SEVENTEEN

If Peter Lawford’s public eclipse by the Kennedy family can be said to have begun at any one moment, it was when Jack Kennedy decided to run for the 1956 Democratic vice-presidential nomination. Kennedy had been one of the party’s brightest young stars since his election to the Senate in 1952, and the publication of his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of biographical essays, Profiles in Courage, had singled him out as one of that rarest of breeds — an intellectual politician.

Jack Kennedy had long been intrigued by Hollywood — by the business of it, the art of it, and the sexuality of it. He often made what he called “hunting expeditions” to Los Angeles, where he would woo beautiful women, from aspiring unknowns to major stars like Gene Tierney and June Allyson, He was fascinated by how sexual dynamism in Hollywood translated into power — and vice versa. His friend Chuck Spaulding recalled that “‘charisma’ wasn’t a catchword yet, but Jack was very interested in that binding magnetism these screen personalities had. What exactly was it? How did you go about acquiring it? Did it have an impact on your private life? How did you make it work for you? He wouldn’t let go of the subject.”

Jack Kennedy later used much of what he learned to great political advantage, but his main interest early on was sexual conquest. With his boyish good looks and keen mind, he had never had trouble attracting women, in Hollywood or elsewhere, but his sister’s marriage to Peter Lawford afforded him additional entree to moviedom’s most gorgeous females.

Of all his in-laws, Peter got along with Jack the best. Jack had no problem with Peter’s being English; he had strongly supported his sister Kathleen’s decision to marry a nobleman, and remained an anglophile despite his father’s debacle as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. His first book, the highly acclaimed Why England Slept, chronicled the events leading to Britain’s entry into World War II.

Jack admired Peter’s savoir faire, his cultured manner, his sartorial elegance, and he knew that Peter was someone he could learn from. The Kennedys lived up to the stereotype of the rambunctious, all- American Irish family (and provoked Lady Lawford’s disdain because of it), but of them all Jack was the only one who aspired to old- world sophistication. His decision to marry a debutante, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, the daughter of socialites Janet Lee and John “Black Jack” Bouvier, was motivated largely by her continental flair, her knowledge of French, her impeccable etiquette. She was just the kind of wife the ambitious Jack Kennedy wanted the world to see on his arm.

The friendship between Jack and Peter, however, was based on more than that. Both men had a lusty appetite for women, and neither felt constrained by their marriage vows to curb their desires. Once Peter became a part of the Kennedy family, he was happy to help the newlywed Jack on his Hollywood “hunting expeditions.” One of the women Peter made sure Jack met was Marilyn Monroe.

In the summer of 1954, Peter arranged for Jack and Jackie to be invited to the agent Charles Feldman’s home for a party. Peter knew that among the guests would be Marilyn Monroe, the most talked- about woman in the world that year, and her husband of six months, former New York Yankee baseball great Joe DiMaggio. Their marriage was already on the rocks, and it would end a few months later, destroyed by DiMaggio’s jealousy and Monroe’s unwillingness to give up her burgeoning career, as DiMaggio insisted, and be a housewife.

DiMaggio’s mistrust of Marilyn’s fidelity was usually unfounded, but in the case of Marilyn and John F. Kennedy, his suspicions were justified. Bob Slatzer was a Paramount publicity and rewrite man. Marilyn told Slatzer about the party at which she first met Jack Kennedy, and a few weeks later Charles Feldman related essentially the same story to him. “She had to talk DiMaggio into going,” Slatzer recalled, “because he hated Hollywood parties. When she was introduced to Kennedy he said to her, I think I’ve met you someplace before,’ and she told me that she thought she might have met him in the forties when he used to stay out here with Bob Stack.”

Marilyn said she felt uncomfortable at the party because Jack Kennedy stared at her the entire evening. “I may be flattering myself,” she giggled, “but he couldn’t take his eyes off me.” Charlie Feldman noticed that Jackie saw what Jack was doing, and she was getting angry. Joe DiMaggio was aware of what was going on, too. Every few minutes he would grab Marilyn’s arm and say, “Let’s go! I’ve had enough of this!” Marilyn didn’t want to leave, and Feldman recalled that “they had words about it.”

