Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (6 page)

Worship of Jack Kelly was the organizing principle of life at 3901 Henry Avenue, and Grace was a willing devotee of the cult. But she found a safe substitute for rebellion in her attraction toward the alternatives that were offered by Uncle George. He cut a handsome figure, as tall as his brother Jack at six-foot-two, but more slender and refined—a man of standards and of subtlety. A photograph of the dark-haired George Kelly in 1924 at the time of
The Show-Off,
his second Broadway hit, displays a pair of piercing black eyes, a long aquiline nose, and curving lips that seem almost feminine.

Uncle George’s sexuality was something of a mystery. Unmarried, he never had girlfriends, and though he wrote rich and challenging roles for women, the critics sometimes accused him of misogyny. He shared his life with a discreet and loyal manservant. But if George Kelly was homosexual, he gave no overt sign of it. He lived detached and sufficient unto himself—precise and a little self-righteous, like his plays. His cup of tea had to be brewed from the raw leaf,
never
from a tea bag.

“He was a very old-world gentleman,” says Dorothy Langdon Sidey, whose father, Roy, was family doctor to both the Majers and the Kellys. “He was very continental.”

Grace loved it when Uncle George would take her out to lunch and talk to her of scripts and books and parts. “You could sit and listen to my Uncle George all night long,” she later recalled. “One story after another.”

George Kelly had started off in vaudeville as an actor in the dramatic one-act sketches that were a feature of many music-hall bills, and he had been drawn into writing by the need to generate his own material. Graduating to full-length plays with
The Torch-Bearers
in 1922, he enjoyed a decade of great success. But his formal drawing-room dramas lost ground to the social realism of the Depression years, and in the early 1930s he moved out to Hollywood to write and polish dialogue for the talkies. He was placed under contract by MGM, and one of his greatest themes was the importance of protecting artistic integrity against the pressures and compromises of the studio system.

“He is the most wonderful and intelligent man I have ever known,” wrote Grace of her uncle when she was seventeen. “Whatever he talks about, he makes you understand all its beauty and hidden meaning.”

If there was one single influence that directed Grace Kelly toward her career as an actress, it was her adored Uncle George. Declaiming long narrative passages from the nineteenth century poets that he loved, lecturing his young nephews and nieces on the need to correct the nasal twang of their Philadelphia accents, walking, even in old age, with the same stately posture with which he had first trod the vaudeville boards, George Kelly was the inspirational essence of dramatic art—filled to his fingertips with the magic of acting.

Talking in 1966 with Irwin W. Solomon about the comedienne Ina Claire, and trying to describe the artfully scatterbrained way in which she had performed a scene from his play
The Fatal Weakness,
George Kelly suddenly offered a demonstration. He was in his Alden Park apartment, and he walked from the living room into the dining room. The two areas were separated by a dull green theatrical curtain that hung from a long, heavy rod with old-fashioned hoops.

“A few moments later,” Solomon recalled, “his hand came through; he pulled the curtain apart a bit, then the whole curtain, and he walked into the room.”

The transformation was astonishing. Without makeup, costume, or even a flick of his hair, Uncle George had accomplished the miracle of the actor. Assuming the postures and saying the lines, George Kelly was no longer George Kelly—”He
was
Ina Claire.”

3

WHITE GLOVES

G
race Kelly started school just before her fifth birthday, in the autumn of 1934, at the Academy of the Assumption, Ravenhill, Philadelphia, in the parish of St. Bridget’s. The Jesuits boast that any child they educate becomes theirs for life. The Sisters of the Assumption could certainly claim as much of their student Grace.

Ravenhill was a grand and upstanding Victorian residence that had been bequeathed to the Catholic diocese of Philadelphia, and the Sisters of the Assumption had adapted the mansion’s handsome wood-paneled walls and pink stained-glass windows into a fee-paying school that was fragrant with wax polish and piety.

“Who am I?”

“I am a child of God.”

