FORTY

He had noticed something was wrong that August, when he started having twinges of pain in his stomach. At first he tried to ignore them, attributing them to tension. But the spasms got worse. They began first thing in the morning and continued throughout the day. The stabbing pain would immobilize him, and he was unable to sleep at night without sleeping pills. Finally, in mid-September, he saw a doctor. Immediately, he was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital for diagnostic tests. The doctors determined that the problem wasn’t Peter’s liver, as they had suspected at first. Although they were unable to come up with a definite diagnosis, they told him that an ulcer was the most likely culprit.

He remained in the hospital under observation for five weeks, anesthetized with regular shots of morphine that dulled the pain but couldn’t disguise the fact that something was still very wrong. “One day I realized my arms were like a skeleton’s,” Peter later said. “I got up and looked in the mirror. I was shocked to see my whole body was emaciated.”

His weight had dropped from 172 to 120 pounds. Mary, alarmed, insisted that he consult other doctors and enter a different hospital. He agreed, and on November 5 she drove him directly to the Scripps Clinic, one of the country’s top diagnostic centers, fifty miles south of Los Angeles. Within minutes of his admission the doctors knew what was wrong with him: he had a cyst on his pancreas, the organ that helps the body digest fat and also secretes insulin — and without which one cannot survive.

Peter didn’t immediately realize the seriousness of the situation. “I was thinking of cysts from childhood,” he said, “the tiny things you get on your eyelid. How bad could that be?” But the Scripps doctors told him that he required immediate surgery, and he found himself lying on a stretcher in an ambulance speeding back to Los Angeles and the UCLA Medical Center. “Why do I need an ambulance?” Peter remembered wondering. He was upset that the vehicle’s curtains weren’t drawn, because when the ambulance reached UCLA, it was surrounded, he said, by “gaping ghouls” craning their necks to get a glimpse of him.

Surgeons labored over Peter for six hours to remove the growth, which turned out to be the size of a grapefruit and perilously close to bursting. “I could have died on the operating table,” he later said. “Or even in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The doctors said that just the slightest bump could have been enough to burst the cyst.”

If the mass hadn’t been removed, the doctors told Peter, he would have died within two or three days. “I can truthfully say that Mary saved my life,” Peter said. He remained in the hospital for two weeks and then returned home for another ten weeks of recuperation, most of it spent resting in bed. “Mary was incredible, the greatest of all nurses. She resolved to bring me back, and she accomplished it through patience, care, and deep love.”

In mid-February 1973, Peter was well enough recovered to travel to Hawaii, where the Lawfords remained for six weeks as guests of Peter’s friends Gordon and Sue Damon. It was there that the marriage finally fell apart as Mary came to realize that the problems that had been nagging at her had not been mitigated by Peter’s illness, only postponed. In Hawaii, Peter — despite his fragile health — smoked pot, popped Quaaludes, took painkillers that he no longer needed, and drank at a time when his digestive system could least deal with alcohol.

Mary shared many of the drugs with Peter because he wanted her to, but she didn’t like doing it. She could see what was happening to him, and feared it might happen to her. “Peter was into drugs and he got me into them,” she later recalled. “It’s a period of my life I’d rather forget. The marriage was a mistake. I don’t have anything good to say about Peter Lawford.”

She made the decision to leave him during a shopping trip to Hong Kong with Sue Damon while Peter returned to Los Angeles from Hawaii. “While I was away, I realized I wasn’t happy with my life anymore. When I got back from Hong Kong, I wanted a separation.” In early April, she moved out of Cory Avenue and back into her father’s house in Holmby Hills. Peter wrote her a letter in which he apparently asked her to come back to him and promised that if she returned he would give up his drug use and his search for sexual variety.

She wrote him a reply on April 30, telling him that she did not believe his promise to give up “those two things.” She closed the letter saying that she had loved him very much, and that he had given her a great deal — he had made her a woman. But, she concluded, she needed to have her own identity, not be a part of Peter Lawford’s.

