THIRTY-SIX

There was about it a distinct aura of déjà vu. The handsome bushy-haired young senator named Kennedy stood in the Senate Caucus Room and said simply, “I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.”

With the exact words his brother had uttered eight years earlier, Robert F. Kennedy embarked on a challenge to Lyndon Johnson, a quest that had seemed, for the past four years, somehow inevitable. Jack Kennedy had said that he ran for president only because his older brother Joe had been killed. Now that Jack was dead, it was Bobby’s turn, and after Bobby, Teddy would step in. The Kennedy family had nothing if not a sense of destiny.

In many ways, however, Bobby’s run for the presidency was anticlimactic. As Peter tellingly put it to a reporter, “With Jack, it was like going to your first prom. It was wonderful working for someone you really believed in. I’m afraid your second prom will never be as exciting.” It may have been his “second prom,” but at least Peter was invited to it. Bobby knew that his former brother-in-law was still capable of rustling up celebrity support for his campaign just as he had for Jack’s, and he asked for Peter’s help. Despite the chilliness of their relationship, Peter agreed. He had long hoped in a nebulous, wishful sort of way that Camelot might be recaptured and that he might once again be part of the magic.

(He wasn’t alone in that. When it looked as though Bobby’s campaign might well be successful, Jackie Kennedy enthused, “Won’t it be wonderful when we get back in the White House?” But when she overheard Jackie’s remark, Ethel — who for years had resented the way her sister-in-law overshadowed her — gave her an icy look and said, “What do you mean we?”)

Peter did his job. He brought dozens of celebrities into the Kennedy campaign, among them Lauren Bacall, Shirley MacLaine, Eddie Fisher, Natalie Wood, and Gene Kelly. He organized fund-raisers at The Factory, the West Hollywood discotheque he co-owned with Sammy Davis, Dick Donner, Paul Newman, Pierre Salinger, and Tommy Smothers, among others. (Newman, however, was an active supporter of another hopeful, Eugene McCarthy.)

Still, Peter was not involved as deeply with Bobby’s campaign as he had been with Jack’s. His efforts were limited to private California fund-raising; he did no traveling, made no speeches, never appeared with the candidate at whistle-stops. There were several reasons for this. One, of course, was Peter’s uncomfortable association with the Hollywood excesses that Bobby wanted to forget and prayed would remain secret.

Another was the fact that Peter’s presence was a reminder of the only divorce in the Kennedy family, a factor that could do nothing but hurt Bobby in a close election. A third reason was made evident by a full-page color photograph of Peter run by Life magazine in its May 10, 1968, article on the primary campaign. The photo, taken at a Kennedy fund-raiser at The Factory, showed Peter wearing shaggy Beatle-esque bangs, a black turtleneck sweater, and Indian beads, sitting at a table with a cigarette in his hand and both a mixed drink and a glass of white wine in front of him. It was a poor image even for a youth-oriented campaign; Bobby’s advisors winced when they saw it and suggested that Peter’s involvement be further limited.

Two weeks after Bobby announced his candidacy, President Johnson, beleaguered by protests against the Vietnam War, announced that he would not run for reelection — a wholly unexpected development that transformed the political landscape overnight. “I felt that I was being charged on all sides by a giant stampede,” Johnson told his biographer, Doris Kearns. “I was being forced over the edge by rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing I feared from the first day of my presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets.”

Bobby Kennedy’s run for the presidency soon turned into what one reporter called a succession of “feeding frenzies.” Much of the ardor stemmed from his brother’s legacy, to be sure, but more and more of it was directed at him by people who saw in his face and heard in his words genuine compassion for them and their struggles.

Those around Bobby worried about the emotionalism of his public appearances, his vulnerability to harm symbolized by his bleeding hands at the end of a day’s campaigning. The candidate was fatalistic. “If they want to get me, they’ll get me,” he said. “They got Jack.”

It soon became clear that Kennedy’s quixotic quest for the Democratic nomination might very well succeed. Whether or not it would rested largely on the outcome of the California primary election on June 4 between Bobby and Eugene McCarthy. Bobby chose to spend election day at the beachfront home of John Frankenheimer, the director. This apparent slap in the face to Peter raised a few eyebrows, but Peter understood Bobby’s need to steer clear. He proceeded instead with plans for a celebration at The Factory that would follow Bobby’s hoped-for victory speech at his Ambassador Hotel election headquarters.

