Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (14 page)
The Bucks County Playhouse was a converted barn on the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, not far upriver from the spot where George Washington made his historic crossing of the Delaware. It was a comfortable, arty place, set in beautifully rolling and wooded countryside, a pleasant summer evening’s drive from Philadelphia and Manhattan. Audiences would dine at a local inn, then stroll to the playhouse for a couple of hours of light drama. Bucks County was a propitious spot for Grace’s very first professional engagement, and she had no difficulty learning the words for her opening role. She was cast as Florence McCricket, the ingenue in Uncle George’s
The Torch-Bearers.
George Kelly was delighted that his niece’s career should get off to such a notable start, and he arranged for Gant Gaither, an actor-producer friend, to watch Grace’s performance with a view to booking her for some future engagements. But the playwright spurned Gaither’s suggestion that the two men might go to watch the performance together. “See one of my plays performed by a summer-stock company?” he exclaimed to Gaither. “Never!”
Summer stock was the means by which aspiring actors and actresses put their training into practice in the years before television. It was the equivalent of English seaside repertory. “You rehearsed for a week, and you played for a week,” remembers Natalie Core O’Hare, who played Bucks County with Grace in the early 1950s. “By Friday you felt that you were beginning to give a really good performance. Then you had two more shows, and it was over.”
In the absence of any previous acting credits for Grace, the caption to her photograph in the Bucks County playbill said little about her career and concentrated instead on the exploits of her father, brother Kell, and Uncle George. But Grace acquitted herself like a professional. “For a young lady whose previous experience was slim,” wrote one of Philadelphia’s leading critics, “Miss Kelly came through this footlight baptism of fire splendidly. . . . From where I sat, it appeared as if Grace Kelly should become the theatrical torch-bearer for her family.”
Still furious and untrusting after the Richardson weekend, Grace’s parents would not allow her to find lodgings near the playhouse. She had to base herself in Henry Avenue for the two weeks of rehearsals and performances. Grace drove the thirty-five miles to New Hope every morning, and drove all the way home again each night. But public recognition made a difference to the senior Kellys. By the time it came to opening night, Jack and Margaret had decided to put the past behind them. Their daughter was on parade, and they sat in the very front row at Bucks County to cheer her on. Jack Kelly positively glowed. Grace’s achievement was family achievement, and he brought along a contingent of friends to share in the celebration. His unpromising middle daughter had done something very right—and there was more to come. Grace had won herself a part in a production of Strindberg’s tragedy
The Father
starring Raymond Massey. It was an ambitious project in which the venerable actor was planning both to act and to direct himself. He had cast Grace for the role of his tortured daughter. After opening in Boston, the play was scheduled to transfer to New York before the end of November 1949—when Grace would reach her twentieth birthday.
Grace could hardly do all this from her bedroom in Henry Avenue. Even for Jack and Margaret Kelly, it was scarcely feasible to “ground” a grown daughter whose name was scheduled to share the canopy with a major star on Broadway. Financially, Grace was quite independent of her parents, in any case. She could command solid fees as a model, and she was also now earning good money as an actress. It was her time to go, and her parents conceded the fact. Jack Kelly had been one of the contractors involved in the building of Manhattan House, a massive and monolithic gray-brick apartment building that covered a full New York City block on Sixty-sixth Street, just up Third Avenue from Bloomingdale’s. Manhattan House had all the charm of a workers’ apartment complex outside Stalingrad, but for Grace it came to represent adult freedom. On her word of honor that she would not see Don Richardson again, her father installed her there in an apartment which Ma Kelly furnished.
“Grand Rapids furniture,” remembers Richardson. “It was really ugly. Crude, dark, heavy wood, all slabby—like you were in a cabin at summer camp.”
Grace broke her promise to her parents the very first day she got back to New York. She went straight to Don Richardson’s apartment on Thirty-third Street and made love. It was a passionate reunion. There were no preliminaries of wood-gathering or fire-lighting. Richardson was delighted to have his beautiful young girlfriend back, while for Grace the resumption of the affair represented the best defiance of her parents she could manage. She was going to make her own decisions about the allegiance of her body at least.
Don Richardson could not help noticing, however, that the allegiance of his partner’s mind remained fixed as firmly as ever on her father. Grace did not welcome her boyfriend’s attempts to discuss the dreadful weekend and what it meant, and she remained unwilling to entertain the slightest criticism of her parents. Richardson ventured a couple of negative comments about her father, and never tried it again. “It was like running into a brick wall,” he says. “It was a subject that just could not be discussed. Her parents could no more be criticized than you could question her Catholic faith. It was something you just believed in and never questioned.”
Soon the couple were seeing each other as frequently and as ardently as before. But the shadow of Jack Kelly hung over them. Grace was terrified that her father would discover her deception, so the lovers would meet, out of prudence, in Greenwich Village. They spent so many hours in the Granados café there that they came to consider the seats by the espresso machine their own. They would go to Thirty-third Street under cover of darkness and would peek around the curtains to make sure they had not been followed. The fear of discovery became something of a game that added spice to their assignations—and then, one day when Richardson was on his own at home, the nightmare came true in an unexpected fashion.
“The doorbell rang,” remembers Richardson, “I opened it, and there was Daddy standing in the hall. He looked absolutely enormous. He was terrifying. He was wearing a dark overcoat, very well dressed, with a tie and suit, the whole thing, and as I opened the door he took a step into the apartment without being invited. He was huge.”
