THIRTY-THREE

On December 11, 1963, at eleven in the morning, an envelope was delivered to the Lawford house in Santa Monica. Peter was in New York, and Pat gave the letter to Milt Ebbins. Inside was a note, crudely scrawled and misspelled as if by a backward child: “Mr Lawfrod. Call Mr Sinatra at Mapas Hotel in Reno. Tell him to call you back on untapped phone. Tell him to play it cool because we have a spy. So if he don’t cooperate Jr. gets a 45 slug in his head.”

Along with the note to Peter was one for Frank Sinatra, in which he was told that his son, Frank Junior, who had been kidnapped on December 8, was all right and would be returned to him in exchange for two hundred thousand dollars in fives, tens, and twenties. The money was to be delivered by Peter at midnight on December 11 at the lifeguard station at Venice Beach.

Frank Junior was nineteen and aspiring to a singing career like his father’s, although his talents were more limited. Just before going on with his lounge act at Harrah’s, he had been abducted from his hotel room by two armed men who had stuffed him into the trunk of their Chevrolet and driven him through a blizzard to Los Angeles.

When the young man’s father got the news in Palm Springs, he telephoned Peter — the first time in almost two years the two men had spoken. Sinatra asked Peter to call Robert Kennedy and make sure that every resource of the FBI was committed to finding his son. “There was no hello, no apology, nothing like that,” Peter later said. Nonetheless, he called Bobby Kennedy, who had remained attorney general under the new president, Lyndon Johnson, and was told that the FBI would do everything within its power. Its agents would work around the clock; roadblocks had been set up at all state borders. “I know how Frank feels about me,” Kennedy said to Peter, “but please tell him that everything is being done, and we’ll get his boy back as soon as possible.”

Peter was frantic over the kidnapping. FBI files indicate that he telephoned the New York bureau office repeatedly, seeking news about the investigation. An internal FBI memo dated December 10 (its sender’s name is blacked out) noted that at around midnight on December 9 the New York office “received a call from Peter Lawford, who asked if there had been any developments in the Sinatra kidnapping case. Lawford called again about 3 A.M. and repeated the question. He appeared to have been drinking.

“Lawford called again this afternoon,” the memo continued, “and asked about developments in the case. I told [the New York supervisor] he should tell Lawford very firmly that while we are investigating, there was no information that could be furnished to him, so as to discourage any further inquiries from him.”

Alongside this last sentence, in the distinctive handwriting of J. Edgar Hoover, is the notation: “Right. Lawford is just a bum.” The ransom note mailed to Peter was postmarked before Frank Junior was released, but by the time it was delivered Frank Senior had received other word of the kidnappers’ demand, paid the ransom, and been reunited with his son. The next day, the kidnappers were captured and most of the money recovered.

Sinatra threw a lavish party to celebrate his son’s safe return. He invited the FBI men who had conducted the investigation, all the Rat Packers, Jimmy Van Heusen, Mike and Gloria Romanoff, his Palm Springs neighbors, and dozens of others. Peter was excluded, and Sinatra never again uttered a word to him.

FIVE MONTHS AFTER THE EVENTS in Dallas, the Lawford marriage remained in an uncomfortable state of limbo. Pat stayed in the East most of the time, returning to Santa Monica only when Peter was out of town. When she and Peter were together in California they would most often sit at home or in Matteo’s and share alcohol and sorrow. “After Jack’s assassination,” Dolores Naar recalled, “night after night Pat would cry in her bed. She was always taking these big red capsules to help her sleep. The poor thing was absolutely devastated — I didn’t know if she was going to survive.”

Pat was able to pull herself together, but she didn’t have the same success with her marriage. The problems she and Peter had had for most of their life together were only worsened by the tragedy they’d been through. Peter drank more and sought comfort with other women more often. “It got so bad,” Bill Asher said, “that it was embarrassing to Patricia. He was doing dumb things — having affairs and drinking and taking drugs, and it got so that I knew there was no hope for the marriage.”

But still the Lawfords were forced to remain married. President Kennedy’s reelection, of course, was no longer a consideration in the timing of a Lawford divorce, but now there was a new factor: Bobby’s decision to seek election as a U.S. senator from New York. He had stayed on as attorney general purely for the sake of continuity; he had long despised Lyndon Johnson and looked on his succession as a usurpation of his brother. Now, after a reasonable amount of time had passed, Bobby felt ready to move on.

