Gloria and Joe: The Star-Crossed Love Affair of Gloria Swanson and Joe Kennedy
387
Gloria and Joe: The Star-Crossed Love Affair of Gloria Swanson and Joe Kennedy
387eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504008556 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 03/17/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 387 |
| File size: | 778 KB |
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Gloria and Joe
The Star-Crossed Love Affair of Gloria Swanson and Joe Kennedy
By Axel Madsen
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1988 Axel MadsenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0855-6
CHAPTER 1
The Savoy Plaza
Lady, lady, should you meet
One whose ways are all discreet,
One who murmurs that his wife
Is the lodestar of his life,
One who keeps assuring you
That he never was untrue,
Never loved another one.
Lady, lady, better run.
—DOROTHY PARKER
He was surprised at how tiny she was; she thought he didn't look like a banker. She was amused by his Boston accent; he was shocked when she told him her five-year-old adopted son hadn't been christened. She surprised him by ordering steamed string beans, braised celery, and zucchini; he ordered shrimp cocktail to start with, and told her he had three boys and four girls.
Gloria Swanson was staying at the elegant new Savoy Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park South. She was in New York this last week of November 1927 to show United Artists sales and distribution chiefs her daring screen adaptation of Somerset Maugham's famous short story that ran on Broadway for eighteen sold-out months as Rain. She was convinced—and a sneak preview in California had confirmed her most optimistic expectations—that in this picture, starring Lionel Barrymore and herself, she had a hit. She was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and lawsuits for the nonpayment of bills were piling up, but on the way into the Renaissance Room with her manila envelope under one arm, she had told the maître d' to put the check on her bill. If the gentleman asked for it, the headwaiter should say the lunch was compliments of the management.
Joseph P. Kennedy mentioned a few familiar names. He had looked forward to meeting her. They mentioned the unusually mild weather, the fact that this was the only day they were both free, small worlds. They both knew First National Pictures' Bob Kane, of course. At her time at Paramount, Robert Kane, Sidney Kent, and Sam Katz were known as the front office KKKs.
The maître d' helped them get rid of the oversized menus. She was returning to Hollywood Saturday, she said.
People at nearby tables couldn't take their eyes off her, he noticed. She lit up the room. At twenty-eight, she was the embodiment of the vivacious, secure, and intriguing woman. Her screen image of the new, sophisticated 1920s female, combined with her ambitious, aggressive, managerial nature, had made her the top box-office magnet. Thousands struggled for a glimpse of her at premieres; fans deluged her with 10,000 letters a week. Her flamboyant fashions and innovative hairstyles, even her chin mole, were copied by millions of women. Diminutive (she stood all of 5' 1"), she was every inch and every moment the star. Over the long-distance telephone, Kane had asked him if he were free for lunch Thursday. She was looking for financing for her next film, and possibly for a tie-over loan.
She guessed her luncheon partner to be in his late thirties. He was broad-shouldered and athletic in his three-piece pinstripes. His freckled face and toothy smile were still boyish, and the horn-rimmed glasses gave him something of Harold Lloyd's quizzical innocence. If she was on her guard, it was because the name Joseph P. Kennedy had figured among the industry chiefs who had condemned her for filming the Somerset Maugham story. On the phone, Kane had confirmed that Joe Kennedy was a distributor, but also that he was a banker and a consultant to several Wall Street investment houses just starting to get into motion pictures. Maybe he was ready to give Bank of America a little competition. "Since you're going to New York, I'll give him a call." Bob Kane had also told her to relax. Everyone producing pictures was in debt. The money always came in eventually.
"My wife and children were impressed when I told them who I was having lunch with," he said, smiling. He looked across at the face that conformed to no known specifications of beauty but photographed successfully from any angle—the chiseled chin, dished nose, and curious almond-shaped eyes ("blue as splinters of heaven," a fan magazine effused) that somehow blended into a bizarre loveliness. She had an elfin quality and a vivid, lively magnetism that was so arresting that nobody had much to say in her presence. Her daughter's name was also Gloria, he noted. What was her little boy's name?
