THIRTY-EIGHT

Robert D. Franks was not likely to forget Lady Lawford. On April 1, 1967, the automobile salesman sold the eighty-three- year-old woman a brand-new convertible Ford Fairlane GT. Four days later, he heard the news that May had backed the car out of her driveway at forty miles per hour, shot across the street, run over a sapling, and hit a car parked in another driveway. Her car had then lurched forward, screeched across the street again, missed a baby in a carriage by inches, and crashed into a brick wall.

Her face a bloody mess, May was rushed to the Beverly Hills Emergency Clinic. She refused treatment and tore up her medical chart — “that awful clinic, nothing but niggers.” She saw her own doctor, who surgically removed nine of May’s teeth from the back of her throat and sewed her nearly severed lower lip back on.

Police sergeant C. O. Lewis wanted to file a hit-and-run complaint against May, which incensed her. In response to his questions she barked, “I’m not a Yank, and I don’t have to tell you a bloody thing. I’m a British subject and immune.” She told friends she would like to forget some of the other things she said to Sergeant Lewis.

May claimed that the accelerator was faulty and had stuck, and later hinted at a conspiracy designed to kill her and make her death look like an accident. She convinced the Ford dealership to replace the car, and on May 10, salesman Franks delivered a replacement, a shiny new six-cylinder Mustang. The next day, he got a call from May. She’d lost the keys; could he bring over a new set?

Franks drove over and gave May the keys, but before he could get back to his own car she had started the Mustang. “I heard the car accelerate at a great rate of speed,” Franks recalled. As he watched in horror, May roared backward out of her driveway and crashed into a house across the street, then roared forward toward Franks’s car. “The Mustang hit my car,” Franks said, “and continued accelerating. It pushed my car up on the parkway. Finally I reached her car and turned the ignition off.”

May wasn’t hurt this time, but the damage to the house and the two automobiles amounted to thirty-two hundred dollars. Sergeant Lewis conferred with the city attorney’s office, but no charges were filed. The press made light of the incidents; a typical headline read, “Lady May Goes for Another Spin.” Sports Illustrated told its readers, “Los Angeles residents who lack the time or money to make it out to the Indy 500 this month might just go and stand around Lady May Lawfords garage. . . .”

To Milt Ebbins, it wasn’t a laughing matter. May had had other accidents, and when her license came up for renewal, Ebbins stepped in. He told the California Department of Motor Vehicles, “Don’t give this woman a license. She can’t drive. She’s gonna kill somebody. She almost killed that baby — it was inches.” May did no further driving.

By the end of the decade, when she was eighty-six years old, May’s mental health had severely deteriorated. Just about everyone, she believed, was conspiring against her, everyone was a threat to her life. After a fall down a flight of stairs, which she blamed on a doctor overmedicating her for a cold, she was taken by ambulance to St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. There she was X-rayed and sedated, and spent a quiet night. The next morning, the doctors told her they were studying her X-ray films and said she would have to remain in the hospital for a few days.

As soon as she was alone in her room, May put the wool dress she’d been wearing back on and walked, shoeless, out of the hospital. “She thought they were trying to kidnap her,” her friend John Farquhar recalled. She commandeered a taxi that had come for someone else and had the driver — drunk, she claimed — take her home. There, she locked herself in.

His mother’s erratic behavior left Peter at a loss. He tried to keep as much distance as possible between them, both physical and emotional, but her recurring crises made that very difficult to do. He was in St. John’s Hospital, on his way to visit her, when she walked out. She had seen him and made sure he didn’t see her, convinced as she was that he was part of the plots against her. More and more her inexplicable behavior weighed on him. “She’s in bad shape,” Peter said to Milt Ebbins. But what could be done?

During another of May’s hospitalizations, Peter asked the doctors to perform psychiatric tests on her. May was typically pigheaded. She refused to cooperate and wrote to a friend, “I am incarcerated in UCLA psycho ward. Drs. have made sanity tests of me. This torture of a British subject cannot continue without active trouble.”

The psychiatrists at UCLA told Peter that May was suffering from advancing senility and some paranoia, but they did not advise that she be institutionalized. When May was released from the hospital, she wrote her son a letter begging his forgiveness for the way she had treated him over the years: “Today for the first time I realize how very harsh and unkind I have been. My dear Peter I can’t blame you for your past actions — Thank God I am a new woman.”

But Peter found May’s new attitude suspect, and in any event it was too late to mend fences. He continued to avoid her as much as possible and left it to Milt Ebbins to help her in day-to-day situations, pay her expenses, and send her flowers on Easter and Christmas.

May’s isolation and loneliness were relieved only by the continual flow through her life of impressionable young men who were fascinated by her title, her regal bearing, her caustic wit, her stories of world travel and friendship with royalty, her connections to Hollywood and the Kennedys. Always, May made efforts to intrigue anyone who might come to her door. When a new boy from the local liquor market delivered her Southern Comfort, she would introduce herself grandly: “I’m Lady Lawford, Peter Lawford’s mother. Would you like to come in?” If he did, she would regale the young man with stories of her husband’s military exploits, of her friendships with kings and queens, of the young Duke of Windsor’s drunkenness, of Joe Kennedy’s chicanery, of her son’s last telephone call to Marilyn Monroe.

