The Patriarch

by David Nasaw

  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.”20

  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.”21

  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.”22

  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.’”23

  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.”24

  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.25

  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.”26

  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.27

  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 Marti
n 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.”28

  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.29

  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.”30

  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.31

  —

  Kennedy 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.”32

  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.33

  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.”34

  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.”35

  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.”36

  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.37

  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!”38

  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.”39