http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/disp ... 40001.html
Fred
Cari Beauchamp's new book: Joseph P. Kennedy Presents
Cari Beauchamp's new book: Joseph P. Kennedy Presents
Fred
"Who really cares?"
Jordan Peele, when asked what genre we should put his movies in.
http://www.nitanaldi.com"
http://www.facebook.com/NitaNaldiSilentVamp"
"Who really cares?"
Jordan Peele, when asked what genre we should put his movies in.
http://www.nitanaldi.com"
http://www.facebook.com/NitaNaldiSilentVamp"
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silentfilm
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Wall Street Journal: The Patriarch in Hollywood
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123388467903455117.html
The Patriarch in Hollywood
A management style worthy of Scrooge and an obsession with Gloria Swanson.
By EDWARD KOSNER
Before Camelot, there was Hollywood. Jack Kennedy's run with Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack and Bobby's dalliance with Marilyn Monroe were no flukes. Star-crossed Hollywood escapades were bred in the bone by their rogue patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, who first made his fortune as a buccaneering movie mogul.
Joe Kennedy's Hollywood phase was eclipsed by the rest of his gamy career as post-crash head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, isolationist ambassador to London just as World War II was breaking out, and Geppetto for Jack's Presidential run. Cari Beauchamp's "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents" turns this absorbing saga of Jazz Age glamour, nerve and mendacity into an extravaganza that often submerges Kennedy pere in a swamp of detail.
Avid with ambition, Joe Kennedy spent only five years, 1926-31, as "a picture man," as he liked to think of himself. But he managed to cram a lifetime's worth of dirty-dealing, self-promotion, star-gazing adultery and generally odious behavior into that brief interlude. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons called him "The Napoleon of Hollywood," and he acted as though she meant it. He ran four different studios at one time or another, signed and seduced some of the biggest stars, ultimately double-crossed nearly everyone he dealt with, and left town with the equivalent of about $200 million today.
Kennedy's gaudiest accomplishment was his capture of Gloria Swanson. Just 28, barely 5 feet tall and "bird-boned," as Ms. Beauchamp writes, Swanson was Hollywood's reigning sex-bomb, married to her third husband, a handsome but cash-strapped French marquis. For all her box-office success, Swanson's finances were a mess, and a mutual friend introduced her to Kennedy to straighten them out. "Together we could make millions!" Joe crowed at their first lunch.
Joseph P. Kennedy Presents
By Cari Beauchamp
(Knopf, 506 paes, $35)
Before long, Kennedy made his move. With his pious wife, Rose, in Boston for the birth of their eighth child, and the rest of the brood stashed in Riverdale, N.Y., Kennedy invited Swanson and the marquis to Palm Beach and had a flunky take the Frenchman deep-sea fishing. Joe arrived at Swanson's bedroom door tricked out in his white flannels, argyle sweater and two-toned spectator shoes. As she told the story in her memoir, Kennedy rushed in moaning, "No longer, no longer. Now." Joe evidently made up in animal spirits what he lacked in finesse, and their affair was launched.
His behavior with Swanson would have been shameful had he any capacity for shame. Although Kennedy paraded himself as a devoted family man, he flaunted Swanson as the ultimate celebrity trophy. He even invited Gloria to call on Rose in Riverdale. Swanson begged off. Rose, who had once left Kennedy because of his compulsive infidelities, kept going to Mass and acted oblivious to the whole tawdry scene.
Kennedy's accomplishment in Hollywood was to bring a bottom-line management style worthy of Scrooge to what had been a harum-scarum business. But his obsession with Swanson turned him into a lust-struck impresario. He enlisted director Erich von Stroheim to create a silent epic for her called "Queen Kelly" just as talkies were transforming moviemaking. Von Stroheim eventually came up with a shooting script calling for 735 individual scenes. The resulting fiasco left Kennedy sobbing, "I've never had a failure before," and Swanson effectively bankrupt -- after Kennedy ruthlessly laid off the movie's costs on the production company he'd created and staffed for her.
The Swanson episode was typical. Kennedy betrayed his earliest investors along with most members of his original "Irish Mafia," who loyally executed his orders, and performers like Fred Thomsen, a devout cowboy star rivaling Tom Mix. Kennedy finagled Thomsen into a contract that effectively made the actor his chattel. Thomsen died despondent at 38.
A blatant anti-Semite, Kennedy couldn't avoid doing business with the immigrant Jews who built Hollywood from its nickelodeon roots. He worked successfully with David Sarnoff, Samuel Goldwyn and other Jewish movie executives, but routinely derided them as "pants-pressers." As Ms. Beauchamp reports, Kennedy made a pass at one man's mistress by bragging that he was about to take over a studio from "a dumb and ignorant Jew" -- the woman's lover, who promptly booted him.
Still, Kennedy improved the fortunes of the studios he ran or "advised" and pioneered wiring theaters for sound. He even managed to portray his awkward exit from the movie business as a bold career move. He quickly attached himself to the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and parlayed his past life as a Wall Street shark into a new role as the reformist chairman of the SEC. "It takes a thief to catch a thief," mused FDR.
As Hitler marshaled his forces, FDR's son Jimmy plucked two plums for his new pal Joe Kennedy: the ambassadorship to London and licenses to import liquor "for medicinal purposes" during the waning days of Prohibition. In top hat and tailcoat, Kennedy was soon swanning around the Court of St. James's spreading isolationist gloom. "Hitler will be in Buckingham Palace in two weeks," he proclaimed as France fell, prompting the king and queen to complain to Roosevelt while Joe used his envoy's clout to ship 200,000 cases of Haig & Haig scotch back to the U.S.
To her credit, Ms. Beauchamp, no stylist, deadpans the Kennedy story -- there's no moralizing here. But she takes more than 400 dense pages to narrate a fragment of pop history that a 1996 Kennedy biographer, Ronald Kessler, managed to capture in 27 -- with better dialogue and sex scenes.
Joe Kennedy's most important production was his son's conquest of the White House. It's an enduring wonder of American politics that JFK managed to become an effective and admired president despite the heavy hand of the old scoundrel.
Mr. Kosner is the former editor of Newsweek, New York, Esquire and the New York Daily News. His memoir, "It's News to Me," has been reissued in paperback.
The Patriarch in Hollywood
A management style worthy of Scrooge and an obsession with Gloria Swanson.
By EDWARD KOSNER
Before Camelot, there was Hollywood. Jack Kennedy's run with Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack and Bobby's dalliance with Marilyn Monroe were no flukes. Star-crossed Hollywood escapades were bred in the bone by their rogue patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, who first made his fortune as a buccaneering movie mogul.
Joe Kennedy's Hollywood phase was eclipsed by the rest of his gamy career as post-crash head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, isolationist ambassador to London just as World War II was breaking out, and Geppetto for Jack's Presidential run. Cari Beauchamp's "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents" turns this absorbing saga of Jazz Age glamour, nerve and mendacity into an extravaganza that often submerges Kennedy pere in a swamp of detail.
Avid with ambition, Joe Kennedy spent only five years, 1926-31, as "a picture man," as he liked to think of himself. But he managed to cram a lifetime's worth of dirty-dealing, self-promotion, star-gazing adultery and generally odious behavior into that brief interlude. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons called him "The Napoleon of Hollywood," and he acted as though she meant it. He ran four different studios at one time or another, signed and seduced some of the biggest stars, ultimately double-crossed nearly everyone he dealt with, and left town with the equivalent of about $200 million today.
Kennedy's gaudiest accomplishment was his capture of Gloria Swanson. Just 28, barely 5 feet tall and "bird-boned," as Ms. Beauchamp writes, Swanson was Hollywood's reigning sex-bomb, married to her third husband, a handsome but cash-strapped French marquis. For all her box-office success, Swanson's finances were a mess, and a mutual friend introduced her to Kennedy to straighten them out. "Together we could make millions!" Joe crowed at their first lunch.
