He was not alone. Randolph Hearst, heir to the Deadwood gold fortune and newspaper mogul, was making movies to help his actress paramour Marion Davies. Kennedy met Hearst and proposed an amalgamation – to ‘foment the talkie revolution and a model of corporate control and vertical integration’ – but when the newspaper baron did not bite, he bought into a bankrupt studio, moved to Los Angeles and soon controlled three studios. Married wholesomely to Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of Honey Fitz, long-serving Boston mayor, Kennedy had nine children, including four boys, but he left them in Boston so that he could enjoy Hollywood where he swiftly beguiled the lost, gamine movie star Gloria Swanson. An insatiable womanizer, often asking his henchmen for ‘good-looking girls’ because he had to be ‘fed on wild meat’, his seduction techniques resembled his business style: he burst into Swanson’s bedroom, announcing, ‘No longer, no longer! Now!’ Gloria recalled. ‘He was like a roped horse, rough, arduous, racing to be free’ and reaching a ‘hasty climax’.
In October 1928, Kennedy merged his studios into RKO, then cashed out with $5 million, selling his last studio to Pathé for $4 million. Abruptly abandoning Swanson and LA, he returned to New York where the stock market was soaring in frenzied trading. Kennedy liked to claim that when a shoeshine boy gave him share tips, he knew it was time to sell all his holdings.
On 29 October 1929, ‘Black Tuesday’, shares crashed on Wall Street, then on stock markets globally, followed by a grinding depression, economic and psychological, a massive sell-off, then falls in prices, demand and credit, leading to the devastation of US industry and agriculture, with thirteen million unemployed. America lost its confidence.
The Crash accelerated a crisis in another American industry: organized crime. Joe the Boss’s rival, Salvatore Maranzano, a murderous braggart from Sicily’s Castellammare del Golfo who saw himself as the Julius Caesar of crime, persuaded Luciano to kill the
In respectable New York, Governor Roosevelt tried progressive measures to fight the Depression as President Hoover floundered in Washington. In 1932 FDR ran against Hoover. ‘I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people,’ he declared, promising vast spending and the repeal of Prohibition. Hoover called him ‘a chameleon in plaid’, but America was desperate for hope: FDR won the presidency. Even before his inauguration, a lunatic tried to shoot him, but Roosevelt reassured Americans that ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ In a blizzard of legislation that enacted his New Deal, he restored faith in the banks and spent lavishly. Setting up a new Stock Exchange Commission to impose rules on the stock market that had caused the crash, he chose as its chairman one of the most successful speculators, Joe Kennedy, who had put his gains into property and, after Prohibition had been overturned by Congress, into Scotch whisky. Kennedy planned to run for president himself, but FDR privately mocked the ‘red-haired Irishman’.
FDR exuded a breezy confidence with his sonorous voice and debonair cigarette holder, backed up by his own story of recovery. Broadcasting aristocratic radio lectures from his people’s fireside, he proved the ultimate political thespian, scarcely hinting at the devious player behind the urbane smile.
