Real Lace (23 page)

The second of Thomas Fortune Ryan's sons, John Barry, was a dreamy young man whose chief talent seemed to be spending his inheritance, though he did write undistinguished poetry from time to time which he published under the name “Barrie Vail.” He and his wife, the former Nan Morgan, had a total of fifteen children, of whom ten lived. Their daughters made generally proper society marriages, but they were not immune from scandal—Adele Ryan, in 1930, becoming involved in a sensational breach-of-promise suit. As for the boys, all of whom had the Ryan good looks and charm to a pronounced degree, only one became famous, and then briefly, when, after a night of carousing, he drove his car up and down the streets of Stamford, Connecticut, tossing rocks in the windows of every store in sight. He concluded this
escapade by driving up the courthouse steps, and into the court as far as his car would fit, which made his apprehension and arrest for vandalism somewhat easier for the police, though somewhat more expensive for his father. One of his brothers, the late Thomas Fortune Ryan II, was first married to a Pittsburgh divorcee named Margaret Moorhead Rea and then, after a divorce from her, married another divorcee, Mayme Cook Masters, of Sheridan, Wyoming. He died in 1955 after a life in which, according to the family, his greatest difficulty was that “he just couldn't seem to keep off the front page.” Still another of these brothers, John Barry Ryan, Jr.—the most socially prominent of this generation—worked for a while as a reporter, and then married the former Margaret Kahn, daughter of the German-Jewish banker Otto Kahn, who had been Jacob Schiff's partner at Kuhn, Loeb. This union must have caused both the old adversaries in the Equitable Life battle to spin violently in their graves. Their son, John Barry Ryan III, is presently at Kuhn, Loeb, and his wife, the former Dorinda Dixon (the exotic-looking “D.D.” Ryan), was voted one of America's best-dressed women in 1959, and frequently decorates the pages of such publications as
Vogue
and
Women's Wear Daily
.

Suicide is another specter that has stalked the latter-day Ryans. Joseph Ryan's son, Joseph, Jr., who ran Mount Tremblant Lodge in Canada, married a girl named Nannie Moore of Washington, D.C. He was separated from his wife at the time of his sudden death in 1921. In his will, he left one hundred dollars to his wife, and the balance of his estate to an actress named Lucille Waterford. He died “under circumstances suspicious of suicide.” The Clendenin Ryan branch of the family fared even worse, in terms of tragedy. Clendenin, who was named after a town in West Virginia, had been a partner in his brother's ill-fated Allan A. Ryan & Company, and, in 1923, shortly after the firm's collapse, Clendenin Ryan was in the tabloids when he was sued for five hundred dollars' “room rent” by a New York showgirl. In 1939, in the
library of the great Manhattan mansion that had been the Ryan family home since the days of Thomas Fortune, he quietly placed his head in a gas fireplace and turned on the gas. Eighteen years later, in the same house, his son, also named Clendenin, also committed suicide. He had promised to donate the famous rose window to St. Patrick's Cathedral. His widow had to finish paying for it. His sister, Caroline, lives today in Florida, in a completely shuttered and sealed-off house.

And the fate of Stutz was no more cheerful than the fate of its once-head, Allan Ryan. Mr. Schwab, it seemed, was not as clever in the automobile industry as he had been in steel. Though Stutz cars went on breaking speed records in road tests, the company's books began showing deficits nearly every year after Schwab's takeover. Its famous bucket-seated Bearcat—which, though infinitely glamorous, was never really practical, or even comfortable—had been discontinued in 1920, and the company never managed to share in the great 1920's automotive boom. In 1938, a year before Mr. Schwab's death, Stutz quietly went broke. Its corporate obituary, tucked in the back of the financial pages, noted that the last Stutz products had been an unsuccessful line of grocery wagons.
Sic transit gloria mundi
.

Chapter 16

WHY DON'T THE NICE PEOPLE LIKE US?

