Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (4 page)

Jack Kelly was not a soft or indulgent trainer—rowing coaches never are—and there were moments when Grace was bitterly to rue the supremacy exercised over her by this inspiring, driving, impossibly demanding man. It is no simple task to be the offspring of a hero, particularly if you admire him and are caught up in his spell. Indifference or rebellion offers the easiest escape route from under the shadow of greatness, and those are the roads that the children of great men often choose.

But it was Grace’s choice to try to please and win the approval of her father—to try to live up to the legend in her own fashion— and years after his death she was to acknowledge his primacy in curious ways. Invited at the beginning of Monaco’s prestressed concrete building boom to christen one of the principality’s new apartment towers, she chose “Le Schuylkill,” a name whose spelling and pronunciation perplexes the locals to this day. Then shortly before her death, aged fifty-two, and basking in the undiluted admiration of just about the entire world, she was asked if she was contemplating writing her memoirs.

“No,” replied the Oscar winner and princess. But she revealed that she was thinking of writing her own sort of double biography — the story of her father’s life, with her own life serving as its postscript.

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3901 HENRY AVENUE

G
race Kelly grew up on a hill overlooking the genteel but threadbare neighborhood of East Falls, Philadelphia, two miles north of Boathouse Row. A former mill town, East Falls was a cluster of faded gray row houses nestling in a valley that was dampened by the mists which came floating off the Schuylkill River. The only landmarks of any note were the deserted mills that had once employed the town, and the rising spire of St. Bridget’s, the Roman Catholic church.

It was in this humble and faintly depressing community that Jack Kelly spent his youth and first made his mark, but by the time his daughter Grace was born in the winter of 1929, Jack’s days of manual labor were already far behind. He had won at the Olympics. He had started his own business, and the measure of his success was the grand brick home that he had built for himself and his family at the top of the hill above East Falls—3901 Henry Avenue.

Henry Avenue was where the bigwigs lived. One of its grand mansions had once housed the Dobsons, the English family who owned the looms that had drawn the Kellys and thousands of other poor Irish immigrants to East Falls in the middle of the nineteenth century. But by 1929 the looms were shut down. The Dobsons were gone, and it was the bricklaying son of one of the lace-curtain families who now lived in style on Henry Avenue. Three stories high, with mullioned windows and broad chimney towers, the seventeen-room Kelly mansion was a palace in comparison with the modest wood and tar-paper villas down by the water. It stood in its own grounds, surrounded by trees. A curved, U-shaped drive led up to the Colonial-style front door. There was a tennis court, a cook, a companion-secretary, a supply of maids—and a black chauffeur-gardener to care for the flowers.

It was tough for most people to survive in East Falls in the 1930s. Grace entered the world three weeks after the great Wall Street crash, and she grew up through the darkest years of the Depression. But these events had very little impact on her life. Her father had never believed in the stock market. He had avoided debt, and put his spare money in government bonds. With his New Deal connections, Jack Kelly sailed through the depression like a king.

So life up at 3901 Henry Avenue was a comfortable and almost dreamlike sequence of activity and fun. The basement downstairs was decked out like a Bavarian rathskeller, complete with paneled bar. At Christmas a giant train set ran through a model landscape of hills, trees, and waterfalls. In winter the tennis court was flooded for ice hockey and skating parties. In summer a truck from Kelly for Brickwork delivered a huge metal cement-mixing container that was filled with water and served as a swimming pool. In the 1940s 3901 Henry Avenue boasted East Falls’s first domestic television set, and neighbors still remember coming around to gaze in wonder at the test pattern flickering on the nine-inch screen.

The Kellys were a showcase family, a handsome sight as Fordie the chauffeur-gardener drove them down the hill to St. Bridget’s on a Sunday morning. They made a grand entrance, well dressed and upstanding as they trooped in line to their pew, and after the service the priest was especially attentive as he paid his respects. In later years, newspaper stories often played up the lowly character of East Falls, the impoverished township that produced its own princess. But East Falls was only the backdrop to Grace’s childhood, and the role that she played in front of it was definitely young lady of the manor.

