Peter Lawford

Adored him in his MGM musicals like GOOD NEWS and EASTER PARADE. He was an incredibly handsome young man.

But I was first introduced to him in the early 60s when I was a pre-teen and he starred opposite another MGM contract player Phyllis Kirk in The Thin Man TV series. Set in modern day LA it was a sort of hipster Rat Pack take on Nick and Nora Charles and they lived in a beach house in Malibu.

But Peter lost it all by the mid 60s after his brother-in-law JFK was assassinated and Frank Sinatra dropped him.

Handsome. Alcoholic.

Wasn't he forced to wear girls' clothescwhen he was a little boy, or something?

Oh, dear, OP. You did not include a reference link. You wanted your readers to engage more excitedly and in depth. This is too bad.

He played Doris Day's boyfriend on her TV show; I remember being a young teen and thinking they both were too old to be wearing the mod fashions they had on.

"... the LATE Marilyn Monroe..."

[quote]"I have been called a bitch by the Aga Khan, by the Duke of Windsor, by Winston Churchill, by King Farouk and by old Joe Kennedy. At least I have been called a bitch by the best!”

Lady Lawford (and mother of Peter) from her autobiography entitled "Bitch"

R6 Sounds like a must read!

He was the epitome of cool onscreen but a mess in real life

He was a mess at the end.

Liz Taylor helped get him into Betty Ford a week after she landed there. He returned the favor by selling the exclusive about Liz’s stay in rehab to the National Enquirer.

He paid to have his drug dealer flown by helicopter into Palm Springs to deliver coke to him.

The only thing he learned in rehab was how to use a vacuum cleaner, and he became obsessed with the appliance.

When he returned from Betty Ford to his dumpy apartment in Weho , he would spend hours alternating between vacuuming and snorting lines of coke.

His trashy fourth wife Pat (who he met when she was 17 and fucking Liz Taylor’s ex Henry Weinberg) called the Betty Ford Clinic and yelled at him-“I sent you Peter Lawford and you sent me back a fucking maid that gets high!”

After he died the widow Lawford couldn’t afford to pay the bill for the crypt for his ashes, and he was evicted. The Kennedys (who didn’t like the widow) refused to pay, so she got the Enquirer to pay for her to take him out on a boat and dump his ashes at sea in exchange for the photos.

I used to LOVE Peter Lawford during those MGM years. He had such a great odd speaking voice - sort of the male version of Audrey Hepburn’s odd speaking voice. My favorites were Easter Parade, Good News and Little Women. ……. A story that he used to tell was very funny - we know he was a drug addled alcoholic to varying degrees throughout his life. Up until his later loser years he was also a good and loyal friend to many troubled stars. In the late forties when Judy Garland was yo yo ing in weight and drigs and sanity and getting suspended from MGM - she would call Lawford and he often kept her company, got her to the doctor and drive her around and listen to her crazy stories. . Peter and Judy did the same thing for Robert Walker who was a hot mess. Eventually Peter balked at the whole situation saying he was a mess, too and keeping these two crazy stars from crashing was far too stressful for him to handle. ……….. In the 60s when Peter’s wife Patricia Kennedy and her family had been icing Peter out. At a big fundraising dinner dinner - because of what a loyal pal Peter had been for years - Judy walked by Patricia’s table and tossed a drink down her back.

Does anyone have the home movie of Van & Peter's Bareback Flip Fuck,

Peter’s mother, Lady May Lawford (author of the delicately titled memoir, “Bitch!”), marched over to LB Mayer’s office shortly after Peter was signed to MGM , to inform Mayer that Peter was gay.

Fuck Oh dear.

Google's AI says "No, there's no credible evidence or widespread belief that Peter Lawford was gay. While he was known for his charm and romantic relationships with various women, including a marriage to Patricia Kennedy, there's no historical record or reliable source that suggests he was homosexual. His personal life was marked by his marriages, including a high-profile one to Kennedy's sister, and relationships with other notable women like Judy Garland and Lana Turner. "

I don't know why "the widow Lawford" made me laugh, but that's such a great, old expression. "The Widow..."

