CHAPTER TWO
Like her mother-in-law, Margaret Majer Kelly was a strong-willed woman, but unlike his father, Jack Kelly was not easily dominated. The influence of the Kelly side of the family can be gauged by the fact that Margaret, raised a Lutheran, converted to Catholicism in order to marry Jack. Despite this concession to Ma Kelly, Jack’s mother never did warm to her daughter-in-law. There was, perhaps, too much similarity between the two women, and Mary feared that Margaret’s strength might undermine her own influence over her son. Two years after the marriage, however, Mary Kelly died—and the wheels were set in motion for a striking re-creation of the John Henry Kelly family in that of Jack Kelly.
Within nine years of their marriage, Jack and Margaret had four children—Margaret (Peggy), born in 1925; John Jr. (Kell), born in 1927; Grace, born November 12, 1929; and Elizabeth Anne (Lizanne), born in 1933. By the time of Kell’s birth, the Kellys had moved from an apartment into a grand, seventeen-room house on Henry Avenue in fashionable Germantown—which Jack Kelly built, of course, with Kelly bricks. The John B. Kellys, never considered for membership in Philadelphia’s renowned Main Line society, had nonetheless become one of the city’s wealthiest families. It was one of the few ways in which Jack Kelly’s family differed from his father’s. But there were many more similarities.
Like her mother-in-law, Margaret Kelly was a woman who dominated her children and ran her household with an iron hand. When they were old enough to verbalize a certain wry bitterness about their upbringing, her children often referred to Margaret as “our Prussian general mother.” Mrs. Kelly wouldn’t take umbrage at the description: “I wasn’t the sort of mother who waited to discipline the children until their father came home.”
Jack Kelly wasn’t home all that much. He tended to his business six days a week and played golf religiously every Sunday. Later he dabbled in politics and, after his youngest daughter was born, had several extramarital affairs. So Margaret Kelly had little choice but to run her household herself, especially since all the parental energy, ambition, and drive that Jack Kelly possessed was spent on just one of his children: Kell. Jack’s only son, and a typically sturdy Kelly progeny, Kell represented to his father an opportunity to avenge the humiliation and disappointment he had suffered at the hands of the Henley stewards in 1919. With a singleness of purpose that some might describe as fanatical, Jack Kelly began, when his son was just seven, to mold him into as exceptional a sculler as he himself had been. Throughout his high school years Kell spent every minute of his spare time practicing and training. He forswore a social life, did not date, and had little of what most young people consider “fun”—not because he was as internally driven as Jack Kelly had been as a boy, but because this was what his father “expected” of him. Kelly family biographer Arthur H. Lewis has said that Kelly “messed up his only son’s life by forging him into an instrument of personal revenge.”
Kathy McKenna, who served for ten years as Kell’s administrative assistant when he was a Philadelphia city councilman, says, “Kell wanted to play football. He didn’t want to row on the river, but it didn’t matter. You have to understand the nature of John B. Kelly, Sr. He was the boss. And Ma Kelly was the boss. I don’t think any of those kids had a shot. They were raised in a family where children were seen and not heard. You speak when you’re spoken to. You do what you’re told. ‘My way or the highway.’ Kell spent his entire life, even after his father died, trying to measure up.”
So great was Kell’s sense of duty that when he lost his first Henley race he was so devastated his hands had to be pried from the oars. Kell ultimately fulfilled his father’s destiny by winning the Henley championship twice, as well as a bronze medal in the 1956 Olympics. But he remained forever in the shadow of his father, whom most sculling enthusiasts consider the greatest sculler in history. In middle age Kell broke free of the emotional constraints that had been inculcated into him, left his wife and six children, and had a relationship with a transsexual which resulted in a near-scandal and helped ruin his chances to become mayor of Philadelphia. Those close to the Kelly family blame Jack Kelly that his son missed out on his adolescence and attempted to have one after forty. Jack Kelly’s influence on his daughter Grace would be as great—and, in many ways, as damaging—but for a totally different reason. Within her family, little Grace was an outcast, a pariah.
