by David Nasaw
There is no evidence that Kennedy ever answered Roosevelt’s letter—and for good reason. Though Smith was from Kennedy’s new home state, New York, an Irish American, and greeted in near messianic fashion by Honey Fitz and Mayor James Curley on his campaign visits to Boston, Joseph P. Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat, neither contributed to nor endorsed his candidacy. He had grown up revering gentlemen Irish Catholic businessmen/politicians such as the sainted Patrick Collins and wincing at loudmouthed, backslapping, plainspoken, stump-singing, and often corrupt Irish pols such as Honey Fitz and James Curley. Kennedy was proud of his heritage, proud of his parents, and a more devout Catholic than Al Smith would ever be. But he may have been slightly embarrassed by the informality of Smith’s campaigning in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, singing “The Sidewalks of New York,” and throwing kisses to his admirers as if he were a movie star, not a candidate for the highest office in the land.
Over the past few years, Kennedy had spent more time in Hollywood and Los Angeles than in New York City or Boston, and with Republicans such as Louis B. Mayer, who revered Herbert Hoover as Irish Americans did Al Smith. Kennedy was not a political chameleon who changed parties when he changed environments. Still, in 1928 his interests as banker, businessman, and millionaire were more in line with those represented by the Republicans than the Democrats. He had profited enormously from the “Coolidge boom” and was convinced that Hoover was better positioned than Al Smith to keep it on track. So he resisted the pull of habit and tradition and the importuning of his father-in-law, who, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy remembered, “was a big backer of Al Smith” and put “a lot of pressure . . . on Joe to back him.” Although he would not publicly back Hoover, neither would he contribute any money to the Smith campaign. Instead, he sat out the election. He would later intimate to Charles Francis Adams III, whom Hoover had appointed secretary of the navy, that he had voted Republican. “I told Mr. Milbank at lunch the other day,” he would confide to Adams, “that I considered your appointment was reason enough for President Hoover’s election and sufficient justification for a good Democrat like myself to vote for him again.”13
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Though he had cashed out of K-A-O and FBO and no longer had any relationship with First National, Joseph P. Kennedy was still in charge of Pathé. He had been brought in to stabilize the Pathé stock and bond prices until such time as the company was swept up into a vertically integrated conglomerate with theaters to provide exhibition venues for its newsreels and features. While he awaited that outcome, his responsibility was to keep the films coming, the profits at a reasonable level, and stock and bond prices stable, which he accomplished without a great deal of effort. In truth, he paid little attention to the studio that fall. His major concern was Queen Kelly, as Swanson’s picture with von Stroheim, formerly The Swamp, had been retitled.
The film had been scheduled to begin shooting in early fall, but as late as mid-October there was no sign of Swanson or von Stroheim on the lot. “Just why the dark and shivering mystery about the delay in starting the picture?” Harry Carr asked in his October 21, 1928, Los Angeles Times column. “Out at F.B.O. they seem to shudder at the mention. The picture was to have started on September 3; it was now to start about the first of November—maybe.”14
Shooting did indeed begin on November 1, 1928. To make up for lost time and to satisfy his own obsessive work habits, von Stroheim pushed his crews night and day, then spent the evening viewing the rushes. Kennedy arrived in Los Angeles during the first week of shooting and sat in on some of these sessions, but more as a tourist than a producer. Swanson appeared delighted with the early scenes and the care von Stroheim was lavishing on her. Still, as E. B. Derr (who had been delegated to watch over von Stroheim) reported by “Confidential” telegram to Kennedy on December 6, von Stroheim had not yet scripted an “ending” and the film was already monstrously long. “Everything suggested [for possible cutting] he calls milestones. I wish he had one around his neck. . . . I will be with Glazer [another of Kennedy’s advisers] to determine what items can definitely be cut and unless you object only way to cut out four excessive reels is to order von to abandon those episodes or sequences to get it down to ten reels.”15
No one was pushing the panic button yet. Kennedy still trusted in the men Swanson had earlier referred to as his “watchdogs,” Derr in particular, and had every reason to believe they would be as ruthlessly effective with von Stroheim as they had been at FBO and with C. B. DeMille at Pathé. None of them, unfortunately, had ever come up against anyone with the talent for self-deception, bravado, and abusive behavior that von Stroheim displayed every day. Vehemently and with unremitting concentration, he blamed everyone else for the delays and cost overruns and insisted that if left alone, he would turn out the masterpiece expected of him.
