Someone is missing from all the coverage of the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination: Peter Lawford, the handsome British member of the Rat Pack whose first wife was the president’s sister, Patricia Kennedy.
Lawford’s fourth wife and widow, also named Patricia, blames the Kennedy family for erasing Lawford from history in retaliation for her refusal to share footage from Kennedy’s Inaugural Ball on Jan. 19, 1961.
The ball featured performances by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Leonard Bernstein, Milton Berle, Sir Laurence Olivier and Gene Kelly, and a short speech by Eleanor Roosevelt.
“Peter organized it. I have the copyright. They want me to donate it to the Kennedy Library, but I refuse,” Patricia told me. “There’s a Kennedy at every TV network, and they have deliberately deleted Peter from every story.”
Patricia — now married to Beverly Hills private eye Dan Stewart — cites the iconic image from the president’s funeral, showing a white horse pulling the caisson with JFK’s casket as John John salutes. Lawford is there behind Jackie. “But every time I see the photo now, Peter’s head is nearly cut off, and he never is named in the caption,” Patricia said.
Lawford was dubbed “Brother-in-Lawford” by Sinatra. But after President Kennedy was advised to steer clear of Sinatra in 1962 because of his mob ties, Sinatra blamed Lawford and shunned him.
“It was downhill from there,” Patrica told me. Lawford, a big drinker, died in 1984 at age 61.