighty-five thousand dollars, netting a smart profit of forty thousand dollars in seven years’ time. He set May up in a small apartment in Westwood, and she was heartbroken at having to leave the Sunset house. The day she moved, she pried the address plaque off the clapboard to keep as a souvenir. “I was so happy here,” she said to a friend. “Why do I have to leave?”