It was the apparent effortlessness of Grace’s success that got under people’s skin. “She always seemed sort of swanlike,” remembers Murr Sinclair. “I can remember Anna Italiano, who later became Anne Bancroft. She was at the Academy with us. She was earnest and intense. Certainly not rich, and not very social. She brought her own sandwiches to the cafeteria. She had these big, fierce, dark eyes. There was no doubt that Annie was heading to be an actress with a capital A. But Grace always seemed to be cruising.”
Champion scullers relate that there are moments of such pain in a tough practice or race that you feel you are driving into a black cave of rage and despair. But betraying even a hint of your agony is the surest way to upset the fragile poise that keeps your shell on the top of the water. Jack Kelly raised his children never to reveal their weaknesses. It was not Kelly-like to reveal the slightest acknowledgment that you feared you might fall. So Grace was always adept at concealing her effort and ambition. Unlike the young Anne Bancroft, she disclosed the purposeful, striving side of herself to very few.
When Grace first met Alex D’Arcy at a Park Avenue party in 1948, she did not even tell him she was training to be an actress. She said only that she was a model. She was excited about a booking she had just secured modeling hats—a definite step upward from vacuum cleaners and bug sprays. This reticence was surprising, because Alex D’Arcy was an established and successful actor with more than twenty movies to his credit. The Academy of Motion Pictures
Players’ Directory
for 1938 ranked Alexandre D’Arcy alongside Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and Clark Gable as one of Hollywood’s leading men.
“I’d love to take you to dinner,” D’Arcy told Grace.
“All right,” she replied. “Call me.”
For their first date, he took her to El Morocco, where the owner, John Perona, greeted the couple warmly and came to sit and chat at their table. This would have been gratifying in any establishment, but it was particularly flattering on the part of a host who was notorious for developing the concept of “Siberia,” that back area of a New York restaurant room to which are relegated the unchic, the unfamous, and the requesters of doggie-bags. For their second date, D’Arcy and Grace went to the Stork Club, where, by coincidence, the owner, Sherman Billingsley, treated them with equal solicitousness. “I think she was impressed,” remembers D’Arcy.
Hailed as “the new Valentino” when he made his film debut in 1928 in the
Garden of Allah,
D’Arcy was a well-liked figure in café society. In a 1940s photograph of him nightclubbing with his friend Errol Flynn, it is difficult to tell which man is which. Both have the same dark, slicked-back hair and thin pencil mustache— and both were driven by the same consuming interest in life. “Girls were my hobby,” says D’Arcy frankly today. “But I never, never went to bed with a girl unless she wanted to. I’d say, ‘Look, darling, if you want to—fine. If you don’t want to—that’s fine, too.’”
D’Arcy’s “dahling” was articulated in a husky and seductive French accent. He had been born in Egypt of French parentage, and he was in his mid-thirties when he met Grace Kelly. He was almost twice Grace’s age, and—not for the last time—she found the appeal of an older man with a French accent quite irresistible.
“We were going home in a taxi,” remembers D’Arcy. “I had known her about ten days, and we had been out several times. She was a nice date, a shy girl from a good background. She was always shy, that’s why I liked her so much. She dressed very conservatively and very nicely. She didn’t dress as the sort of girl that would jump into bed with you.”
Just the same, D’Arcy thought that he might try a gentle approach. He reached out and touched Grace on the knee in a casual fashion. He was amazed at the response. “She just jumped into my arms,” he remembers. “I could not believe it. She was the very opposite of how she seemed.”
There was no need for D’Arcy to deliver his “if you want to, if you don’t want to,” routine. Grace happily came up to his apartment at 140 East Fifty-third Street and spent the night with him.
It was the first of several nights of passion that, nearly half a century later, still leave Alex D’Arcy awed and respectful at the appetites and energy of his new young friend. “She was a very, very, very sexual girl,” he remembers, “very warm indeed as far as sex was concerned. You would touch her once, and she would go through the ceiling. It was very obvious she was not a virgin. She was certainly experienced.”
