So Don Richardson found himself, reluctantly, in the spring of 1949, on the train to Philadelphia. “I did not want to go,” he says today. “I could sense there was only grief ahead. But Grace would not hear of it. She said that her parents were really very nice, that they could live with my being Jewish, that they would not even mind my being in the process of a divorce—though she had not told them that detail. She kept telling me that they would be understanding.”
Grace’s brother, Kell, later recalled the preparations that he made to welcome his sister home with her first potential fiancé. His mother had briefed him ahead of time about Don Richardson. “She asked me to bring over three of my bigger and better-looking friends on the Friday night,” he told author Gwen Robyns. “One was the Olympic Butterfly champion, and looking a bit like Kirk Douglas, and the other was a big-looking guy, a weight-lifting type, who was my partner in rowing races and was also in the lifeguards at Ocean City. There was another chap also, a big, tall, swimming type.
“I gave them the word that this fellow was a bit of a creep, which I had deduced from my mother’s description. When they came into the room they gave Grace’s guy the grip, and in a second had him on the floor.” Younger sister Lizanne, another member of the Kelly family welcoming committee, hotly disputes this picture of the three muscle men jeering down at the wimplike director on the floor, and Richardson supports her recollection. He has no memory of Kell’s buddies engaged in any physical assault. They were engaged in a more sly attack. “They had this Jewish routine,” he remembers. “Jewish jokes, Jewish accents, and so on. I was sitting there horrified. I couldn’t believe this was going on.”
Richardson was downstairs in the Henry Avenue rathskeller taking the measure of his girlfriend’s good-looking family. “They were stunning,” he recalls. “When I walked into that den, they all looked like models in an advertisement. Her father was a gorgeous man. He really looked like a Greek god. They
all
looked like Greek gods. The mother was handsome. The older sister was ravishing. The youngest sister was still a child. The brother had a thick neck, Sylvester Stallone-style—and Grace was sitting in the corner, kind of removed from the group. She was the real model, and yet she was the one person who did not look like a model. She said nothing at all. She had disappeared into this thin, silent, frightened little person—like the girl I had met in the elevator that first night.”
Jack Kelly asked his guest if he would like a drink, and, not to seem impolite, Richardson accepted. “So then there was this performance with keys and locks. There seemed to be locks on everything. He poured me a Bourbon and water, then he locked everything up again, without taking a drink for himself. So there I was, the only person holding a glass, looking like some sort of alcoholic.”
Richardson did not have to suffer long, for scarcely had Jack Kelly handed him the glass, then he took it away from him again, and replaced it on the bar. “Time to go to the club,” he said.
Grace shyly took her boyfriend’s hand as they followed the other Kellys out to the car. “When we got to the front door, the oldest sister’s husband had shown up. So we went round to look at their house, which was close by, and the father walked us around like an inspection party, touching everything and saying that it had held up pretty well, indicating that he had made it, or bought it.”
Jack Kelly repeated this performance three times on the way to his country club. “The cars stopped outside various churches,” remembers Richardson, “and we all had to get out and study the brickwork. He was showing off what he had built, and we all stood there nodding respectfully. Grace was saying nothing, and I was thinking, ‘How weird! How fucking weird!’”
Things got weirder still when the family sat down to dinner— father, son, and the athletes at one end of the table, Richardson with the women at the other. Ma Kelly inquired of the drama teacher how Grace was doing at the Academy. “Mrs. Kelly,” Don Richardson replied, “I have to tell you that I think your daughter is going to be a very important movie star.”
Margaret Kelly appeared to choke on what she was eating.
“What’s going on down there?” Jack Kelly called.
His wife took a sip of water to compose herself, then responded in astonishment. “This young man says that our Gracie is going to be an important movie star!”
The entire table collapsed in laughter. “Don’t worry,” called out Jack Kelly, laughing as heartily as the rest. “She’ll get over
that.”
