The Lawfords had intimate parties two or three times a week, dinner and games and cards, with poker usually reserved strictly for “boys’ nights in.” I was not a regular, by any means, nor was I stranger. I’d been here often enough to know Pat made a great beef stew, and Peter’s specialty was liver and bacon with Brussels sprouts. The latter dish was enough to make some invitees inquire on the phone who tonight’s chef would be-Pat, Peter, or their cook.
Also, I was aware Pat could be moody. I’d seen her warm, I’d seen her hostile, I’d seen her indifferent. And I’d seen all that just being here maybe half a dozen times in three years. Today-despite being unsure whether to call me “Mr. Heller” or “Nate”-she was gracious, moving through the spacious, curving living room with windows on the ocean and French doors to wrought-iron balconies.
“Is Peter expecting you?” she asked, glancing back at me.
“No. This is something that just came up. I wouldn’t be so rude as to drop by this late in the day if it wasn’t important.”
“Don’t be silly. We haven’t even made dinner plans yet.”
I noticed she stopped short of inviting me to be part of them.
She guided me outside, down some steps onto the generous skirt of an enormous marble swimming pool separated by a fence from the Pacific, whose tide was rushing in just yards away. Down the beach, the voices of young people, teenagers probably, laughed and shouted, distant, like memories.
In a yellow polo shirt, white slacks and sandals, wearing sunglasses, Peter Lawford was semi-reclined in a lounge-style deck chair next to a small white metal table. He was reading Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter. That was my first clue to something being amiss-like me, he was more the Harold Robbins type; that had to be Pat’s book.
On the white table was a pitcher of what was probably martinis, but the only glass was in Lawford’s hand. Maybe he was thirsty. The guy did put away a lot of booze, I could testify.
“Well, Nathan Heller,” Lawford said, with a sudden dazzling smile, tossing the book without marking his place, scrambling up to greet me, “this is a pleasant surprise.”
Always Nathan with him, not Nate.
We shook hands, pump-handle style. The last time I’d seen him, I’d taken two hundred bucks off him in poker, so this welcome was warmer than need be. This felt mildly staged, and I had a hunch I knew why.
Lawford looked typically tanned and slender, befitting his recent run as TV’s Thin Man; gray was coming in at the temples, but that was a full head of hair. Not exactly the biggest star in Hollywood, he still had the looks, and a certain grace, though he looked older than his mid-thirties. A limber six feet, he walked me over to a larger white metal table and tossed his sunglasses there-his eyes were as dark as the shades-where two chairs awaited under a white umbrella. Giddy laughter echoed up the beach. Surf rumbled. Sea birds called.
Pat brought over the pitcher of martinis, identifying it as such and asking if I’d like her to bring me a glass, or she could make me something else?
“You’re a gimlet man, if I recall,” she said.
Vodka gimlet, but damned close. I was getting waited on by the president’s sister. Wasn’t I special?
“No, I’m fine, Pat. Thanks. Shouldn’t be here long.”
She smiled tightly; her eyes weren’t as friendly as the rest of her face. “Well, then. I’ll leave you boys to it.”
And she went briskly inside. There was something military about it.
Lawford looked after her fondly. “I’ll never know how I managed that,” he said.
“None of us will,” I admitted, knowing the word was they were desperately unhappy. “I’m going to tell you something off the record.”
“Of course,” he said. He got a gold cigarette case out from his breast pocket, found a lighter in his pants, and lighted up. He didn’t offer me one-he knew I didn’t smoke.
“I can’t give you details without violating the trust of my client,” I said. “There won’t be any details. So don’t ask. All you get is a general warning.”
Now he was frowning. “What is this about, Nathan?”
“If my client wasn’t already compromised, I don’t think I’d even be here. This is a tricky one.”
“All right. Come on, man. Out with it.”
I met his eyes and held them. “I’ve heard the rumors about your brother-in-law and Marilyn.”
“Jack, you mean?”
Well, I didn’t mean Bobby.
He was shrugging and saying lightly, “You know this town, Nathan. The rumor mill. Half of it is nonsense.”
“This is part of that other half. I have it on reliable authority that Jack and Marilyn have been intimate. In fact, that they’ve been intimate”-I jerked a thumb toward the nearby sprawl of Spanish beach mansion-“in one or more of those four bedroom suites of yours.”
His smile was a little too broad, and he seemed about to wave it off, but finally my unchanging deadpan got to him.
“People do things,” he said, with a different kind of shrug. What he said next came with a twinkle in the eye and the lilt of a British accent that made it no less crude: “If you were the president, wouldn’t you fuck Marilyn Monroe, if you had the chance?”
“Me being president,” I said, “doesn’t come up that often.”
“I suppose not,” he granted.
“Peter, I don’t know if you know it, but from time to time, I’ve done jobs for your wife’s family. For Jack, and his father. And Bobby and me, we go way back. To Rackets Committee days. All the way back to that asshole McCarthy. That fucking far.”
“I’m aware, Nathan. Why do you think you’re sitting here?”
“Why do you think I’m sitting here?”
That threw him off balance. His chuckle got mixed up with a cigarette cough. “Well… I, uh… assume it’s to be of help.”
“Marilyn is a friend of mine. I really like the girl.”
“So do I! She and Pat are tight-they’re like schoolgirls together.”
That sent a disturbing if not entirely unappealing image flashing through my mind, but never mind.
“So was it a fling?” I asked. “Was Jack just putting another notch in the Kennedy boys’ belt?”
Lawford’s smile crinkled, then curdled. He was looking for words and not finding them. Actors, especially mediocre ones like Peter, need somebody to provide lines.
“Those two together just once,” I said, “is plenty to make a lot of this administration’s enemies happy. I know for a fact, from my own very special point of view, that certain friends of your friend Frank are not thrilled with Bobby making a hobby out of them at the Justice Department.”
Frank was, of course, Sinatra, and those “friends” included Sam Giancana and James Riddle Hoffa.
His smile almost disappeared. “Frank and I aren’t as close as we once were.”
“Yeah. I heard about Palm Springs.”
That seemed to goose him, mildly. His eyes tightened. “ What have you heard?”
“Just that Frank remodeled his place there, hung up a ‘President Kennedy Slept Here’ plaque in advance and everything, spending a small fortune turning it into a kind of Camp David, Hollywood-style.”
Lawford’s expression turned melancholy. “That is true.”
“And Bobby put the brakes on with Jack, told him no matter how hard Sinatra’d worked for him, the president of the United States could not be seen hanging out with a known associate of gangsters.”
“… Also true.”
I sat forward. “But, Christ, Peter-did Jack have to stay with Bing Crosby instead? The only competition in Frank’s class?”
Lawford reached for the martini glass, saying, “And a Republican, old boy.”
A Republican old boy was right.
“Sometimes,” I said, “I think Bobby gets carried away with this do-gooder nonsense. Where does he think Old Joe’s money came from?”
Lawford grunted something that was not quite a laugh. “That is the point, Nathan. One must purge one’s self of the sins of the father.”