TWENTY-FOUR

From her well-worn Queen Anne wingback chair, drinking Southern Comfort and stroking her tomcat, Amber, Lady Lawford could look around the living room of her one-bedroom cottage in West Los Angeles in 1961 and see her life pass before her. At seventy-eight, she had little more than her memories, and she surrounded herself with reminders of grander times that lined the walls and covered most available surfaces. There were autographed pictures of the king and queen of Belgium, portraits of the Duke of Windsor, Charles de Gaulle, and Benito Mussolini, glass-negative prints of her parents and grandparents, and color movie magazine covers with her son’s handsome face smiling out from them.

A glass case lined with blue velvet housed Sir Sydney’s medals and commendations, and his rifle and sword hung on the wall. A faded Christmas card from King George and Queen Mary held a place of honor on a side table.

Like a sleeping giant, May had been relatively quiet since Peter’s wedding. He had set her up in a small house on Kelton Avenue in West Los Angeles, paid her rent, and given her one hundred fifty dollars a month to supplement the fifty-two-dollar monthly check she received from Sir Sydney’s pension. Once again in “reduced circumstances,” May lost none of the grandness and hauteur she had honed over the years. She called her tiny, cluttered living room “my drawing room.” She served visitors four o’clock tea, with finger sandwiches and scones, on a silver tray that was, she said, a gift from King George. She never abandoned her aristocratic airs and still insisted on being called Lady Lawford. “I used to take her to lunch,” Milt Ebbins recalled, “and she was the ultimate lady. Grand manners. She used to eat at Clifton’s in Century City all the time. They called her Lady Lawford. In a cafeteria! She was a grand lady.”

She was also a lonely and frustrated one. She had little to do, her creative talents stifled, her wit with no outlet, her financial situation barely tenable. She was getting drunk now more and more frequently. Peter hated to be around her when she was drinking, reminded as he was of his childhood traumas and the time at the Sunset Boulevard house when he’d awakened in the middle of the night and found his mother lying spread-eagled on the hallway floor, passed out.

May had begun neurotically to fixate on herself, her problems, her physical ailments. She had suffered from arthritis since girlhood, and in the mid-1950s it had taken a severe turn for the worse. Her doctor told her that her repeated attacks were “more in my head than anywhere else” and suggested that May become more active. “Do something you like doing, and maybe it will get better,” he said. “You need to do something besides just stay home and stroke the cat.”

She also needed extra money; two hundred dollars a month was barely subsistence for her. And so Lady Lawford decided, in her mid-seventies, to make a serious attempt at an acting career. “I will not merely sit and wait for those pearly gates to open,” she declared by way of explanation. May had played a few small film roles at MGM during the previous decade, calling herself either Lady May Lawford or Mary Somerville, but she had never thought of acting as a potential career. Now, she professed, she did.

She signed on with the Virginia Doak agency, then prepared a portfolio of photographs of herself in a variety of guises — a stern Mrs. Danvers-like housekeeper, a formidable businesswoman, an elegant dowager, a frightened, sad old woman. Her résumé noted that she could ride Western and English saddles, spoke French, German, and some Hindustani, could drive a team of four horses, and was a crack shot.

When Peter got wind of her plans, he was not happy. “Peter put both feet down against it,” May said. “He’s such a damned nuisance. It’s really none of his business.” She went ahead, and with some success. She was, as one of Peter’s friends noted, “right out of Central Casting.” She was a perfect “type,” but she put a few restrictions on the roles she would accept. “I won’t play Peter’s mother,” she said, “and I won’t play society matrons. The best thing for me to do is concentrate on a bottle of gin and a red nose — that’s the kind of role I prefer.” Instead, she got a television role as Roddy McDowall’s mother in a Matinee Theatre production and a bit part on the series Climax! When the latter, her first assignment, was aired she watched it alone in her living room with her cat. She didn’t know, she said, whether her son had tuned in to watch her performance.

