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.”
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