Vanity Fair's Women on Women

by Radhika Jones

  The appearance and then sudden disappearance of gifted, beautiful blondes is not unknown to Hollywood. Before Grace Kelly’s five-year phase of radiance in the 50s, there was Frances Farmer, whose brilliance roused the industry for six years, from 1936 to 1942. Like Kelly, Farmer was intelligent, her own person, and a serious actress wary of binding contracts. In 1957, only a year after Grace Kelly’s departure, Diane Varsi took the baton, making a big impression as a sensitive ingénue in Peyton Place. Varsi, too, was both smart and skeptical of Hollywood, and fled the industry in 1959. (She returned in the late 60s, but without momentum.) Farmer and Varsi left, respectively, in mental and emotional disarray. The word “disarray,” however, would never find its way into a sentence that included the name Grace Kelly. She was always in control. Always prepared. Always well groomed and well mannered, delightful and kind. And always, eternally it seems, beautiful.

  Though it is in Rear Window where Grace Kelly achieves full iconic stature, answering Stewart’s question by circling the room in her pure-white snowcap of a skirt, there is nothing “rear window” about her. She states her full name as she switches on three lights, and her picture-window, Park Avenue perfection is itself a kind of incandescence. Here was a white-glove glow to make men gallant and women swoon, and it was present whether she was dressed in dowdy daywear (her beloved wool skirts and cashmere cardigans) or in the confections of Hollywood designers and Paris couturiers. Hitchcock goes so far as to make a joke of it. “She’s too perfect,” Jimmy Stewart complains. “She’s too talented. She’s too beautiful. She’s too sophisticated. She’s too everything but what I want.” And it was true, except for that last, because at the moment when Miss Kelly left Hollywood the whole world wanted her.

  * * *

  —

  The story of Grace Kelly has been told and retold by friends, journalists, historians, and hacks. This April, it will be told yet again, not in words but in artifacts, when London’s Victoria and Albert Museum unveils the exhibition “Grace Kelly: Style Icon.” It begins as her story must, in Philadelphia, where she was born on November 12, 1929. Baby pictures aside, the image that seems to set her life in motion is one that recurs in a series of vacation snapshots. It is Grace as a little girl on the Jersey Shore, being twirled in the air by her father, who looks Herculean in a tank suit as he swings her by her legs or by an arm and a leg. The photos capture an essential dynamic: Jack Kelly was the vortex of his family, and its life revolved around him—his principles, his dreams, his drive.

  Jack’s goal was success in all things, pursued honestly yet relentlessly, and his drive was physical. It manifested itself both in sports—he was celebrated for winning three Olympic gold medals in sculling (one newspaper called him “the most perfectly formed American male”)—and in business, where his construction company, Kelly for Brickwork, became the largest of its kind on the East Coast. His sex drive was Herculean, too. Marriage did not limit Jack’s love life, which was discreet but busy. In many ways the Kellys were like the Kennedys—bright, shining, charismatic, Irish-Catholic Democrats, civically and politically engaged. (Jack once ran for Philadelphia mayor, losing by only a small margin.) Similarly, Kelly women were expected to be team players—outdoorsy, sporting, and supportive of their men.

  Margaret Majer Kelly, Grace’s mother, was herself an impressive physical specimen. A former cover-girl model and competitive swimmer, she was the first woman to teach physical education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her German-Protestant discipline meshed nicely with her husband’s can-do spirit; when they married, she converted to Catholicism. Despite their winning energies, the Kellys were not social climbers. In the Philadelphia of those days, Irish Catholics, even rich ones, were outsiders. Thus the family never lived on the fabled Main Line, as so many Americans thought they had (because Hollywood publicists decided they had). The Kellys built a 17-room home in the Philadelphia neighborhood of East Falls, overlooking the Schuylkill River, upon which Jack rowed. And there they stayed, enviably wealthy, sailing through the Great Crash without a dip because Jack didn’t play the stock market.

