THREE

Peter’s eyes nearly popped out of his head as he and May were escorted around Elstree. Called “the British Hollywood,” the studio was only a few years old and was completely equipped for sound production. “Lady Lawford and Master Peter” toured prop rooms with Roman columns and Louis XIV chaises loungues, costume rooms with World War I soldiers’ uniforms and Victorian bustles. In the makeup rooms they watched actors apply their greasepaint, and Peter was intoxicated. “I’ll never forget the smell,” he said.

Then he set foot on his first soundstage. Peter’s stare widened at the sight of arc lights, scaffolding, sound booms, cameras. After a few moments he and his mother were told to be as quiet as possible — a scene was about to be shot. The production was one of the first British talkies, Poor Old Bill, starring the portly low comedian Leslie Fuller, and Peter watched with rapt attention as the director, Monty Banks, orchestrated a scene in which a small boy puts his father’s clothes on his dog.

It was not going well. The dog was doing fine, but the young actor playing the boy repeatedly botched his lines. “It’s no good!” the mercurial Banks cried over and over. “Do it again!” He was ready to walk off the set when he spotted Peter standing next to his mother on the sidelines. The right age, angelically pretty, Peter seemed the answer to the director’s prayers. “That’s the type of boy I want!” Banks exclaimed, pointing at Peter. “Come here!”

May brought Peter over to Banks, who spoke with him for a few minutes. He then asked May if he could audition the boy in his office that afternoon. She agreed, and Banks shut down production for the rest of the day.

After a lunch at which the excited Peter barely touched his food, he and May were escorted into Banks’s office. As May sat in a corner chair, Peter stood in front of the director’s desk and asked, “Would you like me to recite in English, Spanish, or French?” May thought to herself, Poor man, he’s really in for it.

Peter recited a bit of child’s nonsense called “Tony Goes to War,” then danced and did imitations for the director — who was very pleased. “Wonderful, perfect, he’s in,” Banks told May. “Let’s sign the contracts.”

May wasn’t prepared for such abrupt success. “Now, wait just a minute,” she stammered. “I’ll have to talk to his father.” Banks handed the telephone to May and she, with some trepidation, dialed Sir Sydney.

The general was not pleased. “Are you insane, my dear?” he asked May. “I think you’d better come home.” May told Banks that she would have to discuss the matter with her husband and would let him know the next day. All the way home, Peter pleaded with May to persuade his father to let him take the job. “He must let me do it!” Peter cried over and over. “He must!”

At home, things did not go well. The general refused to allow Peter to accept Banks’s offer, despite hours of pleading by May and Peter’s tearful refusal to eat dinner that evening. But the next morning, as Peter’s hunger strike continued through breakfast, Sir Sydney softened. May convinced him that this would be only a one-time event, and that in fact Peter’s appearance in a film might “get such nonsense out of his system.” With the caveat “Just this one picture,” the general agreed.

May signed a contract for Peter, who was paid ten pounds a day for what amounted to five days’ work. He, of course, cared nothing about the money. What he loved was the atmosphere of the soundstage, the frenetic activity, the warmth of the lights, the glamorous actors and costumes and sets. He felt immediately at home on a soundstage, and he took to acting as though it were encoded in his genes. He remembered his lines perfectly and performed the scene with the dog with a naturalism that thrilled Banks. The director got what he wanted in just two takes.

The best part of it all for Peter was that while he was acting he was the center of attention, not just an occasional addendum to the world in which his mother was the vortex. It gave him an exhilarating feeling of freedom — and for the first time, a real sense of self-esteem.

That self-esteem was heightened by the publication of a major profile of him in the London Sunday Dispatch on April 26, 1931. Jackie Coogan’s worldwide success had created an inordinate interest in fledgling child actors, and the article, titled “Wise Little English Film Star,” dubbed Peter “Britain’s Jackie Coogan.” The unnamed author of the piece described Peter as “the stuff that stars are made of” and quoted him on his opposition to a military career: “It would be very nice to be like Daddy, but it would take too long to be a general. I could become a film star at once. I would rather a profession where I can start at the top.” Then he added, “Besides, think of being in that war.” The writer then editorialized, “So a rational attitude towards the stupidity of war has succeeded the child’s hero-worshipping ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’”

The profile went on to describe Peter as “quite unselfconscious and at the same time quite unspoilt by his success. He can dance with a savage vigour and rhythm which would not be out of place in Harlem, and he has even picked up tap-dancing. He can already play the ukelele with technical efficiency.”

