by David Nasaw
He also wrote Jack, whose birthday he was going to miss again, to say that he had tried but failed to finish up his work on the coast “so I could get home and have a little fun with you all at the beach. . . . You may be sure I will get home as quickly as possible and when I do I will get busy on that horse arrangement so that you can do some regular horseback riding. I hope everything finished up well at school and that you are helping mother out as much as possible.”28
—
Queen Kelly had been quietly shelved, while Kennedy and Swanson figured out if and how it might be salvaged. Eddie Goulding was already at work on Swanson’s next film and first talkie, The Trespasser, a “weepie” about a poor Chicago secretary who marries a rich young man. When the man’s father has the marriage annulled, the secretary is left alone to raise the baby. Kennedy had read the script on the train returning to Los Angeles in mid-May. “Just finished reading story out loud to Ted [O’Leary] and we both cried,” he cabled Swanson from the train. “If that isn’t the greatest motion picture that anyone ever shot I want to go back to stock manipulation. I could see you in every scene. You certainly did a marvelous job. I am so happy for you.”29
On arriving in Hollywood, he invited Swanson, Goulding, and a few others to lunch and a script reading at Rodeo Drive. During lunch, Goulding, having decided that the film needed music, asked Swanson if she could sing. “‘She sings beautifully!’” Swanson recalled Joe calling “out like a proud parent. . . . ‘Why, Gloria wanted to be an opera singer when she was young. She’s told me so many times.’ Before I could be embarrassed that he had, as it were, compromised me in front of strangers, I read easily in the eyes of [those present] that our secret was no secret to begin with. I realized that Hollywood saw us as a modified version of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, only unimpeachable because we were both solidly married with children; beyond whispers, therefore, and entirely free of the possibility of louder accusations. So be it, I thought; at least I don’t have to spend the next two months or two years or two decades playing games.”30
The Trespasser was scripted, shot, and edited in just three months and previewed at the Rialto Theatre in New York in mid-July. Because United Artists, the distributors, had no first-run New York house available that summer, it was decided to open The Trespasser in London in August, then perhaps move it to Paris and Berlin to gather maximum publicity before an American opening later in the fall. Kennedy, who finally had a hit on his hands, though one he had had nothing to do with, was going to enjoy every minute of it. He was smart enough to realize he and Swanson could not attend the European premieres as a couple, so he invited Rose and his youngest sister, Margaret, to sail with him to London on the Île de France. Swanson would sail to Paris on the Olympic with her own traveling companion, her friend Virginia Bowker. In Paris, she would collect her husband, Henri, and then cross the English Channel with him for the London opening.
According to Variety, The Trespasser premiere was nothing less than “a sensational smash”—and both producer and star reveled in it. Kennedy especially, Swanson recalled, was almost giddy with the adulation. His “constant fervent attention” embarrassed her and distressed Henri. Rose appeared oblivious to it all.
The two couples celebrated their London triumph in Deauville, then returned to Paris. While Kennedy attended a series of business meetings, Gloria and Rose went shopping at Lucien Lelong, at the time Paris’s leading couturier, “and ordered our clothes there. It may sound easy, but it was hard work,” Rose remembered. “Gloria had to order something spectacular . . . and, as she was quite short, it was always more difficult. It is always more difficult to dress a short woman than a tall woman. I am not very tall and she only came up to my shoulder.”
