Rat Pack Confidential

But repeatedly he found in his corner that skinny guy he’d met in Detroit. When Sammy was in the army, Frank had become a monster star, and when he was discharged and caught up with Mastin and Big Sam in Los Angeles, he made his way over to NBC studios in Hollywood, resplendent in his dress uniform, to watch Sinatra perform his weekly stint on Your Hit Parade. After the show, he waited out back with the bobby-soxers and autograph hounds and sheepishly offered Sinatra a piece of paper to sign.

“Didn’t you work with your old man and another guy?” Frank asked, and he invited him to the next few shows, letting Sammy drink in rehearsals and backstage ambiance until another gig dragged the Mastin Trio back onto the road.

Two years later, Frank insisted that Sidney Piermont, manager of New York’s Capitol Theater, book the Mastins as his opening act at $1,250 a week—a sum that staggered Mastin and Big Sam. Sinatra never told Sammy that he was behind the act’s being hired—Piermont had wanted the Nicholas Brothers and then gagged at the price Sinatra wanted to pay Mastin—but in every other respect he treated Sammy like a peer throughout the engagement. They parted bosom pals: “Remember,” Frank told Sammy as he left for his next booking—and this was his most profound gesture of friendship—“if anybody hits you, let me know.”

But in the early fifties, no one, it seemed, wanted to hit Sammy. He was the quickest-rising star in nightclubs and theaters, particularly among the New York and L.A. cognoscenti. In 1951, the Will Mastin Trio opened at Ciro’s, the hot Sunset Strip nightclub. The room was packed with Hollywood royalty, and Sammy and Company couldn’t do enough. Dancing, singing, little comic bits, everything was a hit, nothing more so than Sammy’s impersonations of such white stars as Jimmy Cagney, Cary Grant, and Humphrey Bogart. The same good fortune followed at an engagement at the Copacabana, the dream club of Sammy’s youth, some months later. He was on the map to stay.

There was nevertheless a feeling of vertigo to it all. Although all the right people came to his shows, although he was welcome in the homes of Hollywood’s crown royalty, he sensed a distance between himself and the fellow to whom all this good fortune fell, an inner gap separating the real man from the personality he’d become. He became famous for his tight pants, his extravagant spending, his largesse, his energy. But he’d also become infamous, in the tabloid press, as a consort—often only rumored—of white actresses, and the black press could be cutting in their comments about his seeming disregard for his race.

He was calculating and savvy enough to know that all publicity was good publicity—he was thrilled that his name made for hot ink—but he was wounded by the unfairness at the root of it. His race excluded him from a number of opportunities, so he created his own success; his success lifted him out of his race and made him a star simply because of his sheer talent; yet his talent could never entirely erase his race and, in fact, made him more visible as a black man and thus more open to injustice and prejudice. He walked a perilous line between one self, the black man who could be snubbed at the doors of exclusive New York nightclubs, and another self, the showbiz whirligig whom everybody wanted a piece of. He couldn’t avoid being “Sammy Davis Jr.,” even when “Sammy Davis Jr.” was the butt of jokes, gossip, and irrational hate.

Success, money, career offers, work—all this kept the doubts at bay for some of the time, but he was still profoundly susceptible to anxiety about his hold on his life. He would read reviews and compare them to previous notices from the same critics; he would call up clubs he was playing and ask, his voice disguised, if it was still possible to get a table for that evening’s performance, collapsing in secret gratitude at the news that his shows were sold out. He was such a lost, addled soul that he began seeking answers in, of all places, Judaism, the religion of so many of the showbiz uncles who’d taken him so readily under their wings. He knew he could never escape who he was, but he kept searching for ways to somehow, maybe, evolve out of it.

Little by little, barriers fell as to the sheer force of his talent. In 1954, the Mastin Trio was invited not only to play the Frontier but to stay there, to eat, gamble, and socialize among the white customers and make a whopping $7,500 a week besides. Sammy would have to commute back and forth to L.A., where he was doing some record work, but it was a dream gig and they leapt at it. You simply couldn’t do any better than that.

Which was why it was so tragic, the car crash. Driving his Cadillac convertible to Los Angeles late on the night of November 19, 1954, listening to his own hit record “Hey There” on the radio, Sammy crossed into oncoming traffic in order to avoid a car that was making a U-turn right there in front of him on the highway. In the ensuing collision, his head hit the steering wheel. A stylized cone of chrome sticking out of the center of it like a battering ram put out his left eye.

His thoughts upon seeing his own mangled face in a piece of broken mirror as rescuers came to fetch him? “They’re going to hate me again.”

