The credit for Grace Kelly’s astonishing good looks had to go to the happy accident of her Irish-German ancestry, but her voice was very much the creation of her own hard work and her powerful homing instinct for what she wanted to be. Part Jane Austen, part Mary Poppins, Grace’s voice breathed tutored and well-bred vulnerability. If Marilyn Monroe’s voice said “Squeeze me,” and Mae West’s said “Screw me,” then Grace Kelly’s said, “Please hold my hand.” Augmenting the instruction she received at the Academy, Grace took private voice lessons from Mario Fiorella, an operatic tenor who was the boyfriend of Aunt Marie Magee, and she would also spend long hours doing voice exercises with a clothes pin attached to the end of her nose. “It was a deliberate thing,” remembers her old friend Dottie Sitley. “She put on the clothespin to lower the register of her voice, and to pull it down into her throat.”
If you paused more than a second to analyze the components of Grace Kelly’s professional accent it sounded quite ridiculous— and that was how it seemed to her family and friends when she first returned to Philadelphia. “We went to a cocktail party,” remembers Jane Porter, her young friend from Stevens. “Grace came in, and I thought, ‘I don’t believe it!’ She had such a thick British accent.”
The Kellys called it “Gracie’s new voice.” “They teased her unmercifully,” remembers Alice Godfrey.
“I must talk this way—for my work,” Grace responded huffily, and, for the time being, the family held its peace.
Jack Kelly had only consented to his middle daughter going off to New York on the eve of her eighteenth birthday if there was a safe and suitable place for her to stay. The Barbizon Hotel for Women at Sixty-third Street and Lexington somewhat allayed his anxieties—an all-female establishment in the heart of Manhattan where three references of respectability were required to become a guest, and where male visitors were not allowed beyond the ground floor. “It was exactly like a very posh boarding school,” remembers Murr Sinclair.
The Barbizon was legendary as the New York nest from which many a beautiful fledgling had first taken flight. Joan Crawford, Gene Tierney, and Lauren Bacall had all lodged in the Barbizon’s pink and green rooms, with the bathroom and lavatories situated inconveniently down the hall. In her novel,
The Bell Jar,
Sylvia Plath renamed it “The Amazon”—a place “for women only . . . with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn’t get at them and deceive them.”
For this very reason, however, the Barbizon was something of a magnet for young men about town. They cruised the lobby, joking with the burly female elevator operators who came on duty in the evening with the mission of protecting the virtue of the upper floors. Murr Sinclair lived further uptown with a group of fellow Academy students in a pension-apartment under the watchful eye of a landlady, and she can remember envying the clusters of suitors and the relative freedom of the girls who lived in the Barbizon. “They had a wonderful time. It was not very difficult for them to do just as they wished.”
This was certainly the case with Grace. Mark “Herbie” Miller, a fellow student of hers at the Academy, has vivid memories of the Barbizon. “We would go up to the thirteenth floor. There was a recreation room, with part of it roped off. So Grace and I would go into the roped-off part, and just smooch. ‘Necking,’ we used to call it in those days—a lot of kissing and stuff. We were like young little puppies, throwing ourselves at each other.”
Herbie Miller had met Grace on his very first day at the Academy. “I saw this angelic creature. I just fell madly in love with her at first sight—and I suppose that she did the same for me.”
Breezy and genial, with the build of a football quarterback, Herbie Miller was one of the best-looking males that the Academy recruited in 1947. His style was matinée idol, with the collar of his polo coat always stuck up at a rakish angle. Working under the professional name of Mark Miller, he subsequently starred in a number of TV series, among them
Please Don’t Eat the Daisies.
But in 1947 Herbie shared an accent problem with Grace. “You’ll be playing cowboy movies all your life,” Mr. Goodman told him, “if you don’t get rid of that Texas accent.”
The voice tutor made this diagnosis in the same class in which he had jumped upon Grace’s Philadelphia twang. “So we did our voice exercises together almost every night,” remembers Miller. “‘How—now—brown—cow,’ that sort of thing, backward and forward to each other, three or four times a week for over a year.”
