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Patriarch Made It Big In Pictures

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By ROGER K. MILLER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 8, 2009

"Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years," by Cari Beauchamp (Knopf, $35)

It isn't apparent at the outset, but as the pages of this book fly by, its implicit thesis begins to jell, as if it took the gradual accumulation of multiple evidences before an indictment could be rendered: Her subject was contemptible on a world-class scale. It is hardly a new opinion, but rarely has it been documented in such meticulous detail.

Beauchamp, the author of a biography of screenwriter Frances Marion (a prominent figure in this book also), covers the entire life (1888-1969) of the patriarch of the Kennedy family but focuses on Hollywood in the 1920s and '30s. Hollywood - not, as conventional wisdom has it, illegal liquor - is where Kennedy built the foundation of his immense fortune (estimated at $400 million by the mid-1950s).

Up until now no one had written in depth about this aspect of Kennedy's long career. Well-written and researched, Beauchamp's book is a probing examination of the man in the industry during perhaps its most fascinating period.

His film career began, as the industry did, in the east, but when he went to Hollywood in the mid-1920s, he took it by storm, at one point running four companies simultaneously. He was the first financier to buy a studio outright: FBO (Film Booking Offices), which later morphed into RKO.

More than 100 movies were released under the rubric "Joseph P. Kennedy Presents." He influenced dozens, if not hundreds, of careers, including those of Gloria Swanson, Marlene Dietrich, Tom Mix, Fred Thomson (once a rival of Mix's as a cowboy hero) and investors and executives. Beauchamp writes, "He saw everything and everyone ... through a lens of dollars and cents."

Publically adulated as a "family man" because of the nine children he sired with his wife, Rose, Kennedy was a philanderer on a wholesale scale. He had affairs with scores of women, including Dietrich, but Swanson is the best known.

All the rest of his life he would occasionally hear the siren call - or, rather, the cash-register ring - of Hollywood, but by 1931 he was for all intents and purposes out of motion pictures. Beauchamp devotes the last 80 pages to an overview of Kennedy's subsequent career, starting with his active campaigning for Franklin Roosevelt and going on to his stints as chairman of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission and ambassador to Great Britain.

He aspired to the presidency, but despite - or perhaps because of - his consummate skill at self-promotion, that was not in the cards. So he turned his publicity efforts and personal treasury to dynasty-building, and the rest is history.

Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book-review editor, is a novelist and freelance writer and editor.

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