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JOSEPH P. KENNEDY - THE PATRIARCH : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

 JOSEPH P. KENNEDY - THE PATRIARCH : 

The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw. 

MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

first posted February 26, 2018

This is a fine work, well researched with permission of the Kennedy Family who allowed sealed documents at the Kennedy Library to be open to the author, and can be read just for the historical content.  Joseph. P. Kennedy was the self made man who fathered U.S. President John F. Kennedy and left his many children millions.  We Americans seem to know a lot about them, and this vast family still has some illustrious members. Of surprise to me (and I've read so many books about the Kennedys and Jackie and Marilyn) is that Joseph P. Kennedy had quite the relationship with Franklin Roosevelt before and after he became President of the United States and was no stranger to visits to the White House, but also that he socialized with William Randolph Hearst and his Mistress Marion Davies.  Author David Nasaw's focus is entirely on Joseph P. Kennedy so the relationships of all other's named, including his wife Rose, are not detailed, and if you've read a lot of books or seem a lot of films around the Kennedy's much of the information you read here may seem repetitive.  However, I'm reviewing this book for MISTRESS MANIFESTO because of the many characters in it that you have read about here (and can easily summon up using the Google Search feature embedded in the side bar to bring up past posts about!)

These include: 

Joseph P. Kennedy's Mistress Gloria Swanson

William Randolph Hearst and his Mistress Marion Davies

Missy Lehand, said to be the in-Whitehouse Mistress of President Franklin Roosevelt,

Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, daughter of Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy.

Clare Boothe Luce (Who I owe a month to.)

And of course Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, who I think would have made a better Mistress than a Wife.

I came away with an understanding that Joseph, though frequently not home due to business, and the fact that he and Rose seemingly lived separate lives though united by their children. wrote loving letters to his children and had not abandoned his fatherhood.

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Here's where you can find posts in my archive:

November 2019

MARGUERITE "MISSY" LEHAND :OFFICE WIFE AND WARM SPRINGS MISTRESS OF FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

July 2013
MARION "ROSEBUD" DAVIES : MISTRESS OF NEWSPAPER MAN AND HEARST CASTLE BUILDER  WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST

March

KATHLEEN “KICK” KENNEDY ; Sister of J.F.K., Widow of Billy Hartington, Mistress of Peter Wentworth Fitzwilliam When They Died in A Plane Crash

GLORA SWANSON IN JAZZ AGE PARIS : YOUNG and RICH - READY TO REMARRY - PREGNANCY and THE NIGHTMARE ABORTION

Gloria Swanson in Jazz Age Paris : She wrapped a movie called Madame Sans Gene, which was being touted as another success and galas for the opening were being planned in New York City. Starting in January 1925 she would be making $7,000 a week. She had met the man who would become her next husband, French nobleman Henry de La Falaise, reputed to be a millionaire himself. He wasn't close. Her net worth was higher. He was alarmed by her spending; A costume party in which guests danced to three bands, for instance, or that she had bought gifts for every member of the cast and crew of the film. She was mixing with the most famous and successful creative people in Paris.

Excerpt page 109: News of Gloria Swanson's sumptuous wrap party reached American gossip columns, together with rumors that the screen idol had gone totally French - indeed, that as soon as her divorce became final in January, she would marry a French Millionaire and quit the movies. ...... She discovered she was pregnant.

Gloria  had signed the morals clause in her contract. Her divorce from Herbert Somborn was not final and she dreaded being known to have had an affair by giving birth "very prematurely." She couldn't marry Henri de La Falaise asap and become a bigamist. She decided having an abortion was the only thing she could do. And she decided to do so without telling him.  It would not be her first abortion. For she had been aborted during her first marriage to Wallace Beery. She called a journalist, the only person she thought she could trust to explain her dilemma and find a doctor for her.

Excerpt page 109 : ... When she said she saw no other solution but an abortion, he agreed. "You and Henri are both young," he said. "You have all the time in the world to have another child." The words stung. When she was seventeen a nurse had told her the same thing. She had judged Wallace Beery harshly then, had never really forgiven him, and now she was ready to do the same thing.

Andre (Davin) arranged the abortion while Henri arranged a civil wedding.  As it turned out, she was given permission to legally marry Henry earlier than she had thought and as it turned out the abortion had been arranged for the day after she had the permission to marry!

