THIRTY-FOUR

As late as the winter of 1965, Peter harbored hope that his marriage could be salvaged. To him, a divorce from Pat would signify the end of his association with the Kennedys, would mark, with awful finality, the end of Camelot. Peter knew, of course, that those days were over, but something within him refused to accept fully that the glory was unrecoverable. Maybe, if he and Pat could reconcile, and Bobby ran for President . . .

But Pat pressed on with the divorce plans. With Bobby having been elected by a wide margin to represent New York in the Senate and having quickly established a national constituency, there was no longer, in her view, any reason to delay. She notified Peter that she wanted to draw up a separation agreement and then proceed with a divorce.

Jackie and Barbara Cooper were visiting Peter at the beach house when he telephoned Pat in Hyannis Port to ask her to reconsider. According to Jackie, “He wanted to get back together with her, and it was like, ‘Wait until you see what I’m gonna say to her’ — he was pretty sure he could convince her.”

He never got the chance. Bobby intercepted the call, and the Coopers will never forget the one-sidedness of the conversation. “You mean, I’m never to see her again?” Peter said into the phone. “I’m never to call or come there? And she’s never coming back here?” When the conversation was over, Peter’s eyes were filled with tears. Astounded by what she had heard, Barbara asked Peter, “How can you let your brother-in-law talk to you that way?”

Wiping his eyes, Peter softly responded, “When that family tells you you’re not going to do something, you’re not going to do it.” “Why?”

“Because you’ll suffer sooner or later. You learn that very quickly. If they say don’t do it, you don’t do it.”

On December 17, Peter and Pat signed a legal separation agreement. The document, never made public, granted “sole and exclusive” custody of the children to Pat, but allowed Peter to consult with her on the choice of schools they would attend — with the stipulation, “final selection of such schools shall be made by wife.” Peter’s visitation rights were limited to one Saturday or Sunday per month, with prior notification, if he was “living far away.” If he lived nearby, he was allowed to visit the children one day every weekend. Once the children reached age sixteen, they would be permitted to visit their father, with “transportation expenses to be paid by husband.”

All property belonging separately to Peter and Pat remained their own, and each waived any right to the other’s estate. The Santa Monica house and contents were to be sold, and twenty-five thousand dollars of the proceeds, after the first mortgage was paid, was to be given to Peter, with the balance applied to a fifty-two-thousand-dollar second mortgage Peter had borrowed from Pat. Until the sale of the house, Peter was required to repay the debt to Pat in installments of three thousand dollars per year.

The agreement called for no alimony from either party and no child support payments from Peter. After he signed the document, however, Peter felt that he should have some financial obligation to his children. Pat told him that wasn’t necessary, that she had enough money to take care of their every need. But he insisted, stressing that it was important to him that he contribute in some way to their wellbeing. Pat finally agreed that if Peter really wanted to he could pay four hundred dollars a month in child support.

Peter made the first two monthly payments and then never made another one.

ON DECEMBER 20, PAT and her four children joined Jackie, Caroline, and John Junior, along with Bobby, Ethel, and most of their children, for a Christmas ski holiday in Sun Valley, Idaho. The national press sat up and took notice, because rumors of an impending Lawford divorce had been swirling for months, and Sun Valley, with its short six-week residency requirement, had become the divorce mecca of America’s socialites.

Pat would not confirm the rumors until she was ready to make an official announcement. To help shield her sister-in-law from reporters, Jackie Kennedy made herself uncharacteristically available to the press. One British journalist commented, “It was obvious that Jackie, who doesn’t grant interviews, had done so to steer us away from the story we were really digging for.”

The Kennedys left Idaho on January 5, 1966, but Pat stayed behind and took a suite at the Sun Valley Lodge in order to wait out the residency requirement. Now there was no denying it, and the Kennedy family attorney, William Peyton Marin, made the announcement of an “amicable separation.” He said nothing about a divorce, but one clearly was imminent.

The encroaching finality of it unsettled Pat’s resolve. She called Peter several times a day to ask him, “Why am I here? What am I doing?” Again and again she wavered; according to Milt Ebbins, Pat didn’t really want to divorce Peter. “She still loved him. But in the end she had no choice. She knew that she couldn’t live with Peter anymore. She hated hearing all those things about him all the time.”

