High Society

by Donald Spoto

  Her reply was firm: “I am out! Do you think that to get a date I have to use those women who sell mailing lists of boys’ names?” No, she had other plans and was not to be stopped.

  “I was saved from professional perdition,” Grace said, “because there happened to be a place in New York that my parents thought would preserve, protect and defend me, as if I were the Constitution. It was a residential hotel for women only, and to have my father’s consent to audition for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, I had to agree to live at that hotel—not in an apartment on my own.” Perhaps because of his own philandering, Jack was not inclined to trust his children. A hotel for women, which denied access to men above the street-level foyer, would keep careful watch and ward over young Miss Kelly.

  TWO

  The Student Model

  I don’t want to have your mind and will, Father—I want to be myself.

  —GRACE (AS BERTHA) IN STRINDBERG’S THE FATHER

  THE TWENTY-THREE-STORY BARBIZON HOTEL FOR Women, at Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street, was designed using an imaginative blend of Italian Renaissance, Gothic and Islamic architectural styles. Admitting its first residents in 1927, it represented an alternative for young women arriving in New York in the Roaring Twenties, leaving home in search of new professional opportunities but wanting a safe, respectable place to live. The owners and managers created and reinforced the values of the mostly wealthy families from which these women had come; in 1947, few others could afford the rate of twelve dollars a week.

  Three letters of reference were required from applicants, and there was always a long waiting list. Dress codes and house rules were strictly enforced; liquor was forbidden on the premises; and men could visit only on the ground floor. Despite—or perhaps because of—these apparent constraints, the Barbizon was considered a very desirable place to live. “If a girl put on her résumé that she lived at the Barbizon,” recalled Margaret Campbell, the longtime executive housekeeper, “that was almost enough, morally and socially,” to guarantee employment; at the least, residents had access to some of New York’s higher social life. Several of the Beale and Bouvier daughters lived there in the 1920s and 1930s, and over the years its tenant list included the writer Sylvia Plath and many aspiring or working actresses, among them Lauren Bacall, Barbara Bel Geddes, Gene Tierney, Candice Bergen and Liza Minnelli.

  The accommodations were certainly not luxurious, and a new girl’s first impression might have been that her austere quarters resembled a convent cell or a house of correction. The nine-by-twelve-foot rooms were little more than cubicles, with space only for a narrow bed, an armless chair, a clothes rack, a floor lamp and a small writing desk. Fewer than eighty of the 686 rooms had private baths—the rest shared common facilities on each floor. But everyone had the use of the hotel’s gymnasium and swimming pool, library, music studio, kitchen and dining room. Complimentary afternoon tea with tiny sandwiches was served in a large parlor—close to dinnertime, for the benefit of those on tight budgets. The place was lively with news, gossip and music played on a phonograph that had seen better days.

  Grace settled into the Barbizon in late August 1947. “She kept a great deal to herself,” recalled Hugh Connor, the manager during the years of her residency; he added that she seemed very shy, sitting alone, wearing glasses as she read or knitted. Grace kept a wire recorder in her room and listened to herself reading so that she might improve her diction. But she was not antisocial and established several friendships that endured for the rest of her life: close companions knew her skill at droll imitations and responded to her infectious laughter. Carolyn Scott, an aspiring model who also lived at the Barbizon, remembered Grace as being sedate in public, given to tweed suits, sensible shoes and a hat with a veil—an image recalled by many that year. “Grace’s usual outfit,” according to another friend, Alice Godfrey, “was a sweater or cardigan, a bandanna or scarf, a simple skirt and always her glasses—nothing glamorous.”