Of all his children, Jack Kelly appreciated and understood Grace the least. He was a sportsman, and his son and two of his daughters inherited athletic talent from him. The child Grace was a meek, sickly girl, uninterested in sports, and timid and shy amid a rambunctious, energetic family. Jack Kelly disdained intellectuals and the arts; Grace demonstrated an early aptitude for reading, theater, and reverie. Her father never came to understand her or relate to her-—preferring boys, he was delighted by his tomboy daughters and puzzled by the feminine Grace. “I don’t get that girl,” Jack Kelly once told a friend. “We’re an athletic family, very good athletes, and she can barely walk.”
Jack Kelly made no secret of the fact that he favored his firstborn, Peggy, over all his other children. Even Kell would feel the sting of Jack’s sometimes crudely insensitive outspokenness about his preference for Peggy. When Kell’s first child, a girl, was born, he expressed mild disappointment to his father that the child had not been a boy. “Don’t worry,” Jack Kelly told the son who had put the name John B. Kelly on a Henley trophy, “My greatest joy in life has been Peggy.”
Grace’s early years were spent battling a series of illnesses—frequent colds and inner ear problems. “We’d all have head colds,” Peggy says, “but Grace’s would settle in her ear and linger.” Grace was the only Kelly child not robustly healthy; Kell recalled that she was made to drink the blood juice of the family roast “to build her up.” Her sickly state affected her personality, made her even shyer and more withdrawn than she already was. Jack Kelly, for one, couldn’t understand this un-Kelly-like behavior, and he offered little “Gracie” scant sympathy. He was frequently heard to ask his wife, “What’s Grace sniveling about now?”
Most of Grace’s later drives in life would be motivated by a deep-seated need for her father’s love and approbation, but it seemed that there was nothing she could do to impress him. Even after Grace won an Oscar, Jack Kelly told the press, “I always thought it would be Peggy. Anything Grace could do, Peggy could do better. How do you figure these things?”
Grace turned to her mother for the love and attention she wasn’t getting from her father. “Grace was always a mommy’s girl,” Lizanne says. “We have pictures of Peggy, Kell, and Grace when Grace was about two, and she’s on Mother’s lap, but Mother is lying down so as not to be in the picture—Grace wouldn’t sit for the picture unless my mother held her.”
Despite this, Grace did not receive an overabundance of love from her mother either. Mrs. Kelly instilled in her children a strong sense of religious righteousness and social propriety, competitiveness, ambition, and determination, but she did not shower them with affection—least of all Grace. She once described the difficulty of her position in the family: “My older sister was my father’s favorite, and there was the boy, the only son. Then I came, and then I had a baby sister and I was terribly jealous of her. I loved the idea of a baby but I was never allowed to hold it. So I was always on my mother’s knee, the clinging type. But I was pushed away, and I resented my sister for years.”
A series of governesses cared for the children, the first a German woman who frightened Grace: “She told such terrifying stories,” Grace recalled, “that I’d be afraid to go to sleep. I kept asking Peggy, ‘Can I sleep in your bed?’”
This strange woman was replaced, after Lizanne’s birth, with a spinster friend of Mrs. Kelly’s, Florence Merckle. A warm, affectionate woman who took as much interest in Peggy, Grace, and Lizanne as she would have had they been her own, “Aunt Flossie” became a surrogate mother for Grace. “Flossie was wonderful,” she said. “I remember how I’d feel when she came to school to watch me in a play. Just having her in the audience mattered a lot to me. Although I think it did make me wish my mother could have come more often too.”