There is no telling whether Kennedy would have fared any better than Derr and his other advisers had he stayed in Hollywood, taken personal charge of scripting, shooting, and editing, and confronted von Stroheim directly. But as much as he wanted his first film with Gloria to be a glorious one, he was not going to let it interfere with his winter vacation in Palm Beach. Eddie Moore and Ted O’Leary, who worked for him in New York City, had taken the train south with him. They were joined by J. J. Murdock and Pat Casey, the former K-A-O executives with whom Kennedy had traveled to Europe that summer. After two weeks alone with the boys in Palm Beach, Rose arrived, then the Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye, Gloria’s husband, who had decided to take a detour through Florida on his way back to Paris. The shifting constellation of bodies swirling around Kennedy kept the man who feared being alone fully occupied.
Never far from a telephone—except when he was on the golf course or at the beach—Kennedy fielded a constant stream of calls from the Pathé studio and the Queen Kelly set in Hollywood, none of them with particularly good news, but none foretelling the disaster unfolding. Edmund (“Eddie”) Goulding, a British director who had established a reputation as a talking picture wizard, had been brought in to add sound sequences to accompany the silent footage. A voice coach had been hired on an eight-month contract to give Swanson daily lessons. The picture still appeared salvageable, though advance sales through United Artists, which was handling distribution, were tepid. Filming had been shifted from the FBO studios, which were now part of Sarnoff’s RKO empire, to the Pathé studio in Culver City. To ease the transition—and demonstrate his affection for Gloria at a time when he was three thousand miles away—Kennedy built her a “bungalow” on the Pathé lot that was even more “elaborate” than the one William Randolph Hearst had built for his mistress, Marion Davies, in 1925. “Mine had a living room with a grand piano, a full kitchen, a wardrobe, a fitting room, and a big bedroom,” Swanson wrote in her memoirs. “It also had a private entrance from the road and a private garage. I could only surmise that Joe Kennedy was starting to do very well for himself in the movie business. And that he loved me.” What she didn’t yet understand was that Kennedy’s gift had cost him nothing; he had charged the bungalow costs to her production company.16
Von Stroheim, as was his wont, shot take after take—hours of film and crew time expended on scenes that would never make it into the final picture or, if they did, would consume only a few minutes. Eight weeks after shooting had commenced, he had finished only the first part of the film, set in the mythical kingdom in which the prince meets and falls in love with Patricia Kelly, played by Gloria Swanson. On January 2 he began shooting part two, which took place in Africa, where Patricia had been summoned by her dying aunt, who ran a dance hall there. Quite a few kinky scenes had already been shot, some involving nudity, but compared with what would come next, they were remarkably tame. As part two of the film opens, young Patricia, upon arriving in Africa, discovers that her aunt not only runs a bordello but has decided to marry off her convent-schooled niece to the wealthy brothel manager, Jan Vryheid—a drunkard and a degenerate, crippled, leering, and lascivio
us—played by character actor Tully Marshall.
