Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (8 page)

At the time Harper said Grace had given him no real reason for her decision, and Grace never talked about it even with her closest friends. But it soon became clear that Papa had been involved. Jack Kelly considered it his paternal right and duty to regulate the love life of his daughters. He had forced Peggy, his beloved Baba, to break off her relationship with Archie Campbell, a young man who was too pasty-faced and nonathletic for Jack Kelly’s taste, and he was to prove equally interfering—though ultimately he surrendered—when it came to the wish of his youngest daughter, Lizanne, to marry a Jew.

The paterfamilias was surprisingly relaxed when it came to casual dating. The more boys the merrier was Jack Kelly’s point of view. He seemed to take it as a compliment that such crowds of eager young men should flock to the house in pursuit of his beautiful daughters.

“There were so many of us he could not remember our names,” recalled Charlie Fish. “So he’d just grin and call each of us ‘Son.’”

It was when things threatened to get serious that Jack Kelly intervened. That was when his daughters became his property. As he put it bluntly to one of Grace’s teenage suitors: “You can take her out as much as you like. But don’t think you’re going to marry her.”

This was the prospect raised by Harper Davis’s imminent departure for the war. There was the likelihood of the love-struck young couple being drawn toward fantasies of engagement or marriage—and the equal possibility that, engaged or not, Grace might feel impelled to proffer her brave companion the ultimate going-away present, as many a romantic young virgin did in those tense and stirring wartime years.

Either option was unthinkable for Jack Kelly. He disliked Harper Davis’s father, the Buick dealer—and the Davises were not Catholic. Grace was too young. Whatever way you looked at it, the relationship had to end.

Grace bent obediently to the imperious will of her father. She said goodbye to Harper Davis, and replaced him with a succession of handsome young men—the more the merrier, just as her father wanted. Grace had a wonderful time. She played the field with enthusiasm—though it seemed to her friends that she was seeking to bury some sort of pain or guilt in her busy and almost promiscuous program of self-gratification.

The boys about Germantown recorded their clambering up the sexual mountain in code. “Bra” meant inside the blouse, but outside the support system. “B.T.” meant bare tit. “F” stood for finger, from which you advanced to the jobs, hand and blow. It was an age in which full sexual intercourse was still regarded as a special and almost sacred event, not the routine commonplace of a teenage Saturday night. “Petting” was the coy name for the coy explorations of buttons and zips and the soft flesh at the top of the stocking. Each sweaty advance was ungraciously bragged of as the boys compared notes in the locker room, and it became quite common knowledge how far each girl would go.

In her post-Harper Davis years, Grace Kelly became known for her generosity. “I am sure she was still a virgin when she graduated,” says one of her dates. “But I reckon that she had done just about everything else.”

Grace would laugh about it herself when she got older. Charlie Fish was one of her regular dates while she was still at Stevens. He used to take her out in his old blue Ford roadster, and she would ask fondly after the car in later years. “I hope it’s safely in the scrapyard,” chuckled the Princess of Monaco. “Just think of the tales that backseat could tell!”

But Grace was never laughed about, or scorned as cheap or easy. She waltzed through the rituals of perpetual foreplay with nonchalance and pleasure, but she was never available to just anyone. She was discriminating about whom she dated, and she worked hard at being a good companion.

“She didn’t talk too much,” Howard Wikoff explained to Gwen Robyns. “Instead of showing off and chattering all about herself like most teenagers, she was attentive to her dates. She made each escort think he was King Bee.”

“If you wanted to sit, she’d sit,” remembered Jack Oechsle. “If you wanted to dance, she’d dance. And if you took her to a party she wouldn’t float off with another fellow. She was your date, and remained your date.”

By the time Grace was seventeen and coming to the end of her years at Stevens, the streaks of Kelly poise were clearly showing through. Grace was developing a very firm sense of who she was.

“It’s like her father when he would row,” remembers Alice Godfrey. “He would look at the rest of the group and say, ‘I wonder who’s coming in second?’ There was something of that about Grace.”

Inside her own close circle, Grace was impish and extroverted— zany even. Teddy Hughes remembers a crowd of friends discovering her padded bra under the seat of her convertible. Grace seemed to find it as amusing as everyone else, and joined in the melee with gusto, fighting fiercely for her falsies and flinging them cheerfully around the car. Yet she also had a sterner face. Jack Kelly and Uncle George each had their own ways of shrivelling people with a look—scornful in Jack’s case, more brittle and aloof in George’s—and Grace developed her own rapier glance that was a combination of the two. It could be devastating. If you chanced to earn Grace Kelly’s displeasure, you were left in no doubt that you had offended a member of the royal family of East Falls.

This chilly side was to become another of the prominent elements in Grace Kelly’s public persona in later life. It seemed to go neatly with her cool good looks, and it dovetailed with the plausible but mistaken assumption that was commonly made about her wealthy background—that she came from the aristocracy of Philadelphia. The Kellys were rich and royal by East Falls standards, but that was very different from making any kind of an impression on the serious society of Philadelphia itself.

The Philadelphia Assemblies Ball is the oldest and most exclusive social gathering in North America. George Washington attended. Held continuously since 1748, with only a few years break in times of war, the ball draws Philadelphia’s most ancient families together every winter for a glittering evening of dancing, display, and celebration of the comforting feeling that—at least by their own standards—everyone present has come out of the very top drawer. The men dress in white-tie and tails, the women in their finest and most flowing ball gowns.