One of May’s jobs in 1957 was a small part on The Thin Man, an assignment Peter did not want her to have. But the show’s sponsors convinced him that it would be a strong publicity angle for the show and would soften some of the negative press that May’s outspoken comments about his opposition to her acting career had created. Indeed, shortly before May’s Thin Man episode aired, TV Guide ran an article entitled “A New Career at Sixty” (May always lied about her age) in which the author noted Peter’s reservations about his mother’s career plans and added, “Apparently all now is friendly between the two, inasmuch as Lawford hired her for The Thin Man.”

“I don’t want to cash in on Peter’s name,” May told the reporter. “True, here I’m known as Peter Lawford’s mother, but in England, Peter is known as Lady Lawford’s little boy.” She told another journalist that she hoped to continue working steadily. Always one to preserve appearances, however, she added quickly, “I hope I don’t take a part away from some actress who needs the money.”

May’s hopes of a lucrative new career were soon dissipated. There weren’t many jobs for a woman her age, and there was fierce competition from far more established actresses for the roles that were available. But May refused to accept that reality. When acting jobs became scarce, she blamed the great bogeyman in her life — the Kennedys. “I used to get one or two small parts in American TV,” she told a British reporter, “but since Peter married into ‘America’s Royal Family’ there haven’t been any.”

May again and again complained that Peter, the Kennedys, and the Rat Pack were actively preventing her from winning roles, that they “fixed it up so that no agent offers me anything.” In her autobiography, she tells an elaborate story, undated, of going to a party while Sir Sydney, ill with influenza, stayed home. During the evening she was approached by “some little Jew, an agent,” who introduced her to a producer. The man loved May’s presence, and her pronunciation of “Worcestershire sauce,” and he offered to give her “a test.”

The next day, she went to MGM, where the producer “raved over my reading and over my posture and regal carriage.” He asked May if she objected to doing television commercials, and when she said she didn’t he offered her a contract at one hundred dollars a week for an “indefinite” period.

“Well,” May said, “that will buy the cats some liver. Where do I sign?”

No sooner had she said this, May claimed, than the studio door opened and Pat Lawford entered. She was “a bit aghast” when she recognized May, and a few minutes later she and the producer went into another room. When they emerged, the man told May he was sorry that things couldn’t be arranged after all: “The studio limousine will await you out front to drive you home.”

There are a number of problems with this story. Sir Sydney died in February 1953, and Peter did not marry Pat Kennedy until April 1954. (He didn’t even begin to court her until November 1953.) That Pat Kennedy would walk into an MGM audition before she married Peter (or at any time for that matter) is highly unlikely. And the question must be asked — why would Pat object to Lady Lawford making some extra money doing commercials? She saw no shame in product endorsement — she, Peter, five-year-old Christopher, and four-year-old Sydney would soon appear in a print ad for Kodak cameras.

What really happened — or whether anything happened at all — is difficult to tell. In her later years, May began to fabricate stories that justified her growing hatred of the Kennedy family; she blamed them for everything wrong with her life. She harangued anyone who would listen on the subject of the Kennedys’ heritage, their breeding, and their manners. Most of all, she complained bitterly about their treatment of her. She ranted that she had discovered a silver tray “handed down in my family from Queen Anne” that she had given Peter and Pat as a wedding present “leaning against the wall on the dirty floor of Peter’s garage.” She never got to see her grandchildren, she claimed; she wasn’t invited to christenings, and as the children grew older they were never brought to visit her. “Pat says it’s too far for them to come — even though they’re always going off to the East Coast and overseas. Pat rings me up occasionally and asks me over to see the children, but when I get there she runs away to telephone or write letters. My grandchildren don’t know me very well. When I told Sydney that I was her grandmother, she replied, ‘Oh, no, you’re not. My real grandmother is in Boston.’”

May’s antipathy toward the Kennedys reached a crescendo during the 1960 presidential campaign. Because of her acid tongue and ill- disguised disdain for them, the family wasn’t about to allow her access to any forums in which to spout off and hurt Jack’s chances of winning. When May asked her daughter-in-law to get her a ticket to one of Jack’s fund-raisers, Pat allegedly replied, “If I can find someone to let you sit at their table.”

