Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (7 page)

“The sisters were quite remarkable women,” says Alice Godfrey. “I remember being struck by their sense of obligation and social duty. It was quite compelling. It affected us all, I think.”

Alice Godfrey has a particular memory of Sister Inez, a young nun from central America who took her final vows while Grace and Alice were her pupils: “Grace loved her. She was the most beautiful woman you ever laid your eyes on, with the biggest brown eyes and the creamiest skin. Grace and I talked about it. We just couldn’t believe that this gorgeous creature was giving her whole life to God.”

With her friend Alice, the nine-year-old Grace was one of a small group who were invited to witness Sister Inez’s solemn submission and induction into the order: “The ceremony was just unbelievable—the music, the chanting. The sister lay prostrate on the floor, and they covered her. The cardinal was there. If you could have seen the mothers and the sisters in their long white veils, coming in and kneeling at the prie-dieu, all bowing down and touching the marble floor Grace said to me afterward that she would never forget it. I mean, there was a moment in that ceremony when we both felt quite certain that God had come down and was right there beside us.”

Grace was nearly fourteen years old when she transferred from Ravenhill to the Stevens School in Germantown, a private establishment for girls that had been founded in Civil War times by a Miss Susie Stevens. This lady was said to have fallen down the stairs on hearing the news of her fiancé’s death in battle, and to have devoted the rest of her life, from her wheelchair, to the education of refined young ladies. Miss Stevens’s staircase was still there when Grace went to the school, the striking and dramatic centerpiece of yet another old, wood-paneled mansion that had been converted into an academy with an accent on decorum. The former stable house at the back of the courtyard had been remodeled into a sort of practice salon, where the girls were instructed in the etiquette of how to serve, and how to take, afternoon tea. Grace completed her high school education at Stevens, and it was during these last four years of schooling that she started going out with boys. But she did not, initially, meet with great success. “There was one period when she was between fourteen and sixteen,” her mother later recalled, “when she was nothing but a giggly somebody with a high, nasal voice. She always had had trouble with her nose. . . . That gave her the peculiar voice. Her enjoyment of food gave her a little extra weight. And she had been nearsighted for several years, which made it necessary for her to wear glasses.”

Grace had matured early and looked older than her years, but she suffered from a crippling lack of self-confidence. “I was terribly shy when I was young,” she later remembered. “I almost crawled into the woodwork I was so self-conscious. . . . I was so bland, they kept having to introduce me again and again before people noticed me. I made no impression.”

Grace conjured up these painful memories in 1974, when she was nearly forty-five years old, one of the most famous women in the world and universally revered as an example of poise and self-assurance. But the ache was clearly still there. For all her beauty and apparent serenity, the princess retained a core of insecurity that dated back to her childhood years. It was as if she still held inside her the plain and gawky little girl that nobody noticed.

The teenage Grace had a particular anxiety about her breasts, which, she felt convinced, were not large enough. “She had a complex,” remembers one of her school friends. “She was forever massaging them, hoping to make them bigger.”

Flat-chested, overweight, and wearing glasses. “Grace was not really known as a beauty queen in those days,” remembers Jim “Butch” McAllister, who knew Grace down in Ocean City, New Jersey, where the Kellys had a summer home. As Grace’s mother crisply put it, “She was nobody’s Princess Charming.”

At the time, Ma Kelly felt sorry for her shy and gawky fourteen-year-old. She was reminded of the withdrawn and waiflike child who had always seemed to require more babying than her extrovert brother and sisters. But later she came to wonder whether some of the survival techniques that Grace developed in her ugly-duckling years were not a source of her successes in later life. “I always wanted to protect Gracie,” she said. “She must have struck men the same way she struck me. Every man who knew her from the time she was about fifteen . . . wanted to take care of Gracie.”

Even as a successful and stunningly beautiful adult, Grace Kelly had the knack of getting people to coddle her. “She always had a way of getting people to do things for her,” her sister Lizanne once explained. “You really thought she needed help, but she did not need help at all. You’d find yourself thinking, ‘Oh, I’d better go over and help her.’ And she didn’t need help at all. She gave that impression.”

The streak of fantasy that had taken the baby Grace into her own safe world of dolls ran strong as ever. “When she was eight, nine, ten,” remembers Alice Godfrey, “we used to sit and we’d open up the
Esquire,
or whatever magazine was at the house, and we’d turn the pages, and she would make up a story about it— ‘Now, that’s my home, and that’s my car. There’s my husband, and they’re our children, and there’s this, and oh, yes, there’s where we’re going on our honeymoon.’”

Grace’s social confidence might falter from time to time, but she could fantasize with rare conviction. In the winter of 1940-41, when she was eleven, she went to a matinée of the
Ballets Russes
and was entranced with its star, Igor Youskevitch, the Baryshnikov of his day. She decided that she would become a prima ballerina. So she took ballet lessons until she was told that she was too tall— when she moved on to Ginger Rogers with equal enthusiasm. Maree Frisby, the new best friend she had made at Stevens, remembers Grace phoning her reproachfully from the modern dance class in which they had both enrolled. “I was not that keen on it, and I remember getting calls from Grace on Saturday morning—’Maree, where are you? You’d promised you’d be here.’”

Grace had acted in plays from an early age. After serving her apprenticeship as angel and shepherd in the annual Ravenhill Christmas pageants, she had graduated to the role of the “Virgin Mary. But it was during her gawky years that Grace’s passion for acting really started to take root, as she discovered how, on the stage, she could fashion herself into what she wanted with a style she could not yet master in real life.

