by David Nasaw
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For the summer of 1922, befitting his rise in the world and enhanced bank account, Kennedy rented a vacation home in Cohasset, a summer resort town thirty miles from Brookline, a much more appropriate location for a Hayden, Stone executive than Nantasket, the favored resort of Irish Catholic politicians, where the family had been summering. The big remodeled two-story house with a garage, overlooking the ocean at 25 Sheldon Road, was almost the same distance from the water as the East Boston house he had grown up in and the Hyannis and Palm Beach houses he would raise his children in.
Several of Kennedy’s business acquaintances and Harvard classmates, including Bob Fisher, his former roommate and now the coach of the Harvard football team, rented or owned homes in Cohasset and belonged to the golf club there. Fisher volunteered to help Kennedy with his application to the club and asked Dudley Dean, who knew Kennedy and had been a club member for eighteen years, to sponsor him. In early May, Dean reported to Fisher that he had “had a chat” with Hugh Bancroft of the selection committee, who had “emphasized that a great many of the members regarded the outfit as a rather close corporation in a social way because of long acquaintance and not very heavily on the gold end per se. In other words, those having that special regard wanted to see old faces, continually. I want you both to know that it looks as tho it wouldn’t be as easy sailing as I imagined when you broached the matter. . . . Wish to heaven I could turn over to him for this summer my family membership.”50
The committee would never formally turn down Kennedy’s application, but by not acting on it before the summer was over, they made their wishes known. Kennedy biographers and family historians would later make much of the fact that he had been denied admission to the Cohasset golf club. Kennedy never did. Neither did Rose, who told her ghostwriter that she had taken it in stride. She had long since learned that in Boston and its environs, there were certain places Irish Catholics did not venture. The Cohasset golf club was among them. There were other places for Joe to play. He was already a member of the Woodland Club in Auburndale and the Braeburn Country Club in Newton.51
The Kennedy family would return to Cohasset for the following summer, further evidence that the rejection had not meant much to Joe or his family.
PART II
Hollywood
Six
“MY OWN MASTER IN MY OWN BUSINESS”
There were now seven Kennedys in Brookline. Eunice Kennedy, fifth child and third daughter, had been born on July 10, 1921. The newspaper announcement again referred not to Kennedy, but to his more famous wife, whom the Boston Daily Globe jokingly described as “an ardent follower of the Roosevelt doctrines and . . . dead set against race suicide.”1
Eunice’s older brothers and sisters were doing well, though Jack, as thin and sickly as ever, continued to catch every childhood disease that came his way. In January 1922, he took ill with what may been whooping cough. Once again it was his father, not Rose, who took care of him, directing his secretary to call W. W. Hodkinson, the former head of Paramount, and tell him that “that Mr. K. could not get to New York because his boy is ill, and that he can’t go over until the boy is a great deal better, which he hopes will be in a few days, but can’t say definitely.” Fortunately for all, Jack recovered as quickly and miraculously as he had taken ill, allowing his father to resume his normal routine. In September 1922, Jack would join his big brother, Joe Jr., at the Devotion School, the local public school named for Edward Devotion, a Brookline founding father.2
As the Kennedy household grew in size and complexity—with Joe Jr. and Jack now in school and two toddlers and an infant at home, cared for by nursemaids and governesses, cooks, maids, and laundresses—Rose struggled to keep her head clear and above water. Kennedy, except for moments of crisis, was seldom around. When he wasn’t traveling to New York or Washington or to one of his New England theaters, he was doing business or entertaining potential clients in Boston. He didn’t even vacation with the family.
