Movie columnist Tom Deignan examines David Nasaw’s book The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy with an eye to Kennedy’s time in Hollywood.
The year was 1926, a year before Charles Lindbergh would make his heralded flight across the Atlantic. And so, when a 38-year-old Joseph P. Kennedy made his first trip to Hollywood, a train would have to do.
Kennedy’s grandparents, Patrick Kennedy and Bridget Murphy, had also traveled thousands of miles to chase a dream, from New Ross, Co. Wexford, to Boston. But they had traveled in dire conditions, at a time when treacherous vessels were called “coffin ships” and cholera was referred to by some in Boston as “the natural death of the Irish.”