Real Lace (24 page)

Roosevelt's reward to Kennedy, after his election in 1932, was to name Kennedy Chairman of his newly created Securities and Exchange Commission, designed to regulate and control just such speculators as Kennedy had himself been. At first, Roosevelt's New
Deal supporters were dismayed with the appointment; it struck them as a complete sellout to Wall Street. Here was a man no better than the notorious Smith and Meehan; could he possibly be expected to “regulate” such villains? Wall Street, on the other hand, was delighted with the appointment, deeming it “wise and just.” Kennedy, after all, was known as a wily trader, and the Street was certain that any control he attempted to apply would be minimal. What happened, of course, amounted to another Kennedy double-cross because Kennedy did an about-face, turned his back on his old Wall Street cronies, and proceeded to initiate a long series of stiff and much-needed reforms. He began by requiring the registration of the country's 24 stock exchanges, their 2,400 members and their 5,000 listed securities. He then tackled the biggest exchange of them all—the New York—instigating the first of many legal actions by the SEC against manipulators who would not hew to the hard SEC line. “Traitor to your class!” Wall Street cried, as even such sacred figures as Morgan began to feel the force of the Kennedy pinch. Instead of the “friend in government” Wall Street had hoped to find in Kennedy, it found a dreaded enemy, a “henchman” of “that Man in the White House.” None of these activities endeared the Kennedys to such Wall Street families as the McDonnells.

Kennedy, meanwhile, with his new friends in the White House and Cabinet, was able, quietly, to be of service to his old friends in the motion picture industry in ways small and large. Early in the Roosevelt administration, Joseph M. Schenck, head of Twentieth Century-Fox in New York, was able to report to his friend Sam Goldwyn in Hollywood that, through State Department channels—and in coded cablegrams (which Kennedy let Mr. Schenck see)—Kennedy was working out a formula by which the movie industry could withdraw, and transfer out of England, all the money that it was likely to earn there. The money would come out of England in dollars, not in pounds, which was important since at
the time the pound was in a weakened state. Originally, a five-million-dollar ceiling had been in force for such withdrawals. Kennedy, however, had assured Schenck that this limit could be raised to between twenty and thirty million. Schenck also warned Goldwyn not to interfere with Kennedy, since Kennedy was a testy customer and resented anyone who attempted to go over his head, or that of the State Department. Kennedy, in his ambassadorial role at the Court of St. James, would deal directly with the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon.

In terms of his personal morality, Joseph Kennedy also managed to offend such First Irish Families as the Murrays and the McDonnells. While the F.I.F.'s were determined to create an aura of the strictest moral rectitude around their activities and private lives, Joe Kennedy's private life did not meet their standards. There was, to begin with, his much publicized association with the actress Gloria Swanson, the leading glamour figure of her day, whom Kennedy had met on one of his jaunts to Hollywood. He and Miss Swanson became the talk of both coasts, and appeared together at parties in both New York and California. Joe Kennedy became Miss Swanson's banker and adviser. Her husband, the French Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudray, was often in Europe on some project for Pathé Pictures.

Kennedy loaned large sums of money to Miss Swanson's Gloria Productions, Inc., and financed a number of her motion pictures. The first was called
Queen Kelly
, a legendary flop, and a revealing study of the character of the producer. Erich Von Stroheim had been hired to direct, and both Kennedy and the Hays Office had approved the script, but, during the shooting, Miss Swanson became alarmed. The mercurial Von Stroheim was improvising scenes, adding new material, and changing the story line entirely. She telephoned Kennedy in Palm Beach in an agitated state and said, “There's a madman in charge here. The scenes he's shooting will never get past Will Hays.” Kennedy hurried to Hollywood
and asked to see the rushes. What he saw horrified him. One scene portrayed a young priest administering the Last Rites to a dying madam in a bordello in Dar es Salaam. Another showed a young convent girl being seduced. All this was to be offered under the banner, “Joseph P. Kennedy Presents.” Kennedy hastily consulted Sam Goldwyn and Irving Thalberg, who suggested that Edmund Goulding be brought in to try to save the film. But Von Stroheim had shot over twenty thousand feet of celluloid, and very little could be done to tame
Queen Kelly
. In the end, though he had invested some $800,000 in the picture, Kennedy did not dare release it in the United States, though it was distributed in Europe.

For months afterward, Kennedy told everyone who would listen how he had “lost a million” on
Queen Kelly
. It is often as much fun for a rich man to lose money as it is to make it. Actually, Mr. Kennedy had lost little or nothing on the venture. He might admire Miss Swanson personally, but his contract with her was strictly businesslike and stipulated that losses on
Queen Kelly
be offset by profits on future films. At length, Miss Swanson grew tired of hearing her friend talk about his “failure,” and announced the actual state of affairs to the press.