The Assemblies Ball provides the arena in which some of Philadelphia’s best-born debutantes create their first social splash. The girls and their escorts parade down the marble staircase of the receiving room to the grand ballroom of the Bellevue-Stratford hotel, an elegant cascade of white silk and chiffon. One by one, each debutante curtseys to the reception line of matrons from the leading families. Then she prepares for her first dance in grownup society—for which, custom ordains, she must keep wearing her elbow-length, white kid gloves.

It was one of the dreams of the teenage Grace Kelly to “come out” as a debutante, according to her friend and bridesmaid, Judy Kanter, to whom Grace disclosed the fantasy in later years—and Grace would surely have provided a marvelous sight, sweeping down the marble staircase, eighteen years old and dazzling, in her white dress and white gloves. But this was not a fantasy of which Jack Kelly or his circle of friends approved.

“You want to ‘come out’?” Grace’s Uncle Bill Godfrey asked his daughter Alice, who shared her friend Grace’s fancy for a glamorous evening in white. “Well, I’ll hold the door open for you!”

This robust, man-of-the-people attitude masked a certain pique. “Jack Kelly always resented the fact that he was never in the Blue Book,” said Phil Klein, a friend of Kell’s—or as Jack himself preferred to put it, “I’m aiming for the
Do
Book, not the Blue Book.”

With his charisma, wealth, and political connections, Jack Kelly could have made it to the top of almost any other city in North America. In Washington, people manage it with votes and influence. In New York you can buy your way into the most prestigious social function. But when it comes to Philadelphia, one has to be
born
into the Assemblies.

Trying to explain it to outsiders, Assemblies members tend to talk in terms of history and of old friends sticking together—who got off the boat with William Penn and all that. But the bottom line is social and ethnic. This is old blood, and old money, literally the clique for whom the word WASP was invented, since it was while analyzing the social context of the Philadelphia Assemblies that Professor Digby Baltzell was driven to seek some easy abbreviation of the classification he found himself using most frequently—White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Philadelphia’s charmed circle is Old Guard and no apology about it—no blacks, no Jews, no Catholics, and no
nouveaux riches.
There is no room in this picture for self-made Irish bricklayers or their daughters, however slim and elegant.

In her extraordinary career as an actress and princess, Grace appeared to the outside world to be the very epitome of Philadelphia class and breeding. She played aristocratic roles, and she successfully conveyed the impression that she was reared in the elite Assemblies environment of white gloves, white dresses, and fluttering debutantes. But in reality, Grace never attended the Philadelphia Assemblies Ball. She never paraded down the Bellevue-Stratford staircase as a debutante. Her manners and her sense of etiquette came from the Stevens School and from the Sisters of the Assumption in the parish of St. Bridget’s, and for all her eminence in her own particular corner of Philadelphia, she could never make it in the society that really counted.

Grace Kelly was an outsider, an excluded observer of a world that was held to be the ultimate in terms of class and privilege— which may be one reason why she made such a good job of mimicking the style and customs of that world in her later life.

In May 1947, Grace graduated from the Stevens School. She was seventeen and a half, and she had no idea what she was going to do next. She had assumed she was going to Bennington, then a women’s college in Vermont. “I wanted to be a dancer,” she later remembered, “and Bennington had a wonderful four-year course in all forms of dance.”

But Bennington had entry standards for mathematics that Grace could not match. Ever since her earliest Ravenhill days, math had been her weak suit.

Her parents did not really focus on the problem. The priority at Henry Avenue in the summer of 1947 was the boy of the family, Kell, whose years of pain and training on the Schuylkill were poised to reach their intended crescendo—the capture of the Diamond Sculls at Henley. Grace’s college plans had to take a backseat to the preparations for the Royal Regatta that July—getting the shell packed up safely, and ensuring the young athlete a reliable supply of frozen steaks to supplement the austere and rationed food supplies of postwar Britain.

At the end of June 1947, the family set sail for England. Kell had gone to Henley the previous summer, and had failed to bring home the coveted trophy. He had crossed the line in second place and had collapsed where he sat, folding into himself, almost comatose. His hands had gripped the oars so tightly that it took two strong men to pry them off, finger by finger.

Now, on July 5, 1947, with his parents and younger sisters looking on, Kell made no mistake. Wearing a replica of his father’s famous green racing cap, he was the easy winner of the polished antique box that enshrined the world’s premier sculling trophy. When he brought it back to America, he was honored with a victory ride through the streets of Philadelphia, sitting in an open car in the company of his laughing father. The Mayor gave a testimonial dinner in his honor. Only just twenty, and still three years from graduating at the University of Pennsylvania, Kell had already achieved his purpose in life. It was difficult to see what he, or any other member of the family, could possibly accomplish that would add further luster to the Kelly name.

Not until all the rituals of celebration were concluded did the further education of the champion’s second sister resume its place on the family agenda. Ma Kelly set about organizing a tour of women’s colleges in the Northeast, and she set off with Grace at the beginning of August 1947. But they were far too late. Everywhere they went the entry rolls were full, and the middle of the month found mother and daughter taking gloomy stock in the New York apartment of Marie Magee, an old friend of Ma Kelly, who lived just off Broadway on West Fifty-fifth Street.

“We can’t get into any college,” Mrs. Kelly reported. “What are we going to do?”

“Well,” replied Mrs. Magee, “what do
you
want to do, Gracie?”

“Aunt Marie,” said Grace, “I wonder if I could get into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts?”