  * * *

  —

  Grace Patricia Kelly was the third child of four and the only one without a clear definition. Peggy, extremely witty and her father’s favorite, was the eldest. John junior, born second, was the only boy. (“Kell” would become a champion rower like his father, not because he wanted to but because his father expected him to.) And Lizanne was the baby. Grace was defined by what she wasn’t: not athletic, not outgoing, not boisterously healthy (she suffered sinus trouble and asthma). A much-repeated family story has young Grace locked in a cupboard by tempestuous Lizanne; instead of crying to get out, Grace stayed quietly locked in, playing with her dolls, for hours. “She seemed to have been born with a serenity the rest of us didn’t have,” Lizanne later explained. Unfortunately, serenity didn’t particularly impress Jack. Grace was active in a place where it didn’t show: her imagination. Early on, she told her sister Peggy, “One day I’m going to be a princess.”

  Make-believe was where Grace excelled, both in playing with her dolls and in class theatricals, beginning with her first big role—the Virgin Mary in the Ravenhill-convent-school Nativity pageant—and continuing through high school. Years later, as she was just gaining notice in Hollywood, the Los Angeles Times would write that she “came seemingly out of nowhere.” This was not true. Alongside the sporting blood in the Kelly clan ran a more verbal line of showmanship—the stage. Jack Kelly had two brothers who had gained fame in the theater: Walter Kelly, a successful vaudevillian, and George Kelly, a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright. George became Grace’s mentor and confidant. It was he who encouraged her dream of acting, who warned her about Hollywood’s feudal studio system, and whose name helped her win late admission to the renowned American Academy of Dramatic Arts, in Manhattan. Grace’s parents did not want her to leave home for New York. According to close friend Judith Balaban Quine, who would be one of Grace’s six bridesmaids and later the author of The Bridesmaids: Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, and Six Intimate Friends, Jack Kelly thought acting “a slim cut above streetwalker”—not an uncommon view at the time. But Grace was adamant. “She got away from home early,” her brother, Kell, once said. “None of the rest of us managed to do that.”

  Grace did well at the academy, and in her graduation performance played the role of Tracy Lord, the privileged heiress in The Philadelphia Story. This was the beginning of the potent, sometimes prophetic connection between life and art that would reverberate through the career of Grace Kelly. When in 1949 she won her first big part on Broadway—the daughter in The Father, with Raymond Massey in the lead—it was again a role in sync with her own situation: the loving daughter who must break away from a powerful family. Grace got good notices, which brought calls from New York television producers, but Broadway did not fall at her feet. The problem was her voice: it was too high, too flat (those sinuses), and not easily projected over the footlights. She put a clothespin on her nose and worked to bring her voice down a register, to achieve clarity and depth. The result was diction with a silver-spoon delicacy—slightly British—and the stirring lilt of afternoon tea at the Connaught. The Kellys teased Grace mercilessly, this putting on airs, but her new voice would be key.

  So would her walk. Grace had studied ballet as a girl, keen on becoming a ballerina, but she grew too tall (five feet six) to be a classical dancer in that era. She never, however, lost her ballet posture or a dancer’s awareness of her limbs in space. Furthermore, she’d paid her own tuition at the academy by doing lucrative work, making more than $400 a week as a commercial model for the John Robert Powers agency, selling soap, cigarettes, whatever, in print ads. This too contributed to a poise, an inner stillness, in the way she moved. Her walk became something unique: regal above the waist, shoulders back and head high, and a floating quality below, akin to a geisha’s glide, or a swan’s. In fact, Grace developed her acting c
hops not onstage but in the live “playhouse” television dramas that were a new form of entertainment in the early 50s, and one of her more than 30 TV appearances was in a shortened version of Ferenc Molnár’s The Swan. In this play, Grace, as a princess, must choose between young love and a destiny tied to duty, a life where she will “glide like a dream on the smooth surface of the lake and never go on the shore. . . . There she must stay, out on the lake, silent, white, majestic.” It’s hard not to feel clairvoyance in this metaphor.

  Add in the white gloves she wore to auditions—unheard of in the drafty, gypsy world of theater—and the neutral hose, the low-heeled shoes, the slim wool skirts, the camel-hair coat, the horn-rimmed glasses (she was nearsighted), and the less-is-more makeup. Well, Grace was her mother’s daughter, and Margaret had never approved of frippery.