Lawford’s loathsome mother took all her distrust and resentment of men out on her son, whom she would severely spank with a hairbrush for the least infraction. She became convinced he was gay (he evidently wasn’t) and told Louis B. Mayer as much, advising him to treat Lawford like shit to toughen him up.

I read some ‘40s actress’s memoir (don’t remember which one — Lana Turner? Ava Gardner? Janet Leigh?) where she said she dated Lawford for a while, he was good-looking but lacked a strong personality, was finally a bore to be with, and would only allow himself to get sucked off because he was so terrified of getting a girl pregnant. Don’t remember if she said he reciprocated in the oral sex department, but he was known to only indulge in oral sex at that time.

Never quite got why he didn't become a bigger star at MGM in the late 40s but perhaps LB Mayer recognized that his acting had little depth and he was better suited to male ingenue roles in musicals. But he sure was pretty!

[quote]Peter’s mother, Lady May Lawford (author of the delicately titled memoir, “Bitch!”), marched over to LB Mayer’s office shortly after Peter was signed to MGM , to inform Mayer that Peter was gay.

I wonder how many of the drunken messes from the Golden Era of Hollywood were drunken messes because they were forced in the closet by their careers.

He had a bad arm and hand, from going through a glass door before he got to Hollywood. He had to conceal it on the screen.

[quote] Never quite got why he didn't become a bigger star at MGM in the late 40s but perhaps LB Mayer recognized that his acting had little depth and he was better suited to male ingenue roles in musicals.

He was in more than a few musicals but usually didn't sing or dance in them (Good News was an exception, and Easter Parade, briefly). Lubitsch borroed him from MGM for a supporting role in Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones, Charles Boyer). He was in some serious films, he played the lead in smaller movies at MGM.

I never thought he made much of an impression--good looking, likeable, well-spoken, bland.

R14, maybe not gay, but bi. Boze Hadleigh interviewed Sal Mineo, ca 1972, and Sal revealed that he had had an affair with Lawford. I don't how trustworthy Hadleigh is though.

Didn't Maureen O'Hara say in her autobiography ('Tis Herself) that Lawford and Richard Boone frequented an all-male brothel in Australia when they were making the movie, Kangaroo, in the early '50s? If she didn't say it, someone did.

R21, She sure did say that. Allegedly, Lawford and Boone were arrested in Sydney at a "brothel full of beautiful boys." O'Hara also revealed that Lawford and Boone were rude and nasty towards the locals, and she nicknamed Lawford "Peter Awful."

Easy, OP: Peter Lawford is a series of ones and zeroes.

I think that he had the deadly combo of a big ego and expensive taste combined with zero self confidence and low self esteem. ….. Both Peter Lawford and Van Johnson hit the lotto at MGM during the war while the other leading men were in the service. …. When the war was over Van was the real deal with years of Broadway musicals and relationships under his belt (Gene Kelly, Lucy & Desi etc) Also Van had that weird situation with Louis B Mayer - Van sold his soul to the devil to marry Keenan Wynn’s wife Evie. Van had a lot of people around him invested that his career kept going. ….. Peter was charming and handsome and grew up with a grifter mother. He had no skills. He socialized with a cray cray bunch - he didn’t have the council or support system that Van did. He had to “hustle”!literally and figuratively. His prayers were answer marrying Patricia Kennedy. That opened the door to television, politics, Marilyn Monroe and the Rat Pack. When JFK came to Palm Springs and stayed with Bing Crosby instead of Frank Sinatra - Frank blamed Peter and cut him dead. All doors closed. He was drugged out in the 60s. He didn’t have the talent or stamina to go on summer stock tours of Mr Roberts or Music Man like his Bo MGM peers. And he was still pretty young then! Poor Peter!

[quote]he was known to only indulge in oral sex at that time.

And I gave him the best he ever had!

Peter used to hang around the Gay enclaves around Santa Monica and he spent a lot of time at the beach "swimming." he was British with a cruel overbearing mother. So he diddled guys and married a woman. Pat Lawford was an alcoholic who's often take the kids to Palm Beach or the Cape to spend weeks and weeks with her family to escape the marriage. Peter loved having a Big Cool Buddy like Sinatra. He was annoying Frank even before the Palm Springs/Kennedy fiasco. He groveled. Frank like groveling up to a point. But Peter was like lice. Hard to get rid of. If Frank would have allowed it, Peter would have been standing by with toilet paper after Frank took a shit. Peter was weak.