On June 16, the separation was made public. A few weeks later Peter gave an interview in which he said he would “fight like a tiger” to get Mary back. “I am not willing to accept the thought of a divorce,” he said. “I will fight it. I need her and love her.”

If there was any hope for a reconciliation, it was only on the condition that Peter change. Mary asked him to seek help for his addictions and get psychiatric counseling for his sexual problems — in other words, work toward removing what she saw as the obstacles to their marital happiness. When he wasn’t willing to do that, she realized that there was no hope for the marriage, that he was too set in his ways to change. “I felt Peter could have done something to save the marriage,” she said, “but he didn’t. I was very bitter.”

Peter didn’t fight the divorce, and Mary won a final decree on January 2, 1975. She requested no alimony, but Peter was ordered by the court to make all future lease payments on Mary’s 1970 Mercedes- Benz (license plate, “BUNDLE”) and to purchase it for her at the end of the lease term. Two years later, Mary won a judgment against Peter in LA superior court for nonpayment of the car lease expenses ($1,426) and attorney’s fees ($1,658). A garnishee of wages due Peter from Landsburg Productions netted $1,630, but none of the other companies Peter had worked for were able to provide more than a few dollars. The full judgment was never satisfied.

BY THIS TIME IN HIS LIFE, attachments of Peter’s salary were an everyday occurrence, something Milt Ebbins had become expert at evading. “He was so besieged by creditors,” Ebbins recalled, “that his salary was attached every time he turned around. They couldn’t touch residuals, but every time he got a new job his salary was garnisheed. So I’d put his contracts in Chrislaw’s name, and the creditors didn’t know about Chrislaw — they were always wondering where the money went. To make sure they didn’t have time to find out, I’d run down to the production companies the day before he finished the job and physically get the money.” Aware as he was of Peter’s financial troubles, Ebbins didn’t take his commission from the earnings. “I had other clients, like Elizabeth Montgomery and Mort Sahl. Toward the end, for years, I never got a dime from Peter Lawford. I just never took it.”

Peter’s financial problems had taken on an extra dimension by 1973. He was still living as though he were a wealthy man, and still not paying many of his bills. Now, however, there was the added element of drug expenses. Peter’s dependence on marijuana, cocaine, and Quaaludes — and his recent experimentation with PCP, MDA, and even heroin — drained his cash reserves and ate up whatever salary he received from the few television guest shots he was able to muster. (He did one TV movie in 1973, nothing else.)

Peter began to borrow money from friends, but he found that his new life-style had left him with few of his old cohorts. Now, drug users and drug dealers were the most important people in his life; they came and went at Cory Avenue at will, bringing with them hangers- on and groupies who were thrilled to meet Peter Lawford and more than happy to take advantage of his hospitality. In the process, almost all of Peter’s closest longtime friends decided they no longer wanted to be part of his life.

This process of alienation had begun years before, prompted by his pot smoking. At first, he had tried to convert people. Barbara and Jackie Cooper remembered a weekend in Palm Springs in the late sixties when Peter, while he was staying with Anthony Newley and Joan Collins, threw a party for them. “In the middle of the party,” Barbara Cooper recalled, “they all went into the other room. We were sitting there all by ourselves, like two idiots.” The Coopers soon realized, as Jackie put it, that “they were smoking shit.”

The next day, Peter went to the Coopers’ house across the street in an exuberant mood. “Goddammit,” he said. “Everybody stop drinking! This is what you have to do.” He lit up a joint. “When you smoke this stuff, you’re sharp, you feel good, you don’t have hangovers. Look at me!”

“Like most people who started on pot in those days, he wanted to turn someone else on,” Barbara Cooper recalled. “But in most cases he couldn’t. Not with us, certainly. As time went on, we saw less and less of him because of that.”

As Peter went from marijuana to harder drugs, more and more of his friends fell by the wayside, even those who had known and loved him for thirty years, people who remembered the sensitive, fun-loving athlete he had been. They found it very difficult to be around him now, and just as Judy Garland’s friends had done with her, they “washed their hands” of him. “I never had much to do with Peter later,” Roy Marcher said. “He’d make a date to come over to my house at seven, and at seven he’d call and be completely incoherent. Finally I just said, ‘No more.’” Even Molly Dunne, who had introduced Peter to pot, withdrew from him when he started taking harder drugs.

