TWENTY

In the early fall of 1959, Milt Ebbins was having dinner with Peter and Pat in their Santa Monica house. It had been a pleasant evening, good food and wine mixed with conversation about show business and politics while the strains of Sarah Vaughan’s “Broken-Hearted Melody” lilted from the stereo console. Ebbins noticed that Peter was drinking a little more than usual, but he seemed to be okay.

As Ebbins remembered it, “Everything was fine at first. Then, for no apparent reason, Peter turned on Pat. His whole face changed, his lip curled, he started to abuse her verbally. It was terrible to see. She sat there and took it for a few moments; then she just got up, said ‘Good night,’ and went upstairs. I didn’t know what to say. Peter could be like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — especially when he was drinking.”

The scene wasn’t an isolated one. While Peter’s career continued on an upswing, his home life deteriorated. More and more he and Pat found it difficult to be together. They spent lengthy periods apart, she in Hyannis Port with the children, he at home in Santa Monica. On the rare occasions when Pat was home, she and Peter surrounded themselves with friends. On most weeknights and every weekend the house was overrun with Peter’s beach buddies, Pat’s political associates, Peter and Pat’s show business pals. A house full of company would keep the Lawfords in a genial mood, but even when they were in a good frame of mind, according to Peter Sabiston, “there was very little affection between the two of them. No hand holding or embracing or anything like that.” Nor were the Lawfords usually demonstrative in a negative way, but on occasion they would slip. “There was some bickering,” Sabiston recalled. “They both had sharp tongues.”

Dolores Naar added, “Because we were so close to them, we could see the hostility when she talked to him, we could hear the little snide remarks, the put-downs.”

A general assumption about Peter and Pat’s marital problems is that they were created solely by his drinking and philandering. Their close friends knew that the situation was more complex. Joe Naar observed that “Pat made Peter feel like a second-class citizen,” and Dolores Naar added, “He just didn’t fit in with the political side of her. He was trying to find a place, trying to be needed and important. But Pat always kind of put him down. So he would see other women. And that’s why things started to fall apart. But I’m not sure what came first. Maybe Pat treated him that way because he was seeing other women.”

It was truly a vicious circle. Pat in love with Peter but caught up in the whirlwind of her obsessively political family; Peter in love with Pat but feeling emasculated in the presence of her powerful brothers and seeking reassurance from other women; Pat angered by Peter’s womanizing, pulling herself farther away from him and putting him down, which made him feel even less worthy.

For that reason and others, Peter’s sex life with Pat was more unsatisfactory than ever for him. Peter told Jackie Cooper’s wife, Barbara, that “after Pat and I have sex, if I want to talk about it the next morning, she’ll have none of it. It’s over, done with, that was her job and she’d done it.”

“There was reason for Peter to philander,” Joe Naar thought. “Pat was very manipulative. I think she provoked things. I don’t know if she fell out of love with Peter or if she thought she was too good for him or what. But it was clear that she provoked the incidents of infidelity and he reacted to the provocations in the best way he could to keep his self-respect and dignity.”

Pat alternated between sanguinity and anger about Peter’s affairs. She knew about his penchant for prostitutes. According to Milt Ebbins, “Peter was the whore’s delight. Every time we traveled, every place we went, there were all these hookers. It was cheaper for him to do that. You have to wine and dine girls. Peter never wanted to get involved. It was easier to have call girls than to try and romance somebody. So he always liked hookers. They were high-class hookers, of course, not girls off the street.”

Sometimes, Peter did “get involved” — he had a brief fling with Kim Novak in the late fifties and for a time kept a mistress in New York. If Pat found out about a particular dalliance, she would sometimes confront Peter angrily, but more often she simply let him know very coolly that she was onto him. She took the latter course one evening when Peter came home from filming. Pat fixed him a cocktail, and as she handed him the drink she said evenly, “You’ll have to get rid of that girl in New York.” Peter looked at her slack-jawed and she went calmly about her business.

It was around this time that Peter began to suspect Pat of having an affair, and he paid a visit to Fred Otash, the former LAPD vice squad officer who had killed the Confidential magazine story about Peter’s penchant for prostitutes and who was now a private detective. “Peter came to me one day in 1959,” Otash recalled, “and asked if I had anything that he could use to make secret recordings. I gave him a Magnet-O-Phone and showed him how to use it.”

Peter kept the eavesdropping device for over a month and told Milt Ebbins he thought Pat was “seeing other guys.” Ebbins recalled Peter telling him that he had “picked up the phone one time and heard her talking to one of them, telling him what she’d like to be doing to him and all that. But she made no bones about it. It was no big secret. She didn’t say she was going to visit an aunt. By that time the marriage was in trouble, so Peter knew what was happening.” Peter and Pat never seriously considered divorce at this time, for a variety of reasons, her Catholicism chief among them. A divorce not only would have damaged Pat’s position in the church, but could have affected her brother’s hopes of becoming the first Catholic president of the United States. And there were, of course, the children.

Christopher was now four, Sydney three, and Victoria one, but Peter’s talent for fathering had not improved with time. “Peter didn’t know how to treat his children,” Dolores Naar said. “When they would come down from their naps, they would come up to him and kiss him and he’d rub their backs as he sat in his lounge chair out by the pool and give them a kiss. But that was it. I never saw them sit on his lap; I never saw him running or playing with them.”