She married Henry and then Andre went with her to the abortion doctor. She was given ether (put her under before the surgery) and afterwards she was "surprised she could walk." She went back to their hotel suite at the Plaza Athenee and went to bed, awakening with a serious fever. 

Except page 110: By nightfall she was drenched in fever. Henri called a doctor, who had her hospitalized. Each time she woke up. Henri was there. She told him the truth; he told her she had tetanus. He didn't say that such infections were often fatal and characterized by violent spasms and rigidity of many or all the voluntary muscles. Nurses tried to make her stand up; her feet folded under her. Finally, she had her first meal sitting in a wheelchair. Everybody applauded when she began moving her toes.

Of course, the truth of her illness was kept a secret. 

Excerpt page 111: The return to America was a triumph. Gloria's marriage to a nobleman and her long battle with death had provided Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount with millions of dollars' worth of free publicity, and Zukor and Lasky pulled out all the stops. Adoring crowds nearly smothered the far from recovered movie star, but it was out of the question for Gloria to lay low.

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JOSEPH P. KENNEDY PRESENTS by CARI BEAUCHAMP ! MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

JOSEPH P. KENNEDY PRESENTS by CARI BEAUCHAMP ! 

MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

First posted May 14, 2009

Long wait for this new book from the public library but worth it! Joe Kennedy made a fortune in the movies about the time (1920's - early 1930's) that talkies and sound film came into being, leaving most silent stars in the dust! Read all about his outside of marriage relationship with actress Gloria Swanson... (Did his bail out of her misfortunes end in a rip off and personal betrayal?)

pages 276-277

...Rose (Kennedy - Joe's wife, mother of eventual President John F. Kennedy) never publicly wavered from her deep-seated belief that Joe's relationship with Gloria was purely professional... (Goodwin) was incredulous about Rose's "strange attitude" and concluded that "it is impossible to believe that Rose did not know," yet she had "willed" that knowledge out of her consciousness. it was "better perhaps to follow the pattern set by her mother long ago: to suffer in silence rather than take the enormous risk of shattering the entire family and bringing public disgrace upon herself and her husband."....

... Gloria too was shocked at Rose's failure to see anything untoward in her relationship with Joe. "If she suspected me of having relations not quite proper with her husband, or resented me for it, she never once gave any indication of it." Was Rose "a fool, I asked myself as I listened with disbelief, or a saint? Or just a better actress than I was..."

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GLORIA SWANSON AT THE HEIGHT OF HER CAREER : SHE FELT BLACKMAILED INTO AN EXPENSIVE DIVORCE BY HER HUSBAND AND THE HAYS OFFICE

Excerpt page 5 : In 1924, Hollywood movies were made on sets built on stages and back lots. Newfangled rear projection and process-screen photography even enabled characters to sit or stand in front of a screen and appear to be anywhere in the world.  To go overseas to make a picture was unheard of. ...

With the possible exception of Mary Pickford, who never managed the transition from  the girlish image that had made her "America's Sweetheart" to full screen womanhood, Gloria Swanson was the most popular  female celebrity in the movie-crazed mid 1920's. When, in September 1924, she sailed to Europe to make Madame Sans Gene, she was twenty-five, had starred in thirty movies - six in a row with *De Mille - and her leading men had included the great heartthrobs from Wallace Reid to Rudolph Valentino.

When Gloria Swanson wanted out of her marriage with Herbert Somborn, he and his attorney threatened her for $150,000: According to author Axel Madsen, De Mille was panicking too.  The Hays Office, as it was called, had instituted morality clauses in movie star's contracts with their studios, and a nasty divorce with rumors flying about her infidelity could end her career.  As a result, De Mille called a meeting and insisted that the divorce would have to be settled secretly as, though she could have charged her husband with desertion a year earlier, now her circumstances could threaten the entire industry! (pages 86-87)

Excerpt Page 87:  When the divorce papers were presented to her, she was tempted to sign it all without seeing her own humiliation spelled out in black and white.  She steeled herself, however, and began to read. Paramount was indeed picking provisions that awarded Herbert $70,000 because he ha "assisted in procuring" her much-improved contract. He was paid $35,000 in cash and another $35,000 in installments, deducted from her salary at the rate of $500 a week. There was more. To keep her job, she had to sign a morals clause waiver. Should she in the future "be charged with adulterous conduct or immoral relations with men other than her husband, and such charges or any of them were published in the public press," her contract would be null and void.  Angry and embarrassed, she signed and went back to work.