Early in 1964, he began to reconnoiter for a suitable Senate seat. Massachusetts, the most likely state for him to represent, was out of the question because Teddy had succeeded Jack as a senator there in a 1962 special election. New York was the next clear choice; the Kennedys had lived there for many years, and despite a Democratic majority among registered voters, the state had two Republican senators. Still, the race wouldn’t be an easy one, even with the groundswell of sympathy and affection for the Kennedys. New York wasn’t Massachusetts, where the Kennedys were shoo-ins for just about any office they wanted. Bobby had never been elected to anything. And he would be running against a popular incumbent, Kenneth Keating.

Even if Bobby were to win, he would have to prove himself effective in the Senate as his own man, not merely as Jack Kennedy’s younger brother. There was no question but that an announcement of the Lawfords’ estrangement would have to wait until Bobby was solidly in place in Congress.

Constrained to stay in a marriage that had become untenable for her, Pat tried to put as much distance between her and Peter as possible. In March she began shopping for a cooperative apartment in Manhattan for herself and the children, and she soon found a place she liked: a sprawling sixteen rooms in a fifteen-story building on East Seventy-second Street. In order to keep the facade of a happy marriage intact, Pat made the purchase offer in both her and Peter’s names, and the contracts were signed.

The sale, however, was subject to the approval of all five members of the building’s board of tenants. One resident, Francis Masters, turned thumbs down on the sale because, as the apartment’s owner, Charles Amory, put it, “Peter Lawford is an actor and Mrs. Lawford is a Democrat.”

Amory insisted that the board reconsider, and it did so at a stormy two-and-a-half-hour meeting the evening of April 6. Masters, however, wouldn’t budge. Amory then appealed the rejection to New York City’s Commission on Human Rights, complaining that the Lawfords were victims of discrimination. But the commission’s chairman, Stanley Lowell, said that nothing could be done. “No one can deny living quarters to a person because of the applicant’s religion, color, or national origin,” he explained. “However, there is nothing in the law that would allow us to enter a case where the applicant is denied living quarters because a person was either an actor or a Democrat.”

The New York press turned the story from a molehill into a mountain, and Peter endured a good deal of ribbing from his friends: “Sidney Poitier told me, ‘Listen, you can come live in my neighborhood anytime,’” Peter said. “And Sammy Davis — he just wouldn’t let up on me.”

Three months later, Pat found another apartment a few blocks away on Fifth Avenue, and this time the sale went unchallenged. The $250,000 apartment featured five master bedrooms, a library, a huge dining room, and three servant’s rooms. The building’s maintenance fee alone amounted to fifteen hundred dollars a month. The sale was soon final, and Pat made plans to move herself and the children east. Later, when rumors of a Lawford estrangement began to crop up, Peter described the situation as a “geographical separation” caused by the fact that he needed to remain in California for his work and Pat wanted to educate the children in New York.

Pat, while preparing to leave the beach house and move to New York, agreed to meet Peter at Matteo’s the Sunday evening before her departure for a friendly farewell drink. When she arrived at Matty Jordan’s place in the company of Lenny Gershe and Roger Edens, she was shocked: Peter had taken over the restaurant for a surprise going- away party. Fifty of the Lawfords’ friends were there, and Pat was furious.

Milt Ebbins had tried to talk Peter out of it. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked him. “Pat will flip when she finds out!”

But Peter wouldn’t be swayed. “She’ll flip for a few minutes, but then we’ll all have a good time. I want to say good-bye to her, that’s all.”

Pat didn’t appreciate what Peter considered a thoughtful gesture. “Is he crazy?” she snapped at Ebbins. “I’m leaving!”

“Cmon, Pat,” Ebbins said cajolingly. “The guy just wants to do something nice for you. What’s the big deal? All your friends are here.” Roger Edens, who was bisexual and romantically interested in Pat, was incensed; he thought Peter had organized the party in an attempt to win Pat back. He pulled Milt Ebbins aside and berated him. “How dare you do this?” he shouted. “This isn’t gonna get her back. He’s finished, he’s out!”

“Oh shut up, Roger,” Ebbins replied. “He wanted to throw a surprise party for her, that’s all. I think it’s in good taste.”

