Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (3 page)

This book has taken two years to research and write, and is based on press coverage, personal letters and papers, and upon interviews with many of Grace Kelly’s closest colleagues and friends. It contains the first detailed account of the police investigation of her death, and reveals how she had love affairs both before and after her marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco. It also examines the controversial medical decisions taken in her final hours. With different medical handling, might Princess Grace be alive today? It is not, perhaps, surprising that Prince Rainier and his family declined to be interviewed for this book, for it presents a portrait of Grace—and her family—which is very different from the image cultivated by them and by their public relations experts. The conventional picture of Grace Kelly, Princess Grace, was a beautiful illusion created for an age that liked to be deceived, and it may seem cruel to subject it to the intrusive and unforgiving analysis of the 1990s.

But the lady can take it. The truth does not destroy, it actually enhances the beauty of her illusion. Grace Kelly was a tough and courageous woman who conquered the challenges of her life and of her age with hard work, ingenuity, and, yes, with great charm. She was warm and brave and loyal and human. But the myth-making started early.

1

FATHER AND DAUGHTER

J
uly 1935. She was five-and-a-half years old, lithe and skinny and gap-toothed. When her father picked her up to whirl her around him, she laughed and twirled in his orbit, her feet flying out over the sand. How little Grace loved her Daddy, loved to curl in the winter against his warm tobacco-smelling coat. Now, this summer’s day by the ocean, he was all hers for the moment, spinning her around him until the world was just a blur.

Jack Kelly, six-foot-two and 185 pounds, was dressed in swim shorts with a belt and sleeveless top. The shoulder straps strained across his muscles as he turned. With his geometric, chiseled features and his dark, shiny hair, this man was the source of joy and power to his daughter as she spun. Yet even as she circled, the five-year-old knew what was expected. She could sense the instant she must look up and give her smile, and she gave it just right—as she came around with the ocean behind her. The photographer from the
Bulletin
got a perfect shot.

You had to put on a good performance if you were a daughter of Jack Kelly. In July 1935, age forty-five, he was the Democrats’ candidate for mayor of Philadelphia. That was what had brought the cameraman to the seaside—to snap handsome Jack without his collar and tie, playing with his photogenic children on the sand. One pose here, one pose there. Now, into the ocean to catch the breaking waves. So the five-year-old Grace waded into the water, stood at attention and stared straight at the photographer, smiling but serious, quite undiverted by the distractions of the spray. Her brother and her two sisters were looking left and right. They were giggling and ducking—but not young Grace. She kept looking straight ahead, always the good girl. Smile for the camera. Get it right for Daddy.

It is not unusual for a five-year-old girl to rate her father as something close to a God among men. But in the case of Grace Patricia Kelly, born in Philadelphia on November 12,1929, her fond opinion was also shared by a remarkable number of other people.

Her father did not, in fact, win his bid to be mayor. In the election of 1935 Jack Kelly lost by some 40,000 of the 700,000 votes cast. But no Democrat had ever done so well before, and the defeat was only a temporary setback in the career of a man who, love him or loathe him, was generally acknowledged to be one of the city’s more remarkable and charismatic sons.

Born in 1890, one of a sprawling Irish Catholic family of ten children living in the poor, immigrant quarter of East Falls, Philadelphia, Jack Kelly had earned his first wages as a bricklayer. Then he started his own contracting firm, Kelly for Brickwork, and, by dint of charm, hard work, and the right connections, he managed to build the business into the largest construction enterprise on the East Coast. Kelly for Brickwork had a hand in everything from the classical pillars of Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Street Station to Radio City Music Hall in New York. Jack Kelly became a millionaire.

But he also won eminence in another field. In his spare time he was an oarsman dedicated to that most solitary of rowing sports, the single sculls—eight minutes or more of self-imposed torture propelling a fragile wooden shell through 2,000 meters of water— and his sculling triumphs had secured him the special status which adorns the sporting champion. Set money and brickwork aside. Grace Kelly’s father was a local hero.

Rowing counts for more in Philadelphia than it does in most other places. The boathouses cluster close to the grandest boulevards of the city, just behind the art museum, linking together to form a quarter of a mile row along the eastern bank of the Schuylkill (pronounced “Skookle”) River. They make a surprising sight as you drive north out of downtown Philadelphia—a sudden riot of timbered gables, coats of arms, spires and turrets, with their concrete boat aprons sloping down to the water.

Penn, Villanova, and other local schools train out of Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row, but the essence of these ramshackle clubhouses is not varsity. Schuylkill rowing is for the regular, local, working fellow—like Kelly the bricklayer, who would rush from work every evening in the second decade of this century to get in his practice before the light left the river. He was then a single man.

In those days the members of the Vesper Club were the undisputed kings of the Schuylkill. The crews that rowed out of the club’s chapel-like boathouse dominated regattas up and down the East Coast—and Vesper’s best sculler was Jack Kelly. In one extraordinary spring and summer in 1919, the twenty-nine-year-old won every race in which he competed—including the U.S. singles sculling championship.