It was heady stuff for such a small boy — and so too were his admiring reviews once Poor Old Bill was released. But when Peter saw himself on-screen for the first time, he squirmed with embarrassment. “I really thought I looked like a bloody fool,” he said. Still, the acting bug had bitten him, and he nagged at his parents to let him do another role.

They refused, because by now there was mounting hostility toward the idea from both sides of his family. Peter’s quotes in the Sunday Dispatch had angered May’s father, now in his early seventies, who telephoned her and bellowed, “Do you think nothing of putting your only child into hell?” And Sydney’s sister Ethel, a widowed millionairess, threatened to disinherit Peter, to whom she had planned to leave her entire estate, unless he “got over this nonsense once and for all!”2

That didn’t seem likely. Peter’s vague, childish dreams of acting were cemented by the joy he felt at appearing in Poor Old Bill; he talked constantly about making more films and pleaded with his parents to allow it. May managed to persuade Sir Sydney to let Peter do one more film, A Gentleman of Paris, before they returned to France in 1932. There, Peter appeared in several films during the next twelve months, but his fledgling career didn’t have any more of a chance in France than it had in Britain: in 1933, Peter was once again uprooted.

Sir Sydney’s financial picture had improved through a moderate inheritance, and he decided that the family should travel — as much to get Peter away from soundstages as to fulfill his own desire to see more of the world. Over the next five years, the Lawford family would not live in any one region of the earth for more than nine months at a time.

AS HIS COUSIN VALENTINE LAWFORD has said, “Peter wasn’t brought up, he was dragged up.” During his adolescence, he traveled with his parents to India, Australia, Tasmania, Tahiti, Colombia, Brazil, Hawaii, Spain, Portugal, Ceylon, Bermuda, Panama, Cuba, Nassau, and the United States.

Peter remembers this nomadic existence fondly. “I loved it and it never occurred to me that it might be an odd way of growing up.” In India, he rode elephants and haggled with merchants in the bazaars of Bombay. In Ceylon, the family stayed at the opulent Grand Oriental Hotel and May showed him the cinnamon gardens and Buddhist temples that had captivated her as a girl.

The boy’s most vivid memories of this period were of Tahiti, where the family settled for six months in 1933, living in a thatched hut on the Blue Lagoon. “It is a beautiful spot,” Peter recalled. “I’ll never forget the coal-black sand glistening in the sunlight. We had a place right on the ocean. The water was so clear you could see the coral underneath. I lived in shorts, had my own canoe, and swam from dawn to dusk. It was a boy’s paradise.”

He was thrilled with Hawaii as well. In October 1934, the Lawfords sailed into Los Angeles harbor aboard the Italian liner California and spent a week in LA before embarking again for Hawaii. They remained in Honolulu for nine months, living in the sumptuous Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the “Pink Palace” on the still-pristine, uncrowded sands of Waikiki Beach. One evocative photograph shows Peter sitting at a table beneath a huge umbrella, with Diamond Head behind him in the distance. Dressed entirely in white, two-tone oxfords on his feet, his hair slicked back, he calls to mind a boy Jay Gatsby.

Hawaii enchanted Peter, and he returned there again and again throughout his life. It was in Waikiki that he first learned to surf, a sport that was to obsess him as a young man. He learned the hard way: “The surfboards tip up if you’re not careful, and one day mine tipped, hit me over the head and knocked me out.” He was saved from drowning by a companion.

The Lawfords were in Nassau, the Bahamas, in December 1936 when the newly crowned King Edward VIII abdicated his throne in order to marry the American divorcée Wallis Warfield Simpson. Lady Lawford saved until her death a one-sheet bulletin from the Nassau Guardian that announced the abdication, and she — like many other Britons — never forgave Mrs. Simpson for stealing her sovereign. For years she referred to the woman who became the Duchess of Windsor as “that whore” and added gleefully, “She was a prostitute. One officer who had slept with her said that she was quite good, but not that good!”

The family’s travels kept them on shipboard almost as much as on land. At sea they lived in palatial staterooms, often given to them gratis by captains who were friends of the general or by the shipping line, since their arrivals usually made news in the local papers and provided free publicity for the ocean liner.