Joseph P. Kennedy Presents
By Cari Beauchamp
(Knopf, 506 paes, $35)
Before long, Kennedy made his move. With his pious wife, Rose, in Boston for the birth of their eighth child, and the rest of the brood stashed in Riverdale, N.Y., Kennedy invited Swanson and the marquis to Palm Beach and had a flunky take the Frenchman deep-sea fishing. Joe arrived at Swanson's bedroom door tricked out in his white flannels, argyle sweater and two-toned spectator shoes. As she told the story in her memoir, Kennedy rushed in moaning, "No longer, no longer. Now." Joe evidently made up in animal spirits what he lacked in finesse, and their affair was launched.
His behavior with Swanson would have been shameful had he any capacity for shame. Although Kennedy paraded himself as a devoted family man, he flaunted Swanson as the ultimate celebrity trophy. He even invited Gloria to call on Rose in Riverdale. Swanson begged off. Rose, who had once left Kennedy because of his compulsive infidelities, kept going to Mass and acted oblivious to the whole tawdry scene.
Kennedy's accomplishment in Hollywood was to bring a bottom-line management style worthy of Scrooge to what had been a harum-scarum business. But his obsession with Swanson turned him into a lust-struck impresario. He enlisted director Erich von Stroheim to create a silent epic for her called "Queen Kelly" just as talkies were transforming moviemaking. Von Stroheim eventually came up with a shooting script calling for 735 individual scenes. The resulting fiasco left Kennedy sobbing, "I've never had a failure before," and Swanson effectively bankrupt -- after Kennedy ruthlessly laid off the movie's costs on the production company he'd created and staffed for her.
The Swanson episode was typical. Kennedy betrayed his earliest investors along with most members of his original "Irish Mafia," who loyally executed his orders, and performers like Fred Thomsen, a devout cowboy star rivaling Tom Mix. Kennedy finagled Thomsen into a contract that effectively made the actor his chattel. Thomsen died despondent at 38.
A blatant anti-Semite, Kennedy couldn't avoid doing business with the immigrant Jews who built Hollywood from its nickelodeon roots. He worked successfully with David Sarnoff, Samuel Goldwyn and other Jewish movie executives, but routinely derided them as "pants-pressers." As Ms. Beauchamp reports, Kennedy made a pass at one man's mistress by bragging that he was about to take over a studio from "a dumb and ignorant Jew" -- the woman's lover, who promptly booted him.
Still, Kennedy improved the fortunes of the studios he ran or "advised" and pioneered wiring theaters for sound. He even managed to portray his awkward exit from the movie business as a bold career move. He quickly attached himself to the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and parlayed his past life as a Wall Street shark into a new role as the reformist chairman of the SEC. "It takes a thief to catch a thief," mused FDR.
As Hitler marshaled his forces, FDR's son Jimmy plucked two plums for his new pal Joe Kennedy: the ambassadorship to London and licenses to import liquor "for medicinal purposes" during the waning days of Prohibition. In top hat and tailcoat, Kennedy was soon swanning around the Court of St. James's spreading isolationist gloom. "Hitler will be in Buckingham Palace in two weeks," he proclaimed as France fell, prompting the king and queen to complain to Roosevelt while Joe used his envoy's clout to ship 200,000 cases of Haig & Haig scotch back to the U.S.
To her credit, Ms. Beauchamp, no stylist, deadpans the Kennedy story -- there's no moralizing here. But she takes more than 400 dense pages to narrate a fragment of pop history that a 1996 Kennedy biographer, Ronald Kessler, managed to capture in 27 -- with better dialogue and sex scenes.
Joe Kennedy's most important production was his son's conquest of the White House. It's an enduring wonder of American politics that JFK managed to become an effective and admired president despite the heavy hand of the old scoundrel.
Mr. Kosner is the former editor of Newsweek, New York, Esquire and the New York Daily News. His memoir, "It's News to Me," has been reissued in paperback.
Bruce Calvert
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
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silentfilm
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http://www.observer.com/2009/o2/meanest-mogul
The Meanest Mogul
A chilling account of the Joe Kennedy’s rapacious Hollywood reign
by Scott Eyman | 2:06 PM February 5, 2009
Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years
By Cari Beauchamp
Alfred A. Knopf, 512 pages, $35
Joe Kennedy comes down to us as a peculiarly modern figure, a man who formed the mold so comfortably inhabited by Ken Lay and Bernie Madoff. Old Joe was a cold-blooded capitalist carnivore who cared for nobody outside his family, which he was determined to enrich at any cost. On the basis of this revelatory business biography, he never had a business partner he didn’t shaft—or, if he was in a benevolent mood, merely take advantage of.
To cut to the chase: When Kennedy hooked up with Gloria Swanson, she was $500,000 in debt but still a major star. (Swanson was an ambitious but financially incompetent producer who couldn’t control her costs.) When he left her, she was $1.5 million in debt and damaged goods.
Joe Kennedy, needless to say, pocketed millions.
This pattern is repeated over and over again in Cari Beauchamp’s Joseph P. Kennedy Presents. Ms. Beauchamp is the first person to get access to the documents relating to Kennedy’s movie career, and the breathtakingly audacious iniquity of the story she’s telling more than compensates for a pedantic prose style.
JOE KENNEDY’s fling with the movie business ran from 1926 to 1930, a chaotic period in which the movie business converted to sound—turbulence that worked to his advantage.
He had a rough modus operandi:
1. Find studio in trouble (First National, Pathé, FBO); take over said studio with bare minimum of Kennedy cash in play.
2. Radically cut costs; fake good balance sheets.
3. Effect merger with more successful studio; abrogate contracts and break careers as necessary.
4. Move on to next victim.
A snapshot of our hero in action: He signed the cowboy star Fred Thomson to a personal contract, and the overly trusting Thomson allowed Kennedy to make all of his business decisions. When Kennedy signed Tom Mix, a bigger cowboy star, Kennedy simply cast Thomson into the outer darkness and let him sit and stew, unable to work, unable to negotiate with the studios for his services. Meanwhile, the parade moved on. Thomson died in deep emotional distress on Christmas Day, 1928, leaving an estate of $25,000. Joe Kennedy collected $150,000 from a life insurance policy he had thoughtfully taken out on his asset.
When it came time for Kennedy to put up or shut up for his legendary mistress, he cast Gloria Swanson in Queen Kelly, written and directed by Erich von Stroheim, the most flamboyantly out-of-control director in the business, who had a long string of firings and uncompleted pictures trailing behind him. (The Wedding March, Stroheim’s previous picture, had taken eight months to shoot, gone through $1 million 1927 dollars and was never properly finished.)
Stroheim was an impoverished Jew who had converted to Catholicism while pretending to be an aristocratic nobleman. He cared nothing about money, nothing about stars, cared only about fully re-creating his peculiarly rapturous fantasia of the sordid underbelly of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Kennedy was a businessman effortlessly skilled at charming and taking advantage of other businessmen. He’d never had many dealings with high-end creative types before, and Stroheim took him to the cleaners in every way—except financially, of course, because Kennedy had been careful to construct an interlocking series of nets beneath his own investment.
Kennedy had loaned Swanson money—$700,000 to be exact—then kited $650,000 of it to cover expenses at Pathé, his own studio, making sure that Swanson (who trusted him every bit as much as Fred Thomson did) was responsible for paying back the entirety of the loan.
Queen Kelly was never finished and never really released. For Swanson, it was a dead loss, and she was bedeviled by debt for the rest of her career.
As for Joe Kennedy, he emerged from the movie business safe and secure after finagling the merger of his studios and theaters with David Sarnoff’s RCA to form RKO. By the mid-1930s, Kennedy had about $15 million in assets and was the richest Irish-American in the country. Fortune magazine conservatively estimated that about half of his wealth derived from his Hollywood search-and-destroy mission, which left behind a bankrupt mistress and a single chronically underfinanced studio.
Joe Kennedy wasn’t about making movies. He was about girls. He was about the art of the deal. He was about the science of the scam. A predator thoroughly of his time—and ours.
Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at books(at)observer(dot)com.