During her marriage to Somborn, from 1919-to 1922, Gloria gave birth to a daughter and adopted a son. She remarried to French nobleman Henry de La Falaise in 1925. She had her relationship with Joseph P. Kennedy during that marriage. She and Henry divorced in 1931.

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* Demille : Cecil B. DeMille - a movie producer and actor
** Herbert K. Somborn (m. 1919; div. 1922): President of Equity Pictures Corporation.

GLORIA SWANSON IN THE 1923 SILENT FILM "ZAZA"

Gloria Swanson was one of those few actors who was able to go from the acting - later considered exaggerated expressions to convey the emotions and story - necessary in silent films to the talkies, both speaking and singing as well as acting more naturally. Her career was roaring in the 1920's, the era of the flapper, and the New Woman. She married six times and had three children as well as being engaged in political and humanitarian causes in which she used her fame.

From 1914 to 1974 she appeared in films and on some television programs.

IMDb GLORIA SWANSON's FILM CAREER A long list.  Click here!

Gloria Swanson was the top movie actress in the United States for many years, unless you considered Mary Pickford. Pickford was not successful past the silent film era.

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GLORIA SWANSON and HER RED CARNATIONS

Gloria Swanson was known to carry a red carnation when she was out in public or appeared on a television talk show, so that flower became an associated icon. She would give them as little gifts. In 1981 during an interview with Barbara Walters, she said she had first started doing so in order to have something to do with her hands instead of smoking a cigarette. She exercised, limited her diet to health foods, and credited taking care of her health for maintaining her beauty without cosmetic surgeries or procedures.

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GLORIA SWANSON - THE PATRIOT and HUMANITARIAN

In the late 1930's and early 1940's, the World War II era, Gloria Swanson put at least $25,000 into establishing a company called "Multiprises," with the mission to help Jewish and anti-Nazi scientists and inventors to escape from Europe and set up in the United States. They were working to develop new technologies that would be useful to the United States military.

The actress would be considered a conservative today. She was a Republican who supported the presidential campaigns and of Wendell Willkie (1940, 1944), Thomas E. Dewey, and Barry Goldwater (1964). In 1964, she also spoke at a "Project Prayer" rally in Los Angeles, advocating for school prayer in public schools. In 1980 she activated for the Reagan-Bush presidential election. I speculate her attraction to the Republican party - as it was in those days - was because she was a self made business woman.

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This post is the result of Internet research. 

THE DYNAMIC SCREEN STAR GLORIA SWANSON : HER TWO - THREE YEARS WITH JOSEPH P. KENNEDY MAY HAVE RUINED HER CAREER BUT IN LIFE SHE PERSEVERED

GLORIA MAE JOSEPHINE SWANSON

1899 - 1983

Back in 2009 when I began this blog, the very first posts I made here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO included Gloria Swanson, a silent screen star who made it to the talkies, was married repeatedly, and might be most known today for the 1950 film "Sunset Boulevard" in which she portrayed an actress clinging to a famous past long gone. An unconventional woman for her times, the petite and classically beautiful Swanson was a talented actor who earned fabulous sums of money but lost control of her finances when producing her own movies. In 1927, Joseph P. Kennedy, the future father of President John F. Kennedy, and by then a successful banker and broker in his late 30's, married with children, came into her life. She was married too, to her third husband.

Some would say he targeted her.  But, my dear readers, after reading this book I've decided to take the perhaps unpopular stance that Kennedy's confidence, built through other business and investment successes - as a Harvard educated banker who was quite savvy with money and investing in other areas, including the stock market - might have given him the idea that he could succeed in the movies too. But he was in over his head, in business and in love -  and so was Gloria when it came to the business side. There was a lot of ruthless competition and the Stock Market Crash of 1929 that plunged the country into the Great Depression, though Kennedy personally wasn't plunged, is something to consider too.

