Wall Street Journal: The Patriarch in Hollywood
Bruce Calvert
The Patriarch in Hollywood
A management style worthy of Scrooge and an obsession with Gloria
Swanson.
By EDWARD KOSNER
Before Camelot, there was Hollywood. Jack Kennedy's run with Frank
Sinatra's Rat Pack and Bobby's dalliance with Marilyn Monroe were no
flukes. Star-crossed Hollywood escapades were bred in the bone by
their rogue patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, who first made his fortune
as a buccaneering movie mogul.
Joe Kennedy's Hollywood phase was eclipsed by the rest of his gamy
career as post-crash head of the Securities and Exchange Commission,
isolationist ambassador to London just as World War II was breaking
out, and Geppetto for Jack's Presidential run. Cari Beauchamp's
"Joseph P. Kennedy Presents" turns this absorbing saga of Jazz Age
glamour, nerve and mendacity into an extravaganza that often submerges
Kennedy pere in a swamp of detail.
Avid with ambition, Joe Kennedy spent only five years, 1926-31, as "a
picture man," as he liked to think of himself. But he managed to cram
a lifetime's worth of dirty-dealing, self-promotion, star-gazing
adultery and generally odious behavior into that brief interlude.
Gossip columnist Louella Parsons called him "The Napoleon of
Hollywood," and he acted as though she meant it. He ran four different
studios at one time or another, signed and seduced some of the biggest
stars, ultimately double-crossed nearly everyone he dealt with, and
left town with the equivalent of about $200 million today.
Kennedy's gaudiest accomplishment was his capture of Gloria Swanson.
Just 28, barely 5 feet tall and "bird-boned," as Ms. Beauchamp writes,
Swanson was Hollywood's reigning sex-bomb, married to her third
husband, a handsome but cash-strapped French marquis. For all her box-
office success, Swanson's finances were a mess, and a mutual friend
introduced her to Kennedy to straighten them out. "Together we could
make millions!" Joe crowed at their first lunch.
Joseph P. Kennedy Presents
By Cari Beauchamp
(Knopf, 506 paes, $35)
Before long, Kennedy made his move. With his pious wife, Rose, in
Boston for the birth of their eighth child, and the rest of the brood
stashed in Riverdale, N.Y., Kennedy invited Swanson and the marquis to
Palm Beach and had a flunky take the Frenchman deep-sea fishing. Joe
arrived at Swanson's bedroom door tricked out in his white flannels,
argyle sweater and two-toned spectator shoes. As she told the story in
her memoir, Kennedy rushed in moaning, "No longer, no longer. Now."
Joe evidently made up in animal spirits what he lacked in finesse, and
their affair was launched.
His behavior with Swanson would have been shameful had he any capacity
for shame. Although Kennedy paraded himself as a devoted family man,
he flaunted Swanson as the ultimate celebrity trophy. He even invited
Gloria to call on Rose in Riverdale. Swanson begged off. Rose, who had
once left Kennedy because of his compulsive infidelities, kept going
to Mass and acted oblivious to the whole tawdry scene.
Kennedy's accomplishment in Hollywood was to bring a bottom-line
management style worthy of Scrooge to what had been a harum-scarum
business. But his obsession with Swanson turned him into a lust-struck
impresario. He enlisted director Erich von Stroheim to create a silent
epic for her called "Queen Kelly" just as talkies were transforming
moviemaking. Von Stroheim eventually came up with a shooting script
calling for 735 individual scenes. The resulting fiasco left Kennedy
sobbing, "I've never had a failure before," and Swanson effectively
bankrupt -- after Kennedy ruthlessly laid off the movie's costs on the
production company he'd created and staffed for her.
The Swanson episode was typical. Kennedy betrayed his earliest
investors along with most members of his original "Irish Mafia," who
loyally executed his orders, and performers like Fred Thomsen, a
devout cowboy star rivaling Tom Mix. Kennedy finagled Thomsen into a
contract that effectively made the actor his chattel. Thomsen died
despondent at 38.
A blatant anti-Semite, Kennedy couldn't avoid doing business with the
immigrant Jews who built Hollywood from its nickelodeon roots. He
worked successfully with David Sarnoff, Samuel Goldwyn and other
Jewish movie executives, but routinely derided them as "pants-
pressers." As Ms. Beauchamp reports, Kennedy made a pass at one man's
mistress by bragging that he was about to take over a studio from "a
dumb and ignorant Jew" -- the woman's lover, who promptly booted him.
Still, Kennedy improved the fortunes of the studios he ran or
"advised" and pioneered wiring theaters for sound. He even managed to
portray his awkward exit from the movie business as a bold career
move. He quickly attached himself to the new president, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and parlayed his past life as a Wall Street shark into a
new role as the reformist chairman of the SEC. "It takes a thief to
catch a thief," mused FDR.
As Hitler marshaled his forces, FDR's son Jimmy plucked two plums for
his new pal Joe Kennedy: the ambassadorship to London and licenses to
import liquor "for medicinal purposes" during the waning days of
Prohibition. In top hat and tailcoat, Kennedy was soon swanning around
the Court of St. James's spreading isolationist gloom. "Hitler will be
in Buckingham Palace in two weeks," he proclaimed as France fell,
prompting the king and queen to complain to Roosevelt while Joe used
his envoy's clout to ship 200,000 cases of Haig & Haig scotch back to
the U.S.