“Well I don’t. I think it stinks!”

As Peter had surmised, Pat’s pleasure at seeing her friends soon softened her anger. She had a few drinks and got into the swing of things, but she left in the middle of the festivities.

The next day, after a morning of filming, Peter asked Chuck Pick to drive him, Pat, and the children to the LA airport. They all piled into a station wagon, and Chuck noticed that everyone was very quiet on the way. He waited in the parking lot while Peter put his family on the plane; then he drove Peter back to Santa Monica.

During the return from the airport, Peter broke down. Pick asked him what the matter was. “Chuck, that’s the last time my family’s going to be together,” he replied. “Pat and I are getting a divorce.” Pick didn’t know what to say. He could only try to comfort Peter as he sat next to him and sobbed.

When Peter arrived home, his jaw dropped in astonishment. Pat had taken a good deal more from the house than she had said she would, including some items he treasured. What upset him most was that she had removed most of the mementos of Jack Kennedy and his presidency. He called Jackie and Barbara Cooper to express his amazement, exaggerating wildly. “She took everything. Even the wire hangers. Can you imagine? The wire hangers’.”

But Peter made sure he had the last word. A few days after Pat had settled into the Fifth Avenue apartment, she was notified of a delivery from California. Outside her building, three burly, sweating men worked to unload a truckload of five-gallon plastic containers of water — fifty in all. When Pat protested that she hadn’t ordered any water, one of the deliverymen handed her a note that had come with the shipment. It read: “Dear Pat: You forgot to drain the swimming pool.”

BUT PETER’S WIT WAS AN inadequate buffer now. He was an unhappy, lonely man, and rattling around in that enormous empty house threatened to undo him. He had never liked being alone, and now he hated it. He would drink himself insensate nearly every night, trying to relieve his crushing grief, and the friends who stuck by him found themselves tested to the limit by his drunkenness, his constant melancholy, his frequent bitterness. He found himself no longer able to get people together for the dinner parties and the poker games that had in the past allowed him to pretend that everything was fine. Bill Asher recalled, “I must have gone to his house for dinner a half dozen times when he said a group of people were going to be there, and when my wife and I arrived he’d be alone. You’d sit there with him and watch him go, watch him drink himself into oblivion and start to cry.”

Others made herculean efforts to buck Peter up, among them Molly Dunne, who sometimes stayed at the beach house for weeks at a time. She found it a trial. “He’d get up in the morning and he’d have that first drink. He had a schedule. He’d start with Dubonnet and gin in the morning, then he’d have a big lunch and take a nap. Then he’d get up at four and start again, and drink straight through the night because he was a late-night person. I’d have to leave and go home for about a week to rest and catch up to him.”

Molly found that the carefree athlete she had known at the beach was now letting himself go, wracked with fear, terrified of being alone. He wasn’t able to sleep. He would call out to Molly soon after she had retired in an adjoining bedroom, “Please come and watch TV with me.

“Peter, go to sleep, would you?” Molly would call back to him. He would say “Please!” and Molly would go into his room and sit in bed and watch television with him. Finally he would fall asleep and Molly could tiptoe out. She learned not to turn off the set because whenever she did Peter would wake up.

He expressed great bitterness to Molly about Pat. “He used to say all kinds of terrible things about her,” Molly recalled. “What a drinker she was, and that she was gonna marry Roger Edens, which was very confusing because Roger was predominantly gay.”

Molly was surprised when Peter “made a few overtures” to her, as though he were trying to recapture some of the youthful romance they had enjoyed twenty years earlier. She turned him down because, she said, “I just wanted to remain good friends, and Peter accepted that.”

Jean MacDonald had a similar but less pleasant experience with Peter in 1964. She was in Los Angeles with her young daughter, who had been admitted to Children’s Hospital, and had dinner with Peter at the beach house. They shared happy memories during the meal, but then things turned sour. “Peter made a move on me,” Jean recalled, “and it was unpleasant. I hadn’t expected it. I was upset by it. And the kind of sex he was interested in — that was a change! That was the first time I’d seen the side of him that I didn’t like. When I said I couldn’t do what he wanted he got real nasty.

“I wanted to leave, but he wanted someone to stay with him until he went to sleep. He was taking Quaaludes. I sat downstairs in the living room and I didn’t know how to get out of there. I was a little frightened. Finally at dawn I got a taxi and left.”

