The Patriarch (13 page)

In the spring of 1925, Kennedy decided to bid on FBO, the film company he had been instrumental in founding and then walked away from. Pat Powers, whom the London bankers had brought in to run FBO, had after two years succeeded only in piling new debt on old. Kennedy guessed that the long-suffering British bankers might now be willing to sell the company at a bargain price, and he prepared an offer for them. He had no intention of spending his own money—he never did—but he had friends and business associates who might be willing to. Guy Currier, the well-connected lawyer/businessman who had gotten him his job at Fore River, helped him secure investors and may have put in some money of his own.
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In preparation for his leap into the movie business, Kennedy paid off several of his outstanding loans, took back the stock that had been held as collateral for those loans, and deposited in his Columbia Trust safe deposit vault thousands of shares worth tens of thousands of dollars in Eastern Steamship, the Yellow Cab Company, and the Maine and New Hampshire Theatre Company. This was to be his and his family’s safety net should all go wrong. “It was at this time . . . that he established the trust funds for the children,” Rose recalled later, “because he did not know how his venture would turn out and he did not know what would happen to his health and he wanted the children to have some money laid aside in case anything happened to him. Of course, it was a very small amount of money that was put aside then, but as the years went by gradually it increased in value.”
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T
he summer before, in 1924, after two seasons at Cohasset, Kennedy had rented the Malcolm cottage, a large clapboard house at the end of Merchant Avenue in Hyannis Port. Unlike Cohasset or Bar Harbor or Newport, Hyannis Port was not one of the more luxurious summer resorts for Boston’s elites. But it provided the Kennedys with everything they required. It was accessible by rail, there was a golf club that would be eager to have Kennedy as a member (unlike the one in Cohasset), a beach club for the children, a Catholic church, and the Wianno Yacht Club in Osterville, where Joe Jr., Jack, and the other children, as they grew older, could learn to sail and race, and there were no “proper Bostonian” families to look down their noses on the arriviste Irish Catholic from East Boston.

After spending much of his summer assembling the proposal for the London bankers who owned FBO—and the capital behind it—Kennedy left Hyannis Port for New York City in mid-August. On August 17, a few days before sailing, he wrote Rose from the Harvard Club with final instructions and his contact information in London and Paris: “Rosa dear, I am getting ready to go now & when you get this I will be on my way, but I will be coming back soon so please don’t be too lonesome & have a great time. I just want you to know that going away on trips like this makes me realize just how little anything amounts to except you as years go on. I just love you more than anything in the world and I always wonder whether I ever do half enough for you to show you how much I appreciate you. Well dear this is just a little love letter from a husband to wife married 11 years.”
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Kennedy wrote again from the ship, filling Rose in on the entertainment on board—“Carl Fisher of Vienna Opera Co. & Sophie Tucker, the American coon shouter”—and his traveling companions, theater producer Jack Potter, his father, who was the former manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, and his mother, “a splendid type, of fine family gone absolutely broke.” On this and subsequent travels, he sent personalized greetings to each of his children. “You must learn French and come over here,” he wrote Jack, the child who always needed coaxing to do well in school. “The little French boys roll a hoop instead of playing football.”
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Kennedy, who abhorred being by himself but had had to leave Eddie Moore behind to look after their businesses and the Kennedy family in Hyannis Port, was miserably lonely, or so he wrote Rose: “I know it’s terrible to tell you in every letter how homesick I am but it is terrible. I can’t seem to shake it off at all. I think of you and the children all the time and almost go silly. All I have done all week is shop and visit a few churches. I really have had terrible luck as a shopper because I can’t seem to get anything really cute especially for the children but I’ll bring something home. I have received one letter from you but I suppose the others are in England. It was bread from heaven. I went to Communion Friday and went to an English Priest for confession. When I finished he asked me if I were a priest (how do you like that old darling). . . . The Potters are really very nice to me but I can’t get along without you, Rosa. It may be nice to travel but only with you. . . . I haven’t sent any cards or written to anybody so on the whole I’m a great kid.”
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In London, Kennedy tendered his offer of $1 million to the consortium of banks, now led by Lloyd’s, that owned FBO. His proposal was turned down, then months later, after he had returned to America, accepted. According to the story Kennedy later told Terry Ramsaye of
Photoplay,
he was on his way from the Harvard Club to Grand Central to catch the
Havana Limited
train to Palm Beach for a winter vacation with his friends when “a page boy dashed out as the taxi started. ‘Phone call for Mr. Kennedy—they say it’s important.’” According to Ramsaye, Kennedy “stopped the cab and went back into the club. A few minutes later he emerged and addressed his waiting companions. ‘Sorry, but you fellows will have to go on to Florida without me. I’m going to Boston tonight. I seem to have bought a motion picture company.’”
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On February 6, 1926, the deal was finalized and FBO sold to a consortium of investors, organized and headed by Joseph P. Kennedy. The price was $1.1 million, $200,000 due on signing, the remainder to be paid down over the next three years. Congratulations and advice, solicited and unsolicited, flowed in from old friends and newer business acquaintances. Kennedy thanked William Gray of the Maine and New Hampshire Theatre Company for his “bible of good common sense” and took the occasion to apologize for having run roughshod over him in recent business dealings. George Byrnes, a friend from Boston, wrote to wish him “a world of luck and prosperity. . . . Anyway as South Boston used to say to Boston Latin (that’s going back some)—If you put the ball near the plate for Joe Kennedy he’ll kill it. Well, I see by today’s paper that somebody put the film ball near the plate and you have socked it—and how!” Kennedy responded with his usual mixture of self-deprecation and self-confidence. “I am in a new game and will probably be tossed around a bit but I may have some fun and may get away with it.”
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Within hours of signing the final agreement, Kennedy and Eddie Moore moved into the FBO offices at 1560 Broadway, off Twenty-fourth Street in New York City. All the major film executives had offices nearby, including Adolph Zukor and Jesse Lasky of Famous Players–Lasky; Marcus Loew (until his death in 1927), then Nick Schenck of MGM; Carl Laemmle of Universal; Harry Warner of Warner Brothers; and William Fox of the Fox Film Corporation. While the movies were produced in Hollywood—and the executives who worked there got most of the headlines and the glory—it was in New York City that the major decisions were made.

