The Patriarch (14 page)

He introduced himself to the larger public and industry insiders in a July 9, 1926, advertisement, published in the
New York Times
and elsewhere, for
The Two-Gun Man,
starring Fred Thomson, world’s greatest western star, and his miracle horse, Silver King. Referencing Florenz Ziegfeld, who the week before had jumped on the censorship bandwagon and proposed that the secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice chair a six-person committee to clean up the stage, Kennedy’s ad had his western hero address the Broadway impresario directly.

“You Tell ’Em ZIEGGY. Clean up the stage. Make it clean as the screen. I produce CLEAN photoplays with my pal, SILVER KING— But I make ’em hum with action—flame with romance—boom with comedy—whizz with thrills—and Silver performs some of the greatest tricks you ever saw! You please the whole family. SO DO I!”

The very next day, Kennedy made his point again, this time in a huge ad for another of his superclean, homegrown American pictures,
Bigger than Barnum’s
: “BRING THE CHILDREN! Re-live the Golden Hours of Youth! The Ecstasy of Circus Days when Main Street reared and rocked with the Smashing Pageantry of the Greatest Show on Earth.”

As he told a gathering of newspaper reporters he had invited to Adams House in Boston, highlighting once more the fact that he was not an immigrant, but American-born and -bred, he intended to make “American films for Americans.”

“Wholesomeness, Mr. Kennedy pointed out to his guests,” according to the
Boston Daily Globe,
“is intended to form the keynote of the pictures which the new concern will present, and there is to be a very general elimination of the sex problem movies and of those which depend upon sex appeal.” There were no foreign names in FBO productions, no dark, swarthy heroes or exotic-looking heroines, and little intimation of sex, divorce, or debauchery. As part of his branding strategy, Kennedy placed his own, distinctly non-Jewish face with his name in large capital letters in each display ad. Smiling, wearing his spectacles, dressed in a conservative suit jacket and tie, he was the best advertisement he could find for FBO’s clean entertainment.
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As a full-time “picture man” with offices in New York City and a studio in Los Angeles, Kennedy spent most of the week away from home. Every Friday night, he and Eddie Moore took the train to Boston, returning to New York on Sunday night. “Occasionally,” Rose remembered, “I went to New York with him for the weekend, saw some plays and did some shopping, but life at home with seven children [Robert Francis, or Bobby, had been born in November 1925] was a busy one. The New England winters were bitter, cold, and snowy, and the spring weather was changeable which gave everyone constant colds.” “I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to interrupt the children’s schools. They were having their teeth straightened—orthodontia work—and I didn’t want to interrupt that, until he was certain that this was going to be a success.”
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That summer, his first at FBO, Kennedy again rented the house at Hyannis Port for Rose, the children, and his father, who after the death of Mary Augusta was spending more time with his son’s family. When Joe Jr., now a big boy of eleven, went away to camp, Kennedy took it upon himself to keep him informed of what the rest of the family was doing at the Hyannis Port house. So began the series of letters that would continue for the next thirty-five years, with father, then mother, filling in the children on the comings, goings, and misdeeds of their siblings. Kennedy wrote to Joe Jr. in July 1926 and told him that his younger brother Jack, left to fend for himself for the first time in his life, was “really very lonesome for you and wants me to be sure and promise him that he will go to camp next summer. He is taking swimming lessons to see if he can improve his stroke.”
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A few weeks later, after visiting Joe Jr. at camp, Kennedy wrote to say that he and Rose had been “all tickled to death with the way you seem to be getting along.” He reassured his son that the bit of schoolwork he was doing at camp in preparation for his next term would in the end be well worth it. “You will be much better prepared in the Fall and then you will be thankful that you did a little work. Remember that Jack is practicing at the piano each day an hour and studying from one-half to three-quarters of an hour on his books so that he is really spending more time than you are.”
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In August, Kennedy sailed to Europe again, this time with Rose. Two of their six weeks were spent at the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz, the other four in Paris and London, where Rose shopped and her husband held business meetings with film executives, including one at the Pathé offices, set up by Lord Beaverbrook, with whom Kennedy had been in correspondence since his last visit abroad. “With the calculating eye of the banker,” the
Boston Daily Globe
reported on his return, Kennedy had “observed industrial conditions in the Old World from an unbiased viewpoint” and found England, especially, recovering well from the war and ready and willing to import more American films.
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On his return, he hosted a luncheon for theater owners at the Hotel Astor in New York, to which he invited Will Hays, Fred Thomson, and Gene Tunney, the new heavyweight champion, thereby assuring that the event would be covered by the Hollywood trade press. Serving as master of ceremonies, Kennedy introduced Hays, who, he announced based on what film executives in England had told him, was largely responsible for the boom in American film exports. Hays responded with fulsome praise for Kennedy, who had “honored the motion picture industry by coming into it, and it is better for your presence. You are a distinct asset. . . . For a long time I have wanted to state publicly my opinion of Joseph P. Kennedy and the significance of his entrance into the motion picture industry. . . . I see three champions here. Champion Gene Tunney, Champion Fred Thomson and Champion Joe Kennedy: all champions in their lines!”
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Everywhere he went—to New York and Hollywood dinner parties, business meetings, and film openings—Joseph P. Kennedy flashed his toothy Boston smile and put on the charm. “A new figure has appeared among the big men of the motion picture industry,”
Moving Picture World
exulted in a multipage December 11, 1926, profile. “A new personality—in his manner of thought, in his cultural backgrounds . . . a new, big figure on the motion picture horizon, a natural leader and organizer, Joseph P. Kennedy’s shadow looms larger every minute.”
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O
ver the Christmas holidays and January, part of which he spent with the family in Brookline, Kennedy visited Harvard Business School and opened negotiations to organize and present a lecture series on the picture industry, with a star-studded roster of top executives from every branch of the industry. To sweeten the deal, he promised to fund a research project on the industry with the princely sum of $10,000 a year for three years.
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The lecture series was well worth $30,000 to Kennedy. If he could bring it off, he would manage to shine yet another spotlight on his Harvard diploma and business connections and burnish his reputation as a go-to, get-it-done magic man who possessed not only the genius to come up with a brilliant idea, but the organizational talents to produce the season-long Harvard show, starring Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew, Cecil B. DeMille, and Jesse Lasky. Was there any better way to demonstrate to the public and politicians alike that the pictures had outgrown their origins in vaudeville and penny arcades and were entirely legitimate—as art and business—than by parading before a Harvard audience the biggest names in the industry?