  “She was fun and jolly and pretty and nice to have around,” says Laura Clark, who was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar when she met Grace, in the early 1950s, still a struggling actress. Clark remembers her style of dress as “very conservative. You know, the circle pin and the white collars. The sweater-and-tartan-skirt look. Almost schoolgirlish.” Fellow actress and close friend Rita Gam described Grace’s daytime style as that of a “small-town high-school teacher,” while fashion designer Oleg Cassini, whom Grace would begin dating in 1954 and almost marry, called it her “Bryn Mawr look.”

  Maree Frisby Rambo, Grace’s best friend from childhood, says that, growing up, Grace wasn’t terribly interested in clothes. “We all wore about the same thing. Sweaters and skirts and loafers and socks. It was like a uniform. Dances and things, she’d wear a dress of Peggy’s.” That changed when Grace left home. “I remember she’d been in New York for a while,” Rambo recalls. “She came to Philadelphia, and I invited her to the Cricket Club to go swimming, and she appeared, and she just looked different. Whatever she had on was so chic, as opposed to us. She looked New York, where the rest of us looked Chestnut Hill.”

  So the voice, the walk, the reserved bluestocking style—it all came together in a kind of crystalline equation. You couldn’t say it was calculated. Grace was well brought up, and disciplined, and cultured, and shy. She was only highlighting what she had, just as when she took the advice of her modeling friend Carolyn Reybold, who told her to stop hiding her too square jaw under a pageboy and instead accentuate her jawline. Grace pulled back her hair and pulled on her gloves. All that was left now was for the right camera to find her.

  * * *

  —

  She would never have had a career in the theater,” Don Richardson told Robert Lacey, whose definitive biography, Grace, was published in 1994. Richardson was a theater director who worked with academy students, and he was also one of Grace’s lovers. “Great looks and style, yes, but no vocal horsepower.” One day, though, Richardson was studying some photographs he’d taken of Grace, and a headshot transfixed him. “When you looked at that picture, you were not looking at her. You were looking at the illusion of her. . . . The camera did more than love her. It was insane about her—just like I was. When I looked at that photograph, I knew that her future would have to be in pictures.”

  In The Face of the World, the photographer Cecil Beaton explains why the camera was insane for Grace Kelly. “She has, most important of all, a nice nose for photography: flat, it hardly exists at all in profile.” This meant it wouldn’t cast shadows that could trouble the cameraman. Furthermore, Beaton writes, “all photogenic people have square faces. . . . [Grace’s] mouth, the tip of her nose, her nostrils—all are extremely sensitive. Their beauty is effective against the rugged background of the square face.”

  Grace’s first film, Fourteen Hours, was not the one that set her movie career in motion. And while 1952’s High Noon put her on the map, it was more of a spotlight than a spark. No, the touchstone was a little black-and-white screen test she shot for Twentieth Century Fox in early 1950, for a movie called Taxi, the part of a poor Irish girl. Grace didn’t get the role, but the test hung around. In 1952 it caught the eye of John Ford, who said, “This dame has breeding, quality and class.” He cast her in Mogambo. A year later, Alfred Hitchcock saw the test. He was in need of a leading lady for Dial M for Murder, having lost his previous muse, Ingrid Bergman, who’d run off with the married director Roberto Rossellini. On the basis of the Taxi audition, plus a scene or two of High Noon (in which he thought her “mousy”—a compliment), Grace was hired. “From the Taxi test,” Hitchcock explained, “you could see Grace’s potential for restraint.” He liked what he called her “sexual elegance.”

  Grace’s rise in Hollywood was swift, and her self-possession was stunning. On her own, she worked out an enviable seven-year contract with MGM, one that allowed her the freedom to live in Manhattan every other year, so she could pursue the stage, which was still her dream. She had no qualms about turning down stupid scripts, and was tight-lipped when reporters asked personal questions. Financially prudent and secure, she didn’t have to accept second-rate stuff or play the publicity game. “She selects clothes and stories and directors with the same sureness,” said eminent Hollywood designer Edith Head, who dressed Grace in four films. “She’s always right.” Grace loved the feeling of family on a movie set, and was adored by her colleagues, whether they were people behind the scenes or stars such as Ray Milland, Cary Grant, and Frank Sinatra. Oddly, the brass at MGM never seemed to understand their Miss Kelly, or value what they had in her. Of the nine movies she made after signing with MGM, five were with other studios to whom MGM lent her out. The Country Girl, a serious drama for which she won her best-actress Oscar, was made at Paramount.

