THE POWER BROKER by Robert Caro: acclaimined biography- many call it the best book ever written on
the movie business- on the famed Hollywood mogul Joseph P Kennedy. Born in Boston in 1888 into a
family of poor Irish immigrants, Kennedy succeeded- by often questionable methods- in piling up a
fortune by his early thirties. Then, in the 1920's, he became involved with the noted Hollywood actress
Gloria Swanson. This love affair changed Kennedy's life. He scrapped plans he'd been formulating to go
into politics & instead moved himself & his family west to Hollywood. Within a few years of his arrival
Kennedy had become one of Tinsletown's most powerful(as well as feared & downright hated)studio
executives. He would proceed to make- & break- literally dozens of careers. One famous example of the
former concerned Kennedy's managing to make, in the late 1940's, a major TV star out of an intro-
verted & rather gloomy native Californian named Richard Nixon(Kennedy's associates had strongly
advised him to settle instead for a smiling Iowa expatriate named Ronald Reagan but Kennedy gambled
on Nixon & won). All this- & more- is lovingly recounted by Caro. (Incidentally, the Kennedys to this day
remain prominent in the movie business- Joseph's son Edward, for example, is President of Warner
Brothers, the studio which turns out, among its other properties, the smash hit DC comic-book films).
FULL DISCLOSURE: I got the idea for this post from a delightful story by the sci-fi writer David Gerrold,
THE KENNEDY ENTERPRISE. Its plot resembles in some details this post: JPK marries Ms. Swanson, becomes a director, & one of his sons becomes a noted actor (how does John F Kennedy, captain of
the Starship ENTERPRISE, sound?) But the details re Ted Kennedy, Nixon, & Reagan are, I swear,
mine, all mine! To those who want to read Gerrold's story- & it's well worth it- I don't have a link-
sorry- but I can tell you you can find it in an anthology entitled ALTERNATE KENNEDYS, edited by
Mike Resnik(1992).