The Meanest Mogul
A chilling account of the Joe Kennedy’s rapacious Hollywood reign
by Scott Eyman | 2:06 PM February 5, 2009
Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years
By Cari Beauchamp
Alfred A. Knopf, 512 pages, $35
Joe Kennedy comes down to us as a peculiarly modern figure, a man who formed the mold so comfortably inhabited by Ken Lay and Bernie Madoff. Old Joe was a cold-blooded capitalist carnivore who cared for nobody outside his family, which he was determined to enrich at any cost. On the basis of this revelatory business biography, he never had a business partner he didn’t shaft—or, if he was in a benevolent mood, merely take advantage of.
To cut to the chase: When Kennedy hooked up with Gloria Swanson, she was $500,000 in debt but still a major star. (Swanson was an ambitious but financially incompetent producer who couldn’t control her costs.) When he left her, she was $1.5 million in debt and damaged goods.
Joe Kennedy, needless to say, pocketed millions.
This pattern is repeated over and over again in Cari Beauchamp’s Joseph P. Kennedy Presents. Ms. Beauchamp is the first person to get access to the documents relating to Kennedy’s movie career, and the breathtakingly audacious iniquity of the story she’s telling more than compensates for a pedantic prose style.
JOE KENNEDY’s fling with the movie business ran from 1926 to 1930, a chaotic period in which the movie business converted to sound—turbulence that worked to his advantage.
He had a rough modus operandi:
1. Find studio in trouble (First National, Pathé, FBO); take over said studio with bare minimum of Kennedy cash in play.
2. Radically cut costs; fake good balance sheets.
3. Effect merger with more successful studio; abrogate contracts and break careers as necessary.
4. Move on to next victim.
A snapshot of our hero in action: He signed the cowboy star Fred Thomson to a personal contract, and the overly trusting Thomson allowed Kennedy to make all of his business decisions. When Kennedy signed Tom Mix, a bigger cowboy star, Kennedy simply cast Thomson into the outer darkness and let him sit and stew, unable to work, unable to negotiate with the studios for his services. Meanwhile, the parade moved on. Thomson died in deep emotional distress on Christmas Day, 1928, leaving an estate of $25,000. Joe Kennedy collected $150,000 from a life insurance policy he had thoughtfully taken out on his asset.
When it came time for Kennedy to put up or shut up for his legendary mistress, he cast Gloria Swanson in Queen Kelly, written and directed by Erich von Stroheim, the most flamboyantly out-of-control director in the business, who had a long string of firings and uncompleted pictures trailing behind him. (The Wedding March, Stroheim’s previous picture, had taken eight months to shoot, gone through $1 million 1927 dollars and was never properly finished.)
Stroheim was an impoverished Jew who had converted to Catholicism while pretending to be an aristocratic nobleman. He cared nothing about money, nothing about stars, cared only about fully re-creating his peculiarly rapturous fantasia of the sordid underbelly of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Kennedy was a businessman effortlessly skilled at charming and taking advantage of other businessmen. He’d never had many dealings with high-end creative types before, and Stroheim took him to the cleaners in every way—except financially, of course, because Kennedy had been careful to construct an interlocking series of nets beneath his own investment.
Kennedy had loaned Swanson money—$700,000 to be exact—then kited $650,000 of it to cover expenses at Pathé, his own studio, making sure that Swanson (who trusted him every bit as much as Fred Thomson did) was responsible for paying back the entirety of the loan.
Queen Kelly was never finished and never really released. For Swanson, it was a dead loss, and she was bedeviled by debt for the rest of her career.
As for Joe Kennedy, he emerged from the movie business safe and secure after finagling the merger of his studios and theaters with David Sarnoff’s RCA to form RKO. By the mid-1930s, Kennedy had about $15 million in assets and was the richest Irish-American in the country. Fortune magazine conservatively estimated that about half of his wealth derived from his Hollywood search-and-destroy mission, which left behind a bankrupt mistress and a single chronically underfinanced studio.
Joe Kennedy wasn’t about making movies. He was about girls. He was about the art of the deal. He was about the science of the scam. A predator thoroughly of his time—and ours.
Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at books(at)observer(dot)com.
Bruce Calvert
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
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Richard M Roberts
- Posts: 1385
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Wait a tic, Fred Thomsen died of an accidental tetanus infection and was a Paramount star and running a successful horse breeding stable at the time. This is news to me that he was "despondent".
Am I smelling just one more trashing of the Kennedy clan here, with perhaps some accuracy issues?
RICHARD M ROBERTS
Am I smelling just one more trashing of the Kennedy clan here, with perhaps some accuracy issues?
RICHARD M ROBERTS
The "despondency" thing surprised me, too, but then I figured Thomsen may have been despondent over the tetanus.Richard M Roberts wrote:Wait a tic, Fred Thomsen died of an accidental tetanus infection and was a Paramount star and running a successful horse breeding stable at the time. This is news to me that he was "despondent".
Am I smelling just one more trashing of the Kennedy clan here, with perhaps some accuracy issues?
RICHARD M ROBERTS
Wait...are you referring to the book or the review? Because the wsj review definitely struck me that way.
Fred
Fred
"Who really cares?"
Jordan Peele, when asked what genre we should put his movies in.
http://www.nitanaldi.com"
http://www.facebook.com/NitaNaldiSilentVamp"
"Who really cares?"
Jordan Peele, when asked what genre we should put his movies in.
http://www.nitanaldi.com"
http://www.facebook.com/NitaNaldiSilentVamp"
-
Chris Snowden
- Posts: 775
- Joined: Wed Dec 19, 2007 1:20 am
This book review isn't only online; it's in the regular print edition too. The WSJ runs a book review in every issue, right there in the Op/Ed section, so Cari Beauchamp just got a big blast of publicity for her book.Frederica wrote:The "despondency" thing surprised me, too, but then I figured Thomsen may have been despondent over the tetanus.
Wait...are you referring to the book or the review? Because the wsj review definitely struck me that way.
The WSJ editors could've just as easily put this review in its light-weight "Personal Journal" section instead, but they didn't. Maybe that's because they felt the book was too important. Or maybe they just couldn't resist shining the brightest spotlight possible upon the unsavory past of a famous Democrat. That's my bet, but either way, I'm glad the book is getting some attention, and I'm eager to read it.
As for Thomson, if he was despondent before he stepped on that rusty nail, it's news to me. But according to the exhibitor reviews (here I go again), his new Paramount specials weren't being received nearly as well as his earlier FBO films had been. Besides, Paramount was all about the talkies in December 1928, and the future was cloudy for everybody making westerns at that point.
-------------------------------------
Christopher Snowden
Christopher Snowden
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Richard M Roberts
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The book and the review. So Joe Kennedy went to Hollywood, bedded a lot of women and made money. And this sets him apart from all the other moguls how?Chris Snowden wrote:Frederica wrote:The "despondency" thing surprised me, too, but then I figured Thomsen may have been despondent over the tetanus.
Wait...are you referring to the book or the review? Because the wsj review definitely struck me that way.
RICHARD M ROBERTS
Cari has a lengthy description of the events surrounding Thomsen's death in her bio of Frances Marion, Without Lying Down, so I don't think she's the person who made the mistake. I'm wondering if the reviewer read the book.The book and the review. So Joe Kennedy went to Hollywood, bedded a lot of women and made money. And this sets him apart from all the other moguls how?
RICHARD M ROBERTS
In any event, I'm looking forward to reading the book--the business detail the review carps about is precisely the information I'm looking for. Now if someone would just write a bio (with business detail) of Joe Schenck.
Fred
Fred
"Who really cares?"
Jordan Peele, when asked what genre we should put his movies in.
http://www.nitanaldi.com"
http://www.facebook.com/NitaNaldiSilentVamp"
"Who really cares?"