“I didn’t think it would be much fun sitting alone,” May later said, “so I didn’t go. I should have though, it would have forestalled endless calls asking why I wasn’t there.” A reporter from the Times of London asked her why she never appeared at Kennedy functions. She replied that she didn’t know, except that the Kennedy family “is not too hot on etiquette or protocol.” An hour later, the reporter called May back and apologized: he had checked with the Kennedys and was told that she had been “bedridden for years.”

May didn’t cause any trouble during the election. Privately she stewed, she seethed, she threatened to rent an elephant and ride it down Wilshire Boulevard with a banner across its hide reading “Vote for Nixon.”10 Publicly, however, May remained silent — until December 12, 1960. On that day, she took a job at the Tibor Designers jewelry shop in Beverly Hills, and someone alerted the press to the news. The next day, headlines around the country read, “Lawford’s Mother Has $50-a-Week Job.”

“I find it very difficult to live on what I have,” May told the wire service reporters, finally honest about her personal situation. “Now that I’m an old lady I’ve accepted an offer to work for Mr. Tibor’s jewelry establishment. Unfortunately, Mr. Tibor has no first name. But he’s Hungarian. He sells bracelets and things for as much as four thousand dollars. And I get five percent of all my sales.”

She intimated that her son and in-laws had neglected to care for her properly, and she complained anew that she had lost acting roles because of them. “The Kennedy people and I do not see eye-to-eye about anything. They’re Irish — and ever since we English sent the Black and Tans over and beat the bejabbers out of them, the Irish have despised us.” Then she delivered the coup de grace: “If I had been an American citizen during the election I would have voted for Richard Nixon.”

One week after she took the job at Mr. Tibor’s, May was once again unemployed — and once again spoke out, hinting darkly to reporters that sinister forces were at work. “There is something behind all this,” she told the writer Pete Hamill. “And I mean to find out what it is. The atmosphere at the store Friday was so cold I needed wool socks. Mr. Tibor told me, ‘This political thing is affecting my business. I can’t afford to be involved.’ He told me he was losing business because of my differences with the Kennedys.”

May suggested that her forced departure from Mr. Tibor’s was part of a larger conspiracy against her. “I was supposed to do a local television show, but someone of political power swooped down and botched the thing. Also, this week someone called an ambulance, a police car, and heavens knows what-all to my home. One morning, I was lying in bed when a man crashed through a screen window. I sat up and shouted, ‘Who the hell are you?’ He said they’d had a report that I had died of a heart attack, and then he left.”

Peter, in the midst of planning the inaugural gala, was mortified by May’s outbursts, and so were the Kennedys. Joe Kennedy telephoned Peter and barked, “You’ve got to find some way to shut down your mother.”

“She’s my mother, Mr. Kennedy. I can’t kill the woman.”

“No,” Joe replied. “But I can.” He then told Peter, “Slip her some cash. Pay her off. She’ll quiet down. If you don’t, I will.”

“Joe Kennedy plainly didn’t know my mother,” Peter later said. “No amount of money in the world would have bought her silence.” When a friend of Peter’s told him around this time that he had run into May, Peter muttered, “Was she floating facedown or faceup?” But the attempt to silence May, when it came, was far more civilized than that. She received a call from a man asking her to meet him in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel for a “business interview.” When she did, she claimed, he offered her a thousand dollars a month, a car, three maids, and ten percent of his book publishing business if she would agree to live permanently in Cannes. “I stalled and asked a friend to investigate,” May said. The friend’s finding: “The Kennedys want you out of their hair.”

Milt Ebbins confirmed that May was urged to leave the country, but added that, as usual, she grossly exaggerated the circumstances. “Somebody might have said to her, ‘May, your arthritis is bad, why don’t you go and live in Cannes? It’s warmer there.’ And they probably offered to take care of her expenses. That’s all.”

In any event, May refused to leave the United States, and she escalated her diatribes against the Kennedys. A few months later she appeared on the LA talk show of the right-wing commentator Paul Coates and reiterated her disagreements with the President’s family. “The night I went on the Paul Coates program,” May later said, “I was kept awake by prowlers till I opened my window and told them to go or I would come down and beat them up — and remember I was British and afraid of nothing! In the morning when I went down to get breakfast and water my flowers I found the water hose cut to pieces, mud thrown on the house, and several pots of flowers destroyed. My small black cat was missing. I am helpless in the face of such treatment.”

