by David Nasaw
The Kennedys had been given the same advice that was offered other parents of “mentally retarded” children. Rosemary should be sent away to a training school or institution for “slow” children. Rose was a loving, devoted mother, but that, the experts believed, was part of the problem, not its solution. The love of mothers for their “retarded” offspring blinded them to the reality of their children’s deficiencies, the impossibility of a cure, and the dangers and disappointments “slow” children faced in the world outside the institution. It also led to the mother’s focusing exclusive attention on the “retarded” child and neglecting the needs of their other children and their husbands.7
Rose worried about these issues, but she never wavered in the belief that her daughter should not be sent away. “Much as I had begun to realize how very difficult it might be to keep her at home, everything about me—and my feelings for her—rebelled against that idea, and I rejected it except as a last resort.” Kennedy was as adamant that his eldest daughter remain at home. “When psychologists recommended that Rosemary be placed in an institution,” Eunice later recalled, “he said, ‘What can they do in an institution that we can’t do better for her at home—here with her family?’ So my sister stayed at home.” Rose encouraged the other children to include Rosemary in their activities. “They were merely told that Rosemary was ‘a little slow’ and that they should help her and encourage her. When she did something well, tell her so. If she made a joke, laugh with her, don’t give her a quick retort,” she remembered telling them all. “If there is some activity going on, let her participate, invite her to be involved.”8
Rose had sent Rosemary to school with Kick in Brookline and with Kick and Eunice in Riverdale, but at age eleven she had fallen so far behind them—and her classmates—that it no longer made sense for her to continue in a regular public or private school. The same September that Joe Jr. was sent away to Choate, Rosemary was enrolled in the Devereux School in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, a private boarding school founded in 1920 by Helena Devereux of Philadelphia, who had studied with psychologist Henry Goddard, author of the The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. At Devereux, Rosemary would be taught (or, more properly, drilled in) silent and oral reading, arithmetic and making change, spelling, social studies, and the womanly arts of handwork (making doilies), music, art, dramatics, and sewing.9
With her parents in Europe, Rosemary was probably taken to Berwyn by Mary Moore. She would not see her mother, her father, or her siblings until Thanksgiving; visiting at Devereux was strongly discouraged. In mid-November, Kennedy received his first letter and responded immediately. “I cannot tell you how excited and pleased I was to get your letter. . . . I think you were a darling to write me so soon.” He filled her in with news of the family: “Mother went over to Boston to see Grandma Fitzgerald.” He bragged a bit about his Hollywood connections: “Miss Swanson is sending you a picture and writing you a letter.” And he congratulated her on her accomplishments, while exhorting her to do better: “I was very glad to see a lot of improvement in the report card, and I am sure that within the next couple of months it will be even better.” He closed by asking her to write again: “Thanks again, my sweetheart, and if you have some time write me another letter. Lots of love.”10
Rosemary had a difficult time at first, but as her teachers reported to her parents after her first year there, she had made the necessary “social adjustments” to life away from home. She also learned to sew, sing, and dance, exhibited “excellent social poise and is quite charming at times,” had done reasonably well in her arithmetic and in social studies and had “written several very good stories about the robin and her trip to Washington.” Her major problem was that she had little or no self-confidence, needed constant praise and encouragement, was too hard on herself, and was given to outbursts of impatience.11
