by Thilo Wydra
Prince Albert offered this account of the stories his mother told about his grandparents: “I hardly knew my grandfather, John B. Kelly. He died when I was two years old, unfortunately. And I always regretted not knowing him better and not being able to have some conversations with him. He’s a legendary figure, not only in our family, but throughout the United States. But he was also a very generous man, and also had that spirit of entrepreneurship. On his own, in a country where he hadn’t been born, he built his career pretty quickly. And I think also that that side, the Irish side of the family, is also very important. We are all very proud of that heritage, as we are of the German side, too. But I think that also adds to the character of, you know, being generous, and Irish people are usually very generous in spirit and heart and so on, so that’s an added dimension to it.”48
In 1935, Jack Kelly ran on the Democratic Party ticket for the office of Mayor of Philadelphia. His opponent was Republican S. Davis Wilson, who ended up winning by a small margin after a long and heated election. As an Irish Catholic, Kelly was defeated in the then predominantly Protestant Philadelphia, but this was not the only painful loss that he gritted his teeth and bore with composure.
Despite Jack’s political failure, many years later the city of Philadelphia paid tribute to its popular resident by renaming the long road that runs along the eastern bank of the Schuylkill River, “John B. Kelly Drive.” Since father and son bore the same name, it has often been claimed that Kell, the son, was also honored in this naming. Furthermore, in East Fairmount Park, which is bordered by the Schuylkill River and John B. Kelly Drive, a bronze statue stands. It was created in 1965 by Harry Rosin, and its base bears the following inscription: “John B. Kelly, Olympic Champion, Singles 1920, Doubles 1920, Doubles 1924.” His like-named son, who ultimately won the Henley Regatta from which his father had been excluded, is not mentioned.
Only a quarter of a century after Kelly’s mayoral defeat, the Democrat John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), an Irish Catholic from yet another legendary clan, took the presidential oath on January 2, 1961, as the second-youngest president to ever be elected. Even today, he remains the only Catholic who has held this office. Interestingly, John B. “Jack” Kelly and Joseph P. “Joe” Kennedy were personal acquaintances. Two patriarchs. Two businessmen. Two multimillionaires. The Kellys and the Kennedys shared many similarities. The same world views dominated these two dynasties: discipline, perseverance, ambition, social mobility, desire for victory. The one family sought athletic championship, while the other sought political power.
Besides the aforementioned mayoral election, yet another difficult defeat occurred upon Jack Kelly’s application to the renowned Henley Royal Regatta in England. One of Jack’s greatest passions was sculling, a specialized rowing sport, which he viewed as a truly masculine activity. In 1919, he applied to compete as a rower in this coveted event, an honor considered almost as prestigious as the Olympic Games. John B. Kelly, Sr., trained rigorously, almost obsessively, with his newly purchased scull, day after day. He dreamed of winning the Diamond Challenge Sculls, the competition’s main event. What happened next was bitterly disappointing. Only three days before the Competition, he received a telegram from England. The British Henley Committee had decided to exclude him from the contest. For John Brendan “Jack” Kelly, his entire world must have collapsed at that very moment.
Grace, who admired her father her entire life, was always quick to defend him, especially for this devastating disappointment. Although the official justification for his expulsion was that Kelly’s rowing club and an Irish sponsor were unacceptable, the most likely reason was his undesirable status as a professional, working man. Jack Kelly was not an English gentleman, but rather an Irish immigrant and a simple mason. For the English organizers of the Regatta, this was enough cause to reject his application. An Irishman among gentlemen was considered distasteful. They ignored the fact that Jack Kelly belonged to the 1920 US Olympic team, for which he went on to win gold in both the single scull event and the double scull event along with his cousin Paul Costello, at the summer games held in Antwerp. In the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Jack Kelly again won the double scull event with his cousin. In addition, he won multiple US National Championships in rowing, which increased his international fame.
