

This had put Lawford in a vulnerable position. Kennedy, the former American ambassador to Great Britain, and sister of Massachusetts senator John F. In 1954, Peter Lawford had married Patricia Kennedy, the daughter of Joseph P.

One of his regular clients was Confidential magazine, a sensationalists monthly that often got the goods on celebrities. Otash had later left the police department and gone into private practice as an investigator, working for the likes of Sheilah Graham, Frank Sinatra, and Marilyn Monroe.

"Every time we busted a bunch of hookers, his name was always in their trick books." "I told him to cool it," Otash later recalled. That meeting had been to give Peter a warning. As a vice cop in the Los Angeles Police Department, Otash had first met Lawford in the late 1940s, when the handsome actor was one of MGM's biggest stars. Peter Lawford and Otash had had a long, if sporadic, relationship. "Fred," the voice on the line said, "this is Peter Lawford. A man used to late-night summonings, Otash snapped alert and picked up the receiver. On a quiet, palm-tree-lined street in West Hollywood, private investigator Fred Otash, sleeping fitfully in the heat, awakened to the insistent jangle of his telephone. Saturday, August 4, 1962, had been so hot in Los Angeles that by one in the morning the temperature still hovered in the upper seventies.