Kennedy next sponsored Miss Swanson in her first “talkie,”
The Trespasser
, and personally hired Hollywood's leading dramatic coach, Laura Hope Crews, to guide the star through every syllable of Edmund Goulding's script.
The Trespasser
was a huge box office success, handily repaying the losses on
Queen Kelly
, and Kennedy went on to produce a second sound film for Swanson called
What a Widow!
Critics were disdainful (“A comedy of sorts,” sniffed the
New York Times)
, but crowds, as they usually did for a Swanson film, formed long queues outside the box office, and again Kennedy made money.
What a Widow!
marked the end of Joseph Kennedy's career as a Hollywood angel, and his relationship with its star came to an abrupt end shortly afterward. “I
questioned his judgment,” Miss Swanson commented. “He did not like to be questioned.”

The association with Gloria Swanson might be over, but not Joe Kennedy's reputation as a rake. In Catholic circles in New York, it was inevitable that the Kennedy children should meet and mingle with the children of the older-established Murrays and McDonnells, and pretty Charlotte McDonnell became a close school friend of the Kennedys' daughter, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy. In the days when both girls were of debutante age, Charlotte McDonnell Harris recalls (Kathleen was later killed in an airplane crash) an instance when Mr. Kennedy was staying in his Waldorf-Astoria apartment and Mrs. Kennedy was ensconced in a suite at the Plaza. One evening before a party, Charlotte called for her friend at the Waldorf apartment and was met by Mr. Kennedy. After a few pleasantries, Mr. Kennedy jogged her arm, winked mischievously, and said, “Leave your coat here. Will Hays is coming by in a little while, and I want him to think I've got a girl in the bedroom.” At around the same time, Kick Kennedy fell madly in love with a young man of whom her father disapproved. The senior Kennedy got columnists like Walter Winchell to dig up “dirt” about the young man and print it, thus stifling the romance.

But perhaps the fact that irked families like the Murrays and McDonnells most about the Kennedys was their social pretensions. It was patently clear that both Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy wanted places in New York society for themselves and for their children, and the McDonnells have always felt, and resented, the Kennedys' attempts to “copy” them. “They copied us by coming to New York in the first place,” one of the McDonnells says. “In New York, they tried to copy every move we made.” In New York, Murrays and McDonnells and Cuddihys had not only made it to the top of Irish Catholic society, through such institutions as the Catholic Big Sisters and the Gotham Ball, but were also receiving
society-page attention in connection with Protestant affairs, and were listed in the
Social Register
. Quite obviously, the Kennedys were striving for the same sort of recognition.

In Boston, “high Irish” like the Kennedys who had made it out of the cellars and attics of the East End, and out of the tiny maids' rooms of Beacon Hill, had never been accepted by the Brahmin group who ruled the city's social seas. They still have not, and few names beginning with
O
' or
Mc
decorate the rosters of such clubs as the Somerset, the Chilton, and the Myopia Hunt, although more than a few are listed in the
Social Register
. Faced with this state of affairs, Boston's new-rich Irish had formed their own, and pathetically imitative, social institutions. In Boston, Rose Kennedy had been a member of the Cecilian Guild, the Irish answer to the exclusive Junior League, and had helped organize the Ace of Clubs, a group of “better” Irish girls (an ability to speak French was a requirement for admission, indicating that Boston's Irish families were already beginning to draw lines within their own ranks) that had an annual ball at the Somerset Hotel (not Club) which was a thin echo of the no-Irish-allowed debutante parties on the Hill. In her own Irish Catholic group, Rose Kennedy was something of a social leader; after all, her father had been Mayor of Boston. But the second-rateness of it all could not have escaped Rose Kennedy's notice, and it probably rankled within her. She wanted something better.

The Kennedys had spent several summers at the Massachusetts beach resort of Nantasket, which was predominantly rich Irish Catholic. Moving on, they then took a large house at Cohasset, predominantly Old Guard Protestant, where they suddenly discovered that they had unfriendly neighbors. When Joseph P. Kennedy applied for a family membership in the Cohasset Country Club, he was blackballed.

“It was petty and cruel,” admitted Brahmin Ralph Lowell. “The women of Cohasset looked down on the daughter of ‘Honey
Fitz,' and who was Joe Kennedy but the son of Pat, the barkeeper?”

