by David Nasaw
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Over 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.40
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.41
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.42
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.43
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?”44
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In 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.”45
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.”46
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.47
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.”48
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 maj
or 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
HOLLYWOOD
In 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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Eddie 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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Kennedy’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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Fortunately 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.