  BEFORE HER eighteenth birthday that autumn, and after several auditions and interviews, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts accepted Grace’s application for enrollment and handed over a copy of their rating of her abilities:

  Voice: Improperly placed

  Temperament: Sensitive

  Spontaneity: Youthful

  Dramatic instinct: Expressive

  Intelligence: Good

  General remarks: Good, full of potential and freshness

  Founded in 1884 and still successfully operating 125 years later, the Academy was the first school to offer a professional education in theatre arts and was considered a prestigious institute for students and working actors in the United States. When Grace arrived, its alumni list included scores of successful actors, among them Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Edward G. Robinson, Ruth Gordon, Rosalind Russell and Kirk Douglas. Students enrolled in a two-year program, attending classes several hours for two or three days a week in the cavernous upper floors of Carnegie Hall, at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 57th Street.1*

  “As I remember, our lessons, exercises and rehearsals were rather loosely structured,” Grace recalled. “We read and analyzed scenes from the classics and from modern plays, we improvised and from time to time we presented fully staged plays for alumni and teachers. There were classes in voice, fencing, makeup, mime—nothing was omitted. And discount tickets were available to Broadway theatres.” During her first year at the Academy, Grace remembered seeing the New York productions of Finian’s Rainbow, All My Sons, Brigadoon, The Heiress, A Streetcar Named Desire and Mister Roberts.

  Tuition at the American Academy cost $1,000 a year, an enormous sum in 1947. Almost every student held down a job, and Grace was no exception, for she never wavered in her refusal to accept family support. That year, several residents at the Barbizon were working as models, and they insisted that she, too, could earn good money in print ads and commercials. She needed only some good photos to show to modeling agencies.

  In 1946 and 1947, peacetime prosperity brought an increase in leisure time and more disposable income for household appliances and entertainment. At once, there was an enormous upsurge in the production of television sets, as wartime manufacturing freezes were lifted. At the same time, the New York-based television networks pushed westward to cover the entire country, and the price of TV sets continued to fall with the boom in mass production. Whereas only 0.5 percent of U.S. households had a television set in 1946, 35 percent had one by 1947. This astonishing growth was accompanied by a proliferation of advertising agencies like BBDO and Young & Rubicam, and modeling agencies like those founded by Eileen Ford, which needed many more attractive young women to promote and publicize products. Ford, for example, had two clients in 1946 and thirty-four the following year.2*

  Grace’s friends at Barbizon were on the mark. With her restraint and poise, her bright, blue-green eyes, her alabaster complexion, and a glorious smile that made everyone want to smile with her, she was precisely the image Middle America adored and wanted to replicate. Without any difficulty, Grace found work as a model from 1947 through 1949, signing with the John Robert Powers modeling agency. Founded in Philadelphia in 1923, the agency had briefly represented her mother, who frequently had Powers agents photograph her children. By 1947 the agency had a New York office, and along with Grace, the actress Rita Gam joined its client list. “I thought she was the most gorgeous creature I ever met,” recalled Rita. “She was also entirely unaffected, completely without vanity.”

  Grace began working at $7.50 an hour, and her pay rose quickly to $25.00 an hour—and then to more than $400 a week (approximately $4,000 a week in 2009 valuation). She thus became one of the highest-paid models in New York, and the income covered her tuition bills at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts while enabling her to save healthy sums each month. “She absolutely did not want to be supported by the family,” said Lizanne. “I remember her saying, ‘If I can’t have a career on my own, by my own means, I don’t want to have one at all.�
�” Grace appeared in five-minute-long fashion movies filmed in Paris and Bermuda; she was on the covers of Cosmopolitan and Redbook; she was photographed for advertisements for Max Factor lipstick, Lustre Creme shampoo, Cashmere Bouquet and Lux soaps, Rheingold beer, Ipana toothpaste, Talbot beauty creams and Old Gold cigarettes—and she often acted in TV commercials.

  “My still photographs were okay,” she said years later, “but in the TV commercials I was—honestly and truly—just terrible. I think anyone watching me promote Ipana toothpaste must have run out to buy Colgate, or if they saw my Old Gold commercial, they would have bought Lucky Strikes or Chesterfields. It would be nice to think I was not believable in them because I didn’t believe in the products, but the truth is that I was simply awkward in reciting the words and stiff in my gestures. My first TV commercial was for an insecticide, and I had to run around a room smiling like an idiot and spraying like a demon. It wasn’t exactly what the Academy was preparing me for.” When I told Grace that it was very difficult to find any surviving TV commercials in which she had appeared, she said, “Thank God for that!”

