CHAPTER THREE
Unlike most aspiring actors and actresses who descend upon New York each year, Grace did not have to suffer the indignity of living in a cockroach-infested, five-floor walk-up while at school. One of the conditions of her parents’ approval of her move to New York was that she stay at one of the city’s most irreproachable institutions, the Barbizon Hotel for women—something a young girl could not do unless underwritten by her family. For the first year of her stay in New York, all of Grace’s living expenses, and her Academy tuition, were paid by her father.
The Barbizon was the kind of place designed to placate all the fears that mothers suffer when their daughters leave home; so Victorian was it that electrical appliances were banned. The “good character” of the girls who lived there was ensured by the requirement of three references; and their continued acceptable behavior was guaranteed, their parents were assured, by an early curfew and a strict “no men” regulation, which was enforced by burly matrons who guarded the elevators to the girls’ private quarters. Every morning at seven, rooms would be checked to ascertain that the girls had spent the night sleeping alone.
With Grace’s sexual drive aroused by her encounter in Philadelphia, she wasn’t about to let the rules of the Barbizon rein her in too tightly. Of course, the Barbizon wasn’t a prison and the girls were free to come and go as they pleased. Any activity frowned upon by the management of the Barbizon could always be conducted away from its hallowed halls—and frequently was by Grace over the course of the next two years. But her newly developed rebellious streak led her to a very risky breach of the regulations, one for which she could have been thrown out of the hotel.
Grace had met Herb Miller during her first day at the Academy. Miller, who later changed his name to Mark Miller and co-starred in the television sitcom Please Don’t Fat the Daisies, recalls, “We were turned on to each other from the first day we met. We were two young, vital, horny kids, and our relationship was very physical. It was a hot and heavy thing. There was a recreation room on the thirteenth floor of the Barbizon, and Grace used to bring me up there and we’d smooch. We were very much in love, and we had an awful lot of fun. Sometimes you can have a physical relationship with someone, but not like them. But Grace and I really liked each other.”
Grace’s indiscretion within the walls of the Barbizon was never discovered—possibly because, as was true for most of her life, her image was so pristine that no one would have suspected her of such a flagrant flaunting of the rules. The genteel facade of the Barbizon suited Grace perfectly; she had by then well assimilated the Kelly credo of appearance as everything.
Grace had taken her mother’s concept of how a respectable young woman looks and acts and adopted it whole as her personal style. “She was terribly sedate,” a friend recalled. “Always wore tweed suits and a hat-with-a-veil kind of thing. She had any number of sensible shoes, even some with those awful flaps on front.”
She also wore white gloves, a badge of genteel femininity harking back to the 1930s. Her Barbizon roommates recall Grace sitting alone through dinner, quietly reading a book. Within public view she was always flawlessly polite, a model of decorum. Grace would have been the last of the girls the Barbizon guardians would have suspected of bringing men into the establishment.
But the inner tug-of-war between what she wanted to project publicly and what she wanted to experience privately not only led Grace to break the rules, it also caused her to flirt with the exposure of her indiscretions. She could have gone to Herb Miller’s apartment to be intimate with him there,1 but there was something about the danger of discovery that excited her. Another, milder example of this is her roommate’s recollection that despite a ban on loud music and dancing Grace would frequently perform wild dances in the hallways, dressed only in panties, and skitter back to her room whenever the elevator approached.
This wild side of Grace, usually so well hidden beneath layers of propriety, sometimes surfaced even in public—when Grace had been drinking. Those who thought her chilly and decorous were stunned one night at a New York party when Grace suddenly jumped on top of a table, flipped off her shoes, and began to writhe sensuously to the guitar music being strummed by one of the other guests. Moving sinuously, she became more and more sexually provocative, undoing her topknot until her hair fell about her face and shoulders. One of the male guests watching this display with fascination muttered, “I’ve said all along there’s fire under all that ice.”
But if Grace flaunted authority, she also took her studies at the Academy very seriously, even when her assignments seemed silly in the extreme. “We would be assigned to go to the Bowery and watch a drunk,” Grace explained, “and come back and act out a drunk. Or we would have to study a workman on an excavation for several days and play him. We also had to go to the zoo and study a llama.” And, one presumes, come back and play him.
