The newsreel footage from the Plaza in April 1954 shows the Kennedy daughter dancing a waltz with a movie star. Three thousand people pressed against the police lines outside the church that morning. America decided it was watching Hollywood finally marry politics, and it looked like love. Her father had advised her against it.
Eight years later, her husband’s actual job in her family was making phone calls, including the last one Marilyn Monroe ever received. In 1965, he was still telling reporters their separation was purely geographical. He was lying. The wife everyone pitied ended up with the children, the divorce, and the final control of the record.
Patricia Helen Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in May 1924, the sixth child and fourth daughter. In that family, the boys were the product and the girls were the campaign. She was sent to the Convent of the Sacred Heart outside London while her father served as ambassador, then to Maplehurst School and Rosemont College, where she directed and acted in student productions and graduated in 1945. The family assessment was that she was the most mature of the children and also the most introverted.
Her father noticed her math ability and said more than once that Patricia had the best business mind of the nine children. That kind of praise was priceless in a household where no daughter was ever given anything real to run. So she did the best available thing. After Rosemont, she joined the production department at NBC in New York.
At twenty-two, she produced “I Love to Eat,” the first cooking show on network television. She worked on the Kate Smith radio program and moved to Los Angeles with ambitions to produce and direct films. That field was not open to her, and everyone knew it. She had money and fame but no clear path.
What she also had was a childhood spent watching her mother respond to her father’s open infidelities with silence, travel, and attendance at Mass. Rose Kennedy preferred discretion, managing the public image, and then withdrawing. Whatever Patricia concluded from that, she never recorded for anyone. She was thirty when she married.
Peter Lawford was also thirty in 1954, which was not the usual age for first marriages in their class. Her brother Jack introduced them in 1949. The compressed story of a short courtship followed by an engagement and wedding ignores five years in which they saw each other occasionally and nothing happened. The love story the press sold as a whirlwind was in fact long and probably intermittent.
Lawford was born in London in 1923, the son of a British general. Only when he was twenty-seven did he learn that his mother had been married to another man when she became pregnant with him, and a quietly arranged double divorce had produced the family he thought he had always had. He had no formal education, was tutored privately, and trained in tennis and ballet. At fourteen, his right arm went through a glass door and suffered permanent nerve damage, an injury that ended his planned military career before it began.
His aunt cut him out of a large inheritance when he chose acting. MGM put him under contract in 1943 and used him as decorative accompaniment to its female stars. He had real popularity for about four years, and then it faded. By 1953, the studio dropped him in a wave of contract cancellations, and he was appearing as a television guest star.
In the winter of 1953 and 1954, then, there was a man whose career had been taken from him, whose money was never his own, and whose identity was British in a country about to become intensely interested in a particular American family. And there was a woman with a famous name, real money, no defined profession, and a thirtieth birthday approaching. Joe Kennedy did not want the marriage. Lawford was not Catholic but Episcopalian, he was foreign, and he was an actor, a profession Joe knew firsthand and held in contempt.
Patricia’s son later wrote that his grandfather tried to talk her out of it. She married Lawford anyway. She had been warned by the most powerful man in American political life, and she proceeded. The engagement was announced in February 1954.
The wedding took place at the Church of St. Thomas More on Manhattan’s East Side, with the date recorded variously as April 23, 24, and 25. The wedding itself has a contested record, an early sign of what the marriage would become. Three thousand people gathered outside.
Police held hands to form a line. A child slipped through. The celebrant was Father John Cavanaugh, former president of Notre Dame, a family priest brought in for the occasion. Two hundred fifty guests gathered at the Plaza, including Bernard Baruch, Supreme Court Justice William O.
Douglas, Greer Garson, Marian Davies, and Richard Berlin of Hearst. Businessmen, a justice, a newspaper executive, and movie stars, in that order. It was less a wedding than an inventory of the Kennedy assets in 1954, assembled in one room for the photographers, six years before Jack Kennedy would need all of it at once. The couple settled in Santa Monica in a beach house that had belonged to Louis B.
