High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood (5 page)

George spoke to Jack about allowing Grace to act in local amateur productions: her grades at school were fine, so why should she not indulge her love of the theatre? And so, soon after she entered Stevens, Grace was seen in a one-act comedy, now forgotten, called
Don’t Feed the Animals
, written by Bob Wellington and staged by the Old Academy Players on Indian Queen Lane, East Falls. It was no coincidence that the Players—a group that had performed every season since 1923 (and still maintains an impressive schedule)—were passionate partisans of George Kelly, with repeated productions of his works already in their history.

Uncle George remained Grace’s favorite member of the family. She persuaded the entire Kelly clan to travel to New York on February 12, 1947, for the opening night of a Broadway revival of
Craig’s Wife
, which George directed. (The title role was played by Judith Evelyn, who later assumed the role of “Miss Lonelyhearts” in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Rear Window.)

Grace’s teenage scrapbooks, which she preserved and which her children placed on exhibit in 2007, give some idea of her love of theatre during her school years. On December 9, 1943, for example, she saw F. Hugh Herbert’s comedy
Kiss and Tell
, at the Locust Theatre in Philadelphia, and she went to as many productions of Uncle George’s plays as she could.

I
N 1943
, Grace’s social life flourished. At that time, the word “dating” did not imply a casual sexual affair, but innocent activities like moviegoing, dancing and parties. According to her
mother, “Grace’s first date was with a young man named Harper Davis, who went to the William Penn Charter School and often took her out to a basketball game or a dance.” Three years older than Grace, Harper was one of the most popular and handsome young men in her social orbit, and her scrapbook includes many souvenirs of her dates with this good-looking teenager. He gave her a bottle of perfume at Christmas and signed the gift card, “To Grace with love, Harper.” She pasted into her scrapbook the school dance programs for which Harper was her date, a stick of the chewing gum package he gave her on New Year’s Eve, and the business card from the store at which he bought her a silver charm on Valentine’s Day. She also pressed into her memory book remnants of the flowers he brought her on this or that occasion. Grace’s passion for floral arrangements and preservation dates from these early years and was later the subject of her volume
My Book of Flowers
, published in 1980.

At that time, dating among polite young people was conducted according to a complex etiquette that was in fact a subject taught at schools like Stevens and William Penn. Girls and boys learned to dance and were told which subjects were appropriate for civilized conversation. Young ladies were instructed on proper posture, how to walk and sit, how they should hold their white-gloved hands, and what to say to a young man at the door, at the end of an evening. Boys were trained in the right way to ask a girl to dance, and classes in decorum were routinely held in schools.

In the spring of 1944, at the height of World War II, Harper graduated from school, joined the navy and was sent abroad. Not long after returning, he contracted multiple sclerosis, from which he suffered until his death in 1953. Grace visited him often during his confinement and attended his funeral. “He was the first boy I ever loved, and I’ll never forget him,” she said.

The relationship with Harper, like other dates during her high school years, was entirely chaste, for Grace had not yet tested the waters of sexual experience. Such reticence was typical of the time, especially in polite circles: young people’s sexual urges did not tend to lurch into full throttle, nor did they race, as it was said, to go “all the way.” Reliable methods of contraception were not readily or widely available, and the fear of pregnancy, venereal disease and an indecent reputation kept the reins on youthful impulses. In addition, penicillin, later the drug of choice against sexually transmitted infections, had only recently been developed, and it was reserved for men injured in combat. Civilian physicians had access to it for the general public only after 1946.

This is not to say that the standards of Queen Victoria and Mrs. Grundy were everywhere observed; it is simply to state the obvious—that sexual intercourse for American teenagers in the 1940s was not as commonplace as it later became. When Grace graduated from high school, she was still a virgin, although she had easily and often fallen in love. “My sister Lizanne loved only one, the boy she married—but Peggy and I were in and out of love every other day.”

On June 5, 1947, Grace graduated from Stevens; her classmates predicted, in the senior yearbook, that she was certain “to become a stage and screen star.” The following month, she made her first trip to Europe, along with her entire family. The journey was occasioned by Kell’s entry into the Henley Regatta after he had received the James E. Sullivan Award earlier that year, which named him the foremost amateur athlete in America. Before and after his navy service during World War II, Kell was relentlessly, even ruthlessly, trained and driven by his father. He won the United States single sculls title in 1946, and Jack Kelly got his revenge for the episode of 1920 during that summer of 1947, when Kell won the Diamond Challenge
Sculls—a victory he repeated two years later. “There was never any doubt what Jack wanted,” Margaret said later. “He always insisted he would have a son to make the Diamond Sculls.”

Despite impressive post-Henley achievements, Kell never won an Olympic gold medal. “It was a failure my father’s contemporaries won’t let me forget,” he said in 1971. “My father was a tough act to follow—a big, strong guy, fine-looking, eminently successful. There was always pressure to excel, to keep up. I’ve been competing with him all my life. Living in his shadow made losing harder when I lost, which wasn’t very often, but I was humiliated for both of us.” That summer, Jack saw that his son’s presence in England was documented by the press. “I could never understand my father, letting photographers take pictures of Kell shaving in the bathroom,” Grace said. Jack’s influence, added Margaret, “was not always good for Kell. I often told Jack that he leaned too hard on the boy, trained him too hard for the Olympics—and it hurt Kell.” Arthur Lewis, who knew the whole family, was blunter: Jack “messed up his only son’s life by forging him into an instrument of personal revenge.”

As also required by his father, Kell later joined the family business while continuing an involvement in sports. He was president of the Amateur Athletic Union, and he won a bronze medal in the 1956 summer Olympics. He became a Philadelphia city councilman, and, briefly, he was president of the United States Olympic Committee.