He was rushed to a hospital near Palm Springs, and Hollywood rushed to his side. Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh waited on him as he was in surgery; Frank visited constantly, as did a steady parade of showbiz lights; Jeff Chandler took the stage in his stead in Las Vegas—and nobody complained.

And when he came back, at Ciro’s, dancing and singing and gagging with maybe even more energy than before, not to mention a rakish eye patch, the world clapped its hands raw and cried with affection for him. The accident turned out to be the thing that put him over the top; he could do it all, even beat death. It was like Frank dying on-screen in From Here to Eternity: It made him forever more.

An entire Broadway show, Mr. Wonderful, was built around him. There was a rags-to-riches story to it, and Chita Rivera and Jack Carter had parts, but the point of it was Sammy’s nightclub-style performance in the second act, a partially scripted, partially free-form extravaganza of the sort that Al Jolson used to deliver when he was still in the legitimate theater. Mastin and Big Sam were on the stage with him, but it was Sammy’s name on the marquee. He did benefits, TV spots, radio appearances; he partied every night in restaurants and clubs and later in his hotel suite; he became a notorious tomcat on the prowl.

Soon enough, he was so big that the movies came calling. He played Sportin’ Life in Otto Preminger’s Porgy and Bess, and, in a great legends-of-Hollywood yarn, stunned producer Samuel Goldwyn into silence by declaring that he refused to work on Yom Kippur. “Directors I can fight,” Goldwyn lamented. “Fires on the set I can fight. Writers, even actors I can fight. But a Jewish colored fellow? This I can’t fight!”

A Jewish colored fellow: a whirling dervish: an up-and-coming superstar: just as he’d always dreamed.

America’s quest

Poor Peter.

Try this for a curse: You have looks, breeding, savoir faire, but no real talent other than the ability to deploy your mien to ingratiate yourself to the world; nevertheless, fate rewards you with sex, money, fame, station; you spend a decade or two floating atop a gigantic bubble; you can do no wrong; then it all goes slowly sour; a few missteps, two or three vicious body blows, innumerable little jabs and lacerations, and one day you wake up in your own shit, bankrupt, dazed, strung-out, a laughing-stock, alone—Whatever Happened To You?

You wouldn’t wish it on a dog, but it’s all true. Fortune granted Peter Lawford more for less than anyone ever dared hope, then reneged with such perverse violence that even his most envious enemies took pity on him.

And it all started with such promise. Indeed, in a queer way, Peter Lawford was a sparkling gem in the crown of English glory. Scion of two distinguished military lines, he toured the world as a young boy, conquered Hollywood as a teen, and grafted himself onto America’s royal family as an adult. Handsome, poised, and, in a fashion, deft, he was a perfect figure, to American eyes, of British sophistication. You look at Peter Lawford in 1959, and you’re looking at quite possibly the most fortunate man who’d ever lived.

Which makes a nice twist on this most full-of-twists life. Because on the face of things, there wasn’t a chance in hell that the maimed bastard son of Lieutenant General Sir Sydney Lawford and May Somerville Bunny would ever get anywhere, under any circumstances. A one-in-a-million combination of traits, gifts, habits, predilections, biases, and flaws made and broke Peter—a curse that only May Lawford could have concocted.

Lady Lawford, as she insisted on being addressed with technical correctness but technical presumption as well, was more than just some daft embodiment of Victorian eccentricities and perversions—though she never failed to display such traits in excess. She was a genuinely disturbed woman whose contradictions, pretensions, and megalomania consumed her and those around her—chief of all, of course, her only child.

That May Lawford ever even had a child should be reckoned something of a miracle. In her own words (captured frighteningly in her illiterate memoir, Bitch!), she was repulsed by “that horrible, messy, unsanitary thing that all husbands expect from their wives.” Her own mother, although an otherwise worldly woman, and her father, a physician in the Royal Army, never told her the facts of life, and her first husband, another military surgeon, Harry Cooper, so respected his teenage fiancée’s chastity that he never importuned upon her for so much as a kiss before they wed.

Their wedding night devolved, as might be expected, into a horror show of fright, tears, frustration, anger, Harry finally inducing May with biblical verses about spousal obedience. From this merry start, the marriage went downhill, with sex as the chief sticking point. May grudgingly submitted once a month, and then only lay passively. Cooper endured six months of celibacy until he was posted to India; May didn’t join him. Alone in London, secure in the cloak of marriage, May passed her time in amateur theatricals and a bustling social life. (Where she had mortal aversions to actual physical intimacy, she had none whatever to open flirting.) Cooper received strange reports of May’s behavior and assumed the worst. One night, two and a half years after the wedding, the rejection, rumors, guilt, and grief overwhelmed him: He blew his brains out in his office with a pistol.