The day after Pat met the minimum residency requirement, she spent eight minutes on the witness stand in the courtroom of Judge Charles Scoggin to explain why she should be granted a divorce. Dressed in a simple black suit and black leather gloves, she sat with her head lowered most of the time, looking up only occasionally to answer questions. She charged Peter with mental cruelty and testified that her differences with him were irreconcilable. After testimony from the owner of the Sun Valley Lodge established Pat’s residency, the divorce was granted.

The next day, Pat was back in New York — and having dinner with Peter. The New York press ran front-page photographs of the couple leaving the Colony restaurant and wondered if there was a reconciliation in the works. Peter simply said that he and Pat had gotten together “to discuss matters that involved the children.”

What they actually discussed was the state of Peter’s health. He had been having stomach cramps for over a year and had been told by a New York doctor that his liver was enlarged and he would have to stop drinking. He hadn’t, and the cramps had grown worse. All the time, Peter had refused to undergo a full battery of diagnostic tests, but his discomfort was now so great that Milt Ebbins and Pat urged him to check into the Lahey Clinic in Boston, a Kennedy-endowed medical center within the New England Baptist Hospital. There, he would receive some of the best treatment in the world, all of it free.

Peter, worried about what the doctors might find, was reluctant, but he agreed to check into Lahey if Ebbins would accompany him.

Dutifully, Ebbins went along, expecting to have a room of his own. Instead, Peter insisted that a second bed be brought into his room for Milt. “C’mon, Peter, you’re a grown man,” Ebbins told him. “I’ll be nearby.” But Peter wouldn’t budge. “If you don’t stay in my room with me, I’m leaving.” Milt stayed, and when Ted Kennedy came by to visit one day he commented, “This doesn’t look too good. Aren’t people talking about you two guys in this place?”

At Lahey, Peter was under the care of Dr. John W. Norcross, one of the top liver specialists in the world. For three days he ran diagnostic tests on Peter to ascertain the cause of his stomach pain. When the tests were completed, a nurse approached Peter’s roommate and asked to speak to him privately. “Mr. Ebbins,” she said, “there’s something awry with Mr. Lawfords tests. They’re not coming out the way they should.”

“What do you mean? What’s wrong?”

“We think he’s still drinking.”

“He can’t be,” Ebbins said. “I’m with him all the time, and I haven’t seen him touch a drop.”

The nurse was insistent. “That’s the only possible reason for the way the tests are turning out.”

“Well, where are the bottles?”

“We looked for them in his room, but we can’t find any. Would you see if you can find them? We’re absolutely certain he’s been drinking.”

Ebbins returned to the room, where Peter was lying on the bed, dressed in a hospital gown, watching television. After a few minutes had passed, Milt got up and went into the bathroom. “I had a hunch,” he recalled. “I locked the door, took the top off the toilet tank, and there it was — a bottle of gin. I just put the lid back on and went to tell the nurse I’d found it. I didn’t say anything to Peter.”

The doctors confronted Peter, and when he came back to his room he screamed at Milt, “You dirty rat-fink bastard!”

Ebbins feigned innocence. “What are you talking about, Peter?” “You told them about the gin, didn’t you?”

Ebbins denied it, but Peter knew better. “He didn’t forgive me for a long time, either,” Ebbins recalled. After three more days of tests, Dr. Norcross asked to speak privately to Peter about the results. “You might as well let Milt hear it too,” Peter said, “because I’ll just tell him two minutes after you leave.”

Norcross sat on a chair next to Peter’s bed. “Mr. Lawford,” he began matter-of-factly, “your liver is twice its normal size. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll be dead in six months to a year of cirrhosis of the liver. It’s just beginning in you, and it’s a horrible death, believe me. The worst.”

Peter looked stricken. “What do I have to do?”

“You have to stop drinking alcohol. You cannot drink for the rest of your life. We don’t know why alcohol has this effect on the liver, but it happens to alcoholics.”

Peter blanched. “Am I an alcoholic?”

“Yes,” Norcross replied. “You’re not a falling-down drunk, but you are an alcoholic.”

“Can I have a glass of wine with dinner?”

“You can’t even have a piece of rum cake. You have to stop drinking. But there is good news. The liver is a very regenerative organ. And we can bring it down to normal size with a very simple drug.” “What’s that?”