Don Richardson looked across at his girlfriend. Grace’s head was down, and she was looking at the table, saying nothing. “They just didn’t understand him,” Lizanne told James Spada in 1986, in defense of her parents’ treatment of Don Richardson that night. “He was just so different from the boys she had dated at Penn Charter, the friends of my brother—little athletes and so on. All of a sudden, this sophisticated man arrives from New York.”
“That dinner,” says Richardson, “was one of the most horrible experiences of my life. I was a grown man. Apart from my work at the Academy, I had just started directing Helen Hayes in a play in New York. But it meant absolutely nothing to them. When we finally got back to the house, the father stood at the foot of the stairs, watching to make sure that I went to my room, and that she went to hers. The last thing he said was, ‘We’re going to church in the morning. Do you want to come?’ As if he did not know that I was Jewish.”
Next morning Richardson rose to find the house deserted. Everyone was at church. When the family returned, the women went into the kitchen to prepare breakfast, while the men sat down with the Sunday paper. “The father split up the sections and handed them around. He took the financial section for himself, the brother got the sports pages, and I got the theater. As he handed it to me, he noticed an ad for
Death of a Salesman
that was playing locally. ‘Why do they put on these Communist plays?’ he asked.”
Jack Kelly was a “Reds under the bed” man, a keen supporter of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and shortly to become a voluble Philadelphia champion of Senator McCarthy. “After breakfast, Grace took me upstairs to see the trophies,” Richardson remembers. “It was like a shrine, all lined with black velvet. There were these cups and medals that the men had won, and there were some pictures of the mother as a model. It was the first time I had heard about the rowing Kellys of Philadelphia. But the thing I noticed was that there was absolutely nothing there to do with Grace—no pictures, nothing.”
The morning took a turn for the better when Grace drove off with her boyfriend to visit Uncle George. “He was a wonderful man,” says Richardson. “Very gentle and kind, and very sensitive. My impression was of a man who was a total contrast to the whole family. He was much more like Grace. She adored him, and he was very affectionate toward her. He was like mother and father. You could tell that his home was the home of an intellectual, and that he was an art lover. He was happy that we were in love. He thought everything was splendid. He encouraged her and he was interested in her career. He was the only sunlight in that whole terrible weekend.”
After about an hour with Uncle George, Grace gave Don Richardson a tour of the neighborhood, driving him around East Falls and her other childhood haunts in Germantown and Chestnut Hill. She showed him where she went to school. It was the first time that the couple had been alone together with a chance to talk, and they discussed the previous evening, and how badly it had gone. Richardson felt angry and humiliated, and Grace did not know what to tell him. “She just kept saying the same thing— that they were really wonderful people once you got to know them.”
When Grace and Richardson got back to Henry Avenue, there were no cars in the circular driveway, and the house seemed deserted—with the exception of Ma Kelly standing in the hallway, radiating grim rage. The dark cloud over her head was almost visible. “Gracie, go to your room,” she snapped, and Grace went upstairs meekly, no questions asked—”like a little child,” thought Richardson as he watched his girlfriend disappearing up the stairs.
“As for
you,
” said Ma Kelly, turning to Richardson with unconcealed distaste. “I want you to leave this house immediately.”
Richardson went upstairs, partly relieved, but totally mystified— until he reached his bedroom, and saw the contents of his suitcase strewn all over the bed. “Everything was laid out,” he remembers. “She had not made the slightest attempt to hide what she had done. There was a letter I had just received from my lawyer about a hearing in my divorce. That was lying there, opened, by the envelope. And beside that there was a packet of condoms I had brought, in case Grace and I had the chance to get laid. Grace always left that side of things to me.”
At a stroke Ma Kelly had discovered that her daughter was involved with a married man—and that her nineteen-year-old Gracie was no longer a virgin. When Richardson left the house in a taxi a quarter of an hour later, there was no one downstairs in the hall. He did not see Grace, and he had no idea what she was feeling.