The DiMaggios did leave early, but sometime before that Marilyn gave Senator Kennedy her phone number. The next day Jack called, and DiMaggio answered the phone. When he asked who was calling, Kennedy said, “A friend.” DiMaggio hung up in Jack’s face and started to grill Marilyn about who it was, because he hadn’t recognized Kennedy’s voice. The next time Marilyn saw Kennedy, he said, “I guess I shouldn’t call at certain times, huh?”

Marilyn told Bob Slatzer that she and Jack Kennedy didn’t “get together” until after her divorce from DiMaggio early in 1955. She began to spend a good deal of time in New York during this period, and occasionally, when she and Jack were both in the city, they would meet.

A few months after the party at Charlie Feldman’s, Jack was hospitalized for surgery to alleviate a chronic back problem. Visitors to his room were amused by a color poster of Marilyn Monroe he had taped to the wall, in which she wore blue shorts and stood with her legs spread widely apart. Kennedy had hung the poster upside down.

KENNEDY ALMOST DIED after the surgery; he was given the last rites of the Catholic Church while lying in a coma. But he rallied and emerged from the ordeal a stronger, more ambitious man — and a more impatient politician. While recuperating in Palm Beach he wrote Profiles in Courage, and the rise in his national political star prompted by the book’s critical plaudits made him think seriously about higher office.

That one of his sons would achieve the presidency had long been a dream of Joe Kennedy’s; when Joe Junior was killed, Kennedy transferred his expectations to Jack. The odds were long: not only had a Catholic never won a presidential election, but Jack Kennedy was a freshman senator with little experience in international affairs and was barely above the constitutional minimum age to hold the office. By 1960, the Kennedys felt, Jack could overcome these disadvantages, and their master plan was to orchestrate the rise in his reputation and popularity until his nomination had become a virtual inevitability.

At the 1956 Democratic convention in Chicago, which was poised to nominate Adlai Stevenson for a second race against President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jack was scheduled to narrate a documentary that would open the convention, The Pursuit of Happiness. The film was produced by Dore Schary, and for the first time, John F. Kennedy was able to utilize his brother-in-law’s show business ties to further his career. Schary remembered that Kennedy flew to Los Angeles to confer with him about the film: “I went down to call for Senator Kennedy at the Lawfords’ home [in Malibu]. We ran the film alone for Senator Kennedy, and he thought it was wonderful.” With input from Pat and Peter, Jack suggested some changes in the narration script, which Schary made.

The film and Jack’s narration were so well received that Kennedy was asked to make the principal nominating speech for Stevenson. His brilliant oration — he rewrote a draft by Arthur Schlesinger that Stevenson’s aides had supplied to him — catapulted him into the national spotlight, and suddenly the talk was that Jack Kennedy would make a splendid vice-presidential nominee.

He agreed. He decided to fight for the nomination, which he saw as a stepping-stone to the respectability he would need to run for president in 1960. Joe Kennedy argued against the race, afraid that Stevenson’s all but certain loss to the popular Eisenhower would damage Jack’s reputation as a winner. Jack felt that a second Stevenson defeat would not be blamed on him and that a well-fought national campaign would gain him tremendous name recognition and temper him for the 1960 battle as nothing else could.

Kennedy hoped Stevenson would take the traditional route and choose him as his running mate, thereby making his nomination by the delegates a mere formality. Instead, Stevenson threw the decision to the convention floor without a recommendation, allowing the Democrats to choose for themselves among Kennedy, Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, who had a strong political organization forged in his primary campaign against Stevenson, and Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey, a bright new face in the party’s liberal wing.

Stevenson’s action earned him Kennedy’s enmity and left Jack with only twelve hours to campaign. Jack and Bobby surged into action, but they were unprepared — so much so that when Jackie walked into the Kennedy headquarters early the following morning, Bobby looked at her balefully and asked, “Do you know anybody in Nevada?”