To her credit, Ms. Beauchamp, no stylist, deadpans the Kennedy story
-- there's no moralizing here. But she takes more than 400 dense pages
to narrate a fragment of pop history that a 1996 Kennedy biographer,
Ronald Kessler, managed to capture in 27 -- with better dialogue and
sex scenes.
Joe Kennedy's most important production was his son's conquest of the
White House. It's an enduring wonder of American politics that JFK
managed to become an effective and admired president despite the heavy
hand of the old scoundrel.
Mr. Kosner is the former editor of Newsweek, New York, Esquire and the
New York Daily News. His memoir, "It's News to Me," has been reissued
in paperback.
--
Bruce Calvert
Visit the Silent Film Still Archive
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
Bruce Calvert
The Meanest Mogul
A chilling account of the Joe Kennedy’s rapacious Hollywood reign
by Scott Eyman | 2:06 PM February 5, 2009
Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years
By Cari Beauchamp
Alfred A. Knopf, 512 pages, $35
Joe Kennedy comes down to us as a peculiarly modern figure, a man who
formed the mold so comfortably inhabited by Ken Lay and Bernie Madoff.
Old Joe was a cold-blooded capitalist carnivore who cared for nobody
outside his family, which he was determined to enrich at any cost. On
the basis of this revelatory business biography, he never had a
business partner he didn’t shaft—or, if he was in a benevolent mood,
merely take advantage of.
To cut to the chase: When Kennedy hooked up with Gloria Swanson, she
was $500,000 in debt but still a major star. (Swanson was an ambitious
but financially incompetent producer who couldn’t control her costs.)
When he left her, she was $1.5 million in debt and damaged goods.
Joe Kennedy, needless to say, pocketed millions.
This pattern is repeated over and over again in Cari Beauchamp’s
Joseph P. Kennedy Presents. Ms. Beauchamp is the first person to get
access to the documents relating to Kennedy’s movie career, and the
breathtakingly audacious iniquity of the story she’s telling more than
compensates for a pedantic prose style.
JOE KENNEDY’s fling with the movie business ran from 1926 to 1930, a
chaotic period in which the movie business converted to sound—
turbulence that worked to his advantage.
He had a rough modus operandi:
1. Find studio in trouble (First National, Pathé, FBO); take over said
studio with bare minimum of Kennedy cash in play.
2. Radically cut costs; fake good balance sheets.
3. Effect merger with more successful studio; abrogate contracts and
break careers as necessary.
4. Move on to next victim.
A snapshot of our hero in action: He signed the cowboy star Fred
Thomson to a personal contract, and the overly trusting Thomson
allowed Kennedy to make all of his business decisions. When Kennedy
signed Tom Mix, a bigger cowboy star, Kennedy simply cast Thomson into
the outer darkness and let him sit and stew, unable to work, unable to
negotiate with the studios for his services. Meanwhile, the parade
moved on. Thomson died in deep emotional distress on Christmas Day,
1928, leaving an estate of $25,000. Joe Kennedy collected $150,000
from a life insurance policy he had thoughtfully taken out on his
asset.
When it came time for Kennedy to put up or shut up for his legendary
mistress, he cast Gloria Swanson in Queen Kelly, written and directed
by Erich von Stroheim, the most flamboyantly out-of-control director
in the business, who had a long string of firings and uncompleted
pictures trailing behind him. (The Wedding March, Stroheim’s previous
picture, had taken eight months to shoot, gone through $1 million 1927
dollars and was never properly finished.)
Stroheim was an impoverished Jew who had converted to Catholicism
while pretending to be an aristocratic nobleman. He cared nothing
about money, nothing about stars, cared only about fully re-creating
his peculiarly rapturous fantasia of the sordid underbelly of the
Austro-Hungarian empire. Kennedy was a businessman effortlessly
skilled at charming and taking advantage of other businessmen. He’d
never had many dealings with high-end creative types before, and
Stroheim took him to the cleaners in every way—except financially, of
course, because Kennedy had been careful to construct an interlocking
series of nets beneath his own investment.
Kennedy had loaned Swanson money—$700,000 to be exact—then kited
$650,000 of it to cover expenses at Pathé, his own studio, making sure
that Swanson (who trusted him every bit as much as Fred Thomson did)
was responsible for paying back the entirety of the loan.
Queen Kelly was never finished and never really released. For Swanson,
it was a dead loss, and she was bedeviled by debt for the rest of her
career.
As for Joe Kennedy, he emerged from the movie business safe and secure
after finagling the merger of his studios and theaters with David
Sarnoff’s RCA to form RKO. By the mid-1930s, Kennedy had about $15
million in assets and was the richest Irish-American in the country.
Fortune magazine conservatively estimated that about half of his
wealth derived from his Hollywood search-and-destroy mission, which
left behind a bankrupt mistress and a single chronically underfinanced
studio.
Joe Kennedy wasn’t about making movies. He was about girls. He was
about the art of the deal. He was about the science of the scam. A
predator thoroughly of his time—and ours.
Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be
reached at books(at)observer(dot)com.