“I wouldn’t say that Mother is a Nazi,” remarked Kell in later years. “But sometimes I do refer to her as, quote, ‘That old Prussian mother of mine’.”
“Ma” Kelly had the overlarge, practical hands of the hausfrau. She never wore colored nail polish, and she brought up her three pretty blond daughters to present themselves in the same unadorned style. She had their fine hair cut straight and simple across the brow, and she actively discouraged them from getting fussy over clothes. Frugal to a fault, Ma recycled her girls’ dresses systematically, so that Grace’s clothes were more old than new. If the children failed to hang their clothes properly, their mother fined them a nickel from their twenty-five cents per week pocket money, and she was not averse to enforcing her discipline with a sharply wielded hairbrush or with the back of her hand.
Ma Kelly was the day-to-day, hands-on technician who kept the Kelly household functioning. Parsimonious and purposeful, she inspired a deep and lifelong awe in all her children—and that awe was shared by their friends from a respectful distance. “‘The Boss,’ was what she used to be called,” remembered Grace’s friend Charlie Fish. “She ran things pretty good.”
Ma Kelly’s particular passion was the raising of funds for her beloved Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, and she volunteered her children’s energies for fashion shows and benefits as imperiously as her husband put his only son out on the river. One year she got the kids to organize a circus in the back garden. Kell, age eight, did a strongman act. Peggy, then ten, was the ringmaster, while the five-year-old Grace did a tightrope act dressed in a little ballet costume. The children sold tickets to all their rich Henry Avenue neighbors.
“Everything was for Women’s Medical in our life,” remembered Peggy. “We stole flowers. I would tell my little sister to go up and steal all the flowers from next door. . . . I would send her up there, and she would pick those violets and then sell them back to the lovely ladies.”
Ma Kelly had the same striving tunnel vision as her husband. A Kelly cause was a good cause, and normal rules could be waived in the achieving of it. Grace’s focus never strayed far from her charismatic father, but her mother influenced her in ways that were equally profound. There were the physical attributes—the Teutonic blondness and features that contributed so much to Grace’s astonishing adult beauty, as well as the oversized and sometimes ungainly Majer hands. More important was the willpower and the sense of purpose, the sheer busyness with which Ma Kelly tattooed her girls’ spirits.
“We were never allowed to sit with our hands empty,” Peggy told the author Gwen Robyns, many years later. “We just knew we were expected to knit. We had to knit and to crochet from the time we were three or four years old. We had to because we were German girls. . . . Honey, we just had to. It was expected of us, and we just did it.”
Peggy herself felt that she had managed to avoid most of the maternal Germanness. A fay and carefree spirit, the firstborn Kelly child saw herself as incorrigibly Irish. “I’m my father’s daughter,” she used to say with pride. It was middle sister Grace who turned out to be the German daughter, in Peggy’s opinion. Grace was the good girl who knew what was expected of her and just did it.
Grace’s mother needed all her backbone to manage the task of being married to the dashing and romantic Jack Kelly. Ma Kelly ran the household and handled so much of the discipline at Henry Avenue because her husband was away from home so often—and the usual, painful reason for his absence was that he was off romancing other women.
Handsome Jack took full advantage of his reputation as America’s most perfectly formed male. There was the telephone girl at the office, and a secretary. On many an afternoon his car was to be seen outside the home of Ellen Frazer, a divorcee who lived in Chestnut Hill and who was his escort to baseball games. February was Jack Kelly’s month for a jaunt to Florida without his wife and family—and one December the Elizabeth Arden store in downtown Philadelphia got a glimpse of how very extensive his social range might be. Jack Kelly placed an order for twenty-seven identical makeup cases, each to be gift-wrapped and sent to a different lady.
This was the other side of Jack Kelly the hero. Fame went to his head. He cultivated his image as the showcase father of a showcase family, but his philandering suggested that the show might be more for his benefit than for theirs. There is a sense in which the 110 percent sportsman denies adult life, retreating into a world in which play is a value beyond any other, and when it came to women, Jack Kelly’s values were those of a playful child, tied up in himself and totally oblivious to those he might hurt. He would have left his wife and family for Mrs. Frazer, Germantown gossip asserted, if the lady had not been too canny, realizing how a woman had to maintain her independence from a man like Jack in order to avoid total subjugation to his will.
