by Thilo Wydra
Grace began to be noticed and to attract people to her. This radiance and allure accompanied her for the rest of her life.
Grace had just turned fourteen, and Harper was sixteen. Surprisingly, Ma Kelly allowed Grace to accompany Harper to a school dance. When Harper arrived to introduce himself and to pick up Grace, he presented her with an orchid at the door. Her mother stayed up until her daughter returned from this exciting experience. This was her first love affair; Grace and Harper were teenagers in love. Together they went dancing, to the movies, to other events. In 1945, Harper joined the Marines at the age of eighteen. They wrote letters back and forth. Whenever he was in Philadelphia on furlow, they joyfully reunited.
In her scrapbook, which, along with everything else ever collected by Grace, is housed in the archives of the royal family in Monaco, Grace pasted various souvenirs from this time, such as admission tickets; postcards; theater programs; Christmas cards from 1943, 1944, and 1945; dried flowers (thirty years later, in the 1970s, the Princess of Monaco spent many hours drying flowers during her leisure time); imprinted napkins; and even a green Wrigley’s gum wrapper.
She collected, hoarded, reused, and archived everything—habits she may have learned from her German mother, Margaret. Both of Grace’s daughters, the princesses Caroline and Stéphanie, wore clothing from Grace’s own childhood. It was very hard for her to throw anything away. Even today, the closets of the royal palace in Monaco are full of preserved personal artifacts from her life, such as books, clothes, costumes, and bags. In the palace archives, there are numerous letters and cards, personal documents and photographs.
Underneath all the items glued into her scrapbook are captions written cleanly and neatly by Grace in blue ink. Several of the captions from this time simply read, “Harper.” Under the green Wrigley’s wrapper, Grace wrote, “Chewing Gum Harper gave me on New Year’s Eve.” Another item in the scrapbook is a small white envelope to which a white card is loosely glued. The following words are written in black ink: “To Grace with Love, Harper.” In her neat, carefully formed schoolgirl writing, which bears a clear resemblance to her later handwriting, Grace inscribed: “This is the card that came with the parfume [sic] Harper gave me for Christmas.”56
Harper was not the only boy Grace dated. There are also clues that point to other boys, boys with whom she went dancing and to the theater, and perhaps those with whom she took her first tentative steps into the realm of sexual experience. There is a white envelope from Bill D’Arcy, which Grace captioned with “Christmas dance—Dec. 16th 1944.”57 Bill, the seventeen-year-old son of a wealthy Philadelphia plasterer, was a lifeguard with the Ocean City Beach Patrol. Because Ocean City, New Jersey, was just across the water from the Kelly’s vacation home in Margate City, New Jersey, Grace got to spend many summer months with him on the shore.
In 1946, one year after he joined the Marines, Harper was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In the early stages, Grace visited him at home, and then later, she went to see him in the hospital. Harper battled the disease for seven years, but in 1953, he died in his mid-twenties. Although she was in the middle of her first film project and was already being called a star, Grace traveled to Philadelphia for his funeral. It was one of the first times that she dealt with the death of someone close to her. (In 1949, her maternal grandmother, Margaretha Berg, had died at the age of seventy-nine.) As she once commented later in life, Harper was her first boyfriend. And she had loved him.
In May 1947, the same year as Kell’s fateful winning of the Henley Regatta, Grace graduated from the Stevens School on Walnut Lane in Germantown. She was seventeen years old. Grace had hoped to go to Bennington College in Vermont after her graduation. Although Bennington did offer a four-year degree in dance, this hope was motivated less by personal preference than by a desire to please her parents and to follow in the footsteps of other girls of her age. However, Grace’s application was not accepted because of her poor grades in math. Grace also did not excel in the natural sciences, especially chemistry and physics. Bennington’s decision not to accept Grace greatly upset Ma Kelly, who took such things very seriously and had helped her daughter apply to various other colleges. However, Grace’s life path would have been very different if she had decided to go to college after graduation. “The change came when she did not go to Bennington College. That was what changed everything in her life,” recalled Mary Louise Murray-Johnson.58
“She was eager to go to New York and do her drama school . . . eager to work and to get on,” said Grace’s husband, Prince Rainier III of Monaco, about Grace as a young woman.59 At this time, Grace could only think about one thing: taking her first serious step into the acting world by gaining a coveted spot at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. This was what she, and she alone, wanted for herself.
