The Patriarch (15 page)

According to Rose, Kennedy was astonished not only at the number of Jews in positions of power and influence in Hollywood, but at the way in which they clung together and protected one another. As she later told her collaborator Robert Coughlin, her husband brought home from Hollywood an important lesson for his children: that they too “should stick together.”
⁴⁹

Rose and her husband could not help but look at Hollywood, as they did every other community, through ethnic-tinged glasses. They had grown up rich, powerful, and privileged, but in a city sharply and irremediably divided between “us” and “them,” Irish Catholics and Yankee Protestants. Kennedy discovered an entirely different social environment in Hollywood, one in which the major division was not between Irish Catholics and Anglo-Protestants, but between Christians and Jews. As an Irish Catholic studio executive in Hollywood, Kennedy was the odd man out, part of a minority so small, it was of little consequence. There were Catholics in the media, such as Quirk at
Photoplay
and Martin Quigley, the publisher of the
Exhibitors Herald,
but during Kennedy’s time in Hollywood, they did
not
exercise
the
powerful influence they would with the organization of the Catholic Legion of Decency in 1933. Kennedy strategically cast his lot in Hollywood with Presbyterian Will Hays and the Protestant establishment that had so effectively excluded him from positions of power and influence in Boston.

Seven

H
OLLYWOOD

I
n the spring of 1927, “we decided,” Rose recalled, “that Joe was definitely in a successful movie business” and that the time had come to move the family from Boston to New York. Years later, answering a question asked her by Robert Coughlin, her ghostwriter, she denied emphatically that Kennedy had moved the family “to New York because he felt he had been socially snubbed in Boston and it was difficult for the children.” They had moved for one reason only, “because his business was exclusively in New York at that time.” What she neglected to add was that Kennedy had never had any great love for the city he left behind.
¹

He would later advise his friend John Burns, the brilliant Boston-born Irish Catholic lawyer, Harvard Law School professor, and former superior court judge, to move his family from Boston to New York: “Boston is a bigoted place.” The Burns boys would never succeed there as they might in New York City. Wall Street, he told Burns, was a meritocracy in ways that Boston, with its anti-Irish sentiments, would never be.
²

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E
ddie Moore, dispatched to find a home for the Kennedys in New York, located one large enough for a family of nine—plus servants—and grand enough for a picture studio head, at 5040 Independence Avenue, on the corner of 252nd Street in Riverdale. White stucco, with several floors of bedrooms, the top ones overlooking the Hudson River, the house was enormous, by far the largest in the neighborhood, with a multiple-car garage and a spacious backyard. Kennedy rented the house and held on to the one in Brookline as insurance should all fall apart. Rose, who was pregnant with their eighth child, wanted to return there to give birth.

On September 24, 1927, the Kennedy children, Rose, and the servants boarded the private railroad car her husband had leased for the trip from Boston to New York. “Rose and children arrive New York Saturday,” Kennedy wired Fred Thomson, whose first big feature for Paramount was opening in October. “Because of the newness of the place and number of things to be done to get them settled in house I feel I really should bring them over or at least take care of them when they arrive.”
³

The five older children were enrolled in the private school nearest their home, Riverdale Country School. With its well-groomed playing fields, emphasis on athletics, solid academics, and supervised afterschool play program, it was perfect for Joe Jr. and Jack. Rosemary, Kick, and Eunice, who attended the lower school, took the school bus with their big brothers. Joe Jr., never a particularly good student, plodded through with grades in the lower eighties, solidly in the middle rank. Jack started off well, then tailed off. Their school photos reveal two very different-looking boys: the athletically built Joe Jr., proud and composed, with a smirk on his face; and Jack, thin, frail, looking a bit frightened.
⁴

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K
ennedy’s daily life was not appreciably impacted by his family’s move to Riverdale. He saw little of them that fall, worked late hours, and spent many nights at the Harvard Club or at a hotel near the FBO offices at 1560 Broadway.