Looked at in one way, Grace seemed quite a simple girl to D’Arcy. Her sexual needs were so straightforward and direct. But when he reflected on the difference between the tigress that he went to bed with, and the proper and demure girl that he escorted in every other context, he came to feel that part of Grace Kelly must be very complicated indeed. “Basically, she was shy,” he remembers. “But physically, she was not shy. With sex, everything would come out. Maybe it was something she was hiding. She was like a different person.”
Grace’s living arrangements in the Barbizon were not an obstacle to her relationship with D’Arcy. The hotel did a good job keeping men out of the bedrooms, but had no system of checking whether their lady guests actually spent the night in their own beds.
Grace also went on seeing her fellow drama student, Herbie Miller, who did not realize the extent to which his girlfriend was two-timing him. “There were these guys who would call for her,” Miller remembers today. “I would be thinking that I’m the only love in her life, and some stud would arrive at school. So I’d ask her, ‘Who’s that guy?’ and she’d say, ‘Just some guy I know. He’s crazy about me.’ She would laugh about it and brush it off, like she was just sort of doing the guy a favor. I never gave it too much thought. I was very naive, I suppose.”
Grace and Alex D’Arcy said their goodbyes when the actor had to leave New York for some work in Paris. Shortly before he left, Grace did mention the fact that, aside from her modeling, she had hopes of becoming an actress. But she did not make much of it, and she certainly did not pump her older lover for the useful advice and contacts that a well-connected movie actor might be able to offer a girl who was just starting out on her career.
“In this business, it’s ninety percent phony,” says D’Arcy, who went on to make sixteen more movies, among them
How to Marry a Millionaire,
with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable. “Grace was not a phony. She was a very warm and wonderful girl. I do not look back on the month I spent with her as a cheap adventure. I felt it was a real friendship. It was precious to me, a rather beautiful fragment of romance.”
Just over a dozen years later, in the early 1960s, D’Arcy found himself on the beach at Monaco, sitting in the cabana of some French friends who were members of the Monte Carlo Beach Club. Their tent was about thirty yards away from that of the princely family, and suddenly D’Arcy saw his former girlfriend, now a world-famous princess, stepping out elegantly onto the sand. Grace seemed more demure than ever, and D’Arcy’s first instinct was to look away, to avoid any embarrassment. But Grace had caught sight of him, and she started to peer hard across the beach, straining her eyes in her shortsighted fashion to try to recognize this face that she evidently thought she knew.
D’Arcy was hit with a flash of panic as he realized that the memory bank was going into action. It was more than likely that he was quite forgotten after all the years. Or was he, perhaps, too well remembered, so that he had put himself in line for a right royal blank?
Suddenly the Princess of Monaco recognized who her old friend was. Her face lit up with her magical smile, and she threw him an affectionate wave in which the actor felt he could glimpse just a little of the warmth and companionship that he had enjoyed in his brief time with the young Grace.
“I did not go over to talk to her,” says D’Arcy. “Not with her family there. That would not have been right. But I still have that memory of her, the shy girl who was modeling hats when I met her, smiling and waving to me across the sand.”
5
THE ARMS AROUND HER
I
n October 1948, on the eve of her nineteenth birthday, Grace Kelly moved into her second and final year at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. This was no small achievement. A gruelling obstacle course of tests and grading reports often eliminated as many as half the Academy’s students before the end of their first year. Charles Jehlinger wanted only the tough and the talented in his graduating class.
It was the Academy’s policy to treat its final-year survivors less as students than as young working actors and actresses. They were organized into acting companies under the supervision of professional directors, and Grace was assigned to the group working with Don Richardson, a thirty-year-old protégé of Jehlinger’s who had been a student at the Academy, and who already had several groundbreaking professional productions to his credit. He had recently directed Burt Lancaster’s debut on Broadway.
