Rat Pack Confidential. Shawn Levy
with sex a form of currency. Once a month, May would allow herself to be “mauled,” but only when rewarded prior to the act with jewelry. “I felt like a tart,” she confessed, “a French tart!”
She didn’t act the part well: In his priapic despair, Aylen lashed out at her, “I’d rather be in bed with a dead policeman!” Claiming his wife’s two favorite bits of pillow talk were “Don’t!” and “Hurry up!,” the wretched doctor cried, “It’s a good thing you don’t have to make your living off of sex; you’d starve to death.”
After nearly two poisonous decades and many separations, the two agreed at last to live apart. As before, separation from her husband afforded May the opportunity to find another. This time she set her sights higher than the army hospital, however. She became acquainted with her husband’s commanding officer, Sydney Lawford, a dashing hero of the war himself mired in an unhappy union.
He was a hell of a catch. “Swanky Syd,” as fellow soldiers branded him in recognition of his sartorial dash, had been knighted for his legendary valor in the fight against the kaiser. His men adored him; women were invariably taken with his combination of physical charm and high rank.
May, though still married to a junior officer in his charge, became a favorite of the general’s, and she reciprocated the attention, if, as usual, a bit grudgingly. When, two years into her separation, she found herself a guest at his sister’s country estate, she allowed him to escort her to her bedroom after dinner; he followed her inside; “Oh, no, not this again,” she thought to herself, but this fish was too big not to reel in over such a qualm. She granted the general her meager favors, and, at age thirty-eight, conceived their only child with their very first intimate act.
When May’s pregnancy became apparent, she importuned upon Aylen to do the noble thing; although the baby wasn’t his, he agreed to stay married to her until it was born, granting it the generous gift of his name. The general, too, convinced his spouse to play along for decorum’s sake. But when the baby, christened Peter, was born in September 1923, there was no saving either marriage: Divorce petitions, filed within days of the birth’s being registered, were granted within a year; one week after that, May and the general were wed.
It may have seemed a coup on paper, but May’s lot was decidedly mixed. The scandal surrounding Peter’s birth drove the Lawfords from the country; they were to live in France, India, the South Pacific, Hawaii, Florida, and California for the rest of their days, maintaining, frequently enough, a sufficiently high standard of living to seem gay globe-trotters, but, in reality, terrified to return home to the hisses of English scandalmongers.
The general, like Cooper and Aylen before him, expected sexual compliance from his wife, but May hit upon an ingenious ruse to keep him at bay, responding to his overtures by “slipping to the kitchen and getting uncooked meat which I rubbed against my nightdress. I was always having my period!” Time was on her side: The general was fifty-nine when they married and soon lost his interest in his wife’s body. “I never,” May boasted, “had sex with him after Peter was three.”
Ah, yes, of course, Peter, the device by which May had landed the general but a horrid encumbrance nevertheless. May said she’d nearly taken her first husband’s way out during childbirth, putting a revolver in her mouth in response to the pains of labor. Delivered of her child, she suffered the indignities of his infancy: “I can’t stand babies,” she groused. “They run at both ends; they smell of sour milk and urine.”
Peter was, whenever possible, fobbed off on nurses and servants. And, of course, being a child of May’s, he was raised with a combination of notions both indulgent and bizarre. “Peter wasn’t brought up, he was dragged up,” said a sympathetic cousin—and the phrase was keenly apt. Like other Englishwomen of her era, May dressed her boy as a girl, but she persisted in the habit, at least in private, until Peter was nearly in his teens. She allowed him to sleep in his parents’ bed until he’d nearly hit puberty and instilled in him a fanatical discipline for cleanliness (a fussiness also shared by Frank Sinatra): He bathed and gargled at least twice every day. And May had ideas about diet, too. Peter was allowed only a strict regimen of fruits, vegetables, whole-wheat bread, and, rarely, meat, with sweets of any sort taboo.
Peter was never formally schooled and spoke only broken English for much of his childhood (French was, in a way, his native tongue); he was probably some sort of dyslexic, but he had to diagnose his problem—and treat it—on his own. Tutelage in nonscholastic matters, unfortunately, was provided him by others: At nine, he became a target of pedophiles, both male and female—a horror that lasted through his teens.
May knew nothing of Peter’s tortures, concerning herself instead with cultivating his desire to playact and perform. A perfect Little Lord Fauntleroy, Peter charmed crowned royals, ships’ captains, film directors, and journalists alike with his impeccable manners and precocity. At eight, he played a part in Poor Old Bill, an English kiddie film. He acquitted himself so well that he surely would’ve received more offers of work had not the general put his foot down—“My son a common jester with cap and bells, dancing and prancing in front of people!”—and hied the family off on an extended sojourn to India and the South Pacific.
It would be seven years before Peter had another chance to act, and then only because of a freak accident that maimed and nearly crippled him. Returning to his parents’ French Riviera home after a game of tennis, he shattered a window-pane and sliced his right arm straight through to the bone. The first doctor to examine the arm declared it unsalvageable. Counseled to amputate, May responded with aplomb—“Fuck off, doctor!”—and found a physician willing to stitch Peter’s muscles back together. The arm was saved. To combat the lingering pain and stiffness, however, the Lawfords were advised to relocate Peter to a dry climate—Los Angeles, say. Although the arm would never fully heal (in its natural state of relaxation, Peter’s right hand was clawlike), it gave him, perversely, his ticket to success.
He found bit parts right away, but it would take five more years of on-again, off-again work before Peter was granted a full contract by MGM. But when the deal was done, it was as near as a twenty-year-old could imagine to a golden ticket from God Almighty.
May and the general thrived as well, becoming staples of the British expatriate community in Los Angeles and earning a reputation as grand old eccentrics among the Hollywood crowd: Frank once asked May about her son, and she responded in what she thought was perfect Hollywoodese—“Peter? That schmuck!”—bringing him to his knees with laughter.
Aside from affording May a society in which she could act the grande dame, Hollywood gave Peter the opportunity to chase every famous skirt in the world: Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Anne Baxter, Judy Garland, June Allyson, Ava Gardner … you name her. His appetites weren’t necessarily orthodox: He had chances, for instance, to bed both Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, but refused the former because she had what he considered “fat thighs” and the latter because her living room was dotted with chihuahua poop when he rendezvoused with her. But he was always being floated in the gossip pages as some pretty young thing’s fiancé, and he was swain enough to travel with sexual gear—towels, blankets, mouthwash, changes of clothes—in his car.
Despite this impressive record of cocksmanship, though, he was constantly plagued by rumors of homosexuality. He was chummy with Van Johnson and Keenan Wynn, and scuttlebutt put all three of them in bed together with Wynn’s wife, Evie (who, in fact, married Johnson within hours of getting a divorce from Wynn). Later on, stories circulated about trysts with other young actors, of loitering in notorious public men’s rooms, of all-boy parties in Hawaii, of Peter’s being “the screaming faggot of State Beach.” Most insidiously, May Lawford responded to her son’s growing apart from her by walking into Louis B. Mayer’s office and telling the prudish studio chief that Peter was a homosexual, a charge that Peter was forced to refute by soliciting the explicit testimony of Lana Turner; the canard drove a permanent wedge between him and his mother.
At MGM, Peter was little more than an English pretty boy, but he had the good fortune of appearing on the scene just as Freddie Bartholomew’s career was in decline. He played light romantic roles well, didn’t shame himself out of the business when he essayed a bit of song