The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (11 page)

Seduction comes in many forms, and Joe began by offering Gloria’s husband a position at Pathé Studios in Paris, far away from his wife. Each day he huddled with Gloria or worked alone, straightening out her tangled finances. Evening after evening he escorted the couple to the most splendid of parties and balls, always deferring to the marquis. Then one afternoon, when he was convinced that the apple would fall from the tree on its own accord, he had his associate Eddie Moore take the grateful marquis deep-sea fishing. While the nobleman was far out on the Atlantic, Joe knocked on the door to Gloria’s suite at the Royal Poinciana Hotel.

Joe left no memoir of the events of that afternoon, and we have only Gloria’s autobiography to tell us what transpired. As she recalled, he stood in the doorway, a perfect study of the Palm Beach bon vivant in his white flannel pants, sweater, and two-colored shoes. “He moved so quickly that his mouth was on mine before either of us could speak,” the actress recalled. “With one hand he held the back of my head, with the other he stroked my body and pulled at my kimono. He kept insisting in a drawn-out moan, ‘No longer, no longer, now.’ He was like a roped horse, rough, arduous, racing to be free. After a hasty climax he lay beside me, stroking my hair. Apart from his guilty, passionate mutterings, he had still said nothing cogent.”

Joe’s mutterings may have been passionate, but they were surely not guilty. Millions of American men watched Gloria on the screen, but she was
a siren they caressed only in their fantasies. Joe had seen those movies too, and he had moved to this front with the same calculation and cunning that he used on Wall Street. Joe was not a man who liked risk, be it in war, business, or romance. He was, however, in love with Gloria, or at least in love with the idea of Gloria, and love was always a danger. He was passionately attracted to this daring, sensual, perfumed being so different from staid and proper Rose, from whose mouth came axioms and homilies and to whom sex was largely one of the obligatory rituals of marriage.

Joe considered giving birth a wife’s work. He saw no reason to be with Rose to observe the messy, painful business. So his pregnant wife traveled without him to Boston. She would have preferred to deliver at her home, but instead she went to St. Margaret’s Hospital, where she gave birth to Jean Ann, February 20, 1928, with Dr. Good and his team at her side.

As Rose lay in bed, she received a thick sheath of congratulatory telegrams, letters, and flowers, including an especially stunning arrangement from Gloria Swanson. In adultery the act itself is only the start of the duplicities. Joe sent a diamond bracelet to Boston for his wife. He arranged for Rose to have catered food from the Ritz. “Well, he felt sorry for me being in the hospital,” Rose asserted. While Rose spent a month by herself in Boston recuperating, Eddie Moore and his wife, Mary, watched over the children in Riverdale. Eddie was a full partner in Joe’s deceptions, and his presence in the house was another deceit.

Joe and Rose’s marriage may have appeared little more than an elaborate, exquisitely rendered masquerade. They spoke carefully chosen words to each other, rarely stepping into territory that might bring pain or exposure. The Kennedys did not hide in their charade but actively solicited accolades for their wondrous model family. Joe was as proud of Rose as a mother and proper wife as Rose was proud of Joe as a father and proper husband.

Rose and Joe’s children were their mutual business, and when they were around them, there was usually some other agenda at work, some life lesson being imparted. They kept so much of their emotional lives from each other that Rose and Joe’s life together always had elements of a performance. So did their children’s lives. They were often performing for their parents, mouthing the script they were supposed to speak. When they got older and Rose sent them round-robin letters, she mentioned the children one after another, holding them up to scrutiny, judging them on a report card whose standards she alone knew.

J
oe rented a house in the center of Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive, a few minutes from Gloria’s home on Crescent Drive. Hollywood had only
enhanced Joe’s belief that there were always two worlds: the facade, whether the celluloid screen, the speech on the political platform, or the price of a public stock offering, and behind it, a truth known to the wary few. He had arrived in Hollywood celebrated by Will Hays, the industry censor, as the man who would clean up Hollywood and bring back films that the whole family could watch without shame or embarrassment.

His creative contribution turned out to be a series of low-budget films that suggested that morality and mediocrity were blood brothers. As for his personal conduct, in Hollywood hypocrisy was elevated to the level of philosophy, and no one found it unseemly that the celebrated family man was carrying on an assignation with a married star.

