The House of Kennedy Read online

Two years later, the family moves to Crownlands, a 1905 mansion situated on a multiacre property at 294 Pondfield Road in Bronxville. According to Patricia Kennedy Lawford, those were “very, very happy times particularly on weekends and holidays where Joe junior and John returned from school usually with houseguests.”

  Ted Kennedy recalls his father’s adage “Home holds no fear for me.” But the meaning could cut two ways. “Complaining was strictly forbidden. We were not allowed to sit around moaning because we could not go to the movies or received a poor mark in our geometry class,” Jean Kennedy Smith says. “Dad’s voice would clamp down in our ears. ‘There’s no whining in this house!’”

  “Dinner at Uncle Joe’s began promptly at 7:15 o’clock,” Kennedy cousin Joe Gargan recalls, “and no one was to be late.” Biographer Thomas Reeves further relates, “If one of the [children’s] guests was tardy, Joe would often fly into a rage and administer a tongue-lashing. One such victim [was] a pal of Jack’s who never returned” to the Kennedy table.

  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 me
moir, 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.”

  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.”

  Joe “had the sense to recognize the opportunity offered by the SEC,” one financier says, and to revel in his power. “Joe could tell the moneymen in New York what they would do, and they damned well better do it, or he could sweep them into the sea.”

  Though some moguls continue to operate unchecked, Joe’s new rules d
o ensnare at least one notable: John “Black Jack” Bouvier. Bouvier is a handsome Hamptons socialite who made his fortune on Wall Street, though he prefers gambling, drinking, and womanizing to boardroom duties.

  In July 1929, when Bouvier’s daughter Jacqueline (later to become one of America’s most beloved First Ladies) is born, “Black Jack” is a wealthy man. But unlike Joe, who strategically divested himself of vulnerable stock holdings in advance of the October 1929 crash, Bouvier is financially decimated by it, and goes on to owe substantial back taxes and subsist on loans from his father-in-law.

  * * *

  Joe enjoys being a “Washington insider,” with the accompanying political and social freedoms. He rents Marwood, a thirty-three-room, eleven-bathroom Italianate mansion in Maryland overlooking the Potomac River.

  Kennedy and President Roosevelt enjoy a warm, if cautious, friendship. The two men smoke cigars together when the wheelchair-bound president visits the house, accessible via an elevator Joe has installed specifically to accommodate FDR.

  On the weekends, Joe visits with Rose and the kids, either at their home in Bronxville; the compound in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, purchased in 1928; or the Palm Beach mansion, purchased in 1933. He devotedly writes weekly letters to each of his sons and daughters, though he reserves his sternest words for the boys. To Jack, in December 1934: “I am not expecting too much and I will not be disappointed if you don’t turn out to be a real genius.”

  In September 1935, he steps down from the SEC to run the new US Maritime Commission, responsible for building modern merchant ships to replace World War I–era vessels.

  Joe quietly plants stories about himself and his family in the press. One key contact is Henry Luce of Time magazine. Another is Arthur Krock, the New York Times Washington bureau chief, who enjoys vacations at the Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach and other luxury perks in exchange for favorable coverage.