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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GLORIA SWANSON AND THE "BANKER" JOE KENNEDY : HE DID HIS RESEARCH AND WAS INTENT ON SEDUCING HER ... SHE LET HIM ...

Not only because he desired Gloria Swanson as a woman, but because he wanted this actress, perhaps the most famous and successful in the silent film era, to work for his studio and make money together.

Joseph P. Kennedy was the youngest bank president in the United States in 1914 when he was only twenty-five years old.  He had graduated from Harvard and was vividly aware of the discrimination against Catholics and the Irish. He went on to make a fortune in the stock market, and in real estate, and he wanted to add a Hollywood studio and movie making to his wealth portfolio. Though he had many a success in business, reading Axel Madsen's account, I couldn't help but think that he was overly confident that he could also succeed in Hollywood. He went after Gloria Swanson in a manner that would suggest that he had done some research and knew that she was in debt because of her own efforts to produce her own movies.

It's easy to vilify Kennedy but it would also seem that Gloria Swanson didn't resist his seduction.

Circa 1928  Joseph P. Kennedy invited Gloria Swanson and her husband Henri de la Falaise to come to Palm Beach, Florida, where he'd bought a house for his family. He was welcoming and so was Palm Beach society. Calling cards, invitations, parties in her honor, teas, receptions, and business meetings too. He was very proud of knowing her.  He also endeavored to get Henri out of the way. 

 

Excerpt pages 174-175: 

In retrospect, Gloria would remember the tact with which Joe made the offer that could make her husband distinct his own man and, if Henri was clever, rich as well. In her autobiography, her smile o gratitude to Joe when the two men came to a quick verbal agreement immediately precedes her account of how the next day she and Joe tumbled into bed. Her indebtedness to Joe no doubt softened, in her own eyes, the adultery that, since the kiss on the train, she knew was inevitable. In a reversal of the story of the biblical David, who sent Uriah into the most dangerous part of the battle so he could possess Bathsheba, Joe was ready to heap gold on the man he wanted to cuckhold.

Kennedy biographers would wax saucily on how Joe eliminated, with some permanence, the coveted movie queen's husband, but neither Gloria nor the Kennedy memorialists could explain how Joe was able to offer Henri a Pathe directorship in January when he didn't become a Pathe advisor until February. Gloria was, of course, writing for posterity, and by having Joe's generosity and Henri's opportunism preceded her surrender, she softened her image...

Henri would leave no memoirs of his own, and we can only speculate on whether it all passed over his head or whether he knew he was defeated and went for the proffered brass ring. ... he might have been the first to sense he was on a sinking ship and that his wife's impending adultery set him free, morally, to concentrate on enriching himself.

Joe's infatuation was hard to ignore. Others saw how he was dazzled and drawn by Gloria's presence, how his own success - Palm Beach, Gloria, the lot - all made him live beyond the rules, how she exerted an attraction that went beyond physical beauty.

Excerpt page 193 : ... (Circa 1928) ... (Joseph P. Kennedy) took over Gloria's life.  He arranged everything, including Henri's departures. The lovers had two distinct lives: one with each other when Henri was in France, another when the marquis was in town. Joe arranged his own existence so as to be in Hollywood when Henri was not and in the east when Gloria's husband was home.

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VIRGINIA GUIFFRE TOOK A FINANCIAL SETTLEMENT FROM JEFFREY EPSTEIN and SO DID SIXTEEN OTHER WOMEN THAT SHE KNEW ABOUT

 In her book,  Virginia Guiffre states that she knew that sixteen women had taken settlements from Jeffrey Epstein rather than go forward with legal action against him.

Excerpt pages 212-213 :  "There are those who've criticized Epstein's victims for entering into confidential settlements with Epstein because, they assert, that allowed him to sweep his problems under the rug. People are particularly judgmental about our receiving money from him.  My response to that is anger.  The DOJ - not Epstein's victims - made the secret deal that ultimately let Epstein off the hook in 2008: Alexander Acosta, the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, approved the non prosecution agreement behind closed doors without consulting with (and while actively misleading) Epstein's victims.  Afterwards, those of us whom Epstein had abused were told that was the end of it - Epstein wouldn't be prosecuted. no matter how much we wanted him to be. We were also told that extracting money from him was the only way to punish him. (Remember that it was the DOJ that connected me with a lawyer so I could sue.) But here's the real reason I'm angry at those who judge victims who settle: all that legalese in our lawsuits about pain and suffering and mental anguish - those things are real. And getting treatment for them costs money.

When I settled with Epstein, I had a little money for the first time in my life. After years of scrimping - of buying secondhand furniture, driving used cars, and xeroxing baby photos instead of ordering extra prints - Robbie and I could now buy our first house.  We found a brick three-bedroom in the suburb of Glenning Valley, about two hours north of Sydney. Epstein had taken what was left of my childhood. But now a tiny fraction of his immense fortune was going to ensure that my children grew up in their own home."

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PALM BEACH FLORIDA

There are many Mistresses in the Palm Beach area

 and throughout the wealthier areas of Florida.

As well as Palm Springs, California, which is treated as

a suburb of Hollywood.