Peter’s upbringing had left him emotionally ill-equipped for parenting, and he was incapable of being a “pal” to his son. More often than not, it was his friends who did fatherly things with Christopher; Dick Martin, the comedian, recalls that he, not Peter, taught the boy how to swim in the Lawfords’ Olympic-size swimming pool. And it was Peter’s old Freed Unit friend Leonard Gershe who would regale Christopher with stories he’d make up on the spot.

Both Peter and Pat had grown up in households in which children were raised primarily by governesses, and Pat shared Peter’s hands-off attitude toward the children. They had a nanny who took care of them; the children had their time with their mother and their father for an hour or so in the evening, and then it was up to bed. “To tuck the children into bed meant nothing to Pat,” Dolores Naar observed. “To be there when they took their naps meant nothing; she could go on a six-week trip around the world and that meant nothing. That’s how she grew up. Her parents traveled a lot.”

When she was with her children, Pat sometimes seemed short on patience with them. Leonard Gershe recalled that “when the nannies weren’t around and Pat had to deal with the kids herself, she’d push the clocks ahead an hour so they’d go to bed an hour early. She couldn’t take them any more than that.”

For his part, Peter did try to be a good father, Dolores Naar believed. “Peter was always very gentle with his children. They knew that he wasn’t the kind of dad that they could jump on his back or whatever. It was all very restrained. He would stroke their back or pet their hair. He had a softness and a warmth with the children. You knew that he really loved them, but he didn’t know what to do with them.”

PETER DIDN’T SEE MUCH of his children in any event between the summers of 1959 and 1960. In quick succession, he’d made Never So Few and Ocean’s 11 — and his next movie, offered to him independently of Frank Sinatra, would take him to Israel, eight thousand miles from home, and put him under the direction of the formidably Teutonic filmmaker Otto Preminger.

Preminger was one of Hollywood’s most flamboyant producer- directors, with Laura, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Anatomy of a Murder to his credit. His new film was the movie version of Leon Uris’s best-seller about the genesis of the Jewish homeland, Exodus, and Peter was to be part of an impressive all-star cast that included Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Sal Mineo, Ralph Richardson, and Lee J. Cobb. It was a motion picture “event,” and Peter didn’t want to do it.

“I couldn’t get Peter to sign the contracts for Exodus,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “He’d agreed verbally to do the picture, and Preminger kept asking me for the contracts back. He’d call me and say, ‘Milt, vere are ze contracts? I’ve got to have ze contracts!’”

When Ebbins asked Peter why he was so reluctant, he replied that he didn’t want to go on location to Israel, a new country where even the best hotels offered few amenities. Worse, he had heard that it was forbidden to light a match on Saturday. A heavy smoker, Peter shuddered at the thought.

His manager reminded Peter that he had already told Preminger he would do the picture, and he couldn’t back down. He persuaded Peter to sign the top pages of each of the four copies of the contract. After he initialed the inside clauses on the first contract, he refused to do so again on the other three. Ebbins had to do it for him.

Peter was wary, too, of Preminger, an autocratic taskmaster often referred to as “der Führer.” He asked his friend David Niven, who had worked with Preminger, for advice on how to handle him. Over lunch at Romanoffs, Niven spelled out his formula for a successful working relationship with Otto: “There is only one way to handle Preminger. If you get into an argument with him, walk up to him, put your face right up against his — nose to nose — and scream, ‘Fuck you, Otto!’ And you’ll win. But remember, it’s gotta be nose to nose. Stand right in his face and yell as loud as you can, ‘Fuck you, Otto!’ Then you’ll have no problems with him.”

Peter never had to use Niven’s advice; he and Preminger got along well. The director, in fact, seems to have been a pussycat when it came to Peter. When Preminger chartered an airplane to transport the cast and crew from one location to another, Peter sat in the first- class section with his erstwhile best man, Bob Neal, who had agreed to accompany him when Ebbins came down with the flu. Neal, who by now had quite a reputation as a fun-loving millionaire, sat in the last remaining first-class seat while Preminger, who had paid for the plane, sat in the tail section.

Finally the director came up front and said to Peter, “Vy do you bring zis playboy vit chou?” In his usual flip manner, Peter responded, “For laughs, Otto. You wouldn’t know.” Preminger spent the rest of the flight in the rear of the plane.

Although Preminger didn’t live up to Peter’s fearful expectations, the location shooting did. Most of Peter’s scenes were filmed on Cyprus, and his hotel room featured a bare light bulb hanging by a cord from the ceiling and enormous black bugs in the closet. But the filming of Exodus was uneventful. Peter played an English officer he described as “a real stinker. He’s anti-Semitic and does a lot to keep the Jews from getting into Israel.” The rare opportunity to play a heavy did have its appeal for Peter despite the thankless nature of the role.

The film racked up an impressive seven million dollars in box-office grosses and three Oscar nominations (Ernest Gold’s sweeping musical score won). But it was panned by most critics. Although some of the performances were singled out for praise (notably, Sal Mineo’s), Ronald Bergan’s comments about the film were typical. He called Dalton Trumbo’s script “simplistic” and “all-things-to-all-men” and thought the movie contained “little passion, depth or sweep. What it had were stereotypes, sanctimony and schmaltz.”

And it was long. The stand-up comic Mort Sahl provided what has remained the last word on Exodus at an industry screening in the fall of 1960. Three hours into the film, Sahl stood up, turned to Preminger, and pleaded, “Otto, let my people go!”

Peter returned to Los Angeles in late June 1960. He had had a clause inserted in his contract that guaranteed he would be able to return to the United States by July 1 — in time for the Democratic National Convention. He wanted to make sure to be on hand when, if luck continued to smile, John F. Kennedy would be nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president.