Children deprived of parental love and attention often forge a strong bond with their siblings, but this was not so with Grace. Her brother paid scant attention to her; her sisters didn’t understand her much more than their father did, and they alternately mistreated and took advantage of her. Peggy exploited her younger sister’s worship of her: “I was always telling her what to do,” Peggy recalled, “and she always did it.” Grace may have balked once or twice, but to no good end—neighbors remember Peggy once dragging Grace along the ground by her hair. With the compassion of adult hindsight, Peggy later said, “I wonder if I imposed on her.”
A younger sibling dominated by an older one is fairly common in a family; often the harassed child turns around and bullies the next in line. Not Grace. Sister Lizanne, as boisterous as Peggy, quickly began to terrorize her frail older sister. As Lizanne later admitted, “I gave Grace the most trouble. For three years she was the baby of the family. Then I came along and elbowed her out of the way. I used to beat her up—yes, I really did! And let her say she wanted something, and I’d grab it first. When she grew older, I was the brat sister who made her life miserable ... I was awful!
“Grace used to be very nice to Peggy and she used to say to me, ‘Why aren’t you nice to me like I was nice to Peggy?’ She was Peggy’s lackey—Peggy used to make her do things for her and get things for her and she would try the same thing on me and I wouldn’t do it. I guess I was a little more stubborn than Grace.”
Grace, so much a misfit in the Kelly clan, developed a protective shell, and a considerable ability to amuse herself. She read a great deal, lost herself in reverie, and made up little plays for her dolls to act out, providing each of them with a distinct voice and personality. Lizanne says, “Grace never went to Mother and said, ‘What can I do now, Mommy?’ She always entertained herself.” Lizanne remembers a vivid example of Grace’s almost preternatural calm and resourcefulness: “I don’t remember how old Grace was. Probably nine or ten, maybe eleven. We had a fight—we fought constantly—and I locked her in the closet in our room. I don’t even know why I did it, but I refused to let her out all day. Mother kept asking me where Gracie was, and I kept telling her I had no idea ... I gave Grace a pillow and her dolls. That was all she needed. She stayed in the closet until I let her out at suppertime, and she was perfectly happy there. She didn’t seem angry. She didn’t even tell Mother.”
Reminded of the incident years later, Grace admitted she was indeed angry—but even at that early age she had developed a philosophical serenity: “What’s the use of getting angry? You can’t improve the situation ... I can’t quarrel. I’d rather give up. I don’t like fighting, all the loud voices and the angry words ... when it’s finished I feel as though a steamroller had gone over me. And I remember it for a long time.”
As Grace grew older, her health improved, and her innate Kelly athleticism finally showed itself. She began to take dance lessons, developed an interest in tennis, then—in an attempt to be more like the rest of the Kellys—she became involved in sports. In time, she grew proficient. Lizanne recalls, “Grace was a very good athlete. She was captain of her hockey team, she was a good swimmer, and a good diver. She wasn’t consumed with sports, but she was always first team on every sport she went out for. It wasn’t like it was with me and Kell, but to say she wasn’t an athlete is entirely wrong. At camp she won all sorts of medals and honors.” But as her mother recalled, “While the rest of us went in heartily for sports of all kinds and were eager competitors, Grace participated only because she liked the people she played with, not because she was anxious to win.”
If Grace, in some small way, hoped to win the acceptance of her family by participating in sports, she wasn’t successful. Still “mild and timid,” as her mother described her, Grace continually faded into the background of this boisterous group—which put her at a distinct disadvantage in a family in which, she later said, “we were always competing. Competing for everything—competing for love.” She often got lost in the noisy family shuffle; friends recall Grace’s mother introducing her daughters to people and forgetting about Grace. Once, Grace’s birthday cake carried an incorrect number of candles.
In this kind of atmosphere, young “Gracie” was a very lonely little girl, and her possessions—particularly her dolls—became extremely important to her. “Grace always liked to save her dolls,” Lizanne recalls. “We would always get the same dolls. When someone came to the house, they would bring two dolls, one for Grace and one for me. My dolls got to be an absolute disgrace because we’d both play with mine. Grace kept hers safely away. Years later, when I visited the palace, I looked into her closet and saw all her old dolls. I said ‘My God, Grace, you still have those dolls!’ And she said, ‘Don’t you still have your dolls?’ I said, ‘No, we destroyed mine playing with them.’”
