The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  In Hollywood Joe learned one of the profound lessons of his life. He had always believed in family as a manifestation of his will. He saw in Hollywood how the Jews were able to maintain control of this important new industry. As much as they competed with and berated their competitors, they stood together against the Gentile world. That was their strongest weapon.

  Joe would build his family to stand together too, against all who might challenge them. “As long as they stick together that is the important thing,” Rose recalled as the essence of her husband’s thinking. “That is what he believed and expected.”

  When Joe was home, he always accompanied Rose to St. Aidan’s for mass on Sunday. The Kennedys cut fine figures as they entered the Tudor church. Joe had taken away from Harvard a sense that clothes were the way a man advertised himself, telling the world about his class, his aspirations, and his confidence. He was an impeccable dresser—as concerned about his clothes as was his wife about hers—and he walked with a sprightly, self-confident step. His fellow parishioners could easily see that Joe Kennedy was a man of the world, with a pretty, youthful wife and a handsome family. The Kennedys did not mix much with their Brookline neighbors, barely nodding a greeting before sitting down.

  As they kneeled in their pew, the Kennedys were worshiping at different churches. Rose went to mass practically every day. With a faith both deep and true, she was making obeisance to a God who gave her solace and peace. Joe sat with much the same reverential cast to his face, the very picture of the perfect Catholic layman. Yet he slept with actresses and chorus girls, manipulated stocks so as to exploit widows, pensioners, and other less shrewd manipulators, and set up bootlegging deals with mobsters from Cleveland to Palm Beach.

  Joe did not rustle nervously in the pew, worrying that a just God might smite him down for using the Church as a shield for his sins. He had ample reason to believe that there were two churches: the one ministered to by simple parish priests like Father John T. Creagh, here this Sunday, and the sophisticated, worldly church of power and substance, led in Boston by Cardinal William O’Connell. The cardinal was as much a player in the world of power as Mayor James Michael Curley or Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Cardinal O’Connell had officiated at Joe and Rose’s wedding and blessed their lives. His nephew, Monsignor James O’Connell, may have been present that day too, for he then lived with his uncle in the official residence.

  Monsignor O’Connell had a certain disability for a priest—a wife in New York City. So did Father David J. Toomey, editor of the Pilot, the publication read by good Catholics in Boston. When Father Toomey was secretly excommunicated, he claimed that the cardinal’s nephew had bought his uncle’s silence by threatening to expose the cardinal himself for embezzling from the archdiocese as well as his “sexual affection for men.” By apparently lying to Pope Benedict XV about his nephew, the cardinal defused the controversy and returned to Boston to inveigh against immoral movies and sin in general. The cardinal was not one to look too deeply into the cellars of Joe Kennedy’s life, for he might find his own skeletons hidden away there in the darkness. Beyond that, Joe was not only a generous contributor to his church but, in Photoplay magazine’s authoritative words, “the screen’s … leading family man.”

  For Joe, the Catholic Church was like the Democratic Party—an institution that he was born into and that he used as he saw fit—but he had no more deep faith in one than the other. A great family, as Joe defined the term, was a wealthy family, and he was now a millionaire several times over. Wealth, however, could be either the rich sustenance out of which accomplishment grew for generations or an overrich banquet that left those who feasted on it satiated and weak. Joe had seen both aspects of wealth.

  Joe’s father-in-law, Honey Fitz, had feared that his sons might outdo him. If anything, Joe feared the opposite. He had an astute understanding of the psychology of money. One key to the success of the great families lay in institutionalizing money in irrevocable trust funds. Thus, no one generation could squander the family’s assets, and each member could know that he would go into life spared the tedious necessity of scrambling for a basic living.

  Early in 1926, Joe institutionalized his belief in family when he established the first of a series of trust funds. The trust agreement was an artful document, for it created a family wealth that could go on for generations. Until they were thirty-five years old, the trustees had discretion over the percentage of the income they would give the Kennedy offspring. The Kennedy daughters received the same share as their brothers, but with his low opinion of their financial acumen and assumption that women were naturally profligate, Joe added a typical “spendthrift clause for female beneficiaries.”

