Peter Lawford: friend of Marilyn Monroe, Kennedy in-law, Rat Pack member, actor
Lawford knew JFK and Marilyn Monroe up close — and their secrets. He was a movie star for decades and Rat Pack member. This is his story.
“Peter Lawford was always in the background of my life … When I was 13, I was president of the Marilyn Monroe fan club, and he was always a close friend of Marilyn’s. I was already interested in the Kennedy family — even worked for Ted Kennedy as a summer intern in Boston in 1970.”
So says biographer James Spada, author of one of the most controversial and unjustly overlooked books of the publishing season, Peter Lawford: The Man Who Kept the Secrets [originally published by Bantam, $22.50 hardcover; available in Kindle and other editions].
Lawford’s movie career spanned many films at MGM: musicals like It Happened in Brooklyn (in 1947, costarring Frank Sinatra), Good News, Easter Parade, Royal Wedding and Never So Few; vehicles with the Rat Pack like Ocean’s 11 and Sergeants 3.
But his biggest starring role happened in 1954, when he married JFK’s sister, Patricia Kennedy.
Lawford fascinates me because of his Kennedy family connections as a brother-in-law to JFK.
He also seems to be The One Most Likely to Pass for Gay: his epicene good manners, careful English tailoring (and accent) and classic European taste all point to a homosexual stereotype of that period — the aristocratic gentleman with a deep, dark secret in his closet. Were it not for his “Rat Pack” connections with Frank Sinatra, et al., and (to those in the know) frequent womanizing, he seemed an easy target for the macho-driven, anti-gay world of the 60’s.
As Spada points out, Lawford was haunted by veiled accusations of homosexuality throughout his life: “Peter was aware people either knew or thought that he was gay. [Peter’s agent] Milt Ebbins told me he thought Peter was fighting homosexuality his whole life. I think it would be fair to say that Peter was basically a closet case.”
Who is actor Peter Lawford? And why were so many fascinating people — like Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy — interested in him as a person? What role did he play as brother-in-law to the 35th President of the United States? What evidence, if any, supports chronic allegations of a bisexual or gay lifestyle during his career? Why did this cultivated man and an accomplished Hollywood entertainer (he was once a regular guest host of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson) destroy himself with booze over a period of twenty years (1965–1984)?
Spada’s best-selling biographies include Grace: The Secret Life of a Princess, Streisand: Her Life, Monroe: Her Life in Pictures and many others (CBS even bought the TV movie rights to Peter Lawford: unclear if this was ever filmed).
I was so depressed when I began talking to Spada — his book is chock full of secrets, alcoholism, delirium tremens, and the like — that I began on that grumpy note.
Were you shocked or turned off by Lawford’s biographical details? Did the sordidness of his life demotivate your research?
No, because in writing the book I really came to feel sorry for him and like him as a person, too. When you go through his life story and grasp the type of mother and childhood he had, I felt so much sympathy for Peter Lawford that none of the bad things he did made me dislike him. He was a victim of his mother, the film studios, of the many bad associations he had in his life, of fate. Rather than working to improve his life, all of these associations just conspired to destroy him.
I am an intense fan of the Kennedy family, but the details which surface in the book from their association with Peter Lawford truly nauseate: their greed and hyper-promiscuity is overwhelming. Lawford himself acted as their procurer, didn’t he?
The word most commonly used is “pimp.” But I like neither word. Jack Kennedy didn’t need anybody to pimp for him. JFK was the President of the United States, and a well built, handsome man with unlimited access to money. What else do you need to attract women?
Peter was his friend, but he was also used by the Kennedys. His Santa Monica beach house (nicknamed the “Western White House” during this period by the press) was a place Jack could go to meet Peter’s friends, beautiful young starlets and hookers. I think Peter thought he was being useful.
There was a certain arrogance and hubris about the Kennedys which deluded them into thinking nothing they could do would ever be wrong. They certainly were careless about other people’s feelings. There was, for example, the incident where Peter invited Marilyn to a party for President Kennedy with a number of high-priced call girls.
