Though never truly in love with Kennedy, Swanson seems to have assumed that his feelings for her were unwavering. A week passed without so much as an apology. She heard he had left town, and within the next week newspapers throughout the country were reporting that Kennedy had abruptly resigned from all active participation in filmmaking; he was returning to full-time "banking" in New York. Included in his press release was this single-sentence paragraph:

"Gloria Productions Inc. also announces Mr. Kennedy's retirement from the active management of that company."

Swanson's pre-Kennedy accountant soon reported that, from the records he could get his hands on, it looked like everything—the bungalow Kennedy had built for her at Pathé, the mink coat he had "given" her, along with all the expenses of Queen Kelly—had been billed to Gloria Productions and were now debts, totaling upwards of a million dollars, for which she was solely responsible.

A truncated silent version of Queen Kelly was released in 1931 throughout Europe, but not in America; Swanson never really recovered, financially or professionally. She made a few more films and then turned to summer stock and personal appearances to earn a living before Billy Wilder cast her in 1949 at the age of 49 as a faded silent-movie star in Sunset Boulevard (with von Stroheim, ironically, as her butler).

For decades Swanson turned down offers to publish her memoirs, but when Rose Kennedy published her autobiography, Times to Remember, in 1974, and claimed to feel sorry for "poor Gloria" in what she portrayed as a purely professional relationship with Joe, Swanson could not allow that to be the last word. Swanson on Swanson vividly detailed her very personal relationship with Kennedy.

One positive result of her dealings with Kennedy that she didn't mention in the book: "You should have seen that woman read a contract," says William Dufty. "She went over every single line."

Six months after he left Swanson holding the bag, Kennedy, who by this time owned a substantial amount of Pathé's preferred stock, sold that studio to RKO for almost $5 million. Thus ended what he referred to as "my stay in the business." Once again his timing was perfect. He had sold his stock-market holdings before the crash in 1929, and he now got out of the movie business just before the Depression caught up to Hollywood. Over the next few years box-office receipts dropped by almost 50 percent. Kennedy's vision that only a few major studios would survive proved absolutely correct—picture companies that numbered in the hundreds at the time he had entered the business could now be counted on two hands. At his own lecture at Harvard four years earlier, Kennedy had predicted that the industry was "on the eve now of big consolidations." No one had dreamed that Kennedy was planning on doing most of the consolidating himself.

In 1937, Fortune magazine ran a cover-story profile of Kennedy and credited his time in Hollywood as a major source of his personal fortune. *Fortune'*s editor had shown him a draft of the article, and the subject found fault with no fewer than 70 items, calling the writer biased and "psychopathic." Fortune made most of the changes Kennedy requested, and the general tone was positive and upbeat, but the published article still found that "tracing his path from Boston to Hollywood leads you into the ruins of vanished corporations … from which there arise whiffs of an atmosphere distinctly gamey." The magazine used the metaphor of a chess game to describe Kennedy's Hollywood climb: taking small pawns such as Robertson-Cole and F.B.O. and methodically knocking down knights and bishops such as Pathé and K.A.O. to create the queen of RKO, in less than four years. The article concluded that "Kennedy moved so fast that opinions still differ as to whether he left a string of reorganized companies or a heap of wreckage behind him."

There was wreckage, all right, but he had accomplished what he set out to do. Today it is assumed that studios are owned by large corporate conglomerates, but nearly three quarters of a century before Viacom, Vivendi, Sony, and News Corporation entered the fray, Joseph P. Kennedy had charted the future by bringing Wall Street firms and companies into positions of studio ownership, making his own personal fortune in the process.

Cari Beauchamp is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.