While in Paris, Swanson discovered that her husband was having an affair with the American actress Constance Bennett, whom she suspected Kennedy had slept with as well. According to Rose, Swanson threatened to “get a divorce at once” and told Kennedy she would never again appear in public with Henri. “Joe was dumbfounded and flabbergasted.” The last thing he needed was a divorce court scandal interfering with the publicity for his and Swanson’s hit film. “Joe said he had put a lot of money into the picture, also time and effort and he was not going to lose it all for a personal disagreement on the part of the star and her husband.” Swanson agreed and, accomplished actress that she was, made believe that she and Henri were still a loving married couple. “Henri moved to separate quarters in the hotel,” but in public, Rose remembered, “Gloria and he were hand in hand, all smiles and to all appearances very happy.” On September 18, as Rose, Kennedy, sister Margaret, Gloria, and Virginia Bowker boarded their ship bound for New York Harbor, the marquis was there to wave good-bye for the photographers.31
Swanson recalled in the notes for her memoir the near lunacy of sailing home with her lover and her lover’s wife and sister. It was a particularly “crazy experience because by this time J. P. was brazen about his feeling for me, example: After dinner one night, he with his four ladies wife-sister-Virginia and me were sitting in the salon. At the next table was a man who obviously wanted to get a good look at me and was staring— It was embarrassing but was made worse by Mr. K’s telling him to stop, turn around, in no uncertain terms—what his wife and sister thought Virginia and I could never figure out—the whole trip was nerve racking for me—because while someone may be difficult to find on a ship he never left me out of his sight—and if his wife wanted to find him all she had to do was find me. . . . The curious part of the whole situation was that I felt no guilt feeling about Rose. She was an enigma to me. She didn’t show any sign of caring if Joe was possessive of me— She treated me as if I were one of the family—I wanted to say little do you know but I couldn’t because there were times when I was sure she didn’t know and times when I was sure she didn’t care.”32
To her dying day, Rose would deny that there was anything other than a business relationship between her husband and Gloria Swanson. The ridiculous rumors of her husband’s relationship to Gloria, she told her ghostwriter, had begun only because when their boat docked in New York Harbor, she stayed behind in her cabin to avoid being photographed. The reporters greeting the boat, seeing Gloria and Joe on deck without her, assumed that they had vacationed together in Europe. Rose’s story seemed so preposterous that her ghostwriter didn’t include it in her published memoir.33
Swanson did not return immediately to the West Coast but stayed behind in New York to do some publicity work on her new film. Her children, her nanny, and a few friends were imported east to be with her. She no doubt spent some of her nights in New York City with Kennedy, but in hotels or borrowed apartments well out of public view. There was nothing out of the ordinary in Kennedy’s staying overnight instead of returning to Bronxville. In February 1932, while Rose was in Boston giving birth to her ninth child, Kick would innocently include in her twelve-year-old stream-of-consciousness letter to her mother the fact that “Daddy did not come home last night. We do not know when he is coming.”34
Swanson and her daughter visited Bronxville for a Halloween party in 1929, and “little Gloria” went to school with Kick, who was profoundly disappointed when her schoolmates refused to believe that her friend was actually Gloria Swanson’s daughter. (In her memoir, Rose identifies Pat as the child who took little Gloria to school, but Pat was only five at the time, four years younger than little Gloria and not yet in school.) That Christmas, Rose made sure to send presents to Los Angeles for the Swanson children, and Swanson reciprocated by directing her New York assistant to buy the Kennedy children presents. Because her first choice, a “puff billiards game,” was all sold out, the assistant bought a “large horse game . . . quite expensive but [it] was suitable for all six children. Sent army ambulance auto for Bobbie and unbreakable doll for Jean.”35
Swanson and Kennedy’s “secret” would remain Hollywood’s secret, which meant it was never much of
a secret within the industry but was guarded from those outside it. The trade press, anxious to protect Hollywood’s image, was not going to turn on its own. Big-city publishers and editors, Hearst among them, had long ago reached gentlemen’s agreements to stay away from gossip about adultery and infidelity. Such subjects were not to be mentioned, even hinted at, unless and until exposed publicly in divorce court proceedings.