“After having sat in your chair for the past four days, and using your office and your efficient secretary, I am beginning to think I am a ‘picture’ man,” Kennedy wrote Joseph Schnitzer, who ran the FBO studio in Los Angeles. “I brought over with me from Boston an expert accountant and we have been going over the financial situation, trying to familiarize ourselves with it.” He had discovered that the cash flow problem was even worse than he had imagined. But that could be remedied by cutting per picture production costs and studio expenses and reducing the price of borrowing money to finance new pictures.

In the old days, when pictures were shorter and cheaper, the studios had been able to raise money internally to finance new production. In recent years, they had borrowed the money. Kennedy found a better way. He organized a new company, the Cinema Credits Corporation, raised money to fund it from the Boston investors who were investing in FBO, and used this separate corporation to finance his films at better rates than were available elsewhere.
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The movie business, he was convinced, was rife with inefficiencies. He instituted new accounting procedures, shifted control over expenditures from studio executives in Hollywood to New York City, and fired overpaid studio executives in New York and Hollywood. “The trouble with many concerns like my own,” he explained in 1928 to a journalist, “was that employees occupying positions parallel to positions in other lines were vastly overpaid. It was not an uncommon thing for accountants to receive $20,000 a year, when in other business they graded from $5,000 to $10,000. My first problem was to change that, which was easy.”
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He was interested not in making artful or even good pictures at FBO, but in making a profit by producing cut-rate “program pictures,” low-budget westerns, stunt thrillers, and action melodramas and distributing them to independently owned and operated small-town theaters that could not afford to pay premium prices for expensive pictures.

