by David Nasaw
—
On previous trips to the West Coast, Kennedy and Eddie Moore had stayed at the Ambassador Hotel. This time, in spring 1928—perhaps because Kennedy needed a more private place to rendezvous with Gloria and/or because as a studio head, he believed he had to have a mansion of his own—Moore rented a large house on Rodeo Drive, with gardens, a tennis court, a large formal dining room, and a full complement of servants. E. B. Derr and two other business associates moved in with him and Moore. Gloria had her own house and children nearby—and a husband in Paris—but she spent most of her evenings and ate her dinners at Rodeo Drive with Kennedy and his entourage (whom she referred to alternately as his “four horsemen” or his “shadows”).
“It was the strangest house,” she wrote in her memoirs. “An Irish maid took my coat when I arrived, and another Irish maid served the elaborate meal. In addition I saw a butler, and there was mention of the gardener and the cook. Yet the mood of the place, despite its domestic furnishings, was strictly that of a clubhouse or an office building.”24
Their relationship—business and personal—deepened that spring in Los Angeles as they began to plan their first joint venture together, a Gloria Swanson feature produced by Joseph P. Kennedy. “It was certainly obvious to me,” she would later recall in handwritten notes for her memoir, “and I suppose anyone else in the same room that this overpowering personality had a schoolboy crush on me.” She was as taken with him as he was with her. “I must confess I was impressed with his sense of power— His sense of laughter or anger was always on the edge of every situation. He went chalk white when angry and into healthy peals of laughter when there was the slightest opening for it. This man wanted me to lean on him—something I had never done in my life. . . . It was good to have someone say I’ll take care of whatever worriment I had. Darling Henry wanted so much to be helpful but he was bewildered and why not, having been transplanted from a sane normal life to one of complete unreality and madness. I was caught up in both these worlds because I loved both for different reasons.”25
Kennedy had promised Swanson—and himself—that they would make an “important” picture together. The prime ingredient in an “important” picture was an “important” director, and one of the most “important” was free to work with them. Swanson later claimed that she was both delighted and a bit frightened when Eddie Moore called to tell her that the “boss had got von Stroheim” to direct her next picture.26
Erich von Stroheim was available because no one in Hollywood besides Kennedy was willing to put up with him. He was, it was true, possessed of demonic genius—and with his bulldog head and pugilist physique he looked the part—but he had also proven himself to be a self-destructive madman incapable of following orders or staying within the grandiose budgets allotted him. He had gone overbudget in his last five films, each of which had been taken away from him when he failed to edit it down to a workable length. His last film, The Wedding March, which he had made at Paramount after being fired by MGM and Universal, had come in too far overbudget, too long (between six and nine hours), and too misshapen to be saved. Paramount would neither allow him to finish the film nor give him a new project. By the time Joe Kennedy magically appeared to invite him to write and direct an original screenplay for Swanson, he was considered unemployable.
A meeting was arranged between producer, director, and star at Swanson’s Hollywood residence. Von Stroheim appeared with the sketch of an idea, flattered Swanson with his attention, and virtually ignored Kennedy. After he left, Swanson reminded Kennedy of the director’s reputation as being impossibly “difficult to handle.” Kennedy was unfazed. He had decided to hire at least “two watchdogs” to make sure von Stroheim behaved in a businesslike and efficient manner. “I was not to worry about anything—just come on the set looking pretty.”27
—
At this point, Swanson and von Stroheim were the least of Kennedy’s concerns. He was running two studios and being paid a huge amount to do so: $2,000 a week from FBO and $2,000 a week from Pathé for a combined annual salary of $208,000, three times what Babe Ruth made in 1928, the year after he hit his sixty home runs. Simultaneously with running these studios and preparing to produce Swanson’s new film, he was completing negotiations to take over yet another entertainment conglomerate, the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain of theaters. Elisha Walker and Jeremiah Milbank had tried earlier to merge K-A-O with the Pathé/DeMille studios but had been stymied by the aging but still tyrannical Edward Albee, who refused to allow his vaudeville theaters and performers to be engulfed by the moving picture behemoth. To protect their investments, the bankers were determined to buy out Albee, integrate the companies into one corporate entity, and provide Pathé with a nationwide theater chain in which to exhibit its pictures.