“Why am I here?”

“I am here to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him.”

Ninety to a hundred little girls, with a few boys in the kindergarten, were shepherded through their catechism and schoolwork by a score of nuns and their helpers who lived on the premises. The domestic, or lay, sisters did the cooking and kept the place clean. They wore black aprons with white headdresses. The more senior teaching staff wore purple and had a large white felt cross sewn in the middle of their habits. The children addressed them as “Mother.”

The Order of the Assumption was a French teaching order whose mother house was in Belgium. Ravenhill was their first, and at that time, only North American academy, and their ethic was purposefully European. If you wrote “color” in an essay, you lost a mark. The correct spelling was “colour.” Everyone who mattered in the convent’s hierarchy spoke with a foreign accent, or in clipped and precise Oxbridge English in which you heard every consonant. “I didn’t have a native, American teacher until I was in sixth grade,” remembers Mary-Ellen Tolan, a Ravenhill schoolmate of Grace’s.

There was a vivid sense of being part of an international community. Each issue of the Ravenhill school magazine dwelt lengthily on the adventures in the thirty or more Assumption colleges around the world, and these became very real as World War II approached. Children from threatened sister houses were sent to America for safety. Among Grace Kelly’s fellow students were the singing children of the Von Trapp family, fresh off the Alps in their native costumes, and bringing Ravenhill’s concerts alive with the sound of music.

The mothers and sisters of the Assumption laid great emphasis on manners. Each Ravenhill girl kept three uniforms in her locker—one for everyday wear, one for sports, and one for special holy days. She also had to bring her own white, embroidered linen napkin to lunch, where one of the staff patrolled the tables, correcting the girls who did not hold their knives and forks in a proper fashion.

“Any kind of rudeness was taboo,” remembers Mother Dorothy, who was one of Grace’s teachers. “We explained how we are all a body of Christ, and how disrespect and rudeness to each other is rudeness to Christ. We stressed that very much.”

Mother Dorothy remembers Grace as a girl who asked excellent questions. “She asked in a nice way, like somebody who was interested personally, and who wasn’t looking to pick flaws. She was always very positive.” Sister Francis Joséph recalls that Grace was “an average girl intellectually—pretty matter-of-fact.”

Grace Kelly was no brainbox. Ravenhill used the innovative teaching techniques of the Montessori method, but it was not conventional schoolwork that made the impact on Grace’s mind. Her math was particularly weak. She attended Ravenhill for nine years, from the time she was four until she completed eighth grade at the age of thirteen-and-a-half, and what she brought away was less academic accomplishment than an all-embracing and quite unshakable faith in the Catholic religion and its relevance to every detail of her life.

A different spirit might have rebelled against it—the rules, the bells, the curtseyings to Reverend Mother, the lines of white-veiled little girls filing silently to the chapel. But Grace was always a conformist, on the surface, at least, and in the absence of her attaining any particular classroom distinction, religion offered an area in which she could excel. She enjoyed the pageantry and the certainty, and she felt comfortable taking her cues from authority figures.

Grace also encountered a tenderness at the convent that she did not find at home. The Kelly household was an environment of considerable material comfort, but it was tough in emotional terms. Grace found the cosseting she needed in the Mothers and Sisters of the Assumption. There was something otherworldly about them. Vanishing from lessons on a regular basis in order to fulfill their prayer vows eight times a day, Ravenhill’s teachers were gentle and naive—and also slightly mysterious. They lived in their own forbidden areas of the mansion, and they were never seen to eat. But after lunch they always smelled of oranges.

The Order of the Assumption attached particular importance to the drama and liturgy of the Catholic faith, and the sisters introduced this to new arrivals by having them act out the ceremonies of the mass, with the kindergarten boys playing the part of priests, dressed in little paper vestments. God and human mortality were not remote or complicated prospects. Once a girl could write with any fluency, she was given a small black book to note down the questions she would like to ask her heavenly Father when she met Him face-to-face.