Joe’s relationship with Gloria was not simply an erotic diversion. He descended on her life and took it over, from the scripts that she read and the details of her financial statement to the minutiae of her social life. A woman who had so easily betrayed her husband might betray him as well, and several years later the next occupant of Gloria’s dressing room found a bugging microphone embedded in the ceiling, presumably placed there by Joe. Joe did little to hide his paramour from his children, even inviting Gloria to his homes in Hyannis Port and Bronxville. “Would you please get me a picture of Miss Swanson with her name on it,” Kathleen wrote her father in January 1930. “How is little Gloria?” Kathleen asked her father three months later, inquiring about Gloria’s daughter.

Joe’s largest gift to Gloria, or so it seemed, was to star her in his most expensive production,
Queen Kelly,
directed by the celebrated Erich von Stroheim. Joe was not one to let love get in the way of commerce. He had written Gloria’s contract so that although he split the profits on the film with her, if the film lost money she had to pay any losses by herself. In this instance, life truly was in the details, for the film was an unreleasable debacle, and the actress was saddled with enormous debts.

Joe tried in a modest way to balance his various lives. He made periodic visits to Rose and the children and traveled to Boston in the spring of 1929 when his seventy-one-year-old father lay ill in the hospital. His mother had died, at sixty-five, of cancer six years before. Joe made his obligatory appearance at his father’s sickbed. P. J. seemed to be recovering, and Joe hurried off again on the train heading back to Los Angeles. The old man died soon after Joe left, and his son did not return for the funeral. Joe loved his father. His absence was probably not a sign of disregard but more likely indicative of his inability to stare into the implacable face of death. He was a man who avoided blood and pain, and he probably could not confront the terrible finality of his father’s death.

If Joe had been there at the Church of St. John, he would have seen his
own thirteen-year-old son, Joe Jr., greeting the mourners with solemnity and grace, standing where his father should have been. He would have heard Joe Jr. described as Honey Fitz’s natural heir and seen his firstborn son take his first step toward manhood. He would have seen mourners as varied as life itself, from the powerful to the powerless, from men of wealth and position to modest men whose only tie to P. J. was that once he had helped them.

P. J. had asked that with his death all the IOUs that he had amassed over the years be burned. His two daughters, Loretta and Margaret, followed their father’s mandate, burning notes totaling at least $50,000. Beyond that, P. J. left an estate that one of Joe’s closest associates, James Landis, estimated as between $200,000 and $300,000, half to his two daughters and half to his son.

Joe’s affair with Gloria had begun with what the actress called “passionate mutterings,” and it continued with duplicity within duplicity. Joe was the daring director of the romance, with life as his great stage. He brought the actress home to meet Rose and the children. He invited her to travel with him and Rose on a European trip. Through all this Rose played the humble hausfrau and Gloria played the star, and hardly an honest word passed between them.

Gloria had a friend whose face had been scarred by broken glass in an automobile accident. The actress feared that fans pressing against her car might break the glass and destroy her face and career. Rose was sent forward into the crowds around the vehicle. “Who are you?” they shouted as she got in the car. “What are you doing? We want to see Gloria.”

Joe was perfectly willing to send his wife into the yearning, starstruck crowds to protect his mistress. Joe knew that no matter what he did, Rose would act as if she did not see how she was being treated. She had her children and her faith, her honored name and great houses. That was what had been rendered unto her. What transpired beyond that was not her life.

“The story got around that Joe and Gloria had gone on a trip to Europe together,” Rose recalled decades later. “A long story started until they said her child was named after him. The boy Joseph had been named after her father. He was four or five when she [Gloria] first laid eyes on Joe Kennedy. But the story had got around that he was Joe’s son.”

Gloria wrote in her autobiography that at one point Cardinal O’Connell implored her to end the affair. The Church had supposedly turned down Joe’s request to be allowed to marry the actress, and now it was time for them to sever their relationship. That was Gloria’s story. But it is doubtful that Joe would have gone to the Church to ask that he, Joseph P. Kennedy, honored Catholic layman and father of eight children, be allowed to become Gloria’s fourth husband.