Rosemary would return to Devereux in the fall of 1930 for a second year, but, as her teachers reported in November, she appeared to have given up on academics. She was “impatient” in silent reading and, instead of attempting to comprehend the story, “skips a good deal and fills in from her imagination.” She was not progressing in arithmetic because she “dislikes making the effort necessary to attain good results. . . . She is very impatient and does not persevere.” Her progress in English class was stalled because she “dislikes exerting the effort necessary to accomplish acceptable results.” Her teachers were especially troubled by her almost total lack of self-confidence and difficulty in concentrating on any but the simplest tasks. “Rose’s achievements in class work are seldom commensurate with her ability, and an effort is being made to bring her work up to the standard she is really capable of. This is a difficult task, as she has so definitely acquired the idea that her abilities are negligible and that her work cannot reach [any higher] standard.”12
Rosemary’s second year would be her last at Devereux. She would return to Bronxville, but not to school. “As we had a large family,” Rose remembered, “life probably was easier for her with us, because she liked to play with the younger children who were less advanced than the older ones and she could sort of keep up with them.” Because her father was absent so much of the time, he had less to do with his oldest daughter than anyone else in the household. Neither a patient man nor one who easily accepted defeat, he had a great deal of difficulty coming to terms with Rosemary’s condition. Like her teachers at Devereux, he clung to the hope that she could do better if only she tried harder and were more patient. “My father supported her,” Eunice Kennedy Shriver would later recall, “but he was much more emotional, and was easily upset by Rosemary’s lack of progress, her inabilities to use opportunities for self-development.”13
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The “GALA PREMIERE of GLORIA SWANSON in her ALL-TALKING Sensation ‘The Trespasser’. . . A Joseph P. Kennedy presentation” was scheduled for Friday, November 1, 1929. Kennedy was proud enough of the film—and his role in it (minimal though it was)—to invite dozens of friends and former business associates to join him at the Rialto in Times Square for the opening.
Gloria Swanson was his mistress, but she was also his business property. The discovery that she had a decent speaking voice and could sing made her potentially more valuable than ever. No opportunity was overlooked in publicizing the arrival in New York of the “Voice that has Thrilled Two Continents!” Swanson sang on a nationwide radio hookup; her recording of “Love, Your Spell Is Everywhere” was widely distributed; sheet music covers, banners, posters, and newspaper ads ballyhooed her newfound talent, while reminding audiences of her past achievements: “Her talking and singing voice will amaze you! Her supreme dramatic acting will hold you spellbound—her clothes will delight you! Secure Your Tickets Now!”14
The Trespasser turned out to be an enormous box office attraction, and given its minimal cost, a huge moneymaker.
On Thursday, October 24, eight days before The Trespasser’s American premiere, the stock market crashed. Prices steadied on Friday and Saturday, then plunged again on Monday and Tuesday. By the second week in November, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen 40 percent from its high in September. Only a few escaped unscathed. Joseph P. Kennedy was one of them. “The crash in the market left me untouched,” he wrote the Boston attorney who was working on his father’s estate. “I was more fortunate this time than usual.”15
Having learned from the inside how markets worked, he knew enough to resist the trading euphoria of the late 1920s. At base, a conservative man who disliked gambling, he had shifted gears, taken his profits, and months before the crash, refocused his attention on protecting rather than increasing his already considerable fortune. On leaving Hollywood, he had cashed in his options, pocketing millions of dollars. A portion of his Hollywood windfall was used to buy real estate in Bronxville and Hyannis Port; the rest was put into family trust funds and invested in blue chips and secure bonds.
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br /> Though Kennedy had scored a big hit with The Trespasser, he had no desire to go back to Hollywood and reestablish himself as a studio head. His tenure as a “picture man,” more than three and a half years, had outlasted his previous stints as bank examiner, bank president, assistant general manager at Fore River, broker at Hayden, Stone, and private investor. It was time to move on to something new.
There was, however, one piece of unfinished business: Queen Kelly. On returning to Hollywood in November 1929, he gathered his troops to try once again to rescue the project and recoup at least some of the money he had lent Gloria Productions, the company he had organized for Swanson when they went into business together.
