Lovers Lane on Eastville Beach

Thank God there’s nothing so tacky as a Map To The Stars' Homes for Martha’s Vineyard, but every old Island hand has famous sites to point out to first-time visitors: The Jaws house, the cemetery where John Belushi is buried, the Camp Ground cottage where President Ulysses S. Grant was booted out for boozing it up and, my favorite, the beach house that Joe Kennedy built for silent screen star, Gloria Swanson, back in the 1920s.

It’s three houses in on Eastville Beach just as the road swings left from the incline down to East Chop: A pretty late-Edwardian manor-house with eyebrow windows peeking out in each direction from the third story, turquoise shutters adorning first floor windows, and with sweeping views over formal gardens to sand and sea.

I never believed the story. Oh, I believed Gloria lived there, and I imagined Joe Kennedy had perhaps paid amorous visits. His own family compound lay directly to the northeast over the water in Hyannisport. Nothing to stop him from motoring over for some Silent Movie-era nookie. I simply never found it credible that Kennedy built the house or even sent over a box of 2-inch nails.

I knew this from Garson Kanin’s memoir about the film trade, "Moviola." Garson, as some of the longer-term Islanders know, lived in Edgartown with his wife, actress Ruth Gordon (most famously known as the elderly siren in "Harold and Maude"), and if you can think of a cooler couple, let me know.

Garson had been friends with Gloria Swanson (as well as Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe), and she told him all about her affair with Joe the notorious 1920s Boston businessman, bootlegger and, it turns out, bamboozler. The way he bamboozled Gloria was to play the high rolling boyfriend, “Babes, you need a better trailer than the studio is providing. Go out and select the most deluxe model you can find, and my company will reimburse you for it.”

That’s what she did. But Joe’s company didn’t.

Gloria wasn’t any better at managing her finances than most of the rest of us, so Joe dipped her back in a Valentino embrace (I’m making that part up, although it could have happened), and crooned, “My darling, I want to live up to my fiduciary responsibilities to you; hand over your paychecks to my business boys and let them invest your money for you.”

When the lovers parted ways in the late twenties, Joe Kennedy had “misplaced” a million and a half of Gloria’s dollars. Wait, what? Fifty, sixty million — two billion in today’s dollars? I guess to Joe they were like those extra socks that get lost in the dryer.

So could Joe Kennedy have possibly built that beautiful manse for Gloria Swanson? There is no proof that he even bought her lunch.

Oh, by the way, she did have the last word: She told several talkative pals that Joe was a loser in the sack: The New England version of wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am (maybe raise-the-jib-and-lower-the-boom?) Funnily enough, this was the same criticism Marilyn Monroe had leveled at JFK. The apple does not have sex far from the tree.

So your unsinkable gossip girl went to work finding out the real deal with that house that Gloria Swanson may or may not have lived in, and may or may not have received her conniving boyfriend in. She never suffered a shortage, by the way, of gentlemen callers. Along with a string of boyfriends, she’d racked up six husbands, starting with movie star Wallace Berry whom she married when she was 17. She was also briefly wed to a French nobleman who made her the Marquise de la Falaise — call me shallow, but I would have stayed married to that one, and done a lot of dating on the side.

Gloria sounds like a cool lady. She was a vegetarian (not so common in the 1920s), she painted, she sculpted, lectured on health and fitness and, during World War II started a company of inventions and patents whose profits went to saving Jews in Europe.

Joe, on the other dastardly hand, was constantly being investigated for graft, fraud, inside trading and embezzlement, he hated Blacks and Jews, admired Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Joe McCarthy and all the Mafiosi with whom he fraternized. How either Rose or Gloria or any of his other lady friends could stand him was anybody’s guess (Rose, for the record, never commented on what Gloria called his “expeditious” amatory encounters).

Finally, I learned that in 1945, our Gloria married a businessman named John Davey who owned that house in question on Eastville Beach. Gloria herself had already been coming to the Island since 1913 when she and her friend, James Cagney, enjoyed movie dates at the Capawock. But her association with that Eastville Beach house stems from her union with Mr. Davey. They divorced within a year. According to my secret source, an old photograph of him shows him looking “dweeby” in the extreme, so we may assume the lovely seaside home was the larger draw in the relationship, just not enough of a draw to keep the marriage afloat for long.

To paraphrase Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, “I’m still big. It’s the male companions who got small.”