It is revolting and as symptomatic of the era as it was of the Kennedys, don’t you think? There was so much more chauvinism back then. Since that time, even the Kennedys have suffered divorces because the husband was a womanizer — that didn’t happen in the 50’s or 60’s to the Kennedys.
Marilyn Monroe was a victim of her times. Had she been born 20 years later, she’d probably still be alive and acting. In 1962, at age 36, she thought her career was over because she was losing her youth. Today, we have 55-year-old sex symbols.
I struggle with your concept of “victim.” At what point do Peter Lawford and Marilyn Monroe get to take responsibility for their own lives and stop being the victim? Wasn’t Peter Lawford his own worst victimizer?
Many people have no sympathy for people like Lawford, but that attitude is from a 1990-’s consciousness. In the 60’s, no one ever talked about alcoholism or drug abuse. People either ignored or didn’t notice it. There was no help to be had.
As time went by, Peter Lawford was just unreconstructed. He went through the “consciousness-raising” and ‘go-to-Betty-Ford” period blithely without ever paying any attention to it, and denying he was an alcoholic.
He was so strung out that even after Elizabeth Taylor invited him to go to Betty Ford with her, he sold this story for $15,000. I’d buy your argument if Peter Lawford had died in the early 70’s. Do you think he would have ever gotten it together to maintain his sobriety? Did Peter Lawford ever confront and accept the fact that he was a mess?
No. I think he was in constant denial. I also believe he was so self-destructive that the last 20 years of his life was a very slow suicide. What can you say about a man who, after his doctors told him he cannot so much as have a slice of rum cake, then goes out and orders a martini? He wasn’t courageous enough to end his life so he slowly committed suicide.
I really blame his mother [Lady Lawford]. She put it into his mind that he had no intrinsic self-worth and that anything of value in his life he’d have to get from associations with other people. When he lost all of that in the early 60’s, he had nothing in himself to draw upon for inner strength.
You mention Oscar Wilde’s great The Picture of Dorian Gray in your bibliography. I was struck by the similarities, though for different reasons, of Lawford’s death and Oscar Wilde’s: the fluid gushing from a head and a fairly ugly scene all around.
Wilde died a broken man, as he lost what was most important to him, his reputation. Peter Lawford lost his own essential self-importance, his very powerful friends. I often think of Peter Lawford as someone like Doran Gray: in many ways, he sold his soul to the devil. Unfortunately, Peter aged, rather than his portrait, didn’t he?
(Note: Lawford appears in the 1945 MGM adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray).
You allude periodically to Peter Lawford’s sexual habits. He was interested in sadomasochism, and even had trysts with homosexual men. Your notes refer to Boze Hadleigh’s quoting of Sal Mineo to the effect he had an affair with Lawford. Were you able to corroborate this?
No, I wasn’t. I simply list that allegation. Many people make mention of this circumstantial evidence, including his mother. But I don’t conclude Lawford was bisexual. I simply claim it’s probably true.
One of the hardest things in the book to prove was Peter’s bisexual side. It was one of the things I wanted to get to the bottom of in writing the book. I talked to hundreds of Lawford’s friends, all of whom kept their eyes opened, but I couldn’t get my hands on such evidence: it seemingly never occurred.
On the other hand, in researching Lawford’s other acquaintances, people not close to him, I was told of compromising situations he was seen in, etc., but I never interviewed a single man who said he had been to bed with Peter Lawford.
At one point, I even placed an ad in The Advocate which asked simply, “Did you know Peter Lawford?” I hoped someone would write in and answer, “Yeah, we had an affair for six months.” It didn't happen, I didn’t get a single response.
I concluded from my research that Peter Lawford was bisexual, but he was enormously discreet about it, with his friends in particular.
