Peter Lawford Read online

  PETER LAWFORD

  THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECRETS

  by JAMES SPADA

  http://www.JamesSpadasHollywood.com

  Table of Contents

  Begin Reading

  Connecticut ● New York ● Colorado

  Other books by

  JAMES SPADA

  BIOGRAPHIES

  Streisand: Her Life

  Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess

  More Than A Woman: The Intimate Biography of Bette Davis

  Monroe: Her Life in Pictures

  Julia: Her Life

  FICTION

  Days When My Heart was Volcanic: A novel of Edgar Allan Poe

  http://www.JamesSpadasHollywood.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PETER LAWFORD

  THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECRETS

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  THE DARK SIDE OF GENTILITY

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  PART TWO

  A THOROUGHBRED IN THE MGM STABLE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  PART THREE

  AMONG THE KENNEDYS

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  PART FOUR

  HOLLYWOOD / WASHINGTON / BABYLON

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  PART FIVE

  “MORE THAN HE COULD BEAR”

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES ON

  SOURCES

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  PART FIVE

  SELECTED

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  JAMES SPADA

  Peter Lawford -

  The Man Who Kept The Secrets

  Copyright © 1991, 2011 by James Spada

  Library of Congress Cataloging in 2287.L287S6 1991

  Int’l ISBN: 978-0-9837423-1-9

  ISBN: 0983742316

  Third Party Notices

  Son of Lassie copyright ©1945 Loews’ Inc.

  Renewed 1972 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.

  A Yank at Eton copyright © 1942 Loews’ Inc.

  Renewed 1969 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.

  The White Cliffs of Dover copyright © 1944 Loews’ Inc.,

  Renewed 1971 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.

  Cover photos top right to bottom:

  With Elizabeth Taylor © Culver Pictures

  With John F. Kennedy © Shooting Star

  With Marilyn Monroe © UPI/Bettmann

  Cover Design by Chad Fidler

  eBook design by E. Bjarne Blume (iLN™)

  No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted

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  written permission of the publisher.

  For information address:

  Author & Company, LLC

  425 Allen Avenue

  Meriden, CT 06451

  This eBook was designed

  and manufactured in the United States of America.

  PROLOGUE

  “Say good-bye to the President.”

  — Marilyn Monroe to Peter Lawford, August 4, 1962

  Saturday, August 4, 1962, had been so hot in Los Angeles that by one in the morning the temperature still hovered in the upper seventies. At 1342 North Laurel Avenue, a quiet palm- tree-lined street in West Hollywood, private investigator Fred Otash, sleeping fitfully in the heat, awakened to the insistent jangle of his telephone. A man used to late-night summonings, Otash snapped alert and picked up the receiver. “Fred,” the voice on the line said, “this is Peter Lawford. I have a big problem. I need to come and see you.”

  “What is it, Peter?” Otash asked.

  “I can’t talk now. I’ll be over in a few minutes.”

  Otash mumbled his assent, got out of bed, and put on his robe. Uneasy, he telephoned an associate and asked him to come over so that someone else would be present when Lawford got there. He put on a pot of coffee and waited for the actor’s arrival.

  Peter Lawford and Fred Otash had had a long, if sporadic, relationship. As a vice cop in the Los Angeles Police Department, Otash had first met Lawford in the late 1940s when the handsome Englishman was one of MGM’s biggest stars. That meeting had been at Otash’s insistence — he wanted to give Peter a warning. “I told him to cool it,” Otash later recalled. “Every time we busted a bunch of hookers, his name was always in their trick books. Every hooker in LA had him down as a fifty-dollar trick.”

  Otash had then left the police department and gone into private practice as an investigator. He had become known as the “PI to the stars,” handling the likes of Sheilah Graham, Rock Hudson’s wife Phyllis Gates, Frank Sinatra, and Marilyn Monroe. One of his regular clients was Confidential magazine, a leering, sensationalistic monthly that often got the goods on celebrities.

  In 1954, Peter Lawford had married Patricia Kennedy, the daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy, the former American ambassador to Great Britain, and sister of Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. This had put Lawford in a vulnerable position. Confidential had damaged or destroyed the careers of dozens of stars with exposés of their sexual peccadilloes, drinking, or drug use. The magazine, Peter had learned, knew about his frequent forays to brothels, and he was worried. A scandal could destroy his marriage and career, and might seriously tarnish the fast-rising political star of his brother-in-law, already being touted as a prospect for higher office.