May lashed back in the only way she knew how — with her tongue and her quill. She threatened to write a book about Peter and the Kennedys, in which she would publish pictures of Peter, “who fancied himself a girl,” dressed in female attire. She began to write the book, and a few months later she told friends that Peter had hired men who broke into her house and stole the manuscript and photographs. Verbally, she continued to express doubt to everyone within earshot about Peter’s sexual inclinations.

She wrote vicious notes to Peter about the Kennedys. She sent him a May 20, 1961, press clipping from the Irish Times about two cousins of President Kennedy’s who had met America’s ambassador to Ireland, E. G. Stockdale, when he visited New Ross. She typed above it, “Rumor has it that these ladies were found living on a dirt floor in the most primitive aboriginal Irish condition. . . . I always knew the Kennedys were bogtrotters, but never dreamt they were as low on the social scale as these Irish cousins suggest! I understand they have frothy brogues which they spit out between their false teeth!”

Drinking, angry, she fired off “To Whom It May Concern” letters to columnists, reporters, politicians, and movie-industry people berating Peter and the Kennedys for “giving money to dirty, filthy niggers” while she was without enough food to eat. She charged that her telephone had been tapped, that the Kennedys were keeping her a virtual prisoner, and that her life was in danger.

She told Hedda Hopper, in an interview the gossip columnist never published, that she had been having some “trying” experiences. She didn’t know who was behind them, but she hinted it might have been Sinatra’s “hoodlums.” Ambulances had been sent to her door, she said, and one medic told her that she’d been reported dead. She had received threatening phone calls in the middle of the night, May concluded, telling her “We are coming over to cut your throat.”

How much of this was fact and how much the ravings of an embittered, alcoholic woman? It’s certainly possible that any number of people might have wanted to suppress Lady Lawfords more vengeful impulses by stealing an inflammatory manuscript, or even to harass and intimidate her until she agreed to leave the country. But the credibility of many of her charges is made suspect in light of the increasingly fanciful scenarios she had begun to create.

“She was saying such crazy things after a while,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “She said the Kennedys abducted her and took her to a motel, where she was beaten and injected with drugs.” Late one night Ebbins was jarred awake by the shrill jangle of his telephone. It was May. “They’re on my lawn, Milt,” she shouted, extremely agitated, “and I’ve got a shotgun! So help me God I’m gonna kill them!” Ebbins sat bolt upright in his bed. “Who’s on your lawn, May?” “Frank! And Sammy! And Dean! And if they come in here and try to hurt me I’m gonna kill them! I killed people in India and I’m gonna shoot all three of them!”

“May, please, calm down,” Ebbins pleaded. “Don’t do anything until I get there.”

He dressed quickly and drove over to May’s. There was no one on the front lawn. He looked around the grounds and saw nothing out of the ordinary. When he knocked on May’s door, she wouldn’t open it. He soothingly told her that no one else was there. “Are you sure?” May asked him.

“Yes, May. It’s only me. Open the door.”

After she let Ebbins into her living room, May stood in front of him, stock-still, holding a twenty-two-caliber pistol in her hand. “If they come in here,” she said, “I’m gonna shoot them. My husband gave me this and I know how to use it.”

Ebbins tried to calm her. “May, relax. There’s nobody there.” “They must have gone, but they were there.”

“I believe you, May. Give me the gun, okay?”

“Why?” She peered at him suspiciously.

“Just let me look at it.”

Warily, she handed Milt the gun and he uncocked it. There were no bullets, there was no firing pin. He handed the firearm back to May.

“She wasn’t insane,” Ebbins concluded. “She was an alcoholic and I think it just burned a hole in her brain. Don’t forget, here’s a woman who lived the good life. She had money, she hobnobbed with royalty. She had been a creative woman who had written and acted. Then she finds herself without a husband, on the dole, unable to work, her son and daughter-in-law wanting nothing to do with her. It all combined to send her over the edge.”

10 Of course, she never did so, but this is one of those stories that both she and Peter exaggerated over the years until, in the retelling, her threat had turned into an action.