There would later be hints, originating with Swanson, that Kennedy intended to leave Rose and his family for her. In the notes for her autobiography, she referred to a church official in a red robe with “a handsome face and beautiful hands” who summoned her to a clandestine meeting in New York and asked her to give up Kennedy. In her memoirs, her ghostwriters elaborated on the story and identified Cardinal William O’Connell of Boston as the red-robed churchman who informed Swanson “that Joe had spoken about our relationship with some of the higher representatives of the Catholic Church [and] sought permission to live apart from his wife and maintain a second household with me.” The story, published in 1980 when there was no one left alive to refute it, does not ring true. Neither does the casual aside, also in the memoir, that Joe wanted Swanson to bear his child. Joseph P. Kennedy was every inch the realist. He did not engage in quixotic quests for the impossible. He had been in and of the church all his life and certainly knew enough about church doctrine and practice to realize that he would never be granted “permission” to live with Swanson. There was no way he would have prostrated himself before “some of the higher representatives of the Catholic Church” to make a request he knew would be denied.36
Kennedy had no intention of leaving Rose and his children to live with Swanson in Los Angeles—or anywhere else. Other men might have had to make a choice between wife and mistress, but not Joseph P. Kennedy. Having a wife at home and girlfriends away from home was neither an ethical nor a logistical problem for him. He had always been a ladies’ man. Among men of his social set, this was far from unusual. Though we know nothing about P. J. Kennedy’s marriage, there is abundant evidence that Honey Fitz, Rose’s father, had been serially unfaithful to her mother. Kennedy followed in this family tradition, while Rose, like her mother before her, did her best to look the other way. Before Swanson, there had been flings with dozens of women, in Boston, New York, Chicago, Palm Beach, and Hollywood. But the liaison with Gloria was different—and he and his friends knew it. Swanson was a catch, the most famous, the most alluring film star in the world and a woman who, while married, had no compunction about having relations with other married men. Kennedy had to have been delighted with his conquest. It gave him a cachet in Hollywood and a badge of honor he wore proudly in the company of his male friends.
And yet, their affair was not as important to him as Swanson wanted it to be. Years later, she would be so appalled by Rose’s rather dismissive account in her memoir, Times to Remember, of her relationship with Joe that she wrote her own memoir, Swanson on Swanson, to correct the story. Still, as much as she tried to impress on the reader how infatuated Kennedy was with her, it does not appear that they spent much time together. During their romance, they were never in the same place at the same time for more than six weeks or so. Had he wanted to, Kennedy could have spent up to ten months a year with Gloria in Los Angeles (while Henri was in Paris) and pleaded business necessity for doing so. But he did not.
The inescapable truth was that for Joseph P. Kennedy, Swanson was another sexual conquest, one of many he would fit into his busy life. That he wandered from the marriage bed was inconsequential to him. Adultery was a sin, but one easily forgiven.
In notes headed “Joe Rosebud,” Swanson tried to make sense of the fact that Kennedy, a devout, churchgoing Catholic and married man, was able to carry on his affair with her, a married woman, without shame or guilt. “Joe believed in hell and he believed in Purgatory. It didn’t worry him too much because he also believed in confession and the forgiveness of sins. He believed you could wipe the slate clean just by going to confession. It worked for him like sleeping pills for other people.” Swanson teased him often about his confessors, who she claimed were “all after his money. That’s why they let him off with a penance of a few Hail Marys. . . . Joe always had a confessor handy. Someone at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. New York and Hyannisport. There was always one on the boat to Europe too. . . . Joe usually knew in advance what the penance would be. He never wanted to take a chance on running into some smarty pants priest there in a dark confessional from some poor diocese where he didn’t have any real estate holdings.”37
Nine
LAST EXIT FROM HOLLYWOOD
In September 1929, the eight Kennedy children moved into their new Bronxville home and prepared to return to school. Their parents were thousands of miles away in Europe and not expected back until the end of the month.
First days are never easy, not even for Kennedys, but this one may have been particularly tough. They had changed schools before, three times in the past four years, but they had always moved as a pack. Now, in September 1929, with their parents overseas, their oldest brother and sister were sent away: Joe Jr. to Choate in Wallingford, Connecticut; Rosemary to the Devereux School in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.