Grace’s parents were by no means unquestioning Catholics. As a former Protestant, Ma Kelly had particular problems with the doctrine of the Virgin birth. She found the idea of Mary getting impregnated via an angel quite ridiculous, and she did not hesitate to express her skepticism on this and similar topics when family table talk turned to religious matters. But Grace drank down everything the sisters taught her. They had the same mixture of class and delicacy that she found so attractive in Uncle George. She took her first communion at the age of seven in the Ravenhill chapel, dressed all in white for her entry as a full member into the Body of Christ. The evening before, she made her first confession, kneeling in the darkness of the curtained box that stood inside the chapel door, whispering her sins through the screen to Father Allen, who came up to the school every afternoon from St. Bridget’s.

What sins could a seven-year-old girl find to confess? “‘I hit my friend,’ perhaps, or, ‘I told a lie,’” explains Mother Dorothy, who would prepare the girls before they went to the confessional. “Just that little lack of cooperation with what the Lord wants from us.”

Grace’s friends remember quite a mischievous little girl who got the giggles during Benediction. “Something would start her going,” remembers Alice Godfrey. “She would try to hold it in, and then her whole body would be shaking.”

Away from the intense and coercive Kelly environment, the sniffler became a snickerer. The Assumption sisters were not fierce disciplinarians, and Grace felt able to stretch out a little, revealing a definite friskiness. Her place at lunch was by the window, and she would help friends jettison unwanted food into the bushes when the patrolling sister was not watching. Beyond the bushes were the convent gardens and a grotto that was the rendezvous for all sorts of naughtiness.

“Grace Kelly,” remembers Glenna Costello Millar, “was the girl who taught me how to smoke.”

It was at the Academy of the Assumption, Ravenhill, around the age of nine or ten, that Grace began to manifest the intriguing dualism that was to become the central feature of her adult character—the prim and proper Goody Two-Shoes inside whom lurked a wild and often reckless spirit. This was not a simple matter of hypocrisy. Whatever her failings, Grace was never a sly or deceitful person. It was her genuine and wholehearted wish to be a good girl and to do the right thing. But this did not stop her from puffing on a cigarette behind the convent grotto. Grace the naughty was absolutely as authentic as Grace the good, and it was the appetizing tension between these conflicting personalities that was to provide the essence of her appeal as a film star—the outwardly reserved and cool girl who hinted at such wildness underneath.

Roman Catholicism, of all religions, addresses the conflict between virtue and indulgence with particular practicality. The priest in the confession box represents the most tangible acknowledgment that we cannot possibly hope to eradicate sin and must therefore find a mechanism for living with it on a permanent basis. It is a dogma which positively embraces the basic schizophrenia that is the human condition—and it may be that the young Grace was drawn so strongly to the Catholic faith because it offered her some sort of rationale and solace for the conflicting impulses that she could already feel battling inside her.

The Academy of the Assumption, Ravenhill, no longer exists. The sisters later transferred their ministry to the Philadelphia ghetto. But Ravenhill remains a treasured memory for Grace’s school friends—the remembrance of a different and rather innocent world, now more than fifty years past. On holy days the entire student body would participate in
cache-cache,
a massive, school-wide game of hide-and-seek. Every day after school, when sports were over, the girls would be served with
goûter.
One of the cooking sisters would emerge from the kitchen, bearing a tray piled high with fresh-baked pastries.

Grace’s mother and father took her away from Ravenhill at the end of eighth grade because Jack Kelly felt that the convent’s sporting program was inadequate. Pastries after training certainly did not sharpen the competitive edge. But Grace’s early brush with the compelling power of faith and idealism stayed with her all her life. From the year she left, she kept in touch with the sisters, sending them Christmas cards and writing long, newsy letters to her favorite teachers. It was as if she saw them as parents. Sometimes, as an adult, she would turn back to her childhood mentors for advice.