The next logical step was for the U.S. champion to compete in the Diamond Sculls, the world’s premier sculling event, held each July at the Henley Royal Regatta at Henley-on-Thames in England. Vesper had raised money to send crews there before. But early in June 1920, with his training complete and his shell crated and ready for his transatlantic passage, Jack Kelly received a cable from Henley. The stewards had rejected his entry.

Henley’s main objection was to the way in which Vesper had financed the previous sorties of its representatives across the Atlantic. The American club had put the money it raised straight into its rowers’ pockets, making them professionals according to the complicated and famously stuffy rules of the Royal Regatta. A standing regulation banned all future entries from Vesper.

But the Henley stewards had a further and particular objection to Jack Kelly, deriving from his job and from their class-based view of what made for fair competition. “Mr. Kelly,” they declared in their meeting of June 3, 1920, “was also not qualified under Rule 1 (e) of the General Rules (manual labour).” In plain language, a Philadelphia bricklayer who made his living through his own physical toil and sweat had no place in a regatta for English gentlemen.

This rule was not quite as obnoxious as it seemed. It derived from the middle of the previous century, when the River Thames was the busiest street in London, plied by husky, professional watermen who organized races of their own, and who easily out-rowed the schoolboys and college students who competed at Henley. But it was an exercise in prejudice to be enforcing this regulation two years after the end of the First World War, and Jack Kelly wasted little time showing Henley’s stewards what he thought of their snobbery. 1920 was an Olympic year. The games were due to be held in Belgium. So, watched by all Philadelphia, and by a good many other non-rowing Americans piqued by this latest skirmish between the new world and the old, the twenty-nine-year-old Jack Kelly trained and raced as never before.

He packed up his racing shell again, and this time he did make it across the Atlantic—to the Scheldt River outside Antwerp, Belgium, where he won all his qualifying heats, and made his way to the Olympic final. He had guaranteed himself the silver medal. To win the gold, he had to get the better of the noted English rower Jack Beresford—fresh from Henley a few weeks earlier, and his triumph in the Diamond Sculls.

In a storybook conclusion to this storybook confrontation, Jack Kelly swept across the finish line the clear victor, leaving Henley’s champion paddling ineffectively in his wake—and, as his daughter Grace liked to recount the tale that her father told her, the new
victor ludorum
promptly packed up his battered, Irish-green racing cap and sent it off to King George V at Buckingham Palace. We do not know what His Majesty made of the worn and sweat-stained offering, but to Jack Kelly the message was very clear.

More than 100,000 Philadelphians turned out to cheer him home in the autumn of 1920. He was a national celebrity. A much-syndicated photograph showed the victorious oarsman standing beside Jack Dempsey, the boxer, and Man o’ War, the racehorse— three world champions, three superb symbols of physical excellence. One newspaper named Jack Kelly “the most perfectly formed American male,” and there was even talk of the handsome young bachelor going out to Hollywood for a screen test.

He was the toast of the town—literally. The quick-tongued Kelly became the speaker Philadelphia wanted at every benefit and roast, and from his celebrity followed power and money. He won election as a City Councilman and became Chairman of Philadelphia’s Democratic Party. His vigorous New Deal campaigning won him the gratitude of President Roosevelt—and that counted for a lot in these difficult years when the Federal Government was the fountainhead and only dispenser of construction work. The Federal Courthouse, Philadelphia, the Federal Office Building, Philadelphia, the handsome U.S. Post Offices sprinkled around Philadelphia’s suburbs—Kelly for Brickwork got the best government contracts.

But no one was heard to accuse the new party boss of profiteering or corruption. Though Jack Kelly’s broad shoulders were now encased in elegant, double-breasted suits, he never lost his aura of the straight blade in the water—the solid handshake, the bluff, open stare. When he did use his pull, it was to help put deserving kids through college, or to find temporary work for husbands and fathers who had fallen on hard times. Kelly for Brickwork did jobs at cost price, or less, for the Catholic church—as well as for synagogues, chapels, and just about any good cause that could sidle up to the boss’s generosity. Kelly’s friends would tell you how he knelt beside his bed every night to say his prayers, and of “Dreams,” the poem that he kept framed in his study:

Never by many are marvels wrought,

By one or two are the dreams first caught . . .

The dreamer must toil when the odds are great,

Must stand to failure and work and wait . . .

Must keep his faith though he stand alone,

Until the truth of his dream is known.

“Dreams” was by Edgar Guest, the bard of middle America in the 1930s and 1940s. Syndicated in newspapers all over the country, Guest’s singsong rhymes lauded the ethic painted by Norman Rockwell and set to song by Rodgers and Hammerstein—if you climb every mountain, you will surely find your dream.

The hours of lonely toil and training which underpinned Jack Kelly’s success on the river provided him with his own great metaphor for life, and of all his children, none took it more to heart than his middle daughter, Grace. The legend of the bricklayer and the Diamond Sculls, the straight blade who ran for mayor— these were the formative myths that shaped the thought patterns and ambitions of a little girl who would, one day, far eclipse her father’s somewhat provincial fame. The other young Kellys performed better in sporting contests, but it was Grace who assimilated the lesson where it counted most. Like a champion sculler, she knew how to hide the pain and keep on going. There was a sense in which Grace Kelly’s entire life was a race for which her father had trained and coached her.