He and his advisers entertained dozens of ideas for reshooting or re-editing the picture. They considered hiring new directors and screenwriters, adding slapstick comedy, or, to take advantage of Swanson’s newly discovered singing voice, converting von Stroheim’s dark melodrama into a breezy operetta. They brought in Franz Lehár, the composer of The Merry Widow, to write a “Queen Kelly waltz.” But with each attempt at rescue they were struck anew by the unwelcome reality that what Queen Kelly needed was an entirely new script and new director, and that was going to take hundreds of thousands of dollars. After spending the Christmas holidays in New York with his family, Kennedy returned to Hollywood in February. It would be his last trip for a long time. Rather than continue to pour good money after bad or take on more debt, Kennedy concluded that the project had to be scrapped. In mid-March 1930, it was announced that work on Queen Kelly would “not be resumed.”16
Two months later, Kennedy announced that he had retired “from active management” of Gloria Productions. His affair with Gloria had also run its course.17
In her memoir, published a half century later, Swanson would complain that he had run out on her and ended their relationship when she confronted him, sometime in the spring of 1930, about financial matters and insisted rather bitterly that his creative bookkeeping arrangements at Pathé and Gloria Productions had left him rich and her poor. Despite her charges—and the fact that there was probably some truth to them—Swanson stayed in touch with Kennedy and sought his advice in late 1930 about signing a picture deal with Joe Schenck at United Artists. When that deal went bad, she sought him out again, in October 1932. He made several suggestions to her, including that she hire someone outside United Artists to look over her contracts and verify her earnings: “It might help . . . if they thought someone connected with me was checking. . . . Maybe not. . . . Hope you won’t mind my suggestions. You probably have them all in mind, but I believed they might be helpful.” When in 1935 she (or Bette Davis) became interested in remaking The Trespasser, she telegrammed Kennedy to ask that the rights to the film be reverted to her. They exchanged several phone calls, though Kennedy complained that it was “harder to get [her private phone numbers] than the White House” number. She solicited his advice and help in getting an American visa for her ex-husband Henri and his new wife in 1940 and in securing a transfer for her son from one army company to another during World War II. Swanson would, in the years to come, send Kennedy photos of her grandchildren and condolence letters after the deaths of Joe Jr. and Kick. In 1950, after her career was rekindled with the success of Sunset Boulevard, she and her advisers consulted Kennedy and his staff in New York on a variety of items, including a proposal for a Gloria Swanson fashion line, a Sunset Boulevard sequel, and help on her tax returns.18
Only in the late 1950s, pursued by tax bills, did she turn on her former lover and business partner. Struggling to find new sources of revenue to pay her debts, her lawyer came up with the idea of releasing her old pictures—perhaps for television—and completing and reissuing Queen Kelly. In an attempt to figure out the “cost basis” of the picture for tax purposes, Swanson’s lawyer contacted Kennedy’s office to find out if he had taken a “tax loss” on Queen Kelly. If he had not, Swanson might still be able to do so.19
After some delay, Kennedy responded by writing Swanson and belittling the attempt to rescue Queen Kelly. “Now, I am not the one to say that anything isn’t possible, but I wouldn’t bet 10 cents in this new proposition.” Still, he made a few suggestions as to how to raise money to complete the film—and even offered “to get some bank to loan the money.” As far as the tax losses, he reported that his accountant didn’t know if any had been taken, but even if they had not, the statute of limitations forbade Swanson from taking them now.20
Swanson, distressed by Kennedy’s lack of enthusiasm and inflamed by her lawyer’s charge that Kennedy had cheated her by taking her tax credit for Queen Kelly, drafted a letter, which she may or may not have sent: “It’s about time (the last lap of our lives) that the truth concerning the most important matters in my life had God’s spotlight turned on them, for it is possible that they have contributed to the fact that I have had to continue to work instead of relaxing as you have so many times advised me to do. . . . You know as well as you know your right name that every penny spent on ‘Kelly’ was returned to you out of the profits of ‘the Trespasser.’ . . . Moreover, you alone benefited taxwise for I certainly did not.” She blamed Kennedy entirely for her current financial state. He had stolen from her during the brief time they were in partnership together by billing her wrongfully for expenses he had incurred—for travel, entertainment, her bungalow, and, most outrageously, the car he had given actor Sidney Howard as a reward for suggesting the title What a Widow! for one of her films. In the early 1930s, after promising to lend her money if she needed it, he had “proceeded to evaporate into thin air . . . leaving me with no alternative” but to give up her only asset, her United Artists stock.21
Swanson claimed in her 1980 memoir that she had trusted Kennedy with her career and her finances and asked no questions. If that was true, she had been a royal fool. Kennedy was in the picture business to enrich himself—and his family. He looked after his interests and expected those he worked with to look after theirs. He could not be faulted if he was better with figures and corporate structures than those he did business with. He had structured his deal with Swanson and Gloria Productions so that he and Pathé, the studio he controlled and in which he had a major investment, would come out ahead, no matter what happened.