Under massive pressure to win this coveted trophy, which had been denied to his father, son Kell entered the Henley Regatta in 1947. Since his father’s time, the regulations had been updated and changed. Jack and Margaret Kelly, along with daughters Grace and Lizanne, traveled to England during the third week of June to support Kell in the competition. The Kelly family stayed in the Red Lion Hotel in Henley for the duration of the competition. At the age of twenty, Kell was expected to avenge his father’s defeat, and avenge he did: Kell won the race, receiving the Henley trophy cup engraved with the words, “Diamond Sculls,” on July 5, 1947. The Kellys celebrated the victorious son and heir, who had rowed wearing the colors of the University of Pennsylvania.
What a burden it is for a son, an only son, to hold his own among his three competitive sisters. And so it was for Kell—the only son and heir, his father’s favorite child. He was pressured to fulfill everything that was expected of a Kelly: always stand on the winning side, never lose, and never show or admit weakness. This burden could hardly be carried.
It was as if Kell had no autonomy over his own life. He was no more than seven when his father first plunked him into a homemade boat and shoved it out onto the choppy ocean waters at Ocean City. This was how the seven-year-old was supposed to learn to row.
In March 1954, Kell married at the age of twenty-six. He had six children with his wife Mary Gray Freeman, and in later years, he turned completely away from his family. In the mid-1970s, he became romantically involved with a well-known transsexual Philadelphian by the name of Rachel Harlow, the former Richard Finnochio, who was an attractive, blonde night club and restaurant owner. Harlow had gained some fame as an actress in Frank Simon’s film, The Queen (1968). Kell’s liaison represented the greatest possible rejection of his family’s Irish Catholicism. It seemed as if the son wished to catch up on everything that had been denied to him for so many years due to his father’s rigid upbringing. In May 1981, he remarried, this time to the banker Sandra Worley. Increasingly, John B. “Kell” Kelly turned to alcohol, and he died on March 2, 1985, at the age of fifty-seven, two and a half years after his famous sister’s death. He died of a heart attack while jogging to the athletic club after having taken his daily morning row on the Schuylkill River.
It is yet another tragedy that seems to astonishingly resemble those of the Kennedys in Boston, the other famous Irish clan.
At the time of Grace’s birth, America was just entering the Great Depression, catapulted by the New York Stock Market crash on October 24, 1929, so-called “Black Thursday”. The financial world was shaken to its very core. Miraculously, the Kellys were almost completely untouched by the collapse. Jack Kelly had never invested his money in the stock market, instead favoring government securities. This, combined with his rigorous management style, allowed his company, Kelly for Brickworks, to survive the stock market crash relatively unscathed.
From her earliest years, Grace’s constitution was a cause for concern. She was the one of the four Kelly children who caused the greatest worry for her strict parents. Little Gracie, as she was called by everyone, was fragile, delicate, and often sickly. She was the first one to catch colds and the last one to recover. As the second of the three sisters, Grace received the least amount of attention after the birth of Lizanne. Already as a young child, she was susceptible to sinus and middle ear infections, as well as serious colds. She continued to be affected by these, as well as migraines, years later in Monaco. As a child in the Henry Avenue house, she often laid upstairs in her bed, because she was once again sick or about to come down with something. “What’s Grace sniveling about now?” was frequently Jack Kelly’s annoyed reaction to his wife Margaret, whenever
something was wrong with his middle daughter.49
Once, when Grace was irritating her two sisters, they locked her in a closet where she remained for a long time, forgotten and unmissed by her family. Meanwhile, Grace sat on the floor and played with her dolls, some of her favorite playthings. She gave them all names and came up with various voices for them. This was her own personal dream world. When Ma Kelly eventually found her, Grace was engrossed in her doll games. The child seemed well-accustomed to not being missed.
Because of Grace’s physical vulnerability, which is often pointed to as one of the sources of her uncertain, timid demeanor, she was the least athletic of all the Kellys. She took little interest in athletic activity, in any particular sport, or in competition in general. She did play hockey and basketball in school, and she swam and played tennis during the summer breaks, which the Kellys always spent on the New Jersey coast, in Ocean City near Atlantic City, in their whitewashed, clapboard vacation home at 2539 Wesley Avenue. However, in contrast to her athletic, competitive family, Grace saw sports as leisure activities, something that she enjoyed but did not actually take seriously.