Later, Grace would tell stories to her children about her decision to become an actress. Albert, who was always very close to her, was usually the one who was most interested in these stories and would ask for them to be told: “She would start by saying that it was because of her interest in the theatre. And at first it was—as it is for a lot of actors—that wonderful thrill of performing in front of live audiences, so she really enjoyed that part, the theatre acting, her theatre years. And, of course, she went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. During that full time she was exposed to a lot of different roles, a lot of different, great theatre experiences . . . I think she really enjoyed studying plays, learning lines, and acting, and both the other actors and directors wanted her to continue. But it’s true that at first . . . well, I was told when I asked my grandmother, that no one in the family seriously believed that she would become an actress.”60
Once, while still a relatively young woman, Grace commented: “When I really want to achieve something, I do more often than not. I don’t know what’s responsible—my will, my lucky star, or my Kelly pride. Probably it’s all of them together.”61
This self-assessment remained accurate in terms of her decisions and her actions throughout her entire life.
1947–1951
New York—Freedom:
Theater, Television, and Fashion
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 her family. She was afflicted with a great sense of emptiness . . .
—Don Richardson62
Grace was a very simple and unassuming woman, who always searched for happiness.
—Robert Dornhelm63
“Let her go. She’ll be back in a week.”64 This was John B. “Jack” Kelly’s disdainful, unsupportive commentary on Grace’s pursuit of acting.
At the age of seventeen, Grace left her hometown of Philadelphia. This was a giant step, not only for Grace herself, but also for her entire family. The second youngest daughter moved on her own to New York, to Manhattan, a two-hour drive away. “She got away from home early . . . none of the rest of us managed to do that,” explained Grace’s brother Kell.65 One can hear the bitter undertones in this statement by the only Kelly son. How much would he have loved to do what his sister Grace did in leaving home? However, she is the only one who succeeded in doing this.
“He [father Jack Kelly] did not know either New York or the theater life. He imagined the most terrible scenarios and was afraid that his little daughter would veer off the straight and narrow there,” described Grace’s sister Lizanne, attempting to rationalize her father’s attitude.66
Grace’s decision to leave her hometown was a rebellious step, which reflected a strong-willed, unyielding personality despite her shyness and reserve. By this time, Grace was no longer timid and shy, fragile and delicate, demure and quiet. She had finally become the decisive and certain, the disciplined and patient, the ambitious and upwardly mobile Grace that people would come to embrace.
Thus, Grace entered into a brand new world in 1947. Over the next eight and ha
lf years—October 1947 to April 1956—she lived in the world of the theater, movies, and television. This is probably the period in Grace Kelly’s fifty-two-year life in which she was truly happy.
August 20 was the day of Grace’s audition for acceptance into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. The audition took place in the afternoon, and it had been rescheduled from an earlier date by Dr. Emile Diestel, the secretary for the Academy’s board of trustees. Marie Magee, an actress and a good friend of Margaret Kelly, lived only a few streets over from the Academy. Grace called this friend of her mother’s “Aunt Marie,” and she helped Grace by interceding on the young woman’s behalf with Dr. Diestel. The Academy was actually no longer accepting applicants for that year, and Grace’s application was initially denied. After receiving word of this decision, Marie Magee approached Mr. Diestel directly, outspokenly informing him that Grace was the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright George Kelly’s niece. Ultimately, Dr. Diestel opened the door for the aspiring actress’s admission to the Academy. Grace soon won Diestel’s approval. Her performances in George Kelly’s The Torch Bearers and in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice immediately resulted in Diestel’s recognition of Grace’s talent. Her famous name combined with her intrinsic talent helped her to enter that world of which she had once dreamed as she played alone with her dolls in her upstairs room on Henry Avenue.