Lizanne’s perception of Grace’s “timidity” was that it did not reflect her sister’s true personality. “She was very strong-willed and determined, but very mild about it. She had a way of making people think she needed help. You always thought, ‘Oh, I better go over and help her.’ But she did not need help at all.” Lizanne isn’t sure why the disparity existed, but she has an idea. “It might have been a conscious thing—maybe she was more conniving than I thought she was.”
Grace’s interest in acting began when she was nine or ten. By the time she was twelve, she and Peggy were performing regularly with the East Falls Old Academy Players. For Peggy it was a lark, but Grace took her roles seriously and developed an ability that brought her increasingly important roles as she entered her teens.
Acting, for Grace, was the best way she knew to shine the way a Kelly was expected to. Unable to compete with her siblings in personality and athletic skill, she was able to take her inner fantasies and act them out on stage, where people had not bad to listen to her. And there can be little doubt that Grace saw theatrics as her way to the fame and accomplishment that her father and two of his brothers had enjoyed, and that he was grooming Kell to achieve. If she couldn’t—or didn’t want to—follow in her father’s athletic footsteps, she could at least emulate his famous theatrical brothers.
It was no coincidence that Grace felt closest to her uncle George during her formative years. Both were pariahs within their families. Like Grace, George had no love for physical pursuits. He was a quiet, book-loving pretender to sophistication amid a rough-and-tumble Kelly tradition. A homosexual in a family of womanizing men, George Kelly knew what it was like to be different, and Grace strongly sensed his empathy with her plight within her own family. Like Grace, George was enraptured of fantasy, but he took his several steps further than Grace: throughout his life he invented a background for himself considerably more impressive than the one he had lived. To many, George Kelly was an insufferable snob—he refused to consider tea brewed from a tea bag—but to Grace he was the epitome of sophistication, style, and taste. Indeed, many of Grace’s own refinements were developed through careful observation of her uncle George.
It was George Kelly, above all others, who fostered Grace’s continued interest in the theater—both by his exalted example and by his active encouragement. George had tried to discourage his sister Grace from becoming an actress, telling her the life was “too hard.” But after his own great success, George felt more confident in prodding his niece along a path he sensed she was headed anyway.
Grace did something about her interest when she joined the Old Academy Players. Mature and dedicated beyond her years, Grace was a godsend to the company’s director, Ruth Emmert. She was never late for rehearsals, always knew her lines, and was able to raid her house for impressive props and wardrobe. Tall, and with a poise and sophistication uncommon for her age, Grace was given ingenue roles when her peers were still playing juveniles. Ruth Emmert, in fact, thought Grace was fourteen or fifteen. When she found out otherwise, Grace begged her not to tell anyone else, so that she could continue to have a wide range of roles.
One of Grace’s Academy Players performances elicited a rare word of praise from her father. As he told it, “The woman who played Grace’s mother forgot her part. Grace dropped her handbag. As she came up with it, she fed the older actress her lines. Turning to Margaret, I said, ‘We’ve got a trouper on our hands.’” Grace’s first newspaper notice came with her performance in her uncle George’s play The Torch Bearers, and the critic agreed with Jack Kelly’s observation: “For a young lady whose previous experience was slim,” he wrote, “Miss Kelly came through this footlight baptism of fire splendidly. From where I sat it appeared as if Grace Kelly should become the theatrical torch bearer of her family.”
Even at Ravenhill, the Convent of the Assumption, where Grace spent her grammar school years, the nuns sensed in her a talent for the stage when she played the Virgin Mary in the school’s annual Nativity play. One of her teachers, Sister Elizabeth, recalled being impressed by her performance: “She understood the drama of the thing—she was reverent and serious ... she came in majestically and sweetly, laid down baby Jesus, and made a deep genuflection.”
