Literary Review - Review on 'Joseph P Kennedy's Hollywood Years' by Cari Beauchamp<

Frank McLynn
DOLLAR SIGN ON HIS HEART
Joseph P Kennedy's Hollywood Years
By Cari Beauchamp (Faber & Faber 506pp £25)

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The Kennedy family has so often been likened to the House of Atreus in Greek mythology that the comparison has become something of a cliché. But reading this absorbing, first-rate and scholarly study of the founding father, Joseph Kennedy, makes one realise how apt the analogy is. Atreus originally brought down the curse by killing the sons of Thyestes and serving them up to his father in the original Thyestian feast, while Agamemnon, Atreus's son, later prolonged the anathema by sacrificing his own daughter Iphigenia. Joseph Kennedy too would cruelly sacrifice a daughter, but the original curse he called down on his family (son Joe killed in the Second World War, John the president assassinated, ditto Bobby, daughter Kathleen killed in a plane crash, daughter Rosemary lobotomised and institutionalised) was surely the result of his own evil (not too strong a word) actions.

Joseph Kennedy (1888-1969) was one of the most disgusting apologies for a human being ever to walk this planet. The original man who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing, he lied, cheated and bamboozled his way through a spectacular business career, taking advantage of the lax (and often non-existent) regulations governing stock-market dealings, management buyouts and takeover bids. In a later era, he would surely have been found guilty of graft, fraud, insider trading and embezzlement. A Boston Catholic bigot and man of the far right, who would later count Cardinal Spellman and Pius XII among his close allies, he genuinely regarded all other human beings with contempt. Blacks were 'niggers', Jews 'kikes' or 'pants pressers', liberals 'communists' and women mere sex objects. He virtually drove his wife Rose into psychosis by his compulsive womanising; admired Hitler, Mussolini and Franco; and, as Roosevelt's ambassador to Britain, despised the British, supported the Nazis and predicted, after the fall of France, that Hitler would be in Buckingham Palace in a fortnight. In the 1950s he was a rabid supporter of Senator Joe McCarthy and remained unrepentant even when that notorious red-baiter was disgraced and got his justified comeuppance at the hands of the US Army. He consorted with Mafiosi such as Meyer Lansky, Joe Bonanno, Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello, was best buddies with the unspeakable J Edgar Hoover and made a point of ruining as many careers as he could. For his son the president he was prepared to do anything. In the 1950s he bribed the Pulitzer Prize committee to honour his son for Profiles in Courage, which was ghostwritten anyway. And in 1960 he enlisted the help of senior Mafia don Sam Giancana (with whom JFK shared a mistress) to swing the results of presidential elections in West Virginia and Illinois his son's way, thus ensuring the narrow victory over Nixon. Needless to say, once the Kennedys were safely in the White House, he double-crossed even the Mafia.

Many biographers would be dragged down by the sheer catalogue of depravity, but Cari Beauchamp is a cool and dispassionate observer indeed. While not neglecting Kennedy's other nefarious activities, she focuses on the years 1926-30, when he was not just a player in Hollywood but almost the player. During a time when there were no legal impediments to simultaneous control of production and distribution in the movies, at one point he owned four studios - Pathé, First National, KAO (Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theaters Corporation) and FBO (Film Booking Offices of America). He entered the Hollywood snakepit first by acquiring FBO, which specialised in making 'quickie' Westerns, for $1.5 million, and then by acquiring KAO, which also owned 700 movie theatres nationwide. In an era of extremely decentralised film production he made another huge fortune by reorganising and refinancing these infant studios. He had no interest whatever in the movies as an art form but, with his background in real estate, commodity investment and the stock market, had a talent for short selling, asset stripping and loan padding. His method was basically to amalgamate and then sell on: when FBO and KAO merged to become RKO, he made a cool million dollars from that one transaction alone. Altogether Beauchamp estimates that he made at least $9 million from his four-year venture into Hollywood, not just from the RKO and First National deals, but $4 million profit from FBO while it was in his hands and another $3 million from Pathé and KAO. By 1931, when he left the movie industry, he was worth $15 million (maybe equal to £1 billion at today's values) and was the richest Irish-American in the world.

While he was amassing this gigantic sum he amused himself by torturing some of the best talent in films and bringing promising careers to an abrupt end. Beauchamp provides copious detail on his ousting of Cecil B DeMille from the company the great showman had founded, and the destruction of the careers of people who were major figures in their day but are now forgotten: Guy Currier, Charlie Sullivan, E B Derr and Edmund Goulding. It was Kennedy who condemned the brilliant director Erich von Stroheim to a life as a ham actor playing Nazis and oddballs when he rang down the curtain on the Austrian's would-be masterpiece Queen Kelly - though admittedly von Stroheim contributed to his own downfall by his extravagance. What he did to Fred Thomson was especially nasty. In 1926, when Kennedy acquired FBO, Thomson was the screen's leading star of Westerns. For reasons Beauchamp does not make entirely clear, Kennedy took against him and brought in Tom Mix as the next big Western star while marginalising Thomson. He ruined Thomson by doing to him what Hitchcock later did to Tippi Hedren - having him under an ironclad contract but never actually allowing him to make a film. Unable to adjust to obscurity from fame, Thomson literally lost the will to live and died at thirty-eight.

Kennedy's worst treatment was meted out to Gloria Swanson, in 1926 one of the biggest, and certainly the highest-paid, female star in Hollywood. It tickled the vanity of a pathological womaniser to make the world's sweetheart his mistress, and at first he played the ardent lovestruck besottee - though Swanson later claimed that as a lover Joe Kennedy was hopeless and that, like his son JFK, he believed in the three-minute 'expeditious' amatory encounter. Sure enough, Kennedy soon tired of playing second fiddle (as he saw it) to a 'mere' woman and dumped her heartlessly, not even staying to explain why she was suddenly rejected. Even worse, Kennedy left her financially ruined. One of his initial 'selling points' had been that he would put Swanson's finances in order - she was notoriously prodigal and was $500,000 in debt in 1927. When he left her, three years later, having promised to make her fortune, she was $1,500,000 in debt. She joined the long list of those, like Kennedy's wife Rose, Fred Thomson and many others, who never recovered from the shock of being stitched up and filleted by Kennedy.