For father Jack, this child, his third, was somehow different. He did not connect well with Gracie nor did he try to be close to her. It may be that, from his side, there was no actual emotional connection. John B. Kelly could not develop an affinity for his ethereal daughter, who, already at a young age, seemed to most closely resemble her Uncle George through her preference for the arts and music. Between father and daughter existed an unbridgeable chasm. This remained unchanged through to Jack Kelly’s death in 1960. Grace struggled her entire life with this discord, and she constantly sought to compensate for it. At the same time, her strong desire for her father’s approval functioned as a driving force behind so much of what she tried to achieve in the coming years. For Jack Kelly, his daughter’s ongoing poor health and her disinterest in sports was a double thorn in his side. He could not understand Grace’s disposition, and besides, his main interest was in Kell to whom he not only gave his full name but whom he strove to raise as a younger version of himself.
“Grace and all the family—we were a competitive family. I think we got that from—I know we got that from our mother and father . . . They instilled into us a deep sense of competition and the love of sports, the thrill of winning . . . [and] also taught us how to lose gracefully,” according to Grace’s younger sister, Lizanne Kelly LeVine.50
In the summer of 1937, something happened to the young, seven-year-old Gracie for which she had long yearned and for which she would yearn for years to come, mostly in vain. The family was on the beach at Ocean City for an event, and for publicity reasons, the Kellys were asked to pose for a photographer who wanted to capture their family on film. At this moment, father Jack suddenly picked up his daughter Grace and whirled her through the air. He held her by her feet and twirled on his heels. Little Gracie stretched her arms wide into the air, as her strong father, in his 1930s striped bathing shirt, spun. There is only one sepia-toned photograph of this moment between father and daughter, which is kept at the archives of the royal family of Monaco. In the photo, Grace’s hair is tousled in the wind, and a delighted smile is on her face. There, for a moment, was the intimacy she had longed for all her life. Even if it was only a stunt for the photographer’s camera, it must have been an unimaginably precious moment for her.
Young Grace’s first experience on the stage came at the age of twelve. It was the stage of the East Falls amateur acting group, Old Academy Players, located on Indian Queen Lane. Under the direction of Ruth Emmert, the troop, along with Grace, performed the play, Don’t Feed the Animals. Another, more significant performance by the players was The Torch Bearers (1922), a play written by Grace’s favorite uncle George about Philadelphia. The original production had opened to critical acclaim on Broadway years earlier.
Grace’s first acting teacher noticed right away that she was never late to rehearsals and she always knew her lines. Just as Ruth Emmert was impressed with these qualities in Grace in 1941, so were Grace’s colleagues and teammates on film sets in Hollywood and New York in the 1950s. “She was the most punctual and the most reliable,”51 said Robert Dornhelm, and she had at her disposal an amazing ability to memorize lines perfectly. Both of these characteristics were anything but a given in the acting world. The other major Hollywood blonde of this era, Marilyn Monroe, regularly arrived hours late on the set and could often not remember her dialogue.
George Edward Kelly (1887–1974), one of John B. Kelly’s younger brothers as well as Grace’s godfather, was an important person in her life. Although brother Walter C. Kelly (1873–1939) had been a vaudeville actor and had toured the United States and England to great acclaim in the musical Virginia Judge—which was also filmed in 1935 with him in the title role—it was mainly George who, like Walter, remained unmarried, who was acknowledged as the member of the Kelly clan with the greatest ties and commitment to the world of art, literature, and theater. For this reason, he was viewed as an outsider. Like his niece Grace, George Kelly was a visionary, a dreamer, a book lover. He refused to drink tea brewed from tea bags. Furthermore, in contrast to his actor brother Walter, this strong-willed, cranky man with the slightly snobbish yet stylish demeanor was homosexual. George Kelly lived his entire adult life with his partner William Weagly, a former bookkeeper, who also worked for George as a kind of personal valet. When George Kelly died and his funeral was held in St. Bridget’s Church on Midvale Avenue, Weagly sat in the last row of the church and wept bitterly. He had been George’s committed partner for fifty-five years, but the Kellys had only ever treated him as George’s valet. He was not invited to George’s funeral and, when he attended anyway, was not acknowledged by the Kellys.
