The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [37]
Joe tried in a modest way to balance his various lives. He made periodic visits to Rose and the children and traveled to Boston in the spring of 1929 when his seventy-one-year-old father lay ill in the hospital. His mother had died, at sixty-five, of cancer six years before. Joe made his obligatory appearance at his father’s sickbed. P. J. seemed to be recovering, and Joe hurried off again on the train heading back to Los Angeles. The old man died soon after Joe left, and his son did not return for the funeral. Joe loved his father. His absence was probably not a sign of disregard but more likely indicative of his inability to stare into the implacable face of death. He was a man who avoided blood and pain, and he probably could not confront the terrible finality of his father’s death.
If Joe had been there at the Church of St. John, he would have seen his own thirteen-year-old son, Joe Jr., greeting the mourners with solemnity and grace, standing where his father should have been. He would have heard Joe Jr. described as Honey Fitz’s natural heir and seen his firstborn son take his first step toward manhood. He would have seen mourners as varied as life itself, from the powerful to the powerless, from men of wealth and position to modest men whose only tie to P. J. was that once he had helped them.
P. J. had asked that with his death all the IOUs that he had amassed over the years be burned. His two daughters, Loretta and Margaret, followed their father’s mandate, burning notes totaling at least $50,000. Beyond that, P. J. left an estate that one of Joe’s closest associates, James Landis, estimated as between $200,000 and $300,000, half to his two daughters and half to his son.
Joe’s affair with Gloria had begun with what the actress called “passionate mutterings,” and it continued with duplicity within duplicity. Joe was the daring director of the romance, with life as his great stage. He brought the actress home to meet Rose and the children. He invited her to travel with him and Rose on a European trip. Through all this Rose played the humble hausfrau and Gloria played the star, and hardly an honest word passed between them.
Gloria had a friend whose face had been scarred by broken glass in an automobile accident. The actress feared that fans pressing against her car might break the glass and destroy her face and career. Rose was sent forward into the crowds around the vehicle. “Who are you?” they shouted as she got in the car. “What are you doing? We want to see Gloria.”
Joe was perfectly willing to send his wife into the yearning, starstruck crowds to protect his mistress. Joe knew that no matter what he did, Rose would act as if she did not see how she was being treated. She had her children and her faith, her honored name and great houses. That was what had been rendered unto her. What transpired beyond that was not her life.
“The story got around that Joe and Gloria had gone on a trip to Europe together,” Rose recalled decades later. “A long story started until they said her child was named after him. The boy Joseph had been named after her father. He was four or five when she [Gloria] first laid eyes on Joe Kennedy. But the story had got around that he was Joe’s son.”
Gloria wrote in her autobiography that at one point Cardinal O’Connell implored her to end the affair. The Church had supposedly turned down Joe’s request to be allowed to marry the actress, and now it was time for them to sever their relationship. That was Gloria’s story. But it is doubtful that Joe would have gone to the Church to ask that he, Joseph P. Kennedy, honored Catholic layman and father of eight children, be allowed to become Gloria’s fourth husband.
Gloria was an actress, and she used all her skills in her autobiography, as she did in her decade-long affair with Joe Kennedy. She continued to visit him even as the affair slowly dissipated. Joe was left