The affair escalates in intensity, with the married Joe proclaiming his “fidelity” to the married Swanson. As she writes in her memoir, “He stunned me by telling me proudly that there had been no Kennedy baby that year”—though his wife, Rose, had been already five months pregnant with their eighth child, Jean Ann (born February 20, 1928), when Joe and Swanson met in November 1927. “What he wanted more than anything, he continued, was for us to have a child,” Swanson writes. Swanson is not interested in this career-threatening idea, and flatly refuses.
Except when it comes to the children, Rose and Joe deliberately lead separate lives: “If he was in Europe, she would be here [in the States], and if she was in New York, he would be in Palm Beach. If he was in Palm Beach, she would be in New York,” a family friend remembers.
In 1929, Joe books two sets of accommodations for a steamship Atlantic crossing—one stateroom suite for Rose and the eight kids, and, on a deck below, one for Swanson. The illicit pair strolls the ship deck arm in arm, shipboard gossip feeding tabloid headlines.
Biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin recounts an extended family argument over the affair, in which Rose’s mother, Josie, chastises her daughter. “You see, you fool, your beloved husband is no different from your beloved father. Now you finally know what men are really like.”
But Rose manages to maintain the upper hand over “poor little Gloria,” as she calls Swanson. She knows Joe will never divorce her; nor does he have any inclination to marry any of his many mistresses. Swanson writes of Rose, “Was she a fool, I asked myself…or a saint? Or just a better actress than I was?”
* * *
“Kennedy is the first and only outsider to fleece Hollywood,” says Betty Lasky, daughter of the Paramount cofounder Jesse Lasky. During his three-year reign, Joe’s only major failure is the ill-fated Queen Kelly (originally titled The Swamp), a sexually explosive, uncensored 1929 silent movie. Gloria Swanson, then age thirty, plays the title role of poor Irish convent girl, Patricia “Kitty” Kelly. Joe hires the renowned Austrian film director Erich von Stroheim.
But the production is an utter failure. Stroheim insists on hundreds of retakes, busting the budget. Swanson quits. Joe shells out an additional six hundred thousand dollars to salvage the movie, but when it becomes clear that the film is a disaster, Joe is devastated. Swanson, in her autobiography, recalls how he once left a screening of the footage to burst into her bungalow on the Pathé lot. “He held his head in his hands, and little, high-pitched sounds escaped from his rigid body, like those of a wounded animal whimpering in a trap. He finally found his voice. It was quiet, controlled. ‘I’ve never had a failure in my life’ were his first words.” The experience leads Joe to break his own family edict—“Kennedys don’t cry.”
Queen Kelly is shelved for decades, finally receiving a New York theatrical premiere in 1985, though movie trivia fans might recognize it from Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard. Swanson, then fifty-one, plays Norma Desmond, a delusional aging silent film star. In one scene, where she is watching a movie starring her younger self, the images are unreleased snippets from Queen Kelly. The second piece of trivia? In the film, Queen Kelly director Erich von Stroheim plays Desmond’s devoted servant.
* * *
Joe doesn’t allow the Queen Kelly debacle to slow his roughshod ride through Hollywood. He buys up theaters to showcase his films. Not everyone wishes to sell to him, but Joe has some strong-arm tactics. According to Ronald Kessler’s biography, The Sins of the Father, in 1929 Greek-born Alexander Pantages refuses multiple offers to sell his sixty movie palaces to Joe Kennedy. Within months, Pantages is accused of raping seventeen-year-old Eunice Pringle in a broom closet in one of his LA theaters.
“There he is, the beast!” Pringle exclaims of Pantages, racing to the lobby in search of the police.
Pantages shouts, “She’s trying to frame me!” but is promptly arrested.
At trial, Pringle is the star witness, testifying to a rapt courtroom full of newspaper reporters, “He was kissing me madly. Not only was he kissing me,” she says, dramatically pointing to her breasts, “he was biting me.”
Pantages is convicted and sentenced to fifty years behind bars—until his lawyer appeals the judge’s denial of testimony about the underage accuser’s “morals,” especially Pringle’s living with a man out of wedlock. The new trial introduces proof that the dimensions of the broom closet made the alleged details of the rape a physical impossibility. Pantages is acquitted in 1931, but at the cost of his multimillion-dollar fortune. Now broke, he is forced to sell his business to Joe for three and a half million dollars, less than half of the original eight-million-dollar offer.
By 1933, Eunice Pringle has a change of heart. As Ronald Kessler relates, she is preparing to publicly expose her true involvement in the case, and who put her up to it, when she suddenly dies, possibly from cyanide poisoning. The cause of death—murder or suicide—is undetermined. In a deathbed confession to her mother and a friend, Pringle names Joe Kennedy as the mastermind behind the Pantages setup, claiming that in exchange for false testimony, the producer paid Pringle’s agent ten thousand dollars and guaranteed the young woman stardom. She dies without ever receiving the money or the fame.
Yet while Joe certainly profited from Pantages’s crises, any nefarious involvement on his part remains unproven.
“He’s a charmer,” pronounces Frances Marion, a top screenwriter and memoirist. “A typical Irish charmer, but he’s a rascal.” The scribe—who was the highest-paid screenwriter of Hollywood’s Golden Age, making three thousand dollars per week (more than forty thousand in today’s dollars) at MGM in the 1920s—recognizes the illusion of power that Irish charm wields. “Frances rarely said anything negative about anyone,” her daughter-in-law later recalls, “but she hated Joe Kennedy with a passion.”
Joe’s final act in Hollywood is to write himself out, having added prosperously to his already considerable fortune.
Chapter 3
When the time comes that a shoeshine boy knows as much as I do about what is going on in the stock market, it’s time for me to get out.” Even as Joe Kennedy Sr. turns from Hollywood and finance to politics, he’s spinning yet another tale, this one tailored to Wall Streeters eager to pin him for short-selling on the largely unregulated stock market.
As the 1929 crash hits and the Great Depression takes hold, Joe demonstrates his support of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s efforts toward shoring up the capitalist system by becoming one of FDR’s biggest campaign donors. And when in 1934, soon after his first inauguration, President Roosevelt creates the Securities and Exchange Commission—for the protection of investors from swindles, schemes, and insider trading—he has a surprise appointee for chairman of the SEC: Joe Kennedy Sr.
The president rates Joe’s deep knowledge of financial trickery as an asset. He wryly observes, “It takes a thief to catch a thief.”
And Joe does indeed go after them. During his yearlong tenure, the SEC mandates the registration of stock sales and financial disclosures and investigates some two thousand small securities fraud cases. On July 25, 1934, Chairman Kennedy addresses the National Press Club, positioning the SEC as “simple and honest,” and says, “Only those who see things crookedly will find [the new rules] harsh.”