  GRACE’S ROMANTIC life has been the stuff of considerable tabloid speculation since her death, and the number of her lovers has been greatly exaggerated. But an intimate relationship did begin in late 1948, when she fell in love with Don Richardson, one of her teachers at the Academy. Eleven years her senior, he was a sophisticated New Yorker who completely charmed her, and their affair continued intensely over almost two years. “It came as no surprise when she asked permission to bring him home for the weekend,” Lizanne recalled. “The visit was in April 1949, and it was a disaster. At the dinner table, the sound of knives and forks was deafening. The silence was virtually absolute. Every now and then, somebody tried to start up a conversation, but it didn’t last. Mr. Richardson, for his part, was racking his brain for any topic of conversation that was not theatre. Again, silence. He just didn’t fit in and never did.”

  There may have been several reasons for the collective cold-shouldering of Don Richardson. Separated but not yet divorced from his wife, he was an actor, a director and a Jewish New Yorker. In addition, Margaret implied that Grace was using Richardson to advance her career. “Honey,” she told her daughter, “you can make it on your own. You don’t need anyone.” Grace was horrified at her mother’s suspicions, but her mother’s words planted the seeds of doubt about her intentions with Richardson. “The whole situation couldn’t have been more gruesome,” Grace wrote to Prudy Wise, a friend at the Barbizon who later became her secretary. “The fact that I could fall in love with a Jew was just beyond them.” Grace ended the affair when Richardson persisted in pursuing other romances at the same time, and because he was not free to marry; most of all, she became enormously confused about their respective motives.

  Graduation from the Academy in the spring of 1949, when she was nineteen, gave her the opportunity to break off all contact with Richardson. “We were typical young drama students,” Grace told me. “When we graduated, we were all saying that soon we would be signing autographs for millions of fans, and we tried out all kinds of ways to write our signatures. Oh, it was just a question of time before we’d have fame and fortune! There would be nothing between us and stardom except a few city blocks—from the Academy to Broadway theatres, an easy five-minute walk.” At the commencement party was a young man named John Cassavetes, who was a year behind Grace at the Academy and who soon launched a significant career as an actor and director. He was surprised when another student said to him, “That Grace Kelly is such a pretty little thing. Isn’t it a shame she’s too shy ever to amount to anything?”

  In fact, she was amounting to something that same week, and it had nothing to do with modeling or her connection to Richardson.

  Every spring, the producer Theron Bamberger came to the Academy to select a young man and woman for roles at the Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania—a venerable institution for repertory theatre and a good place to be noticed as a fledgling actor. After visiting a few classes and interviewing students, Bamberger wrote to Grace on June 22, 1949, offering her summer employment in two plays, with rehearsals beginning July 19. Somehow this reached the press, for the New York Times noted briefly that “Grace Kelly, niece of George Kelly, the playwright, will make her professional stage debut beginning July 25, at the Bucks County Playhouse, in Mr. Kelly’s comedy, ‘The Torch-Bearers.’”

  The printed program for the week of performances identified Grace by detailing the achievements of her family. “She is the daughter of John B. Kelly, of Philadelphia. Her brother recently figured in the news by winning the Diamond Sculls at the Henley Regatta in England. Her father was a champion oarsman and is well known as the former chairman of the Democratic Party in Philadelphia.”

  In her uncle’s satire on amateur theatricals, Grace played the role of Florence McCrickett, described by the playwright in the 1922 edition as “a very gorgeous-looking thing, in a sleeveless gown of canary-colored metallic silk, made quite daringly severe, to exploit the long, lithe lines of her greyhound figure. She has a perfect shock of hair—rather striking—a kind of suspicious auburn, and she has it bobbed.”

