GLORIA SWANSON and JOE KENNEDY : THE WAY THEY WERE

 He was married with many children, she was married with two.

Excerpt page 194 : Gloria was very much one of Hollywood's own, and honored player of the movie colony's most popular pastime, a party-giving and party-goi9ng, but Joe was not.  His Catholicism and Boston sense of propriety prevented him from a too ostentatious display of his double existence  Though many in Hollywood would later make the comparison, Gloria and Joe were no Marion Davies - William Randolph Hearst twosome who flaunted their liaison.

For one thing, Gloria and Joe were both married with children. She was no starlet looking for  a sugar daddy; he, no elderly tycoon hopelessly in love with a chorus girl. She saw in him someone who was plainly going far, and she fell in love with his business savvy and can-do openness. He was the one man in her life she trusted when it came to money. To him, she was one of the most desirable women, one of the symbols he had grappled with all the way up from East Boston  He fell in love with a woman who was everything Rose was not.  Gloria was, first of all, fame --- a woman whose public personality spoke to people of golden youth and glitter.  To discover that she was also a creature of shadows was part of his lover's ecstasy. She was a woman of her own means, self-confident and elusive, possessed of a dignity that was both paralyzing and magnificent. In their intimacy, she was almost tomboyish --- terse and disarming.  Fun, too.

Excerpt pages 194-195 :

Smitten with her from the first meeting at the Savoy Plaza (Palm Beach - Florida) two months earlier --- with the idea of her as well as the fact --- he was not only giving her advice but smothering her with attention.  He loved uncovering the Gloria Swanson millions would never know --- the quiet, slightly weary person with soft hair and a dark, husky voice so different from the screen image, the woman who boasted that she'd never been kept.  None of her homes, he happily discovered, was a place into which friends casually dripped.....

They made love at his place. Here, he was in control of comings and goings of staff and underlings. On Crescent Drive (Beverly Hills), her waking hours were a series of disturbances by butler and maids, secretaries and assistants, and her moods ran in channels dammed up by her staff.  On Rodeo Drive (Beverly Hills - his place) order flowed effortless from the master.

Excerpt page 209 :

...When he had a moment alone with Gloria, he called her the most desirable woman, held her gaze with his electric blue stare, and said he couldn't wait to take her out that evening. She told him they had to be reasonable; they couldn't be seen together.  "We're business associates," he grinned.

"Business is done in the daytime if both associates are married," she said.

If you want to know the slightly more scintillating details - not pornographic but - certainly get yourself a copy of this book.|

In this passage, we note that Gloria Swanson had never been kept and was proud of that, as a woman who had earned her own for years. All Mistresses are not Kept, and all adulterers are not Mistresses, and so here we go again trying to define Mistress. It is the nature of the relationship that defines it, I believe, but in popular thought it's all about money and sex, as if love doesn't count.

Gloria Swanson's husband Henri moved into an affair with actress Constance Bennet.

Missy

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BARBARA BENNET INTRODUCED LOUISE BROOKS TO WALL STREET MEN

Louise Brooks was invited to their parties by Randolph Hearts and his mistress Marion Davies both in California and New York.  She was also a friend of the Bennett family, known for the actress Constance Bennett, Joan Bennett, and Barbara Bennett.  Barbara was a good friend.

pages 14 - 15 of LULU IN HOLLYWOOD - essays by Louise Brooks

... Among the Hollywood detestables, even I was no match for Constance, who could sit across from me at the dinner table in Marion Davies' beach house and never acknowledge my existence with so much as an icy nod....

It was then that Barbara introduced me to a group of Wall Street men who made it possible for me to buy expensive clothes.  These most eligible bachelors in their thirties, finding debutantes a threat, turned to pretty girls in the theatre, whose mothers weren't husband hunting.  Cafe society developed about this time.  The theatre, Hollywood, and society mingled in the monthly Mayfair dances at the Ritz, where society women could monitor their theatrical enemies and snub them publicly.  All the rich men were friends who entertained one another in their perfectly appointed Park Avenue apartments and Long Island homes.  The extravagant sums given to the girls for clothes were part of the fun - part of competing to see whose girl would win the Best-Dressed title.  Sexual submission was not a condition of this arrangement, although many affairs grew out of it.  For a time, Barbara was kept by William Rhinelander Stewart, who gave her a square cut emerald from Cartier.  One night when we were swimming of Caleb Bragg's houseboat, the Masquerader. she watched it slip off her finger into Long Island Sound.  She kept this hilarious accident secret from Stewart by buying a fake emerald from Denis Smith, whose jewelry business was unknown to innocent lovers.  They would have been staggered to learn how many of their gifts were converted into imitations and cash.  Truly, ours was a heartless racket.  After receiving an ermine coat from Jaeckel's, the gift of a stockbroker named John Lock,  I let him take me just once to a tea dance at the Biltmore Hotel.