Grace’s greatest diligence in school was in the effort to improve her speaking voice, the one area in which she was criticized at her audition. The Academy’s policy was to smooth out regional accents, giving everyone an “American” way of speaking that could not be localized. Mark Miller recalls working very hard with Grace on both their voices. “I had this Texas drawl and she had the worst, most nasal Philadelphia accent you could ever imagine. We were both very conscientious about trying to lose our accents— we’d stay up until one in the morning doing speech exercises. It was very funny really, us doing all these umlauts and oow-ooh sounds. I finally lost my drawl, but Grace corrected her accent a little too much—she started sounding British.” Grace liked her new manner of speech; it was refined and mellifluous and went very well with her prim image.
Casting directors would later find Grace’s new voice quite fetching, but when her sisters first heard it they teased her unmercifully. Finally Grace told them, with a touch of hauteur, “I must talk this way—for my work.” Mrs. Kelly recalled, “They saw that she was serious and stopped joking.”
The only thing Grace was as serious about as her acting was her determination to become financially independent of her parents. Theatrical jobs were out of the question until she graduated, and Grace was at a loss to figure out a way to make her own money. On a weekend trip with Mark Miller, an unexpected opportunity presented itself. “I was doing some modeling at the time,” Miller relates, “and had become friends with a photographer who had begun doing covers for Redbook magazine. He invited me out to his house for the weekend, and I brought Grace with me. When he saw her he flipped. He said to her, ‘You’ve got great bone structure. Do you mind if I take some pictures of you?’ Grace said he could, and a few weeks later he called me for her phone number —Redbook wanted to use her on its cover.”
Grace had thought about modeling, but she wasn’t at all convinced she could make any real money at it. The Redbook cover encouraged her to put together a portfolio and, with the moral support of her friend Carolyn Scott, she approached several modeling agencies. Her wholesome prettiness was perfect for the kind of all-American image advertisers sought to project, and a top agency quickly signed her. She began working at the excellent 1948 wage of $7.50 an hour, doing both print jobs (newspaper and magazine ads) and television commercials; the first featured her spraying a can of insecticide around a room. She was most often used for household ads, prettily promoting the latest cleanser or appliance, and she more than once bemoaned the fact that although she aspired to be a career woman it still seemed as though she’d be stuck in the kitchen.
Although Grace made the covers of other important national magazines like Cosmopolitan and Ladies’ Home Journal, she never could project the kind of high-fashion modeling image that would have put her in the pages of Vogue. A photographer for Macy’s department store, which used Grace frequently for its newspaper ads, explains why: “She was very beautiful and certainly tall enough, but she was not as painfully thin as most of the fashion models, so by the accepted standards she was just not chic. As a result of this criteria we couldn’t use her for ‘high fashion’ clothes. We used Grace Kelly only for lingerie.”
Ruzzie Green, another photographer who shot Grace for a toothpaste ad, described her as “what we call good clean stuff in our business. She’s not a top model and never will be. She’s the girl next door. No glamour, no oomph, no cheesecake. She has lovely shoulders but no chest. Grace is like [Ingrid] Bergman in the ‘clean’ way.”
She may not have become a “top” model, but by any standards she was a success. Within a year she was earning a steady four hundred dollars a week, often much more. Still, she wasn’t happy modeling. She resented some of the things she was called on to do (like wearing lingerie and being flirtatious with men at conventions while handing out cigarettes), and the grueling work was especially difficult for someone who was doing it only to make ends meet. (After a year of work, she had stopped accepting money from her parents and moved into her own apartment in Manhattan.) Her lack of real enthusiasm for modeling affected her performances: “I was terrible,” she said about a cigarette commercial she’d done for television. “Anyone watching me make a pitch for Old Golds would have switched to Camels.”
Grace’s success as a model created some problems with her fellow Academy students. John Lupton recalls that Grace was “a candidate for Miss Rheingold, and that was like being Miss America if you lived in New York. There were big billboards all over the place. You looked up at the top of a five-story building and there was a picture of Grace Kelly’s face. It just made her seem that much bigger than life.”
The reaction that this, and Grace’s personality, engendered in many of her Academy classmates was, in many ways, similar to the kind of response she would get years later in Hollywood: a combination of awe, jealousy, and resentment. “I had several classes with Grace,” Mary Woolverton, now Mrs. Daniel Naredo, recalls, “and like everybody else in that class I’ll never forget her when she got dressed for exercise class. We had to get into our leotards and Grace was absolutely exquisite. She was so beautiful. But I always thought she was kind of cold. I didn’t think she had much talent. I remember thinking, though, that she would become a success just on her looks—and that thought kind of amazed me.”