Reporters, Peter discovered, were among his best friends at this point in his life. He gave lengthy interviews to several British newspapers for around ten thousand dollars each, providing just enough juicy tidbits so that no one quite realized he was giving away very few real secrets. There were many British journalists in Los Angeles, working for either the American tabloids or the Fleet Street papers, and they could be counted on to buy Peter meals and drinks in exchange for a few innocuous morsels about his past affiliations.

Milt Ebbins was one of the few friends who remained loyal, but even he began to distance himself. “Peter resented me being straight,” Ebbins said. “Whenever they started doing drugs, I’d get up and walk out. Not marijuana, they could smoke that all they wanted, I didn’t care. But when they started sniffing coke and doing PCP and all that shit, I got up and walked out. And druggies hate that.”

Peter certainly did, and he grew nasty with friends who expressed disapproval of his drug taking. Jean MacDonald remembered a visit Peter made to Hawaii in the midseventies, when she went to his hotel room in the hope of talking him through his problems. “He was distressed over a lot of things, and I went there to try and be helpful to him. It was the most bizarre thing. He was like somebody I didn’t know. He wanted me to turn on, and when I didn’t want to he looked at me like What’s the matter with you? And I’m looking at him like, What’s the matter with you! He practically threw me out of the room.”

Jean’s reaction the next time she saw Peter, in Hawaii a few years later, was typical of many of his friends’. “I saw him coming out of a drugstore and my first impulse was to run over to him and say hello. But I thought, ‘He’s gonna put me down, he’s gonna say something nasty. I don’t need that.’ So I just turned and went the other way. And I’ll always remember that day with tremendous sadness.”

PETER HAD PLENTY OF COMPANY as a “druggie” in the early 1970s, particularly when cocaine became the drug of choice.

Celebrities often had little trouble scoring drugs, often free of charge. At a party, Peter might meet someone who, when they shook hands, would slip him a packet of coke. The boast in Hollywood was no longer “I got his autograph,” but rather “I dropped some stuff on him.” That had become the ultimate in cool, and Hollywood had not had a similar rash of drug use since the twenties, when heroin, cocaine, and morphine ruined the lives and careers of a number of stars before the industry, fearing a public backlash against its product, instituted a morality code in 1930 and drug use became unfashionable. It remained so until the late sixties, when the pendulum swung back.

And it was now a pastime the children of celebrities were taking up as well. Christopher Lawford had turned eighteen in 1973, and like the children of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, he had grown up essentially fatherless. Peter had never been much of a paternal figure in his son’s life, and Chris had rarely seen him after Pat had moved him and his three sisters to New York when he was nine.

Bobby Kennedy had served as a surrogate father not only to John and Caroline but to Chris and his sisters as well, giving them strong guidance and a sense that they mattered as individuals. The thing all the Kennedy youngsters liked best about Uncle Bobby was that he never made them feel less worthy because they were kids. With Bobby’s death, all that changed. The horror and disillusionment were bad enough, but suddenly the children had no rudder, no one who treated them as equals. Their uncle Teddy tried to take up the slack, but, with his own personal problems, he was an inadequate replacement. Those who suffered the most were Bobby’s oldest boys — Joe, Bobby Junior, and David — and Chris Lawford.

A canoe trip in 1969 was symbolic. Bobby had taken the older boys on the trip annually, working with them as part of a team to conquer the Green River in Colorado. Now, they were all looking forward to this first trip with Uncle Ted as a way to recapture their sense of Kennedy family cohesion.