"Joseph, after my late father. Both Gloria and I have called him Brother for so long the poor boy thinks it's his real name."
He told her his eldest son was named Joseph, too, after him. He couldn't help noticing how the rest of the luncheon guests watched them—watched her—and pretended not to hear what they were saying.
She handed him the contents of her folder and thought he looked relieved to have something to study. At Bob Kane's suggestion, she explained, she had had her accountant prepare a memorandum outlining proposals by United Artists and Bank of America for financing Rockabye, her next film. She would be grateful if he would tell her which offer seemed the better, and if he had an alternative proposal of his own.
Behind the movie star's dark, husky voice, determined chin, and regal sparkle, he guessed at a chaotic existence, days tied up in knots with her press agent, script manager, production chief, wardrobe designer, secretaries, maids, and bill collectors. Even though she was going to release Rain under the title Sadie Thompson, she was playing with dynamite. The Maugham story about a puritanical South Seas missionary who tries to reform a prostitute only to fall prey to her spunky charms was the property every studio had itched to do and every actress with a brain and a figure had dreamed of doing. The two-year-old decency code, however, automatically banned story material that ridiculed the clergy, and it warned producers to be extra careful when depicting women selling their virtue.
He asked about the people running her company, about her accountant.
"Irving Wakoff," she said.
He didn't know the accountant to the stars. Scanning the papers, he said nobody in Hollywood knew how to draw up a balance sheet that answered bankers' questions. Certainly nobody knew how to depreciate, to amortize, to capitalize—the very things that in any other business spelled the difference between success and failure.
He didn't tell her Kane had suggested that he look into her affairs with the view of perhaps taking over Gloria Swanson Productions, that she was now prepared to place herself in proper hands and star in pictures instead of trying to be a businesswoman. When he asked about her overseas grosses, she grimaced.
Gloria had her own office in Paris because Paramount distributed her films there, and she didn't trust their figures or their advertising. If Henri, her husband, was in France right now, it was to try and make sure The Love of Sunya got booked into the right cinemas. Here, the press had called it a fragile little fantasy of sweetness. Joseph Schenck, the head of United Artists, had said it wasn't exactly dynamite, and Wakoff felt that only foreign revenues could make it break even. The notices were much better in Europe.
The Love of Sunya had inaugurated the Roxy eight months earlier. The biggest night in movie history, the newspapers had called the premiere. U.S. senators and generals; the governor of New Jersey; Mayor Jimmy Walker; the "czar" of the Motion Picture Producers association, Will Hays; Irving Berlin; the Shuberts; the Harold Lloyds; Schenck and his wife, Norma Talmadge; Adolph Ochs; and Mrs. Otto Kahn attended. The crowd almost broke down the doors when Charlie Chaplin tried to sneak in unnoticed. The 100-piece Roxy Symphony preceded the forty-member Roxy Ballet on the stage. Filmed greetings from President Calvin Coolidge, Mayor Walker, and the eighty-year-old Thomas Alva Edison appeared on the giant screen with printed titles before spotlights picked her out in the audience, wearing a scintillating black evening gown, her hair lacquered down flat against her head the way she wore it in several sequences in the film.
"Funny," he said, "I used your picture to illustrate the fact that movies are like green salads, they wilt fast." To inaugurate the Roxy, he explained, her picture might have rented for $50,000 for a ten-day engagement. Nine months later it would rent for $7.50 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Where had he used Sunya to show the perishable nature of motion pictures? It was just three days after the Roxy premiere, while speaking at his alma mater, Harvard.
When he said "Hah-vad," she tried to remember whom he reminded her of. She asked where he had learned about the picture business, and he said, "At Harvard. I'm just applying the principles I learned there to the movie industry because I'm convinced most people in pictures don't know how to do that."
