Joseph P. Kennedy Presents by Cari Beauchamp

Author:Cari Beauchamp [Beauckamp, Cari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-27129-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

Gloria with her husband, the Marquis de la Falaise, on the set of Queen Kelly

At the same time, RKO was looking at just what they had purchased in FBO and K-A-O and they were not pleased. They ordered a new audit and, after paying K-A-O dividends and putting the costs of the transition in the mix, they found that the two companies combined to lose over a million dollars for the first half of the year. It was a far cry from the balance sheets Kennedy had presented, but the public release of the numbers did little to tarnish his still glowing reputation.

Still, he wasn't the major mogul he had been only months before. When fifty-four “important executives” of the film industry were polled for their opinions on the upcoming year, there was room for David Sarnoff, but not for Joseph P. Kennedy. Yet he was lauded in Variety as a “money maker for himself and others” and the proof was in the fact he was one of the only twenty thousand millionaires in America. While there were rumors that he was on “the fence for the future,” it was assumed he would stay with Pathé and perhaps be elected president of the company. Undoubtedly, more success lay ahead because he was unique in having a “duplex mind that runs equally smart in the show business as it does to banking.”

That “duplex mind” had indeed served to quadruple his personal bank account, but the ripple effect of his actions was now taking its toll on others. Frances Marion had returned home from her shortened trip to Europe in the early fall of 1928 to find her husband still in limbo. She brought him an English bulldog to add to their already large menagerie, but nothing seemed to energize Fred. If their hopes were raised by the creation of RKO, there were no cowboys on their roster and K-A-O had already announced that because of low box office receipts, they “were off westerns.” Thomson, however, continued to believe in the genre so deeply he took to writing syndicated newspaper articles on their power to teach clean living and he reached out to Gene Tunney about the possibility of him becoming his producer. There were even some conversations with MGM; if there was one man in Hollywood willing to take on Kennedy it was Louis B. Mayer. Still, it would mean legal wrangling and publicly airing their differences, so Thomson remained in a twilight zone of inactivity, vacillating between grandiose plans and despair, sitting at home, “looking very depressed, holding his head in his hands,” Fred's nephew Carson remembers. “This was a Fred none of us had ever seen before.”

Fred Thomson died on Christmas Day 1928 at the age of thirty-eight. The death certificate listed the cause of death as tetanus, but his wife would tell family members that she was convinced Fred had lost his will to live. Headlines throughout the country expressed the shock over his unexpected death and accolades and condolences poured in.

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