For his brother Jack Kelly and the other Kelly brothers, Patrick, Walter, and Charles, George’s homosexuality was a compromising situation that had to be rigorously and strictly denied and hidden. It was to stay a family secret. George was a homosexual in a clan that prided itself on its Catholic Irish provenance, to which the preservation of carefully crafted social roles and the pursuit of sports were of utmost importance.
Like Grace, George Kelly knew only too well what it felt like to be different and to not belong. Thus, it is no surprise that he was her favorite uncle, as well as the inspiration for her career. George Kelly’s name played a pivotal part in Grace’s acceptance to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, a process which was plagued by complications. George Kelly despised sports and loved Shakespeare. After his success with The Show-Off (1924), he won the renowned Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for his play Craig’s Wife (1925). Uncle George was the only Kelly who fully understood Grace, who showed her empathy and understanding, who supported and inspired her. Even after Grace had long become a celebrity, she would frequently meet her favorite uncle for a meal, and this continued until his death in June 1974.
Uncle George showed Grace the very thing that father Jack always withheld from her: pride for his niece. “On Sundays many times we used to go to church. And then Uncle George, who lived in Southern California, would come and pick us up and take us for a ride around and take us to lunch. And she enjoyed those rides with George so much, that the two would talk. I would sit in the back seat, and maybe take a little nap. But the two of them would talk theatre and books and poetry,” recalled sister, Lizanne Kelly LeVine.52
Only a few weeks before his death, George Kelly wrote the following lines in a letter: “I am so proud of my niece, Grace. She was 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.”53
Grace received her first local newspaper review for the play The Torch Bearers. Her portrayal was praised, and in a play on the play’s title, the review emphasized her status as a young, inexperienced amateur actress, emerging from the Kelly family to be a torch bearer on the stage. Even at this young
age, Grace took every one of her roles seriously.
Beginning in the fall of 1935, at the age of six, Grace attended the Catholic Convent of the Assumption on School House Lane, commonly known as Ravenhill Academy. She went to “an excellent school, and she was well educated.”54 During this time, it was an annual tradition to act out the Nativity story, and Grace played the Virgin Mary, which in a way foreshadowed her later cultivated persona of virginal aloofness. Interestingly, after her marriage to Prince Rainier III, she was twice offered the role of Mary for two film projects.
“She was quite devoted to prayer and the community of saints. For this reason, we always prayed for each other,” recalled Abbess Frances, teacher at Ravenhill, about her student Grace. “Even as a child, she had something spiritual about her. I remember well a specific Christmas pageant. She played the Virgin Mary, and she did this quite piously.”55
It was customary at Ravenhill for the girls, as instructed by the nuns, to wear white gloves coming to and from school. Grace already knew this tradition because of the strict practices of Ma Kelly, who also periodically insisted that her three daughters wear hats. Grace carried on this habit, and later the wearing of white gloves became one of her unmistakable stylistic hallmarks.
Grace entered high school at the Stevens School in September 1943. At this time, she met Harper Davis, a classmate of her brother Kell from the William Penn Charter School. These two schools were located close to each other in Germantown. By this point, the small, thin, sickly, seemingly fragile girl had turned into a lovely teenager: tall with fine, blonde hair, striking blue eyes, and long legs. Trim and neat, she was often compared to a gazelle. The young Grace had developed into a natural beauty. The only feature she was self-conscious about was her backside, which tended to be curvy. Later, when on a film set, this physical characteristic was a sensitive issue for her, and she tried as much as possible to camouflage it.