Peter Lawford, by James Spada
Lord, M. G.
T he first time I saw Peter Lawford 1 on television was in the late sixties. I was twelve or thirteen, and even with a child's susceptibility to trendiness, I sensed that this withered actor with...
...So if I was shocked by James Spada's new biography of Lawford, it was not because of any disclosures about Lawford's late-inlife substance abuse: it seemed perfectly logical that a washed-up actor who fought bankruptcy with gigs on "The Gong Show" would seek solace in chemicals...
...Or was it to blunt memories of what he had, in fact, done...
...Lawford stands in sharp contrast to Stephen Ward, the other notorious procurer of the 1960s, whose bungling brought down an entire British government...
...T he Monroe coverup was the near- ' est thing in Lawford's life to a finest hour...
...22.50 M. G. Lord THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 45...
...Long before Peter tied the knot with Patricia—back when Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., Ambassador to the Court of St...
...His style as a biographer is to bulldoze dirt onto the reader, without ever sifting through it or relating one shovelful to another, as when he piles up the details of the sexual affairs between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedy brothers—first Jack, then Bobby...
...In fact, one of the few moments when Lawford's behavior strayed from the reptilian to the vaguely human was when he learned of President Kennedy's assassination: he wretched and sobbed on the floor of his Lake Tahoe hotel room...
...While married to her second husband, however, she overcame her aversion to "that horrible, messy, unsanitary thing that all husbands expect from their wives" and conceived Peter adulterously in order to snare her third husband, Sir Sidney Lawford, and, with him, the title "Lady...
...Although Spada drops the analogy, the reader can't help but stumble upon clues to substantiate it...
...No, what astonished me was that anybody—especially a style-conscious creature like JFK—had ever taken Lawford seriously...
...Thwarted in her own theatrical ambitions, she pushed him toward the stage...
...To insure that his gossipy, tabloid tone is untainted by profundity, he steadfastly refuses to interpret any of his facts or M G. Lord is a columnist and cartoonist for New York Newsday...
...Peter's childhood was played out against the backdrop of her alcoholism...
...An unaccomplished actor, philandering husband, and disastrous father (he gave his son cocaine as a present on his twenty-first birthday), Lawford could at least do something right: procure women...
...Her pushing finally paid off, but, curiously, once he obtained a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, she turned on him...
...Or that Lawford, who introduced Monroe to the Kennedys, combed through the sex goddess's apartment while her corpse was still warm to remove all evidence of the "Catholic family men...
...Ward was a social-climbing osteopath who fixed up Conservative Minister of War John Profumo with chorus girl Christine Keeler...
...Without irony, Spada tells us that, just as Kennedy assembled "the best and the brightest"—people like Theodore Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.—as his presidential advisers, he turned to Lawford, the soon-to-be slobbering juicer and junkie in the Nehru jacket, for tips on dress, in recognition of Lawford's "sophistication, his savoir faire, and his sartorial flair...
...even place them in context...
...A serial mar-der, vindictive drunk, and ruthless social mountaineer whose frigidity drove her first husband to kill himself, May Lawford (nee Bunny) never wanted to breed...
...why should they have been fussy about a go-between...
...At a time when studios could break contracts if performers violated a rigid moral code, she once tried unsuccessfully to convince Louis B. Mayer that Peter was homosexual...
...Lawford's skill and discretion are all the more impressive when he is compared with a less efficient practitioner of the same craft...
...James's, urged appeasement of Hitler—Lady Lawford referred to the clan as "those barefoot Irish peasants...
...When he was ten, she ordered his tutor to stop teaching him math and Latin so that his career options would narrow...
...In 1960, she threatened to take to the streets with a "Vote for Nixon" banner...
...Even a feminist opposed to the practice of blaming Mom would have to admit Lady Lawford was trouble...
...Whatever modest affection Lawford might have felt for her was replaced with loathing...
...True, at the time, Lawford's look was a little different: more Cary Grant, less Timothy Leary...
...This was before one referred to political bimbos as "model/actresses...
...Did he guzzle, snort, and toke to blunt fantasies of what he might have achieved...
...Nor was it because Lawford, who was once married to John E Kennedy's sister Patricia, procured starlets for in-laws Jack and Bobby: the former President and attorney general were indiscriminate about sexual partners...
...This is unfortunate, because important nuggets are lost in the debris: To this day, how many Americans know that Bobby paid Marilyn a visit on the day of her death and left Los Angeles a few hours after her alleged suicide...
...Unfortunately, Keeler also had a thing going with an accused Soviet spy, and when the story leaked to the press it led to Profumo's resignation, Ward's suicide, and the election of a Labour government...
...He not only hooked up his high-ranking pals with top-of-the-line sexual appliances like Monroe, he made sure nobody took a fall if the appliances started to break down...
...It's hard to say whether the Kennedy connection made or destroyed Lawford, whose career from the sixties on fizzledto the point that he was largely forgotten by the time of his wretched death in 1984...
...Spada also implies that, by ignoring Monroe's desperate phone calls on the night of her death, Lawford hastened her demise, knowing that she had threatened to tell all and wreck Bobby's career...
...Although Spada never makes the connection, one has to believe that the intensity of Lawford's passion for the Kennedys was a function of his mother's enduring antipathy toward them...
...Lawford married and had many girlfriends, but his strongest attachments seem to have been to men —specifically Sinatra and JFK...
...I was twelve or thirteen, and even with a child's susceptibility to trendiness, I sensed that this withered actor with Beatle bangs, gray mutton-chop sideburns, and a Nehru jacket could be dismissed as an old fool...
...ertainly Lawford's mother contributed to his misogyny...
...If he hadn't been distracted by the responsibilities of pimping, throwing orgies, and covering up, would he have been remembered as a great—or even a competent—actor...
...Although Spada doesn't mention Ward, his prologue suggests another provocative analogy: that Lawford wasa sort of male Marilyn—an insecure, pretty man with gender-identification problems (when Lawford was a child, his mother dressed him as a girl) who was destroyed by a weakness for drugs, booze, and the wrong guys...
...PETER LAWFORD: THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECRETS James Spada/Bantam Books/504 pp...
...The fire of hell," she spat, "isn't too hot for old Kennedy...
...Thanks to Kitty Kelley's widely reported allegations of a romantic link between Old Blue Eyes and Nancy Reagan, it's hard to remember a time when Sinatra had Democratic sympathies...
...It's also hard to figure out why the mob-connected crooner and his untalented friends captured the imagination of the American public...
...Spada doesn't make it any easier...
...And he had powerful Hollywood cronies, like Frank Sinatra, leader of the infamous Rat Pack, a group of overgrown juvenile delinquents who used the word "dig" when they meant "understand...
Vol. 24 • November 1991 • No. 11
