Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years Paperback - 2010

Excerpt

Mention the name Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of America’s royal family, and it evokes a mental picture: an older man smiling out from a photograph surrounded by numerous family members, or perhaps he is gaunt and wheelchair-bound, felled by a stroke. Erase those images.

Visualize, instead, a young man in his mid-thirties, a “wickedly handsome six footer, exuding vitality and roguish charm.” He strides confidently into a room wearing “the most wonderful smile that seemed to light up his entire face,” impressing everyone he met with “his warm handshake and his friendly volubility.” His vibrant energy fuels a headturning charisma that commands attention. “You felt not just that you were the only one in the room that mattered,” recalls Joan Fontaine, “but the only one in the world.” With bright blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, a frequent laugh, and a tendency to slap his thigh when amused, he is strikingly different from the typical Wall Street banker or studio mogul.

This is the man who took Hollywood by storm, at one point running four companies simultaneously when no one before or since ran more than one. He was profiled in national magazines and newspapers as a brilliant financial wunderkind, “the most intriguing personality in the motion picture world” and “the person who now monopolizes conversation in the studios and on location.” Kennedy was “the blonde Moses” leading film companies into profitable territory as they faced the pivotal years of converting from silent films to sound. In the process he was instrumental in killing vaudeville. The mystique around him grew so thick that Fortune magazine warned “the legends are so luxuriant that when you see Joe Kennedy you are likely to be startled to find him as plain and matter of fact as he is—a healthy hardy good natured sandy haired Irish family man—athletic, unperplexed, easily pleased, hot tempered, independent and restless as they come.”

Louella Parsons hailed Joe Kennedy as “the coming Napoleon” of the movies, the white knight with the wherewithal to save film studios by bringing bankers and corporate representatives onto their boards of directors. He was the architect of the mergers that laid the groundwork for today’s Hollywood. While even he might be surprised to find that United Artists, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Columbia are now all partially owned by the same multinational conglomerate, he was the one who designed that very blueprint.

Kennedy was the first financier to simply buy a studio. Fortune used the metaphor of a chess game to describe his Hollywood climb: taking “small pawns” such as Robertson-Cole and FBO and methodically knocking down the knights and bishops of Pathé and Keith-Albee- Orpheum to create “the queen of R-K-O” in less than four years. They concluded that “Kennedy moved so fast that opinions still differ as to whether he left a string of reorganized companies or a heap of wreckage behind him.”

Over one hundred films were released under the banner of “Joseph P. Kennedy Presents” during which time he influenced the careers and personal lives of Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, and the cowboy stars Fred Thomson and Tom Mix, as well as dozens of other investors, executives, and underlings. Kennedy was a multifaceted, magnetic charmer, a devious visionary with exquisite timing and more than a flash of genius. And nothing, including the destruction of other people’s careers, deterred his consuming passion to increase his personal bank accounts.

“Not a half dozen men have been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads,” F. Scott Fitzgerald noted in his final novel, The Last Tycoon. Joe Kennedy was not one of those men, for he had no appreciation of the nuances of storytelling or an ability to spark true creative collaboration. However, to paraphrase Fitzgerald, Kennedy may have been the only one to have the whole economic equation in his head and that is a key to understanding him. He saw everything and everyone, from Gloria Swanson to Adolf Hitler, through a lens of dollars and cents.

When he first arrived in Hollywood in 1926, no one knew Joe Kennedy as the man he would become; he wasn’t that man yet. He was already more than well off, always meticulously dressed and chauffeured in his Rolls-Royce, but he had yet to accumulate his fortune. His wealth was estimated at a little over a million dollars and he would increase that tenfold over the five years he was immersed in the film industry. When Kennedy left Hollywood, “he already had so much money that making the rest of it, which must have been many many millions, was almost a routine affair.”

He caught the wave at exactly the right moment, and, perhaps more important, the timing of his departure was perfect. By 1932, he was “the richest Irish American in the world,” and while he would continue to build capital through other ventures, it was Hollywood that provided the foundation of his wealth. It was also Hollywood where he learned how to perform as a public personality and where he came to believe that how you were perceived was more important than who you were. The skills and knowledge he gained would affect everything he did and influenced from then on, from how he presented his family to the world to his son’s election to the presidency.

This is the story of those Hollywood years.


From the Hardcover edition.

Media reviews

“An exceptional work of film scholarship, packed with information no one had uncovered before that reads like a juicy novel.” —Vanity Fair 

“Beauchamp serves up with gusto many measures of gossipy history and historical gossip. . . . One hell of a story.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Fascinating. . . . The intellect, the intuition, the gumption, the gall, the vision, and the restless ambition of the founding father are meticulously documented.” —The Boston Globe 

“Cari Beauchamp deserves great credit for bringing Joseph P. Kennedy into sharp focus with a wealth of detail. . . . Beauchamp has succeeded not only in finding a new way of telling the story, but one which adds to it much we didn’t know before. ” —Michael Korda, The Daily Beast

“Smart. . . . Beauchamp 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.” —New York Times Book Review
 
“[A] crackling page-turner. . . . Beauchamp demonstrates again and again, that apart from [Kennedy’s] abiding love and concern for his nine children (and perhaps a few others including Marion Davies), the bottom line was everything.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“Rarely has [Kennedy’s Hollywood years] been documented in such meticulous detail. . . . Well-written and researched, Beauchamp’s book is a probing examination of the man in the industry during perhaps its most fascinating period.” —Chicago Sun-Times
 
“Beauchamp’s research is phenomenal and would have daunted any other author. . . . A masterpiece of backstage capitalism.” —Cineaste
 
“Cari Beauchamp has dug deep into my mother’s files and records and emerged to finally tell the true story of Gloria Swanson’s relationship with Joe Kennedy. No one else has ever been as honest or as thorough.” —Michelle Farmer Amon, daughter of Gloria Swanson

Citations

• New York Times Book Review, 02/28/2010, Page 20