The trip was a disaster. Ted and the other adults segregated themselves from the youngsters, left them to their own devices, and got angry when the boys tried to engage them in horseplay. As Chris put it to Peter Collier and David Horowitz, authors of a family biography The Kennedys, the adults “wanted to float along with their frozen daiquiris and not be bothered . . . we were all upset. We didn’t want to have anything to do with them after that. For the rest of the trip we took our sleeping bags and found the hardest place to get to every night, places where they couldn’t find us, and camped there. We’d sit in the darkness talking about what a drag the family was, what an incredible asshole Teddy was to let it happen, how it was never like this when Bobby was alive. We had the feeling that nobody cared enough about us anymore to make us part of the family.”

Chris’s closest relationships were with Bobby Junior and David Kennedy, both extremely troubled young men free-falling into drug dependency. There had first been pot, then LSD, then the amphetamine “black beauties.” When Bobby was arrested with his cousin Bobby Shriver for marijuana possession, Ethel Kennedy threw him out of the house and he headed for San Francisco, riding freight cars with bums. “It was good,” he said. “I could be one of them and not be a Kennedy.” On Telegraph Hill, he panhandled for drug money.

Chris Lawford and David Kennedy, both fifteen, felt like orphans. David was estranged from his mother, who, friends say, treated him harshly. (She blamed him for just about everything that went wrong, David said. “Her idea was that it didn’t really matter whether or not I had actually done anything. I would do it sooner or later, so she might as well get heavy with me in advance. I remember it all clearly. It was the point in my life when everything began to turn against me.”) In 1969, Pat Lawford put Christopher in a boarding school and left the United States for France with her daughters. “I don’t want to have anything to do with this family for a while,” Pat told Chris. “I’m going to France to get my own life together, away from the Kennedys.” David and Chris, both feeling abandoned, hitchhiked to New York during the summer; when they arrived they begged money from commuters in Grand Central Station. They made about forty dollars after an hour and then went to Central Park to buy drugs. They scored some heroin and snorted it, for the first time.

They met two girls and invited them to Pat’s Fifth Avenue apartment for a party. Before long, the place was overrun with street people and hippies. David fell asleep; when he awoke in the early morning hours he found winos and motorcycle-gang types frying eggs in the kitchen. When the neighbors threatened to call the police, Chris and David persuaded everyone to clear out.

David’s drug addiction ultimately killed him in a Palm Beach hotel room in 1984. Chris’s was helped along by his father. Chris had been expelled from Middlesex for drug use, and when his mother discovered him behind a couch with a needle in his arm, she sent him out to his father for a while — and “that was a big mistake,” Milt Ebbins recalled. David Kennedy said that when he came out to Peter’s house to visit Christopher that summer of 1971, “I knocked on the door and there’s Peter Lawford. I hadn’t seen him for years. The first thing he does after saying hello is offer me a pipe full of hash.”

Peter had no compunctions about sharing his drug supply with his son. Christopher came to stay with his father at Cory Avenue again in January 1973, and it seemed that drugs brought the two of them closer together. “Peter and I would stay up all night doing dope together and talking about family problems,” Chris said. “We’d have what seemed a breakthrough — saying we loved each other and hugging and all that. But the next morning it would all be gone. He’d snap at me and absolutely cringe if I called him ‘Dad’ instead of ‘Peter.’” One night, when the drugs seemed to have created a special rapport between father and son, Chris let down his guard and told Peter how alienated he and his cousins felt, how badly they needed adult guidance and love. “I need you, Dad,” Chris said finally, and started to cry. “I need you to be my father — at least for a little while. My life is a mess and if I go back East again it’s going to get worse.”

Peter grunted and told the boy, “You must be high on something. Get the hell out of here.”

WHEN THERE WAS ONLY FUN to be had, Peter and Christopher got along beautifully. Not all of Peter’s friends withdrew from him because of his drug use; some grew closer. One of these was Elizabeth Taylor, who hadn’t seen Peter much during her years as Mrs. Richard Burton, when the volatile couple spent most of their time in Europe. In 1973, however, the Burtons separated and Liz returned to Los Angeles, where she renewed her closeness with Peter. “He and Elizabeth used to turn on together,” Peter’s companion Arthur Natoli remembered. “They were high on pot a lot. I don’t know if he supplied her. When it came to him and drugs, I turned the other way.”

