High Society

by Donald Spoto

  The Stevens School, located on Walnut Lane in the adjacent neighborhood of Germantown, had been established “for young matrons who are interested in establishing ideal, satisfying homes and in administering them efficiently and scientifically.” This rather grandly stated agenda, written at the turn of the twentieth century, was effectively the program for little more than a finishing school for the daughters of wealthy Philadelphians, although by Grace’s time things had taken a somewhat more academic turn. She did well in her four-year course of studies, except in science and mathematics, which bored her.

  “She is one of the beauties of our class,” states the school yearbook for 1947. “Full of fun and always ready for a good laugh, she has no trouble making friends. A born mimic, she is well known for her acting ability, which reached its peak this year in her portrayal of Peter Pan in our Spring Play.” Grace was also a member of the glee club and the hockey and swim teams, she excelled at modern dancing, and she was named “Chairman of the Dress and Good Behavior Committee,” which must have pleased her mother. Her favorite actress and actor, she said that year, were Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten, who had appeared together in Gaslight, a picture she saw many times. “Ingrid Bergman made an enormous impression on me,” Grace said. “I couldn’t imagine where that kind of acting talent came from.” Her favorite summer resort was Ocean City, the family’s summer residence; her preferred drink was a chocolate milkshake; among classical music selections, she loved Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”; her favorite orchestra was Benny Goodman’s; and she especially liked the singer Jo Stafford.

  But it was acting with the school drama society, and the parts she played with local amateur groups, that most appealed to Grace. Her parents were almost mute with astonishment as their shy, retiring daughter flourished not by competing, but by participating in the joint effort that a cast makes onstage to create a memorable impact on an audience. As it happened, she drew her primary inspiration from one of her father’s brothers.

  HER THEATRICAL mentor was not, as is commonly believed, her uncle Walter Kelly, who was sixteen years older than Grace’s father. The family had seen him act onstage and in a few films, but he was something of an embarrassment. A nationally known vaudevillian, he had made his fame in a series of monologues that could not be performed in later decades, for they were openly and frankly racist. Dough-faced and corpulent, Walter Kelly played “The Virginia Judge” in a constantly changing series of sketches in which he mimicked not only the judge but also a legion of black men characterized as ignorant and slothful. Both the magistrate and the malefactors, all played by Kelly, appeared in a mock court where the “colored folks” tried unsuccessfully to defend themselves against various specious accusations.

  Walter’s sketches about “darkies” and “pickaninnies” (his words) were a staple of clubs, theatres and music halls for over twenty-five years. He also made a number of wildly successful recordings, and he appeared in seven Broadway shows and a half-dozen movies. Grace saw some of his acts and a few of his pictures, but she found only one production both amusing and oddly congruent: the 1935 film McFadden’s Flats, about a successful bricklayer who earns his fortune as a builder of apartments. Walter Kelly died in January 1939, succumbing to in juries after being hit by a speeding truck on a Los Angeles street. He was sixty-five, had never married, and, owing to his sumptuous living, had depleted a fortune.

  The mentorship offered to Grace came from another of her father’s brothers, whose fame has more deservedly survived—George Kelly, who became Grace’s theatrical guru and lifelong champion. First as an actor and then as one of America’s most successful playwrights, George was a completely different man from Walter; indeed, they had so little in common that they never made any efforts to keep in touch.

  “George Kelly was a very gracious, highly educated person,” recalled Rupert Allan, “well read and very witty, but also exceptionally elegant and cultivated. Grace just adored him.” Rita Gam agreed: “George was a perceptive and enormously kind man, and he took a great interest in Grace’s youthful dramatic escapades.”

