The Patriarch (101 page)

Spring, 1908: A photograph from the
Boston Daily Globe
of the starting first baseman on the Boston Interscholastic Nine. Joe Kennedy made his mark at Boston Latin, one of the finest public high schools in the nation as an athlete, not a scholar. He managed the football team in the fall, played basketball in the winter, and was captain of the tennis team and an all-star first baseman.

Kennedy had hoped to get a job with a major Boston bank on graduation from Harvard but had to settle instead for a civil service position as an assistant bank examiner. In January 1914, he resigned his position, and after helping to rescue the East Boston bank his father had founded from a hostile takeover, he was named its president. According to the Boston newspapers, he was at age twenty-five the youngest bank president in the nation.

1918: Fore River shipyard, Kennedy with J. W. Powell (far left), general manager of the shipyard, and Charles M. Schwab (center), chairman of the board of Bethlehem Steel. Though Kennedy knew nothing about shipbuilding, he accepted the position as assistant general manager at Fore River because he had gone as far as he could as president of a tiny East Boston bank and needed a job that would carry with it a draft exemption.

October 1914: The wedding photo of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald, the mayor’s daughter, as published in the
Boston Daily Globe.
The marriage of the children of two of Boston’s leading Irish Catholic politicians was performed by Cardinal William O’Connell in his private chapel.

Beside his 1919 Ford Model T, of which he was quite proud, with two-year-old Jack and four-year-old Joe Jr. In June 1919, Kennedy resigned his position at Fore River to take a job as manager of the brokerage business at the Hayden, Stone office in Boston. His next car would be a Rolls-Royce.

In 1920, the Kennedy family moved into a larger house in a wealthier section of Brookline. He is pictured here, in 1924, with his three girls, from left to right, Eunice, three, Rosemary, six, and Kick, four, probably on their way to church.

Another photograph from1924 taken on the front steps of the Kennedy home in Brookline. Grandfather P. J. Kennedy is pictured here with Joe Jr., looking quite unhappy, and his three sisters, Rosemary, on the step below her brother, Eunice, on the top step, and Kick, only partially visible to the far left. Jack was not in the photograph, probably because he was ill in bed, as he was so much during his childhood.

Beginning in the spring of 1926, Kennedy, now in the moving picture business, made frequent train trips back and forth to Hollywood. The first leg of the journey from Los Angeles took about sixty hours, three nights and two days. Passengers changed trains in Chicago, then spent another day on the train bound for New York City. In this photo, Kennedy is shaking hands with Fred Thomson, the cowboy movie star, whom he had signed to a personal services contract.

When Kennedy met Gloria Swanson, whose career he managed and with whom he would have an affair, she was married to her third husband, Henri, Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye. Swanson and the marquis are photographed here, looking rather somber, on the deck of one of the luxury liners on which they sailed back and forth to Europe.

Gloria Swanson, with Edmund Goulding, who wrote and directed her first talking picture,
The Trespasser
. Though Kennedy had had little to do with the writing or filming of the picture, he produced it and proudly introduced Gloria at the premieres in London and New York in the late summer and fall of 1929.

September 23, 1932: Kennedy is standing a bit right of center in the first row as the Roosevelt campaign train stops somewhere near the Oregon-California border. On the train platform is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His son James is to his far right. Kennedy was delighted to be one of the few campaign officials invited to ride on the train with the candidate. And Roosevelt was delighted to have onboard the wealthy Irish Catholic businessman with connections to Hollywood, to Wall Street, and to William Randolph Hearst, the nation’s most influential publisher.