TV Radio Mirror (Jan - Jun 1955)

even drove Pat past the place where he once was employed for thirty dollars a week, including tips. "I took her to the parking lot where I used to work when I was sixteen. That was a nice Democratic touch — and nice Republican, too." During the holidays, they decided they were in love. Pat was about to embark on a tour around the world, and one night Pete remarked at dinner that eventually he would like to be married to her — and Pat agreed eventually she would. . . . "Eventually," as it happened, was practically "now." . . . Since Pat was taking off for Tokyo on the first lap of her tour, they flew back to the Coast together. After she'd gone, a lonely Pete went to San Francisco for the weekend. By nature, he's a man of few words, and the first knowledge his mother, Lady May Lawford, had that theirs was a serious romance was the following Monday, when Pete breezed in home to pack a bag. "Who is that girl out in the car with you?" his mother asked. "It looks like Pat." "It is Pat," Pete grinned. "I thought she was on the other side of the world." "She was. But I called and asked her to come back — and marry me." He was flying with Pat and her sister to New York that night to ask her father's consent. Hollywood bachelors were finally convinced that the prince of their brotherhood was about to bite the dust when Pete purchased an eightcarat diamond ring and startled his pal, Bob Neal, young Texas oil man, by inquiring casually, "Would you like to do me a large favor? Would you come to my wedding and be best man?" With the Reverend John J. Cavanaugh (formerly president of Notre Dame) officiating, Pat, 26, and Pete, 30, were married a year ago April 24 in St. Thomas More's Catholic Church, New York City. In the past, when pressed on the subject, Pete had hazarded a guess that he would be married when he reached the mellow maturity of thirty years. "It looks as though I really planned it that way, doesn't it?" he says laughingly now. Nobody who knows him is surprised that Pete didn't marry an actress. He's always had some doubt about how that might work out — two egos battling for a place in the Hollywood sun. One thing sure, he used to say, "She won't be one of those ultra-career-conscious girls . . . always looking around as if they've lost something. Peeling a room to see whom they can see. You know — girls who can't eat without first looking to see if a director is watching them." That description certainly wouldn't fit Patricia Kennedy. On the other hand, Pat wouldn't be thrown by the challenge of acclimating herself to show business and its demands on her husband-to-be. Not even four thousand of Pete's clamoring fans screaming outside the church — and knocking the bride's princess cap and wedding veil askew to get nearer him — seriously disturbed her. As Pete would say: "She's much too intelligent for that." The spotlight's no stranger to her, coming from a family so active politically. But, with her natural reserve, Pat's happier out of it and she's convinced she has no place whatsoever in Pete's career. Nor would religious differences be a barrier. Pat comes from a staunch Catholic family and Pete was brought up in the Church of England, but from childhood he was taught by his mother to be tolerant of all religions. "I don't care if you worship a totem -pole on Thursday Island — as long as you're religious," Lady Lawford would say. "All religions lead to God, anyway." Pete didn't give up his own church, but he took instructions in Pat's faith for the wedding ceremony, and agreed their children would follow her faith. Theirs was a wedding day to remember. The bride traditionally beautiful in her Hattie Carnegie imported-satin gown. Excitement, what with fans and churchcrashers, so feverish that all the barricades and twenty-three policemen couldn't control it. The reception at the Plaza Hotel rosily aglow with pink candles, pink table arrangements, champagne, a profusion of dogwood. Their first dance together as man and wife, to the strains of their favorite, "Stranger in Paradise." And taking off into the blue yonder, bound for their Hawaiian honeymoon. But Pete's pals will never let him forget that . . . for all the love scenes he'd played so smoothly before the cameras with Janet Leigh, June Allyson, Kathryn Grayson and other movie queens ... in his nervousness to get back down that aisle — he forgot to kiss the bride. "That was a real mob. All I remember was saying, 'Let's get out of here!' " Pete says now. He was playing this one for the most illustrious audience ever. Royalty, diplomats, senators, socialites, statesmen-philosophers