In researching Peter’s FBI reports, I discovered that he frequented brothels in the late 1940’s. I shared this with one of his closest friends, who expressed utter surprise: “I wish Peter had told me about that! We would have had such great fun together!” Now if Peter were keeping something like that from one of his closest friends, Peter Lawford was a very secretive person, which is why I entitled the book The Man Who Kept the Secrets. He was either a very good actor or the most discreet man on earth.
If it weren’t for his public, heterosexual image, Peter Lawford fits a certain stereotype of being gay: a gentlemanly, aristocratic looking, fastidious, educated man. I found myself wondering how someone who was so fey could fit into the Kennedy clan?
Bobby Kennedy had no use for Peter Lawford at all. Jack liked that continental flair. Look at the women that RFK and JFK married. Jack married Jackie, a woman who spoke fluent French and was completely continental. RFK married Ethel, a schlump of an American girl who probably can’t speak a single French word.
The difference was that Jack wanted to learn from Lawford how to be more sophisticated than what his Irish roots brought him. Most of the Kennedys didn’t admire these Lawford qualities: that’s why he didn’t fit into the family.
One of Peter’s biggest problems was he was always a pariah in the Kennedy “clan.” Jackie and Peter were both misfits in that family: neither ever felt they really belonged. Both were much more sophisticated and refined than the Kennedys. Jackie felt very sorry for Peter because she knew what he was going through.
What was Peter’s attitude toward gay men?
That’s an interesting question.
Several of his friends told me he could act out a wicked send-up of a gay man stereotypically limp-wristed, that kind of thing. This might make you think he was a homophobe.
On the other hand, he made constant reference to a “live and let live” attitude. There was no racism in him (witness his long friendship with Sammy Davis, Jr.).
He took out an ad in the Hollywood Reporter which blasted Anita Bryant for her anti-gay stand in the late 70’s. In that ad, he did something with the letters A-N-I-T-A, with “A” is for anti-discrimination, etc., playing back her name to her. That was a fairly courageous stand for a guy who had been fighting rumors about this for his whole life.
Right after JFK’s assassination, Peter asked Chuck Pick to come to Las Vegas to take care of his needs. Chuck Pick was a very young, handsome collegiate athlete. That’s a very interesting event because Peter was very much aware of what Chuck Pick’s reservations regarding him were all about. Peter was aware people either knew or thought he was gay.
Peter’s agent, Milt Ebbins, said to me he thought Peter was fighting homosexuality his whole life. I think it would be fair to say that Peter was basically a closet case.
A lot of these male friendships he developed were not consummated, but in many ways were homosexual relationships as far as Peter was concerned. There was a tremendous affection for Chuck Pick that comes from Peter, and yet Chuck was entirely straight. Yet whatever Peter needed from men he was able to get from these very close friendships.
Both Peter and Judy Garland, like a lot of alcoholics and people suffering from emotional ills, hated to be alone. Peter would pick up these girls in Las Vegas and they would be gone once the sex was done. It was Chuck Pick who was there to live with him.
So it’s very complicated. I can’t say with any kind of real determination what was in Peters head, but I believe the evidence indicates that he did have a homosexual component to his personality. He lived it out as best as he could. Considering his background, the era he was raised in, his career, his marriage to the Kennedys — it was very difficult for him to be himself in many ways much less for him to deal with homosexuality. He was, after all, brother-in-law to the President.
Will the Kennedy family ever get honest about the relationships of JFK and RFK to Marilyn Monroe?
Ethel is really the keeper of the flame, isn’t she? She wants to keep the legend of her husband RFK intact as a great statesman. After all, there are young politicians coming up in that family.
I was once on a talk show where someone asked, if all these rumors are true about Marilyn and JFK and RFK, why won’t the Kennedy women come on TV and talk about it?
Yeah! I can just see Ethel Kennedy going onto The Phil Donahue Show and admitting Bobby had an affair with Marilyn Monroe. It’s a ridiculous concept which I don’t think will ever happen.