She didn’t, but she suggested Bobby call Peter in Malibu — Peter knew Jimmy Durante, and didn’t Durante perform in Las Vegas? Bobby called the Lawford house and woke up Peter and Pat, who was eight months and three weeks pregnant. Peter told Bobby that he knew Wilbur Clark, the owner of the Desert Inn. Clark, it turned out, was the chairman of the Nevada delegation, and Bobby asked Peter to give Clark a call because “We need Nevada’s votes, and I don’t think we’ll get them unless you can persuade Clark to change his delegates’ minds.”

Peter called Clark, and that evening thirteen of Nevada’s fourteen votes went to Kennedy on the second ballot, putting him within thirty- eight votes of the nomination. Jack ultimately lost to Kefauver, but afterward he made an eloquent appeal for unity and left the convention a much stronger — and more famous — politician. He campaigned hard for Stevenson, all the while gaining more recognition and collecting political IOUs that he could cash in for the 1960 campaign. With Stevenson’s defeat in November, John F. Kennedy quickly became the front-runner for his party’s next presidential nomination.

A WEEK AFTER THE CONVENTION ended, on August 25, Pat gave birth to the Lawfords’ second child, a girl they named Sydney, after Peter’s father, in the unisex British tradition Peter favored. A month later, Peter purchased the home that he, Pat, and their children would share for the next eight years. It was a house with a celebrated past, and within a few years the Lawfords’ occupancy of it would make it one of the legendary houses in show business history.

The dwelling was Louis B. Mayer’s Santa Monica beachfront mansion that Peter had first visited as a wide-eyed fifteen-year-old during one of Mayer’s Sunday brunches. Mayer had purchased it in 1932 and spent nearly a million dollars to turn it into a surfside Xanadu. A ten- thousand-square-foot neo-Spanish building on two lots, it featured a dozen rooms, four bedroom suites, an elevator, a theater-sized projection screen that pulled down from the ceiling in the living room, a guest house, and an enormous swimming pool yards from the Pacific Ocean.

Mayer had spent seventy-five thousand dollars on imported Italian marble that he installed around the pool and fireplaces and throughout the master bedroom. The Mayer house became one of the social centers of Hollywood, a fitting den for the MGM lion and his cubs, and a “second home” to such movie greats as Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, and Katharine Hepburn.

When Mayer’s wife, Margaret, divorced him in 1947, she won a three-million-dollar settlement that included the mansion. Ill and a recluse, Margaret was unable to keep the place up; when she died in 1955 it was badly in need of repair.

The photographer Don Pack remembered walking along the beach with Peter in the early fifties when Peter pointed to the Mayer house and said, “Someday I’m going to buy that.” On September 27, 1956, he did, from the estate of Margaret Mayer — for a purchase price of ninety-five thousand dollars.

The enormous amount of money Mayer had put into the house over the years meant little to its resale value. In the fifties the population of Southern California was still relatively small, and there wasn’t the kind of frenzied competition for housing that later developed with the area’s population boom. Most wealthy home buyers didn’t want to live in Santa Monica, even at the beach; they preferred Beverly Hills or Malibu. Property values around the Mayer house kept its value low, and because its upkeep had been neglected, it was something of a white elephant, a “fixer” in today’s real-estate parlance. After he bought the house, Peter spent twenty-two thousand dollars to repair the plumbing alone.

The house gave the Lawfords the kind of privacy they could never have had in Beverly Hills, where their house would have been one of the stops on the bus tours of movie stars’ homes. Most of the houses like Peter’s that fronted on the ocean along the Pacific Coast Highway looked modest from the street; it was only once one was inside that their lavishness became apparent. Peter’s neighbors were doctors, lawyers, and other professional people with enough income to afford big houses in Santa Monica, but without the wherewithal to live in the “better” neighborhoods of Malibu and Beverly Hills. Although Pat did have that kind of money, Peter was more comfortable here — because the house was right next to State Beach, where he could surf and play volleyball with his friends.