By the time she was graduated from Stevens, a public high school, Grace’s theatrical ambitions were so well known that her yearbook photograph bore the caption, “She is very likely to become a stage or screen star.”
High school years are either among one’s happiest or a period that one cannot wait to be over. For Grace, it appears to have been largely the latter. “The teens are rather awful to live through, aren’t they?” she said. “I was rather shy—certainly never much of an extrovert. They were wonderful years and terrible years. Anxious years. Not very happy.”
Between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, according to her mother, Grace went through an awkward period: “She was nothing but a giggly somebody with a high, nasal voice. She always has had trouble with her nose, and in her childhood winters she had been the victim of one long sustained cold in the head. 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. All in all, she was nobody’s Princess Charming in those days ...”
Joseph Kenworthy, then a seventeen-year-old high school junior, dated the fourteen-year-old Grace and disagrees with Mrs. Kelly’s unflattering assessment of her daughter at this time. “There was nothing awkward about her looks, in any way, shape, or form. Ever. She was beautiful, intelligent, fun—you name it, she had it. She had a great personality, and she was all kinds of fun. Everyone who took her out fell in love with her, believe me.”
Despite Grace’s recollections of unhappiness in high school, she seems to have been the kind of lovely, popular young lady every adolescent girl envies; by most accounts Kenworthy’s assessment appears to be accurate. One friend described her as “the best giggler I ever knew,” and her high school yearbook contained this description of her, obviously written by a friend: “One of the beauties of our class. Full of fun and always ready for a good laugh, she has no trouble making friends.” A classmate said after she became famous, “Grace was a wild teenager, but everybody hides it. She gets loyalty from everybody, but those of us who knew her remember her.”
If Grace ever did go through an awkward period, by the time she was sixteen she possessed the loveliness that would make her world famous. Even in her yearbook photograph—those pictures usually being notoriously bad depictions of even the most attractive young people—she looks more like a movie ingenue than a typical high school student.
With her beautiful complexion, blond hair and blue eyes, a carriage and sophistication rare for her age, and her “great personality,” Grace was inordinately sought after by young men, usually several years older than she. “Men began proposing to my daughter Grace when she was barely fifteen,” Mrs. Kelly has said, contradicting her statement that Grace was “nobody’s Princess Charming in those days.” “She probably won’t like my saying this at all—but I’m sure that if she had added a charm to a bracelet for each proposal, she would scarcely be able to lift that bracelet today.”
Just as she had been with her family, Grace was pliable, deferential, and accommodating with the young men she dated. One remembered, “Grace had a pleasing way about her. She didn’t talk too much, just listened. 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, and you know, some girls never learn that.”
Another concurred: “I think she was popular because she made a man feel comfortable. If you wanted to sit, she’d sit; 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 she remained your date.”
Grace’s accommodation of her dates did not, at this time, extend to providing sexual favors, but neither was she prudish or off-putting with her boyfriends. Joseph Kenworthy recalls, “It may not have been as free and easy as it is today, but there was plenty of what we used to call necking and that kind of thing. Certainly there wasn’t as much sleeping around as there is today—unfortunately. But there was nothing cold about Grace. She was a normal girl on a date. There was no way that you got the feeling that she was trying to freeze you out—but she wasn’t free and easy either.” Grace fell in love in high school, with a young man named Harper Davis. He was a friend of her brother’s at the William Penn Charter School, and he used this “in” with the family to convince Mrs. Kelly to allow him to escort Grace to a Penn dance—although she was only fourteen (Harper was sixteen). “Because she was so young, I was concerned,” Mrs. Kelly said later. “I waited until they got home; I couldn’t force myself to go to sleep as long as she was out of the house. When she did get back she said, ‘Oh, Mother, I had a wonderful time!’” Mrs. Kelly liked Harper Davis: “He was a nice clean-cut boy with brown hair and eyes,” Mrs. Kelly recalled. “He and Gracie made a handsome young couple. And he took her out many times, to dances, sports events, and sometimes to the movies.”