Kennedy returned to New York in early May to finalize a deal with Albee on behalf of Walker and his fellow investors. On May 15, 1928, Edward Albee agreed to turn over control of his company to the Kennedy and Walker consortium for $4.2 million. His only condition was that he retain his position as president. The deal consummated, Kennedy was rewarded for past and future services with a two-year option to buy seventy-five thousand shares of K-A-O stock for $21, another unlimited expense account, a five-year contract as chairman of the board, control of the executive committee, an exemption from the provision that directors should have no other “financial interest, etc. in any other theatrical or motion picture company,” and an explicit agreement that he would “not be required to devote your entire time and attention to [the company’s] affairs.”28
Kennedy reached out at once to Johnnie Ford, with whom he had worked at Fore River and then hired to run the Maine and New Hampshire Theatre Company, which he had taken control of the year before. A skilled accountant and businessman, Ford would remain one of Kennedy’s most trusted associates for the next twenty years. His long-term assignment was to reorganize the K-A-O management and retrofit its vaudeville theaters for sound. His short-term task was to deal with Albee. “Find out just how far we are obligated to pay him his salary: then go in and have a talk with him, explaining conditions and discuss with him the cuts. . . . I think he should be cut to $25,000” from his current salary of $100,000.29
Though the seventy-one-year-old Albee retained his title as president of his theater chain, “Mr. Kennedy,” the Los Angeles Times reported on May 23, was “expected to assume the active management” of the company. While Kennedy would later pay homage to Albee and vaudeville, he had been brought in to push both the man and the live entertainment genre he had pioneered off the stage. House managers across the K-A-O circuit were instructed to make room for Pathé pictures on their bills and devote at least 50 percent of their advertising budget to them.30
Kennedy was now running three large entertainment companies at the same time, two picture studios and a chain of several hundred vaudeville theaters that were in the process of being converted to pictures. Even those who had worked with him in the past marveled at the energy he expended, the impossibly long hours he kept, his ability to concentrate on several matters at once, and his capacity for juggling numbers, accounts, personalities, staffs, employees, and contracts as he flitted back and forth from office to office, city to city, coast to coast.
That spring, while negotiating the takeover of the Albee company, he presided over the annual sales conventions for his movie studios. It appeared that 1928 was going to be FBO’s biggest year ever—and he intended to take full credit for it. The multipage, full-color announcements of the upcoming season that appeared that spring in the trade journals prominently displayed a smiling photo of Joseph P. Kennedy, under the headline THE MAN . . . THE PRODUCT AND THE MASTER SHOWMAN OF THE WORLD. From that moment on, in posters, in press advertisements, or on the screen, every FBO film would be preceded in large letters by “Joseph P. Kennedy Presents.”31
—
The first public announcement of the Swanson/von Str
oheim deal appeared at the end of April 1928, though with no mention of Kennedy’s involvement. “Here’s one to make your eyes bulge,” wrote one columnist, speculating on the likelihood that von Stroheim could complete the film within the rumored ten-week shooting schedule. “He’s spent longer than that on a couple of scenes.” In mid-May, Kennedy and his lieutenants in Hollywood, still below the radar, secured permission from Paramount to “borrow” von Stroheim for the project. The next step was getting a cameraman, which would not be easy, as the best ones were tied to major studio contracts. Kennedy wrote to Louis B. Mayer on May 25 to ask as a “personal favor” if he could “borrow Ollie Marsh,” a cameraman agreeable to both Swanson and von Stroheim. “As you may or may not know, I have taken unto myself the responsibility of financing and producing the next Swanson picture. I have arranged to get von Stroheim to direct, and I can already hear you saying: ‘You have had no troubles in the picture business yet—they have just started.’ However we shall try to do the best we can under the circumstances.” Kennedy closed his chatty, one-mogul-to-another letter with a joke about his latest coup, the takeover of K-A-O: “As you probably know, not feeling that there was enough excitement in the picture business, I have gone into the vaudeville game—God knows what will happen there.”32
Though there was as yet no public connection with Swanson, Joseph Kennedy’s fame was spreading beyond the confines of the Boston papers and the Hollywood trades. On May 23, 1928, following the K-A-O takeover, the Los Angeles Times ran its first feature on the “Banker Now Theater Man.” That same week, Time magazine profiled him. Then, on June 3, the New York Times published a feature-length Sunday story titled “Movie Chief’s Rapid Rise.”
