- Born
- Died
- Birth nameJoseph Patrick Kennedy
- Nickname
- Joe
- Height6′ (1.83 m)
- Patriarch of a famous political family, Kennedy had a brief Hollywood career: He was one of the first financiers to play a leading role in the movie industry. Although he grew up in modest East Boston, where his father was a barkeeper and politician, Kennedy was educated with the Establishment's children at Boston Latin School and Harvard. In 1914, he married Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of Boston's mayor. Billed as "America's youngest bank president" at 25 (his father and his friends owned the bank.) He became a prominent stock market "operator" in the 1920s. In 1926, as the front man for Wall Street interests, he became chief executive of Film Booking Office, a distributor of low-budget features for unsophisticated audiences. Soon Kennedy also assumed power at another studio, Pathe, and at the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain. Through "financial engineering" of these companies - some of their pieces went into a new major studio, RKO - Kennedy added to his already substantial fortune. (A sidelight in his Hollywood period was his business and sexual relationship with Gloria Swanson, recounted in detail in her autobiography.) In the 1930s, Kennedy turned his attention to politics: an early fund-raiser for Franklin D. Roosevelt, he became the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, then U.S. ambassador to England (1938-40). Kennedy's pessimistic statements about Britain's chances in World War II alienated Roosevelt and made Kennedy deeply unpopular in America. After the war, Kennedy steered his surviving sons, John, Robert and Edward, into politics and served as financier and strategist for their campaigns. In 1961, he suffered a stroke that left him unable to speak, but by all accounts he was aware of many calamities that befell his family until his own death in 1969. Some say that the scandal of his son Teddy at Chappaquiddick was what killed him. Some historians see Kennedy's rapacious greed for success as a fatal flaw that he passed on to his sons, none of whom could transcend it.- IMDb Mini Biography By: David S. Smith
- SpouseRose Kennedy(October 7, 1914 - November 18, 1969) (his death, 9 children)
- Children
- RelativesRose Schlossberg(Great Grandchild)Tatiana Schlossberg(Great Grandchild)Jack Schlossberg(Great Grandchild)Caroline Kennedy(Grandchild)John Kennedy Jr.(Grandchild)Robert Shriver(Grandchild)Rory Kennedy(Grandchild)Patrick Joseph Kennedy II(Grandchild)Kerry Kennedy(Grandchild)Christopher Lawford(Grandchild)Tim Shriver(Grandchild)Mark Shriver(Grandchild)Anthony Shriver(Grandchild)Katherine Schwarzenegger(Great Grandchild)Patrick Schwarzenegger(Great Grandchild)Christina Schwarzenegger(Great Grandchild)Christopher Schwarzenegger(Great Grandchild)Maria Shriver(Grandchild)
- The UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill threatened to have Kennedy arrested in 1940.
- Four of his nine children died before him: Joseph Jr. was killed in a W.W.II plane crash in 1944. Kathleen died in a plane crash in 1948. John was assassinated in 1963. Robert was assassinated in 1968.
- During Prohibition, Kennedy's company Somerset Importers became the exclusive U.S. agent for Gordon's Dry Gin and Dewar's Scotch. Anticipating the end of Prohibition, he assembled a large inventory of stock that he sold for a profit of millions of dollars when Prohibition was repealed in 1933. One of his partners in the deal was Franklin D. Roosevelt's son, James Roosevelt. Kennedy invested the money from his legal liquor business in real estate, the Merchandise Mart in Chicago and Hialeah Race Track in Hialeah, Florida. However, rumors that he was a "bootlegger," involved in running illegal liquor across the Great Lakes into the U.S. from Canada in cahoots with the Bronfman family and the Mafia, have never been proven.
- In 1925 he was retained by the financially troubled owner of Film Booking Office of America (FBO), a "Poverty Row" studio specializing in cheaply made westerns, to help find a new owner. Kennedy formed his own group of investors and bought FBO for $1.5 million (approximately $20 million in 2012 dollars). Subsequently, he moved to California in March 1926 to focus on running the studio. At the time movie studios were permitted to also own exhibition companies (a practice that was stopped by a 1947 Supreme Court decision involving Paramount Pictures), so Kennedy launched a hostile buyout of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theaters Corporation (KAO), which had more than 700 vaudeville and movie theaters across the U.S. In 1927 he acquired another production studio and film exhibitor, American Pathé, and its Pathé Exchange distribution subsidiary. In October 1928 he formally merged his film companies FBO and KAO with RCA's Photophone Division to form Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO). He topped this off by acquiring the Pantages Theater chain for $3.5 million ((approximately $47 million in 2012 dollars), creating a major studio in the process with RKO Pictures.
- Born in Boston, the son of Patrick J. Kennedy, a successful businessman (liquor) and Irish Catholic community leader active in Democratic Party politics. Joseph attended Boston Latin School, where he was a below average academically but proved popular among his classmates, winning election as class president and playing on the school baseball team. Following the example of several older relatives, he attended Harvard University, where he focused on becoming a social leader, gaining admittance to the prestigious Hasty Pudding Club.
- If you want to make money, go where the money is.
- There are only two pursuits that get in your blood: politics and the motion picture business.
- Don't get mad, get even.
- [after the 1929 stock market crash] I knew it was time to sell when my 'shoeshine boy' gave me a stock tip.
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