SHORT TAKES : Joe Kennedy’s Affairs ‘Accurate’
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The producer of an upcoming television miniseries on the Kennedy family Monday said the dialogue written for the program and the creation of a woman who is having an affair with clan patriarch Joseph Kennedy are historically accurate.
Screenwriter William Hanley said in the Feb. 17 issue of TV Guide that the character named Cora was “invented dramatically but implied by the facts” based on Kennedy’s long affair with actress Gloria Swanson.
Kennedy, husband of Rose Kennedy, “was a serial philanderer, there was no question about that. It was a dramatic device to show that Gloria Swanson was not an isolated event in his life,” Hanley said.
The scene involving “Cora,” which takes place in a 1920s speak-easy, is incorporated in the three-part ABC miniseries “The Kennedys of Massachusetts” that will be broadcast next week on Sunday, Monday and Wednesday.
The six-hour show traces the Kennedy family history from the 1906 inauguration of John (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald as mayor of Boston to the 1961 inauguration of his grandson, John F. Kennedy as President.
The series is based on the best-seller, “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
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