Jordan Peele, when asked what genre we should put his movies in.
http://www.nitanaldi.com"
http://www.facebook.com/NitaNaldiSilentVamp"
-
Richard M Roberts
- Posts: 1385
- Joined: Fri Dec 21, 2007 6:56 pm
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silentfilm
- Moderator
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Tampa Tribune: Patriarch Made It Big In Pictures
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2009/feb/08 ... -pictures/
Patriarch Made It Big In Pictures
By ROGER K. MILLER
The Tampa Tribune
Published: February 8, 2009
"Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years," by Cari Beauchamp (Knopf, $35)
It isn't apparent at the outset, but as the pages of this book fly by, its implicit thesis begins to jell, as if it took the gradual accumulation of multiple evidences before an indictment could be rendered: Her subject was contemptible on a world-class scale. It is hardly a new opinion, but rarely has it been documented in such meticulous detail.
Beauchamp, the author of a biography of screenwriter Frances Marion (a prominent figure in this book also), covers the entire life (1888-1969) of the patriarch of the Kennedy family but focuses on Hollywood in the 1920s and '30s. Hollywood - not, as conventional wisdom has it, illegal liquor - is where Kennedy built the foundation of his immense fortune (estimated at $400 million by the mid-1950s).
Up until now no one had written in depth about this aspect of Kennedy's long career. Well-written and researched, Beauchamp's book is a probing examination of the man in the industry during perhaps its most fascinating period.
His film career began, as the industry did, in the east, but when he went to Hollywood in the mid-1920s, he took it by storm, at one point running four companies simultaneously. He was the first financier to buy a studio outright: FBO (Film Booking Offices), which later morphed into RKO.
More than 100 movies were released under the rubric "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents." He influenced dozens, if not hundreds, of careers, including those of Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, Tom Mix, Fred Thomson (once a rival of Mix's as a cowboy hero) and investors and executives. Beauchamp writes, "He saw everything and everyone ... through a lens of dollars and cents."
Publically adulated as a "family man" because of the nine children he sired with his wife, Rose, Kennedy was a philanderer on a wholesale scale. He had affairs with scores of women, including Dietrich, but Swanson is the best known.
All the rest of his life he would occasionally hear the siren call - or, rather, the cash-register ring - of Hollywood, but by 1931 he was for all intents and purposes out of motion pictures. Beauchamp devotes the last 80 pages to an overview of Kennedy's subsequent career, starting with his active campaigning for Franklin Roosevelt and going on to his stints as chairman of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission and ambassador to Great Britain.
He aspired to the presidency, but despite - or perhaps because of - his consummate skill at self-promotion, that was not in the cards. So he turned his publicity efforts and personal treasury to dynasty-building, and the rest is history.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book-review editor, is a novelist and freelance writer and editor.
Patriarch Made It Big In Pictures
By ROGER K. MILLER
The Tampa Tribune
Published: February 8, 2009
"Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years," by Cari Beauchamp (Knopf, $35)
It isn't apparent at the outset, but as the pages of this book fly by, its implicit thesis begins to jell, as if it took the gradual accumulation of multiple evidences before an indictment could be rendered: Her subject was contemptible on a world-class scale. It is hardly a new opinion, but rarely has it been documented in such meticulous detail.
Beauchamp, the author of a biography of screenwriter Frances Marion (a prominent figure in this book also), covers the entire life (1888-1969) of the patriarch of the Kennedy family but focuses on Hollywood in the 1920s and '30s. Hollywood - not, as conventional wisdom has it, illegal liquor - is where Kennedy built the foundation of his immense fortune (estimated at $400 million by the mid-1950s).
Up until now no one had written in depth about this aspect of Kennedy's long career. Well-written and researched, Beauchamp's book is a probing examination of the man in the industry during perhaps its most fascinating period.
His film career began, as the industry did, in the east, but when he went to Hollywood in the mid-1920s, he took it by storm, at one point running four companies simultaneously. He was the first financier to buy a studio outright: FBO (Film Booking Offices), which later morphed into RKO.
More than 100 movies were released under the rubric "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents." He influenced dozens, if not hundreds, of careers, including those of Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, Tom Mix, Fred Thomson (once a rival of Mix's as a cowboy hero) and investors and executives. Beauchamp writes, "He saw everything and everyone ... through a lens of dollars and cents."
Publically adulated as a "family man" because of the nine children he sired with his wife, Rose, Kennedy was a philanderer on a wholesale scale. He had affairs with scores of women, including Dietrich, but Swanson is the best known.
All the rest of his life he would occasionally hear the siren call - or, rather, the cash-register ring - of Hollywood, but by 1931 he was for all intents and purposes out of motion pictures. Beauchamp devotes the last 80 pages to an overview of Kennedy's subsequent career, starting with his active campaigning for Franklin Roosevelt and going on to his stints as chairman of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission and ambassador to Great Britain.
He aspired to the presidency, but despite - or perhaps because of - his consummate skill at self-promotion, that was not in the cards. So he turned his publicity efforts and personal treasury to dynasty-building, and the rest is history.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book-review editor, is a novelist and freelance writer and editor.
Bruce Calvert
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
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silentfilm
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Screen grabs
Joseph P. Kennedy's conquest of Hollywood helped to create his fortune and transformed films
Joseph P. Kennedy with cowboy star Tom Mix, 1928. Kennedy ran three movie studios simultaneously during the 1920s. (JFK Library)
By Martin F. Nolan
February 8, 2009
The handsome two-story house stood "at 801 Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, complete with a clay tennis court that ran parallel to the swimming pool." Its five bedrooms could have comfortably housed Joseph P. Kennedy's growing young family in 1928. Would history have been different had the Kennedy dynasty landed on the Left Coast?
But only Joe and his assistant Eddie Moore lived in the leased house, because Joe Kennedy was all business in his Hollywood years, except when he wasn't. The house "soon took on the aura of a well-appointed clubhouse" and "had the added advantage of being down the block and around the corner" from the house of Gloria Swanson, then the world's most famous film star and the object of the Boston banker's professional and personal attention.
Unveiling a trove of newly revealed documents, Cari Beauchamp makes fiduciary details fascinating and Hollywood gossip substantive. "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents" is an essential guide to understanding the role of this family in American life. If anyone who is somehow new to the Kennedy saga needs a primer, here it is. The intellect, the intuition, the gumption, the gall, the vision, and the restless ambition of the founding father are meticulously documented.
After becoming the nation's youngest bank president at 25, the recent Harvard graduate looked westward to make money, saying in 1919 that the motion picture "is another telephone." Hollywood was dominated by former furriers, tailors, and glovemakers, nearly all of them Jewish. They were unprepared for the Boston Irish cyclone who bought failing studios, restored them, and usually made a profit. Kennedy's financial wizardry affected RKO, Warner Bros., and Paramount. He "cleared a profit of at least $4,250,000 on the RKO deal alone," the author notes. In 1928, that was serious money.
He didn't do it alone. Accompanying Kennedy was "the gang," a posse of bookkeepers, auditors, and aides-de-camp, cheerful Bob Cratchits to Kennedy's Scrooge. Their clerical work let the spotlight shine on the boss. Chief among them was Eddie Moore, to whom Kennedy remained loyal, naming his ninth child Edward Moore Kennedy in 1932. To Moore, Hollywood may have seemed tame compared with Boston City Hall. As Kennedy said, he "served as secretary to three former mayors of Boston, no one of whom talks to the others, but each speaks affectionately to Eddie."
One of the mayors was John F. Fitzgerald, Kennedy's father-in-law, whose showmanship was helpful to Joe's career, though not as much as his father's bank, Columbia Trust of East Boston, founded by Patrick J. Kennedy. Whatever family values Joe Kennedy learned in his youth, paternal presence was not one of them. He was absent for weeks and months at a time, traveling to New York, Hollywood, Palm Beach, and Europe. He was a prodigious letter-writer, in touch with all nine of his children.