Strangely disassociating herself from this ghastly event, May met and was courted by another military surgeon, Ernest Aylen, and married him within two years of Cooper’s death. Once again, the fruits promised by May’s quite modern behavior proved illusory when her wedding night arrived. Aylen, however, was made of tougher stuff than Cooper; his marriage became a kind of swap meet, 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 and dance, could play gravely enough for small roles in serious drama: a good all-round B-movie lead, or nice support for an A production. He’d never make them forget Olivier, but he was a reliable asset for a studio at something like its height.

Despite his lack of professional distinction, Peter was a highly sought-after invitee, an especially glittering extra in the diadem of Hollywood nightlife; he became known as “America’s guest,” as much for his habit of showing up at every noteworthy party as for his reluctance to pick up a dinner tab.

There was, however, another social group with which Peter mingled and to whom he showed an especially generous and loyal side of his nature. Having been introduced to surfing as a young boy in Hawaii, Peter had a genuine love for beach life, and he spent all the time he could at the shore, catching waves, playing volleyball, and steeping himself in the lingo and rituals of beach bums—a cultish society whose vocabulary and attitudes would later be borrowed, in a fashion, by the Rat Pack. May hated the ne’er-do-well manner of this crowd—which, of course, attracted her son to it even more. Moreover, Peter relished mixing his surfing and acting cronies, watching the cultures clash with sophomoric delight.

As he neared his thirties and seemed stuck on a treadmill of light comedy and dull drama at MGM, as his genteel parasitism grew wearying, two life-altering events befell him. At eighty-seven, General Lawford died contentedly in his garden, so deeply rattling Peter that he initially refused to return from Hawaii and endure the funeral. Nine months later, he found himself engaged once again, seriously this time, to Patricia Kennedy, the strong-willed sixth child of Irish-American Croesus and political dynast Joseph P. Kennedy.

Pat Kennedy was not a soft, obliging Hollywood gal. She was not as pretty as Peter’s other fiancées, nor as sensual, but she was sharp-witted and independent and spunky. She didn’t just throw open her legs for him because he was a handsome movie star who talked nice; she challenged his opinions and stood up for her own beliefs in a fashion that must’ve reminded Peter at least a little bit of May. Peter and Pat drew toward one another with surprising ease, not slaving over one another but respectful of their mutual independence. They were in their thirties and set in their ways; their relationship seemed as much one of siblings as of lovers.

Everyone knew what Pat saw in Peter, but many observers, especially Pat’s very jaded father, Joe Kennedy, saw something suspicious in Peter’s commitment to the relationship: Pat, though smart and vivacious, was no beauty, so Peter’s affection tended to give off a mercenary vibe, at least at first blush; moreover, Joe was appalled at Peter’s baroque Hollywood manner—the actor wore red socks to their first meeting—which seemed to lend credibility to the gossip he’d heard about Peter’s catamitic proclivities.

To satisfy himself as to the first matter, he had Peter agree to a prenuptial pact that protected Pat’s fortune (at the crucial moment, though, he forgave Peter from signing it, satisfied at his willingness to do so). As for the other, he importuned upon J. Edgar Hoover to open his infamous store of Official and Confidential files, which revealed that Peter was a well-known patron of Hollywood prostitutes. Rather than blanch at this evidence of Peter’s moral character, lascivious Old Joe, who approved of hearty sexuality, even in potential sons-in-law, was delighted. The courtship climaxed in a lavish April 1954 wedding. Peter Lawford had graduated from waning pretty-boy actor to American royal—a hot number all of a sudden.

Frank, for one, took notice.

Through the dusty haze kicked up by his killing schedule, Frank had begun to set his sights on something higher than mere success as a singer, actor, or even mogul.

He had always seen himself as a representative man, a “little guy” whose ascent in the world was a vindication of his parents’ immigration to America and his own combative resiliency in overcoming ethnic prejudice, loneliness, and, if you could call it that, economic privation. It wasn’t enough for a guy like that to simply be busy at his job—Sammy, say, was at least as active. No, he had to have an impact on the world.

So in 1958, when it looked like this handsome young senator from Massachusetts, Jack Kennedy, would make a bid for the presidency, Frank decided to become part of it the way he did everything else he was passionate about: both hands, feetfirst, no looking back.