Q&A with Cari Beauchamp
Q: What convinced you to write about this particular chapter in Joseph P. Kennedy's life?
A: While I was researching my book Without Lying Down about the women writers of early Hollywood, I read through all of the trades of the day and I kept finding articles about Joseph P. Kennedy. At first I tried to resist, but then I gave in and just started copying them and by the time I had finished, I had a substantial file that convinced me it was an important and untold story. Here
was the only man to have ever run three studios silmultaneously at a time Hollywood was going through the turmoil of converting to sound. A fascinating man during a fascinating time and no one had put the flood lights on it.
Q: Before this book, how much was known about Kennedy's Hollywood years?
A: It is remarkable how little was known or written about, even in some of the best biographies. The history of the studio system is complicated and I think by coming to his story as a Hollywood historian, I had a distinct advantage.
Q: What sources were available to you that had previously been inaccessible?
A: With the assistance of Kennedy's granddaughter Amanda Smith and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., I was one of the first to be allowed access into Kennedy's private papers. I also had access to Fred Thomson's and Frances Marion's private papers and Gloria Swanson's archives. Gloria's daughter, Michelle Amon, had never spoken to a biographer before and she was very forthcoming and helpful to me. In addition, the granddaughter of Kennedy's silent partner in FBO, Guy Currier, opened her family papers and together we pieced together new information. I also found Board minutes that were in the hands of private collectors that were very important in telling the story of Kennedy's methods and acquisitions. Another goldmine was Phillip Whitehead's transcripts from the interviews he had conducted in the late 1980s for his Thames/PBS documentary, The Kennedys. While he had used bits and pieces, he provided me with the full transcripts of his interviews with Kennedy associates, many of whom passed on shortly after speaking with him. Joan Fontaine and Tina Sinatra, who rarely speak on the record, were kind enough to give me interviews as did other witnesses such as Budd Schulberg, Gore Vidal, Arlene Dahl and Jesse Lasky's daughter, Betty.
Q: You say that Kennedy was instrumental in killing vaudeville, but how did he change the business of movies?
A: Vaudeville died in large part because when Kennedy bought the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theaters, the largest vaudeville theater circuit, he changed them into movie theaters and live performers lost their venues. Kennedy was also instrumental in bringing in financiers onto the boards of directors of studios and advocating the mergers that were the blueprint for today's corporate Hollywood. He spearheaded the idea of taking their collective eye off of the creative long view to focus on the next quarter's bottom line.
Q: How did the business of movies change him?
A: First and foremost, the foundation of his wealth came from his four years in Hollywood. He arrived with a little over a million dollars in the bank and left with over ten million. He had always been a self promoter and in fact owned an advertising firm in the early 20s, but it was in Hollywood where he learned the nuances of the art of celebrity, how to perform as a public personality and came to believe that how you were perceived was more important that who you
were. I think that the skills and knowledge he gained affected everything he did and influenced from then onward, including how he presented his family to the world and his son's election to the
presidency.
Q: Whose careers did he most influence, for good or ill?
A: His life in the movies is indeed star studded. He signed Babe Ruth in 1919 and then put the football star Red Grange under contract. He ruined the career of cowboy star Fred Thomson, the number two film personality of 1928, by putting him under personal contract and then keeping him off the screen after Joe signed Tom Mix. Kennedy could turn on a dime in his relationships with even those who worked closely with him and each time it happened, it shocked the object of his betrayal. Obviously, the most famous of all his associations was with & Gloria Swanson, both on and off the screen. When they met, she was $500,000 in debt and when the parted several years later, she was over a million dollars in debt. Their roller coaster relationship is fascinating; they were both smart, feisty individuals and although he would have dozens of affairs, theirs was the only one that, in his mind, threatened his marriage.
Q: How did you come away from this feeling about him?
A: There are things to admire about him, things make your jaw drop and much to learn from him. Studying his theories about mergers, his management style and business axioms, his investments and his financial machinations turns out to be remarkably timely considering the current economic crisis. How he managed to not only avoid the stock market crash, but prosper in its wake, how this brilliant stock market manipulator turned himself into the first and much heralded chairman of the SEC and how he became, as Betty Lasky puts it, become "the only outsider ever to fleece Hollywood."
Q: Several of your other books, such as Without Lying Down, we about the same era in Hollywood, but you had other careers and how did they influence the writer you have become?
A: Politics certainly taught me a great deal about people, but I think my years as a private investigator was the perfect training for becoming a biographer. I learned to be tenacious in finding the facts and that the answers are out there, you just have to keep digging. Every experience has taught me to be as open as possible to the unexpected and to keep my preconceptions to a minimum.
Q: What surprised you the most in what you discovered about Kennedy?
A: There were many surprises. The reason the book took me so long to write was that I had to know everything that was out there about Kennedy and then wipe the slate clean and construct his life anew, not from others' suppositions, but from his own papers, various archives and other witnesses of the time. As a result I found that much of what people assume as "common knowledge"
about Kennedy is not true and then there were other things he did that were unknown that were quite shocking.