Kennedy consulted with Will Hays on the speaker list for his lecture series. He also volunteered to coordinate an industry-wide effort to lend films that represented “the best artistic achievements in the industry” to a Fogg Museum film library and archive. When the chair of the Harvard Department of Fine Arts signed off on the proposal, Kennedy wrote Hays that “it would be of great interest to Harvard if
New York Times
commented on their progressive steps editorially. I merely make this suggestion for your consideration. Believe Times would do it.” Two days later, the
New York Times
ran the requested story.
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After clearing the names with Hays, Kennedy got in touch with Adolph Zukor, Jesse Lasky, Marcus Loew, William Fox, Harry Warner, and Cecil B. DeMille, not as a supplicant who needed a favor, but as a potential collaborator in an industry-enhancing project. To Adolph Zukor, arguably the most powerful individual in moving pictures, he explained that the alliance with Harvard Business School, the Fogg Museum, and the Harvard Department of Fine Arts was “a step of world-wide importance” for the film industry. “It means a recognition of the artistic work by the oldest university in the United States and by a department that is second to none in the world.” In a separate letter, written the same day to one of Zukor’s top executives, Kennedy suggested that Zukor might want to delay his promised gift to Yale and consider Harvard instead.
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In March, he wrote Cecil B. DeMille, who had asked if he could change the date of his lecture. “If you had any idea how anxious the Harvard authorities are to see you, you would forgive my keeping after Hays to have you come here. I spent most of my first lecture at Harvard telling them about the marvelous work you have done in ‘The King of Kings.’ . . . President Lowell,” Kennedy added, was “very anxious to meet you personally.” DeMille, who apparently took well to flattery, agreed to give his lecture in April.
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Kennedy acted as host and master of ceremonies for the lecture series that spring and editor of the collected lectures, which he published in book form. He introduced the speakers, took them on tours of the campus, hosted special luncheons where they met “Harvard people,” and had his picture taken with each of them. He also offered his services to students who wanted to work in the industry, helped to set up the film library at Fogg, and got from Hays “passes” at Boston’s leading moving theaters for the “members of the Fine Arts Department who are to select the films for the archives at Harvard.”

