“Have you really looked at it? Whoever painted it has made your head too small, your shoulders too narrow, and stuck you on a park bench outside the White House. Whose idea was that?”
“Well,” he explained, “Clare was having her portrait done....” He has the greatest regard for Clare Luce; years before he arranged with a single telephone call to have her play The Women staged on Broadway after the script had been lying around producer Max Gordon’s office for months. And this for a play that Bernie told her was “the most cynical satire on your sex ever written.”
I said no more against the picture, but on my next visit a year later, the portrait had been replaced by another, by Chandor, a wonderful likeness, complete to Bernie’s hearing aid. He autographed a reproduction of it for me. With pen in hand, he looked up: “How do you spell gallant—one ‘l’ or two?”
“Never could spell,” I said. “Use a different word.”
“No. Gallant is the word for you,” he said, and waited until the butler found a dictionary. Bernie is a loyal friend. If our top governmental officials had listened to him, we shouldn’t be in the mess we’re in today.
I once worked for another Democrat, not in politics, to be sure, but making two silent pictures at the studios of the old Film Booking Offices of America, called FBO for short, before it was acquired by Howard Hughes and renamed Radio-Keith Orpheum, or RKO. Joseph P. Kennedy, father of our President, had just arrived from Boston as a sharp, up-and-coming businessman to see if he could make a fortune in Hollywood.
He signed up a scad of stars—Joel McCrea; Constance Bennett; Fred Thompson, the cowboy Adonis who’d been a Presbyterian pastor in the Valley until Frances Marion married him on a bet with Mary Pickford. Heading Joe Kennedy’s contract list was Gloria Swanson, who was always quite a gal.
She’d been married to Wally Beery and Herbert Somborn, who started the Brown Derby restaurant chain, when producer Mickey Nielan entered her life. He rapidly hired Somborn to go off on a nationwide promotion tour plugging a movie Nielan had made. To make sure that his wooing of Gloria would not be interrupted, he had Somborn telephone him every evening at eight California time from whatever city he was in that day. When Somborn hung up, Nielan would have the operator check back to verify where the call had originated.
I met Joe’s wife, Rose, at a luncheon Frances Marion gave, where Polly Moran stared at Colleen Moore’s straight boyish bangs and said: “Look at her—makes $10,000 a week and has a lousy haircut.” Rose adored her husband.
Gloria was Joe’s number-one star. He hired Laura Hope Crews as her coach, and she practically lived day and night with Gloria, including sessions at Laura’s home overlooking the beach at Santa Monica. He made some good pictures before he started Queen Kelly, with Gloria as star, which began as a silent, then ran into the monster called Sound. He never forgot he was a businessman. He had notes for $750,000 signed by Gloria to help finance the picture. The question was: What to do? Finish Kelly as a silent, scrap it, or take time off to see if Sound became important?