Mayer, at 625 Palisades Beach Road. Mayer had built it as a producer’s beach home from the era when the Santa Monica shore was a refuge for studio elites. It had a pool overlooking the ocean and could host a hundred guests without anyone stepping outside. Within a few years it became a West Coast operations station for a national political family, and its owners were the staff.
Four children arrived in six years: Christopher in March 1955, Sydney in August 1956, Victoria in November 1958, and Robin in July 1961, all born in Santa Monica. Their son later described a childhood in which his mother was often absent, called away to Washington or Hyannis Port wherever the family needed her, and described himself as more committed to the extended Kennedy operation than to the household his mother built with her husband. She had married into Hollywood and kept traveling back to the family that had opposed the marriage. Peter Lawford became useful.
In 1959, Frank Sinatra brought him into the Rat Pack and gave him a nickname that made the value of the relationship clear. He was the brother-in-law, not a friend, a relative. Lawford bought the rights to a heist story from a director who had heard it from a gas station attendant, and when Sinatra showed interest, it became the film Ocean’s 11. That was his career by then.
He brought the material, a bigger man adopted it, and he got a supporting part in his own idea. He became an American citizen on April 23, 1960, just in time to vote in the November election, with his brother-in-law on the ballot. Patricia had worked for her brother’s campaigns since 1946, when she and her sisters and mother hosted Boston tea parties where women gathered to hear Jack’s stories of his childhood and war. In 1960, she traveled the country speaking for him.
Lawford supplied the entertainers, the money, and the glamour. Sinatra recorded a campaign version of “High Hopes. ” For one election cycle, Joe Kennedy’s objections looked like a miscalculation, and Patricia’s decision to marry against her father looked right. Then the family took possession of what it had bought.
The Santa Monica house became the place where Jack Kennedy stayed on the West Coast, where he met people. Marilyn Monroe was a guest there, along with many others. What the president needed was a house that was not his own, run by his own family on the other side of the country, with a host who would never speak. That was the job.
The woman managing the guest list, the meals, and the four children in that house was his sister. Monroe taught Patricia’s seven-year-old son the twist in the living room. That was what the house was like. In December 1961, Joe Kennedy suffered a stroke at Palm Beach that left him unable to speak.
Patricia learned of it while driving her children to lunch. A stranger stopped her to say he had just heard on the radio that her father had collapsed. Whatever Joe Kennedy had been, he had been the only person who ever imposed sanctions on the men of that family. After December 1961, there were no sanctions left.
Three months later came the weekend that turned Peter Lawford’s life upside down, and in which he had almost no role. The president was to stay at Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs during a March 1962 trip to the West Coast. Sinatra had prepared for months and built a helipad. Then Robert Kennedy, worried for years about Sinatra’s ties to organized crime figures, persuaded his brother to move the visit to the home of Bing Crosby, a Republican, which made the insult complete.
The change came at the last moment. Sinatra tore out the helipad with his own hands. He blamed Lawford, not the attorney general who made the decision, not the president who accepted it, and not the brother-in-law who delivered the news. He threw Lawford out of the Rat Pack and never spoke to him again except once the following year, when his son was kidnapped and he needed Robert Kennedy’s help.
By the spring of 1962, Lawford had been dropped by the studio, expelled by Sinatra, and left with only one professional identity, brother-in-law of the president. He had no influence inside the family and no standing outside it. He turned to drink. In May of that year, he stood on the stage of Madison Square Garden and introduced a late Marilyn Monroe as “the late Marilyn Monroe.
” It was an improvised joke, it worked, and it became one of the most excruciating lines on record. On August 4, in the early evening, he phoned her to invite her to dinner at the beach house. She had already declined an invitation once that day. Her speech was slurred and hard to understand.
She told him to say goodbye to Pat, to Jack, and to himself. He called again, but the line was busy. He called her housekeeper on another line and was told she was fine. He called his lawyer and his business manager, and the advice was to stay away from her house, because a Kennedy relative appearing at Marilyn Monroe’s home at night would be front-page news no matter what he found there.
He stayed away. She died that night. For the next twenty-two years, the public story of Peter Lawford’s life revolved around that phone call. Patricia, raised by Rose Kennedy to believe that sex outside marriage was a sin and inside marriage was only for children, was living with a man whose social life rested on the opposite assumption.
