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me—what difference does it make? Somebody going to sue me? What’re they going to get? My wheelchair? I’ll say it again. Kennedy had no talent for acting. Zero. Zilch. Nada. What he did have was a considerable talent for self-promotion. He was great at that.
    And y’know what else? Y’know what else Kennedy had? He had style. You don’t need talent if you’ve got style. Mae West proved that. Gable proved that. Bette Davis.
    Funny business, movies, television. Any other industry run the same way would go straight into the ground. A movie studio—you make one success, it pays for twenty flops. You have to be crazy to stay with it, y’know.
    Okay, okay—back to Kennedy. Well, y’know, to really understand him, you gotta understand his dad. Joe Kennedy was one ambitious son of a bitch. He was smart enough to get his money out of the stock market before ’29. He put it into real estate. When everybody else was jumping out of windows, he was picking up pieces all over the place.
    He got very active in politics for a while. FDR wanted to send him to England as an ambassador, but the deal fell through—nobody knows why. Maybe his divorce, who knows? Y’know, the Kennedys were Irish-Catholic. It would have been a big scandal. Especially then.
    Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The story really starts when Joe Sr. brings his boys out to California. He marries Gloria Swanson and starts buying
up property and studios and contracts. Next thing you know, his boys are all over the place. They come popping out of USC, one after the other, like Ford Mustangs rolling off an assembly line.
    In no time, Joe’s a director, Jack’s taken up acting and Bobby ends up running MGM. It’s Thalberg all over again. Lemme think. That had to be ’55 or ’56, somewhere in there. Actually, Teddy was the smart one. He stayed out of the business. He went East, stayed home with his mom and eventually went into politics where nobody ever heard of him again.
    Anyway, you could see that Joe and Bobby were going to make out all right. They were all sonsabitches, but they were good sonsabitches. Joe did his homework, he brought in his pictures on time. Bobby was a ruthless S.O.B., but maybe that’s what you need to run a studio. He didn’t take any shit from anybody. Remember, he’s the guy who told Garland to get it together or get out. And she did.
    But Jack—Jack was always a problem. Two problems actually.
    First of all, he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. Bobby had his hands full keeping the scandal-rags away from his brother. He had to buy off one columnist; he gave him the Rock Hudson story. The jackals had such a good time with that one they forgot all about Jack’s little peccadillos in Palm Springs. Sometimes I think Bobby would have killed to protect his brother. Y’know, Hudson lost the lead in Giant because of that . They’d already shot two or three weeks of good footage. They junked it all. Nearly shit-canned the whole picture, but Heston jumped in at the last moment and ended up beating out the Dean kid for the Oscar. Like I said, it’s a strange business. Stupid business.
    Sometimes you end up hating the audience for just being the audience. It’s not fair, when you think about it. The public wants their heroes to look like they’re dashing and romantic and sexy—but they’re horrified if they actually behave that way. I mean, could your private life stand up to that kind of scrutiny? I’m not sure anybody’s could. Hell, the goddamn audience punishes the stars for doing the exact same things they’re doing—cheating on their wives, drinking too much, smoking a little weed. If they’re going to insist on morality tests for the actors, I think we should start insisting on morality tests for the audience before we let them in the theater. See how they’d like it for a change.
    Oh well.
    Anyway, the other problem was Jack’s accent—that goddamn Massachusetts accent. He’d have made a great cowboy. He had the