What galled Swanson most was Kennedy’s blithe dismissal of any responsibility for the sorry financial state he had left her in. After having refused for decades to admit to herself that she had been bested in their business—and personal—relationship, Swanson lashed out at her former partner and lover, attributing his reprehensible behavior to his Catholicism. He had cheated her without remorse because he knew his God would absolve him. “Speaking of being absolved,” she wrote in the letter she may or may not have sent him, “does one really set oneself free from one’s conscience (on the assumption that everybody possess one) by confession? There is only one God—and Joseph—he is mine as well as yours, though I have not contributed money to his glorification, I have paid for my mistakes (by the sweat of my brow rather than another’s) and my sins, I hope, by my own suffering rather than Christ’s.”22
Swanson was wrong. If Kennedy had taken advantage of her financially and felt no guilt about it, it was not because he was a Catholic, but because he was a businessman.
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With Queen Kelly scrapped, his business and personal ties with Swanson at an end, and FBO sold out from under him, Kennedy’s only institutional connection to the picture business was his position at Pathé. The studio was still turning out pictures, but for how long nobody dared guess. The insoluble problem Pathé faced was that it owned no theaters in which to exhibit its films, and after the October 1929 crash, there was not much chance that it would find the wherewithal to purchase any. Kennedy, though nominally in charge of the studio, had paid it less and less attention in recent months. In his absence, the studio’s chances of survival had gone from bad to much worse.
In early December
1929, a fire destroyed the Pathé sound studios in New York. Ten people lost their lives, the newspapers cried scandal (there were no sprinklers installed), and production on new films was halted. That same month, Kennedy discovered that his plan to make Pathé talking films in French, German, Italian, and Spanish to avoid the heavy tariffs placed on American-made products was also going nowhere, in large part because in the aftermath of the stock market crash, it was impossible to raise capital to invest in the project.
On May 7, 1930, Kennedy announced that he was retiring as the active manager of Pathé but would retain his position as chairman of the board of directors. The reason he gave for his retirement was that he had decided to return to banking with Elisha Walker, who had been named chairman of Transamerica, the investment banking conglomerate organized the year before by the merger of the Bank of America and Blair & Co.
In early summer, Kennedy and Walker opened negotiations with Hiram Brown, the president of RKO, which was the only company large enough and rich enough to buy Pathé and the only one that required additional studio space. Kennedy valued Pathé’s assets at $12.7 million, which included $6 million for its stake in the DuPont-Pathé Film Manufacturing Corporation, which produced raw film stock. Hiram Brown recommended to David Sarnoff that instead of buying the entire company for $12 million, as Kennedy proposed, RKO should purchase its studio, stars’ contracts, and newsreel operation for $5 million.23
A deal was struck in early December. The purchase price was large enough to cover the redemption of the company’s 7 percent bonds, but not to buy back its common or preferred stock. The stock prices fell immediately and dramatically: the common, which had been priced at 11/9 at the end of the year (12 percent of its pre-crash price of 9), to 25 cents; the preferred from 27/8 to 11/8. Kennedy had disposed of his stock before the October 1929 crash and his bonds in August and September 1930, so he was not affected. Elisha Walker, whose investments were in bonds, not stock, would be fully compensated. “Deal signed six forty-five tonight,” Kennedy wrote Walker on December 4, 1930. “Think it magnificent one for us. I am happiest because I know you will like it.”24