Kell’s personal life was complicated and disordered. He married a champion swimmer and had six children, but then one day, without warning or explanation, he walked out on his family and never returned. He became a notorious playboy, had a serious problem with alcohol, and on May 2, 1985, at the age of fifty-seven, John B. Kelly Jr. dropped down dead while
jogging to the Athletic Club after his customary morning row on the Schuylkill River. He was posthumously inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame, and Philadelphia’s Kelly Drive was named in his honor. He and his father are the only parent-child athletes in the Olympic Hall of Fame.

“Kell never had to grow up,” Grace said. “He was naïve, he confused attention with loyalty, he tried too hard to make people like him—and he didn’t have Father’s toughness, sense of humor or resilience.”

Peggy’s story, too, was unhappy. After two failed marriages, she sank into alcoholism and died of a stroke at the age of sixty-six, in 1991. Lizanne was then the only surviving offspring of the Kelly-Majer marriage.

A
FTER
H
ENLEY
that summer of 1947, Margaret took her daughters to Switzerland while the men returned to Philadelphia. The holiday was intended as a kind of consolation prize for Grace, whose low grades in mathematics prevented her matriculation to Bennington College in Vermont, to which she had applied because of its highly regarded drama department.

But Grace really needed no solace. As soon as she received the exceedingly polite rejection letter from Bennington, she began making inquiries about enrollment at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. When she finally brought up the subject with her parents, they were not at all pleased—perhaps because of the unorthodox, unconventional life of Jack’s brother George. “Daddy was uncomfortable around theatre people for one simple reason: he didn’t understand them,” said Lizanne. Judith Quine was more explicit: “Jack Kelly saw acting as a slim cut above streetwalker.”

“She wouldn’t let her Uncle George help her prepare” for
the American Academy, recalled Jack. “She was determined to go places without leaning on anybody or using influence.” Added Judith, “She left a prominent Philadelphia family to become a struggling actress in New York. It was an independent move. She had a certain amount of maverick in her, and she was entirely self-sufficient. She knew how to depend on herself.” Grace was single-minded in her ambition to succeed as a professional actress. “I rebelled against my family and went to New York to find out who I was—and who I wasn’t.”

Margaret intervened to temper her husband’s disapproval, which could have become an outright veto. “Oh, Jack—it’s not as if she’s going to
Hollywood
, after all,” her daughters remembered their mother saying. “Let Grace go—this won’t amount to anything, and she’ll be home in a week.”

The idea of a career in the theatre was disturbing enough to her father, but pursuing it in New York, and not just with an amateur group in the Pennsylvania provinces—well, that combined Sodom with Gomorrah. Manhattan was no more than ninety minutes by train from Philadelphia, but it was no place for a proper young lady on her own. Why wouldn’t she settle down in Philadelphia and marry a nice, rich Catholic boy? “I hear some of your school chums are coming out,” Jack said to Grace, raising the prospect of the formal entrance into polite society that was common at the time. “Do you want to come out, too?”

Her reply was firm: “I
am
out! Do you think that to get a date I have to use those women who sell mailing lists of boys’ names?” No, she had other plans and was not to be stopped.

“I was saved from professional perdition,” Grace said, “because there happened to be a place in New York that my parents thought would preserve, protect and defend me, as if I were the Constitution. It was a residential hotel for women only, and to have my father’s consent to audition for the American
Academy of Dramatic Arts, I had to agree to live at that hotel—not in an apartment on my own.” Perhaps because of his own philandering, Jack was not inclined to trust his children. A hotel for women, which denied access to men above the street-level foyer, would keep careful watch and ward over young Miss Kelly.

TWO

T
he Student
M
odel

I don’t want to have your mind and will, Father—I want to be myself.

      —GRACE (AS BERTHA) IN STRINDBERG’S
THE FATHER

T
HE TWENTY-THREE-STORY
B
ARBIZON
H
OTEL FOR
Women, at Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street, was designed using an imaginative blend of Italian Renaissance, Gothic and Islamic architectural styles. Admitting its first residents in 1927, it represented an alternative for young women arriving in New York in the Roaring Twenties, leaving home in search of new professional opportunities but wanting a safe, respectable place to live. The owners and managers created and reinforced the values of the mostly wealthy families from which these women had come; in 1947, few others could afford the rate of twelve dollars a week.

Three letters of reference were required from applicants, and there was always a long waiting list. Dress codes and house rules were strictly enforced; liquor was forbidden on the premises; and men could visit only on the ground floor. Despite—or perhaps
because of—these apparent constraints, the Barbizon was considered a very desirable place to live. “If a girl put on her résumé that she lived at the Barbizon,” recalled Margaret Campbell, the longtime executive housekeeper, “that was almost enough, morally and socially,” to guarantee employment; at the least, residents had access to some of New York’s higher social life. Several of the Beale and Bouvier daughters lived there in the 1920s and 1930s, and over the years its tenant list included the writer Sylvia Plath and many aspiring or working actresses, among them Lauren Bacall, Barbara Bel Geddes, Gene Tierney, Candice Bergen and Liza Minnelli.

The accommodations were certainly not luxurious, and a new girl’s first impression might have been that her austere quarters resembled a convent cell or a house of correction. The nine-by-twelve-foot rooms were little more than cubicles, with space only for a narrow bed, an armless chair, a clothes rack, a floor lamp and a small writing desk. Fewer than eighty of the 686 rooms had private baths—the rest shared common facilities on each floor. But everyone had the use of the hotel’s gymnasium and swimming pool, library, music studio, kitchen and dining room. Complimentary afternoon tea with tiny sandwiches was served in a large parlor—close to dinnertime, for the benefit of those on tight budgets. The place was lively with news, gossip and music played on a phonograph that had seen better days.