  George Kelly was born in 1887 and toured nationally as an actor from 1911 on. After military service in France during World War I, he wrote, directed and starred in his own one-act plays, several of which (The Flattering Word, Poor Aubrey, Mrs. Ritter Appears and The Weak Spot) have stood time’s test and are occasionally presented in repertory and by school and amateur groups. His first full-length Broadway play, The Torch-Bearers (1922), which he also directed, is a mordantly funny indictment of amateur theatricals and self-absorbed nonprofessionals. The play reflects George’s profound respect for the stage and his lightly veiled contempt for untalented amateurs; ironically, ever since its premiere it has been most often performed by precisely the nonprofessional “little theatre” groups it skewers. “I loved that play as much as I loved Uncle George,” Grace said, passing over any mention of Walter when she discussed family history.

  Two years after The Torch-Bearers, Kelly directed his play The Show-Off, which had a Broadway run of almost six hundred performances and was staged with equal success in London; like The Torch-Bearers, it has been revived very often. This was soon followed by his production of Craig’s Wife, which won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for drama and was the basis for the 1950 movie Harriet Craig, which gave Joan Crawford one of her most intense roles as the archetypal middle-class, middle-aged, domineering wife who places domestic perfection above all relationships.

  More plays followed, but the last decades of George Kelly’s life, while comfortable and personally fulfilling, were professionally static. His plays were neither epigrammatic nor vulgar, and audiences had to sit patiently, listening to long acts in which both characters and social commentaries were revealed through dialogue. He was, in other words, a man of a specific kind of theatre, ferociously moralistic and poorly suited to the later different styles of (for example) Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and William Inge. “I won’t put my plays out for production because the theater has changed so much,” he said in 1970. “I just don’t want to become involved [in an era] that is frightful, shallow and sensationalistic.” The truth was that the styles of popular comedy and drama had moved beyond him, and he had no desire to keep up with changing theatrical fashion.

  One might presume that Margaret and Jack Kelly took pride in their connection to George. But in fact they were less than enthusiastic about him, for he was exclusively homosexual, living for decades with his partner, William Weagley. At that time, having a gay relative was too terrible to contemplate for all but a few enlightened American families, and a man who was “sensitive” (the tip-off code word) could be endured only if the most insistent silence about the awful truth was maintained. When George died in 1974, Weagley was not invited to the funeral; he crept into the church and took a back seat, weeping quietly and completely ignored. He died a year later.

  During her childhood and adolescence, Grace heard the whispers and cruel giggles about Uncle George. These she deeply resented, cherishing his visits to Henry Avenue, when he advised her on plays to read, cued her lines when she was in rehearsal, made lists of roles she might undertake in the future and was the only one in the family to take her acting aspirations seriously. “I am so proud of my niece Grace,” he said toward the end of his life. “She is not only a very fine actress but is a human being with considerable qualities. Had she stayed on the stage and continued her career, I think we would have seen some very fine performances from her.”

  Even on his deathbed, George could give quite a performance on his own. When another niece came to visit him, he addressed her with words worthy of Oscar Wilde: “My dear, before you kiss me good-bye, fix your hair—it’s a mess.”

  “To me, he was the most wonderful person,” Grace said. “I could sit and listen to him for hours, and I often did. He introduced me to all kinds of things I would never have considered or been exposed to—classic literature, poetry and great plays. He loved beautiful things and r
efined language, and these he shared with me in ways I never forgot. He was also one of the few people who stood up to my father, disagreed with him, contradicted him. I thought Uncle George was fearless.”

  George spoke to Jack about allowing Grace to act in local amateur productions: her grades at school were fine, so why should she not indulge her love of the theatre? And so, soon after she entered Stevens, Grace was seen in a one-act comedy, now forgotten, called Don’t Feed the Animals, written by Bob Wellington and staged by the Old Academy Players on Indian Queen Lane, East Falls. It was no coincidence that the Players—a group that had performed every season since 1923 (and still maintains an impressive schedule)—were passionate partisans of George Kelly, with repeated productions of his works already in their history.

  Uncle George remained Grace’s favorite member of the family. She persuaded the entire Kelly clan to travel to New York on February 12, 1947, for the opening night of a Broadway revival of Craig’s Wife, which George directed. (The title role was played by Judith Evelyn, who later assumed the role of “Miss Lonelyhearts” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.)

