"When Joseph P. Kennedy bought his son Jack a private plane for presidential campaigning, he rationalized the expense with a memory of having once “risked a million dollars . . . on an adventure much less worthwhile.” Three decades before President Kennedy became his principal production, the ill-fated “Queen Kelly” and its silent star, Gloria Swanson, had marked the culmination and comeuppance of Joe Kennedy’s half-dozen years in Hollywood. “Joseph P. Kennedy Presents,” Cari Beauchamp’s smart if bean-counting new book, suggests that nothing in Kennedy’s long career of banking, stock manipulation and New Dealing prepared him for presidential politics the way his time in the picture business did.
Even as a bumptious Boston arriviste — “America’s youngest bank president,” who avoided the draft in World War I by running a shipyard for the government — Kennedy had felt an itch to get in on the money being made by all the new Jewish moguls (he called them “pants pressers”) out in California. In 1919, he formed a production company to move the blackface song-and-dance man Fred Stone from vaudeville into the movies. Kennedy then spent several years running companies that distributed films produced by others until, in 1926, he became “the first outsider to simply purchase a studio outright.” Will Hays, the industry czar, welcomed Kennedy’s acquisition of FBO and the arrival of a new, “exceedingly American” presence in Hollywood.
FBO churned out horse operas and family fare, but Kennedy still managed to bring a bit of Harvard to Hollywood, and vice versa: in 1927, he organized a series of lectures by film-industry leaders, starting with himself, at the university’s business school. The attendant publicity, as Kennedy wanted, was mostly personal. Other studio bosses might fly beneath the radar, but Kennedy continually puffed and polished his own story, cultivating and bullying profile writers until their philandering subject looked like a family man and all the ink in his books ran a deeper shade of black.
For a while Kennedy acquired studios about as often as he fathered children. He took over Pathé not from any passion for its newsreels or its star director — he quickly reined in Cecil B. De Mille’s spending — but to gain access to the theaters of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation, with which Pathé had become allied. Kennedy thus entered vaudeville in order to finish it off, seizing its Main Street palaces and wiring them for talkies as fast as he could. His cruel treatment of the notoriously cruel impresario Edward Albee (“Didn’t you know, Ed? You’re washed up, you’re through”) helped extend his conquests to the point where the columnist Louella Parsons declared Kennedy “the Napoleon of the movies.” Within days of adding First National to his empire, he fired more than a score of executives and producers. When he turned his green eyeshades toward the actors, Loretta Young got to stay; Mary Astor did not.
Wherever he operated, Kennedy delegated authority to a posse of loyalists he’d met long ago back East. (Chief among them was Edward Moore, for whom Kennedy’s one surviving son is named.) The boss favored coded cables and the telephone, over which business could be conducted more quickly — and less bindingly — than it might on paper. The victims of Kennedy’s many betrayals included Fred Thomson, the handsome, straight-arrow cowboy star married to the screenwriter Frances Marion, the subject of Beauchamp’s previous book. After putting him on a rapacious “personal contract,” Kennedy dropped Thomson in favor of Tom Mix, and when Thomson died at 38, in December 1928, Kennedy contrived to make money off his life insurance.
Kennedy’s successes could be big and even visionary: he knew early on that sound pictures would transform the industry and that its scattered studios would have to undergo, in Beauchamp’s words, “Darwinian consolidations.” But his retreat from the business occurred as fast as his entry. Before the ’20s ended, Kennedy was outmaneuvered by David Sarnoff, with whose RCA he had merged FBO in order to create RKO. He also lost control of First National to Warner Brothers. Soon he was selling off everything — for millions, to be sure — except for Pathé, and left himself to concentrate on the only Hollywood obsession he’d ever had besides the grosses: Gloria Swanson.
In 1927, once they were brought together by the independent producer Robert Kane, Kennedy began to ease as well as exploit the actress’s financial problems. Swanson had just finished making “Sadie Thompson” and was heavily obligated to the I.R.S., United Artists and her own flotilla of fluffers. Kennedy got everyone paid, took control of the star’s purse strings and then pounced on her in a Palm Beach hotel room while Eddie Moore took her husband, a French marquis, deep-sea fishing.
According to Beauchamp, Swanson “genuinely liked” Kennedy, but found the security he provided more refreshing than the sex. Over the next few years she sent Christmas gifts to the Kennedy children, made a visit to Hyannis Port and spent time in London and Paris with both Joe and Rose Kennedy as well as her own husband — whose affair with Constance Bennett troubled Swanson much more than Joe and Gloria bothered Rose. Kennedy’s wife waited things out, just as she and the children had always waited out Joe’s long Hollywood absences from the family homes in Massachusetts and New York.
What kept Kennedy and Swanson together was “Queen Kelly,” a celluloid calamity resulting from the only time he “went ‘creative.’ ” Kennedy had always approached the film business with what he called “the viewpoint of a banker,” but when it came to “Queen Kelly” he was a cinéaste smitten with a star. The earliest version of the plot, suggested by the director Erich von Stroheim, involved — in Beauchamp’s heroic attempt at summary — a Catholic maiden whose “chance meeting with the prince of a European kingdom leads to a fire at her convent and then a night at the castle where the lovers are discovered by the queen, who whips Kelly and orders the prince arrested. Kelly attempts suicide before returning to the convent, where she learns she has inherited her aunt’s brothel in Africa.” The production’s delays, overruns and contemplated mixture of silence and sound were so messy as to make the plot seem Aristotelian. Kennedy eventually broke down in front of Swanson, stunned to hear himself saying, “I’ve never had a failure in my life.” Stroheim was replaced; the production was shelved, revived, and then at last abandoned. Kennedy sold Pathé and left Hollywood in April 1930.
“Joseph P. Kennedy Presents” is well sourced, often to a level of detail about stock swaps and share prices that suggests an M.B.A. case book; Kennedy’s sex-laced financial dealings with Swanson get timelined with an urgency and precision that may seem more suited to a study of the Cuban missile crisis. Beauchamp’s protagonist seems, finally, a hollow figure, the man who “shifted the gears of an entire industry” toward the short-term financial thinking “taken for granted in today’s multinational corporate Hollywood.” His real achievement in the film business was a quick “tenfold” increase in personal wealth. That was something, but not, Kennedy seemed to understand, all that much. If he wanted to keep crowing like Pathé’s trademark rooster, he knew that he should start concentrating on his own brood back East."
JOSEPH P. KENNEDY PRESENTS
His Hollywood Years
By Cari Beauchamp