Grace was the third of the four Kelly children, arriving after Peggy, born in September 1925, and Jack, Jr. (“Kell”), born in May 1927. Grace was the youngest child until her sister Lizanne completed the family in June 1933, and she very much enjoyed her four years as baby of the household. She was never quite reconciled to being the daughter in between.

“My older sister was my father’s favorite,” she recalled in later life, “and there was the boy, the only son. Then I came, and then I had a baby sister. . . . I was terribly jealous of her.”

It was fortunate for Grace’s brother Kell that he was a strong and athletic character, for as the only boy of the brood, he was the child charged with a sacred quest. Defeating Henley’s champion and winning the Olympic gold medal in 1920 had not been enough for Jack Kelly. He would not have settled his accounts finally with the English, in his mind, until he could see the name of Kelly inscribed on the trophy of the Diamond Sculls itself, and he had no hesitation in charging his only son with the accomplishing of that mission.

The moment Kell was old enough, his father took him down to the Schuylkill. The kid started off as a cox, graduated to double sculls with his father, then went off on his own. Mornings and evenings saw the boy out on the water, skimming between the arches of the gray stone railway bridges. Kell enjoyed football at school, but his father warned him that the risk of injury would jeopardize his rowing. He grew pudgy and indolent in his early adolescence. Two brisk years away at military school snapped that out of his system—and when the weather was too dirty for working out on the Schuylkill, Kell could be found in his gymlike bedroom on the second floor of the family home. In the center of the floor sat a rowing machine.

Even in an age that was not much given to psychologizing, Jack Kelly’s obsessive channeling of his son’s life into the path of his own ambition struck some people as unhealthy. Relatives and the closer family friends mumbled about it forebodingly. But Jack Kelly was not a soul who could be easily diverted from his chosen purpose, while Kell, for his part, was an amiable and biddable boy, the epitome of good nature. He had the physical build for the river, and he seemed quite happy to be indentured to his father’s dream and to the Schuylkill.

“Kell was the boy lying on the couch doing exercises to strengthen his wrist,” remembered Charlie Fish, a friend of the family who grew up in nearby Germantown.

Angular and crew-cut, Kell reveled in the knowledge of the special hopes and dreams that he carried for his father—and for the whole family. But the boy was not bright. It was Peggy, the eldest daughter, who had inherited her father’s quickness of wit. She was the Lucille Ball of the clan. Tall and slender, with long grasshopper legs, Peggy Kelly was funny and outgoing, always ready with the snappy retort. Her nickname was Baba. She had a combination of good looks, athleticism, and spirit which her father considered just about perfect.

“The sun, the moon, the stars, they all rose and set on Baba,” remembers Alice Godfrey, who lived around the corner and was a playmate of Grace’s. Peggy had been just six months old when her father carried her proudly over the threshold of 3901 Henry Avenue—the first child he had made, moving into the home that he had made for her. It was a memory that Jack Kelly often recalled with pleasure, and it formed the basis of the particularly close relationship between the father and his eldest daughter.

Lizanne, the baby of the family, was tough and four-square—bigger boned, once she had grown for a year or so, than either of her elder sisters. She maneuvered robustly to find her own niche, shaking off Grace’s attempts to bring her under her wing. When Grace had been the infant of the household, she had been quite happy to play dutiful younger sister to the brilliant Baba, fetching and carrying and following her instructions in games. But Lizanne was not taking orders from anybody.

“What aren’t you nice to me,” Grace would complain, “like I was nice to Peggy?”

By Kelly standards, Grace had a feeble side. She was by far the least forceful of the four Kelly kids—quieter and more withdrawn, almost waiflike. Grace was the one with the colds and allergies, the child who was always falling over in the playground. When the Kellys sat round the dinner table for their roast, it was not Kell the rower or Lizanne the baby who got the essence from the meat. The juice went to Gracie with the scabs on her knees.