One current reason for the pronounced antipathy, among such families as the Murrays and the McDonnells, toward the entire Kennedy clan is the family's pompous habit of referring always to the late John F. Kennedy as “The President,” as though he were the only one. But another has been that the older-established families considered the founder of the Kennedy fortune, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, a rogue and a scoundrel and, in his business dealings, a double-crosser. Born in East Boston in 1887, the son of a saloon keeper who had elevated himself—though just barely—from the “shanty” Irish status of his immigrant father to where he might have been considered, by Boston's Protestant elite, “lace curtain,” young Joe Kennedy early showed himself to be a man of restless drive, energy, and ambition, for whom business scruples came second. From a relatively humble position in the Boston office of Hayden, Stone & Company, Joe Kennedy had been able, by 1922, to go into business for himself
behind an office door that proclaimed somewhat grandly—and pretentiously—”J
OSEPH
P. K
ENNEDY
, B
ANKER
.” He rapidly gained a reputation as an aggressive stock manipulator and, two years later, he was ready for New York, “where the real money was.”

On Wall Street, Joseph P. Kennedy, Banker, was at first placed in the category of such other Irish upstarts as Mike Meehan and Bernard E. Smith. Like others of his generation, who had little education, no social background, but no end of determination to succeed, Mike Meehan got his start by becoming the helpful friend and useful errand boy to Old Guard members of the Establishment. Meehan had started out as a theater-ticket broker, and by wangling aisle seats at Broadway hits for the partners and their wives of such eminent firms as Morgan & Company, Lehman Brothers, and Goldman, Sachs. The partners would not have entertained a Mike Meehan at their dinner tables, but they rather liked his brash and spirited ways, and clearly the lad was smart. When Meehan expressed an interest in becoming a stock trader, several of these men were willing to help him out and to set him up on the Curb Exchange. Meehan turned out to be as clever at cornering stocks as he had been at securing tickets to musicals, and, within two years, he had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange alongside the Morgans, Whitneys, Rockefellers, and Lehmans. Meehan originated the idea of placing brokerage offices on the decks of ocean liners, and his firm established them on the
Bremen
, the
Leviathan
, and the
Berengaria
. By 1929 Mike Meehan was living in a floor-through apartment at the Sherry-Netherland, owned no less than eight Stock Exchange seats and—though he was barely literate—operated from a downtown office whose walls were lined with volumes of Shakespeare bound in calf. Mike Meehan became known as “the mastermind of the Radio pools,” and, in 1929, succeeded in bull-trading RCA up from a 1928 low of 85¼ to an unprecedented high of 549—even though RCA had
paid no dividends whatever in the period. It was the most spectacular, and perhaps the most shameful, stock manipulation of the decade. In the process, Meehan became the darling of “little men” investors who, in the wake of such feats, began plunging heavily into the market throughout the twenties—the cab drivers, barbers, and shoeshine men who tossed their savings into RCA may have felt differently about Meehan after the stock plummeted in the Crash (and after Meehan had got himself out).

Bernard E. (“Ben”) Smith was an even tougher character than Meehan. Ben Smith grew up, around the turn of the century, in a tough Irish neighborhood in New York's far-west fifties, near the docks, left school without graduating, and for a while bummed around the country selling newspapers, working for a used-car dealer, and finally winding up with a job in a brokerage house. Here he managed to become friendly with some of the firm's richer customers, who fondly regarded young Ben Smith as “a diamond in the rough.” Rough he certainly was, addicted to simple-minded practical jokes, bathroom humor, and foul language. And yet, in 1926, when Smith was barely thirty, he had none other than such old-line aristocrats as Percy Rockefeller and Stuyvesant Fish to sponsor him for a seat on the Stock Exchange. Throughout the late twenties, Smith was behind some of the biggest bull pools of the day, and made enormous profits—enough for a country estate in Bedford Village and a swimming pool. He became so arrogant and inaccessible that one of his clients, none other than the British Lord Rothermere, was kept waiting, hat in hand, outside his office. Reporters, seeking to interview the financial wizard, often had to wait a week or more before Mr. Smith deigned to return their calls, and, when the calls were returned, they did not come from Mr. Smith or even his secretary but from his personal public-relations person. He had been staunchly on the bull side of the market during the summer of 1929, and was hurt badly in the first wave of the Crash. Then he suddenly reversed
himself and became bearish. At one point—it has never been clear quite when—be rushed into his brokerage office and shouted, “Sell 'em all! They're not worth anything,” earning him the life-long nickname of “Sell-'em Ben” Smith. His huge short sales, and enormous profits in the process, earned Ben Smith a reputation for villainy almost unequaled on the Street as, in the process, he helped the plunge of prices and the destruction of the American economy. As for his old friends who had helped him along a few years earlier, he announced, “To hell with them,” or possibly something even stronger. He had never given a damn for the Wall Street Establishment, or its code, and, furthermore, did not give a damn what the Establishment or the world thought of him or his trading methods. He had been in the stock game to make money for Ben Smith, and no one else. As for America, to hell with that too. What had America ever done for him?