“Vitamin A. If you stop drinking and take vitamin A, you’ll be fine.” “That’s great — ”

“But believe me, if you continue drinking, you’ll die.”

Stunned by the severity of Norcross’s warning, Peter resolved then and there to stop drinking. A few days later, he and Ebbins left the clinic. The first thing Peter did on the way home was stop at a bar and have a martini.

A FEW MONTHS LATER, Peter made plans for a trip to Hawaii. When he learned that Jackie Kennedy would be vacationing there at the same time, he wondered about the propriety of going. “Do you think it’s okay?” he asked Milt.

“Why not?” Ebbins responded.

“Don’t you think it’ll look bad?”

“What are you talking about? Her kids will be with her.”

Peter telephoned Jackie, with whom he had remained the friendliest of all the Kennedys, their bond as family outsiders still a strong one. He asked her if she would mind his being in Hawaii while she was. “Of course not,” she told him. “In fact, why don’t we fly there together?”

And so the plans were set for Peter and Jackie, in essence, to vacation together. She didn’t seem to care about the inferences some might make about such an arrangement, and Peter put his own doubts out of his mind.

“It probably never even occurred to Jackie that it might look bad for her to travel with Peter,” Ebbins recalled. “There was never any kind of an involvement between Peter and Jackie, other than that they genuinely liked each other. On the other hand, Peter told me that her sister, Lee Radziwill, made a big play for him once in the early sixties while they were strolling through Hyde Park in London. Peter said he turned her down because he had too much respect for her husband.” On June 5, Jackie flew from New York to San Francisco with her two children, Caroline and John Junior, and was joined there by Peter, Christopher, and Sydney. The next day a photograph was wired around the world showing Peter, Jackie, and the children descending an airplane ramp in Honolulu. Pat had given Peter permission to take the children on the trip, but she didn’t know Jackie was going to be with him until she saw the picture in the newspapers.

Pat called Milt Ebbins on the telephone, very angry. “How dare he do that?” she shouted into the receiver.

“Pat,” Ebbins replied, “Peter was planning to go there anyway and so was Jackie. They decided to go together. So what?”

“She was so angry,” he recalled, “that she just kind of growled. She thought that he was doing it for publicity or that people would misconstrue Peter’s being with Jackie on vacation. She hung up and then she called me back and yelled some more. She was livid”

In Hawaii, Peter went to great lengths to see that Jackie enjoyed herself. He acted as her tour guide around the islands, took her and the children on camping trips, introduced her to his friends, and acted as her protector throughout her stay. A few days into the trip, he arranged a lavish garden party for Jackie at the Kahala Hilton, to which he invited his island friends and some of the most important people in Hawaii.

Jackie was hours late for the party, and one hundred and fifty of Honolulu’s finest milled around under a broiling sun anticipating her arrival. “We were all dressed to the nines,” Alice Guild recalled. “We waited and waited for her and started to sink into the grass with our high heels.” When Jackie and her children arrived by helicopter, she was wearing sandals, a scarf, and a light shift, the kind a young woman might wear to the beach. According to Alice Guild, “Instead of her feeling embarrassed, one hundred and fifty guests were embarrassed because we were inappropriately dressed.”

What surprised Peter’s friends most about Jackie was that in private her voice was completely different from the soft, whispery voice that had fascinated the country during her televised tour of the White House early in 1962. Jean MacDonald was astonished that “she talked like you and me. I heard her with her children and it was so weird, because here was this totally normal mother’s voice.”

During the Hawaii trip, Jean and her husband, Bob Anderson, spent an evening with Peter at the beachfront house he had rented on Oahu. They talked late into the night, and Peter poured his heart out to them about the distress he felt at the recent events in his life. When Bob Anderson had to leave, he asked his wife to stay behind and “talk with Peter.” She did, until seven in the morning.

They sat outside on a seawall in front of the house as the first rays of the sun started to appear over the water and talked about everything that had happened to Peter over the last few years. “I was struck by how concerned he was about what he had to offer his children,” Jean recalled. “He was afraid that there was no role for him to play in their lives. He felt inadequate and overwhelmed by the Kennedys and their visibility and success. Everything his children needed could be provided for them by the Kennedys. He was afraid that his children wouldn’t respect him because of that.”