On Grace’s 1947 application form, Emile Diestel made the following notations: “Voice: Improperly placed; Temperament: Sensitive; Spontaneity: Youthful; Dramatic Instinct: Expressive; Intelligence: Good; General Remarks: Good, full of potential and freshness.”67
In October 1947, one month before her eighteenth birthday, Grace Kelly began her acting studies in the junior class at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. This renowned academy was founded in 1884, and often labeled “the Cradle of the Stars.” Its graduates included such famous actors and actresses as Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, Lauren Bacall, and Kirk Douglas. At the time, the Academy was located in New York’s Carnegie Hall. The Academy students fell under the guidance of Charles Jehlinger, who had belonged to the Academy’s first graduating class. He had taken over as director when the Academy’s founder, Franklin Haven Sargent, died in 1923, and he was the Academy’s vice president until his own death in 1952. The Academy students were required to honor strict rules regarding decorum and behavior, as well as regulations pertaining to neat, decorous clothing. They had to address each other as Mister or Miss. Jehlinger was the feared master of the Academy, inciting fear in most of the acting students. Already at their young ages, the pupils were expected to behave as ladies and gentlemen. This was probably not easy for some of these eighteen-year-olds, who now found themselves in the middle of Manhattan for the first time.
The initial period of study lasted for one year. However, because of her discipline and diligence, Grace was selected in April 1948 to stay for a second year of study. This began in September 1948 and ended in April 1949.
In New York, Grace lived in the legendary Barbizon Hotel for Women, located on 63rd Street at the corner of Lexington Avenue. The redbrick building had been constructed in 1927, and it reflected a combination of Renaissance and Gothic Revival elements. Since 1928, the twenty-seven-storied Barbizon offered young women safe lodgings, particularly for new arrivals to this East Coast city. The doors were locked at 10:00 p.m. Male guests were not allowed to proceed beyond the lobby area. A fortress for the weaker sex. How countless admirers, as well as the Barbizon residents themselves, must have puzzled over ways and possibilities to attain evening and night access! Other prominent Barbizon residents included Barbara Bel Geddes, Liza Minnelli, and Gene Tierney (who later married and then divorced the fashion designer Oleg Cassini with whom Grace was seriously involved in the mid-1950s).
Grace attended courses, practices, and auditions daily at the American Academy at the corner of 57th Street and 7th Avenue (today, Madison Avenue). She enrolled in as many courses as were allowed. She was full of intellectual curiosity, anxious to be as engaged as possible in the Academy’s offerings. She worked hard to diminish her Philadelphia accent and her high, nasal voice. Later, in her Hollywood movies, as well as her years as Princess of Monaco, she pronounced her words very carefully in a way that seemed almost snobbish in tone. Her soft, almost silky inflection seemed at times to be warm and then cool at a turn. Besides their training, the Academy students received reduced tickets to productions on Broadway, which was only five minutes away by foot. During this period, Grace saw plays such as Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947), and Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress (1947).
Although she received a monthly check from her father, Grace decided, as much as possible, to make her way in New York without financial support from Philadelphia. Thus, she had to find a job to go along with her studies. She had to find some way to pay for her room at the Barbizon and her new life in Manhattan. Between 1947 and 1949, Grace worked as a model for the New York branch office of the John Robert Powers Agency. This agency was founded in Philadelphia in 1923, and many years previously, it had been the agency of Grace’s mother Margaret, who also had her daughters photographed there. Posing for the camera had never been hard for Grace, even when she had been in Philadelphia and had been asked to pose for one event or the other. However, this was her first serious engagement as a photographic model, a job that eventually led to her appearance in television advertisements. Grace was featured in advertisements for shampoo, lotions, soaps, toothpaste, insect sprays, household appliances, beer, and cigarettes.