“I don’t think there was one good marriage in the entire Kelly family,” commented Charles Kelly, a nephew of Jack’s. “The Kellys had a tendency to take over.”
Jack Kelly could annihilate you in a sculling race, and he could annihilate you in real life, exhibiting an unblushing indifference to the feelings of other people. When in later years his son Kell became a father himself and confessed his disappointment that his first child was not a boy but a girl, Jack Kelly told the young man who had laid his whole childhood on the altar of the Diamond Sculls, “Don’t worry, son. My greatest joy in life has been Peggy.”
Ma Kelly coped with her inspiring and enraging child-husband, all agreed, with real dignity. His infidelities might even have suited her Germanic and slightly masculine style. Like Mrs. Frazer, she carved out her own territory and protected it, making sure that she remained in charge of her own life. “It’s very difficult to be married to a Kelly,” she would acknowledge.
Margaret Majer had not married for passion. She had always had her own, unusually woman-centered goals to achieve, and these assumed more importance as she resigned herself to her husband’s errant ways. With Jack in Florida, February was Ma’s month for a grimly savored shopping spree, and she threw herself more fiercely than ever into the raising of funds for her beloved Women’s Med. She endeavored, above all, to hide her marital problems from her children.
In this she temporarily succeeded. The Kelly clan stayed looking good. Peggy, Kell, Grace, and Lizanne did not learn directly about their father’s womanizing—or of the pain inside their mother— until they were all adult. But what they did learn, and from an early age, were the ways in which a family maneuvers around a problem whose existence it does not acknowledge. Keep up appearances. Impress the world. Don’t talk about what is really bothering you, and—particularly in the Kellys’ case—make sure that you keep on playing the game.
Sport can provide most helpful training for the game of life. Jack and Margaret Kelly believed that fervently. It was one subject on which they were very happily united, and a typical Saturday or Sunday for the Kelly family involved long hours of working out together, parents and children, in the gym and pool of the Penn Athletic Club on Rittenhouse Square. After long hours of training, Peggy and Lizanne, the eldest and youngest Kelly girls, both became outstanding competitive swimmers.
But sport becomes a form of sickness when it turns into obsession, and it is difficult to think of another word for the way in which three of the Kelly children came to dedicate their childhoods to the pursuit of sporting excellence—Kell sculling after the specter of his father on the river, Peggy and Lizanne seeking to win his attention as their mother had done, in the swimming pool.
The exception was child number three, the sensitive one. Grace was no slouch at athletics. She was as nimble as Peggy or Lizanne, and as she grew older she easily won her way onto her school teams for field hockey. But the reflective little girl who wove dramas around her dolls was looking for more than physical exertion and competition—and she found it in a family elder who provided a very different role model from either of her charismatic parents.
George Kelly, Grace’s uncle, lived just around the corner from Henry Avenue, in an elegantly bohemian set of rooms in the Alden Park apartments. 3901 Henry Avenue had a spartan feel with its displays of sporting trophies. But Uncle George’s bachelor apartment was altogether more relaxed, for Uncle George was a creative spirit—an actor-turned-playwright who had once been a big name on Broadway. Outside Philadelphia, in fact, George Kelly was better known in many circles than his younger brother Jack. In 1926 George had won the Pulitzer Prize for his play
Craig’s Wife,
the harrowing moral tale of a woman who marries for status, and four of his plays were made into movies that featured such stars as Will Rogers, Spencer Tracy, and Joan Crawford. His satirical comedy
The Torch-Bearers,
is revived and played to this day as one of the classic treatments of the backstage misadventures that can befall an amateur dramatic company.