  So Peter had gone to see Otash. “Fred,” he told him, “I know Confidential has got something coming out on me. Now that I’m married to Pat Kennedy, I really can’t afford this horseshit.”

  Otash had helped Lawford out of that scrape and got the story killed. In 1959, Lawford had called on the investigator again, this time to lend him electronic eavesdropping equipment so that Lawford could bug his own telephone. Peter hadn’t said why he wanted to do this, but Otash knew the Lawfords were having marital problems and he assumed that Peter suspected Pat was cheating on him.

  Fred Otash was a man for hire, one with few personal loyalties. Before long he had helped bug the Lawford house again, but not for Peter. This time it was for a variety of parties who had wanted to develop a “derogatory profile” of Jack Kennedy in anticipation of his nomination for president by the Democrats in 1960.

  In 1962, Peter Lawford was the brother-in-law of the president and the attorney general of the United States, two men with enemies ranging from their political adversaries to the corrupt Teamsters to mob members whom Attorney General Robert Kennedy had targeted for investigation. All of these factions, according to Otash, were expressing great interest in what the wiretaps in Lawford’s home would reveal.

 
As Otash and other of the Hollywood cognoscenti knew, both Jack and Bobby Kennedy had been sexually involved with Marilyn Monroe, the world’s reigning movie sex goddess, and their trysts — sometimes at Lawford’s Santa Monica beach house — were of particular interest to Otash’s clients. The situation was explosive. A scandal involving the sex lives of these two Catholic family men could topple the Kennedy administration, and there were many who would welcome the fall.

  Now, in the early morning hours of August 5, when Otash opened his door to Lawford, he was struck by the fact that the actor was “half crocked or half doped.” At the very least, he looked a nervous wreck — “squirming like a worm in a frying pan,” as Otash’s associate later described him.

  “Marilyn’s dead” were Lawford’s first words. As Otash recalled it: “He told me that Bobby Kennedy had broken off the affair with Marilyn and that she was hysterical and calling the White House and the Justice Department and Hyannis Port, insisting that Bobby get in touch with her. And that the Department of Justice had called Bobby in San Francisco and told him, ‘You’d better get your ass down to LA because she’s out of control.’”

  Lawford told Otash he was terrified that an investigation of Marilyn’s death would reveal her affairs with the Kennedy brothers. He had already been to her house to “clean up,” and had removed what incriminating evidence he could find. But he was afraid he’d missed things. He wanted Otash to return to the scene and finish the job.

  “Me?” Otash responded. “You gotta be fucking nuts! If I went within four miles of that place — I mean, I’m too well-known. I want no part of it.”

  But Otash did send over his associate — the same man who had installed surveillance wires in Marilyn’s house several months earlier. “He knew the place very well,” Otash said. “He finished the job that Lawford started, and he found things that Lawford had left behind.”

  MARILYN MONROE’S DEATH sent shock waves around the world. Editorial-page writers raged against the heartless exploitation by the Hollywood star factories. Millions were saddened by the descriptions they read of the private Marilyn: her crippling lack of self- esteem that stemmed from a loveless childhood and uncertain parentage, her sexual molestation as a child, her frequent affairs as an adult that had brought her little fulfillment. It was reported that she could be charming, giving, and thoughtful one minute, vicious and hurtful the next. She had abused alcohol and drugs to the impairment of her health; her death was a result of that abuse. And she took a great many provocative secrets about equally famous people with her to the grave.

  No one could have anticipated that twenty-two years later the same description, in every particular, would apply as well to Peter Lawford.

  PART ONE

  THE DARK SIDE OF GENTILITY

  “Peter was an awful accident.”

  — Lady Lawford

  “Peter wasn’t brought up, he was dragged up.” — Peter’s cousin Valentine Lawford

  ONE

  Friday morning, September 7, 1923, dawned blustery in London, the first chill of autumn sweeping through after a warm late-summer rainstorm. Inside the gracious row house at 17 Artillery Mansions in Victoria Street, May Aylen, the wife of Ernest Vaughan Aylen, a major in the Royal Army Medical Corps, lay in her oak-paneled third-floor bedroom and waited to become a mother. When she felt the first of a series of sharp labor pains, she summoned Miss Hemming, the squat, earnest Royal Red Cross nurse she had retained to help her with the delivery.

  The labor, excruciatingly painful, lasted for hours, complicated by May’s slim hips and the fact that this was the nearly forty-year-old woman’s first pregnancy. She bore the pain as long as she could, but when Miss Hemming left the room to summon the doctor, May reached under her pillow, pulled out her husband’s service revolver, and put the cold steel barrel into her mouth. Just as she was about to press the trigger, Miss Hemming raced back into the room and snatched the gun away from her.