Two weeks later, Kennedy’s name appeared in the headlines again, in even more spectacular fashion, with the announcement that he had been appointed “adviser” to a third film studio, First National, in anticipation of his taking over the company. First National was one of the five “majors,” with a rich history, a stable of box office stars, a huge studio in Burbank, a chain of regional theaters, and many of the grandest big-city, first-run movie palaces. News of the deal reverberated through Hollywood and New York. How could any one man, even a Joe Kennedy, run four companies at the same time? Was a merger in the offing? Or some sort of market-sharing “specialization” plan under which, as Variety reported, FBO would stick to making “B” films for smaller theaters, First National would produce “A” features for first-run theaters, and “Pathé would distribute short subjects exclusively”? Or, as most industry insiders believed, had Kennedy been brought in to slash costs so that the company could be sold or merged with another?33
“If you hear a movie Paul Revere tearing down a studio street,” Harry Carr of the Los Angeles Times reported in his weekly column on July 22, “you can be sure this is what he is yelling: ‘Look out: Kennedy is coming!’ The word ‘Kennedy’ whispered in any studio will send all the executives shrieking for the fire escapes. . . . Up to date, Mr. Kennedy has accumulated F.B.O. Studio, the Pathé interests, has done something or other to First National that no one can find out. And is said to be negotiating for the purchase of Universal. As I haven’t inquired during the last few minutes, I don’t know whether Kennedy by now owns Paramount, M.G.M. and Fox, or not. At any rate, every time the footfalls of Kennedy are heard approaching, they thrust all the little movie companies under the bed and block the doors.” Carr did not regard Kennedy’s appointment—as adviser/chief of First National—as necessarily bad for the industry. On the contrary, he welcomed the Boston banker and wished him well: “The point is . . . that Mr. Kennedy is turning things upside down in the studios where he holds sway. He is bringing business methods to Hollywood. . . . The picture business, in general, isn’t feeling so healthy. A shakeup has long been necessary, and the resultant tremor is considerable.” The industry was in the process of converting its studios and theaters from silence to sound. “Is it significant or providential,” Carr asked rhetorically in his final paragraph, headed “The Kennedy Era,” “that a great new financial force has come into pictures at the moment of this sweeping change in technical method?”34
While Hollywood was rife with rumors about who was going to be fired, hired, promoted, or demoted and how and when Kennedy was going to start merging his three studios and theater company, Hollywood’s “big mystery man,” as the Film Daily now referred to him, kept his counsel. He cooperated with the large-circulation dailies and magazines for their puff pieces but refused to talk to the trade journals about his plans for his studios, especially the latest one, First National. “Western Union niceties about California weather but nary a word about First National,” the Film Daily reported. “If it means anything to you, dear reader, Joe is running true to form. He never discusses his business with outsiders. His business, so he reflects when you ask him, is nobody’s business.”35
Part of the reason he may have kept quiet was that he had nothing to say. Although he was the one getting the publicity, he was still working for Elisha Walker and the major stockholders in the companies he was running. The short-term agenda they had given him was to cut costs by reducing the payroll and, in so doing, raise the stock price. What happened next depended entirely on his partners on Wall Street and whether they were willing to spend more money buying or merging or consolidating more companies.
