The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [145]
Jack saw Cooper as a consummate artist of charisma and endlessly pondered how the man did it. For hours, Jack discussed with Spalding the nature of stardom. How was it created? Why was it that crowds swarmed around Cooper? What was it about Spencer Tracy, a man of undistinguished looks, that made him such a star? Did he, Jack Kennedy, have what it took? Did he have this quality of stardom? Or could he create it?
The star-making machinery took obscure young actors and actresses and set them up on the pedestal of fame to be worshiped and emulated. The process may have seemed patently transparent, churning out nothing but one fraudulent creation after the next, an endless parade of interchangeable performers. The reality, however, was that the public had to connect to that person on the screen, and if it did so in a profound and visceral way, then a star was born. That process could be manipulated only so far. That was what obsessed Jack—whether, in Spalding’s words, “he had it or he didn’t have it.”
As candid as he was with Chuck, Jack always held back a part of himself, the self-critical, manipulative self that sent the other Jack Kennedy on his public pathway. Of all his male friends, Spalding probably saw more of the spectrum of Jack’s personality than did anyone else and had deeper insights into his friend. Chuck saw that Jack was a natural seducer and that women were merely the temporary objects of his game.
Spalding observed that Jack’s obsession with bedding every attractive woman who even momentarily passed across his horizon was not primarily about sex. The act itself was usually nothing more than a quick release. It was about testing his power and charm and will. It was not sexual impotence he feared but the possibility that he, the Jack Kennedy he had created, wouldn’t work anymore.
What better test of his powers, though, than to seduce Olivia de Havilland, who had played the angelic Melanie Wilkes in Gone With the Wind. Jack was usually proudly disheveled, but this afternoon, as he was about to meet Olivia for drinks at her house, he prepared his toilet at the Beverly Hills Hotel with detail and refinement.
Jack fixed Olivia with deep, glowering eyes. He flattered her with subtle phrases. He paraded his wit before her. Nothing could ruin his little recital more than speaking his lines too long or too loud. He rose to say good-bye to the star, finally turning and opening what he remembered as the front door. As he turned the knob and moved to head out into the world, tennis rackets and luggage came tumbling down out of the closet he had mistakenly opened.
The closest most veterans got to Olivia de Havilland was a front-row seat at the Bijou, but Jack fancied he could have whatever he wanted, from an assignation with a movie star to a privileged seat at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco in the spring of 1945. His peers would have been delighted simply to have been there, but Jack wrangled an assignment as a reporter for Hearst that would have been the dream of any journalist.
Jack wore his seriousness as lightly as it could be worn. One evening Arthur Krock found his erstwhile new colleague propped up on his hotel bed in impeccable evening clothes trying to reach the managing editor to tell him, “Kennedy will not be filing tonight.”
When he arrived in San Francisco in late April, Jack had neither the giddy optimism of the more vocal internationalists nor the paranoia of right-wingers who believed that this so-called United Nations would end American sovereignty. In his first articles he had the cautiously hopeful attitude of most of his fellow veterans. He compared what was going on to “an international football game with [Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav] Molotov carrying the ball while [Secretary