  “Such agony!” May later said of the labor, but it was nothing compared to her suffering during the delivery itself, which didn’t come until the late afternoon. The baby was large — nine and a half pounds — and in the breech position inside May’s womb. For nearly twenty minutes the doctor struggled to pull the infant — a boy — through May’s cervix, trying not to injure him, tugging at his feet as carefully as possible. When the child’s head was finally freed the doctor saw that the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck and had almost choked him. The baby was listless, his left arm apparently paralyzed, his color poor. Out of earshot of Mrs. Aylen, the doctor told Miss Hemming, “He’ll be dead before midnight.”

  “I wasn’t going to let that baby die,” Miss Hemming said years later. While his exhausted mother slept, the nurse labored over him most of the night, massaged his limp arm, rubbed and patted him, splashed him with brandy to get his circulation going. As dawn broke the next morning, the child revived, and he cried lustily as Miss Hemming handed him, bundled in a blue blanket, to his mother.

  May Aylen was not overjoyed at the birth of her son. “I can’t stand babies!” she said years later. “They run at both ends; they smell of sour milk and urine.” For the sixteen years of her marriage, she had refused Major Aylen’s pleas that she give him a child.

  When May finally did allow herself to conceive early in December 1922, it was not because she longed for the rewards of motherhood; nor was it so that she could make her husband’s fondest wish come true. No, this baby had been planned with an altogether less altruistic goal in mind.

  Ernest Aylen was not present when his wife gave birth, because he knew the baby was not his child. The boy’s father was Aylen’s fifty-seven-year-old commanding officer, Lieutenant General Sir Sydney Lawford. As May had hoped, the birth of her baby — she named him Peter — would eventually result in her marriage to Sir Sydney. At that point, May, an inveterate social climber, would realize a lifelong dream, a goal so important to her that she had allowed herself to become pregnant despite the dangers for a woman her age and her abhorrence of children. As Sydney Lawford’s wife, she would be immediately elevated from merely Mrs. Ernest Aylen to Lady Lawford. And she would revel in what she called “this handle” for the rest of her life.

  PETER LAWFORD, IN A MOMENT of rare public candor, described his mother as “a dreadful snob.” May was unquestionably that, and hers was the worst kind of snobbery: it stemmed from delusions of superiority rather than from the real thing. Throughout her long life she invented details of her background, large and small, designed to improve her stature in the eyes of all she met.

  May Aylen was to her core a product of the society and the era into which she had been born. George Orwell called England “the most class-ridden country under the sun,” and in the Victorian nineteenth century this was more true than it had ever been or would ever be again. By the early 1900s, nearly ninety percent of the capital value bequeathed to heirs in Britain belonged to less than four percent of the population.

  The sharp distinctions between the upper and lower classes were vividly apparent on London’s streets. Dapper gentlemen in bowler hats and black silk capes brandished gold-and-ivory walking sticks to shoo away maimed beggars; ladies dressed in layers of satin, taffeta, and tulle, resplendent with diamonds and rubies, alighted from carriages and deftly sidestepped homeless mothers surrounded by half-naked children caked with the soot and grime showered on London every day by the belching smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution.

  A subtler but only slightly less rigid distinction existed within the privileged classes themselves. Money itself did not bring prestige; that could be won only through the acquisition of a title or a landed estate. As British historian John Stevenson has put it, “gentility [was] an attribute of status rather than income for which some families paid by a constant struggle to preserve appearances.” Stevenson quotes a woman brought up at the same time as Lady Lawford: “I remember girls at school judging each other’s wealth by the number of maids each had. And sometimes, I suspe
ct, inventing an extra one to impress their friends.”

  It was into this milieu that Peter Lawford’s mother was born on Sunday, November 4, 1883, the forty-sixth year of Queen Victoria’s reign. The delivery, as was common practice then and long afterward, took place in her parents’ bedroom in the family’s eighteen-room country house at 33 Coley Mile, Reading, outside of London. Named May Somerville Bunny, she was the daughter of Frank William Bunny, a lieutenant in the 66th Regiment of Queen Victoria’s army (later, a colonel), and the former Caroline Stanley Todd. Her father’s side of the family had a history of military distinction dating back to 1100, when they first migrated from France to England. Their surname was properly pronounced “Bon-nay,” and May grew testy in later years whenever it was mispronounced “as if I were one of those Hugh Hefner Playboy rabbits!”