That Harper and Grace were a school “couple” can be gauged from a mock “gossip column” item which appeared in the Penn Charter Class Diary in March 1944: “Rumors of a rift between a Buick salesman’s son and a brickmaker’s daughter. The buzzards gather ...”
Immediately after Harper was graduated from Penn Charter in 1945, he enlisted in the Navy. He and Grace wrote to each other faithfully and dated while he was on leave. In 1946 Harper contracted multiple sclerosis. “I suppose we never knew how much he meant to her,” Mrs. Kelly said. “The first intimation of Grace’s deep feeling for Harper came only after he was stricken ...”
At first Harper was confined to his house, and Grace spent hours with him, trying to keep his spirits up. Not long afterward, his condition worsened, and he was transferred to a hospital. “It became terribly apparent that he would never recover,” recalled Mrs. Kelly. “Toward the end it was more saddening than ever for her to visit him. The people who today regard Grace as cold and emotionless should have seen her after she came home from an hour by the bedside of a boy who could neither move nor speak.”
Harper remained ill for seven years and died in 1953. Grace flew in from Hollywood for his funeral, and a year later, she admitted to a reporter, “I was in love with my first boyfriend. His name was Harper Davis, and he died.”
As Grace prepared to graduate from Stevens in 1947, family attention was focused away from her even more than usual—Kell was about to make his father’s dream come true. Later that summer he won the Diamond Sculls at Henley on his second try. “At last,” wrote his father years later, “after twenty-seven years of waiting and hoping, the name of John B. Kelly was on the Diamond Sculls.”
Grace had been her brother’s most enthusiastic booster in the family—once deeply embarrassing him by becoming inconsolable over one of his losses—but his success only made her more eager to carve out achievements of her own. By this time, she knew she wanted a career in the theater, but she hadn’t expressed this ambition to her family. Although most of her contemporaries aspired to little more than marriage and children—Peggy was already a mother by the time Grace was graduated from high school—Grace found her mother sympathetic to her hope of furthering her education.
The school Grace wanted to attend was the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, but she was too meek to make the suggestion to her mother, who was more enthusiastic about her daughter attending a good East Coast college to get a “proper” academic education. In the hope that she could have it both ways, Grace suggested Bennington, the women’s college in Vermont. “At the time I wanted to be a dancer,” she explained, “and Bennington has a wonderful four-year course in all forms of the dance.”
Grace applied to Bennington, but a series of roadblocks confronted her. “That was the year all the boys who had been in the war came back to school, creating such a jam that hundreds of girls who would have gone to coeducational schools had to go to women’s colleges. Bennington just had to raise its entrance requirements to keep from getting too overcrowded, so instead of asking that each girl have one year of math, it asked that she have two. Me, studying to be a dancer, I had only one year, and that was that.”
When she found out she had been denied admission to Bennington, it was too late for Grace to apply anywhere else. Along with her uncle George’s encouragement, this rejection emboldened her to broach to her parents the subject of where she really wanted to go. Neither, unsurprisingly, was enthusiastic. Her father warned her against entering the theatrical life. “My husband knew, from hearing his brothers talk of the stage,” Mrs. Kelly said, “what a difficult and often dismal life it could be. I was not too fond of the idea of my little girl all alone in New York.”
“My parents were afraid that she wouldn’t make it and she’d be disappointed,” Lizanne recalls. “I don’t think they were unhappy about the profession; they were afraid she wasn’t determined enough. But she was.”
For one of the few times in her life, Grace was insistent. “She had never wanted anything so badly before,” Mrs. Kelly said, “so we couldn’t hold out.” Jack Kelly relented, allowing her to audition—probably because he thought she’d be turned down and finally get this nonsense out of her head; his comment, according to a family friend, was, “Let her go. She’ll be back in a week.”