  * * *

  —

  The year 1955 was a big one for Grace. She had four films in the theaters and was the year’s highest-earning female star; at the Academy Awards, not only did she win an Oscar but Bob Hope declared, “I just wanna say, they should give a special award for bravery to the producer who produced a movie without Grace Kelly.” That same year she rose to the top of the Best-Dressed List, sharing the No.1 spot with socialite and Über-Wasp Babe Paley, who wore mostly Mainbocher. That Grace, who did not wear couture, could tie with Babe, who did, attests to Grace’s discerning eye. “The stylish image of Grace Kelly was everywhere,” writes H. Kristina Haugland in Grace Kelly: Icon of Style to Royal Bride, “including department store windows. In the fall of 1955, her likeness was used to create a line of mannequins.” It was in 1955 and ’56 that Grace ascended to something white, silent, majestic.

  These were the years of her last three movies: the glorious To Catch a Thief, filmed on the French Riviera, all sea and sky; The Swan, from the play that she’d done on television in 1950, and which was now getting the lavish MGM treatment; and High Society, a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, co-starring Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Any actress would be floating with this kind of material, and Grace, almost literally, was, in fabrics that were light, airy, and ineffable (a theme that had begun with Rear Window). She wore chiffon, watered silk, unlined linen, and that most levitational textile, silk organza. The costumes that designers Edith Head and Helen Rose were making for these films show that everyone was on the same page, working in celestial alignment.

  “Every few decades Hollywood finds a way to classicize the look of one of its stars,” says film and dance critic Don Daniels. “It did it with Marlene Dietrich. It did it with Katharine Hepburn. And it eventually did it with Grace Kelly. Helen Rose specialized in this sort of thing in the 50s, in films like Athena and Jupiter’s Darling. She worked on this look for Grace in both The Swan and High Society. It’s every now and then a woman and her look floats into the public consciousness and can be styled so that we remember Greek goddesses.”

  The Swan was a costume drama and hews to an Empire line. But in To Catch a Thief and High Society, references abound to both classical draping and classical dance, an art form full of mythological creatures. Grace’s gowns are columnar, with water
fall pleats and cascades of fluting, sheer trains flowing from the back (where wings would be, if she had them), and sheer scarves like soft breezes around her neck. All this pleating and fluting and floating was in tune with the Hellenistic sculpting of 50s couturiers such as Madame Grès and the Greek designer Jean Dessès. Grace’s day dresses have fitted bodices and skirts blossoming from the waist—a very clever fusion of the ballerina’s tutu with the American shirtwaist, and a shape that allowed her to move freely (as she did in the sensational flowered shirtwaist of Rear Window, in which she climbed a fire escape). As for color, Grace was given her own, Apollonian palette. Wheat-field and buttercup yellows, azure and cerulean blues, seashell pink and angel-skin coral, Sun King gold and Olympus white—no one wore white like Grace Kelly. To those with a feeling for history, beauty, and style, Grace Kelly’s late-career wardrobe—the huntress Artemis during the day and Aphrodite at night—is unforgettable if not positively Delphic.

  “Every time I see Grace Kelly I’m influenced by what she wears,” says Janie Bryant, the costume designer for AMC’s Mad Men. “The simplicity, it is so classic, but it’s always dramatic.”

  “When I branched out into women’s wear,” says designer Tommy Hilfiger, who has an Andy Warhol silkscreen of Grace Kelly in his New York apartment, “I began to really study icons of style. Grace stood out. Style is enduring and forever. It’s something you cannot buy. There is a chic-ness to conservative style done in an elegant way. You know, we did a book called Grace Kelly: A Life in Pictures. We did this as an inspiration book, not only for ourselves. We find that the French are obsessed with her, and the Japanese are intrigued.”

  “She didn’t necessarily lead fashion in a new direction,” says Jenny Lister, a curator of Textiles and Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum. “She’s become shorthand for a very polished and well-accessorized look. Contemporary designers like Zac Posen have talked about her timeless appeal. I think it boils down to quite ethereal ideas, because in some of her films she almost seemed like a goddess, and because they couldn’t pin her down—she was so private. That aura of mystery, she retained that. And because she stopped making films, it never changed.”