Peter Lawford

For some reason he was one of the older actors spoken about often by my mother, so I assumed he was a big star. Maybe my mother was just huge fan of his, though.

I think I read his autobiography or something. He said he used to hang around with young Liz Taylor but she was a plain little girl and he wasn't sexually attracted to her.

He was out with John Lennon one night during Lennon's 2 year "Lost Weekend" in LA, and Lennon was being a complete asshole to the people in a nightclub, and Lawford dragged him out of there, or something.

Lawford used to always have drugs, so Lennon and Keith Richards and a bunch of other younger-than-Lawford celebrities used to always come over to his house.

Kitty Kelley once claimed to have interviewed Peter Lawford in 1985 for one of her "biographies". This was impressive, given that Lawford had died in 1984.

R3 Am I the only person who is surprised that Kitty Kelly hasn't come out with a Trump "biography." Between, her lies and his lies, it would be one crazy read.

I just finished his son's biography. Symptoms of Withdrawal. The kid was kind of a nobody but he had a lot of gossip. It was a great book. He even talked about watching Aunt Jackie take a bath. I never knew about Pat Kennedy until I read the book. She seems like such a mess but she was an actual attractive Kennedy girl.

Four posts and it's a Trump thread. Just when I thought you treason gals were losing steam.

R5 If you think Chistopher Lawford was a nobody, you obviously weren't an All My Children fan.

He WAS, indeed a big star during his MGM days. But, like most of those stars, once the studio system folded, they never again reached those heights. Lawford had a horrible stage mother and a shitty young life (as did many of the stars of that era) and was lucky as hell that MGM took him in and made him a star.

btw, he was bisexual and a drug addict in later life (the drug part..he always diddled around with the guys). There are stories that he had affairs with Tom Drake, Van Johnson. all three of them MGM boys together

I think he enjoyed most of his life but he was always a bit of a sleaze.

R6 Honestly, I meant R4 to be more of a dig at Kitty Kelly, than Trump. In fact, I think her horrible biographies tend to make the subjects more sympathetic because of all the obviously made up things that she writes.

Peter Lawford was pretty pathetic and creepy, but read his mother's aptly titled autobiography "BITCH!" She hated her husband, she hated sex, she hated her son, she really hated the Kennedys, and she was an anti-Semitic snobbish homophobe. And racist too. It's amazing he survived at all.

He was a very good-looking man. He was never a star, OP.

Surprisingly, he was in a lot of movies and died at only age 61 in 1984.

With Judy Garland in "Easter Parade". Handsome back in the day.

Late in his drug-addled life, he would pull it out and piss on the TV set when he’d see Nancy Reagan on the screen. His then-wife said he shorted out a couple of TVs.

Peter used to do blow with a lot of people, but Dominic Dunne wrote about it.

His son Chris was a good guy and great looking in his prime. He had his problems, too, but who wouldn’t under the circumstances?

Best Peter Lawford contribution to society is outing Nancy Reagan as the Blow Job Queen of Hollywood.

He was considered my pimp

Joe Kennedy had Lawford vetted to see if he was gay before he approved his marriage to his daughter.. The investigators came back and told Joe "Lawford's not a fruit he's just English"

Weren't his movies with June Allyson very successful?

I haven't seen too many of his pictures, but I loved him in Son of Lassie, Easter Parade but especially in Good News, where he was at the height of his beauty and charm.

He was certainly handsome, but undoubtedly horribly traumatized from working so closely with June Allyson.

No, his career was basically over in 1962, when he failed to get JFK to stay overnight at Frank Sinatra's house in Palm Springs. Instead he stayed with BIng Crosby who was famously Republican. The reasoning was that Frank's mob ties were too embarrassing and Bobby warned him off. This was around the time JFK was seeing Judith Campbell Exner, who was mobster Sam Giancana's personal play thing. Sam was friends with Frank. Of course Frank and Peter Lawford were also friends with Marilyn Monroe at the same time....

Peter was in the closet. Some said he was Bi but he wasn't. He was gay. Horrible Domineering mother, Lady Lawford who tried to stage manage his career. She hated the Kennedys but loved their money. He used to pick up guys or be picked up by guys at the beach in Malibu when he was young. Before he married Pat Lawford. He was always an alcoholic, but he got into drugs too.

He did drugs with Marilyn, mostly prescription drugs, and later, with Elizabeth Taylor. In fact Peter introduced Elizabeth to a Used Car dealer named Henry Weinberg, and she actually dated this slob for a few months....al for his drug connection. Peter was a complete mess. Pat LAwford divorced him when his cheating and pills and alcohol got out of control. She was no slouch with alcohol. It's the "Irish disease." But Peter was ten times worse.

Like Van Johnson, Robert Walker, and Robert Young, Peter Lawford filled the leading man void left behind when Clark Gable, James Stewart, Robert Taylor, etc., went off to join the armed forces during WWII. Lawford graduated to A pictures at MGM, and he was pretty popular for a time. But when the war ended and Gable, et. al. returned home, Lawford was demoted back to second string pictures before being released from contract altogether. He was pretty much washed up by the mid-1950s when he married into the Kennedy clan and joined the Rat Pack several years later.

Lawford wasn't a big star, he was a medium star!

Really, he was popular in the late forties and fifties and lots of women crushed on him, but I suppose he was more B+list than A-list. Maybe an A- at his peak. He was popular, but not a huge box-office attraction, and was never given the great big prestige products that put an actor's career over the top. It's easy to see why he attached himself to Sinatra, as there was a chance that close association with a genuine A-lister might have gotten him closer to the A-list. But it didn't work out that way, Sinatra turned on him and ruined what career he had.