The front door opened directly into the kitchen of the apartment, and Richardson was half intimidated, half amused by the spectacle of the immaculately dressed businessman staring disdainfully at the dirty dishes and the worn and broken fragments of furniture. The two men looked at each other. “Would you like a Jag?” Jack Kelly asked.
The young director was confused. “The only meaning that I knew of a ‘jag’ was to go out with some buddies and have some drinks. So I thought, ‘My God! We’re making up! We’re going to be friends!’ Then he said, ‘Any color you like.’ And I thought, ‘It’s an object?’
“So then I made this enormous, stupid, emotional speech in which I said that I did not want anything from him, that I loved his daughter, and that I was not interested in a payoff. He did not stay to listen. He walked out of the door.”
Soon after that the phone calls started. “They’d happen around two o’clock in the morning,” remembers Richardson, “from the brother. He never said he was the brother, but he would say things like ‘Hello, you son-of-a-bitch. I’m gonna break every bone in your fucking body! You stay away from my sister, or you’ll be paralyzed for life.’ That kind of thing.”
When Richardson told Grace about the phone calls, she would look puzzled and hurt. “All she could say was that they were really lovely people, and that I would get to understand them one day, and that once everyone understood everybody, then everything would be just fine.”
It was the same passivity Grace had shown during her weekend with Richardson at Henry Avenue. When confronted by her father she became a little girl again. Her adult brain processes shut down. Her placid acceptance of the male Kellys’ right to interfere in her life made explicit a loyalty that she would never surrender, and though she and Richardson went on seeing each other for another two years, the threatening phone calls and the bizarre offer of the Jaguar proved a watershed in their relationship. They saw each other less frequently. When they did meet, their passion was not as overwhelming as it once had been, and Don Richardson was not really surprised when he eventually discovered that he was far from being the only object of Grace Kelly’s affections.
Claudius Charles Philippe was not a conventionally good-looking man. With his long hooked nose and thick round glasses, he had the air of a startled owl. Nor did his position as Banqueting Manager of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel obviously mark him as the sort of man that Grace Kelly was likely to date. But Philippe of the Waldorf was a character of extraordinary charm and magnetism. He had the drive of a Napoleon. Many women found him quite irresistible, and when it came to café society, he was a very prince of New York.
Philippe made his name as an assistant to the legendary René Black, a professional Frenchman whose Central Park restaurant, the Central Park Casino, pioneered the concept of restaurateur as showman—Cherries Jubilee, the hand-prepared Caesar salad, and the other table-side mummeries of flame and chafing dish. Philippe brought this panache to the Waldorf-Astoria, where he elevated the unpromising business of private banqueting into a consummate and immensely profitable art form. His supreme creation was the April in Paris Ball—which he organized in October to fill a hole in the banqueting year—and to which he attracted, with the help of his friend, Elsa Maxwell, every social luminary of the day: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Marlene Dietrich, Gypsy Rose Lee, the Winston Guests, the Drexels, the Vanderbilts, the Cabot Lodges.
If part of Grace Kelly was drawn to the nonconformist and bohemian style of Don Richardson, she was equally attracted to the social gloss and connections of a Claudius Charles Philippe. Alex D’Arcy had discovered this side of Grace when he introduced her to his important friends at the Stork and El Morocco. Once she had found her feet, the girl from East Falls was very impressed to be in New York and to find that her charm and good looks could open all sorts of doors that were closed to her in Philadelphia.
Philippe wooed Grace with champagne. He dispatched Martin Riskin, a young assistant in the banqueting department, with magnums for the attention of Miss Grace Kelly, Manhattan House, and Riskin bore them to the young actress’s door. “She was definitely cool,” Riskin remembers. “She seemed rather haughty. And she had something that I considered an affectation. Sometimes, indoors, she would be wearing sunglasses.”
When she was with Don Richardson, Grace played the ardent and aspiring young actress. With Claude Philippe, she played the great lady. Tom Hogan, another of Philippe’s assistants, remembers Grace being distinctly standoffish when she stayed at Philippe’s weekend farm at Peekskill in the Hudson valley. Guests were supposed to compete and collaborate in the preparation of Sunday brunch, diving out into the garden to dig up salads and vegetables. You might find Victor Borge and Maurice Chevalier racing each other in the peeling of potatoes. Grace held back from the general merriment—though Tom Hogan liked his boss’s girlfriend, and did not think that she was affected. He put her distance down to shyness.
It was when Grace was spotted wandering without makeup through the upper floors of the Waldorf in the middle of the afternoon that the banqueting assistants really started to talk. “You could play all sorts of games in the towers and various suites,” remembers Martin Riskin, “and not be caught in the act.” There were quite lengthy periods when Grace was something of a fixture at the hotel, stationed for long hours in Philippe’s outer office, patiently waiting for him to complete his daily barrage of solicitations and phone calls. The pretty young actress seemed more like a wife, at times, than a girlfriend. Grace was clearly under the spell of the forty-year-old Philippe, and he appeared to reciprocate the infatuation. Under her influence, Philippe softened his habitually hard-bitten style, and his much terrorized assistants were pleased to note some sentimental chinks in the armor of the iron man.
Charles Ohrel, Philippe’s principal assistant and confidant, began to get worried about the time and attention that his boss was devoting to Grace. “We would take a little rest period in the evenings while the banquets were going on,” remembers Riskin. “We would sit in the office with a glass of champagne and some supper, and Charlie would begin to talk. ‘Poor Philippe,’ he would say. ‘He doesn’t know what to do about Grace.’”