Joseph P. Kennedy, however, was to turn out to be of not quite the same breed as Meehan and Smith, who were roughly his contemporaries. Kennedy wanted to make money, yes, but money to him appears to have been only an incidental item, a tool. He also wanted power, which, according to an old Chinese proverb, has been denned as “ancient wealth.” Kennedy wanted his money magically to acquire the patina of age as quickly as possible. He wanted prestige also, and to be liked and well thought of by the men he intended to make his peers. Inside him, an Establishmentarian was trying to get out; his ambition, or at least a good part of it, was to be instant Old Guard. In this, he was assisted by his personality—an affable surface good nature and reserve, a charm equal to that of a Thomas Fortune Ryan, poise, good looks, a clubman's good manners, and a speaking voice which he did his best to rid of its East Boston accent. On the surface, Joseph P. Kennedy appeared to be, of all things, a gentleman, or at least a man trying very hard to be one.

Kennedy's first big New York assignment, in 1924, was to
defend John D. Hertz's Chicago-based Yellow Cab Company against a raid from the bears that was seriously threatening the company's owners. Hertz himself offered to raise the money for a bull pool, and Joe Kennedy was thereby relieved of the terrible burden of raising his own money, which had undone Allan Ryan a few years earlier. Kennedy hurried down to New York from Boston, and set himself up in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, where a battery of telephones and a ticker-tape machine were hastily installed. He managed his bull counterattack so skillfully that he was able to collect an important commission for himself as well. To be sure, a few months later Yellow Cab stock dropped again, and this time Hertz suspected that Joe Kennedy himself was the principal bear behind the raid. Hertz was so enraged at Kennedy that he threatened to “punch the s.o.b. in the nose” if he ever encountered him. The punch in the nose was never administered, nor has the Kennedy double-cross ever been definitely proved, though Kennedy's biographer, Richard J. Whalen, has said in
The Founding Father
, “It would not have been unthinkable.” Kennedy was that sort of trader. In any case, in 1926 Kennedy moved his family—including his sons, John F., aged nine, and Robert F., less than a year old—to New York, where they settled in a large house in the fashionable Riverdale section of the Bronx (and later in even more fashionable Bronxville, in Westchester County). Throughout the rest of the decade, Joseph P. Kennedy was known as one of Wall Street's ablest and most agile wheeler-dealers—bullish or bearish as suited his purposes—specializing in the then glamorous and lucrative motion picture company stocks.

By 1929 Kennedy was rich and, with his hail-fellow personality, was able to do business not only with the likes of Meehan and Smith (often referred to as “The Underworld of Wall Street”) but also with the Street's upper crust, including such
Social Register
-ites as Jeremiah Milbank and the patrician Owen D. Young of General Electric. But there was one man whose shell Kennedy
could not crack. Early that year, he strolled casually into the redoubtable offices at 23 Wall Street and asked to see Mr. J. P. Morgan. Kennedy must have expected that Morgan, by now, would be curious enough about the Street's new genius to receive him, for Kennedy was not a man to risk being snubbed unnecessarily. But he had miscalculated. He got no further than the receptionist. After telephoning her boss, she told Kennedy that Mr. Morgan was too busy to see him.

Unlike his friend Ben Smith, Joe Kennedy did not make extra millions through selling short during the 1929 Crash, but there is no evidence that he lost any substantial amount either. In September, according to his biographer, Kennedy was “standing at a safe distance” from the market, and had commented, “Only a fool holds out for top dollar.” He himself wrote later, “In those days I felt and said I would be willing to part with half of what I had if I could be sure of keeping, under law and order, the other half.” But there is no evidence that he lost anything even close to half in the Crash, and, in fact, during that winter of Wall Street's greatest discontent Joe Kennedy casually removed himself from the financial community entirely and retired to the pleasant purlieus of Palm Beach, where his thoughts seem to have turned from the making of money to the uses of it—to acquire power. A few months later, through the good offices of his friend Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Kennedy arranged an invitation to lunch at the Governor's Mansion in Albany, New York. He emerged from that meeting with the announcement that he believed Franklin D. Roosevelt would be an excellent Democratic candidate for President, and that he, Kennedy, would do everything in his power to see that Roosevelt was nominated and, in due course, elected.