Sir Sydney and May ate at the captain’s table and dressed in tuxedoes and ball gowns for elegant receptions. Sometimes, May and Peter performed skits for the amusement of the other passengers. On a return trip from Australia in 1937, Peter learned of a father-and-son talent contest. When Sir Sydney refused to participate, an undaunted Peter persuaded May to allow him to masquerade as a girl and enter the mother-and-daughter contest with her. They donned Tahitian grass skirts and coconuts from their luggage trunks, performed as Lady Lawford and her little girl, and won the contest. Then Peter grandly announced that he was really a boy, and was nevertheless allowed to keep the first prize. (What that was remains unrecorded — as does Sir Sydney’s reaction to all this.)

His family’s travels did nothing to dilute Peter’s dreams of getting back into the movies. The day after they arrived in Tahiti, May noticed a movie crew on the sand about three quarters of a mile from their hut. As she walked closer along the beach, she saw cameras, lights, reflectors, and microphones. When she got close enough to recognize faces, sure enough, there was Peter, bustling happily amid the confusion, delighted to do anything the crew needed him to do.

Peter took every opportunity to see movies as well. Everywhere the family traveled, he went to the pictures as often as possible, sometimes three or four times a week, sometimes in a primitive hut with a generator to run the projector. He would sit, completely absorbed in the fantasy world that flickered to life in front of him, fascinated by the performers, the sets, the costumes. But he couldn’t enjoy the films completely; watching movies only reminded him that he wanted to be appearing in them himself. Still, he went back again and again because, he said, he hoped he might somehow see himself up on the screen again.

WHEN PETER WAS AROUND NINE, he began to receive a new kind of attention that had nothing to do with acting, one that both excited and frightened him. He was an eye-catching lad, his brown hair thick and wavy, his blue eyes captivating. Fair, smooth skinned, and slim, he had a sweet, sad shyness about him that charmed many of the adults he encountered and drew some of them to him in sexual arousal.

The first such advance, according to May, occurred when the famed British war correspondent Ward Price encountered Peter in a deserted hotel hallway, pulled the boy close, and tried to kiss him. Peter resisted and went back to his parents’ room to complain: “He thinks I’m something I’m not.” Lady Lawford wasn’t too concerned. She said of Price, “Even though he did run on two currents — AC and DC — I couldn’t help but like him.”

Soon thereafter, Peter was molested by a friend of the family, a man he had come to know as his “uncle.” Peter was never comfortable talking about the incident; all he would say later was that a pillow had been pushed over his face to silence him and that the experience traumatized him.

He had more ambivalent feelings about his first sexual encounter with a woman, when he was ten. While staying in the south of France, Peter’s beautiful thirty-five-year-old German governess took him on a picnic. After their lunch, as they sat in the cool shade of a sprawling tree surrounded by wildflowers fluttering in a soft breeze, the woman pulled Peter toward her and put his head in her lap.

Deeply contented, Peter began to drift into sleep when he was roused by the woman’s hand under his shirt. She rubbed his stomach, then worked her way down into his shorts and began gently to caress his penis. Peter recalled that the sensation was highly pleasurable — “and for some reason, most natural.”

The governess then asked Peter to kiss and suckle her breasts. He began clumsily and she stopped him. “Doucement,” she told him. “Gently.” He resumed in a dreamy slow motion. After a few moments, the woman became aroused and held Peter’s head against her bosom, more insistent now. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he later surmised that the woman soon reached orgasm, because she suddenly lifted herself up, turned Peter on his back and started “eating me alive.” The woman fellated Peter to climax — his first.

He later said that this experience had not been an isolated one, that several of his nannies had taken sexual advantage of him around this age. He found himself deeply confused by the experiences, his emotions a jumble of pleasure, guilt, and fear.

Sexual relations with a governess — or any mother substitute — can be as disturbing to a child as incest, and Peter transferred his deeply conflicted feelings about them to his mother. Speaking of his parents years later, Peter said, “I adored him and loathed her, from a very early age.”

It wasn’t as simple as that. Peter’s third wife, Deborah Gould, remembers him telling her about these early sexual experiences: “Peter said that he resented his mother leaving him with these women who took advantage of him. But he really didn’t know what to think about it at that age. He loved his mother and hated her at the same time.”

2 Because Peter later returned to acting, he never did receive an inheritance from Ethel, and Frank Bunny, who died in 1940, omitted May from his will for the same reason.