To show she knew a few things about figures, she said that, if you believed the newspapers, the only people making any money in movies were the stars; the moguls were all working for nothing. The way she understood the arithmetic, eighty percent of the box office went to exhibitors and distributors, to say nothing of their friends, the butcher, the baker, and half the world, who walked in for free. But how could she as a producer stop that? "Why, not even Mary Pickford's mother can be in twenty thousand theaters every night to count the house."
"Does she do that?" he asked, incredulous.
"That's what they say, but you couldn't prove it by me because she never took me along."
He burst into peals of laughter and whacked his thighs. People at nearby tables shifted in their seats, but he couldn't stop laughing. As she would write more than fifty years later, "he was enjoying himself so unabashedly, so unaffectedly, that I started laughing too."
When he grew businesslike again, he told her that since she knew Sidney Kent she should ask him for some old Paramount distribution figures for Europe. With those one could work out projected overseas grosses for Sunya and Sadie Thompson. Upcoming play dates should be counted as income, as accounts receivable. "Otherwise your balance sheet for this entire year will be just an inventory of cost—all red ink."
He said all the right things convincingly, she thought.
As the waiters cleared the plates, she observed him with more interest than she usually accorded businessmen. Behind the bespectacled glance, receding blond hairline, Boston accent, and sonorous laughter, she divined shrewdness, imagination, and an electric and vital temperament. He was fun and spoke with enormous facility. Suddenly she knew who it was he reminded her of. It was Craney Gartz, her millionaire suitor ten years ago. Her success as a funny, impossible girl in crazy clothes in Cecil B. De Mille's "Park Avenue idylls" had made her realize that Craney's money, good looks, and teasing, patrician snobbery were not enough. Craney kissed wonderfully, but she had never allowed him to take her to bed. Like her luncheon guest, Craney knew how to talk passionately, how to be inspired by ideals.
A waiter brought him his pie, ice cream, and coffee. He had heard about the duplicity she and Raoul Walsh, her director, had used to get the Somerset Maugham screen version started, how they had changed the Reverend Davidson into a Mr. Davidson. Since they couldn't use the title of the forbidden play, Walsh opened the picture with a torrential downpour designed to jog people's memory of the stage play that Jeanne Eagles had made memorable on Broadway and Tallulah Bankhead had tried to repeat in London only to be vetoed by Maugham in favor of Olga Lindo. He also knew production money had dried up for her after Will Hays and the Motion Picture Producers had put pressure on United Artists and Joe Schenck. With Kent, Katz, and twelve other studio chiefs and distribution heads, he himself had signed a telegram to Schenck condemning the making of Rain under any subterfuge title. Bob Kane had told him that, in order to finish the picture, Gloria Swanson was selling property in New York and California.
Stirring his coffee, he leaned forward and, with a twinkle in his eye, asked how she had managed to get Will Hays to give her the go-ahead in the first place.
For a second she resented the question. She was still smarting from the battle. Then she thought he was paying her the compliment of dealing with her as an equal, producer to producer. "I just invited him to lunch and asked him," she said.
She realized her mistake the moment he burst into laughter. There was something in his mirth that implied she had used her feminine wiles on Hays when in fact she had outsmarted Hollywood's "director of morals" and the rest of them.
Taking out a cigarette, she said in measured tones, "I think I told all you gentlemen as much when I replied to your telegram to Joe Schenck in June. I know you got your copy, Mr. Kennedy, because your secretary or assistant replied."
He reddened.
Fumbling for a match, he said he had understood the issue of defying the decency code to be a mere formality. Rain ridiculed a clergyman, therefore no one was supposed to adapt it for the screen. "A number of other signers had done me a favor. I felt I owed them one in return."
A waiter smartly lit her cigarette. When she asked what favor they had done, he told her that, to assist in the industry's rehabilitation, he had persuaded Harvard to sponsor a series of speeches by a dozen top film people last March. Marcus Loew, Adolph Zukor, Jesse Lasky, Harry Warner, Will Hays, William Fox, and a half dozen others had lectured on the film business.