Herbie and Grace made an attractive and purposeful young couple, working together on their craft and making a point of catching the latest European art movies that were screened once a week at the Museum of Modern Art. They were devotees of the understated British style of Alec Guinness. Bettina Thompson, who shared a room with Grace at the Barbizon, remembers more frivolous outings. “We went to see a Fred Astaire movie one night, “she recalls, “and afterward we all did pirouettes and dance steps up and down the stone steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”
Grace’s was a clean and joyous New York that did not know of muggers or drug dealers—or parking meters. “We might be sitting around in the evening in our pajamas drinking coffee,” remembers Murr Sinclair, “and someone would say, ‘Let’s go see such-and-such a movie.’ So we’d throw on our raincoats, jump into my convertible, which I kept outside in the street, unlocked, and go off to the theater—still in our pajamas.”
Grace fitted perfectly into this giggly and artless companionship, in which wickedness was measured by your ability to smuggle curling tongs into your room at the Barbizon, where electrical appliances were strictly banned. She was exuberant, extroverted, fun—in no way the timid girl that Ma Kelly had expected to see come running back to Henry Avenue. “Mother,” Grace wrote home after just a few weeks in New York, “this is exactly the place I have always wanted to be!”
In her new circle of friends Grace was a grown-up version of the little girl who had jettisoned unwanted lunches out of the window at Ravenhill and organized smoking parties behind the grotto. Her Barbizon companions recall Grace, clad only in the skimpiest underwear, performing her exotic dances in the hallway, then skittering back into her room when the elevator approached.
Unlike some of her lovers, Herbie Miller is reluctant to discuss the physical side of his relationship with Grace. “Let us just say we were sweethearts,” he says. “We stumbled on each other when we were children, basically. I just know how much she loved life, and how much she loved romance. She was a very romantic person, not cold or chiseled in granite or marble—the total opposite of that. She was an incredibly warm and earthy and fun-loving girl.”
Grace did not introduce her New York boyfriend to her parents, but Herbie did meet the fabled Uncle George—”he was a very swishy old guy, very elegant”—and he also met her sisters. “It was really strange, because she was in total awe of her big sister. She idolized Peggy. I’d say, ‘C’mon, Grace. You’re much prettier than she is.’ And she’d say, ‘Oh, no, I’m not.’ For some reason she felt totally inferior to her.”
This hangover from the childhood praise heaped upon the brilliant Baba was reflected in Grace’s appearance when she was feeling shy. “There were times when she was anything but a glamour girl,” remembers Murr Sinclair. “She wore tweed skirts, an old cardigan, and heavy, horn-rimmed glasses.” When Grace was in her dowdy mode, it was as if she were actually striving for a schoolmarm look. Friends recall her eating dinner on her own at the Barbizon, sitting straight-backed and rather forlornly alone at her table, wearing her glasses and reading a book—the model of a bluestocking spinster.
Dick Coons, a young banker just starting in New York, took Grace on a few dates soon after she moved into the Barbizon, and his memory is of a young woman who still seemed to be searching for herself, with her uncertainty reflected in her clothes. “One night,” Coons remembers, “she appeared in a very elegant black dress, with her hair up. She was statuesque and sophisticated. Next time she was the farmer’s daughter in a calico skirt and blouse.
And the third time she came down wearing a tweed suit and looking preppy—the standard Smith girl. It depended on her mood. It seemed to me that she was trying on different personalities for size.”
Grace got the chance for more role-playing when she went to Connecticut one weekend. “I was doing a modeling job,” remembers Herbie Miller, “and we were staying together at the house of the photographer. But the guy never looked at me. He only had eyes for Grace. ‘Do you mind if I take a picture of your girlfriend?’ he asked me. ‘I have a cover for
Redbook
coming up.’”