The same thing happened in Palm Beach, where the family attempted to establish a social base. The old families of Palm Beach came to the Kennedys' parties, mostly out of curiosity when there was nothing better to do, but they did not invite the Kennedys to theirs. The Kennedys applied for membership to the Everglades Club, and were turned down. In order to play golf, they were obliged to apply to the Jewish Palm Beach Country Club, where they were accepted. McDonnells and Murrays snickered at the Kennedys' social striving, not least when, as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, Joseph P. Kennedy succeeded in having all his daughters, including the tragic Rosemary, presented at Court. He took inordinate delight in reminding his friends that one of the daughters had married the Duke of Devonshire, and that he had had the temerity to tell a British journalist that he thought the Queen was a cute trick.

Long after the family had moved to New York, the wounds from the snubs of Boston had not healed in Rose Kennedy. Once, on the eve of a holiday when he was a student at Harvard, John F. Kennedy was picked up by his family in the big limousine for the drive down to New York. He brought with him a friend and classmate who was a member of one of Boston's topmost families. When he introduced his friend to his mother, and she heard his name, Rose Kennedy reacted with nervousness. She was tense during the drive, and at one point she turned suddenly to her son's friend and, “with a note of desperation in her voice,” according to Richard Whalen, asked the young man, “Tell me, when are the nice people of Boston going to accept us?”

The answer, from the “nice” people of Boston even today, is: not yet.

Part Three

HIGH SOCIETY

Chapter 17

THE DUCHESS BRADY

In Rome in the 1920's, one of the loveliest villas in the city was the Casa del Sole, perched on the Janiculum Hill at 16 Via Aurelia Antica, the winter home of an American couple, Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas F. Brady. Its view took in a breathtaking panorama of the Eternal City, with St. Peter's in the distance, and the house was surrounded by beautiful gardens and terraces, groves of lemon trees, and hushed avenues of tall cedars designed for meditative strolls. There were fountains and statues and tennis courts, and one tiny garden created just for tea. Servants in slippered feet waited on the Bradys, who were the Roman equivalent, in that sunlit era, of Gerald and Sara Murphy, the Americans who entertained with similar elegance slightly to the north, on the French Riviera. There was one difference. The Murphys' guests were largely artistic, from the worlds of letters, the theater, and dance. The Bradys' guests were ecclesiastical, consisting predominantly of Princes of the Church. Three
particularly good friends were Cardinal Bonzano, Cardinal Gasparri, and Cardinal Pacelli.

Nicholas Brady had inherited a fortune from his father, the utilities emperor Anthony N. Brady (who had been the first to spy and promote the inventing talents of Grandpa Thomas E. Murray), and his wife was the former Genevieve Garvan, a sister of the celebrated detective, Francis P. Garvan, who headed the Bureau of Investigation of the United States Attorney General's office (to confuse things somewhat, Nicholas Brady's sister, Mabel, was married to Mr. Garvan). Nick Brady, a lapsed Catholic, had, under the influence of his wife's dynamic personality, returned to the Church. One of the reasons for the Brady's winter residence in the city was Mrs. Brady's strong affinity to the Roman Church, particularly the Jesuit Order. She had selected the site of Casa del Sole largely because of its unimpeded view of St. Peter's.

In the autumn of 1925, a young priest in his middle thirties named Francis J. Spellman had arrived in Rome, where he had been assigned to duty with the Papal Secretariat of State, something of an honor for an American priest. Born in the little town of Whitman, Massachusetts, the son of a grocer and the grandson of an immigrant cobbler from Limerick who had made shoes for the rich of Boston, Francis Spellman had, on his graduation from Fordham and his decision to enter the priesthood, been told by his father, “Always go with people who are smarter than you are—and in your case it won't be difficult.” In Rome, where his title was the modest one of “playground director,” Father Spellman was actually working closely with the Papal Secretariat of State and the important Cardinals who were the nucleus of the Brady circle. One day at St. Peter's, Spellman noticed Mr. and Mrs. Brady sitting a few pews behind him. There were two much better seats up front, which had been reserved for the Ambassador of Portugal, who had not shown up, and Spellman suggested to Cardinal Bonzano that the Bradys might prefer these seats. The Bradys were delighted to be moved up front, and so was Cardinal Bonzano, an
old friend of the Bradys and an important star in the Brady set. Cardinal Bonzano jotted down the name and address of the young priest who had been so helpful and gave it to the Bradys, and presently Father Spellman was joining the red-hatted guests at the little lunches and dinners at Casa del Sole. The Bradys were charmed by the young priest from Boston, and when a chaplain was needed for the Bradys' private chapel, the Bradys asked Father Spellman if he would like the job. He eagerly accepted.