Philandering is hardly the major topic of this book, but it is a titillating part of the saga. In 1929, one of "the gang" instructed Gloria Swanson to go to a suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York. There she encountered "in full clerical garb" Cardinal William O'Connell. "I am here to ask you to stop seeing Joe Kennedy," the archbishop of Boston said, saying the movie star was "an occasion of sin for him." Gloria told the cardinal to take it up with Joe. That Kennedy was bedazzled by her is evident in the chapters devoted to Kennedy's most unbusinesslike decision, his attempt to make a seriously artistic movie starring Swanson. "Queen Kelly" was a notorious flop.
The book is more about business than bedrooms, but the author dishes with details of its subject's pursuit of Marlene Dietrich, Joan Fontaine, and others. In 1947, Joe also tried to marry off actress Arlene Dahl to his son Jack. The patriarch thought she was Catholic, but Arlene was a Lutheran.
Any project steeped in Hollywood and politics contains clichés. In this book, a fine-tooth comb examines a contract, and opportunity arrives on a silver platter. The precision of a cliché also suggests the size of the author's task. "When I initially contacted the John F. Kennedy Library, which houses Joe Kennedy's papers, in the mid-1990s to inquire how I could see documents, they reacted as if they were guarding Fort Knox and I had asked for a few bricks of gold," she writes. Eventually, the scholarship of Kennedy's granddaughter Amanda Smith, in her book of letters, "Hostage to Fortune," helped make the library recognize candor's value.
Others have written incisively on Joe Kennedy: Doris Kearns Goodwin on his relationship with his in-laws, and Michael Beschloss on the shared spotlight with Franklin D. Roosevelt. But this book is Joe's alone, evoking the famous line from Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard." The film features three film icons with whom Kennedy ferociously tangled: Erich von Stroheim, Cecil B. DeMille, and, as the fading star, Gloria Swanson. Vamping toward the camera in the final scene, she says, "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."
This volume is hefty, but the narrative moves as fast as any shoot-'em-up. The author's special effects include hard work and a diligent curiosity. As audacious Kennedy ideas swiftly fly across the pages, Beauchamp's tale evokes the first words uttered in a major talking picture. As Al Jolson, in the title role of "The Jazz Singer," says, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!"
Martin F. Nolan often covered the Kennedys for the Globe from 1961 to 2001.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
Screen grabs
Joseph P. Kennedy's conquest of Hollywood helped to create his fortune and transformed films
Joseph P. Kennedy with cowboy star Tom Mix, 1928. Kennedy ran three movie studios simultaneously during the 1920s. (JFK Library)
By Martin F. Nolan
February 8, 2009
The handsome two-story house stood "at 801 Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, complete with a clay tennis court that ran parallel to the swimming pool." Its five bedrooms could have comfortably housed Joseph P. Kennedy's growing young family in 1928. Would history have been different had the Kennedy dynasty landed on the Left Coast?
But only Joe and his assistant Eddie Moore lived in the leased house, because Joe Kennedy was all business in his Hollywood years, except when he wasn't. The house "soon took on the aura of a well-appointed clubhouse" and "had the added advantage of being down the block and around the corner" from the house of Gloria Swanson, then the world's most famous film star and the object of the Boston banker's professional and personal attention.
Unveiling a trove of newly revealed documents, Cari Beauchamp makes fiduciary details fascinating and Hollywood gossip substantive. "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents" is an essential guide to understanding the role of this family in American life. If anyone who is somehow new to the Kennedy saga needs a primer, here it is. The intellect, the intuition, the gumption, the gall, the vision, and the restless ambition of the founding father are meticulously documented.
After becoming the nation's youngest bank president at 25, the recent Harvard graduate looked westward to make money, saying in 1919 that the motion picture "is another telephone." Hollywood was dominated by former furriers, tailors, and glovemakers, nearly all of them Jewish. They were unprepared for the Boston Irish cyclone who bought failing studios, restored them, and usually made a profit. Kennedy's financial wizardry affected RKO, Warner Bros., and Paramount. He "cleared a profit of at least $4,250,000 on the RKO deal alone," the author notes. In 1928, that was serious money.
He didn't do it alone. Accompanying Kennedy was "the gang," a posse of bookkeepers, auditors, and aides-de-camp, cheerful Bob Cratchits to Kennedy's Scrooge. Their clerical work let the spotlight shine on the boss. Chief among them was Eddie Moore, to whom Kennedy remained loyal, naming his ninth child Edward Moore Kennedy in 1932. To Moore, Hollywood may have seemed tame compared with Boston City Hall. As Kennedy said, he "served as secretary to three former mayors of Boston, no one of whom talks to the others, but each speaks affectionately to Eddie."
One of the mayors was John F. Fitzgerald, Kennedy's father-in-law, whose showmanship was helpful to Joe's career, though not as much as his father's bank, Columbia Trust of East Boston, founded by Patrick J. Kennedy. Whatever family values Joe Kennedy learned in his youth, paternal presence was not one of them. He was absent for weeks and months at a time, traveling to New York, Hollywood, Palm Beach, and Europe. He was a prodigious letter-writer, in touch with all nine of his children.
Philandering is hardly the major topic of this book, but it is a titillating part of the saga. In 1929, one of "the gang" instructed Gloria Swanson to go to a suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York. There she encountered "in full clerical garb" Cardinal William O'Connell. "I am here to ask you to stop seeing Joe Kennedy," the archbishop of Boston said, saying the movie star was "an occasion of sin for him." Gloria told the cardinal to take it up with Joe. That Kennedy was bedazzled by her is evident in the chapters devoted to Kennedy's most unbusinesslike decision, his attempt to make a seriously artistic movie starring Swanson. "Queen Kelly" was a notorious flop.
The book is more about business than bedrooms, but the author dishes with details of its subject's pursuit of Marlene Dietrich, Joan Fontaine, and others. In 1947, Joe also tried to marry off actress Arlene Dahl to his son Jack. The patriarch thought she was Catholic, but Arlene was a Lutheran.
Any project steeped in Hollywood and politics contains clichés. In this book, a fine-tooth comb examines a contract, and opportunity arrives on a silver platter. The precision of a cliché also suggests the size of the author's task. "When I initially contacted the John F. Kennedy Library, which houses Joe Kennedy's papers, in the mid-1990s to inquire how I could see documents, they reacted as if they were guarding Fort Knox and I had asked for a few bricks of gold," she writes. Eventually, the scholarship of Kennedy's granddaughter Amanda Smith, in her book of letters, "Hostage to Fortune," helped make the library recognize candor's value.
Others have written incisively on Joe Kennedy: Doris Kearns Goodwin on his relationship with his in-laws, and Michael Beschloss on the shared spotlight with Franklin D. Roosevelt. But this book is Joe's alone, evoking the famous line from Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard." The film features three film icons with whom Kennedy ferociously tangled: Erich von Stroheim, Cecil B. DeMille, and, as the fading star, Gloria Swanson. Vamping toward the camera in the final scene, she says, "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."
This volume is hefty, but the narrative moves as fast as any shoot-'em-up. The author's special effects include hard work and a diligent curiosity. As audacious Kennedy ideas swiftly fly across the pages, Beauchamp's tale evokes the first words uttered in a major talking picture. As Al Jolson, in the title role of "The Jazz Singer," says, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!"
Martin F. Nolan often covered the Kennedys for the Globe from 1961 to 2001.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
Bruce Calvert
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
But it's also in the WSJ review: "Thomsen died despondent at 38."azjazzman wrote:The Fred Thomson reference was in Scott Eyman's review.Frederica wrote: The "despondency" thing surprised me, too, but then I figured Thomsen may have been despondent over the tetanus.
Wait...are you referring to the book or the review? Because the wsj review definitely struck me that way.
Fred
Oh well. Let's all read the book. Maybe the despondency mystery will be solved.
Fred
Fred
"Who really cares?"
Jordan Peele, when asked what genre we should put his movies in.
http://www.nitanaldi.com"
http://www.facebook.com/NitaNaldiSilentVamp"
"Who really cares?"
