Shawn Levy - Rat Pack Confidential

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.