Peter made the mortgage payment every month, but Pat paid for most of the renovations. (In the late fifties General Electric installed a completely new kitchen in exchange for a commercial endorsement from Peter.) Within a few years the house was both palatial and comfortable, both elegant and lived-in. Pat installed a playground and built a playhouse for the children and furnished the bedrooms in art deco and the den with cozy overstuffed sofas. The living room served as a sprawling entertainment center.

Bonnie Williams, a secretary to Joe Kennedy who later worked for Peter, recalled the house as “typically Kennedy. Kennedy homes are all big and beautifully done, but comfortable. Peter loved it. He spent a lot of time in that large formal living room, and I can just see him on the couch with his feet up, talking on the telephone.”

After the November election, Jack Kennedy came to spend a few days with Peter and Pat in their new home and recover from the rigors of the campaign. As he sat on the patio at twilight, the ocean waves lapping gently at the shore just yards away, Jack spoke to Peter about what an exhilarating experience it had been to travel from state to state in support of various Democratic candidates and how encouraged he had been by the public’s reaction to him.

“You have no idea, Peter,” he said, “how nice it is to hear people say, ‘There goes John Kennedy.’ They don’t say, ‘There goes Peter Lawford’s brother-in-law’ anymore. I’m really getting an identity of my own.”

WHILE PETER FELT ALIENATED from the Kennedy family, Pat had problems of her own with Peter’s close network of friends. Dolores Naar felt that “it was tough for Pat, having Peter’s buddies running through her living room all the time with their surfboards, yelling, ‘Surfs up!’ Peter was very close to these men. Every Saturday and Sunday he was out on the beach.

“Joe and Peter and the rest of the guys had their own little dialogues going on. I used to go with Joe when we first got married, but after a while I stopped because I realized it was just a gang of guys who wanted to be together. Pat didn’t participate; she’d just do whatever she wanted to do.”

Peter Sabiston thought that Peter’s reluctance to “cut the cord” with his bachelorhood friends stemmed from his unfulfilling relationship with his wife. “He would always try to include some friends, whether it was me or Joe Naar or Dick Livingston, in whatever he did, because he didn’t have much fun with Pat in a one-on-one situation.” Pat disliked Peter’s beach friends, and they, for the most part, reciprocated her ill will. They saw her as cold, aloof, difficult to get close to. Dolores Naar’s recollection of her first exposure to Pat was fairly typical. On her first date with Joe he took her to Peter’s house — but she didn’t know that’s where they were going. Just before they arrived, Joe told her who his friend was and warned her, “He and his wife will probably ignore you, but it doesn’t mean anything.”

Dolores braced herself, but she found Peter charming. “He was in his swim trunks. What a beautiful man, with such a warm smile! But Joe was right about Pat. She was reading the newspaper when I came into the room, and she didn’t even look up at me.” Dolores would become one of only a handful of Peter’s friends who managed to get close to Pat, but even she never fully understood her. “Pat was so complex. She could be the warmest, she could be the most hostile, she could be the most indifferent. And you had to kind of read her. She never sought my advice — she’s not that kind of woman. She’s very private.”

Peter Sabiston never forgot an incident with Pat, one that left a bitter taste in his mouth. “Pat wanted to buy Peter a diving board for his birthday, so she asked me if I knew anyone who could lend her a station wagon so she could go out to the [San Fernando] Valley and pick it up. I borrowed a friend’s car and let her use it. On the way out there, she was involved in an accident. Did about eight hundred dollars’ damage. And she refused to pay for it! She said I should have my friend pay for it. I said, ‘How dare you! What do you mean have my friend pay for it? He was nice enough to lend you the car. The least you can do is return it to him in the same condition it was in when you borrowed it!’ She didn’t see it that way. She simply wouldn’t pay. I almost ended our friendship over it. Peter finally wound up paying for it.”

When Pat did show her warm, friendly, generous side, it was usually to Peter’s Hollywood friends. Still an enthusiastic movie fan, she loved meeting Judy Garland, Jackie Cooper, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Martha Raye, Jimmy Durante, and dozens of other celebrities who were close to Peter. If Pat wanted to meet a movie star or two, all Peter had to do was invite them to dinner. Usually, they accepted.

