by Thilo Wydra
When Grace finally took Don Richardson to Henry Avenue to introduce him to her parents, and to perhaps earn approval for this relationship, disaster struck. The family received Richardson frostily, hardly speaking to the acting teacher. Besides that, Grace’s brother Kell, as instructed by his parents, had invited over two buddies, two athletes, who had been asked to make Richardson’s visit particularly unpleasant. The three young men cracked Jewish jokes at Richardson’s expense, making crude imitations of Jewish mannerisms. The sensitive theater man was offended. An affront, a tactless embarrassment. Stuck in a corner of the room with her younger sister Lizanne, Grace was completely ignored by everyone.
And then, a proposal was made to take a drive in father Jack’s car through the city. This gave Jack Kelly the opportunity to point out which buildings had been constructed with Kelly bricks and which public projects he had helped fund. Afterward, at supper in Jack Kelly’s Country Club, Don Richardson was seated next to Margaret Kelly. Grace and Lizanne sat at the lower end of the table, while the upper end was taken by father Jack, his son Kelly, and his two teammates. As the men talked excitedly about athletes, discipline, and competitions, complete silence reigned at the other end of the table. Grace sat at the table with her head lowered. It was as if she was not even there. This was her family.
What Don Richardson unpleasantly experienced in 1948 on Henry Avenue and at the country club supper was very similar to what Oleg Cassini encountered six years later in 1954 at the family summer home in Ocean City. Grace’s own family refused to make it easy for Grace to find a partner whom she could stand by and care for. The Kellys did not seem to realize, or to even really care about, what she actually wanted. Either way, the end result was hard for the daughter to bear. Once again, she found herself in conflict. As Richardson noted, “She seemed to be in a state of denial where they were concerned.”71
Don Richardson eventually recommended Grace to the legendary agent Edith Van Cleve at the MCA Agency. Edith unhesitatingly agreed to represent her. One of Van Cleve’s new male clients at this time was a certain Marlon Brando.
Grace Kelly’s relationship with Don Richardson was one of the most important and formative ones prior to her marriage with Prince Rainier. Grace and Richardson—who died of a heart attack in 1996 at the age of seventy-seven—remained friends after their separation and even after the royal wedding in Monaco. This friendship did not end until Grace’s death in 1982. “Don Richardson seems to have been a most significant friend. She spoke of him often,” explained director and friend Robert Dornhelm, who spent much time with Grace during her last years.72
Once, in the late 1970s, Grace wrote to Richardson, explaining that she wanted to introduce him to a young director she had met when she provided the commentary for the dance documentary film, The Children of Theatre Street (1977): “a dear boy who reminds me a bit of you. He could almost be our son.”73 Having grown up in Romania and Vienna, Robert Dornhelm divided his adult life between Los Angeles and Mougins, near Cannes. He was a close friend of Grace during the last six years of her life (1976–1982) and worked with her on two film projects.
However, Richardson refused to meet Dornhelm. It seemed that twenty-five years after his relationship with Grace, Richardson was jealous of the young Dornhelm: “I didn’t want to sit with him, on either side of Grace like bookends—you know, before and after.”74 And as Dornhelm himself explained: “I once called Don Richardson on the telephone. Grace wanted me to meet him at all costs. And he was quite strange on the phone and did not want to talk to me. I did not understand that. The whole thing was quite absurd. They had had a relationship, long before her marriage, and yes, it was very intense. She had told me a lot about him.”75
The relationship between Grace and Richardson could be best compared to the young romance between Grace and Harper Davis, but it was, to a certain extent, formative for Grace’s later love affairs. Although Don Richardson was “only” eleven and a half years older than Grace, this age difference may have been quite significant, considering Grace’s youth at the time. Also, there were other differences between the young Catholic acting student and the socially mature, Jewish acting teacher. “We were like yin and yang—we were total opposites. And I guess I was La Bohème to her. When you’re raised with money, Bohemia can have its attractions.”76 And just as Richardson described the two of them as yin and yang, he saw in Grace a deeply rooted dualism: “Her public persona was so completely different from 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.”77
In Spring 1949, Grace completed her acting studies at the Academy. She was now nineteen years old. After her graduation in April, her parents pressured her to move out of the Barbizon. They also strictly forbade her to continue her relationship with Don Richardson. For a while, Grace lived in the family’s vacation home in Ocean City, but then in the fall of 1949, Ma and Jack Kelly gave their blessing for her to return to New York. Of course, the assumption was that she would move back into the supposedly secure Barbizon. While in Ocean City, Grace and Richardson had called each other on the telephone and had secretly met each other whenever they could manage it. With Grace now back in New York, they immediately resumed their intimate relationship. Grace had no intention of following her parents’ orders here in New York. She and Richardson met at his apartment regularly, until one day, when father Kelly unexpectedly rang the bell at Richardson’s door on 44th Street West. Standing with his coat and hat in hand, he demanded that Richardson finally break off all contact with his daughter and offered, in exchange, to give him a Jaguar automobile. Richardson could pick the color himself. Clearly, the father placed great value on ending the relationship between his daughter and this very undesirable man. In outrage, Richardson refused the offer and was again offended. Father Kelly left. Despite the refusal of the Kelly Clan’s offer, Grace and Richardson only remained together for a short time more.