such as Bernard Baruch, and motion-picture stars such as Greer Garson, who was starring in "Mrs. Miniver" when Pete was working as an usher in a theater and got one proud line in the film. Thronging that small church 82 SUDDENLY I SAW WHAT A FOOL I'D BEEN! Thousands of people — bewildered by overwhelming emotional problems — have found the very help they needed on radio's "My True Story". For this moving dramatic program deals with the emotional difficulties of real people . . . the kind of people you see and talk to every day. And when you tune in, you'll hear how they surmount real-life problems of love, hope, fear and jealousy. Each emotion-packed episode is taken from life jttelf — right from the flies of "True Story Magazine". Tune In "MY TRUE STORY" American Broadcasting Stations Would she find out In time that life with her dream-lover would be a nightmare? Read "NE'ER-DO-WELL LOVER" in June TRUE STORY MAGAZINE at newsstands now. were names that are legends in their own fields — and who'd touched the lives of Pete and Pat at one time or another. . . . Logically, their own paths could have crossed years before Fate finally introduced them in Hollywood. They might have met in Pete's own native England in 1937, when Pat's father was named Ambassador to Great Britain and sailed there with his pretty Irish wife and family of nine. But, in 1937, Master Peter Lawford suffered a serious arm injury. Reaching for the handle of a French window, he missed the handle and ran his arm through the window, cutting the main artery and endangering the use of that arm forever. A specialist prescribed a warmer climate and, together with his parents, Sir Sidney and Lady Lawford, Pete sailed for Santa Barbara, California, where the muscles soon began to heal again. However, the injury ruled out the military career for which Pete had been unenthusiastically headed — and he headed for near-by Hollywood, instead. "We were all reaching for some reason for the accident at the time it happened. I'd always been so athletic. I kept wondering what I'd ever done that God would do this to me. But apparently it was for this," Pete has said, of his Hollywood career. From childhood Pete had always been crazy to act, but tradition and ancestry decreed a military career. When he had an opportunity to audition for a London movie studio, Pete and his mother made a bargain. "If they say I have no talent — then I'll be a general," he promised her then. Lady Lawford was so sure they would be of that opinion, she consented. They shook hands in front of his tutor to seal the bargain. However, the studio signed him — and she couldn't go back on her word. English papers front-paged "British General's Son Goes Into Films," and the whole thing so unnerved relatives that his grandfather immediately cut Pete out of his will. (Time, however, spared that dignified gentleman from seeing his grandson portraying a lonely-hearts editor named Phoebe Goodheart on television.) Meanwhile, labor laws prohibiting any child from working in films soon nipped Pete's career in England. Then, in Hollywood, his voice was changing, and there was nothing to do until the process was complete. About this time, war broke out in Europe. The Lawfords' income was frozen to $200 a month. . . . They went to Palm Beach, Florida — where the paths of Peter Lawford and Patricia Kennedy might have crossed again. Pete got a job parking cars at "Mr. Brookenfeld's lot" near the Everglades Club — and about a mile from the Kennedys' estate. But Pat Kennedy wasn't home. . . . By the time she was back in America and attending Rosemont College in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, Pete was getting into the groove in Hollywood — and cutting quite an American rug at the Palladium. He worked as an usher at the Village Theater in Westwood, and he got his foot inside the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios one day when an agent passed the word they needed an English boy for "Mrs. Miniver." Pete got somebody to take the theater door, rushed to the studio, read for Director William Wyler, did his partone line — and was back at the door before the theater manager missed him. Metro had a flock of English-background pictures on schedule and they kept Pete busy in "Yank at Eton," "White Cliffs of Dover," and "Mrs. Parkington." They signed him and he was soon on his way up. The Lawfords lived then in a little white bungalow, in which autographed photographs of kings and queens and the Prince of Wales divided their billing with a large colored poster for "Son of Lassie" Pete had begged from some theater. Lady