"Adolph Zukor at Harvard," she said. "That's an image to conjure with."
They both smiled.
In any case, she was proud of Sadie Thompson, she said. Barrymore was marvelous as the sanctimonious, lustful hypocrite. And so was Raoul, both directing and playing the marine sergeant with whom she runs off in the end.
She couldn't resist telling him that Raoul and she had had a hard time identifying the name Joseph P. Kennedy among the Zukors, Loews, Foxes, and Laskys on the collective telegram. What had he produced?
His answer was mildly defensive. "My most successful picture was The Gorilla Hunt."
"Never heard of it."
"I walked out of it myself, and I can't for the life of me understand why it made money, but it did."
Had she heard of cowboy pictures starring Fred Thomson? Big-city audiences generally had no idea who was Fred Thomson and his spirited gray stallion, Silver King, but in theaters outside large cities their pictures had the widest distribution. Fred Thomson was married to Frances Marion, the writer.
"Frances is a friend of mine, a woman with a talent for picking people."
He called for the bill. The maître d' told him the lunch was on the house.
When he glanced over her accountant's memo one more time and, without making an offer of his own, advised her to accept Joe Schenck's proposal, she realized the luncheon had been a waste of time. His handshake, when they said good-bye in the lobby, was firm; she was sure she wouldn't see him again.
It was turning colder after a record warm autumnal spell (the Weather Bureau thermometer atop the Whitehall Building had touched seventy degrees the previous afternoon, a new high for a November 23). De Mille's King of Kings was playing at the Gaiety; John Gilbert and Greta Garbo were opening in Love, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's adaptation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, at the Embassy; Michael Curtiz's Good Time Charley was at the Roxy; Aileen Pringle and Barrymore were featured in Body and Soul at the Loew's Lexington; and at the Warner on Broadway and Fifty-second Street, The Jazz Singer was entering its second month ("See and Hear Al Jolson on the Vitaphone," cried the newspaper ads).
Joe Kennedy rushed back to his office at the 1560 Broadway building. These days he spent most of his time at the West Coast studio of Film Booking Office Inc., but like any self-respecting movie company FBO maintained its corporate headquarters in New York. It was less than two years ago that he had strolled into FBO to take charge. If Gloria Swanson wanted to know who he was, it was all in the September issue of Photoplay. A feature article described how he had been in his new office all of half an hour when he had sent for one of his vice presidents. The man appeared, expecting to discuss weighty matters of policy. "Kennedy was studiously examining his desk, going through the drawers with systematic efficiency. Then he looked up with an air of great profundity. 'What this corporation needs first and most of all, is a nice box of Havana cigars for the president's office.' After that they proceeded to business." The most influential film journal for the general audience told how just fifteen months after engineering the takeover of FBO, Kennedy had become known as someone who was bringing substance to a picture business that was supposed to work in mysterious ways and be controlled by some deep combination of luck, magic, and genius.
Since he and his group of Boston backers had bought control of FBO, he had not only turned the small, debt-ridden company around, he had also acquired an increasingly ambitious view of motion pictures.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Gloria and Joe by Axel Madsen. Copyright © 1988 Axel Madsen. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
PART 1,1. The Savoy Plaza,
2. Gloria,
3. Let's Do It,
4. Joe,
5. Ascending Star,
6. Go for It!,
7. Independence,
8. Making It,
9. Sadie,
10. Mr. von Stroheim,
11. This Sporting Life,
PART 2,
12. Rose,
13. Multiple Lives,
14. Back to the Future,
15. Queen Kelly,
16. Eddie,
17. Hyannisport,
18. Triangles,
19. Black Tuesday,
20. A Cadillac for a Playwright,
21. A Shabby Ending,
22. Afterimages,
23. The Shadows We Cast,
Bibliography,
Index,
Acknowledgments,