Grace made the cover of
Redbook
—and the covers of
Cosmopolitan, True Romance,
and
True Story
—all within the course of the next year. Without really trying, she suddenly found that she was a model. It came naturally to her. She had been posing for photographs all her life, from her father’s political campaigning to the fashion shows and benefits that her mother organized for Women’s Med. Now Grace flashed her wide and even-toothed smile for Old Gold cigarettes (“for a TREAT instead of a TREATMENT”) and even held up a can of insecticide for the Bridgeport Brass Company. “I used to do what they called ‘illustration,’” she later remembered. She started posing for lingerie advertisements, until she came home one weekend and asked her old teachers at Ravenhill for their advice.
“‘Who are you, Grace?’” Sister Francis Joséph remembers asking her. “‘Who are you?’ Well, I let her give me the answer. I let her tell me why she shouldn’t be posing for those kinds of pictures—and after that she didn’t.”
Grace had always been photogenic. All the Kellys were. But dashing to photographers’ studios between her Academy classes, Grace rapidly discovered just how much the camera loved her. Her good looks became something extra when translated into silver nitrate. She was not sufficiently hollow-cheeked and starving to get regular work on high-fashion assignments, but she was wholesome and handsome, a dreamy and glamorous version of the girl-next-door.
Carolyn Scott, a friend across the hall at the Barbizon, was already earning good money as a model, and she encouraged Grace to start doing the rounds of New York’s advertising agencies on a systematic basis. Toothpaste, skin cream, soap, beer, vacuum cleaners—Grace promoted them all, at rates that ranged from $7.50 to $25 an hour ($70 to $230 in early 1990s dollars). She did not do very well at conventions. She could be decidedly frosty with the businessmen who considered the models on the display stands fair game for a squeeze. But she commanded good fees for her television commercials. Back at 3901 Henry Avenue, dinner was disrupted more than once as the family decamped to the television room to watch Grace posing with the latest offering from Electrolux.
Grace’s modeling career proved remarkably lucrative. Old Gold paid her $2,000 for one session (more than $18,000 today). But Grace did not go wild with the money. The frugal Ma Kelly had taught her kids well. Brother Kell kept his money in a strange little clip-topped change purse of the sort that a woman might carry. He was notorious for his reluctance to open it, and Grace was similarly careful. Her friends used to joke about the dangers of sharing a cab ride with her. Somehow she usually managed to drift off, smiling and vague, when the meter got clicked, leaving someone else stuck with the fare.
It was the old syndrome of the girl who appeared to be fay and helpless, but who was taking very good care of herself. At the core, Grace was all business. It was what her father expected of a Kelly— and Grace made sure that her father got the point. She did not spend her modeling income on an extravagant new collection of shoes or clothes. The first installments of the money went straight to Daddy to pay off the tuition and her bills at the Barbizon.
This was Grace’s decision, not her father’s. “She wanted to be self-sufficient,” remembers Maree Frisby Rambo. “She wanted to make it on her own, without her father taking the glory for himself.”
By 1948 Grace’s brother, Kell, was a world-famous oarsman, thanks to his father, while Peggy was married and living with her new husband close to Henry Avenue in a home which Jack Kelly had built and furnished at not inconsiderable expense. Grace wanted to step away from that. As Peggy herself later said, “She did it all herself. She paid her rent. She paid her tuition. Mother and Daddy never sent her a penny.”
Grace’s sudden success as a model provoked some envy among her fellow students. She was “a candidate for Miss Rheingold [beer],” remembered John Lupton, who was in her class. “There were big billboards all over the place. You looked up at the top of a five-storey building, and there was a picture of Grace Kelly’s face.”
Grace was well liked within her own particular circle of friends. She was warm and close with them. Life along the upper corridors of the Barbizon was a succession of high-spirited giggles and japes. But she could be distinctly off-hand with people whom she did not know well, and this earned her a reputation as “snotty.”
“She was a loner,” said Mary Woolverton, another Academy student, talking to James Spada in 1985. “She looked like a model who came in, did her thing, and left. There were students who were in awe of her because of her beauty and that distant quality she had. . . . I’ll never forget when she got dressed for exercise class. We had to get into our leotards and Grace was absolutely exquisite. She was
so
beautiful. But I always thought she was kind of cold.”