Richardson was an intense and voluble young man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a gypsy look about him. Born Melvin Schwartz, he had worked as an actor in radio and theater, but had changed his name after a producer denied him a role in a Christian drama on the grounds that he was Jewish. Richardson’s training was evident in the ringing tones he used to declaim his directions to his students, and he was a fierce knight-errant on behalf of Charles Jehlinger’s battle against the self-absorption of the “Method” school of acting.
Now in his seventies and living in California, Don Richardson continues to teach the deft and creative acting techniques that he absorbed from Jehlinger. After an award-winning career in television drama, he is a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and he cannot today recall any particular contribution that Grace Kelly made to the American Academy acting group that he was assigned in the fall of 1948. She was not the red-meat style of actress that he preferred. It was an incident that occurred outside the classroom that drew the pupil to the attention of her drama instructor.
One winter evening, Richardson was coming down in the elevator after class, when he noticed a slim, blondish girl standing in the corner, with a scarf tied over her head. “She did not seem terribly pretty,” he remembers. “She was fragile-looking, about nineteen years old, very well dressed, with a camel coat.”
The girl seemed oddly distanced from her classmates in the elevator—half shy and half aloof—and sensing this, one of them began to tease her. Richardson knew this young man as the class clown. The boy was something of a bully, and he happened to be holding a puppy in his arms. He thrust this puppy into Grace’s face, and instead of laughing, she burst into tears.
“I bawled the guy out,” remembers Richardson. “Then everybody left, and I was alone with the girl. When she finally stopped crying, we were standing by the exit to the street.”
It was snowing outside, and after twenty minutes of vainly trying to hail Grace a cab so that she could get home to the Barbizon, Richardson suggested that they might warm up in the Russian Tea Room next door. “Her eyelashes were frozen,” remembers Richardson. “Then she went to the John to dry her hair, and when she came back and had taken her scarf off, I noticed that she was actually much prettier than she had seemed in the elevator.”
The Russian Tea Room was still quite a bohemian hangout in the years after World War II. You could eat there inexpensively, and you could nurse a cup of tea for hours. But when a waiter came over to the table, Richardson realized to his horror that he only had a few cents in his pocket. So it was out into the snow again to search for a taxi—with Grace sniffling and sneezing rather pitifully, and giving every indication of developing a severe cold.
“Grace was never a great actress,” says Richardson today. “I was her teacher, and I should know. But she had some fantastically advantageous attributes, and one of them was getting people to feel that they should do something to help her. There were times when she seemed so pathetic and helpless. You had the feeling that if you left her alone, she would die. She would be destroyed. Seeing her sniffling there, I felt very drawn toward this girl—and, believe me, it was in no way sexual.”
With no taxis in sight, Richardson suggested an alternative—a bus ride down to Thirty-third Street, where he lived. He could pick up some cash there, and they could go out together for a hamburger. Richardson lived in a small, unheated apartment in an old converted brownstone. Many of the nearby shops were occupied by Armenian rug dealers, and it was Richardson’s practice to gather his firewood from the crates and packing cases that the dealers had discarded in the street. Grace joined in with the fuel-gathering as her drama teacher walked her along through the slush from Broadway. “Here was this pretty girl in a camel-hair coat, stooping down in the snow to pick up those boxes,” he remembers. “It was somehow
La Bohème.”
The couple went upstairs to Richardson’s bare and arctic apartment, where he knelt down to kindle the fire. “I got the fire going,” he remembers, “and went out to make some coffee. When I came back into the room, she was waiting for me on the camp bed. She had taken all her clothes off and had pulled up the bed so it was alongside the fire. I never saw anything more splendid. We had no introduction to this. There was no flirtation. We both had a desperate need, like two people on a lost island. We were in bed, and when I came up from this miracle, I couldn’t believe it. Here was this fantastically beautiful creature lying beside me.”