Also Van Johnson was just way more popular than Lawford from the get-go. He was called "the non-singing Sinatra". Popular mainly with the teen girls and old ladies. I have a couple of Modern Screen magazines I got in an antique store. One has a cover with Johnson, Sinatra, and June Allyson, those three having won the readers' poll of most popular stars (1946 or '47). All three MGM. Popular with the bobby soxers.

But Lawford managed to have a long screen career, he wasn't Tom Drake.

Wasn't Lawford also a surfer?

Born in London in 1923, Lawford was the only child of Lieutenant General Sir Sydney Turing Barlow Lawford, KBE (1865–1953) and May Sommerville Bunny (1883–1972). At the time of his birth, his mother was married to Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Ernest Vaughn Aylen DSO,[4] one of Sir Sydney's officers, while his father was married to Muriel Williams.[5] At the time, May and Ernest Aylen were living apart. May confessed to Aylen that the child was not his, a revelation that resulted in a double divorce.

But in spite of her whoring, from "BITCH!" we learn that Lady Lawford thought sex was repulsive and would smear her nightgown with meat blood and tell hubby she was on her period.

Pity the Peter.

........

When you do drugs and are an alcoholic, it affects potency. A lot of guys in that situation can only do oral, they can get it semi hard but not enough for intercourse. Good thing Peter preferred oral.It's probably all he could do.

If you click on R30 there's nice picture of him with his surfboard.

Yeah great pic. Handsome AND charming alcoholic. Did we ever get any dis-pics?

When Dominick Dunne was producing Liz Taylor’s Ash Wednesday , he went to Disneyland with Peter, Liz, some of their kids, Roddy McDowall and George Cukor. From David Heyman’s Liz biography:

“In his Lawford biography, Spada relates an episode he had heard about from Dominick Dunne. Dunne, who had recently returned to Hollywood after producing Ash Wednesday, accompanied Taylor—and others—on an afternoon’s frolic to Disneyland. Also in the group were Dunne’s daughter, Dominique; Elizabeth’s daughters, Liza and Maria; Peter Lawford; Christopher, Peter’s son; George Cukor; and Roddy McDowall.

“This huge helicopter picked us all up at the top of Coldwater Canyon and Mulholland Drive and took us to Disneyland,” reported Dunne. “It was the first helicopter allowed to land inside Disneyland.” A huge crowd gathered around the group for a gander at Taylor. To escape the mob, Elizabeth and her coterie took the Pirates of the Caribbean ride “through the buccaneers’ nighttime world.”

Dunne recalled what happened once their boat disappeared into the darkness: “Elizabeth had a bottle of Jack Daniels, and Peter had something, and everybody got the bottles going. Then a bit of coke was going around, and you’d hear sniffing. Everybody was . . . screaming with laughter. It was one of the maddest moments I ever saw in my life.”

Degenerates!

According to one of the two bios I remember reading about him, he had sizemeat, but as indicated upthread, had trouble keeping it up, especially later on, and was into some kinky stuff. He was hot, with a nice hairy chest you can see in Good News, when he was younger but ugh those eyebrows and that awful hair when he was older plus the booze bloat, no thanks.

The right arm was the bad arm. MGM could hide anything. To watch his movies you'd never know.

He once did a nightclub act with Judy Holliday, around the time of It Should Happen to You, where some sources say they had an affair.

His son's two recovery memoirs were bestsellers.

He was directed by Clarence Brown, Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor, Otto Preminger (4 times) Jules Dassin, Mervyn LeRoy, Stanley Donen, Charles Walters...not too shabby.

In the gorgeous photo of bare chested Peter at r30 you can see both arms including his "withered" right one and they appear quite normal.

Did Dominick Dunne write much about Peter in his own books? Weren't they neighbors in Malibu or one of the LA beach colonies in the early 60s?

MGM made leading men of the similarly shallow William Haines, Robert Montgomery, Robert Young and Robert Taylor.