Dominick Dunne, who had just produced Elizabeth’s film Ash Wednesday, recalled an afternoon he and his daughter, Dominique, spent at Disneyland in 1973 with Liz and her daughters Liza Todd and Maria Burton, Peter, Christopher, George Cukor, and Roddy McDowall. “This huge helicopter picked us all up at the top of Coldwater Canyon and Mulholland Drive, and took us to Disneyland. It was the first helicopter ever allowed to land inside Disneyland.”

Once the group started touring the park, a huge crowd gathered and started to follow them — “because of Elizabeth,” Dunne recalled. “It wasn’t because of the rest of us, believe me.” They were able to escape the prying eyes only inside rides like Pirates of the Caribbean, where the group tumbled into a gondola for a water trip through the buccaneers’ nighttime world.

Once their boat was safely enveloped in darkness, the group got giddy. As Dunne remembered it, “Elizabeth had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and Peter had something, and everybody got the bottles going. Then a bit of coke was going around and you’d hear sniffing. Everybody was just screaming with laughter. It was one of the maddest moments I ever saw in my life. And then the boat came out into the sunlight again. Everybody tried to compose themselves and Liz waved regally to the crowds as they cheered her.”

A few years later, Dunne saw Peter at a party at the house of the literary agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar. “There was a woman at the party who shall remain nameless,” Dunne recalled. “She said to Peter, ‘You got anything? You got any stuff?’ Now I used to be a drinker and I used to take the occasional drug, so we all went into the bathroom at this swell party we were at and did a couple of lines and all got screaming with laughter in the bathroom. While we were doing the lines, Peter asked us if we wanted to buy any. And then I felt this tremendous sadness to know that Peter Lawford was dealing drugs. The woman said to me later, ‘Can you believe it? He’s dealing! Dealing!’”

NO MATTER HOW BADLY THINGS were going for Peter in his private life, when he worked he was the picture of professionalism. Doris Day enjoyed his sporadic appearances on her television sitcom in 1971 and 1972. “I was never aware of any problems Peter may have had with drinking,” she recalled. “He did seem to be preoccupied, and he kept to himself a great deal. He wasn’t a very open person. He was not one to shoot the breeze on the set. He would just do the scene and then go to his dressing room. But when we did our scenes together, we really had a good time. He was very warm, and I think he really enjoyed working with me. I think he was a very underrated actor. He enjoyed working the way I do, we both loved the spontaneity of the first take. He was great at improvising, and we’d throw things back and forth to each other. It was terrific. We really kept each other on our toes.”

Peter’s brief appearance in They Only Kill Their Masters in 1972 brought back bittersweet memories for him. A murder mystery, its gimmick was that in addition to its stars, James Garner and Katharine Ross, a great many cast members had been MGM contract players — Peter, June Allyson, and Ann Rutherford among them. The movie was the last filmed on the old Metro lot, which during the production was in the process of being dismantled and sold by the studio’s new owners.

“It was a totally depressing scene,” Peter said. “That old back lot, number two, hadn’t been touched for years. We used the old Andy Hardy house in the film — it’s completely overgrown with vines and bushes. . . . I get moments of melancholia. Middle-aged melancholia, if you will.”

Peter, in fact, didn’t have any scenes with the other MGM alumni. There was a minimum of interaction between him and June Allyson, limited mostly to the first day on the set, and the film’s director James Goldstone recalled that it wasn’t always pleasant. “There were jokes and light banter between them, and some of it got a little nasty. Peter found it rather amusing, in his way, which is a sort of fey, wan kind of sophisticated bemusement. Here he was back, burying the lot on which he was born.”

The MGM reunion angle didn’t help make They Only Kill Their Masters any more than a moderate success. As Goldstone put it: “I don’t think ‘Come see the stars of yesteryear’ was a very good way to sell a sophisticated suspense mystery to contemporary audiences in 1972.”