According to Don Richardson, the relationship between him and Grace crumbled when she supposedly began to see other men, such as the manager of the renowned New York Waldorf Astoria Hotel, whose restaurant and bar she often patronized in the evening. The hotel’s international flair stood in stark contrast to the rigid atmosphere at the Barbizon. Another love interest was the Shah of Persia: “The Shah also wanted to marry her.”78 Ali Khan, the Prince of Pakistan, was a great admirer. He gave her a large gold bracelet studded with several sapphires, which she proudly showed to Richardson. Hurt and jealous, Richardson angrily threw the bracelet into an aquarium and left.
That was the end of their relationship.
At the small yet renowned Buck’s County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Grace made her true stage debut on July 25, 1949. Again, she appeared in her Uncle George’s The Torch Bearers. She acted alongside Carl White and Haila Stoddard in this production, which was subtitled A Satirical Comedy in Three Acts. This was Grace’s first stage appearance since she had received her acting certificate.
Just as the mention of George Kelly’s name opened the door to the Academy, so did it now open the door to the acting world. In his play, which was already so familiar to her, she was cast as the part of a young, inexperienced actress. Grace also acted in the Buck’s County Playhouse’s staging of The Heiress, which was based on Henry James’s novel Washington Square. Grace had seen this play on Broadway during her time at the Academy.
On November 16, 1949, only four days before her twentieth birthday, Grace made her New York Broadway debut in August Strindberg’s play, The Father (1887). The play ran in the Cort Theatre, which has been an active theater since its founding in 1912. This was her first Broadway performance. In Strindberg’s three-act play, Grace played the role of Bertha, the daughter of a riding master. Raymond Massey costarred as the riding master, and Mady Christians took the role of his wi
fe Laura. The Father ran for sixty-nine performances and closed on January 14, 1950, only two months after its opening. Strindberg’s play no longer drew large crowds into the 1,100-seat Broadway theater. During this New York period, both before and after her two performances in The Torch Bearers and The Father, Grace continued to apply for work. She went to several dozen stage auditions and was turned down time and time again. Often she was told that her legs were too long or that she was too tall. (Grace was 5’7”.)
She was significantly more successful in a much newer medium; during the early 1950s, television was becoming increasingly popular. And Grace was one of the first and most widely employed television actresses not engaged in a weekly series. This work was almost groundbreaking in nature. The significance of Grace’s television work is hardly known today, as it has been overshadowed by her Hollywood films and her fame as princess. Another reason for the loss of this knowledge can be attributed to the fact that many of the live broadcasts from this period were not fully archived because of the film technique related to the Kinescope recordings. (At that time, television programs were usually recorded via the Kinescope process, which involved directly filming from a screen. The Kinescope process was made obsolete by the introduction of the first analog videotape in 1956, the Beta system, and other techniques.)
Grace Kelly appeared in her first live television program on November 3, 1948, one year after her Broadway debut. Alongside Ethel Owen, Grace starred in the sixty-minute NBC production of Kraft Television Theatre in the episode “Old Lady Robbins,” written by Albert G. Miller. This was Grace’s only television appearance in 1948.
Although Grace did no television work in 1949, she followed “Old Lady Robbins” with additional live television roles between 1950 and 1954. All told, she appeared in forty-two live television productions.79 In other sources, the total number of appearances ranges from more than sixty to one hundred. However, these claims cannot be proven, since there are no sources that substantiate these higher estimates.80
Director and producer Fred Coe, who was in charge of the direction or production for several of the television productions in which Grace appeared, once described her as follows: “[she] had talent and attractiveness, but so do a lot of other young people in the theater who never become stars. The thing that made her stand out was something we call ‘style.’ She wasn’t just another beautiful girl, she was the essence of freshness—the kind of girl every man dreams of marrying.” Coe further expressed a sentiment that was repeated over and over again during her film career by those who worked with her on set: “All of us who worked with her just loved her. You couldn’t work with Grace Kelly without falling a little in love with her.”81
On January 8, 1950, Grace played the title role in Sinclair Lewis’s work Bethel Merriday (1940), which was filmed by NBC for the Philco Television Playhouse series. This was also the final week of Strindberg’s The Father. With sixteen television programs, 1950 was Grace’s busiest year in terms of television productions. For an actor on the stage, these live performances were enormously demanding when it came to concentration and dialogue memorization. If you botched a line, a prop fell over, or a technical malfunction occurred, millions of television viewers would be watching it happen live.
Director and friend Robert Dornhelm recalled this time: “Grace told me some about this period, about the live television performances. There were many directors whom I respected greatly—Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer—an array of famous American directors who were directing these live television programs. They were aired weekly and were half an hour in length, and because of this they were making many of these programs. Actors had to remember the entire text. If you made a mistake, it was on live television. Naturally, there was an element of discipline tied to this. They did not have much time to memorize the dialogue.”82
Besides the handful of live television performances in 1951—five in all—Grace worked on fifteen additional half- or one-hour programs in 1952 for NBC and CBS. These included the CBS series Television Workshop, in which she acted in the first episode of Season 1, which was aired on January 13, 1952. This episode was a thirty-minute rendition of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote as directed by Sidney Lumet. In this episode, Boris Karloff, the star of Frankenstein, played Don Quixote, while Grace Kelly was Dulcinea and Jimmy Savo was Sancho Panza.