He had made great strides in his year and a half as FBO chief executive. By adhering closely to his business model, he had not only cut losses but had begun to make a profit feeding the small-theater audiences’ endless appetite for “B” features. FBO brought out fifty-one forgettable films in 1927, including
South Sea Love, Aflame in the Sky, Jake the Plumber, Toupay or Not Toupay, A Racing Romeo, Skinny,
and
Bee Cause.
Kennedy profited as well from his “personal services” contract with Fred Thomson. He had negotiated a contract for Thomson with Jesse Lasky at Paramount, which provided him with a sizable fee for each picture Thompson made. For his first big-budget feature, Thomson had decided to play Jesse James—but as a Confederate war hero, not a villain. Regrettably, there was no way in the world that a film portraying Jesse James as a hero was going to pass censorship. When Thomson stuck to his guns and refused to play Jesse as a villain, Kennedy was forced to use his considerable charm and negotiating skills to work out an acceptable compromise with Paramount and the censors. The film was re-edited so that James died in the end, which angered Thomson’s fans but satisfied the censors. To make sure audiences got the right moral, the closing title was changed from “He was shot in the back by Bob Ford” to “After all, Jesse was wrong—it had to end this way.”
⁵

The film opened in October on Broadway at the Rialto. The reviews were mixed, the box office poor. Fred and Silver King followed with three additional westerns for Paramount. They too did poorly. Kennedy saw the handwriting on the wall. The public had grown weary of westerns, even Paramount-produced, big-budget ones. There were too many of them, with the same plots, stunts, characters, costumes, and interchangeable athletes on horseback. Kennedy did everything he could to keep Fred’s career alive, but ultimately he failed. Thomson’s stardom had crested at FBO. There was nowhere left to go but down.
⁶

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F
ortunately for Kennedy, another star whose light burned much brighter than Fred Thomson’s was gravitating in his direction. On November 7, 1927, he got a cable from a Hollywood acquaintance, Robert Kane, asking if he would meet with Gloria Swanson, who was on her way to New York City. “Gloria needs handling,” Kane wrote, “needs being properly financed and having her organization placed in proper hands and I have taken the liberty of asking her to see you.”
⁷

They met at Barclay’s, the hotel where Swanson was staying. “The maître d’ led me to the table,” Gloria recounted in her memoirs, “and Mr. Kennedy rose and energetically introduced himself. I was amused by his heavy Boston accent, and I could tell he was surprised that I was so tiny. He didn’t resemble any banker I knew. His suit was too bulky, and the knot of his tie was not pushed up tight. With his spectacles and prominent chin, he looked like any average working-class person’s uncle. A man of about forty, he still retained a certain boyishness. Apart from his accent, his hands were the most noticeable thing about him. They looked unused to work, and there were wide spaces between his fingers. He gestured often and animatedly with them when he talked.” The meeting went well, for the most part. Swanson showed Kennedy “a memorandum from her accountant outlining the two propositions I had received for financing my third picture for United Artists.” Kennedy seized the opportunity to show off his banker’s vocabulary and declaim on the studio’s failures to properly finance and account for production and distribution costs. “Nobody in Hollywood, he declared, knew how to make a balance sheet that gave a banker what he needed. . . . Certainly nobody knew how to depreciate, to amortize, to capitalize—those very things, he said, that spelled success or failure in any other business.”

Despite herself, Swanson was enchanted by the boyish banker who was trying so hard to impress her with his knowledge of finance. When he wasn’t expatiating on the failures of Hollywood to follow reasonable accounting procedures, he was bellowing with laughter “and whacking his thighs” at her little jokes. She was a bit surprised and disappointed when instead of offering a proposal of his own for financing her next film, he suggested that she stay with United Artists. Kennedy was playing hard to get; he had no intention of letting the opportunity to work with one of Hollywood’s greatest stars slip away. When Swanson returned to her hotel room that evening, the hotel telephone operator informed her that she had had several calls from a Mr. Kennedy, who was now downstairs and had asked to see her. “I was bemused and told her to send him up,” she recounted in her memoirs. Kennedy asked her to dinner. “He added in a different tone altogether that he had a proposition to discuss with me.”
⁸

They drove for three quarters of an hour over the Queensboro Bridge into Long Island, Kennedy talking all the time about banking and moving pictures. When they sat down for dinner, Swanson recalled in handwritten notes for her autobiography, Kennedy looked a bit uncomfortable. “It was obvious he was ill at ease not knowing what to do next—I’m sure he was not accustomed to dining alone with a lady.” Swanson was only half right. Kennedy had been out with ladies before, but not with glamorous movie stars. He had lured her to dinner to discuss a business proposition, but both of them knew that if that was all he intended, he would not have felt obliged to have a chauffeur drive them to Long Island.
⁹

He presented her with a copy of his Harvard lectures, now in book form. They laughed together at the idea of Zukor lecturing at Harvard, and Swanson “imitated Mr. Zukor’s heavy Hungarian accent.” Kennedy was in his element here, the Harvard-educated banker alternately railing against and mocking the immigrant Jewish amateurs in Hollywood who didn’t understand business, banking, or accounting—and never would. “There is no question that one of the bonds between them that Joe exploited was that she had been taken advantage of by Jews,” William Dufty, Swanson’s sixth and final husband, told author Cari Beauchamp.
¹⁰

As the night wore on, Kennedy laid out his proposition. He offered to take her on as his personal client, to put her finances in order, reduce her debts, finance her next picture, and manage the business aspects of her career.