Jordan Peele, when asked what genre we should put his movies in.
http://www.nitanaldi.com"
http://www.facebook.com/NitaNaldiSilentVamp"
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silentfilm
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http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09081/956910-44.stm
'Joseph P. Kennedy presents his Hollywood years' by Cari Beauchamp
He made his fortune at the movies
Sunday, March 22, 2009
By Roger K. Miller
It isn't apparent at the outset, but as the pages of Cari Beauchamp's history fly by, its implicit thesis begins to jell, as if it took the slow accumulation of multiple pieces of evidence before an indictment could be rendered:
Her subject was contemptible on a world-class scale. It is hardly a new opinion, but rarely has it been documented in such meticulous detail.
"Joseph P. Kennedy presents his Hollywood years"
By Cari Beauchamp
Knopf ($35)
Beauchamp, the author of a biography of screenwriter Frances Marion (a prominent figure in this book as well), covers the entire life (1888-1969) of the patriarch of the Kennedy family but focuses on his time in Hollywood in the 1920s and '30s.
It was in Southern California -- not as legend has it, in bootleg liquor -- where Kennedy built the foundation of his immense fortune (estimated at $400 million by the mid-1950s).
Although Kennedy began as a Boston banker, it was in Tinseltown that he learned what was for him his most essential lesson, one that he passed on to his sons:
"It is not what you are, but what people think you are that is important."
His film career began, as the industry itself did, in the East, but when he went to Los Angeles in the mid-1920s, he took it by storm, running four companies simultaneously at one point.
He was the first financier to buy a studio outright -- FBO (Film Booking Offices), which later became RKO, the maker of "Citizen Kane." More than 100 movies were released under the label "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents."
He influenced dozens if not hundreds of careers, including those of Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich and Tom Mix, and investors and executives: "He saw everything and everyone ... through a lens of dollars and cents."
Publicly hailed as a "family man" because of his nine children, Kennedy was a philanderer on a wholesale scale.
Now we come to what most readers will want to know about -- Gloria Swanson. Kennedy had affairs with scores of women, including Dietrich, but his fling with Swanson is the best known. They met in 1927 and for many years were, after William Randolph Hearst and actress Marion Davies, the most prominent unmarried couple in the country -- unmarried to each other, that is. Swanson was already on her third husband.
What Kennedy got out of the relationship, besides the public glow of squiring "the reigning queen of the movies," was -- as William Dufty, her sixth (and final) husband, called her "the ultimate trophy mistress."
What she got was, besides romance, a boost to her film career through Kennedy's studio and help, of a sort, with her eternally tangled finances.
Help "of a sort," because after Kennedy dumped her, it was revealed that he had fraudulently made money from the affair by shifting expenses from his studio to her production company.
He stiffed numerous others, the lowest example, perhaps, being that of his longtime friend and business partner, Fred Thomson.
"Without emotion or introspection, he had become a man capable of insulating himself in self-justification," Beauchamp writes. "After all, they had let themselves be put in a situation where they could be taken."
All the rest of his life he would occasionally hear the siren call of Hollywood riches, but by 1931 he was for all intents and purposes out of motion pictures.
Beauchamp devotes the last 80 pages to an overview of Kennedy's subsequent career, starting with his active campaigning for Franklin Roosevelt and going on to his stints as chairman of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission and ambassador to Great Britain.
He aspired to the presidency, but despite -- or perhaps because of -- his consummate skill at self-promotion, that election was not in the cards. So he turned his publicity efforts and personal treasury to dynasty-building, and the rest is history.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book-review editor, is a novelist and freelance writer and editor.
First published on March 22, 2009 at 12:00 am
'Joseph P. Kennedy presents his Hollywood years' by Cari Beauchamp
He made his fortune at the movies
Sunday, March 22, 2009
By Roger K. Miller
It isn't apparent at the outset, but as the pages of Cari Beauchamp's history fly by, its implicit thesis begins to jell, as if it took the slow accumulation of multiple pieces of evidence before an indictment could be rendered:
Her subject was contemptible on a world-class scale. It is hardly a new opinion, but rarely has it been documented in such meticulous detail.
"Joseph P. Kennedy presents his Hollywood years"
By Cari Beauchamp
Knopf ($35)
Beauchamp, the author of a biography of screenwriter Frances Marion (a prominent figure in this book as well), covers the entire life (1888-1969) of the patriarch of the Kennedy family but focuses on his time in Hollywood in the 1920s and '30s.
It was in Southern California -- not as legend has it, in bootleg liquor -- where Kennedy built the foundation of his immense fortune (estimated at $400 million by the mid-1950s).
Although Kennedy began as a Boston banker, it was in Tinseltown that he learned what was for him his most essential lesson, one that he passed on to his sons:
"It is not what you are, but what people think you are that is important."
His film career began, as the industry itself did, in the East, but when he went to Los Angeles in the mid-1920s, he took it by storm, running four companies simultaneously at one point.
He was the first financier to buy a studio outright -- FBO (Film Booking Offices), which later became RKO, the maker of "Citizen Kane." More than 100 movies were released under the label "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents."
He influenced dozens if not hundreds of careers, including those of Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich and Tom Mix, and investors and executives: "He saw everything and everyone ... through a lens of dollars and cents."
Publicly hailed as a "family man" because of his nine children, Kennedy was a philanderer on a wholesale scale.
Now we come to what most readers will want to know about -- Gloria Swanson. Kennedy had affairs with scores of women, including Dietrich, but his fling with Swanson is the best known. They met in 1927 and for many years were, after William Randolph Hearst and actress Marion Davies, the most prominent unmarried couple in the country -- unmarried to each other, that is. Swanson was already on her third husband.
What Kennedy got out of the relationship, besides the public glow of squiring "the reigning queen of the movies," was -- as William Dufty, her sixth (and final) husband, called her "the ultimate trophy mistress."
What she got was, besides romance, a boost to her film career through Kennedy's studio and help, of a sort, with her eternally tangled finances.
Help "of a sort," because after Kennedy dumped her, it was revealed that he had fraudulently made money from the affair by shifting expenses from his studio to her production company.
He stiffed numerous others, the lowest example, perhaps, being that of his longtime friend and business partner, Fred Thomson.
"Without emotion or introspection, he had become a man capable of insulating himself in self-justification," Beauchamp writes. "After all, they had let themselves be put in a situation where they could be taken."
All the rest of his life he would occasionally hear the siren call of Hollywood riches, but by 1931 he was for all intents and purposes out of motion pictures.
Beauchamp devotes the last 80 pages to an overview of Kennedy's subsequent career, starting with his active campaigning for Franklin Roosevelt and going on to his stints as chairman of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission and ambassador to Great Britain.
He aspired to the presidency, but despite -- or perhaps because of -- his consummate skill at self-promotion, that election was not in the cards. So he turned his publicity efforts and personal treasury to dynasty-building, and the rest is history.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book-review editor, is a novelist and freelance writer and editor.
First published on March 22, 2009 at 12:00 am
Bruce Calvert
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
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silentfilm
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Hollywood star-breaker
Click-2-Listen
By SCOTT EYMAN
Palm Beach Post Books Editor
Sunday, March 22, 2009
JOSEPH P. KENNEDY PRESENTS: His Hollywood Years, by Cari Beauchamp. Knopf; 512 pages; $35.
Joe Kennedy comes down to us as a peculiarly modern figure, a man who formed the mold so comfortably inhabited by Ken Lay and Bernie Madoff. Old Joe was a cold-blooded capitalist carnivore who cared for nobody outside his family circle, whom he was determined to enrich at any cost. On the basis of this revelatory business biography, he never had a business partner he didn't shaft or, if he was in a benevolent mood, take advantage of.
To cut to the chase: When Kennedy hooked up with Gloria Swanson, she was $500,000 in debt but still a major star. When he left her, she was $1.5''million in debt and damaged goods.
Kennedy, needless to say, pocketed millions.
This pattern is repeated over and over in Cari Beauchamp's book. Beauchamp is the first person to get access to the documents relating to Kennedy's movie career, and the breathtaking audacity of the story she's telling is more than a match for a pedantic writing style.
Kennedy's fling with the movie business ran from 1926 to 1930, a chaotic period in which the movie business converted to sound - turbulence that worked to his advantage.
