The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [36]
Joe considered giving birth a wife’s work. He saw no reason to be with Rose to observe the messy, painful business. So his pregnant wife traveled without him to Boston. She would have preferred to deliver at her home, but instead she went to St. Margaret’s Hospital, where she gave birth to Jean Ann, February 20, 1928, with Dr. Good and his team at her side.
As Rose lay in bed, she received a thick sheath of congratulatory telegrams, letters, and flowers, including an especially stunning arrangement from Gloria Swanson. In adultery the act itself is only the start of the duplicities. Joe sent a diamond bracelet to Boston for his wife. He arranged for Rose to have catered food from the Ritz. “Well, he felt sorry for me being in the hospital,” Rose asserted. While Rose spent a month by herself in Boston recuperating, Eddie Moore and his wife, Mary, watched over the children in Riverdale. Eddie was a full partner in Joe’s deceptions, and his presence in the house was another deceit.
Joe and Rose’s marriage may have appeared little more than an elaborate, exquisitely rendered masquerade. They spoke carefully chosen words to each other, rarely stepping into territory that might bring pain or exposure. The Kennedys did not hide in their charade but actively solicited accolades for their wondrous model family. Joe was as proud of Rose as a mother and proper wife as Rose was proud of Joe as a father and proper husband.
Rose and Joe’s children were their mutual business, and when they were around them, there was usually some other agenda at work, some life lesson being imparted. They kept so much of their emotional lives from each other that Rose and Joe’s life together always had elements of a performance. So did their children’s lives. They were often performing for their parents, mouthing the script they were supposed to speak. When they got older and Rose sent them round-robin letters, she mentioned the children one after another, holding them up to scrutiny, judging them on a report card whose standards she alone knew.
Joe rented a house in the center of Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive, a few minutes from Gloria’s home on Crescent Drive. Hollywood had only enhanced Joe’s belief that there were always two worlds: the facade, whether the celluloid screen, the speech on the political platform, or the price of a public stock offering, and behind it, a truth known to the wary few. He had arrived in Hollywood celebrated by Will Hays, the industry censor, as the man who would clean up Hollywood and bring back films that the whole family could watch without shame or embarrassment.
His creative contribution turned out to be a series of low-budget films that suggested that morality and mediocrity were blood brothers. As for his personal conduct, in Hollywood hypocrisy was elevated to the level of philosophy, and no one found it unseemly that the celebrated family man was carrying on an assignation with a married star.
Joe’s relationship with Gloria was not simply an erotic diversion. He descended on her life and took it over, from the scripts that she read and the details of her financial statement to the minutiae of her social life. A woman who had so easily betrayed her husband might betray him as well, and several years later the next occupant of Gloria’s dressing room found a bugging microphone embedded in the ceiling, presumably placed there by Joe. Joe did little to hide his paramour from his children, even inviting Gloria to his homes in Hyannis Port and Bronxville. “Would you please get me a picture of Miss Swanson with her name on it,” Kathleen wrote her father in January 1930. “How is little Gloria?” Kathleen asked her father three months later, inquiring about Gloria’s daughter.
Joe’s largest gift to Gloria, or so it seemed, was to star her in his most expensive production, Queen Kelly, directed by the celebrated Erich von Stroheim. Joe was not one to let love get in the way of commerce. He had written Gloria’s contract so that although he split the profits on the film with her, if the film lost money