For NBC’s Philco Television Playhouse, Grace acted in the one-hour performance of The Rich Boy, based on a short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald. On stage in front of the cameras, Grace Kelly and the Irish actor Gene Lyons (with whom she was later romantically involved) played the main roles of Paula Legendre and Anson Hunter. The performance aired live on February 10, 1952. Once before, they had acted together in another live television program, an adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s The Swan for the CBS series The Play’s the Thing. Grace played Princess Alexandra in this short television version of Molnár’s historic costume drama, which she again interpreted five years later in the almost prophetic MGM film, The Swan (1956). However, at the time of the CBS broadcast of The Swan, the two actors did not foresee their impending romance. Their time together was yet to come.
Until the filming on John Ford’s Mogambo began on November 17, 1952, which was continuously filmed through the early months of 1953, Grace irregularly appeared most months in various live television programs. The last one of 1952 was the half-hour production A Message for Janice for CBS’s Lux Video Theatre. This aired on September 29, 1952. Grace acted in four additional television programs in 1953.
Early in 1954, she performed one more time in front of a television camera for a live program in New York. (This was the year that she transitioned to making film after film and had to travel from one film location to the next; after the filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, she was completely drained and exhausted.) Her final televised performance was in the NBC series Kraft Television Theatre (1947–1958). It aired on January 6, 1954, and was a sixty-minute piece titled The Thankful Heart, written by Herbert A. Francis as episode 19 of season 7.
This was the conclusion of Grace’s television career. By this point, another career had already long begun.
1951–1956
Hitchcock and Hollywood:
The Eleven Films of Grace Kelly
I was never happy in Hollywood. There, everything is distorted by the importance people give to money.
—Grace Kelly83
She was sort of shy, and very talented, but really did not have the typical characteristics of an actress. I think being an actress actually helped her overcome her shyness.
—Prince Albert II of Monaco84
Grace Kelly’s relationship with Hollywood was, from the very beginning, an ambivalent one. She never truly felt at home on the West Coast. She was not comfortable with the elements of artificiality, nor did she care for the fact that power and greed called the shots in the mecca of the West Coast film industry. In Hollywood, as had already been the case in Philadelphia, Grace had trouble feeling like she fit in. She never felt fully settled there.
Exiled from Europe to the California coast in the summer of 1941, Bertolt Brecht titled one of his poems, “On Thinking About Hell” (“Nachdenkend ueber die Hoelle”). In this poem, he mused that Hell must resemble Los Angeles: “I who live in Los Angeles and not in London find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be still more like Los Angeles.”85
However, the German exile Brecht was not the only one who did not feel at ease here. Many others experienced the same things he did. This was the case for some of the numerous intellectuals exiled from Europe, who again found their lives to be difficult during the McCarthy Era of the late 1940s and early 1950s. And this was also the case for Grace Kelly.
It is telling that Grace never stayed very long in Los Angeles, Hollywood, or Beverly Hills. She never settled down here, rented long term, or bought a house or an apartment. Once she was finished with a film, she usually took the earliest possible flight back to New
York or Philadelphia. She preferred the foggy rain or the snow flurries of New York to the ever-burning California sun, which shone brightly regardless of bad moods or dissatisfaction. LA was almost the opposite of New York. LA seemed to be a network of towns without its own cityscape; everywhere there were highways, suburbs and slums, expensive addresses and mansion neighborhoods. New York, on the other hand, was a culturally pulsating metropolis oriented toward Europe. “She did not like Los Angeles,” recalled Robert Dornhelm.86
This ambivalence, this conflict in terms of feeling at home somewhere, exemplifies the life, the behavior, the thought process, and especially the sensibility of Grace Kelly.
“She was full of contradictions. That is where her fascination lay. Even if you knew her well, suddenly an entirely different aspect of her character would emerge,” maintained Judith Balabin Quine, a long-time friend of Grace.87 Quine went on to claim that “I think the thing that most people forget is that when all of this was happening to Grace, this extraordinary excitement about her career being generated and roles with the world’s most famous leading men and the world’s most respected directors, she was just a girl in her early twenties.”88 With these words, Quine tried to explain Grace’s distaste for Hollywood and the subsequent public frenzy over it.
Furthermore, Grace’s complex personality expressed itself in her thoroughly self-critical attitude toward her own films, as well as toward films documenting or portraying her career and life. Director and friend Robert Dornhelm accompanied Grace between 1976 and 1982 to numerous honorary events in various cities and countries: “When I was with her at any of the films either about her or in which she starred, she would always say before the performance, ‘I am already bored.’” In addition, “she did not like to talk about her films. She felt they were over before they even started.”89