A visit to a production by the Old Academy Players, a small East Falls amateur dramatic group, lit the spark. Grace rushed home from the play, which had featured her mother’s brother, Uncle “Midge” Majer, to tell her father that she wanted to be an actress.

Jack Kelly was not impressed. “He just looked up at me from his desk for a long time,” Grace later remembered. “Then he said: ‘All right, Grace, if that’s what you want to do . . .’”

The Old Academy Players were one of the many “little theater” groups of amateur enthusiasts that flourished in Philadelphia in the 1930s and 1940s. They had converted an old East Falls school-house into a theater, and it was in the plain but functional setting of this “old academy” that Grace Kelly made her stage debut in 1942 at the age of twelve. “I remember the first time on stage as a nice feeling,” she recalled in Hollywood a dozen years later. “ [It] was nice to feel an audience respond.”

The play was
Don’t Feed the Animals,
and Ruth Emmert, who directed it, was struck by Grace’s professionalism. The young actress was always on time for rehearsals, and she never forgot her lines. She also displayed a commendable willingness to raid her mother’s wardrobe for the costumes and props that the amateur company needed.

By the time she was a teenager, Grace was an amateur dramatic ministar. She was a juvenile stalwart of the Old Academy Players, cycling down the hill for rehearsals with the same commitment that Kell was displaying about rowing. The boy was starting to win at regattas. Grace’s equivalent was to win the leading roles in the productions at Stevens. She played Kate in
The Taming of the Shrew,
she was a dazzling Peter Pan, and she was the star of the school dancing classes. She brought the Stevens field day to a halt one year with a strangely erotic interpretation of a ritual fire dance, all jerks and drama, performed barefoot.

Her Stevens schoolmates had no doubt about her acting and her dancing abilities. The “prophecy” section of her final school yearbook envisioned a future for Grace Patricia Kelly as “a famous star of screen and radio”—though this was not to suggest that her friends considered her stagy or self-important. In the yearbook’s composite portrait of the “Perfect Senior,” Grace was listed as a model of a popular student.

“She had a real sparkle about her,” remembers Jane Porter, who was several years behind her at Stevens. “She was just fun!”

When Jane Porter first went to Stevens, she found that she had been assigned to Grace as her “little sister.” Older girls were given newcomers to take under their wings, and Grace carried out her responsibilities more thoroughly than most. “She was one of the few girls who had her own car,” remembers Jane, “a convertible, a Plymouth, I think. It was light blue—zippy. Every day we’d have to go down for hockey practice, and because I was her little sister she’d say, ‘Come on, Jane!’”

Jane Porter has horrified memories of Grace shifting the light-blue convertible into “drive,” jumping onto the top of the back of the driver’s seat-and then steering the car with her toes. The frolics of the convent schoolgirl now had an adolescent tinge. Grace was the center of an effervescent, bobby-socked group of girls at Stevens who shared her weakness for giggling and fun. They would meet Saturday mornings in Germantown for milk shakes and sundaes at the Dairy Maid.

Evenings found them at the Bandbox, the Orpheum, or the Colonial, one of the local movie houses, where Grace would swoon over the composed good looks of Alan Ladd, who was her favorite male film star. Her favorite film actress was Ingrid Bergman. Hopelessly sentimental, Grace did not like to leave the theater without a good cry. Alice Godfrey remembers her friend dissolving into tears at Mickey Rooney’s memorable line in
Boy’s Town:
“He’s not heavy, he’s my brother.”

And then there were the boys . . . . Some time before Grace was sixteen, these were no longer lacking. A year or so of development, the chemistry of the Kelly-Majer genes, and the self-confidence that had grown with Grace’s adolescent acting success had all come together to produce a real stunner. Grace was now a beauty.

“She had the most wonderful complexion,” remembers Teddy Hughes, a friend and schoolmate of Kell’s. “Her coloring was fantastic—sort of fresh and clear. It was her best feature—and it never showed in the photos.”

All the Kelly kids had luminosity. With their geometric good looks and their mouthfuls of perfect teeth, they exuded an aura of happy destiny that was comparable to that of Boston’s Kennedy family, another high-profile clan of Irish-Americans who were marching in these years to the drumbeat of a dynamic father. But Grace’s facial features clicked together with a symmetry and charm that her siblings could not quite match. Kell’s looks were so regular he was almost bland. Lizanne was on the tough side, Peggy a trifle coy. Only Grace was blessed with the balance that got the mixture just right—a near-perfect combination of the physical traits that her handsome parents had brought to their marriage. Good looks which seemed to shout out pedigree were the cornerstone of Grace Kelly’s adult fame, and the same was true of her beauty as a teenager.

3901 Henry Avenue acted as a kind of clubhouse for all the friends of the four Kelly children. Everybody gathered there. So it was not surprising that Grace’s first serious boyfriend was a schoolmate of her brother’s—Charles Harper Davis, the son of the local Buick dealer. Harper Davis belonged to the Trident Society, the elite fellowship of senior boys at Penn Charter School. Penn Charter was quite elite itself, the second-oldest school in America, having been founded in 1701 by William Penn, and it was a social focus for middle-class teenagers in the Germantown area. The school’s various clubs and societies held a series of dances through the winter, the high point being the Trident dance, and Grace went through a happy season on the arm of one of the biggest men on campus. The romance between the “Buick salesman’s son and [the] bricklayer’s daughter” was serious enough to rate a mention in the Penn Charter Class Diary.

In 1944 Harper Davis graduated from school and enlisted in the Navy. The war was drawing to an end, and he was anxious to follow in the steps of his father, a Navy man. But two days after Harper told Grace he would be joining the service, he came to his friend Teddy Hughes, ashen-faced and shaken. Grace had suddenly dropped him. Their romance was off.