I think that privately, especially among the younger Kennedys, they’ve probably accepted it, but Ethel is still in deep denial.
Peter Lawford had a tremendous ability to prevaricate, to use his acting skill, even on the evening of Marilyn Monroe’s death, to fool the world into thinking that nothing was happening. How did Peter’s habit of lying affect your ability to evaluate things he told people? How did you sort out Lawford’s lies from the truth, especially with relation to the Kennedys, especially when you’re dealing with someone who was a drug addict and an alcoholic?
Toward the end, especially, Peter’s mind became clouded by alcohol, and what I had to do was really weigh what Peter said against that of his closest friends. Frequently, I’d be verifying a story from Peter, and his closest friends would either say, “No, it never happened” or “Here’s the way it really happened.”
Peter didn’t lie about everything. There are many things he ‘fessed up to in the mid-70’s to the British press. Many of the things Peter told the British papers held up as being true because he probably thought Americans would never get access to that information.
But the point in his life when Peter finally started to get honest about the Monroe-JFK-RFK connection is also the point when his mind was most clouded by drugs.
Peter would only give the littlest bits away. When I interviewed Deborah Gould (Lawford’s last wife) about the drunken night when he confided how Bobby had flown to the West Coast to tell Marilyn that Jack couldn’t see her anymore, she told me the very next morning he instructed her to forget everything he said, he was just nervous about what had happened. I believed that.
But “in vino veritas” is not true. Anyone corrupted by substances doesn’t necessarily tell the truth when under the influence.
No, but the anecdote here was a very simple thing. It wasn’t that he couldn’t get the details right.
We know that there were affairs among Jack and Bobby and Marilyn. There are just too many witnesses. It would be questionable if it only was coming from Peter Lawford’s mouth.
When Peter was confronted by someone on the subject of JFK’s assassination, he was asked whether it was done by Oswald or by someone higher up. That’s all he ever said, that we know. Did he ever expand on that?
No, the thing about Peter Lawford is that I wish he were still alive and I could shake it all out of him.
But Peter was so drunk, what could you shake out?
He was always drunk. If you got him at seven in the morning …
You think so? What is Patricia Kennedy’s (Lawford’s first wife) attitude about her late husband today?
She’s 67 years old and extremely bitter. She doesn't want to talk about it to anyone, including her own son, Christopher, who asked her if she could talk about what Peter was like as a young man and she refused. She also recently told someone that she feels that Peter destroyed her life.
AFTERWORD
This interview was originally published under the headline “SECRET Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” in EDGE Magazine on November 6, 1991.
Golly gee willikers, how the world has changed.
In 1991, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was still alive, as was Patricia Kennedy (Lawford’s ex-wife and JFK’s sister). The Phil Donahue Show was still on the air and the Internet as we know it did not exist.
In other words, we thought we knew a lot about the Kennedys back then, but we were really just getting started.
Enter James Spada (among many others). A one time intern in Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s office (in 1970), he brought unique insights into the world of the Kennedys. He had previously published Marilyn Monroe: Her Life in Pictures (1982) and an international bestseller, Grace: The Secret Lives of a Princess (1987). He went on to later write biographies of Barbra Streisand, Bette Davis, Ronald Reagan, Julia Roberts, and many others.
For me as a freelance journalist, The Man Who Kept the Secrets brought special challenges: I’ve been a recovering addict for many years and fascinated by the Kennedys for decades.
Peter Lawford‘s headlong descent into drug addiction and alcohol in his final twenty years intrigued me, indeed. His first wife, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, battled alcoholism for many years. One of his four children, Christopher, became an addict — but spent the final 30+ years of his life clean and sober, and was an outspoken activist promoting recovery.
James Spada later became renowned as a photographer of the male nude, and his collection, Black & White Men, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award as the Best Visual Arts Book of 2000.
James Spada died in 2017 at the age of 67. The only obituary I was able to find for Spada is from a group called “Immortal Marilyn,” which commemorates her passing every year on the anniversary of her death.