Kennedy had a specific modus operandi:
1. Find a studio in trouble (First National, Pathe, FBO). Take over said studio with a bare minimum of Kennedy cash being involved.
2. Radically cut costs. Fake balance sheets.
3. Effect a merger with a more successful studio, leaving behind as many abrogated contracts and broken careers as was necessary.
4. Move on to the next victim.
Kennedy signed the cowboy star Fred Thomson to a personal contract, and the overly trusting Thomson allowed Kennedy to make all of his business decisions. When Kennedy signed Tom Mix, a bigger star in the same genre, Kennedy simply cast Thomson into outer darkness and let him sit and stew, unable to work. Thomson died in deep emotional distress on Christmas Day 1928, leaving an estate of $25,000. Kennedy collected $150,000 from a life insurance policy he had thoughtfully taken out on his asset.
And when it came time for Joe to put up or shut up for his legendary mistress, he put Swanson into Queen Kelly, written and directed by Erich von Stroheim, the most flamboyantly uncontrollable director in the movie business. The Wedding March, Stroheim's previous picture, had taken eight months to shoot, gone through 1 million 1927 dollars, and was never really finished.
Stroheim was an impoverished Jew who had converted to Catholicism while pretending to be an aristocratic nobleman. He was a brilliant artist, but a man who cared nothing about money, nothing about stars, cared only about fully recreating his rapturous fantasia of the sordid underbelly of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Kennedy had never really dealt with high-end creative people before, and Stroheim took him to the cleaners every way except financially, because Kennedy had been careful to construct an interlocking series of nets beneath his own modest investment.
Kennedy loaned Swanson money, $700,000 to be exact, then kited $650,000 of it to cover expenses at Pathe, his own studio, making sure that Swanson, who trusted him every bit as much as Fred Thomson did, was responsible for paying back the entirety of the loan.
Queen Kelly never was finished and never really released. For Swanson, it was a dead loss, and she was bedeviled by debt for the rest of her career. As for Kennedy, he got out of the movie business after finagling the merger of his studios and theaters with David Sarnoff's RCA to form RKO.
By the mid-1930s, Kennedy had about $15 million in assets and was the richest Irish-American in the country. Fortune magazine conservatively estimated that about half of that fortune derived from his search-and-destroy mission into the movie business, which left behind a bankrupt mistress and a single chronically underfinanced studio.
Joe Kennedy wasn't about making movies. He was about girls, he was about the art of the deal, he was about the science of the scam.
A very contemporary predator, indeed.
Hollywood star-breaker
Click-2-Listen
By SCOTT EYMAN
Palm Beach Post Books Editor
Sunday, March 22, 2009
JOSEPH P. KENNEDY PRESENTS: His Hollywood Years, by Cari Beauchamp. Knopf; 512 pages; $35.
Joe Kennedy comes down to us as a peculiarly modern figure, a man who formed the mold so comfortably inhabited by Ken Lay and Bernie Madoff. Old Joe was a cold-blooded capitalist carnivore who cared for nobody outside his family circle, whom he was determined to enrich at any cost. On the basis of this revelatory business biography, he never had a business partner he didn't shaft or, if he was in a benevolent mood, take advantage of.
To cut to the chase: When Kennedy hooked up with Gloria Swanson, she was $500,000 in debt but still a major star. When he left her, she was $1.5''million in debt and damaged goods.
Kennedy, needless to say, pocketed millions.
This pattern is repeated over and over in Cari Beauchamp's book. Beauchamp is the first person to get access to the documents relating to Kennedy's movie career, and the breathtaking audacity of the story she's telling is more than a match for a pedantic writing style.
Kennedy's fling with the movie business ran from 1926 to 1930, a chaotic period in which the movie business converted to sound - turbulence that worked to his advantage.
Kennedy had a specific modus operandi:
1. Find a studio in trouble (First National, Pathe, FBO). Take over said studio with a bare minimum of Kennedy cash being involved.
2. Radically cut costs. Fake balance sheets.
3. Effect a merger with a more successful studio, leaving behind as many abrogated contracts and broken careers as was necessary.
4. Move on to the next victim.
Kennedy signed the cowboy star Fred Thomson to a personal contract, and the overly trusting Thomson allowed Kennedy to make all of his business decisions. When Kennedy signed Tom Mix, a bigger star in the same genre, Kennedy simply cast Thomson into outer darkness and let him sit and stew, unable to work. Thomson died in deep emotional distress on Christmas Day 1928, leaving an estate of $25,000. Kennedy collected $150,000 from a life insurance policy he had thoughtfully taken out on his asset.
And when it came time for Joe to put up or shut up for his legendary mistress, he put Swanson into Queen Kelly, written and directed by Erich von Stroheim, the most flamboyantly uncontrollable director in the movie business. The Wedding March, Stroheim's previous picture, had taken eight months to shoot, gone through 1 million 1927 dollars, and was never really finished.
Stroheim was an impoverished Jew who had converted to Catholicism while pretending to be an aristocratic nobleman. He was a brilliant artist, but a man who cared nothing about money, nothing about stars, cared only about fully recreating his rapturous fantasia of the sordid underbelly of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Kennedy had never really dealt with high-end creative people before, and Stroheim took him to the cleaners every way except financially, because Kennedy had been careful to construct an interlocking series of nets beneath his own modest investment.
Kennedy loaned Swanson money, $700,000 to be exact, then kited $650,000 of it to cover expenses at Pathe, his own studio, making sure that Swanson, who trusted him every bit as much as Fred Thomson did, was responsible for paying back the entirety of the loan.
Queen Kelly never was finished and never really released. For Swanson, it was a dead loss, and she was bedeviled by debt for the rest of her career. As for Kennedy, he got out of the movie business after finagling the merger of his studios and theaters with David Sarnoff's RCA to form RKO.
By the mid-1930s, Kennedy had about $15 million in assets and was the richest Irish-American in the country. Fortune magazine conservatively estimated that about half of that fortune derived from his search-and-destroy mission into the movie business, which left behind a bankrupt mistress and a single chronically underfinanced studio.
Joe Kennedy wasn't about making movies. He was about girls, he was about the art of the deal, he was about the science of the scam.
A very contemporary predator, indeed.
Bruce Calvert
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
-
silentfilm
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03/22/09 07:49 AM
Kennedy patriarch had Hollywood to thank for his success
By Carol Crissey Nigrelli
NEWS BOOK REVIEWER
- Joe Kennedy, the father of a U. S. president and two U. S. senators, inspired a lot of name-calling in his day, much of it deserved. He was as ruthless as he was charming; as cunning as he was jovial. He flaunted his affairs, yet believed in the sanctity of family.
As despicable as Joe Kennedy could be, he knew how to make money. And contrary to prevailing belief, he did not make his millions from bootlegging. He made his millions from movies.
Biographers tend to condense that chapter of his life, skimming over the business deals that made Kennedy a force in Hollywood and playing up the juicy details of his dalliances with chorus girls and starlets.
Not Cari Beauchamp. The author dove into a treasure trove of Kennedy’s personal papers and came up with the detail-rich “Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years.” Her exhaustive research paints a picture of a young, vibrant rogue whose genius for business, public relations and self-promotion catapulted him to the top of four movie companies at the same time — an accomplishment unequaled before or since.
The author traces the seeds of greed to Kennedy’s childhood. His father, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, had done well for a Boston Irishman. The elder Kennedy showed warmth and compassion to anyone who sought his help — qualities his son, Joseph Patrick, did not inherit. Beauchamp writes Patrick Kennedy’s eldest child “saw him as suffering financially and emotionally by giving too much to his acquaintances and his community.”
At Harvard, Joseph Kennedy, the Irish Catholic, had the brass to apply to the exclusive clubs on campus. The Boston Brahmins rejected him. That slight not only enraged Kennedy, it molded the man he was to become. “You can go to Harvard and it doesn’t mean a damn thing,” he said. “The only thing these people understand is money.” So Joe went to where the money was.