Gloria was an actress, and she used all her skills in her autobiography, as she did in her decade-long affair with Joe Kennedy. She continued to visit him even as the affair slowly dissipated. Joe was left not with sweet memories of nights of bliss, but with an object lesson in the danger of passions, not only for himself but also for his sons. “Forty is a dangerous age,” he reflected to Harvey Klemmer, an aide. “Look out, boy. Don’t get in trouble. When I was forty, I went overboard for a certain lady in Hollywood of which you may have heard. It ruined my business. It ruined my health, and it damn near ruined my marriage.”

A
fter a year in their rental house in Riverdale, Joe bought a splendid estate in the exclusive Westchester County community of Bronxville. When he was home, Joe joined the other men in this town of sixty-five hundred residents, commuting to New York City each morning by train, leaving Rose and their children behind in the brick Georgian mansion.

Alice Cahill Bastian, the nurse, recalled that Joe “was always the first one up in the morning in the household. Shortly thereafter, the sound of childish voices came from his room. The little ones had quietly crept down the hallway to enjoy a romp and reading the funnies with Daddy. This early morning visit was a highlight of their day and his. As he kissed them good-bye when leaving for his office or on a trip, he was never too hurried to ask them about school or their plans for the day. Oftentimes the younger ones would accompany him to the train.”

Joe was the more demonstratively affectionate parent. His children responded with a love that was far more deeply emotive than what they felt for Rose. They learned quickly not to lie to their father. He tolerated none of the casual dissembling he called “applesauce.” Nor did he want any “monkey business” at home or school. Though their mother’s hand disciplined them, they feared their father’s displeasure far more deeply. His slightest reprimand stung far greater than a coat hanger applied to their backside. Joe, however, like Rose, was often gone. “Daddy did not come home last night,” Kathleen wrote her mother in Palm Beach in February 1932. “We do not know when he is coming.”

Gossip was one of the town’s primary products, and a favored subject was the mysterious Kennedys living in the most expensive property in town. “They were considered nouveau riche,” recalled David Wilson, who went to school with the Kennedy boys. There were no Jews and few Catholics in Bronxville, but it was neither the Kennedys’ faith nor their ethnic background that had set the town buzzing. It was Joe’s sexual indiscretions.

Bronxville fancied itself a sedate, churchgoing, conservative place, but there were dalliances galore among the affluent couples. It did not matter what one did as long as one did it quietly. Joe was so public in his womanizing that even many of the children in town knew about his assignations. He was so disrespectful of the shallow sanctimoniousness of the village that he brought women to the Gramatan Hotel. Some of the teenagers in town were so brazen as to chase after Joe, hoping for a glimpse of his current companion.

Joe’s most flagrant adventures did not begin until after Rose gave birth to Edward Moore “Teddy” Kennedy, their ninth and final child on February 22, 1932. “People said, ‘Why do you want to have nine children [if] you have had eight?’” Rose recalled. “You are over forty years old, and you will be all tired out, and you will lose your figure and looks. Why do you want to pay any attention to those priests? So I got rather indignant and made up my mind that neither Teddy or I were going to suffer and [we] were going to be independent and make it in a superior fashion. We weren’t going to have anybody feel sorry for us.”

Rose was forty-one years old, and it was a difficult, tiring labor that left her exhausted and seriously ill. She was in bed for over a month. Rose had ample reason to believe that if she became pregnant again she might die in labor. Since she was not going to violate the church’s mandate against birth control, she saw that her only choice was no longer to have sexual relations with her husband. Joe had needed no excuse for his affairs, but now there was an unspoken agreement that he could live as he wanted to live.

O
n the first day that ten-year-old Jack attended Riverdale Country Day School, he came running out late for the sparkling Reo bus, clutching a piece of toast in his hand, his shoes in the other hand, his tie askew. Jack had a preternatural instinct to take whatever was best. Instead of moving toward the back of the bus, he plunked himself down in the seat directly behind the driver. The seat had been claimed already as the prized property of one of his new classmates, Manuel Angulo. The boy cherished the seat in part because whoever sat there got first dibs in the afternoon when the driver stopped for the Good Humor ice cream truck. Manuel was no more going to argue his case with Jack than Jack was going to listen to his belligerent seatmate, and within a few minutes the boys started pounding each other, rolling into the aisle, setting off screams and shouts of encouragement. The bus driver pulled over to the roadside and separated the two boys. “After that we became good friends,” Angulo recalled.