Several nights a week the Lawfords had a small group for dinner and games — sometimes poker, sometimes charades, sometimes a board game. Usually there was a current-events quiz, something Pat had been brought up with; she and her siblings had been questioned about world events by their father every evening at dinner.

Meals were prepared by the cook, but sometimes Pat or Peter would give it a go. “Pat made one of the all-time great beef stews,” Milton Ebbins recalled. “She’d serve a salad, some crusty French bread, and this terrific stew, and boy, nobody complained. She was a great hostess, too.”

Peter wasn’t a bad cook either, his friends agreed, although he had a maddening habit of making whatever he wanted to eat whether his friends liked the dish or not. On one such occasion, Martha Raye watched him put a plate of food in front of her, then stood up and screamed, “Jesus Christ! Are we having liver and bacon and Brussels sprouts again! Don’t you realize we think it stinks!’

With people she knew and liked, Pat sometimes let her hair down to the point of childishness. “One night, there were eight of us sitting around the dining room table at Pat’s house,” Dolores Naar recalled. “We helped ourselves at the buffet, then sat down at this beautifully set table with wine, and the meal was wonderful. Then for dessert the girl came in with a platter of ginger snaps and something struck Pat funny. She took a bite out of one of the cookies, then she threw it at Peter. Soon we were all throwing these cookies at each other. Pat used to do things like that.”

The one performer Pat was most eager to meet, Frank Sinatra, never accepted an invitation from Peter Lawford. Pat begged her husband to patch up his rift with Frank, but Peter had already made a number of unsuccessful attempts and didn’t want to subject himself to the humiliation of Frank’s cold rejection again. So Pat took matters into her own hands. She was having lunch with Molly Dunne one afternoon, and when Molly mentioned that she had a date with Frank Sinatra that night, Pat’s eyes lit up. “Call him and tell him I want to invite him over for dinner!”

“Call him yourself,” Molly replied. Pat did — and pretended to be Molly in order to get through to him. When he got on the line and found out it was Pat, he was furious. He not only refused her dinner invitation, but shouted at her before hanging up, “Tell Mrs. Dunne that I’m busy tonight!”

Molly did try to intervene between Peter and Sinatra. “Frank would have me in tears because he would refuse to have anything to do with Peter, who was my best friend. I asked him why and you know what he said? ‘Any guy who would stiff a hooker is a real jerk.’”

PETER BECAME CONCERNED about money in the second half of the fifties; he was doing only sporadic TV work, and his finances were tight. It was these worries, ironically, that led him into a serious blunder that probably cost him once and for all the major stardom that had always seemed just one step ahead of him — and the financial independence that would have come along with it.

In 1958 the producer Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli offered Peter the leading role in a series of films he planned to make based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond spy novels. Broccoli thought Peter would be perfect to play the handsome, soigné Englishman with an eye for beautiful women, a love of gadgetry, and a distaste for criminals. But the idea of playing a British spy reminded Peter uncomfortably of all those cloak-and-dagger scripts he had rejected before Dear Phoebe, and the success of the films was by no means guaranteed. Broccoli was not a powerhouse producer; he’d done just seven unmemorable films to that point.

Worse, Broccoli was able to offer Peter only twenty-five thousand dollars per picture and wanted him to commit to the entire Bond series he planned — at least five films. Peter’s minimum asking price at the time was seventy-five thousand, and he didn’t want to take such a severe cut in pay. The five-picture stipulation, Peter said later, would have given him pause at any price. “I thought it would have tied me up too far in the future.”

It seemed like the right decision at the time, but in retrospect it was the worst of Peter’s several professional missteps. When the first Bond film, Dr. No, was released in 1962, it became an enormous boxoffice hit and spawned an endlessly lucrative Bond series that made a legend of Sean Connery, a young Scottish actor with three minor films to his credit. There’s no reason to assume that the picture would not have been as big a hit with Peter in the lead role; and if it had been he would have been in a strong position to renegotiate his contract with Broccoli for far more money and a share of the profits in the subsequent films. Most important, it would have made a superstar of Peter and allowed him to carve out a niche for himself quite distinct from the rising Kennedy phenomenon. It was a missed opportunity that remained one of his great regrets.