Though he was not charged with formulating long-term plans, he had taken on more than was humanly or organizationally possible for one man, even one as talented as Joseph P. Kennedy. He had built a personal organization of tough-minded, number-crunching, relentless negotiators, accountants, and managers, but the final decisions remained his to make. And there were now too many of them, too many moving parts, too many investors and bankers to satisfy in New York, too many budgets to cut, too many managements to revitalize and reconfigure. He was stretching himself too thin, entwining himself in increasingly tangled business relationships and, as he added new responsibilities and new companies, neglecting older ones.
David Sarnoff, to cite but one example, was near furious at the delay in converting FBO pictures to RCA Photophone sound and more furious still when it became apparent that First National, Kennedy’s latest Hollywood conquest, was going to install his competitor’s equipment. The Film Daily found the whole situation rather amusing: “You can never tell. Here Kennedy has RCA and General Electric as partners in FBO and yet, First National, one of Joe’s ‘specially advised’ companies, signs with Western Electric for sound. Nobody would have believed it.”36
Sarnoff, fearing now that Kennedy might double-cross him entirely and install Western Electric equipment in the FBO and Pathé studios, demanded that he sign an exclusive agreement with RCA for both studios and start spending studio money to make sound films. Elisha Walker met with Sarnoff in New York City to try to hammer out a settlement. Kennedy called in from Los Angeles and agreed, as the conference memorandum recorded in language much tamer than he must have used, “that there seemed to be some misunderstanding between the parties as to whom was to pay for the [sound] work already completed or in process.”37
It had become clear to everyone in the room—and to Kennedy on the West Coast—that the partnership between Sarnoff and the Kennedy-run studios was not going to work. Sarnoff was interested in promoting his RCA Photophone equipment; Kennedy, in wringing maximum profits and personal publicity, with or without RCA Photophone sound, from the companies he now controlled. The Film Daily, which took great pleasure in Kennedy’s misadventures—perhaps in retribution for his refusal to talk to it—gleefully reported the dispute in mid-August. “Kennedy may have one toy less to play with now. When he was in California, several telephone wires fairly burned up between the place where they make ’em [Hollywood] and the place where they finance ’em [New York]. The scene was something like this: Sarnoff at RCA headquarters in New York; Kennedy in the glorious West. A telephone call. ‘Mr. Kennedy talking at length about RCA and sound.
Mr. Sarnoff very much inclined not to listen.’ That’s one incident. There have been others. Result: Kennedy and Sarnoff decide to call it a day.”38
Kennedy refused to acknowledge to himself or his associates that he might have been at blame for failing to follow through on the deal he had made with Sarnoff or that he had acted too precipitously in cutting costs at First National. Instead, he responded to his critics by lashing out at the industry that had welcomed him as its savior. In August 1928, he broke his silence in an angry interview with the Los Angeles Times that was picked up by the trades. “Dissatisfaction,” he claimed, “permeates this business and it is the most harmful thing in its effect. . . . Legislators are introducing [censorship] bills that are aimed at pictures, and foreign countries are throwing up barriers to American film importations.” These issues were “serious enough without any additional complications but they are complicated a hundred fold by the advent of the sound films. These throw the whole thing into a new form of chaos.” The problems facing the industry were enormous, but they were all solvable, he insisted, given the right leadership. First Hollywood had to cure itself of the “psychological condition” that plagued it: “too many grumblers, too many growlers, too many people listening to every idle bit of comment, too many making mountains out of molehills.”39
Having said his piece—and intimated, not very subtly, that there was no basis for the criticism he was getting and that the industry needed him more than he needed it—Joseph P. Kennedy returned from Los Angeles to New York to meet with the First National executives on August 10. The next day, a Saturday, First National president Irving Rossheim announced that Kennedy had signed “a contract which places him in charge of First National Pictures for five years. . . . He will have charge of all producing and distributing for First National.” What was not made public was that the agreement guaranteed him $3,000 a week from First National (in addition to his $2,000 from FBO and $2,000 from Pathé), to be increased to 10 percent of profits after three years. This, Kennedy had argued, was more than reasonable, as he intended to eliminate three top First National executives who together were receiving $7,000 a week plus 10 percent of the profits.40