  Joe told the financier Bernard Baruch, who shared his cynicism about human nature, that the trust fund would allow his children to “spit in his eye.” It was not that at all. Joe’s belief in family was in some ways an immortality wish, a way of living on through his sons and his sons’ sons. A trust fund was as much a part of that vision for his sons’ lives as private school education and athletic competition, as well as a part of his vision of what he thought a true man should be and have and do.

  5

  Moving On

  In September 1927, the Kennedy chauffeur drove the family from Brookline to South Station to take a train to their new home in New York. Joe had a gift for mythic self-creation that was as American as the curveball. He could not admit that he was moving to New York largely because it was a more convenient place for him. He had to create a moral drama. He was fond of saying later that he had left so that his children would not have to suffer from the anti-Catholic, anti-Irish ambience of Boston.

  “I felt it was no place to bring up Irish Catholic children,” Joe said. “I didn’t want them to go through what I had to go through when I was growing up.” His sons knew that among their schoolmates the term “Irish” was not a term of honor, but they surely would have been bewildered if they had been told they were leaving their friends and their neighborhood to save them from the horrors of prejudice.

  The Kennedys were leaving a Boston in which the Protestant upper class dominated banking and the law, but the city itself, by the mid-1920s, was largely run by Irish-Americans like James Michael Curley, who was mayor during most of this period. Joe, moreover, was moving to a suburb of New York that was even more an enclave of the Protestant elite than Brookline.

  On one occasion two decades later he did admit why he had left Boston, though he made it seem as if he had been a poor man driven out of the city because he could not get a job. “It is not a pleasant thing for a young man born and reared and educated in Boston to have to pull up his stakes and seek opportunity elsewhere,” he said. “I know, for I had to do it.”

  Joe fancied not only that he had fought against outrageous prejudice and was driven in hunger out of Boston but that he had struggled upward from the pits of poverty. That too was a common American belief: if you were not born rich, then the next best thing was to have been born poor and to have pulled your way up with nary a helping hand. As the train pulled out of South Station, however, Joe was leaving behind not poverty but most of the inconvenient witnesses to his past.

  Those most irritated at his attempt to wrap his past in the sackcloth of poverty were his maternal aunts and uncles. They were proud of their family’s achievements and thought that Joe was diminishing them and their lives. His Aunt Catherine had so much believed in young Joe that she had lent him much of her life savings, when he was trying to save Columbia Trust Company from a takeover bid, without so much as asking for a promissory note.

  It was not a woman’s place to know much about banking and finance. When, several years later her check bounced at the Columbia Trust Company, she had gotten dressed and gone down to the bank to find out why it had made such an embarrassing mistake. Joe had never replenished her account, and indeed he would never do so. Nor did he return money to his other relatives. Catherine and her brother and the other Hickey relatives we
re nothing more than reminders of a past he wanted to forget. As he left Boston that day, he was leaving unpaid debts. He was a sagacious judge of character, as ready to take advantage of the nobility of a relative as the ignobility of a stranger. He knew that these debts would never be called, that his actions would never be known beyond his uncles and aunts, who would bear a silent shame.

  Joe was used to traveling endlessly. Rose’s roots were far deeper, and she would never grow them as deeply again, away from her family, from her identity, from her own separate status as the mayor’s daughter. She now had seven children, including her third daughter, Eunice, born July 10, 1921, her fourth daughter, Patricia, born May 6, 1924, and her third son, Robert Francis, born November 20, 1925. She was pregnant now with her eighth child, and as the train rolled onward she was traveling each mile farther away from the security of Dr. Good, who had delivered her babies and in whose care she planned to return to give birth to her newest child. Rose, even on this day, kept studious notes of her children’s lives. She wrote that six-year-old Eunice was suffering from stomach problems. Another mother might have scribbled down that perhaps her sensitive daughter was upset by the move. That was a guilty suggestion that Rose would never consciously admit, or her daughter dare to speak.

