Barry is back this week for Friday’s Forgotten Books with a
biography on Peter Lawford……
PETER LAWFORD: THE MAN WHO KEPT THE
SECRETS (1991) by James Spada
Reviewed by Barry Ergang
An excellent biography
recommended to me by a writer friend years ago when it was first published,
this one has been languishing on my shelf until very recently, when I finally
read it and had a hard time putting it down. This is an outstandingly readable history
of a man who might—and possibly should—have become a major Hollywood
heartthrob, and whose decline is both surprising but perhaps not altogether atypical
of its time.
The product of an oft-married,
relentlessly social-climbing mother who hated sex, let alone babies, whom he
came to loathe, and the famed and knighted military-legend father he adored but
who loved his son undemonstratively, Peter Lawford was an extremely
well-traveled but poorly-educated (in any formal sense) subject of the British
Empire who knew from the age of four that he wanted to be an actor.
James Spada’s account covers
Lawford’s formative years, revealing a great deal about mother May in the
process; the actor’s arrival in Los Angeles and his dual life as another steer
in the herd of the era’s Hollywood studio system and the celebrity friends he
made at MGM in contrast to his “civilian” existence among friends from California’s
beach scene; his marriage to Patricia Kennedy and, consequently, his
insalubrious relationship to the Kennedy clan which turned his prominence into
that which could benefit the lives and careers of others, not only more than
his own but sometimes to his own detriment; and to his eventual and rather
desperate decline into multiple marriages, drug and alcohol abuse.
Those reading this sometimes
verbally- as well as somewhat sexually-explicit (and, thus, potentially reader-warned)
biography, might find themselves offended not only by Lawford’s behavior but by
the behavior of others, not the least of whom are John F. Kennedy and his
brother Robert Kennedy, on whose behalf
Lawford often acted, for all intents and purposes, as pimp. Their presumably (at
the start, anyway) unintentional victim? Marilyn Monroe. And then there was
Frank Sinatra, whose celebrity and underworld ties helped JFK get elected but
whose criminal associations were
undermined by Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s war on organized crime. Lawford
got caught in the middle, which cost him Sinatra’s friendship.
I can’t predict, obviously,
how other readers might react to Peter Lawford and how he dealt with the
circumstances he found himself caught up in, but I personally felt sorry for
some and contemptuous—to put it mildly—of others.
A strongly recommended
biography worth readers’ time.
© 2015 Barry Ergang
Derringer Award-winner Barry
Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and
electronic. Some of it is available at Amazon
and at Smashwords.
His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.
Very interesting. I'll have to grab a copy. Thanks for posting.
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