Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family Read Online Free Page A

difficult, she would compensate by saying you ought to try them.”

    Rose hoped to make Joe more of a constant presence in their lives by agreeing to move the family to New York. They rented a mansion in the neighborhood of Riverdale in the Bronx, where they lived for two years before buying an estate in Bronxville, in Westchester County, fifteen miles north of midtown Manhattan. Leaving Boston couldn’t have been an easy or happy choice for a woman so identified with her hometown, but Rose deemed it worth the trouble to be closer to Joe. Unfortunately, Joe’s escalating involvement in the film industry meant that, almost immediately upon his family’s arrival in Riverdale in 1927, he started spending most of his time in Hollywood, as he would until 1930.
    Joe’s business dealings in Hollywood were typically diverse and complicated, but the focus of his work was running FBO, a film studio that hebought in 1926 on behalf of a consortium of investors that he organized. Moving pictures were still in their youth, and there was money to be made. One of the ways Joe did this was to root out inefficiencies in the filmmaking process on both coasts. He centralized the accounting practices of FBO in New York and fired several overpaid studio execs in New York and Los Angeles.
    Joe was not indulging previously latent artistic urges; he was muscling in on a new and rapidly expanding market. “He was interested not in making artful or even good pictures at FBO,” wrote David Nasaw, “but in making a profit by producing cut-rate ‘program pictures,’ low-budget westerns, stunt thrillers, and action melodramas and distributing them to independently owned and operated small-town theaters that could not afford to pay premium prices for expensive pictures.”
    In Los Angeles, Joe avidly pursued his business interests and, just as passionately, pursued actress Gloria Swanson, becoming both her manager and lover. A huge star of the silent era, Swanson was struggling to make the transition to the talkies. Kennedy hoped to manage this transition, and he did so with only limited success. Their coproduction of the epic Queen Kelly would be a disaster—one of the most famous uncompleted films of all time—and Swanson’s career would subside to regular TV and theater work until 1950, when she would again rocket to fame (and become a camp icon) with her scenery-chewing turn as Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard . Swanson became familiar to the entire Kennedy family during the late 1920s, visiting them in Hyannis Port and at their new home in Bronxville. Joe’s ardor for her was ultimately short-lived but flagrant; if Rose knew, her feelings about the affair, like her feelings about so much else, would never be available for public consumption. Rose visited Joe in Hollywood exactly once, in the late spring of 1927. She returned to Riverdale pregnant with Jean.
    With Jean’s birth on February 20, 1928, Rose now had eight children, ranging from newborn to twelve years old. She instituted a new dining schedule. “Up to age six, [the children] ate an hour earlier than the rest of the family. Rose sat with them and discussed simple topics of interest to toddlers and preschoolers. Then the older children dined together, and she would chat with them about more complicated subjects.”
    Rose and Joe would always see the family dinner table as a prime location for education and intellectual stimulation. They expected the older children to read the newspaper and have not only knowledge of, but opinions about, current events. Rose “posted articles or documents on a bulletin board, expecting older children to read them and discuss the content at dinner. . . . On Sundays and Holy Days she posed questions about the priest’s sermon and Catholic symbolism.” According to Rose, the Sunday dinner interrogations ensured that “if they didn’t pay attention one Sunday they’d pay attention the next.”
    When Joe dined with the family,