  Grace’s teenage scrapbooks, which she preserved and which her children placed on exhibit in 2007, give some idea of her love of theatre during her school years. On December 9, 1943, for example, she saw F. Hugh Herbert’s comedy Kiss and Tell, at the Locust Theatre in Philadelphia, and she went to as many productions of Uncle George’s plays as she could.

  IN 1943, Grace’s social life flourished. At that time, the word “dating” did not imply a casual sexual affair, but innocent activities like moviegoing, dancing and parties. According to her mother, “Grace’s first date was with a young man named Harper Davis, who went to the William Penn Charter School and often took her out to a basketball game or a dance.” Three years older than Grace, Harper was one of the most popular and handsome young men in her social orbit, and her scrapbook includes many souvenirs of her dates with this good-looking teenager. He gave her a bottle of perfume at Christmas and signed the gift card, “To Grace with love, Harper.” She pasted into her scrapbook the school dance programs for which Harper was her date, a stick of the chewing gum package he gave her on New Year’s Eve, and the business card from the store at which he bought her a silver charm on Valentine’s Day. She also pressed into her memory book remnants of the flowers he brought her on this or that occasion. Grace’s passion for floral arrangements and preservation dates from these early years and was later the subject of her volume My Book of Flowers, published in 1980.

  At that time, dating among polite young people was conducted according to a complex etiquette that was in fact a subject taught at schools like Stevens and William Penn. Girls and boys learned to dance and were told which subjects were appropriate for civilized conversation. Young ladies were instructed on proper posture, how to walk and sit, how they should hold their white-gloved hands, and what to say to a young man at the door, at the end of an evening. Boys were trained in the right way to ask a girl to dance, and classes in decorum were routinely held in schools.

  In the spring of 1944, at the height of World War II, Harper graduated from school, joined the navy and was sent abroad. Not long after returning, he contracted multiple sclerosis, from which he suffered until his death in 1953. Grace visited him often during his confinement and attended his funeral. “He was the first boy I ever loved, and I’ll never forget him,” she said.

  The relationship with Harper, like other dates during her high school years, was entirely chaste, for Grace had not yet tested the waters of sexual experience. Such reticence was typical of the time, especially in polite circles: young people’s sexual urges did not tend to lurch into full throttle, nor did they race, as it was said, to go “all the way.” Reliable methods of contraception were not readily or widely available, and the fear of pregnancy, venereal disease and an indecent reputation kept the reins on youthful impulses. In addition, penicillin, later the drug of choice against sexually transmitted infections, had only recently been developed, and it was reserved for men injured in combat. Civilian physicians had access to it for the general public only after 1946.

  This is not to say that the standards of Queen Victoria and Mrs. Grundy were everywhere observed; it is simply to state the obvious—that sexual intercourse for American teenagers in the 1940s was not as commonplace as it later became. When Grace graduated from high school, she was still a virgin, although she had easily and often fallen in love. “My sister Lizanne loved only one, the boy she married—but Peggy and I were in and out of love every other day.”

  On June 5, 1947, Grace graduated from Stevens; her classmates predicted, in the senior yearbook, that she was certain “to become a stage and screen star.” The following month, she made her first trip to Europe, along with her entire family. The journey was occasioned by Kell’s entry into the Henley Regatta after he had received the James E. Sullivan Award earlier that year, which named him the foremost amateur athlete in America. Before and after his navy service during World War II, Kell was relentlessly, even ruthlessly, trained and driven by his father. He won the United States single sculls title in 1946, and Jack Kelly got his revenge for the episode of 1920 during that summer of 1947, when Kell won the Diamond Challenge Sculls—a victory he repeated two years later. “There was never any doubt what Jack wanted,” Margaret said later. “He always insisted he would have a son to make the Diamond Sculls.”

