I Remember Pat Lawford

October 2024 · 4 minute read

The death of Pat Kennedy Lawford brings back memories of the good times in Hollywood — and the world.

The beautiful and classy Kennedy daughter and the handsome Hollywood star were the perfect pair for press of the ’60s. I was happy to be one of them. In my columns of the weeks of July 1960, I would write about the Kennedy conclave in L.A. when John F. Kennedy received the Democrats’ nod to be the Presidential candidate.

I was in the L.A. sports arena many of the convention nights and wrote having been on that platform one night with Peter Lawford, Tony Curtis and Frank Sinatra — with John F. Kennedy.

Peter and Pat Lawford had partied the Kennedy clan in town. But I also wrote, “Lady Lawford, Peter’s mom, is mucho miffed she hasn’t been invited to any of the doings with the Kennedys. She accuses, “The Kennedys are rather snobbish.” And recalls the engagement party of Pat K. to Peter, where, she says, “Joe Kennedy told me he was sorry his daughter was marrying an actor — and an English actor at that!”

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As history was to prove over the years, the marriage of the Lawfords, despite four children, was a sad story, the subject for constant coverage along with that of the rest of the Kennedy clan — already headline fodder.

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Peter and Pat Lawford’s son, actor Christopher Kennedy Lawford, winged to New York, Monday morning for the final farewell to his mother. In his book, “Symptoms of Withdrawal,” he writes, “My mother had struggled against the yoke of being a talented and willful female in a family and society that didn’t really care what the women were up to as long as they were having lots of babies. (She had four). Her marriage to my father and her subsequent life in California were early attempts to find her own identity and be noticed outside of The Family. It’s a miracle that I was born at all since neither of my parents was the marrying kind.”

Chris has three children of his own from his first marriage to Jeannie — David, Savannah and Matthew — for whom he wrote his book, “So that you know who I am.” He is now married to actress Lana Antonova with whom he filmed Anthony Hopkins’ “Slipstream.” In his book, Christopher writes of his mother’s too-tragic, decade-long illnesses and surgeries which saddened family and friends. Her death this week brought to a close the once-thought, made-in-heaven-like romance.

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