A YEAR OF IDLENESS since President Kennedy’s murder had not helped alleviate Peter’s grief. Everywhere he turned, there were reminders of Marilyn and Jack; magazine covers, newspaper articles, television documentaries. Even, sometimes, living embodiments. Chuck Pick recalled that before the November 1964 elections, Ted Kennedy was at Peter’s house for a political fund-raiser: “Peter and I were in the den, and Ted was in the living room. We heard Ted say something and it sounded just like Jack. Peter broke down on the couch and started crying.”

Milt Ebbins hoped that having Peter come to the Chrislaw offices every day would take his mind off his sorrow, provide him with some immediate goals, give his everyday life some structure. It didn’t work. The duties at Chrislaw — the company was now producing a film for Patty Duke called Billie — could be handled well enough without him, and there was really no one for Peter to answer to if he didn’t show up. Bonnie Williams, now a Chrislaw secretary, recalled that “he was drinking a lot, and we had a great deal of difficulty getting him to come to work in the morning. Sometimes we had to go out to the house and help him get up.”

A movie role, Ebbins hoped, would force Peter to pull himself together. In the fall of 1964, Martin Poll, the producer, hired Peter for his film Sylvia to play a wealthy man about to marry a beautiful, mysterious young woman played by Carroll Baker. The picture was unmemorable and unlikely to do much to further the careers of anyone involved in it. Luckily, by the time of its release, Peter, Carroll Baker, and their director Gordon Douglas had all been signed to reunite in a much more interesting project: Joseph E. Levine’s film version of Irving Shulman’s Harlow, the controversial best-seller about the life of MGM’s shimmering, sassy blond sex symbol of the thirties, Jean Harlow.

Carroll Baker, who had created a sensation in 1956 playing the sultry child-wife in Baby Doll, was being strongly hyped as the successor to Marilyn Monroe, who had long been considered the only actress who could do justice to Harlow on screen. After Marilyn’s death, there was a vacuum in Hollywood that Carroll Baker and Carol Lynley were both trying to fill. Lynley, in fact, had been hired for a low-budget film of Harlow’s life that was intended to compete with Levine’s “official” version. Clearly, however, neither Baker nor Lynley had the complex allure of Monroe — or of Jean Harlow, for that matter.

Still, casting Jean Harlow was much less difficult than casting her husband, Paul Bern. Shulman had shocked readers with the tawdry details of Harlow’s brief marriage to the forty-three-year-old MGM executive who — mortified and enraged by his sexual impotence — had first beat his bride with a cane on their wedding night and then, a few months later, killed himself after Harlow laughed at him when he entered her bedroom brandishing a dildo. (Five years later, Harlow herself was dead, a victim of uremic poisoning likely caused by a kidney injury she suffered when Bern beat her.)

Bern would be a thankless role, and certainly not one that most producers would think of Peter Lawford to play. But when the idea came up, Joe Levine and Gordon Douglas agreed it was just quirky enough to work. They did wonder whether Lawford would be willing to take such a big career risk.

He was. The drawbacks of playing so miserable a character were outweighed, in his view, by the sheer acting challenge of it. Acting challenges were not something Peter had been often asked to take on, and now that he was no longer concerned about being “a Kennedy” his options had expanded greatly. Most important, Harlow was a movie based on the most talked-about book of the year, produced by the hottest producer in Hollywood, and costarring the most publicized blond bombshell since Monroe. A major role in this film — even that of Paul Bern — could do nothing but bolster Peter’s flagging stock in Hollywood.

Which isn’t to say that Peter wasn’t embarrassed to be playing Bern when the announcement was made. He felt it necessary to tell the press at a party Joe Levine threw to kick off the picture, “Thank goodness nobody can doubt me — I’ve got four kids.”