At the time, however, Peter’s best course of action appeared to be another television series. In a wry twist, it was MGM that approached him with the idea. Of all the Hollywood studios, Metro had disdained television the longest, but early in 1958 the studio was in deep trouble. At the end of its fiscal year in August 1957, it showed a loss for the first time in its history. Now, MGM looked on television as its salvation, and with good reason: when Peter began work on his series it was the only production on the lot.

Metro’s idea was for Peter to do a small-screen version of their famous series of six Thin Man movies that had starred William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, an urbane couple who solve crimes, bicker wittily, and drink heartily. (In one of the films, Nora enters a bar where Nick has been imbibing for some time. She sits down next to him and asks, “How many has he had?” The bartender replies, “Six.” Without missing a beat Nora says, “Set ’em up.”)

Peter liked the idea, especially when MGM agreed to give him twenty-five percent ownership of the show. The Colgate-Palmolive Company signed up as the sponsor, and statuesque, stylish Phyllis Kirk joined the cast as Nora. John Newland got the nod to direct the first ten episodes.

According to Peter, now 34, the studio wanted him to be a replica of William Powell. “Once I had signed for the part,” he said, “I got a call from makeup. I couldn’t imagine what it was. When I got there they put a homburg hat on me, grayed my hair a bit, added a small mustache, and even suggested I add a little padding to my beltline. They were actually trying to get me up like William Powell!” He balked loudly. “Get Powell if you want!” he shouted at MGM executive Eddie Mannix. Later he said, “I wasn’t about to follow William Powell. I’m not that crazy. Besides, I wanted some identity of my own.”

So did Phyllis Kirk, who made it a point not to watch the Thin Man movies so she wouldn’t pick up any of Myrna Loy’s characteristics. She and Peter were, on and off the screen, never anything but themselves: Peter the light, devil-may-care leading man, Phyllis the sophisticated New Yorker, a former model and stage actress just a tad disdainful of Hollywood. From the beginning, the impression was that they mixed about as well as oil and water, and a number of people believe to this day that he intensely disliked her.

Indeed, Phyllis Kirk was an acquired taste for Peter. They had met in 1950 when Phyllis, just put under contract to MGM, did a few scenes in Please Believe Me. “Peter was the star of this film,” she recalled, “and he was terribly kind to me. He was so gentle and gave me little tips — he was wonderful. I will never forget that first encounter with him, because he was so generous. The best part of Peter was very kind.”

On the Thin Man set, however, Kirk’s reserved demeanor often rubbed Peter the wrong way, and it brought out some unpleasant behavior on his part. Except for Kirk, it was an all-male company, and Peter led the cast and crew in continual razzings of her that sometimes drove her to distraction. Eventually, everyone joined in. Bill Asher was a well-regarded TV director (I Love Lucy) who took over from John Newland, and he remembered that he once needed a frightened reaction shot from Kirk and did “a terrible thing. She was supposed to react to someone coming through the door, and I told her to reach behind her at the same time into a cigarette box. I put a mouse in the box, and everybody knew it except her. She reached back and what a reaction! She let out a scream and got so mad, she was throwing things at us.”9

Peter enjoyed doing wicked send-ups of his costar’s more distinctive characteristics. He would hold a comb across his forehead to mock her signature bangs or walk across the soundstage in the tiny mincing steps she was forced to take in her stylish but confining midcalf-length skirts. His tauntings rarely let up. During an interview with a TV Guide reporter, Phyllis mentioned that her birthday was coming up soon and said, “I’ll be twenty-eight.” Peter glanced at her and said, “Around the waist you’ll be twenty-eight.”

Whenever the script called for Peter to do a scene holding Asta, the couple’s famous terrier, Kirk recalled that “he would, on the fourth word of the scene, hand me this forty-five-pound mass of muscle and sinew and bone and I would have to hold this monster throughout the scene. Like a trouper, I would do the whole scene holding this dog.”