Grace, Mary remembers, “wasn’t particularly popular. She was a loner. She looked like a model who came in, did her thing, and left. There were students who were in awe of her because of her beauty and that distant quality she had. No one believed she had any particular talent. I remember once we were all sitting around and talking about where we’d be after we graduated, who’d be doing what. Grace said there was no doubt in her mind that she would be a success. It was taken by the others as her being presumptuous and snobby, and they resented it.”
Classmate Craig Shepard confirms that there was a good deal of resentment toward Grace at the Academy. “People would see her on the street and say to each other, ‘Did you see Grace Kelly? Get her! Who does she think she is?’ Of course, she was working and most of us weren’t, so there was a lot of jealousy, I’m afraid.” Shepard had his own problems with Grace, though. “Grace I found was very cold. We graduated together, and later I worked with her on a Philco/Goodyear Playhouse. She played Mrs. Lincoln, which was the lead, and I was just an extra. Never once did she say, ‘Hiya, Craig.’ I mean, we had been classmates! I’m not bitter about Grace, but I don’t think she was a saint. She was always a lady, always well groomed, but she was not always charming.” One of Grace’s most serious problems with the other students at the Academy was their sense that she had an unfair advantage over them. As Shepard puts it, “I never thought Grace could act. She wasn’t an imaginative actress, a creative actress. All she had was technique. She knew her craft, but as for the actor’s temperament, innate talent, forget it. But she had other things going for her that were obviously more important. She had good connections. Her uncle was George Kelly, and she came from a wealthy family. And she had perseverance, drive. I’m sorry I can’t say better things about Grace. She was beautiful and—I was going to say she was kind, but I’m not sure she was kind.”
Occasionally her classmates expressed their resentments toward Grace with childish tauntings. Once, in a crowded elevator, a student continually pushed a puppy he was holding into Grace’s face until she began to cry. The young man ridiculed her tears until an instructor who had entered the elevator put a stop to it.
The instructor was twenty-seven-year-old Don Richardson, a married man separated from his wife, who has since directed hundreds of theater and television shows and now teaches acting at the University of California at Los Angeles. He had never met Grace before, and he found himself drawn to the teenage girl. “I was amazed to realize that without knowing her at all I felt immediately protective ... I found myself treating her as tenderly as a child.”
Richardson offered to walk Grace back to the Barbizon, but when they got there, she was reluctant to say good-night. Richardson asked her if she would like to come over to his apartment. “She said yes,” Richardson recalls, “and we went over to my place. I started a fire, and within forty minutes we were in bed together. It was an amazing sight, seeing a girl as beautiful as Grace lying naked in my bed, bathed in the light from the fireplace. I thought to myself, ‘Boy, you sure got lucky.’”
Grace and Richardson began an affair, the first of many she would have with older men. In the months that followed, he often took her to parties at the homes of theater and television professionals he knew. One of these was Irving Pincus, producer of Ellery Queen, a TV show Richardson was directing at the time. “There were a few important agents present, with their wives,” Richardson says. “At this gathering, like all the previous ones, Kelly— that’s what I called her—sat wringing her white gloves, listening and listening, but deeply enclosed. When one of the women would direct a question or comment at her, she would answer in a high young voice with a slight Philadelphia ring to it, articulately and poised, but then, having made a reply, she asked no question or made any comment in turn. The next day Pincus called me on the phone and said, ‘Jeez, you’ve brought some dull broads to my house, but last night was the dullest.’”
Richardson didn’t think Grace was dull. “Her public persona was so completely different than her private self that it was phenomenal. She was so proper, people thought of her as a nun. But when we were alone together, she used to dance naked for me to Hawaiian music. And if you don’t think that was an incredible sight, you’re crazy. She was a very sexy girl.”
Before long, Richardson found himself falling in love with her. Grace too was infatuated. Richardson was exactly right for her—nine years older, separated from his wife, worldly and accomplished, an authority figure, and a man in a position to help her who believed strongly in her potential for success. “Even then,” Richardson says, “I was convinced that she was going to be a major movie star. She wasn’t a great actress, and her voice was minimal, which was a problem for the stage—I don’t think she would have become a great stage star—but I knew that the special qualities she possessed would come across beautifully on the screen.”
Several of Grace’s fellow students were aware of her relationship with Richardson. “Grace and Don Richardson were very much in love,” Mary Naredo volunteers. “He was the first great love of her life.” John Lupton recalls that this affair between an instructor and a student became a prime topic of classroom conversation. “It wasn’t a very common thing,” Lupton says. “I think the general reaction was ‘Wow!’”