What few could have suspected at the time was that enacting Paul Bern would be one of the most emotionally trying experiences of Peter’s professional life. For the past several years, he had been grappling with impotency himself, a problem exacerbated by his drinking binges and anxieties. Playing Paul Bern was so deeply resonant an experience for Peter that it kept him in a fragile emotional condition throughout the filming in the early spring of 1965. Frequently he arrived on the set late, hung over, unable to remember his lines. Assistant director David Salven recalled that there was little sympathy for Peter when scenes had to be reshot again and again before he was able to recite the dialogue correctly. “At one point he needed cue cards. Everybody would say, ‘If you drank sixty-five quarts of vodka every day, you’d have trouble remembering where to find the studio.’ Some people would try to make excuses for him, and the usual reaction was, ‘The fucker’s drunk, that’s all.’ Nobody knew that he was impotent; nobody knew what he was going through.”

Ken DuMain, who hadn’t worked with Peter for several years, was his stand-in again for Harlow, and he was shocked at his condition. “When I came in, they were doing a scene in a restaurant with Carroll Baker and Peter, and he was in bad shape. He had been drinking, and he was hung over and his face was puffy. I felt very sorry for him. It’s embarrassing when an actor blows his lines again and again.”

The director called a break, and DuMain walked over to Peter. “Give me your script,” he told him. “I’ll go over your lines with you.” The two men went outside and walked around the lot, rehearsing the sides of dialogue. “When we finished,” DuMain recalled, “Peter told me that of all the telegrams he and Pat had received after President Kennedy’s assassination, mine had touched them the most deeply. When we got back to the set, Peter went through the scene again and it was perfect. They printed it.”

HARLOW, ALTHOUGH SUMPTUOUS to look at, was not a good film and was widely panned. It was a box-office hit, however, primarily because of the avalanche of publicity that surrounded it. Joseph Levine once said, “You can fool all the people all the time if the advice is right and the budget is big enough.” Few critics were fooled by Harlow because although the budget was huge, the advice was abysmal. Rather than tell the Harlow story as it actually happened, Levine, Douglas, and screenwriter John Michael Hayes opted for the clichéd Hollywood yarn of a virginal young girl thrown to the show- business wolves who triumphs on-screen but, in life, experiences tragedy and early death.

Because Joe Levine knew that Carol Lynley’s rival version was in the works, Harlow was a very rushed production. John Michael Hayes had been brought in to “de-sexify” the original script by Sydney Boehm, and Carroll Baker was so grateful for his rapid rewrite that she gave Hayes one third of her fifteen percent profit participation in the picture. Editing was done on scenes that had already been shot at the same time that other scenes were still being filmed, and on the last day of production Neal Hefti, the composer, had already scored nine reels of music for the film. There was virtually no postproduction work.

Many of Harlow’s shortcomings can be attributed either to this rush or to the censorship restrictions of the day. Presenting Jean Harlow as the salty-tongued, sexually profligate woman she was would have created problems with the Catholic Legion of Decency that Joe Levine preferred to avoid. And certainly Paul Bern’s sexual problems presented a thorny issue. The producers grappled with whether to show the events that preceded Bern’s suicide — the centerpiece of the book — or merely refer to them.

Douglas did film Peter and Carroll in what the crew dubbed “the dildo sequence,” but the scene ended up on the cutting-room floor, along with any other explicit evidence of the characters’ sexual problems. According to participants in the filming, the sequence contained some of the best acting Peter Lawford had ever done. “The performance Peter gave as Paul Bern was brilliant,” Carroll Baker recalled. “What I saw him do in that scene was really magnificent. He was touching, he was real. I was knocked out.”

The one scene in the released version in which Peter is given free rein to emote — his final appearance in the picture — shows Bern begging Jean to give him another chance. “Help me over this,” he pleads. “I’ll go to a psychiatrist. Give me a chance — give me time.”

Jean Harlow did try to help Paul Bern. She urged him to see a doctor, and she agreed to remain under the same roof with him so that he could save face. In the film version, she is not only unsympathetic but cruel. “Fifty million men, and I had to marry you,” she snorts. When he pleads for her help she tells him, “I’m just an ordinary woman with the same ordinary fears and problems — ”

“Then you should understand my problem,” Bern says.

“I said ordinary!”

Now in tears, Bern says, “I couldn’t live if I couldn’t make it up to you.”

“It’s all so sick!”

“Please, Jean,” Bern sobs. “Don’t expose me to people for what I am.”

Peter’s performance of this exchange, enormously touching, caused the crew to burst into spontaneous applause when it was over. Milt Ebbins watched the scene being shot. “Peter wasn’t acting,” he recalled. “He was really feeling all those emotions.”