Her father, as he would through most of her life, underestimated Grace’s mettle—and her shrewdness. “Deep down,” Lizanne would later say, “Grace had to prove to Daddy that she could do it.” Later, Grace would usually avoid use of her family name to create an advantage for herself, but she was not above doing exactly that at key times—and this was one of them. Asked to explain her theatrical goals on her application to the Academy, Grace wrote—with marvelous disingenuousness—“I hope to be so accomplished a dramatic actress that some day my uncle George will write a play for me and direct it.”
Her relationship to the revered George Kelly played a larger part in her admission to the Academy than Grace could have imagined it would. When she applied, enrollment had already been closed, and she was told that there simply was no additional room in the class for anyone, not even the next Eleonora Duse. But when Grace’s “aunt” Marie Magee took her to see Emil Diestel, the secretary of the school’s board of trustees, she told him that he simply had to hear this girl: she was the niece of George Kelly. Marie recalls, “Mr. Diestel said, ‘Oh, in that case, have her come tomorrow and read for me.’ And he gave her twenty sides of dialogue to learn.” The dialogue—by wild coincidence—was from George Kelly’s The Torch Bearers.
The door may have been opened because of her family ties, but Grace was on her own once the audition began. Although her evaluation sheet contained the notation “niece of George Kelly,” it was Diestel’s favorable impressions of the girl herself that guaranteed Grace admission to the Academy: she had, Diestel noted, a “good” personality, “very good” stage presence; “good” intelligence; “expressive” dramatic instincts; and “positive” imagination. The only negative remarks were reserved for Grace’s speaking voice, described as “nasal” and “improperly placed.” But Diestel very much liked what he saw. “Lovely child,” he concluded. “Should develop well.”
And thus Grace Kelly embarked on her first major step toward independence from her family—and, she hoped, success in a field she herself had chosen. Her boldness in tearing herself away from the Kelly nucleus won her the admiration of her brother. Asked years later why Grace had been able to succeed to such an astonishing degree, Kell replied, “She got away from home early ... none of the rest of us managed to do that.”
Shortly before Grace left for New York to cross a major threshold in her life, she crossed another quite different one in Philadelphia. At the age of eighteen, Grace Kelly lost her virginity. In a pattern that would repeat itself again and again over the next eight years, her partner was a man several years older than she— and married. Describing her first sexual experience to a later lover, she said, “It all happened so quickly. I dropped in unexpectedly at a girlfriend’s house—I remember it was raining very hard—and her husband told me she would be gone for the rest of the afternoon. I stayed, talking to him, and before I knew it we were in bed together.”
Grace was aching to have her sexual and artistic vistas broadened, and her life in New York would do just that-—to a degree she never imagined in 1947. Outwardly Grace was everything her mother had wanted her to be—demure, sensible, and refined. But she possessed a strong rebelliousness, a thirst for experience, a burgeoning sexual drive and curiosity, and resentment against the strictures of her upbringing. Most important, Grace’s drives and motivations were inspired by her almost pathological need for her father’s approbation. Lizanne’s assessment that Grace “needed to prove to Daddy that she could do it” is an accurate but mild one. Most of Grace’s actions in the next eight years were motivated by this need—and the result was extraordinary success. But her “father complex” also left her with an obsessive attraction to older, accomplished, authoritative paternal figures. She allowed this attraction to take her into imprudent liaisons that caused her great public embarrassment and no small amount of private guilt, and ironically, infuriated the very man whose love and approval she most sought.
But for Grace in 1947, her first thrust of independence and her acceptance into the august Academy of Dramatic Arts—alma mater of such celebrated performers as Spencer Tracy, Lauren Bacall, and Kirk Douglas—represented her first step toward the freedom and emotional fulfillment she had never before been able to attain. “Now,” she said to her mother as she prepared to leave, “I’m really going to do what I’ve always wanted to do.”