She had four children, a church that did not permit divorce, a father who could no longer speak, and a brother in the White House whose reelection campaign was eighteen months away. No account of 1962 or 1963 suggests she left her husband. The family needed the image, and she kept sitting for it. Then, on November 22, 1963, the reason for all of it was gone, in Dallas.
Within weeks, she began proceedings for a legal separation. The timing is documented. The usefulness of Peter Lawford ended at the Plaza, as everything else did. What followed was not simply a woman reaching her limit after a decade of humiliation, though that was also true.
It was something harder. It took her two years to complete the ending. More than a year before the divorce was announced, she moved her four children from the Santa Monica house to an apartment in Manhattan. Lawford kept his California home.
It was not a trial separation but a transfer of the children to the other side of the country, and it settled the one issue that could have been decided against her. Custody was never contested. By the time any case was filed, the children had been living with their mother in New York for over a year, three thousand miles from their father. When the story first broke in the spring of 1965, Lawford was quoted as saying the separation was news to him.
Another account describes it as stupidity. More likely, he was a man watching the only thing that gave him status walk out the door, saying anything to delay the finality for a few more months. In the meantime, the family closed around her. New York in 1965 allowed divorce on essentially one ground, adultery, which would have required Patricia Kennedy to stand in a New York court and formally accuse her husband of it, before the press, sixteen months after her brother’s assassination, while another brother sat in the Senate.
Idaho required six weeks of residence and far less. So in late December she went to Sun Valley to ski, accompanied by Bobby and his family, joined by Jackie. Her brother the senator was photographed on the slopes while his sister completed her residency requirement. On February 1, 1966, the proceedings took twelve minutes, in a closed courtroom, out a back door, and into a waiting car.
She chose the court. She chose the timing. She moved the children first and filed second. She used the family’s resources, from travel to media management, on the assumption that a Kennedy in court was a private matter.
Her father had said she had the best business mind among all nine children. He was right, and this was the one major deal she managed herself. She kept her name, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, on everything for the next forty years. What she did not keep was the man.
Peter Lawford’s career after 1966 declined noticeably, traceable through guest spots on Wild Wild West, Fantasy Island, and The Love Boat. He married three more times, each shorter than the last. He married Mary Rowan in 1971, separated in 1975. He married Deborah Gould in 1976, after knowing her three weeks, and separated within two months.
He married Patricia Seaton in July 1984, months before his death. He was an alcoholic and drug addict until his kidneys and liver failed, and he died at Cedars-Sinai hospital on Christmas Eve 1984, aged sixty-one. By then he had been effectively excluded from the Kennedy family he had married into. No one denounced him, no one attacked him, he was simply absent from every account any Kennedy gave.
In 1988, his widow moved his remains because of a dispute over burial bills and had the ashes scattered in the Pacific, inviting the National Enquirer to photograph it. In 1969, a year after Robert Kennedy was killed, Patricia produced a book called That Shining Hour, 306 pages, dark blue cloth, gold lettering, privately printed by a Massachusetts lithographer, never given a commercial edition, distributed only to family and friends. She compiled the contributors herself: Ted Kennedy, Jacqueline Onassis, Arthur Schlesinger, Robert McNamara, Justice Douglas, Cesar Chavez, Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, George Plimpton, Averell Harriman. She signed the copies in her own hand.
The woman who had wanted to produce and direct since she was twenty-two, and had been told that work was unavailable to her, produced the most distinguished private memorial to her brother’s life, and controlled who received a copy. She spent the rest of her life working for the John F. Kennedy Library and founding the National Committee on the Literary Arts. She never gave a single interview about her marriage.
When James Spada was researching his biography of Lawford in the late 1980s, he could not persuade her to talk. Her own son asked her to tell him what his father had been like as a young man, before the alcoholism, before the Kennedys. She refused. A secondhand account says she told someone that Lawford destroyed her life.
The refusal to speak to her son is not in dispute. She died of pneumonia at her Manhattan home in September 2006, aged eighty-two. The marriage America remembers is the newsreel of the wedding, the waltz. She allowed no interview, no memoir, no letter, no answer to her son.
That is the single image she left, and she chose it herself.