Years later, in an interview with Robert Coughlin, who worked with her on her memoirs, Rose explained that the idea of separate vacations had been hers. Her husband wanted to go to Palm Beach every winter to play golf. She did not. “I thought that was a terrible waste of money, to be always coming to the same place, but he used to say he worked hard during the year and he wanted to come and rest someplace. He didn’t want to have to be coming to Europe where’d he have to wait around for customs and changing planes, but anyway I said that I’d like to go to California and that was before he was in the motion picture business. So he said all right why don’t you go with your sister. . . . He took care of the children while I was gone.”3
Kennedy took his two-week Palm Beach vacation in early January. In April, Rose took a two-month trip to California with her sister. In her diary entry for April 3, 1923, the day she left on her vacation, she noted that as she walked out of the house, “Jack said, ‘Gee, you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children all alone.’”4
From California, she wrote Joe regularly, keeping him fully abreast of her adventures away from home. In Hollywood, she and her sister watched “Gloria Swanson taking a scene and it was so long to prepare and everything . . . it was tiresome. We met Owen Moore [another movie star] outside but he was bored to extinction and told us to go riding, etc. I guess we really have had all the thrills—that is we have not let anything go by that we could nab. But my dear, please do not let me ever go away again for so long. And how are you, anyway? . . . All my love, dear, and I do wish I were coming home sooner so as to see you all.”5
“It really seems months since I have seen you and the children,” she wrote a short time later. “I do hope you all are OK. I know you would not tell me if anything were wrong anyway—I shall be glad when we get started home again—the trip is just half over now and it really seems ages. . . . Please do tell me the minute anything is upset— There is no need of you shouldering too much too long and I shall gladly leave for home and go directly if you have the slightest wish in the matter.”6
Kennedy replied in telegrams to California, which, though terser, were every bit as cheerful and chatty as his wife’s letters. “Rosa dear, I still maintain a reputation as the greatest manager in the world,” he telegraphed on April 8, at the start of her trip. “The children are fine. Jack is sleeping every noon and is greatly improved. . . . Joe is great and the little girls look fine. We go out Friday nights so the cook is great and all in all we are doing nicely. . . . I hope you are having a real good time because you richly deserve it. Please do not think too much about us and spoil your party. I am not lonesome because I find myself very happy in the thought that you are enjoying yourself.”7
A week later, he attended his sons’ parent/teacher conferences. Joe Jr. was in first grade; Jack was in kindergarten. “Saw school teachers. They report big improvement.”8
He visited Winthrop often that spring. His mother, ill for some time, had been hospitalized. She died on May 20 and was buried on May 23. Rose returned to Brookline four days later. Five days after her return, she and the children left for Cohasset for the summer. For the next three months, she would see Joe only on weekends.9
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In November 1922, Galen Stone announced that he was retiring from the company that bore his name. Kennedy, having lost his mentor and chief advocate in the firm, left soon afterward. “I knew the time had arrived for me to do at thirty-four what I had been determined to do at twenty-four—be my own master in my own business. So I took a bold step and announced that I had launched my own private banking business.” He rented a small office at 87 Milk Street, the building that housed Hayden, Stone.10
In early 1924, taking advantage of the conversion of legitimate theaters from live to mixed live and moving picture entertainments, Kennedy incorporated and financed a new company, Columbia Advertising, with Eddie Moore as its nominal president, to sell advertising space
on theater curtains placed over the back walls of the stages on which live performers crooned, joked, tap-danced, whistled, somersaulted, or did whatever they did before and after the moving pictures were shown.11
Curtains were installed, for the cost of about $1,000 each, in Boston, Newark, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Atlanta, Birmingham, and Memphis. Kennedy tried to interest the National Shawmut Bank in Boston, where Bob Potter was now a vice president, in advertising their savings accounts and safe deposit banks on the curtains. “I have already talked to them,” he wrote Steve Fitzgibbon, who had worked with him at the Fore River restaurant and was his chief salesman, “about the idea and it is within the realm of possibility that we might sell them the two curtains. Of course if we did that, there would be no question about selling the remaining spaces.” They did not get the Shawmut contract—or many others. The business failed, one of the few failures Kennedy would experience in his life. By March 1925, thirteen months after he had incorporated the company, Kennedy closed it down.12
After leaving Hayden, Stone, Kennedy continued to trade stocks in his own account and for his friends. Although he did quite well in the baby bull market of 1923, by December 1923 he was convinced that the market was running out of steam and it was time to get out or at least stop buying. “Unless your friends in New York strong-arm this market and elect Calvin Coolidge president, I think we are in for it,” he wrote Matt Brush in New York.13
His first big score came in the spring of 1924. Walter Howey, the Hearst newspaper editor who had moved from Chicago to Boston, visited Kennedy in his offices on Milk Street and asked him to go to New York to rescue his friend John Hertz, the Chicago businessman who owned companies that manufactured and rented out Yellow Cabs. Howey claimed that Hertz, who had just listed his companies on the stock exchanges, was being attacked by “bears” who were selling his stock “short” and driving down the price precipitously. Short sellers operated by borrowing shares of high-priced stocks from brokers, dumping them onto the market, and spreading rumors that shareholders (actually the short sellers themselves) were getting rid of the stock because it was near worthless. When the share price fell low enough, the short sellers paid back what they owed in shares that cost less than the ones they had borrowed and sold. They pocketed the difference, which could be considerable.
