He would have been 91. In honor of the day, I have culled an excerpt from my book Peter Lawford: The Man Who Kept The Secrets that describes the circumstances surrounding his birth (hint: there was a breath of scandal). I hope you enjoy!
Friday morning, September
7, 1923, dawned
blustery
in London,
the
first chill of
autumn sweeping through
after a warm late-summer
rainstorm. Inside the gracious
row
house
at 17 Artillery
Mansions
in Victoria
Street,
May Aylen, the wife of
Ernest Vaughan
Aylen,
a major
in the
Royal Army
Medical Corps,
lay
in her oak-paneled third-floor bedroom
and
waited
to become a mother.
When
she felt the first of
a series
of sharp
labor
pains, she
summoned Miss Hemming,
the
squat,
earnest Royal
Red Cross nurse she
had retained to
help
her with the delivery.
The labor, excruciatingly painful, lasted
for
hours, complicated
by May’s slim
hips and the
fact that
this
was the nearly forty-year-old
woman’s
first pregnancy.
She bore the
pain
as long as she
could, but
when
Miss
Hemming left the
room to
summon the doctor, May
reached
under her pillow, pulled
out her husband’s
service revolver, and put
the
cold steel barrel
into
her mouth. Just as
she was about
to press the trigger, Miss Hemming raced
back
into
the
room and snatched the gun away from her.
“Such agony!”
May later
said
of the labor,
but it was nothing
compared
to her
suffering during
the
delivery itself, which didn’t come until the late
afternoon. The baby
was large — nine and a half pounds
— and
in the
breech position inside
May’s
womb.
For
nearly twenty minutes
the
doctor struggled to
pull
the
infant
— a boy
— through May’s cervix, trying not to
injure him, tugging
at his feet as
carefully as
possible. When the child’s head was
finally freed the doctor
saw
that the umbilical cord
was wrapped around his
neck and had
almost choked
him. The baby
was listless, his
left arm apparently
paralyzed,
his color poor. Out of
earshot
of Mrs. Aylen, the doctor
told
Miss
Hemming, “He’ll be
dead before midnight.”
“I wasn’t
going to
let that baby die,” Miss Hemming said years later. While his
exhausted
mother
slept,
the
nurse labored
over
him most of the
night,
massaged his
limp arm, rubbed
and
patted him, splashed
him with brandy
to get
his circulation
going.
As dawn
broke
the
next morning, the child revived, and he
cried
lustily
as Miss Hemming handed him, bundled in a blue blanket,
to his mother.
May Aylen was not overjoyed
at the birth
of her
son.
“I can’t stand babies!” she
said years later. “They run
at both
ends; they smell of
sour
milk and urine.” For the sixteen
years of her marriage,
she had refused
Major
Aylen’s
pleas that
she give him a child.
When May finally did allow herself to
conceive early in December
1922, it was not because
she longed for the rewards
of motherhood; nor was
it so
that she
could
make her
husband’s fondest wish come true.
No,
this
baby had
been
planned with
an altogether less
altruistic
goal
in mind.
Ernest
Aylen
was not present when his
wife
gave
birth, because
he knew
the
baby was
not
his child. The boy’s
father was
Aylen’s
fifty-seven-year-old commanding officer, Lieutenant General
Sir Sydney
Lawford.
As May
had hoped, the birth
of her
baby — she
named
him Peter — would
eventually
result
in her marriage to
Sir Sydney. At
that point,
May,
an inveterate
social
climber,
would realize a lifelong
dream, a goal so
important to
her that she
had allowed
herself
to become pregnant
despite the dangers
for
a woman
her age and
her abhorrence
of children.
As Sydney Lawford’s
wife, she
would be
immediately
elevated from merely Mrs. Ernest
Aylen
to Lady Lawford. And
she would revel in what
she called “this handle” for
the
rest
of her
life.