But the early seventies did see the advent of the nostalgia craze that hasn’t waned to this day. Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Clark Gable, W. C. Fields, Mae West — all became cultural icons again, for the young as well as the old. The sci-fi movies of the 1950s, trashy as they were, enjoyed a tremendous revival. So did the MGM musicals of the forties, as theaters across the country held revivals and invited such stars as Peter, Ann Miller, Van Johnson, and Cyd Charisse to attend. Invariably, they were mobbed by adoring fans of all ages.

Before long both MGM and the stars of its heyday were able to take lucrative advantage of the nostalgia boom. In 1973 the studio hired Peter, Gene Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, Fred Astaire, Liza Minnelli, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Bing Crosby, James Stewart, Mickey Rooney, and Frank Sinatra to narrate That’s Entertainment, a dazzling 132-minute compilation of the best MGM musical numbers.

As did the others, Peter narrated a single segment of the film, and he was shown in the “Varsity Drag” number from Good News.

The clips were delightful, stirring pleasant memories in older audiences and allowing younger viewers to see what their parents had raved about for so long. The movie was a huge box-office hit.

The vogue for nostalgia persisted throughout the seventies, and it brought Peter other opportunities as well. He did a voice-over along with Liza Minnelli in the 1972 animated film Return to the Land of Oz. In 1976 he was paid handsomely to participate in “Peter Lawford Day,” one of a series of “Sails with the Stars” offered by the Carras Cruise Lines. Passengers spent a few days at sea aboard the cruise liner Daphne, saw a screening of Good News, and then heard Hollis Alpert, the movie critic for Saturday Review, interview Peter about his career.

In 1975, some news was made when Oui magazine offered Peter ten thousand dollars to pose nude along with one of his MGM costars, perhaps Esther Williams or Janet Leigh. Both of the actresses turned the offer down, and Peter told the press that the lady he posed with would probably have to be younger than he.

The Fleet Street papers reported that when Rose Kennedy heard about this, she “became quite livid” and ordered Senator Ted Kennedy to talk Peter out of the idea. Teddy may well have done so, because Peter soon announced that he had declined to bare all, and explained his decision thus: “I wouldn’t want to be guilty of disappointing the older generation or disillusioning the younger generation.” (Peter was being overly modest; according to a number of sources, he was very well endowed.) The London Daily Mirror had the last word on the matter when they called the idea “the most ridiculous project he has embarked upon since the days when he walked around with his initials on his toe caps.”

Another source of income for Peter was television game shows. Many of the shows hired the “stars of yesteryear” to appeal to their largely middle-aged viewers, and Peter’s charm and his facility with word games had made him a particularly desirable guest star on such programs since the midsixties. (May boasted that Peter “holds the all- time record for winning Password.”)

Marion Dixon, whom he dated for a year after his separation from Mary Rowan, was astonished by the professionalism Peter maintained despite whatever damage the excesses of the night before had done to him. “One morning he had to go to the studio to tape some game show — I think it was Masquerade Party,” Dixon recalled. “Peter was so messed up he couldn’t drive, so I had to take him over there. He wasn’t even coherent in the car. I was sure he wouldn’t be able to perform. When we got there he changed dramatically. It was like he was a completely different person. He seemed perfectly sober, he did a good job on the show, everything. I was astounded. Then, after the performance, he got back in the car and changed again. His head was lolling on the headrest, he was barely coherent.”

Dixon broke off the relationship soon thereafter. “I couldn’t take it. He had no control over the substance abuse. He wasn’t strong enough to break away from it. He thought of himself as a victim. I could no longer handle baby-sitting him, which was what I was doing. Toward the end of our relationship, I told him how disappointed I was. When I was fourteen, I went to the opening of a big mall in my neighborhood, and Peter Lawford was one of the stars who made personal appearances at the ceremonies. I was so excited to see him I snuck under a police barricade and was able to run up to him and say hello. For all the intervening years I kept this glamorous image of him in my mind. And here I was with him and he was not the same person I had seen under those klieg lights. He wasn’t nearly the person I had thought he would be.

“When I told him that, he didn’t say a word. He just looked at me, and the look on his face was very sad.”