But May was nothing if not contrary. Should a young man express admiration for Peter, May would snap, “He’s a bastard! I haven’t seen him in I don’t know how long. He never calls me.” Almost invariably, the reaction would be, “Oh, you poor dear,” and the irrepressible Lady Lawford would have a new friend.

Too many of these “friends,” however, were merely hucksters who saw a way to make a quick buck off a dotty old lady. She gave one young man she trusted a number of rings and silver pieces and asked him to have them appraised so that she could sell them and raise money — Peter was no longer paying her expenses at this point because he had so many debts of his own. Her friend returned a few days later, told her the items had been appraised for very little, and offered to sell them for her. He then gave May the pittance he had said the items were worth and pocketed the considerable difference. May lost all the diamonds she owned this way.

The one bright spot in Lady Lawford’s declining years was her friendship with Buddy Galon, a twenty-five-year-old theater student at UCLA. May’s friend Thelma Keaton, the widow of Buster Keaton, had met Galon when he was speaking on the subject of reincarnation at a symposium in Beverly Hills in the summer of 1966. May’s interest in the occult had not waned; in 1968 her description of an encounter with a UFO appeared in newspapers across the country in a column of hard-to-explain occurrences. She had espied, she said, “a beautiful candelabra UFO with sparkling lights hanging all around it, which immediately sped away at terrific speed through a hole in the sky.” Thelma Keaton thought May might enjoy Galon, a boyishly handsome blond who had briefly been a “Mousketeer” on television’s Mickey Mouse Club in the 1950s. She was right. Although there was a nearly sixty-year difference in their ages, May and Galon hit it off immediately. “Within fifteen minutes,” he recalled, “there was that wonderful chemical reaction that happens between people. Having spoken an hour or so before on reincarnation, I believed I already knew this woman — that we had met in a previous life. And later on, we used it to explain our age difference, in that she arrived early on this Earth plane, whereas I arrived late.”

Galon was amazed by Lady Lawford’s interest in him. “She knew that trick of making someone you’re with seem like the most important person in the world. Her whole concentration was on me, on the things that I was doing. And I thought, This woman knew Queen Mary and Louis B. Mayer and the Kennedys, and she thinks I’m interesting. That really attracted me to her.”

The two of them saw each other almost daily for the next five years. As “the most exciting and fascinating woman I’ve ever met,” May mesmerized the star-struck Galon with stories of royalty and movie stars. They discussed mysticism during a drive up the California coast. She helped him with his homework, and “she was,” he noted, “no dummy when it came to Shakespeare.” They had “vociferous” debates about international politics. They collapsed into helpless giggling at a Santa Barbara dinner party when an elderly German ambassador fell asleep facedown in his soup. In Palm Springs, they went skinny-dipping after midnight.

Nearly every day, they would have afternoon tea together at four o’clock. “It was a ritual,” Galon recalled, “a carryover from her past. In the later years, it was just the two of us, but in the earlier years we had company — Patrick Mahoney came quite often. Patrick is the half-brother of Sir Arthur Bliss, of the London Philharmonic. John Farquhar came, and so did Leo G. Carroll. Lady Victoria Stevenson, the queen’s cousin, would come in from Claremont. I might have been bowled over by these people with titles and everything, but I learned that they go to the bathroom just like we do. They’d come in with wrinkled, dirty clothes, dandruff on their shoulders. And some of them are bores.”

Galon has said that he and Lady Lawford were married on Easter Sunday, 1968, in Tijuana. Because he has no proof of this (according to him, the marriage certificate was destroyed) and because they never lived together, Galon’s claim has aroused skepticism. But whether or not he and May were in fact married is irrelevant. What is clear is that the two were very important to each other. “I didn’t want anything from the woman,” he said. “I didn’t make any claims on the estate. I had more than she had, really. But I had grown to love her. It wasn’t a passionate love, but it was love nonetheless.”

If their story is reminiscent of the Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon film Harold and Maude, it’s because, according to Galon, the film’s screenwriter, Colin Higgins, was told about his relationship with May. “That movie was based on us. Even the stuff about the young man being suicidal. I was fascinated by death when I first met May.”

As the months went by, Galon began to see the less enchanting side of May Lawford. “I noticed the liquor around the house, I experienced the mood changes. She could be impossible, she was awful, she was insulting. It would be enough to make you cry. It would happen so quickly, I wouldn’t be prepared for it. Sometimes a phone call would trigger these episodes, sometimes nothing at all. I called them her ‘black moods.’ I’d have to leave her place, and if I came back in an hour, she’d be fine.

“I’m not a psychiatrist, but it seemed to me she was manic- depressive. That makes some pieces of the puzzle fit into place. She could be so energetic, almost manic, when she was entertaining. She’d go into a frenzy. When you got her on a particular subject, she’d be like a motormouth.

“And then she’d turn. She showed me the Sports Illustrated piece about her accident and she sat there and roared about how humorous it was; then all of a sudden, she started to cry. It had been traumatic for her. And she worried, Will the same thing happen again?