“Grace was always sniffling,” remembers Gloria Otley, whose father, Jess, was Jack Kelly’s estimator and principal partner in Kelly for Brickwork. “We were always saying, ‘Gracie, blow your nose,’ ‘Gracie, stop your sniffling,’ ‘Gracie, here’s a handkerchief.’”

The sniffler would spend long hours apart from the other children, playing with her dolls. “She was always very good at being alone,” remembers Maree Frisby, a childhood friend who was to stay close to Grace throughout her life. Grace would lose herself in the little dramas that she dreamt up for her dolls. She made up her own language for them, creating a private world of formality and make-believe that she could share with these wood and plaster friends. One cherished piece of Kelly lore relates how Lizanne, in a fit of temper, locked her elder sister in a closet. It was hours before Grace was discovered—unconcerned and quite self-sufficient, happily at play with her dolls, babbling the private code of endearments that she reserved for her own little family.

In adult life Grace Kelly was to prove something of a chameleon. Grace the sensible, Grace the sensuous, Grace the frivolous—she had a whole range of personalities, and she flung herself into each with rare energy and commitment. It was not a matter of superficial posing. She passionately believed in every role in which she cast herself, and it was her skill to isolate and insulate her various selves from each other with such success that people often swore they had met a totally different person. Grace Kelly was not naturally endowed with the tricks and techniques of the actress—she always had to work hard at her craft—but she did have conviction, an absolute belief in the part she was filling at that minute. “I’ve always liked to make-believe,” she told the Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky in 1954.

Grace’s infant world of fantasy illuminated another streak in her character. In later years her sister Lizanne was rummaging through some closets in the palace at Monaco, when she came upon a compartment that was stuffed with Grace’s childhood collection of dolls. At first surprised by her sister’s sentimentality in preserving her family of inanimate friends and transporting them all the way to the south of France, Lizanne then reflected on how remarkably clean and unbroken the dolls all seemed. Grace had usually preferred to play with somebody else’s toys if she could. She liked to keep her own dolls out of harm’s way, saving them for best. So the waif with scabby knees had not, perhaps, been quite as helpless as she seemed.

There was always a certain element of detachment in Grace. When her childhood friends recall her early years, they dwell almost enviously on the richness and excitement of life at 3901 Henry Avenue—the playhouses and the Christmas trees, the dynamic people shuttling to and fro. But Grace herself never felt entirely part of it. “I was terribly shy when I was young,” she recalled in one interview in 1974. “I almost crawled into the woodwork I was so self-conscious.”

“We were always competing,” she added two years later, developing the theme, “competing for everything—competing for love.” Grace felt like an outsider in her family of triers and tusslers, the third of four children, and lost in the shuffle. “I was always on my mother’s knee, the clinging type,” she remembered. “But I was pushed away.”

Grace’s mother subscribed to the energetic and elbowing Kelly ethic as completely as her husband. Margaret Majer came of stern and purposeful German Protestant stock—her family had owned a featherbed business in Baden-Wurttemberg—and she spoke nothing but German until the age of six or seven. She had first met Jack Kelly at a swim meet in 1913, and one of the principal reasons why the couple did not marry for nearly eleven years was Margaret’s insistence on first accomplishing the goals that she had set for her own life. Jack Kelly had left school in eighth grade, but Margaret Majer graduated from Temple University with a degree in physical education, then worked as a phys-ed teacher at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, a pioneering institution which was for many years the only all-female medical college in the United States. Margaret also found time to coach the University of Pennsylvania women’s swimming team, the first woman ever to be entrusted with the task.

A striking blonde with well-shaped cheekbones and a firm jaw, Margaret Majer was a handsome woman. She never worked as a professional model. That would not have been dignified. But she did pose in the 1920s for the cover of
The Country Gentleman
magazine, the very picture of refined and healthy beauty—with a distinctly Nordic tinge. When Margaret married Jack Kelly in 1924 she converted to Catholicism, but she remained unmistakably Teutonic.