She was a good sport about all this and she harbored no ill will. “It was like having a group of pesky brothers who were always trying to upset my dignity a little bit. I was probably terribly proper in their view. I was also somewhat separated, in the sense that I did not party and my personal life was my personal life. That used to drive Peter crazy. He couldn’t understand anyone who had this sort of other life that didn’t have to do with everything that was going on in Hollywood.”

The main reason many people feel that Peter disliked Phyllis was a curious conversation he had with John Newland a few episodes into the series. Newland was directing Peter in a bedroom scene with Phyllis, and he asked them to kiss. Afterward Peter approached Newland and said, “I’m not going to do this. I don’t want to kiss Phyllis. I like her, but I don’t want to do that. And I don’t have to.”

Newland looked at him blankly. “What are you talking about, Peter?”

“My contract says that I don’t have to get involved in any kind of overt sexual level in this show.”

Newland replied, “Well, Jesus, okay,” and went to talk to one of the producers. “Peter tells me that he has a clause in his contract that he not be required to kiss and touch Phyllis Kirk,” Newland told the man. “Now, how can I do the show like that?”

“Oh, you know Peter,” the producer replied. “Just do the best you can.”

Newland asked if there really was such a clause in the contract. There wasn’t. But rather than go back to Peter and confront him about it, Newland tried to choreograph the ten episodes he directed so there would be no physical contact between Peter and Phyllis.

Why did Peter make such a strange demand, that actors playing man and wife never kiss each other during a series? Phyllis Kirk believed the only explanation was that Peter had a very bizarre sense of humor: “Depending on what day of the week it was and what time of day, Peter was apt to say anything.” It could also have been that Peter overreacted in a desire to avoid doing anything in front of millions of television viewers that would embarrass his wife or her family in an era of strict morality codes. Paul Wurtzel recalled that “we had one scene where they had to be in bed together, discussing something. Because of the network censor we had to reshoot it with them in separate beds.”

Later in the run of the series, the code restrictions were loosened, and Peter and Phyllis kissed whenever it seemed appropriate. Phyllis recently viewed a Thin Man episode that “showed me and Peter sitting on the same bed, kissing. Now, on television in those days you did not do passionate, slobbering, current-day kisses. But it was certainly a kiss and it didn’t look to me as though either one of us abhorred what we were doing.”

THE TROUBLESOME CHEMISTRY between the two stars, it developed, was only one of the problems that plagued The Thin Man once it debuted over NBC on Friday, September 20, 1957, in the nine- thirty P.M. time slot. Critical reaction was scathing. Jack O’Brien’s comments in the New York Journal American were typical. Under the headline “A Fat Chance for Thin Man,” O’Brien complained that “everyone connected with the TV version of The Thin Man seemed to have absolutely no notion what its old effervescent movie joke was about. Its writing was dogged and dull, the performance of Phyllis Kirk ditto, the direction sluggish, the mood leaden and dense. Peter Lawford, a practiced and recognized professional at light comedy, enjoyed neither lightness nor comedy in his script this time, for whatever the high proficiency of even so effective a light romantic comedian as Lawford, the play still is the thing, and this thing was not a play, not a comedy, nor even a farce, except for being a joke on its own self. It will have to improve.”

Peter had complained from the beginning that the show didn’t have enough comic elements. “I screamed for comedy,” he said, “but they insisted on making mystery the most important thing. Then, the notices came out pointing up that we were short on whimsy.” Even when comedy was added, however, the scripts often left a lot to be desired. “Peter and I were dreadful in script conferences,” Phyllis Kirk recalled. “We’d sit with the writers and be terribly insulting. My feeling was — it can be as cute as they want it to be, but if it ain’t actable, fellas, forget it.”

Advice started to come in on how to improve the show, in one instance from no less an authority than William Powell himself. Peter told the story of asking Powell what he thought of the series: “Mr. Powell’s theory — and I agree with it wholeheartedly — is that what’s lacking in the Thin Man as I play him is his quality of tipsiness. The original character was half stiff all the time. He went through life on a pink cloud and Powell played him that way. But we’re limited because of TV. In the premier episode, I mixed martinis and we got over four hundred letters, mostly from the South, some demanding that we drink milk! Can you see me mixing a chocolate milk?”