One classmate who wasn’t aware of Grace’s new romance was Mark Miller, even though he continued to see her for much of the time she was involved with Richardson. Ironically, Miller recalls a fight they had over his discovery that Grace was dating someone else. “I found out she was seeing this stud from Philadelphia, a real big handsome guy. I thought, Where did this guy come from? and I got real pissed off. Very jealous. I had no idea about Richardson. We resolved the problem of this guy from Philadelphia, but we broke up over something else, but I can’t remember what it was. It was shortly before graduation. It was very tragic for me. I’d dated a lot of girls, and I was ‘pinned’ in college and all that, but I never adored anyone like I did Grace. But I’m happy that we were able to segue into a friendship—we remained friends all her life.”
For his part, Don Richardson wasn’t in the habit of falling for his students, but Grace fulfilled several important emotional needs in him. “I fell in love with Grace,” he says, “for reasons that were very different from why I thought she was going to be a great movie star. When I met Grace, she seemed very pathetic, very helpless, very fragile. She was terrified of people, and very uncomfortable with herself. I felt protective toward her; she needed somebody to look after her. She was friendless, she had no warmth at home of any kind. And so my heart went out to her almost as though she were a waif.”
Part of Grace’s appeal for Richardson, of course, did stem from the qualities she possessed that he felt would make her a star. “I also fell in love with Grace because to me she was the ultimate shiksa. To a Jewish boy that kind of blond, blue-eyed beauty was the forbidden thing. Apart from that, I was madly in love with her sculpturally, pictorially. I’m also a sculptor and I paint. I used to sit and admire her wrists or her ankles or her hands. I found her a terrific art object, aside from being a human being.”
Grace returned Don’s affections, he says, “not just because I was a very handsome man, but because, as a Jew, I was forbidden to her. We were like yin and yang—we were total opposites. And I guess I was La Boheme to her. When you’re raised with money, bohemia can have its attractions.”
Richardson was surely living the part. After separating from his wife, he had moved into a small apartment on west Forty-fourth street. To furnish it, he turned to his father, who owned a boardinghouse in Coney Island and sent him some old furniture that had been stored in the basement: a bridge table, eight wooden restaurant chairs, and an army cot. “That was my pad. That was where Grace and I spent weekend after weekend. You can only explain it as La Boheme, because, compared to her wealth, this looked like Raskolnikov’s lair in Crime and Punishment.”
As the relationship became more and more serious, Grace began to talk of marriage. “I wasn’t terribly interested in getting married,” Richardson says, “because I’d just been through a separation. But Grace kept talking about it. I told her that her church would never allow it, because I’d be a divorced man. But she told me that because I’d never been baptized, everything that went before could be wiped out. I’d have a clean slate in heaven, or something like that.”
After several months of increasing involvement with Richardson, Grace made a weekend trip home to Philadelphia. Almost immediately Mrs. Kelly sensed a dreamy distraction in her daughter, and that could only mean one thing. “Gracie,” she asked her, “there’s a man, isn’t there?” Grace told her mother about Richardson and added that he had asked her to marry him. Richardson, Mrs. Kelly recalled, had convinced Grace that “he could make her into a wonderful actress within a very short time ... She was flattered. She was intrigued by the idea of becoming a big star— and even more beguiled by the fact that someone thought she could be a star. When she spoke about him, she was carried away. There were all these big things they were going to do...
Mrs. Kelly advised Grace to wait, telling her, “You can make it on your own. You don’t need anyone.” Later she recalled that “I went on in that vein at length, and I believe I convinced her ...”
“Convinced” is not exactly what Grace was; “bullied” is a more accurate term. Mrs. Kelly did not want Grace involved with a “theater person”—or with an older man, a New York sophisticate, or a Jew: Kellys were expected to marry within their religion. Even before she met Richardson, Mrs. Kelly decided he wasn’t right for Grace. And she sensed, correctly, that her importunings for her daughter to “wait” (meaning “forget it”) would not be heeded. When Grace told her mother that she wanted to bring Richardson home to meet the family, Mrs. Kelly felt she needed to take swift rearguard action. What ensued was Grace’s first jarring realization that when it came to matters of the heart, her life was not her own.
On the Friday evening that Grace and Richardson were due to arrive on Henry Avenue to spend a weekend, Mrs. Kelly asked Kell to bring over two of his more obnoxiously macho athlete buddies while Richardson was in the house—and Kell knew exactly what he and his friends were meant to do. “I gave them the word,” he admitted years later, “this fellow was a bit of a creep.”