The bricklaying beginnings and energetic self-publicity of Grace Kelly’s father have fostered the impression that Grace’s acting talents sprang, somewhat against the odds, from Irish laboring roots. But there is another Irish tradition—of ballads and humor and light entertainment—and this loomed as large as bricklaying in the history and makeup of the Kellys of East Falls. Apart from Uncle George, the dramatist, there was Uncle Walter, a bill-topping vaudeville comedian, and Aunt Grace, a comic actress and mimic in whose memory little Grace was named.
Uncle Walter developed a most successful stage persona as “The Virginia Judge.” Dressed in a baggy white suit and panama hat, he played the role of a Southern magistrate hearing the cases against a succession of Amos ‘n’ Andy characters who provided the pretext for a stream of unashamedly racist jokes:
Virginia Judge: “Want to make a quarter?”
Darkie: “No, Suh. I’ve got a quarter.”
Aunt Grace was more demure. Her forte was a Harry Lauder impression which she performed dressed in tartan, while enunciating her lines in a faultless Scottish accent.
Young Grace never knew her humorous and extrovert namesake—Aunt Grace died before she was born—but any child who grew up in the unconventionally talented Kelly family was provided with ample evidence of how it was possible, in the words of the author Steven Englund, “to make a career not from bricks and mortar, but from make-believe.” Uncle Walter, fat and jolly and smelling of cigars, entranced the children at family gatherings. He could always be counted on for a large and enjoyably frivolous present when birthdays came around—and he was also a reminder of how make-believe can make bricks and mortar possible, since it was a $5,000 loan from Walter, with a further $2,000 from George, the playwright, that had launched their younger brother’s company, Kelly for Brickwork, in 1919.
Uncle George took great pleasure in correcting the Jack-centered, rags-to-riches, version of Kelly history that was propagated by his younger brother. It was true that the Kellys, like thousands of Irish-Americans, had fled from Ireland during the potato famine of the 1840s. But by the time Grace’s grandparents, John and Mary Kelly, were established in East Falls half a century later, the family was by no means without resources. Old John, the paterfamilias, was making a decent living from his own insurance business, and he was able to provide quite a comfortable and solid home for Walter, George, Jack, Aunt Grace, and six other sons and daughters. Two of the sons, Patrick H. and Charles, were already partners in their own successful building business when their younger brother Jack left school, and it was Patrick H. who had given Jack his first job.
So while it was technically correct to say that Jack Kelly had started his working life as a bricklayer, he had, in fact, been something of a privileged trainee, working on the payroll of his brothers’ construction business—and it was his rich show-business brothers who provided the cash that enabled him to get started on his own. Uncle George liked to point out that the calluses on Jack’s hands came less from manual labor than from his own decision to spend so much of his time at “scull practice on the Schuylkill river.”
They were both master mythmakers, these divergent Kelly siblings, tycoon Jack conjuring up the picture of a youth among lunch pails and work boots, while George, the playwright, talked grandly of ease and comfort, and of being educated “privately”—a boast which played with truth and fantasy in a fashion that was oddly similar to Jack’s claim to have started out in life a bricklayer. George went to the local public school, but, as a dramatist, he could fairly be said to have educated himself.
In later life the adult Grace Kelly was to pick what she wanted from the contrasting myths developed by her uncle and her father, shaping an identity for herself that embraced the striving East Falls girl who made good, as well as the serene and fully fledged Philadelphia princess. But, beyond mere ingredients, the lesson that she absorbed from the two men who dominated her childhood was the need to write her own scenario for life. Jack and George were living proof that if a person believed their own myth with enough conviction, most other people would come to believe it, too.
Grace Kelly’s style in later years was to be notable for its aloofness, and this was something else that she learned from her Uncle George. Publicly remote and fastidious, George Kelly was definitely a snob. When it came to politics, he was a conservative Republican, and he hated the populist style of F.D.R. as thoroughly as Jack Kelly adored the president. The two brothers felt so strongly about the subject that they avoided talking politics after a time, but they kept on arguing fiercely about everything else. “He was one of the few people,” Grace remembered of Uncle George, “who ever contradicted my father.”