On one billboard for the Old Gold brand, Grace could be seen carrying a vender’s tray full of various cigarette packages. She smiled at the viewer and wore long, glossy black gloves that reached her elbows. In several black-and-white television ads, she modeled clothing and hats, at times narrated from off-camera by a voice actor: “Grace wrapped in a lace veil;” “Grace presents herself in yellow;” or “Here is a particularly attractive summer hat. The price is quite high, but who wants to talk about money when Papa will be paying? True, Miss Kelly?!”68
The image of the demure young woman who knew how to dress well and behave herself was in demand and was well-received in the prudish America of the 1940s and 1950s. For this reason, this modeling period is highly relevant. These years set the foundation for the creation of Grace Kelly as a style and fashion icon. Even today, the fascination with this image has not waned. This is the icon that became world famous in the 1960s through, among other things, the naming of the Kelly Bag by the Paris luxury fashion house Hermés.
Sister Francis, abbess of Ravenhill Academy, remembered Grace’s years as a model. “She came one Sunday morning—she was an exquisite girl and at the time, a model for hats and gloves. She said: ‘Mother Abbess, I need your advice. I have had an offer to model underwear. Should I do this?’ I answered: ‘Grace, that is a decision that only you can make. Try to imagine what you feel when you think about this. You must have doubts about it, or you would not be asking me about it.’ Later I learned that she did not do this. She must have been convinced that she should pass up this opportunity.”69
Financially, Grace now stood on her own two feet.
Thanks to her lucrative advertising contracts, she received $400 a week (which corresponds to about ten times as much today). This was yet one more step away from the ties to her family in Philadelphia.
According to Robert Dornhelm, “She was always anxious not to disappoint her family. She wanted to prove to her father that she did not need her family’s assistance. She could find jobs on her own and pay her own way. However, the ongoing fear that the next job would not materialize, this never left her. As a freelance artist and filmmaker, you constantly rely on the next job. And the fear that this would not appear was deep in her bones.”70
Already in her early New York days, Grace was seen as an outsider—a loner. The reasons for this lay in her demeanor and in her clothing style. Both of these a
spects separated her from her peers. Because of this, she found success as one of the highest paid fashion and commercial models in New York. This gave rise, time and time again, to jealousy and envy among the other Barbizon residents and Academy students. Of course, Grace did form friendships during these years, important ones that lasted her whole lifetime. For example, there was Rita Gam, a fellow actress with whom she decided to share an apartment in Hollywood during the early 1950s. (She stayed here during the longer film projects, and the apartment was located on Sweetzer Street near Sunset Boulevard.) Grace also became friends with Maree Frisby Rambo and Judith Balaban Quine, both of whom were later bridesmaids at her wedding. (The other bridesmaids were Carolyn Reybold, Bettina Thompson Gray, and Sally Parrish Richardson.) At this time, Grace also met Prudence “Prudy” Wise, who joined the other two in the apartment on Sweetzer Street and who later moved to the royal palace in Monaco as Grace’s personal secretary. Regardless of these relationships, in general, Grace was again the one who did not really belong, who was not really assimilated into the larger group. She stood out and attracted attention.
This is also the period in which Grace Kelly met the acting teacher Don Richardson (1918–1996). He taught at the Academy. When they first met, Grace was eighteen, and Don Richardson had just reached thirty. He was tall and slim, a charmer, perhaps even something of a playboy—a cultivated cosmopolitan. And, although he was separated, he was still married. Furthermore, he was Jewish. Grace went into raptures whenever she talked about Richardson, whether when with her friends or when catching up with her mother. At home in Philadelphia, her parents were less than thrilled about this new relationship with a man from the theater world. Margaret and Jack Kelly imagined a very different kind of man at Gracie’s side. They were certain that Grace should marry a decent, respectable, proper man from a good family, far removed from the world of art and other questionable things.