If Peter was compelled not to tipple on the show, he felt no such constraints offscreen. Paul Wurtzel recalled that “every day when we’d break for lunch, Bill Asher and I would go up to his dressing room and we’d call the commissary and they’d bring whatever you wanted. We’d drink gin and Dubonnet, straight. Nobody would get smashed, but you’d have a couple of cocktails and eat lunch and you’d go back to the set and you could hardly move.”

John Newland and Don Weis, who also directed some episodes, had found themselves unable to join the lunchtime drinkers. “I went once,” Newland says, “and never went again. I never drank during lunch because it made me too slow. Peter drank a lot. And what amazed me about him was that he could drink three or four martinis and later not miss a mark or a beat. It never affected one moment of any shoot on any day.”

There was a lot of pressure on Peter filming The Thin Man. The production schedule was grueling — two shows every eight days with only Sundays off — and workdays were so long Peter complained that “I meet myself coming home every night.” He was worried about the scripts and worried about the ratings, which were mediocre despite weak competition. Still, he always kept an eye out for the girls. He often asked Paul Wurtzel, “You know any dames? Let’s get some dames.” Wurtzel told him he didn’t know any dames — “My life and the studio, I kept them separated” — but tried to help Peter round somebody up. “Here’s Peter Lawford, the great romantic guy who can get any woman he wants, and one night I sit there for an hour trying to figure out who might know some hookers for him.”

By now, Peter was convinced that the problem with The Thin Man was a lack of on-screen chemistry between him and his costar. Before the second season began, he spoke to an executive of Colgate- Palmolive: he wanted to replace Phyllis Kirk with the British actress Hazel Court, whom he thought more sensuous than Phyllis. “Everybody else thought Phyllis was sensational on the show,” Milton Ebbins recalled. “She got a lot more publicity than Peter ever did, and the sponsor told Peter that without Phyllis there’d be no show. So he had no choice. He backed off.”

A number of attempts were made to save The Thin Man. The show had already used three talented directors when its desperate producer, Sam Marx, suggested that George Cukor try his hand at a few episodes. Cukor, intrigued by a medium he’d never worked in, was interested. “George came to help us and he was marvelous as always,” Phyllis recalled. “He was such a master at getting people to loosen up and extend themselves, and that’s what that was all about — just to get us out of a kind of rut.”

Paul Wurtzel recalled that “George did try to help. He never directed a whole episode, though, only a couple of shots. He said, ‘I don’t know how to help this show.’”

There was the rub — The Thin Man was beyond help. It faced much stiffer competition its second year when 77 Sunset Strip was scheduled against it on ABC and became not only a hit series but a pop trendsetter. When Colgate-Palmolive withdrew its sponsorship at the end of the second season, NBC canceled the show.

Despite the indignities she was subjected to on the set, despite everything, Phyllis Kirk harbored no regrets. Often approached by fans who remember the show fondly, she recalled that “I had a wonderful time doing The Thin Man. Peter was a marvelously generous actor. He taught me a lot; he never hogged a scene. We had a lot of fun doing that series. We had bad days, too. Peter could be cranky, even bitchy. So could I. There were days when we would snarl at each other, like a brother and sister — which, incidentally, was always how I viewed our relationship. I was very fond of him.”

Peter was galled by his second failure in what many still considered a third-rate medium (so called, according to Ernie Kovacs, “because it is neither rare nor well done”), but he had little time to be depressed. His movie career was about to be revived at an unlikely studio, MGM, and by an unlikely benefactor — Frank Sinatra.

9 PhylIis Kirk wasn’t alone as the victim of practical jokes. At a wrap party at the end of The Thin Man’s first season, everyone exchanged presents. When Peter opened his, he found a chicken claw inside the box. “It was cruel to make fun of his bad hand like that, but he laughed harder than anyone,” assistant director Paul Wurtzel recalled. “He could take it as well as dish it out.”