“I didn’t want to go,” Richardson says, “because I’d been through that before with my first wife, and I could have done without it. But Grace insisted. I knew nothing about her family— she wasn’t famous at this time, remember.” When Richardson entered the Kelly home, the family was gathered in the den. Mr. Kelly told him to sit down and asked if he would like a drink. Richardson replied that he would. “He went to the bar and unlocked it—everything in that house was locked, including the refrigerator. He poured me a drink and then locked the bar again. I found myself sitting there with this bourbon and water, feeling like I was a drunkard or something—I was the only person in the house with a drink.”
Feeling awkward and self-conscious, Richardson looked around the room. “There was a painting of Papa sitting in a chair with a rifle in his lap and a hound dog, you know, the typical bullshit painting.” Nothing was said for several minutes, then Kell and his friends began to needle Richardson.
“They gave me a real hard time, making Jewish jokes and doing Jewish imitations. ... It was very uncomfortable for me.” “But I’ll tell you,” Richardson continues, I felt worse about the way they treated Grace. She was as removed from the family orbit as I was. She sat in the corner with her kid sister, totally isolated from the rest of the family. They seemed to take no interest in her at all. During the course of that evening, we went to his country club for dinner. On the way, we stopped at Peggy’s house, and Papa went around making a whole show of himself, touching things and saying, ‘This is holding up pretty good. They told me it would when I bought it.’ He kept saying ‘I bought this, I bought that, I bought this.’ Then we continued on, stopping three times to look at churches, where he announced that he had donated this wall, and we stood there looking at bricks. And during this, nobody paid any attention to Grace whatsoever. When we sat down to dinner, all his conversation was with his son and those two bully boys he’d brought along to humiliate me, and they talked about athletic scores, that kind of thing.
“I was seated at the far end of the table with Mama and Grace and the kid sister. Grace mostly sat with her head down and looked totally separate from all of them. At one point Mama asked me, ‘How is Grace doing at the Academy?’ And I said, ‘Oh, your daughter’s going to be a very important movie star.’ She looked at me as though I’d wounded her mortally. ‘It’s only a childish whim,’ she said. Mr. Kelly called from the other end of the table, ‘What’s going on down there?’ And Mama said, ‘This young man says that Grace is gonna be a great movie star.’ And he said, ‘She’ll get over that nonsense and settle down.’”
Richardson spent the night; the following morning, things got worse. Mary Naredo supplies an interesting piece of information of which she became aware. “That next morning, after Don left his bedroom, Mrs. Kelly actually went through his briefcase—and she found a letter from Don’s wife’s lawyer about their divorce. Well, Grace had never told her mother that Don was married, and that’s when things really hit the fan.”
Told of Mary Naredo’s comment, Richardson says, “You know, I’d completely forgotten about that. But it’s true. When Mama found that letter from my wife’s lawyer, she asked me to leave the house. They threw me out. I’m sure things were made much worse by the fact that also in my briefcase were condoms. Grace was very naive at that time; she didn’t even use a diaphragm. So it was up to me to make sure she didn’t get pregnant. I can only imagine Mama’s reaction when she realized that Grace and I were having an affair.”
The Kellys forbade Grace ever to see Don Richardson again. When he returned to Manhattan, he did so alone, and after Grace was graduated from the Academy a few days later, she was moved out of the Barbizon and sent to the Kellys’ summer beach house in Ocean City, New Jersey. She was not allowed to return to New York and pursue the theatrical roles her two years of training had prepared her for. Several weeks elapsed before she telephoned Richardson. “When the call came at last,” he says, “she said she had walked a mile up the beach to a public phone in order to call me.”
At the end of the summer Grace made a furtive trip into Manhattan to see Richardson. All she could do was sit talking with him in Penn Station for half an hour. “During which,” Richardson says, “she sat on a bench and cried.”
“Grace said she was in love with Richardson,” Lizanne recalls, “and she was very upset about that horrid weekend. But my parents didn’t understand him at all. They didn’t understand his way of life. He was so different from the boys Grace had dated in school, the boys from Penn Charter. They were friends of my brother’s, athletes, Joe College types, and all of a sudden here was Grace with a sophisticated man from New York. They didn’t like that. Their age difference was a problem too. But you know, my father was nine years older than my mother, and we always used to throw that in her face when she’d say, ‘I think that man’s too old for you.’ It came up a lot with Grace, because she definitely had a thing for older men.”