  Florence has the eponymous role in The Doctor’s Wife, the play-within-the-play, a group vehicle chosen for a one-time performance by an amateur company and hilariously (and badly) rehearsed as both dark tragedy and high comedy. Grace was instructed to speak with a kind of wan, affectless detachment, and this she evidently did to deliberate comic perfection. “For a young lady whose previous experience was slim,” wrote a local critic, “Miss Kelly came through this footlight baptism of fire splendidly. Although father and mother beamed at Grace from the front rows and other friends were scattered through the house, it was largely a theatrical crowd this girl faced. From where we sat, it appeared as if Grace Kelly should become the theatrical torch-bearer for her family.” This was the only review taking note of Grace, and it was written by a woman who knew her family.

  She had another small but attractive role in New Hope that season—as Marian Almond, Catherine Sloper’s cousin, in the taut drama The Heiress (based on Henry James’s novel Washington Square), which was not reviewed. For these summer productions, she was paid the standard playhouse fee—a total of $100 for two plays, including rehearsals. Again, her family was in the audience. Their reaction to her performances has not been recorded, but for Grace, the support she most sought—her father’s—was never forthcoming. He continued to tell interviewers, time and again over the years, that Grace’s success astonished him. “I’ve always thought that Peggy was the daughter with the most on the ball,” he said. “I thought all the success would come to Peggy.”

  DURING A BRIEF late-summer holiday with her family at the New Jersey seaside, Grace read a news item: Raymond Massey was about to direct and act in a Broadway revival of August Strindberg’s The Father (1887), the Swedish playwright’s most widely read and performed work, and his darkest, angriest tragedy. In taut, suspenseful dialogue, it tells of Captain Adolph and his wife Laura, who disagree on the education of their daughter Bertha: the father believes his daughter would benefit most from leaving home to study, but the mother wants her to remain. This apparently undramatic premise is but the pretext for the couple’s increasingly bitter struggle for power. Laura insists that the final decision must be hers alone because Adolph may not actually be Bertha’s father. Hearing this, the captain becomes angrier, more perplexed, and then more violent before dying of a stroke.

  Grace hurried to New York to read for the role of Bertha. With no Broadway experience and only her recent summer roles to her credit, she knew that it would be difficult to land a significant part in an important classic, with no less a director and costar than the respected Massey. But Grace had read and reread the play, and she went to the audition with a calm intensity and intelligence that won over Massey and the producers, who chose her over twenty-three other candidates. Rehearsals began in mid-October for a November 16 openin
g at the Cort Theatre on West 48th Street.

  Brooks Atkinson, the senior drama critic of the New York Times, felt that the production was fine as far as it went, but that it had too much gentility, that Massey’s acting and direction lacked the implacable ferocity necessary for a successful presentation of Strindberg’s “thunderbolt of wrath and hatred.” On the other hand, Atkinson singled out the twenty-year-old making her Broadway debut: “Grace Kelly gives a charming, pliable performance of the bewildered and broken-hearted daughter.” Another critic wrote that Grace had “a naturalness that owes nothing to artifice—no airs, simply a charming fresh ness.” But The Father is a difficult and demanding play, and the production failed to attract audiences for longer than two months; it closed on January 14, 1950, after sixty-nine performances.

  Later, Grace was typically modest about her debut: “For two years before this, I had been told so often that I was too tall for this part or that part—even at the Academy. Fortunately, Raymond Massey and Mady Christians [who played her parents] were tall actors. If they had been just a few inches shorter, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been in the cast.” Massey completely discounted her assessment: “She got the part because she showed the most promise. All through the rehearsal period, we were impressed with her earnestness, her professionalism and her good manners. She was organized and dedicated. Between rehearsals, she would ask Mady if she could sit in her dressing room and talk about the theatre. She was a delight to have in the company—a rare kind of young person who had a hunger to learn and to improve herself.”