  Rose was proud that her children were so wonderfully resilient, and the seven young Kennedys soon settled into life in the gracious thirteen-room house that Joe had rented in Riverdale, just outside of New York City, overlooking the expansive Hudson River. Rose was heavy with child and alone in a new community in which she knew no one, but she understood that this was all women’s business, something with which Joe must not be distracted. Joe left his family there and headed off into his other life.

  Joe considered life a banquet at which he could feast on whatever and whomever he pleased. He had taken a liking to the sun and sociability of Palm Beach when Rose introduced him to the Florida resort a few years before. Now, in January 1928, instead of spending time in the frigid North with his pregnant wife, he was down in Palm Beach, setting off on a daring new romantic adventure.

  Joe’s choice for his newest dalliance was twenty-eight-year-old Gloria Swanson, a celebrated Hollywood star. Greta Garbo was more classically beautiful, Mae West was more voluptuous, but no other contemporary actress had Gloria’s mysterious, exotic aura. She was a thrice-married egotist, now saddled to a fawning gentleman whose most notable feature was his name, the Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye. Gloria fancied herself a woman of her time, not a silly flapper but a spirited, independent, passionate woman who thought that eroticism was her natural due. While Rose perused her Catholic missives, Gloria read such up-to-the-minute works as Sex and the Love Light and The Art of Love.

  Seduction comes in many forms, and Joe began by offering Gloria’s husband a position at Pathé Studios in Paris, far away from his wife. Each day he huddled with Gloria or worked alone, straightening out her tangled finances. Evening after evening he escorted the couple to the most splendid of parties and balls, always deferring to the marquis. Then one afternoon, when he was convinced that the apple would fall from the tree on its own accord, he had his associate Eddie Moore take the grateful marquis deep-sea fishing. While the nobleman was far out on the Atlantic, Joe knocked on the door to Gloria’s suite at the Royal Poinciana Hotel.

  Joe left no memoir of the events of that afternoon, and we have only Gloria’s autobiography to tell us what transpired. As she recalled, he stood in the doorway, a perfect study of the Palm Beach bon vivant in his white flannel pants, sweater, and two-colored shoes. “He moved so quickly that his mouth was on mine before either of us could speak,” the actress recalled. “With one hand he held the back of my head, with the other he stroked my body and pulled at my kimono. He kept insisting in a drawn-out moan, ‘No longer, no longer, now.’ He was like a roped horse, rough, arduous, racing to be free. After a hasty climax he lay beside me, stroking my hair. Apart from his guilty, passionate mutterings, he had still said nothing cogent.”

  Joe’s mutterings may have been passionate, but they were surely not guilty. Millions of American men watched Gloria on the screen, but she was a siren they caressed only in their fantasies. Joe had seen those movies too, and he had moved to this front with the same calculation and cunning that he used on Wall Street. Joe was not a man who liked risk, be it in war, business, or romance. He was, however, in love with Gloria, or at least in love with the idea of Gloria, and love was always a danger. He was passionately attracted to this daring, sensual, perfumed being so different from staid and proper Rose, from whose mouth came axioms and homilies and to whom sex was largely one of the obligatory rituals of marriage.

  Joe considered giving birth a wife’s work. He saw no reason to be with Rose to observe the messy, painful business. So his pregnant wife traveled without him to Boston. She would have preferred to deliver at her home, but instead she went to St. Margaret’s Hospital, where she gave birth to Jean Ann, February 20, 1928, with Dr. Good and his team at her side.

  As Rose lay in bed, she received a thick sheath of congratulatory telegrams, letters, and flowers, including an especially stunning arrangement from Gloria Swanson. In adultery the act itself is only the start of the duplicities. Joe sent a diamond bracelet to Boston for his wife. He arranged for Rose to have catered food from the Ritz. “Well, he felt sorry for me being in the hospital,” Rose asserted. While Rose spent a month by herself in Boston recuperating, Eddie Moore and his wife, Mary, watched over the children in Riverdale. Eddie was a full partner in Joe’s deceptions, and his presence in the house was another deceit.