After nearly two years of making cheap, grade-B pictures, he was ready to move up a notch in the Hollywood pecking order and join the rest of the studio heads in throwing money at overpriced, self-indulgent stars. In his Harvard lecture he had joked that when told by a magazine writer that he “had some good pictures this year,” he’d asked, “What were they?” His most successful film to date had been
The
Gorilla Hunt,
which, he told the Harvard students, he had watched for five minutes before leaving the room “in disgust.” There was money to be made in cheap westerns, melodramas, and adventure stories starring dogs, but little prestige accrued to studio heads who turned them out like cookies from a cooker cutter. Having hobnobbed with the industry’s elites at Harvard, Kennedy did not relish returning to his lowly perch at FBO.
¹¹

Gloria Swanson offered him the vehicle he needed to climb to the top of his profession. At the time, she was arguably one of Hollywood’s two or three greatest stars. In the 1924
Photoplay
fan poll, she had come in third, behind Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. In the
Film Daily
’s rating of box office attractions, she had ranked second behind Harold Lloyd. The year before, Jesse Lasky had offered her $1 million to re-sign with Paramount, but she had turned him down to join her fellow megastars Pickford, Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, and Buster Keaton at United Artists.
¹²

There was no one quite like her. Physically, she was eerily like Rose. Both were tiny, with sparkling eyes, the whitest of teeth, and curly dark hair. But Gloria was tinier, her eyes (always well mascaraed) shone brighter, her hair was darker and curlier, her features were sharper and more defined. And unlike Rose Kennedy—or for that matter Mary Pickford, her only real rival at the box office—Swanson would never be mistaken for the girl next door. She exuded a devil-may-care sensuality that, under Cecil B. DeMille’s direction, had been transposed early in her career into box office magic. She avoided being stereotyped, took different roles, and enjoyed breaking the rules for public appearances. She was among the first female stars to be photographed with her children and the first to marry and divorce one husband after another. She stopped at six. When she met Kennedy she was on her third, the dashing Frenchman Henri, Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye, who with his perfect physique and posture, greased-back dark hair parted on the left, elegant suits, and well-manicured mustache looked as much the movie star as she did.

That Kennedy and Swanson met in the fall of 1927 was fortuitous for both. He needed her to escape being typecast as the chief executive of a minor studio. She needed him to put her financial house in order so that she could secure funding for her next film. That they were sexually attracted to each other was icing on the cake.

Swanson returned west soon after their dinner on Long Island. Kennedy stayed in touch with her and her longtime attorney and adviser, Milton Cohen, by telephone, telegram, and letter. “From the very sketchy outline I am able to obtain from Miss Swanson,” he wrote Cohen on December 20, “it rather appears to me as if she has so heavily mortgaged her future that very drastic steps must be taken if she hopes to straighten herself out.” Kennedy informed Cohen that he would be “very glad, after receiving word from you, to put myself and some people in my organization at her disposal to work out her problems as best we could without any cost to her.”
¹³

Kennedy did not follow Swanson to Los Angeles but remained in New York, where there was much to do. It was becoming clearer by the minute, especially after the opening of Al Jolson’s
The Jazz
Singer
in October, that picture audiences wanted and were willing to pay a bit extra to hear their stars talk and sing. Converting the studios and theaters to sound would require huge amounts of capital. Fortunately, Wall Street was in the midst of what appeared to be an unstoppable upward trend in stock prices and profits. With but a few minor dips along the way, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had doubled from 92 in May 1924 to over 200 in December 1927. In 1927 alone, $7.8 billion in stocks and bonds had been floated, a postwar record; corporate-bonded debt had reached an all-time high of $35.2 billion.

By late 1927, the remaining question for most of the major studios was not when or whether to convert to sound, but which system to install. Western Electric had taken an early lead in the multimillion-dollar sweepstakes by signing Vitaphone contracts with most of the leading studios. David Sarnoff was desperate to demonstrate the superiority of the RCA Photophone, but he hadn’t yet found a studio willing to install and produce pictures with it.