The silent film era was almost over and Swanson was one of the actresses who moved into the talkies with some success. But perhaps, though Swanson was at the top, earning record-breaking sums for her acting, she wouldn't have sustained her career anyway, for she was getting older.  Acting for women, like modeling, tends to span years, not decades, to this day. Swanson wanted to produce her own movies. Kennedy wanted to expand his financial empire by investing in the movie business, by owning his own production company, and making movies with a star that would attract the audiences. So, he was quite possibly learning as he went himself and the day came when he knew it was all too much for him and he got out. However, the overall opinion circa 2026 is that the man was ruthless and heartless, allowed her to sink her fortune into a movie that didn't go so well, and then left her in a lurch and broke. 

That's why the book "Gloria and Joe" by Axel Madsen jumped off the library shelf; and my quick review of it at this moment is that it goes into detail about both Gloria and Joe's career success and financial dealings before they met, while I will focus on what happened when they did. Though Gloria Swanson was at the top when they met in November of 1927, she had been taken advantage of by men before, in various ways. Joe Kennedy had done his business research, had interesting questions that proved he'd done his 'due diligence", but also manipulated her to agree to let him get her out of debt and into his bed.

Gloria Swanson was married several times, the first time at age seventeen to Hollywood star Wallace Beery, who was thirty. According to Gloria, he raped her on their wedding night and he was very abusive. She had an abortion he tricked her into during that brief marriage and wanted out quickly. They were married in 1916 and divorced in 1918; she had to wait a year before the divorce could be granted at that time.

Her second husband was Herbert K. Somborn, a movie business executive who was the president of Equity Pictures Corporation at the time. According to author Madsen, he hid his financial problems from Gloria until they were married and unfairly threatened to ruin her by lying that she'd had a long list of men - adulterous affairs, in order to get money from her, when she wanted out. They were married in 1919 and divorced in 1922-23.  Movie moguls at the time were involved in getting Somborn a settlement that would preserve her reputation and thus her career, though there were some shenanigans going on there too. Gloria felt this husband was blackmailing her. A morality cause was added to her studio contract. Herbert was the father of her daughter, Gloria Swanson Somborn, who was born in October of 1920 and called Sister. It was a difficult birth and so Gloria also adopted a son from an orphanage, Joseph, called Brother. Somborn used the money he got in his divorce settlement from Gloria to invest in the restaurant business, the popular Brown Derby. Of interest to me, though perhaps it is just a coincidence, Gloria named the son, said to be of Irish heritage, Joseph Patrick Swanson...

Her third husband was Henri de la Falaise, a French aristocrat with a noble heritage who also benefited by his marriage to Gloria. She met him in Jazz age Paris, and he followed her to Hollywood where he was offered the opportunity to become a movie director. It Joseph P. Kennedy who offered him that opportunity and Henri had to go back to France to take the job; this was likely Kennedy's manipulation to get him out of the way. Some of her friends thought Henri was a gigolo, but he was one who could hold his own in conversations and an intellectual who seemed to have loved Gloria, if his heartfelt, sad goodbye is to be believed. They were married in 1925 and divorced in 1931, this being Gloria Swanson's longest marriage.

Her fourth husband was Michael Farmer, a rich sportsman, who she married in 1931 and divorced in 1934. During this marriage Gloria gave birth to Michelle Bridget Farmer in 1932.

Her fifth husband was William Davey, an investment banker, who she married in 1945 and divorced in 1946.

Her sixth husband was William Dufty, a  successful ghost writer and anti-sugar activist, who she married in 1976 and stayed married to until her death in 1983. They shared a macrobiotic lifestyle. Gloria believed healthy food was the key to, not only health, but also her enduring good looks. She was considered to be a "fitness pioneer."

Now dear readers, I want to let you know that while reading this book, I learned a little bit about a mistress I had never heard of and a little bit more about one I elected Mistress of the Month years ago. So stick with me, because next month I'm going to include them in this narrative!

Missy

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For this month's posts, Axel Madson's book is the primary reference.  Having once read Swanson's memoir and at least two books about Joseph P. Kennedy, I also did some Internet research.

You may be interested in :

January 2016

CLARA BOW

Actress, First "IT Girl" and Roaring Twenties Mistress of Old Hollywood Film Producer B.P. Schulberg