But later that day Maree Frisby came round to Henry Avenue— to find Grace up in her room, lying on her bed, red-eyed and weeping. Grace told her friend the story of the nightmare weekend, and of her parents’ fury at their discovery of her affair with Richardson. The Kellys were talking of banning Grace from returning to New York, and had lectured her severely on her immorality. But Grace would not admit defeat.
“I hope I
am
pregnant,” she sobbed defiantly.
6
LETTING GO
I
cried so much . . . . Hell just can’t be much worse than what I went through.” Three days after Don Richardson’s catastrophic visit to Henry Avenue, Grace described the details of the weekend and its aftermath in an emotional, eight-page letter to Prudy Wise, her Barbizon roommate. After Don had left for New York, she wrote, her parents had summoned her to Ma Kelly’s room for a serious talk. They said they had some frank questions to ask, and that they expected frank answers. Was Grace secretly married to Richardson?
The Kellys confronted their daughter with the divorce letter that Ma Kelly had discovered, though they did not mention the condoms. Her father was beside himself—ready “to blow a fuse”—while her mother tried a more moderate, woman-to-woman tack, asking Grace to talk about what she saw in Richardson. “The fact that I could fall in love with a Jew,” wrote Grace, “was just beyond them.”
The inquisition went on and on. Grace was crying so much, she told Prudy, that she could not remember all the details, but she had no doubt about how she felt—”They . . . made me so mad.”
It was the first time that Grace had ever seriously crossed her parents. As a young teenager, she had bowed obediently to her father’s wishes and had ended her romance with Harper Davis.
Collegeless in the summer of 1947, she had meekly allowed her own life to be placed on hold when the family rules ordained that Kell and his rowing should be the priority. But now the good girl had become a bad girl—for the moment, at least. “It was when I went away to New York,” she later said, “that I had my rebellion.”
Grace was no longer willing to function as a mere accessory to her family, and she felt so angry that she could barely bring herself to speak to them. “For a month we ate in silence,” remembered Kell, describing the chilly domestic atmosphere that spring.
But Jack and Margaret Kelly were equally resolute. Their style was unapologetically Victorian. When Peggy and her friends had got drunk down in the Henry Avenue rathskeller one Saturday night, Peggy had been compelled to pay for the damage, and Jack Kelly had locked up the booze. That was the reason for all the bars and bolts that had attended the serving of Don Richardson’s bourbon and water. Now Jack Kelly essentially locked up his middle daughter. Grace was banned from New York. She was allowed to go up once, for the day, to close down her room at the Barbizon and bring home her things on the train. She had no more classes and she had done her graduation play at the American Academy. Then she was sent down to the Kelly summer home at Ocean City, where the family took turns at keeping an eye on her. It was several weeks before Richardson heard from his girlfriend again, and when she phoned she was puffing and panting. She told him she had had to give her sister Peggy the slip and run several miles down the beach in order to find a pay phone.
Her other Barbizon friend, Bettina Thompson, heard the whole story when Grace came to New York. “She told me that she had been to bed with Don,” Bettina remembers. “That came as news to me. I was horrified. I had no idea. I told my mother some of what had happened. I was living in my mother’s New York apartment at the time, and I asked if Grace could, perhaps, come and share my room there. My mother just looked at me. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘parents know better than children.’”
But Grace’s defiance had its limits. When it came to the ultimate loyalties, she was her father’s daughter. She did not really hope that she was pregnant by her drama coach. That no more fitted into her nineteen-year-old vision of what lay in her future than it appealed to her parents. It was Grace’s delight to surrender to her emotions when she wanted, to live out events romantically, as if real life were a role that she was performing on stage. But something inside her always stayed in control. She had a very calm center—and in the summer of 1949, with her drama training now at an end, she had some serious professional work on her plate. Two of the best students in the American Academy’s graduating class were picked every year to join the company of the prestigious Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, and in 1949 Grace Kelly was one of those selected.