The Kellys allowed Grace to return to the Barbizon that fall, after extracting a promise that she would not see Richardson again. “It was a promise neither of us could keep,” he says, and they resumed their affair, spending weekends at his apartment. Before long, Richardson found an unexpected visitor at his door.
“Papa came to see me. There was Mr. Kelly in all his grandeur, in a gray hamburg and dark overcoat and suede gloves, and he looked at my place and he just couldn’t believe it. I asked if I could take his coat, and he said no and just stood there in the middle of the room. He said, ‘Let me put it to you straight—how would you like a Jag?’ Well, in New York City in those days, no one had a car, and I didn’t understand him. I thought he meant to go on a jag, you know, go out drinking together. I thought he was trying to make amends for that horrible weekend. And then he said, ‘Any color,’ and I realized it was an object meant to bribe me into leaving Grace alone. I then made a great speech about how dare you, I love your daughter, and I don’t want anything from you, how dare you insult me. He left in a great huff.”
Then, Richardson says, Mr. Kelly changed his approach. “The following week I got a phone call; a young male voice advised me that if I didn’t stay away from Grace, I would have every bone in my body broken. I replied, ‘Her father’s offer was better.’”
The phone calls continued, “threatening all kinds of mayhem,” Richardson says, but he never told Grace about them, or about her father’s visit. “I found myself unable to talk to Grace about her family. Her family was off limits. Her devotion to them was actually kind of pathological when you consider how much rejection they gave her.”
Grace would never have criticized her parents to anyone, but she was left angry, frustrated, and hurt by their combination of distance and self-serving possessiveness. Her reaction took the form of renewed resolve to achieve her own success, but she also rebelled against the heavy-handed moral strictures forced upon her and became sexually promiscuous. It was this, ironically, that drove the wedge between her and Don Richardson that the Kellys could not.
“We continued to see each other for three or four years,” Richardson says. “But I began to see the other side of her nature, which was that she was cold as steel. She was like a Patton tank on her way somewhere. The thing that ended our romance was that she started to get interested in people who I found unworthy of her. She started to go around with the maître d’ of the Waldorf, because he was connected with a lot of big society people, and he knew a lot of celebrities. She became his mistress.
“Then, one night she had a date with Aly Khan, and a few months later, after she had started to be in the movies and she was still living on the East Side, she called me up and invited me to come and have dinner. She made dinner, and later in the evening she said to me, ‘Would you like to see some beautiful things?’ and she started modeling clothes for me. I thought they were pretty clothes, but I couldn’t understand her great pride in them. She’d always had wealth, so what was so important about these clothes? And then she brought out a bracelet. It was a gold bracelet with several emeralds in it. Unfortunately, I recognized the bracelet. I had known several other girls who had the same bracelet. When Aly Khan had a date with a girl, he used to give her a cigarette case with one emerald in it. When he fucked her, he gave her the bracelet.2
“I took the bracelet and dropped it into her fishbowl and left in a huff. That was the end of our romance. I thought her values had gone gaflooey, you know. I knew our relationship couldn’t go anywhere because I was never interested in social climbing, celebrities, that sort of thing. I loved the work. When I asked Anne Bancroft, who was also one of my students, what she aspired to, she said, ‘To be a great actress.’ Grace’s reply was ‘I want to be a big movie star.’ There was the difference, you see.”
Grace and Richardson remained friends and corresponded until the end of her life. But he found it difficult to accept what he saw as a tragic spiral into which Grace had fallen. “From the time of the bracelet incident, she screwed everybody who she came into contact with who was able to do anything good for her at all. I lost all respect for her. She screwed agents, producers, directors. And there was really no need for it. She was already on her way.
“Ironically, her Catholicism, which she believed in, didn’t prevent her from being promiscuous. She would jump out of bed on Sunday morning, wearing nothing but the crucifix, go to church, come back in an hour, and jump into bed. Catholicism is a very flexible religion.
“It wasn’t that she was a nymphomaniac, in any way at all. I saw no signs of that. She was a normal girl. But she just had a terrible need to have someone put his arms around her. What she needed, constantly, was reassurance that she existed. She was starved for affection because of the family. She was afflicted with a great sense of emptiness, terrible loneliness, and this was her way of alleviating it.”
1 On other occasions, she did just that. Classmate John Lupton recalled, “I went to a party at Mark’s once, and he and Grace spent the entire evening making out in a corner.”
2 Mark Miller reports as well that Grace told him that Aly Khan proposed marriage to her; she turned him down, because at that point her career was the most important thing in her life.