Swanson had persevered through the filming of the European scenes and the first few days on the African ones, trusting that in the end E. B. Derr would succeed in reining in von Stroheim. As late as the morning of January 21, she had cabled Kennedy in Palm Beach with delight: “EB successful. Von toeing the mark. . . . Watch my smoke. Kindest regards.”17
And then, that same day, it all fell apart. Von Stroheim had instructed Tully Marshall to drool tobacco juice on Swanson’s hand as he put on her wedding ring. Swanson, disgusted and near nauseated, ran out of the studio and placed a call to Kennedy. “My first words were: ‘You had better get out here fast,’” she recalled in her unpublished notes. “Then I went into everything that I had been concerned about—secretly.”18
Kennedy was not prepared to cut short his vacation, even for Swanson. Instead, he picked up the phone, called von Stroheim in Hollywood, and fired him. Derr brought in playwright Eugene Walter to read von Stroheim’s script, view the thirty reels (about five and a half hours) of film already shot, and offer suggestions on how the film might be completed. On January 25, Derr summarized Walter’s findings in a long telegram to Eddie Moore in Palm Beach.
The sins of von Stroheim were legion, and Derr, citing Walter’s report, expatiated on each and every one of them. The film as scripted and shot was “slovenly, gross, often revolting . . . in execrable taste . . . not coherent nor believable nor in good taste nor human.” Above all else, von Stroheim had failed to create a worthy “vehicle” for a star of Gloria Swanson’s magnitude. “Her characterization as depicted is negative and retreating and passive and at no time does one single solitary thing which would show any evidence of strength or individuality or of charm or of any of her attributes. Her characterization as written could be played by any third-class leading woman. Up to end of first half she is depicted as either the most exasperating sap or a potential prostitute. . . . All she does is yield and weep which becomes deadly monotonous in spite of client’s skill.” The entire film, Derr concluded, had to be re-scripted with sound sequences added and additional scenes written to bring the story to an end and fill in the gaps von Stroheim had left behind him. No one wanted to abandon the project. A way had to be found to save it without damaging Swanson’s “star value” or Kennedy’s reputation as a take-charge studio executive.19
Money was also an issue. Though Kennedy had refrained from putting his own capital into the production, he had lent a considerable sum to Swanson’s production company, money that would be lost should the project founder. “The boss suggests that I write you,” E. B. Derr telegrammed Scollard in New York in mid-February, “so that you and Tom can discuss the effect on the boss’s income tax in the event it is decided to abandon ‘Queen Kelly.’ . . . Generally, the total cost will be about $600,000.”20
Kennedy arrived in Los Angeles in early February and was driven to the studio, where he met with his advisers and looked at some of the footage. “After more than an hour of waiting,” Swanson recalled in the notes for her memoir, “a very anxious—a very white man charged into the bungalow living room alone. He slumped into a deep chair—put his head in his hands and grumbled and groaned like a hurt animal— His first words were in a quiet voice. ‘I’ve never had a failure in my life.’ . . . He put his arms around me and presently I felt his face was wet— Why, this big strong man had shed a few sultry emotions. Bravo—it can happen to the strongest of us.”21
Swanson blamed Kennedy for the debacle. He had promised that his “watchdogs” would protect her from von Stroheim, then disappeared entirely. She refused even to contemplate returning to the set—or the project—and without Kennedy’s knowledge had gone to see Jesse Lasky about doing her next picture for Paramount. Kennedy wrote his employee and mistress’s husband, the Marquis de la Falaise, hoping that he would be able to exert whatever influence he had to get his wife back to work on Queen Kelly: “I went out there and found Gloria in very bad shape and in the hospital, as the result of practically a nervous collapse. She was down to 108 in weight and her attitude towards the picture, and everybody connected with it, was quite hostile. I looked at the picture and agreed that it certainly could not be released in its present form. . . . There is no need to go into the personal reaction of Gloria toward owing me considerable money on the picture, but it was far from a pleasant one. . . . I think her whole attitude was due to her overwrought condition and the discouragement over the whole situation. We had a very drastic showdown after the Lasky incident, and I insisted that some sort of a finish must be made because there was too much money at stake and too much loss of prestige if the picture was not finished. . . . Whether it will ever get started, whether it will ever see a finish, whether (when it is finished) it will be any good, I can give you no information whatsoever. If there is a reasonable chance of finishing the picture and my presence in California will help, Rose and I will go out there again. It is the chief concern now, as there is already over a million dollars invested with nothing to show. I am not giving you this story to annoy you but just to keep you posted on what is going on.”22