A month after taking charge of the New York offices, Kennedy and Eddie Moore boarded a train to Los Angeles. “I imagine you will have quite a time out at the Coast,” William Gray, his New England associate in the distributing business, wrote him. “If I were fifteen or twenty years younger, I would like to go out with you.” Their every expense charged to their new company, the two Boston businessmen checked into the town’s premier hotel, the Ambassador. Neither had ever been in Los Angeles before.
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Having entered a new business, Kennedy set about making new friends, working his charm on future business associates, and ingratiating himself with the members of the trade press, who would be critical to raising the reputation of FBO and its new chief. One of the first—and most influential—was Martin J. Quigley, a devout Catholic, owner and publisher of the picture industry trade journal
Exhibitors Herald
(later to merge with
Moving Picture World
), and because of his connections with the church hierarchy, a powerhouse in Hollywood on matters regarding censorship. “They say a man’s lasting impressions in a new country, a new situation, or even a new business are formed by the first people he meets,” Kennedy flattered Quigley in a letter written soon after they had met in Los Angeles. “I may say truthfully that if this old idea is true and one wants to like the film business he should first meet Martin Quigley. I know I feel this way because no one could have been kinder to me or launched me more successfully on the waves of the film industry.”
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Kennedy also made the acquaintance of and initiated a lifelong friendship with Sime Silverman, the editor of
Variety,
who in return for financial favors over the years to come, including favorable loans from Columbia Trust, would supply him with the current Hollywood gossip. He introduced himself as well to the editors of the
Los Angeles Examiner,
owned by William Randolph Hearst.
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He was already on good terms with FBO’s major (perhaps its only) asset, cowboy movie star Fred Thomson, whom he had advised on his career years before, when Kennedy was a consultant to the bankers who owned the studio. “We were at the end of our rope (one might call it lasso),” Frances Marion, Thomson’s wife and a very successful screenwriter, recalled in her memoirs, “when we heard of a new man in the game . . . who was a great admirer of athletes and did not scorn horse operas. . . . Accustomed to the squinty-eyed appraisal of those in power who sat behind big desks and merely grunted or nodded when you entered their offices, we were rather taken aback by Kennedy’s sudden leap from his desk, his warm handshake, and his friendly volubility. . . . He’s a charmer, I thought, a typical Irish charmer. But he’s a rascal; he knows exactly why we’re here.”
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By early 1925, Fred Thomson was a full-fledged Hollywood star. He was not a particularly talented actor or a strikingly handsome man, but he was a good horseman and stuntman, and with his rugged, athletic body and a cowboy hat on his head, he looked the part of the clean-cut boyish hero. His biography was custom-made for the publicists: he didn’t drink, smoke, or use profane language; he had played football, been a track star, studied for the ministry at Princeton, and served as an army chaplain. Thomson’s success was so remarkable that by the time Kennedy purchased FBO, he and Silver King, his horse, were being wooed by Joe Schenck at United Artists and by other studio heads who were prepared to pay him a higher salary and put him in big-budget features instead of the “B” westerns he was shooting for FBO. Kennedy, figuring that Thomson had become too expensive to continue at FBO, advised him to make his pictures elsewhere and to sign a “personal services” contract, which authorized Kennedy to organize and run a new corporate entity, Fred Thomson Productions.

Having let Thomson go, Kennedy offered a contract to a photogenic Detroit weight lifter named Vincent Markowski, whom he renamed Tom Tyler and to whom he paid a portion of what Thomson had been getting. He offered movie contracts as well to three other photogenic athletes: football great Red Grange and tennis champions Suzanne Lenglen and Mary Browne.
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K
ennedy had never visited Hollywood, held any studio position, or produced any pictures, but he did not apologize for his lack of experience. On the contrary, he trumpeted his outsider status as a Harvard-educated banker born of American-born parents, a Bostonian whose only language was English, a baseball-playing, suburban-house-owning father of seven, and he made the case persistently and passionately that the picture industry—plagued by charges of immorality, sullied by sex scandals and divorce suits, and struggling to protect its products and profits from increasingly aggressive state censorship boards—needed someone like him. He would be Hollywood’s white, non-Jewish knight and rescue it from the suspicion that its pictures were not to be trusted because they were produced by men who through breeding and background were morally untrustworthy. “While anti-Semitic sentiments were never openly voiced,” writes film historian Garth Jowett, “it seemed as if there was a basic resentment that this ‘art of the people’ should be in the hands of ‘Jewish ex–clothing merchants’ who sold their product like so many cheap garments.”
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