On Sunday, April 13, 1924, Kennedy and Eddie Moore took the train to New York City to set up shop in a Waldorf-Astoria suite outfitted with telephones and a ticker-tape machine. Their mission was to use money Hertz had borrowed in Chicago to buy as many shares of his Yellow Cab Company and its subsidiaries as necessary to push the price back up and frighten away the bears. Although he tried his best—and made use of the considerable resources behind him—Kennedy was not able to significantly raise the share price, though he might have stabilized it somewhat. He was paid $20,000 for his efforts. In mid-June, he invested $25,000 in Hertz’s new “Drive-Ur-Self System,” the precursor of Hertz Rent-A-Car, and told one of Hertz’s chief lieutenants that he was “going to work along with it, not to the exclusion of my other business however, and see how it turns out.” Regrettably for Kennedy, who was still looking for his main chance, Hertz wanted nothing to do with him.14
Though a staple of the Joseph P. Kennedy story, the Yellow Cab Company incident was more of a detour than a turning point. Either because he had operated under the Wall Street radar or because his triumph was not as spectacular as he would later claim, the Hertz job did not open the door to other work as a freelance stock specialist. Still, it had yielded him a $20,000 paycheck, the equivalent of more than a quarter of a million dollars today, and a story he would tell again and again.
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At age thirty-six, Joseph Kennedy was not yet a millionaire, but he was making enough money at his various enterprises to exchange his Ford for a Rolls-Royce, hire a chauffeur, encourage Rose to do more shopping for more expensive clothing—in New York as well as in Boston—and move his boys from the local public school to the rather exclusive and expensive Dexter School on Naples Road in Brookline. Dexter served as the lower feeder school for Noble and Greenough, one of the private schools that had come into being and prospered in the late nineteenth century as an alternative pathway to Harvard for parents who preferred to have their children detour around Boston Latin and its growing Irish, Jewish, and immigrant student populations. Its alumni and present student body included boys named Lowell, Saltonstall, Appleton, Coolidge, and Storrow. Kennedy appeared to be the only Irish name on the register.15
All six Kennedy children—Joe Jr., Jack, Rosemary, Kathleen, or Kick as she was called in the family, Eunice, Patricia, or Pat, who was born on May 6, 1924—appeared to be prospering in their new home in Brookline. Joe Jr. had had some problems in kindergarten but was now doing well in the classroom and on the ball fields, where he was showing promise as a pitcher. Jack’s health seemed to have stabilized. Only Rosemary appeared to have any trouble in school. “She was slow in everything,” Rose recalled in her memoirs, “and some things she seemed unable to learn how to do, or do well or with consistency. When she was old enough for childish sports, I noticed, for instance, that she couldn’t steer her sled. When she was old enough to learn a little reading and writing, the letters and words were extremely difficult for her; and instead of writing from left to right on a page, she wrote in the opposite direction. She went to kindergarten and first grade at the usual ages, but her lack of coordination was apparent and as time went on I realized she could not keep up with the work. In the Brookline school system intelligence tests were given to all the children very early. I was informed that Rosemary’s I.Q. was low, but that was about all the concrete information I received, and it didn’t help much.” Rose consulted and would continue to consult for the next twenty years with everyone she could locate who professed some expertise: her own doctors, specialists in Boston, psychologists at Harvard, and a priest from Washington, D.C. “When I said, ‘What can I do to help her?’ there didn’t seem to be very much of an answer. There were no classes in the public schools. There didn’t seem to be any private schools, and I was really terribly frustrated and heartbroken.”16
Though he was away most of the time, when at home Kennedy spent every minute he could with his children. His returns from business trips were moments of joyous pandemonium. “He would sweep them into his arms and hug them, and grin at them, and talk to them, and perhaps carry them around. Also, as each one became old enough to talk . . . he would want that child in bed with him for a little while each morning. And the two of them would be there propped up on the pillows, with perhaps the child’s head cuddling on his shoulder, and he would talk or read a story or they would have conversations.” On weekends, when he was in Brookline, he piled the older kids into the automobile for the trip to Winthrop to visit his father, who had eased comfortably into retirement. He had grown a bit stouter, but he bore the weight well. His hair had grayed, but his mustache was still well groomed, and he was as handsome and imposing a presence as he had been as a young man. Honey Fitz was also thriving, as was his wife, Josie. They too spent time with their grandchildren, who adored their raucous granddad as much as they did their more restrained one.17
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Kennedy had been on his own for two and a half years now and was making money from his various enterprises. But nothing had worked out quite as he had hoped: in banking, at Fore River, at Hayden, Stone, or as a private broker/banker. He was nibbling at the edges, still on the outside, with no chance, he knew, of ever being invited into one of the major financial firms in the city. He had gone about as far as he could in Boston. It was time to look beyond the city and focus his considerable talents on an industry the “proper Bostonians” had ignored: moving pictures.
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 succee
ded 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.18
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.”19
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The 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.