  Joe and Rose’s marriage may have appeared little more than an elaborate, exquisitely rendered masquerade. They spoke carefully chosen words to each other, rarely stepping into territory that might bring pain or exposure. The Kennedys did not hide in their charade but actively solicited accolades for their wondrous model family. Joe was as proud of Rose as a mother and proper wife as Rose was proud of Joe as a father and proper husband.

  Rose and Joe’s children were their mutual business, and when they were around them, there was usually some other agenda at work, some life lesson being imparted. They kept so much of their emotional lives from each other that Rose and Joe’s life together always had elements of a performance. So did their children’s lives. They were often performing for their parents, mouthing the script they were supposed to speak. When they got older and Rose sent them round-robin letters, she mentioned the children one after another, holding them up to scrutiny, judging them on a report card whose standards she alone knew.

  Joe rented a house in the center of Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive, a few minutes from Gloria’s home on Crescent Drive. Hollywood had only enhanced Joe’s belief that there were always two worlds: the facade, whether the celluloid screen, the speech on the political platform, or the price of a public stock offering, and behind it, a truth known to the wary few. He had arrived in Hollywood celebrated by Will Hays, the industry censor, as the man who would clean up Hollywood and bring back films that the whole family could watch without shame or embarrassment.

  His creative contribution turned out to be a series of low-budget films that suggested that morality and mediocrity were blood brothers. As for his personal conduct, in Hollywood hypocrisy was elevated to the level of philosophy, and no one found it unseemly that the celebrated family man was carrying on an assignation with a married star.

  Joe’s relationship with Gloria was not simply an erotic diversion. He descended on her life and took it over, from the scripts that she read and the details of her financial statement to the minutiae of her social life. A woman who had so easily betrayed her husband might betray him as well, and several years later the next occupant of Gloria’s dressing room found a bugging microphone embedded in the ceiling, presumably placed there by Joe. Joe did little to hide his paramour from his children, even inviting Gloria to his homes in Hyannis Port and Bronxville. “Would you please get me a picture of Miss Swanson with her name o
n it,” Kathleen wrote her father in January 1930. “How is little Gloria?” Kathleen asked her father three months later, inquiring about Gloria’s daughter.

  Joe’s largest gift to Gloria, or so it seemed, was to star her in his most expensive production, Queen Kelly, directed by the celebrated Erich von Stroheim. Joe was not one to let love get in the way of commerce. He had written Gloria’s contract so that although he split the profits on the film with her, if the film lost money she had to pay any losses by herself. In this instance, life truly was in the details, for the film was an unreleasable debacle, and the actress was saddled with enormous debts.

  Joe tried in a modest way to balance his various lives. He made periodic visits to Rose and the children and traveled to Boston in the spring of 1929 when his seventy-one-year-old father lay ill in the hospital. His mother had died, at sixty-five, of cancer six years before. Joe made his obligatory appearance at his father’s sickbed. P. J. seemed to be recovering, and Joe hurried off again on the train heading back to Los Angeles. The old man died soon after Joe left, and his son did not return for the funeral. Joe loved his father. His absence was probably not a sign of disregard but more likely indicative of his inability to stare into the implacable face of death. He was a man who avoided blood and pain, and he probably could not confront the terrible finality of his father’s death.

  If Joe had been there at the Church of St. John, he would have seen his own thirteen-year-old son, Joe Jr., greeting the mourners with solemnity and grace, standing where his father should have been. He would have heard Joe Jr. described as Honey Fitz’s natural heir and seen his firstborn son take his first step toward manhood. He would have seen mourners as varied as life itself, from the powerful to the powerless, from men of wealth and position to modest men whose only tie to P. J. was that once he had helped them.