Around midnight, a contest that had been close all evening finally swung Bobby’s way. He had won the most important primary in the country, and he now had the strongest possible momentum going into the Democratic convention in Chicago. Before he made his victory speech, he took a telephone call from his aide Kenny O’Donnell. “You know, Ken,” he said, “finally I feel that I’m out from under the shadow of my brother. Now at last I feel that I’ve made it on my own.”

Peter and Milt Ebbins watched Bobby’s celebratory speech on television at The Factory. There would indeed be a victory party, and Peter couldn’t help but feel pangs of the old excitement as hundreds of supporters cheered Bobby’s last line — “Now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there!”

A few minutes after Bobby left the podium, television cameras remained trained on the Ambassador ballroom as reporters began to interview Kennedy supporters. Suddenly, there was commotion, confusion. No one was quite sure what had happened. Some people thought they’d heard shots. Someone shouted, “He’s been shot!” And suddenly the dread possibility of another disaster whipped Peter’s attention back to the television screen.

He watched as the confusion grew into shouts of dismay. A commentator cried, unbelievingly, “Is it possible? Is it possible that Senator Kennedy has been shot?” The news cameras zoomed in again on the podium as Bobby’s brother-in-law Steve Smith shouted frantically into the microphone, “Is there a doctor in the house?”

When he heard that, Peter turned to Milt and said, “He’s had it.” He then stood up and walked out of The Factory.

ROBERT KENNEDY, HIS HEAD shattered by two bullets police said were fired by Sirhan Sirhan, an Arab angered by Kennedy’s pro- Israel positions, lingered for twenty hours at LA’s Good Samaritan Hospital. Jackie Kennedy, sedated and musing aloud about the church and death, flew in from New York; Lee Radziwill’s husband, Prince Stanislaus, came all the way from London and joined the Kennedy family vigil.

Peter, who lived only a few miles from the hospital, did not. Instead, he went to Palm Springs to see a girlfriend, and Milt Ebbins was aghast. “Jesus Christ, Peter! How can you not go?”

“I just can’t, Milt,” Peter replied. “There’s no place for me there.” Kennedy died at one forty-four A.M. on June 6, and a funeral mass was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York on June 8. One hundred thousand ordinary citizens lined up for blocks outside the church for the chance to pass Kennedy’s bier and pay their respects; during the service President Johnson and dozens of other dignitaries heard Teddy Kennedy deliver an eloquent and moving eulogy. “My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life,” Teddy said, his voice breaking, “[but] remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world.”

Peter was invited to the funeral service, but his bad judgment on that occasion would result in his irremediable alienation from most of the Kennedy family. As he and Milt Ebbins checked into their hotel, Peter met a sexy young woman he wanted to impress. Despite the fact that the invitation to the funeral had been explicitly designated for only one person because of space constraints, Peter invited this young woman, a stranger, to accompany him to the rites.

Ebbins recalled what happened. “This girl went out and bought a black miniskirt, a black hat, and black gloves. Christ, the dress was so short it was obscene!”

As the three of them got into a cab to go to St. Patrick’s, Ebbins said under his breath, “Peter, you’re crazy — this broad — you can’t! This is a mistake.”

Peter saw that Ebbins was right. “You get out with her,” he said. “No way!” Ebbins replied.

When they reached the cathedral, Peter tried to distance himself from his companion, but she clung tightly to his arm, leaving no room for misapprehension about whom she was with. “She wouldn’t let go of him,” Ebbins recalled. “It was awful. The Kennedys were absolutely furious with him.”

Pat Lawford was mortified by her former husband’s behavior. She and the rest of her family looked on it as a deliberate insult to Bobby’s memory, and they never forgave him. It was the final straw. If Peter had hoped ever to be accepted back into the bosom of the Kennedy family, the hope was now forever dashed.

That fact was made harshly clear to him a few months later, when he tried to place a telephone call to Ethel at her home in Hickory Hill and was informed by the operator that the unlisted number had been changed. He asked Milt Ebbins to call Sargent Shriver at the Kennedy Foundation offices in New York and get Ethel’s new number for him. When Ebbins called and explained that he was inquiring for Peter, Shriver refused to give him the number.

EVEN JACKIE KENNEDY BECAME unavailable to Peter, in October, when she left the country to marry the Greek shipping billionaire Aristotle Onassis. The former First Lady’s decision to marry the often vulgar tycoon was viewed by many in America and abroad as a betrayal of her martyred husband, but Peter — though he did not attend the wedding on the island of Skorpios — was vocal in her defense. “What do people expect of her?” he said to a journalist. “To be a widow for the rest of her life? She’s a human being, and she needs companionship and happiness just like all the rest of us. Wherever she finds that happiness, I’m all for it.”