“She would say, ‘They really do want me dead. They are not going to let me stay alive.’ In the beginning, I thought she was paranoid, that she was having delusions, hallucinations. But maybe because I was with her every day, I lost my objectivity. At the end, I came to believe her. Some of these things were real. I saw bruises on her that I don’t believe she could have inflicted on herself in any way.”

By March 1971, May, eighty-seven years old, seemed no longer able to function safely without constant attention. “She kept getting progressively worse,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “She always thought people were coming to kill her.” Peter and Milt conferred with May’s doctor, and he told them that in his opinion May would be best off in a nursing home.

It was left to Ebbins to break the news to her. “Look, May,” he told her, “you don’t feel well. You’ll be much better taken care of there.”

May had feared institutionalization. She often told friends, “They’re going to put me away. I can’t stand the thought of that.” She asked Ebbins, “They’ll be nice to me there, won’t they?” He reassured her, describing the Monterey Park Convalescent Hospital as “palatial, a wonderful home, with a beautiful courtyard — very highly recommended.” It was expensive, he added, and one of the best in Southern California. A private room in the facility cost thirty-four hundred dollars a month (equivalent to twice that in 2011 dollars). “And of course you’ll have a private room, May. Don’t worry about it.”

“She trusted me,” Ebbins recalled, “and she agreed. A few days later, he and Peter’s maid, Erma Lee Riley, drove May to the home on Garfield Avenue in Monterey Park. “They put her in her room and she was a martinet. She drove them crazy. She complained about everything: ‘Where’s my soup?’ she’d yell at them. ‘The bacon’s cold!’”

When Ebbins brought Peter to see May for the first time, they entered her room and Milt said, “May, look who’s here.” She stared at Peter and said, “Who are you?”

“May, it’s Peter, your son,” Ebbins said.

“No it isn’t!” May insisted.

“Yes, May, it’s Peter.”

“No! That’s Alan Mowbray.”

Peter bolted out of the room, leaned against the corridor wall, and began to cry. Finally, Milt convinced May that Peter was indeed her son, not Mowbray, the elderly English character actor who had passed away in 1969. “Peter looked so much older than May remembered him looking,” Ebbins said. “They hadn’t seen each other in years. His hair was long and gray.”

When Peter went back into the room, May looked at him closely and said, “Are you Peter?” He said, “Yes.” She then adopted a regal attitude and said, “How are you?” Ebbins recalled that “she started to act like a queen talking to her son.”

May remained in the Monterey Park Convalescent Hospital for almost a year. At first, the expenses of her hospitalization were paid from a conservancy account that Ebbins had set up with the nearly eighteen thousand dollars he had discovered in May’s several savings accounts. Peter had joint access to the account, and Ebbins soon discovered that he was writing checks to prostitutes and drug dealers. “I told him, ‘What are you, nuts? You could go to jail for that!’ He said to me, ‘Who’s gonna know?’ I told him a lot of people could find out and he was asking for trouble.” When Peter didn’t stop, Ebbins took access to the account away from him.

Buddy Galon, according to his account in his “as told to” autobiography of Lady Lawford, had gone out of town on family business, and when he returned he found May gone and her apartment bare. He did not know where she was and spent weeks trying to find out, telephoning a score of her friends without success. (He apparently never thought to ask Milt Ebbins where May was.) Six months later, he quite by accident discovered May’s whereabouts and — pretending to be her grandson — went to see her.

He described her as “emaciated,” her hair “hacked off” so closely that she looked like a concentration camp victim. She wore a thin muslin shift stained with urine and fecal matter. She was, Galon wrote, restrained at her ankles, waist, wrists, and mouth.

Milt Ebbins refuted the implications of Galon’s description of May’s condition. “She got excellent care. It was a very good hospital. I saw her from time to time. She wasn’t shaven, she didn’t have excrement on her. Now, toward the very end, she might have. But if you have somebody who can’t take care of themselves, that happens. She might have been incontinent. And they might have shaved her hair very short to help keep her groomed.”

He never saw May restrained in any way. “But it is possible that she had become violent. If the hospital felt that May might harm herself, they would have had to restrain her.”

Ebbins paid May a visit toward the end. “She was lying down. I didn’t notice if her hair was shaved because I couldn’t see the back of her head. She didn’t know anybody. She had grown quite feeble. She rambled. And then she went into a coma. They told me she probably wouldn’t last very long. Peter wouldn’t go to visit her. He didn’t want to see her like that.”

In his alarm over May’s condition, Buddy Galon tried to reach Peter in the hope that he could do something to help her. After a series of fruitless phone calls, he finally tracked Peter down in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on October 29. His emotions about to get the better of him, Galon pleaded with Peter to do something about the “horrors” he’d seen May subjected to. He expected Peter to be shocked and concerned about his mother and offer immediate help.

Instead, it was Galon who was shocked. He encountered a drunken, belligerent Peter on the telephone. When Galon said how concerned he was about May, Peter grunted. “Why don’t you just shoot her in the goddamn leg and be done with it?” he spat. “Now leave me alone — I’m getting married!”