“Joe and I had agreed,” Rose wrote in her memoirs, “that the responsibility for education for the boys was primarily his, and that of the girls, primarily mine.” Joe Jr. was now ready for high school and had done moderately well at Riverdale, though schoolwork did not come easily to him. His father, who had never been a particularly good student, never ceased to remind him (though usually gently) that he could do better if he worked harder. The last year at Riverdale had been a tough one, as Joe Jr. had had to compile a good enough record—and complete enough courses—to move on to a good high school. When he succeeded in doing so, his father made sure to congratulate him. “Your making up those subjects,” Kennedy wrote his son from Los Angeles in June 1929, “was a real worthwhile achievement, and while we may have had a little disagreement once in a while about some particular thing, I am very proud of your effort and results.”1
Kennedy had no real problem with Riverdale for his girls, but he wanted something better for his boys, a school like Boston Latin with rigorous academics and competitive sporting teams. “Joe did a lot of investigating, thinking, and discussing,” Rose wrote in her memoirs. “For a time his chief adviser was Mr. Pennypacker, who had been headmaster of Boston Latin, and who became dean of admissions at Harvard.” Kennedy also contacted his Harvard classmate Russell Ayres, who was coaching baseball and teaching history at Choate, to inquire about the possibility of Joe Jr., and maybe Jack, transferring there in September.2
Choate was seventy miles away, closer to Bronxville than the older, more prestigious New England prep schools, and though Protestant, it was neither rigidly Episcopal like Groton or St. Paul’s nor overly celebratory of its WASPish ancestors and alumni like Andover and Exeter. The Kennedy boys would be welcomed at Choate, while they might not have been at the New England boarding schools that the “proper Bostonians” attended.
“My only hesitancy about doing it,” he wrote C. Wardell St. John, the Choate assistant headmaster (and headmaster’s son), “is I realize that when the boys go away now to school, they are practically gone forever, because it is three years there and then four years at college, and you realize how little you see of them after that. I may be selfish in wanting to hold on for another year at least. . . . However I am talking the matter over with his mother and will try to come to a decision and make out the applications as you suggest.”3
Kennedy filled out the application for Joe Jr. to enter in September 1929, Jack two years later. St. John wrote to thank him and “confess that we ‘fell’ immediately for those attractive snap shots that were clipped to the applications. Both boys look like mighty good Harvard material.” Still not sure whether Kennedy would actually send the boys, he invited him, Rose, Joe Jr., and Jack to v
isit “before the end of the school year.” Kennedy did not visit the school, but he did enroll his oldest son.4
Joe Jr. did not take immediately to the rigidly ruled prep school environment. As the privileged older son, he had ruled the roost at home, lording it over Jack and his sisters. Rose had tried to keep an orderly home, but as the family grew in size, she had concentrated her attention on the babies and on Rosemary, who needed more guidance than her brothers and sisters. She made sure Joe Jr. and Jack remained in good health, did their homework, got to school and church on time, learned proper table manners, watched their language, and took care of their younger siblings. She had long ago given up trying to make them clean up after themselves. Joe Jr.’s room was always a mess, his clothes a bit disheveled; he never made his bed or put away his clothes; and he spent far too much time roughhousing with his scrawny little brother Jack, who never gave up and never won.
Choate did not countenance such behavior. Roughhousing and teasing were frowned on, rooms had to be clean and neat, beds made, ties and jackets worn to class. Joe Jr. struggled, then adjusted and thrived. His father watched over his progress, offering advice and encouragement and interceding with the school officials when necessary. When, days after arriving at Wallingford (probably escorted there by Eddie Moore), Joe Jr. wrote to ask his father to arrange for him to go horseback riding on a regular basis, Kennedy suggested he concentrate on football instead. “Perhaps both of these things can be done but I would not give up the chance of participating in school athletics for the sake of riding horseback. I also have written the school for permission for you to attend First Friday [Mass], and I know you will fix this up so that you can go.”5
Rosemary would also be sent away to boarding school that fall. Her parents had put off this day as long as they could. It was no secret to any of the Kennedys that Rosemary, now eleven, was “different from them and from children of her age group,” as Rose would put it in her memoirs. She was attractive, as pretty as her sisters, if a bit taller and plumper, round-faced, with a lovely smile. But she had none of their athletic grace; she lacked their sense of humor and whimsy, their gift of gab. She was shy, withdrawn, a bit distant. Nothing came easily to her.6