Pat Lawford, on the other hand, was never able to find marital happiness again. Although she had been tempted to revert to her maiden name, she kept the name Lawford, mainly for the sake of her children. After the divorce, she moved to Paris to be near Walter Sohier, a State Department lawyer she had been intermittently involved with since the early 1960s.

Leonard Gershe remembered his and Pat’s interaction with Sohier after a party, when they went back to Walter’s Georgetown home for a nightcap. The men were in black tie, and Sohier went upstairs to change clothes. Leonard and Pat loved practical jokes, and while they waited for Walter to come back down, Gershe hit on an idea. He scurried into the kitchen and got a bottle of ketchup. “I lay down on the floor,” Gershe recalled, “and Pat poured the ketchup over me and stood there with her hair all a mess holding a knife over her head. He came down and saw us and didn’t think it was at all funny. We were crying with laughter, and he was annoyed. So when I think of Walter Sohier all I can think of is his great sense of humor.”

Nothing ever came of Pat’s relationship with Sohier, and the same was true of Roger Edens. Leonard Gershe was Edens’s companion, and he recalled that “Roger was very much in love with Pat. She was crazy about him, too — I don’t know if she was in love with him, but she loved him.”

Early in 1970, Pat and Edens were in New York to attend the opening of Gershe’s play Butterflies Are Free. The night before, Edens told Pat that he was terminally ill with cancer. “She went mad,” Gershe recalls. “She just lost all control. Her father had just died, and Jack and Bobby were dead, and she screamed, ‘I’m losing another one!’ Roger had to slap her to calm her down.”

PETER MADE THREE MOVIES in 1968, one of them abysmal, one mediocre, and one quite good. This last was The April Fools, Stuart Rosenberg’s acerbic comedy of corporate morals and suburban marriages. Working opposite Jack Lemmon and Catherine Deneuve, Peter played — very well — a smug, smooth tycoon whose beautiful but neglected wife has a bittersweet affair with one of her husband’s more hapless employees. It was Peter’s best movie role in years. Variety thought that “Lawford is excellent in an unsympathetic part as the too-busy-to-bother husband of Miss Deneuve.” And Time noted cleverly, “As played by Mr. Lawford, he is an untruthful narcissist with hair of chestnut brown and sideburns of Dorian Gray.”

The April Fools should have led to further good film offers for Peter. It didn’t, possibly because of the other two films he had in release at about the same time — Hook, Line and Sinker, a Jerry Lewis clinker in which he plays a doctor who convinces a patient to fake his own death for insurance purposes, and Otto Preminger’s Skidoo, a disastrous all-star “mod” comedy about LSD, gangsters, and swinging hippies.

In December, Peter wrote to his agent, Abe Lastfogel, of the William Morris agency, to complain that very little had been done to get him quality work since his last letter on October 5, 1967. At that time, Peter wrote, he had felt encouraged by Lastfogel’s reaction and was confident that the agent’s belief in his potential would “seep down through the ranks. It makes me sad to report that this was far from being the case.”

All his films since then, Peter pointed out, had come to him independently of William Morris, as had several TV shows and a four- day stint as guest host of the Tonight show. “I bore you with the aforementioned data,” Peter went on, “simply to illustrate ‘where it’s at’ and from whence the bread is coming!” He felt the “desperate need,” he went on, for another agency to put an “imaginative force” to work for his benefit. He then informed Lastfogel that he was switching agencies.

The fault, however, lay not in the William Morris agency but in Peter Lawford. He had rarely been a box-office draw, and he had not — with the exceptions of Salt and Pepper and One More Time, which he had produced himself — been an “above the title” star since 1954.

Peter wasn’t, of course, alone among notable MGM alumni in his career tribulations. With a few exceptions — Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and John Wayne among them — most of the stars of the “old days” were considered has-beens, relegated to occasional television work. The question “Whatever happened to?” became the cliché prelude to most mentions of the names June Allyson, Van Johnson, Cyd Charisse, Jane Powell, Kathryn Grayson, Gloria De Haven, and others.

A separate set of problems attached to Peter Lawford. He had made a lot of enemies in Hollywood; a number of directors, producers, and stars had refused to work with him under any circumstances for years. Now, as a tumultuous decade in Peter’s life came to an end, he found himself looked upon by the “new Hollywood” as little more than a superannuated MGM second banana who had never had an excess of talent and whom they didn’t much like anyway. If there had ever been a glimmer of hope that Peter could recapture the kind of power by association he had enjoyed while Jack Kennedy was President, it had been buried with Bobby.