His stature—at Harvard and in Hollywood—was, as he had hoped and expected, boosted by his service as liaison between the two. Later that spring, he was asked by the dean’s office to secure newsreel coverage for the dedication of the Harvard Business School’s new building. “They are very anxious to have the news reels take shots of the buildings,” he telegraphed Hays in Hollywood, “so that the whole world will have an opportunity to see what Harvard is doing. Incidentally, it will be good advertising for us. Would you care to call up the various companies that have news reels and make this suggestion?”
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I
n the late spring of 1927, Kennedy, for the first and only time, took Rose with him to the West Coast. Frances Marion hosted a dinner for the Kennedys, followed by a ladies’ luncheon for “the boss’s wife” at “The Enchanted Hill,” the name bestowed on her and Fred Thomson’s twenty-room, two-story “Andalusian farmhouse” in Beverly Hills, complete with an indoor movie theater and outdoor pool, aviary, tennis court, riding ring, and stables for several horses, including Silver King and his double. Rose, who had come to Los Angeles to scout out the possibility of moving the family there, found the estate “magnificent” but confided to Marion that “she would never want to surround her children with such an overabundance of luxuries.”
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Like other movie moguls in Hollywood and New York, Kennedy that spring offered a picture contract to America’s newest and cleanest-cut homegrown hero, Charles A. Lindbergh. Joseph W. Powell, Kennedy’s former boss at Fore River, who had a small financial interest in FBO, was enlisted to tender the offer. As Powell explained to a Captain Alan Buchanan after Lindbergh had rejected their overture, while recognizing “that the chances were 100 to 1 against us,” FBO had felt obligated as “the only Christians in the moving picture business . . . to offer to do a good job for this very fine young gentleman.”
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In the fall of 1927, a year and a half after he had bought FBO, an old family friend from Boston, James Quirk, now the editor of
Photoplay,
commissioned a multipage profile by Terry Ramsaye, the industry’s unofficial spokesperson, complete with photos of the newest movie mogul, his wife, and his seven children. Ramsaye’s article, like all the other publicity on Kennedy, made the none-too-subtle point that the Boston banker had nothing in common with other “famous film magnates” who had entered the industry by accident. Kennedy, by contrast, after a “career of business success behind him in . . . banking and shipbuilding, came in the amusement world and the motion pictures deliberately, consciously and with his eyes open.” To drive home his point that Kennedy was a new breed of studio head, Ramsaye offered what he claimed was Marcus Loew’s reaction on being introduced to Joseph Kennedy. “‘A banker! . . . A banker?—why I thought this business was just for furriers.’” According to Ramsaye, Kennedy had arrived at just the right moment to “endow the febrile motion picture industry with an atmosphere of Americanism and substantiality. Kennedy is a valuable personality from this point of view. He is exceedingly American, with a background of lofty and conservative financial connections, an atmosphere of much home and family life and all those fireside virtues of which the public never hears in the current news from Hollywood.” Ramsaye’s piece was so much to Kennedy’s liking that he would soon afterward hire him as a publicist.
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Rose Kennedy, always a shrewd observer, concurred entirely with Ramsaye’s observations about her husband’s Hollywood career. “One reason he was so much in demand was because he was a banker and no banker was directly in the business in those days. . . . They were also all of Jewish extraction and Kennedy was the only one of Irish extraction in the movie business company and there were a lot of jokes around how the Jews were going to take the Irishman. However, he did very well.”
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