  Despite impressive post-Henley achievements, Kell never won an Olympic gold medal. “It was a failure my father’s contemporaries won’t let me forget,” he said in 1971. “My father was a tough act to follow—a big, strong guy, fine-looking, eminently successful. There was always pressure to excel, to keep up. I’ve been competing with him all my life. Living in his shadow made losing harder when I lost, which wasn’t very often, but I was humiliated for both of us.” That summer, Jack saw that his son’s presence in England was documented by the press. “I could never understand my father, letting photographers take pictures of Kell shaving in the bathroom,” Grace said. Jack’s influence, added Margaret, “was not always good for Kell. I often told Jack that he leaned too hard on the boy, trained him too hard for the Olympics—and it hurt Kell.” Arthur Lewis, who knew the whole family, was blunter: Jack “messed up his only son’s life by forging him into an instrument of personal revenge.”

  As also required by his father, Kell later joined the family business while continuing an involvement in sports. He was president of the Amateur Athletic Union, and he won a bronze medal in the 1956 summer Olympics. He became a Philadelphia city councilman, and, briefly, he was president of the United States Olympic Committee.

  Kell’s personal life was complicated and disordered. He married a champion swimmer and had six children, but then one day, without warning or explanation, he walked out on his family and never returned. He became a notorious playboy, had a serious problem with alcohol, and on May 2, 1985, at the age of fifty-seven, John B. Kelly Jr. dropped down dead while jogging to the Athletic Club after his customary morning row on the Schuylkill River. He was posthumously inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame, and Philadelphia’s Kelly Drive was named in his honor. He and his father are the only parent-child athletes in the Olympic Hall of Fame.

  “Kell never had to grow up,” Grace said. “He was naïve, he confused attention with loyalty, he tried too hard to make people like him—and he didn’t have Father’s toughness, sense of humor or resilience.”

  Peggy’s story, too, was unhappy. After two failed marriages, she sank into alcoholism and died of a stroke at the age of sixty-six, in 1991. Lizanne was then the only surviving offspring of the Kelly-Majer marriage.

  AFTER HENLEY that summer of 1947, Margaret took her daughters to Switzerland while the men returned to Philadelphia. The holiday was intended as a kind of consolation prize for Grace, whose low grades in mathematics prevented her matriculation to Bennington College in Vermont, to which she had applied because of its highly regarded drama departmen
t.

  But Grace really needed no solace. As soon as she received the exceedingly polite rejection letter from Bennington, she began making inquiries about enrollment at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. When she finally brought up the subject with her parents, they were not at all pleased—perhaps because of the unorthodox, unconventional life of Jack’s brother George. “Daddy was uncomfortable around theatre people for one simple reason: he didn’t understand them,” said Lizanne. Judith Quine was more explicit: “Jack Kelly saw acting as a slim cut above streetwalker.”

  “She wouldn’t let her Uncle George help her prepare” for the American Academy, recalled Jack. “She was determined to go places without leaning on anybody or using influence.” Added Judith, “She left a prominent Philadelphia family to become a struggling actress in New York. It was an independent move. She had a certain amount of maverick in her, and she was entirely self-sufficient. She knew how to depend on herself.” Grace was single-minded in her ambition to succeed as a professional actress. “I rebelled against my family and went to New York to find out who I was—and who I wasn’t.”

  Margaret intervened to temper her husband’s disapproval, which could have become an outright veto. “Oh, Jack—it’s not as if she’s going to Hollywood, after all,” her daughters remembered their mother saying. “Let Grace go—this won’t amount to anything, and she’ll be home in a week.”

  The idea of a career in the theatre was disturbing enough to her father, but pursuing it in New York, and not just with an amateur group in the Pennsylvania provinces—well, that combined Sodom with Gomorrah. Manhattan was no more than ninety minutes by train from Philadelphia, but it was no place for a proper young lady on her own. Why wouldn’t she settle down in Philadelphia and marry a nice, rich Catholic boy? “I hear some of your school chums are coming out,” Jack said to Grace, raising the prospect of the formal entrance into polite society that was common at the time. “Do you want to come out, too?”