After graduating in 1912, Kennedy began as a clerk at the bank his father helped establish. He then honed his banking skills as an auditor, eventually making it to the top of Columbia Trust. At age 25, Joseph P. Kennedy became the “youngest bank president in the country” and newspapers took notice. Later that same year, 1914, Joe married his sweetheart, Rose Fitzgerald.
Kennedy’s career took him to a Boston brokerage firm where “employees were free to invest in whatever caught their fancy along the way,” writes Beauchamp. The young man with the round glasses learned the fine art of investing other people’s money for his own profit.
His eyes may “never have wavered from the bottom line of the investments he explored,” but they did wander. He enjoyed the theater and the chorus girls who appeared in them. Ever resourceful, Kennedy found a better way to mix pleasure with profits: films.
The silent films of 1919 were churned out on a weekly basis by literally hundreds of small movie companies, most of them founded by poor Jewish immigrants. Beauchamp reveals, “Kennedy liked what he saw and told a fellow broker, ‘Look at that bunch of pants pressers in Hollywood making themselves millionaires. I could take the whole business away from them.’ ”
How Kennedy accomplished his goal is spelled out in great detail by the author. She follows every negotiation, conversation, stock transaction, stock manipulation, back slap and double cross that finally resulted in Kennedy acquiring his first movie studio, Film Booking Offices of America (FBO), in early 1926. Anyone who can wade through the intricate financial maze without having their eyes glaze over can bypass the Wharton School of Economics and award themselves an MBA.
“Joseph P. Kennedy Presents” picks up steam when Gloria Swanson enters the picture. The “reigning queen of the movies” was 28 when she met the 39-year old father of seven and asked him to straighten out her finances. Miss Swanson routinely spent her millions faster than she could make them. Inevitably, the Nordic beauty became Kennedy’s lover. She also became his Achilles heel.
The Joseph Kennedy who took over her professional and personal life was a Hollywood outsider, a banker who had cleverly acquired a second-tier movie company known for its Westerns. When FBO’s fortunes soared under his leadership, Kennedy was asked to run three more enterprises. Yet when it came to Kennedy’s “ultimate trophy mistress,” all his
business sense went south.
Kennedy indulged Swanson’s desire to star in an “important film.” He hired the tyrannical and self-bloated Erich von Stroheim to write, direct and co-star in the “lavish epic” they called “Queen Kelly.” The author’s re-creation of the ensuing events pulls the reader in for a wild, gleeful, head-shaking ride.
Doomed to failure from the start, “Queen Kelly” remains one of the great uncompleted fiascoes in the earliest days of the sound era — and Joe Kennedy’s first public shame. After signing off on “Queen Kelly,” Kennedy left Hollywood for good.
But he had accomplished what he set out to do. His million dollars had “increased tenfold over the five years he was immersed in the film industry,” writes Beauchamp. Little did Joe Kennedy know at the time that he had also drawn up the blueprint for the way Hollywood conducts business to this day.
NONFICTION
Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years
By Cari Beauchamp
Knopf
403 pages, $35
As Carol Jasen in Buffalo, Carol Crissey Nigrelli was long the top-rated co-anchor of Channel 4 News.
03/22/09 07:49 AM
Kennedy patriarch had Hollywood to thank for his success
By Carol Crissey Nigrelli
NEWS BOOK REVIEWER
- Joe Kennedy, the father of a U. S. president and two U. S. senators, inspired a lot of name-calling in his day, much of it deserved. He was as ruthless as he was charming; as cunning as he was jovial. He flaunted his affairs, yet believed in the sanctity of family.
As despicable as Joe Kennedy could be, he knew how to make money. And contrary to prevailing belief, he did not make his millions from bootlegging. He made his millions from movies.
Biographers tend to condense that chapter of his life, skimming over the business deals that made Kennedy a force in Hollywood and playing up the juicy details of his dalliances with chorus girls and starlets.
Not Cari Beauchamp. The author dove into a treasure trove of Kennedy’s personal papers and came up with the detail-rich “Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years.” Her exhaustive research paints a picture of a young, vibrant rogue whose genius for business, public relations and self-promotion catapulted him to the top of four movie companies at the same time — an accomplishment unequaled before or since.
The author traces the seeds of greed to Kennedy’s childhood. His father, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, had done well for a Boston Irishman. The elder Kennedy showed warmth and compassion to anyone who sought his help — qualities his son, Joseph Patrick, did not inherit. Beauchamp writes Patrick Kennedy’s eldest child “saw him as suffering financially and emotionally by giving too much to his acquaintances and his community.”
At Harvard, Joseph Kennedy, the Irish Catholic, had the brass to apply to the exclusive clubs on campus. The Boston Brahmins rejected him. That slight not only enraged Kennedy, it molded the man he was to become. “You can go to Harvard and it doesn’t mean a damn thing,” he said. “The only thing these people understand is money.” So Joe went to where the money was.
After graduating in 1912, Kennedy began as a clerk at the bank his father helped establish. He then honed his banking skills as an auditor, eventually making it to the top of Columbia Trust. At age 25, Joseph P. Kennedy became the “youngest bank president in the country” and newspapers took notice. Later that same year, 1914, Joe married his sweetheart, Rose Fitzgerald.
Kennedy’s career took him to a Boston brokerage firm where “employees were free to invest in whatever caught their fancy along the way,” writes Beauchamp. The young man with the round glasses learned the fine art of investing other people’s money for his own profit.
His eyes may “never have wavered from the bottom line of the investments he explored,” but they did wander. He enjoyed the theater and the chorus girls who appeared in them. Ever resourceful, Kennedy found a better way to mix pleasure with profits: films.
The silent films of 1919 were churned out on a weekly basis by literally hundreds of small movie companies, most of them founded by poor Jewish immigrants. Beauchamp reveals, “Kennedy liked what he saw and told a fellow broker, ‘Look at that bunch of pants pressers in Hollywood making themselves millionaires. I could take the whole business away from them.’ ”
How Kennedy accomplished his goal is spelled out in great detail by the author. She follows every negotiation, conversation, stock transaction, stock manipulation, back slap and double cross that finally resulted in Kennedy acquiring his first movie studio, Film Booking Offices of America (FBO), in early 1926. Anyone who can wade through the intricate financial maze without having their eyes glaze over can bypass the Wharton School of Economics and award themselves an MBA.
“Joseph P. Kennedy Presents” picks up steam when Gloria Swanson enters the picture. The “reigning queen of the movies” was 28 when she met the 39-year old father of seven and asked him to straighten out her finances. Miss Swanson routinely spent her millions faster than she could make them. Inevitably, the Nordic beauty became Kennedy’s lover. She also became his Achilles heel.
The Joseph Kennedy who took over her professional and personal life was a Hollywood outsider, a banker who had cleverly acquired a second-tier movie company known for its Westerns. When FBO’s fortunes soared under his leadership, Kennedy was asked to run three more enterprises. Yet when it came to Kennedy’s “ultimate trophy mistress,” all his
business sense went south.
Kennedy indulged Swanson’s desire to star in an “important film.” He hired the tyrannical and self-bloated Erich von Stroheim to write, direct and co-star in the “lavish epic” they called “Queen Kelly.” The author’s re-creation of the ensuing events pulls the reader in for a wild, gleeful, head-shaking ride.
Doomed to failure from the start, “Queen Kelly” remains one of the great uncompleted fiascoes in the earliest days of the sound era — and Joe Kennedy’s first public shame. After signing off on “Queen Kelly,” Kennedy left Hollywood for good.
But he had accomplished what he set out to do. His million dollars had “increased tenfold over the five years he was immersed in the film industry,” writes Beauchamp. Little did Joe Kennedy know at the time that he had also drawn up the blueprint for the way Hollywood conducts business to this day.
NONFICTION
Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years
By Cari Beauchamp
Knopf
403 pages, $35
As Carol Jasen in Buffalo, Carol Crissey Nigrelli was long the top-rated co-anchor of Channel 4 News.
Bruce Calvert
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com