Sinatra had some post-war doldrums where he was far from A-list.

(But of course he bounced back in 1953 and stayed on top for the next 45 years...)

He was the first actor I crushed on, in the TV series The Thin Man, with Phyllis Kirk (and Asta as "Asta"). He was just so handsome.

But he never topped out, and finally ended up playing a caricature of himself in The Oscar, with DL Fave Stephen B, when BoyBBBBBBBdBoyd

Sorry--the whole post went haywire.

I meant to say: when Boyd found Lawford, as a former movie star, now working as the maître d' in a restaurant.

Are those Salt and Pepper movies with Sammy Davis Jr. any good?

Once Sinatra dumped him he was fucked. Sinatra propped up his career and tried to maintain a "friendship" even though he reached a point where he couldn't stand him.

He looks so old in his narration segment of That's Entertainment, the first one. He WAS older but that horrible hairdo did not help any.

r26, I also fell in love with Peter Lawford in that Thin Man series when I was a young kid and was then pleasantly surprised to discover his earlier MGM movies in which he was beyond gorgeous and charming. So odd that MGM used him in some of their best musicals (Easter Parade, Royal Wedding and Good News) when he really couldn't sing or dance.....you'd think with all the talent available, the studio would have wanted a true young song and dance man to pair up with all their musical leading ladies.

I've recently looked at some of The Thin Man episodes on youtube and they don't wear well. It has a very contemporary Rat Pack style and is set in LA. Phyllis Kirk as Nora Charles is very brittle and no Myrna Loy.

He was more than bi, a true pansexual.

He had a comparatively small role in 1964's "Dead Ringer" with Bette Davis. Steeply downhill from there. I think he even did a television show with Sammy Davis, Jr in the later 1960s - a flop.

During the 70s, Bill Cosby encountered an inebriated Lawford at the Playboy mansion passed out cold. Cosby's companion asked "Is that Peter Lawford?" Cosby's pompous ass replied "Yes - pity isn't it?" And they walked on.

He was handsome when. he was young.

Wasn't he still making prestige movies in the Sixties like Advise and Consent?

I crushed on him in Salt and Pepper.

Lawford was still making some great films in the early 60s (even if he was the 3rd or 4th lead) but went downhill before the decade was over, as did most of his generation who made fools of themselves trying to look and behave like Aquarian hipsters.

Aquarian hipster? This has got to be the deepest cut of all.

He always seemed like a lightweight on screen, he lacked the gravitas, presence, or testosterone of a leading man. Of course a man who was good at light material could make a hell of a good living during the studio era or on TV, but the 1960s wasn't a good time for a man of his talents, so he probably would have had career problems then even if he hadn't pissed of Sinatra.

No, the sixties weren't a good time for light films, the most popular comedies were sexless farces starring Dean Martin or Tony Curtis, or those godawful beach-bikini things, both genres proving career dead ends for anyone involved. And a lightweight like Lawford wouldn't have fit into the best comedies of the age, like "Dr. Strangeglove" or "The Odd Couple".

He never did drugs with MM. Marilyn did not do recreational drugs and she hardly drank. Her problem was sleeping pills mostly.

Lawford had a big dick. He fucked around with women and men. He liked attractive people.

His wife ,, Pat Lawford, was one of Marilyn s closest friends the last 2 years of her life which has largely not been reported. Peter was never attracted to MM. She was like a kid sister and he felt pity for her for whatever reason. Peter was a cleanliness/ hygeine freak and took several baths or showers a day and Marilyn did not measure up in that area either.

Peter was never a major star and when his looks started to go he faded somewhat. He also loss the support of the rat pack so that didnt help either. When he worked on dead ringer with Bette Davis, Davis described him as wobbly on set and beset with problems, but she had sympathy for him.

I suspect that since Peter Lawford was the last person to have a brief conversation with MM the night of Aug 4th on the phone and she was feeble and slurring her words badly and then just faded off...............he hung up and called the phone co and they told him the phone was still off the hook so she had never hung up.............LAWFORD TOOK NO ACTION. He was supposedly somewhat drunk at that point..but Im sure the Kennedy s and Sinatra also if he heard about it.............. were probably appalled that Lawford dropped the ball when it came to getting help for Marilyn. (Sorry. the Kennnedy s had nothing to do with MM death..its just a stupid conspiracy theory).

He played Doris's love interest on the last season of "The Doris Day Show."

Jesus. Doris must have cried. He looked like he was about 100 years old.

He was a marvelous a Password player, known as perhaps the best one they ever had, maybe tied with Carol Burnett and Elizabeth Montgomery

I read the trashy biography written by his third wife. Apparently he was a hopeless, pathetic, broke, douchebag drug addict during the last decade of his life.

In remember these (yes, I’m old!)

He's very sexy in "It Should Happen to You" opposite Judy Holliday, especially his attempted seduction of her, which Judy makes hilarious by suggesting if he's lonely, maybe he should consider getting a parrot. Jack Lemmon's first film, too. Here's the trailer.

He did an episode of Hawaii Five-0 in 1978 and he's obviously drunk in his first scene . He trashed his hotel room and did so much damage that he was banned from working for CBS ever again

Peter Lawford died at only age 61 from a heart attack, also suffering from kidney and liver failure from years of substance abuse.

What a great head of hair he had, R45, he had to be in his 50s by then! I'm jealous!

No. Not a big star. Not even a B lister. More like a C lister with connections so he got more visibility than his career deserved.