In the midst of this Sturm und Drang, Kennedy was called back to the East Coast. His father had been taken ill with degenerative liver disease and been admitted to Deaconess Hospital in Boston. The train trip across the continent was never an easy one, though it had become faster and more luxurious since the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway rolled out the Chief in November 1926. Those willing to pay the extra fare were whisked east—from Los Angeles to Chicago, with a brief layover in Albuquerque—in just under fifty-seven hours, three nights and two days, or so the timetable promised. Along the way, passengers were invited to make full use of the specially designed “two-car set” in the front of the train, which “included a dining car [with room for forty-two passengers] and club lounge, with bath, barbershop, and soda fountain.” From Chicago, passengers such as Kennedy who could afford it boarded the 20th Century Limited for the day-long trip to Grand Central Station in New York.23
Kennedy arrived in New York in mid-March and would remain there, commuting back and forth to see his father in Boston until early May, when the doctors told him (wrongly, it would turn out) that P.J. was out of immediate danger. Rescue work on Queen Kelly continued in his absence. He and Swanson talked regularly on the telephone, though that was not easy. It took several telegrams back and forth to set up each phone appointment. “Shopping today for house furnishings for Mrs. Kennedy,” Kennedy wired Swanson on April 23. “Will call tomorrow. Nothing new.”24
In early April, Swanson and the cast of Queen Kelly returned to the Pathé studio to shoot a new beginning and ending for the film. Gloria approved the script, then, after screening the footage from the ten days of filming, rejected it. As she had previously rejected every other suggestion for re-scripting and reshooting, the project was put on hiatus. None of this made Kennedy happy. Swanson was now interfering with his plans to get Queen Kelly finished and recoup at least some of his money—and reputation. On April 15, he called the marquis in Paris with the latest bad news: “Picture likely be shelved. Approximate loss between eight hundred and million. . . . Have been unable to get to California to find out how things are because my father’s illness which is dragging on. Nothing can be done. Just keeping you advised.”25
British director/writer Eddie Goulding, who in Kennedy’s absence had grown closer than ever to Swanson, suggested that she draw attention away from the Queen Kelly fiasco by quickly making a lighthearted talkie, her first, which he offered to write and direct. Kennedy, perhaps worried that if he did not agree, Swanson would follow through on her threat to return to Paramount, gave the go-ahead and arranged for the film, which would be distributed by United Artists, to be shot at the Pathé studio.
With a new picture to work on, a director/writer she trusted, and a temporary surcease to her Queen Kelly travails, Swanson was satisfied for the time being. In New Yo
rk, Kennedy was busy as usual, juggling multiple, and at times conflicting, business interests. In April, he solidified his control of Pathé, his only institutional connection to the film industry, by having himself elected chairman of the board.26
In May, after two full months in the East and persuaded by the doctors that his father was well past any danger, Kennedy boarded a train from Grand Central that would connect in Chicago with the westbound Chief. He arrived in Los Angeles on May 17. The next morning, a Saturday, he was at the Pathé studio when the news he had dreaded caught up with him. His father had died.
The funeral was scheduled for Monday, May 20, at the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Winthrop, not East Boston. Kennedy might have requested that the funeral be put off a few days so that he could attend. But what purpose would that have served? There was no widow to comfort. He had no desire to listen to hours of funeral tribute or attend wakes. His father’s friends were not and had never been his. He would grieve by himself, three thousand miles away.
The Kennedy family, now of Bronxville, was represented at the funeral by Rose and Joe Jr. “I was terribly disappointed not to be there myself,” Kennedy wrote Joe Jr., “but I was more than proud to have you there as my own representative and delighted everybody liked you so much. . . . I do not know how long I will have to stay here to finish the job I came out to do, but in the meanwhile, help mother and everybody out as much as you can and I will be with you as soon as possible.”27