Meals are also a time for discussions of current events and politics, often kicked off with questions. “Where has Amelia Earhart gone?” Jean Kennedy Smith recalls being asked at age nine when the famous aviator went missing.
Inevitably, the talk turns to Joe Sr.’s aspiration to have his family run the country. Eunice Kennedy Shriver explains how Rose, the children’s “greatest teacher,” helped the young ones through. “She taught us to listen to Dad’s dinner table conversations about politics, which seemed too boring to a small child but later become the basis for our life’s work.”
And Rose herself, Jean recalls, would arrive at the breakfast table “with newspaper articles she found interesting pinned to her dress.”
For her part, Rose describes the household division of labor between her and Joe in business terms: “We were individuals with highly responsible roles in a partnership that yielded rewards which we shared. There was nothing that he could do to help me in bearing a child, just as there was nothing I could do directly in helping him bear the burdens of business.”
Any motherly frustrations are carefully confined, even in her journal: “Took care of children. Miss Brooks, the governess, helped. Kathleen still has bronchitis and Joe sick in bed. Great life.”
Frustrations aside, Rose harbors great nostalgia for precious childhood memorabilia, and keeps meticulous family records. “There’s a memory of mine, and of all of us, growing up,” Pat Kennedy later says, “that Mother was in the attic, putting things away.”
“Mother kept all our vital statistics on index cards that became an absolute necessity as our numbers began to grow,” recounts Jean. The international press, Rose remarks, lauded her card file as a “symbol of ‘American efficiency.’ Actually, it had just been a matter of ‘Kennedy desperation.’”
Young Jack’s poor health was a constant worry for Rose. “Jack had what Mother called an ‘elfin quality,’” Jean explains of her elder brother, “because he was so sickly for most of his childhood. Whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, and the dreaded scarlet fever all found Jack and sent him to bed.”
Yet Joe draws on a father’s supreme confidence in the strength of his son Jack, a feeling that would endure throughout the Kennedy presidency. “I see him on TV,” he tells presidential biographer William Manchester many years later, “in rain and cold, bareheaded, and I don’t worry. I know nothing can happen to him. I tell you, something’s watching out for him. I’ve stood by his deathbed four times. Each time I said good-bye to him, and he always came back.…When you’ve been through something like that and back, and the Pacific, what can hurt you? Who’s going to scare you.”
Joe dares to believe that nothing else bad could happen to Jack.
He is a Kennedy, after all.
Chapter 2
In 1926, before moving his growing brood from Boston to New York, a restless Joe Kennedy leaves his family on the East Coast to follow a twentieth-century California gold rush: Hollywood. There’s money to be made and women to be had.
To maximize potential profit, Joe targets small film studios. He partners to buy the fledgling FBO, Film Booking Office of America, for one million dollars. It’s the predecessor of Radio-Keith-Orpheum, RKO, later famous for greenlighting then-unknown director Orson Welles to make Citizen Kane. As studio head, Joe’s aim is to make “American films for Americans.” But it’s much more profitable to make cheap pictures like The Gorilla Hunt, the kind of film that he “couldn’t for the life of him understand why it made money, but it did,” notes actress Gloria Swanson.
In clubby Hollywood, an outsider attracts outsize attention. Who is Joe Kennedy? What interest does an East Coast banker have in the movie business? rival studio heads want to know. The mutual distrust is inflamed by Joe’s virulent anti-Semitism, a discordant echo of the discrimination his own Irish Catholic ancestors suffered at the hands of Boston Protestants. He tells friends of his intention to wipe out the Jewish movie producers he calls “pants pressers.”
“Joe Kennedy operated just like Joe Stalin,” associates remark, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons dubs Joe “the Napoleon of the movies.” He is the only studio head in Hollywood history to run three of them simultaneously. He slashes jobs, turning each property into a streamlined model of fiscal austerity, a blueprint for future studio management and mergers. He’s also instrumental in bringing talkies to the silver screen despite critics who are still convinced the new technology is a fad.
When his father, P.J. Kennedy, passes away, Joe is too busy to return to Boston for the funeral.
He’s rarely too busy for a pretty girl, however. Indeed, Joe’s appetite for bedding young women is known to be insatiable. He asks a New York theater manager to arrange introductions to “all the good-looking girls in your company,” any aspiring actresses with Hollywood dreams. “I have a gang around me that must be fed on wild meat,” he writes.
But unknown ingenues won’t further Joe’s business interests. For that, he needs movie stars. He tries and fails to convince Babe Ruth to appear in his movies. Then, in November 1927, he meets Gloria Swanson at a New York City luncheon in the hotel dining room at the Barclay, where she is a frequent guest. An instant attraction sparks between the six-foot, bespectacled, thirty-eight-year-old studio head and the twenty-eight-year-old screen siren who stands less than five feet tall.
At the table, Joe hands Swanson, whom the renowned director Cecil B. DeMille called “the movie star of all movie stars,” a book he edited, The Story of Films. The gift marks the beginning of a three-year romance.
Though Swanson earns millions, her lavish lifestyle drains her coffers. In 1924, Photoplay magazine breathlessly reports on her extravagant expenditures—ten thousand dollars a year on lingerie and five hundred a month for perfume—in an era when the average American individual income is fifty-five hundred dollars annually.
The debonair Boston banker turned Hollywood producer promises to get her out of debt. He convinces her to let him manage her finances, filing a charter in Delaware for a new company, Gloria Productions, Inc., and instituting a complex system in which he’ll write “a letter to the files saying one thing and then order the exact reverse on the phone.” Though Swanson is grateful to Joe, who has “taken the business load off” of her, her finances show little sign of improvement, thanks in part to his underhanded habit of charging his own pricey personal expenses to her account. At least one newspaper cites Joe’s transcontinental calls to Swanson as “the largest private telephone bill in the nation during the year 1929.”
Joe is smitten with the blue-eyed screen goddess. Their intimate affair begins one afternoon at the Hotel Poinciana in Palm Beach. He slyly arranges to have his friend and business associate Edward Moore take Swanson’s third husband, the French marquis Henri de Bailly de La Falaise, on a deep-sea fishing trip while Joe makes a surprise visit to Swanson’s room.
“He moved so quickly that his mouth was on mine before either of us could speak,” she recounts in her memoir, Swanson on Swanson.
“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.”