I think Peter's biggest problem, what kept him less ambitious, was he never believed in his talent. Or, I should say, he just knew he wasn't very talented.

R38 He had severe, irreversible nerve damage which compromised the use of the right hand and arm. You wouldn't be able to see that in that photo.

His last wife was on some show like Oprah and said he was impotent due to drugs. Kind of cringe to share such private info.

The Widow Lawford is a low born guttersnipe.

My mom would always scoff at Peter's hair in the 70s saying it was an awful wig, but that was really his own hair, wasn't it?

Looks like a wig at r43

It's his hair.

Why don't some guys trim their eyebrows?

Well, I'm the guy who had Jeff Richards.

So I might as well add that I had an opportunity with Peter Lawford. But by that time, late 1970s (maybe early 80s), he was so old and grizzly I was just not interested. He would have been in his late 50s but looked worn out.

R47 What was your age, at the time of these two encounters?

Mid 20s. A combo of Björn Andrésen and Ryan O'Neal. Those were the days... Long gone.

The Widow Lawford was the one who wrote about Miss Nancy Davis taking turns giving Peter Lawford and Robert Walker blow jobs on a road trip to Phoenix.

The mention of impotence above was referenced in this Old Hollywood blind item (reveal) once:

[quote] This deceased foreign B list actor had A list associations and an A list marriage but by the end of his life he was a dissolute wreck. The state he was in is perhaps summed up by an injury he received while trying to cure his chronic impotence with electrical shock treatments. He set fire to his testicles leading to 2nd degree burns.

Well that "foreign" would have thrown me, since Lawford lived in the US since he was a child.

And was an American citizen (I'm assuming).

r47, could you please expound a little on how you met Jeff Richards and Peter? And how each of them approached you?

Peter didn’t become a US citizen until 1960, so he could vote for JFK.

Right before Peter and his parents moved to Los Angeles, they were living in reduced circumstances in Palm Beach. Peter was parking cars at a hotel at the time. One of his frequent customers was Joe Kennedy.

The only members of the Kennedy family who seemed to like Peter were JFK, Jackie and Rose.

Apparently, his parents had some kind of precognition to name him "Peter."

Little known fact: The song "The French Lesson" in GOOD NEWS was inspired by Peter's fluency in French. Comden & Green wrote it with him in mind.

[quote] Peter didn’t become a US citizen until 1960, so he could vote for JFK.

R55 He couldn't have become a citizen overnight, it would have taken around 5 years.

Sorry r58-I should have been clearer-that’s when he was sworn in as a citizen (1960).

But Peter knew the right people to speed up the process.

Peter's application for citizenship was more than likely based on the date and residency requirements associated with his "green card marriage" to Pat Kennedy. So by 1960, they would have already been married for about six years, thereby well beyond the three year waiting period (although I do not know if there were any time differences to that back in the 1950s/60s.)

Just like Jack Jones who died a few months ago, Pete was hunky with short hair and hideous with the longer mop. One wonders how he would have looked in middle age with a better haircut

From the book "Tragic Hollywood Beautiful, Glamorous and Still Dead":

[quote] Peter Lawford shortly before his death: December 14th, he reported to the set of Malice In Wonderland: a television movie about Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper. Liz Taylor starred as Parsons, and she badgered the producers to give Peter a small role in the film. She was one of the few friends from the old days he still had left. Unfortunately, Peter was very ill, and had been for a year. He stumbled around the set, unable to remember the simplest lines or follow directions. They told him to go home. On Sunday the 16th, Patty found him lying unconscious, bleeding, and face down on the kitchen floor. He was transported to Cedars Sinai, where he lingered—in and out of consciousness. On the 19th, he fell into a coma, as his skin became the color of urine due to kidney and liver failure. He reeked of ammonia as the toxins seeped from his body. Finally, on the morning of Christmas Eve, 1984, his body suddenly jerked upward. Blood spurted from his nose, mouth, and ears. Then, he fell back…dead. Not a very dignified exit for the son of a nobleman, who had once been the epitome of grace and class. Death didn’t care. We are all no one when we stand and face eternity.