Jean tried to reassure Peter that there were a great many things he could offer his children. “I kept telling him what I had found in him that I thought was simply wonderful. I felt that he was an innately kind and good person. He was a great friend, understanding, someone you could sit down with and talk to and have a very meaningful, caring conversation. I felt that he had a solidness underneath that he could impart to his children.”

Jean left Peter’s house just as the sun cleared the horizon, uncertain whether her pep talk had made the impact she hoped it would. “I think he wanted to believe it, and he somewhat believed it. But he was losing confidence in himself as a person.”

‘‘I FOUND OUT WHO MY true friends were after my divorce,” Peter later said. “When I wasn’t a part of the Kennedy family anymore, a lot of people I thought were my friends didn’t come around anymore. I can’t say it didn’t hurt.” Professionally, he discovered that the same thing was true. He had enjoyed some residual goodwill and sympathy after Jack’s assassination, but it had faded by 1966, and the divorce eliminated the Kennedy connection that had buffered much of the enmity many in the business felt toward him. By then, Milt Ebbins found, Peter had become highly unpopular in Hollywood. “He burned

bridges big time while Jack was President by adopting such a superior attitude. He stepped on a lot of toes, insulted important people in this town — and a lot of them wouldn’t forgive him.”

Peter found good film offers rare now — the combination of Sinatra’s blackballing and the store of ill will against him proved a damaging one. What work he did get was provided by friends in the industry who remained loyal to him. He did two television guest shots in 1966, and had two minor film roles.

Sammy Davis was one of the few Rat Pack members willing to buck Sinatra and associate with Peter, and he cast him in A Man Called Adam in a small role as the agent of a trumpet player addicted to drugs. “It was not a good movie and Peter was terrible in it,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “He was fat — stomach out to here. He never should have done that movie. He got fifteen thousand dollars for it, I think. God.”

A more important movie but an equally small part followed in The Oscar, another glitzy Joe Levine drama purporting to show the raw underbelly of Hollywood. Stephen Boyd starred as an over-the- hill actor who finds himself Oscar-nominated and attempts to assure his victory — and his comeback — by ruthlessly spreading lies about his competitors. Art once again imitated life as Peter, who had just one scene, played an actor whose glory days were far behind him. When Boyd enters a restaurant, he is shocked to see that Lawford, an old friend who had once been on top of the heap, is now working as a maitre d’. Boyd offers his friend a small part in his next picture, and Lawford replies, “Look, I made the money. I blew it. New kids were arriving on every bus. So I died. I don’t want to be dug up like some corpse and have to die all over again.”

NOW, EVERY DAY HELD little deaths for Peter. He coveted film roles but did not get them. He was offered such insultingly small parts in minor pictures that whenever anything remotely reasonable came his way he accepted it in order to meet the bills.

And prodigious bills they were. Peter couldn’t completely give up the trappings of wealth and power he had so enjoyed as John Kennedy’s brother-in-law, and they were expensive. The most visible were the helicopters that landed on the beach in front of his house to shuttle him to and from the soundstages in Hollywood or to and from the airport. “I was chopper happy at the time,” Peter later admitted, and he didn’t like the drive out to the beach now any more than he had when he stayed in town weeknights to avoid it during Pat’s pregnancy with Christopher.

It was more than that, though. Having a helicopter transport you was the ultimate status symbol in 1966, and for Peter it was a vivid reminder that he had been, for a while, a confidant of the most powerful man in the world. “He wanted to put a helicopter pad outside his house,” recalled Leonard Gershe, “until all the neighbors complained. It wasn’t for the President, it was for him. For him! So he wouldn’t have to drive to Warner Brothers.”

Yet even this symbol would be snatched from him. In June, copter pilot Hal Connors had landed amid swirling sand in front of Peter’s house and picked him up for the trip to Los Angeles Airport and his flight to San Francisco on the way to Hawaii. When Connors returned, Santa Monica police arrested him for violating a city ordinance against such landings in residential areas. Connors protested that he had picked Peter Lawford up dozens of times before this with no problem. Why, Connors asked, were they all of a sudden forbidding him to transport Peter as he had for years? A policeman replied, “Because Lawford isn’t a Kennedy anymore.”