Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (9 page)

Marie Magee had been an actress herself, and her own daughter had been a student at the American Academy, which, as its name implied, was one of the country’s leading private drama schools. In 1947 the American Academy was located in the studios above Carnegie Hall, only two blocks away from Broadway and Fifty-fifth Street, and Marie Magee wasted no time. She made an appointment for Grace to see Emil Diestel, the administrator of the school, who was also in charge of admissions.

“Mrs. Magee, I can’t take her,” was Diestel’s discouraging opening line, according to Marie Magee’s memory of the episode. “Our registration’s closed. . . . We don’t have one spot in the school for her.”

Mrs. Magee asked Grace to wait outside.

“Look, Mr. Diestel,” she explained, “this child’s father and George Kelly are brothers.”

The name of the famous playwright got results. George Kelly was a revered figure to Diestel’s generation, and he also stood for the traditional, four-square form of drama which the American Academy favored. “I’ll see what I can do,” Diestel said, and gave Grace thirty pages of Uncle George’s
The Torch-Bearers
to read and prepare for another meeting the next day.

The handwritten audition book of the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts records that Grace Patricia Kelly of Philadelphia appeared in front of Emil E. Diestel on August 20, 1947. She weighed 126 pounds and stood five-foot-six-and-a-half inches in her stocking feet. Her coloring was described as “blond,” her proportions “good,” and her nationality as “American-Irish.” The entry was headed by the significant notation—“niece of George Kelly.”

Grace had spent what she remembered as a sleepless and anxious night in the apartment of Aunt Marie, but she rose to the occasion splendidly. Emil Diestel rated her reading as “intelligent” and her temperament as “sensitive.” Her dramatic instinct was awarded a solid “Yes.’’ Diestel’s only criticism was of her voice. It was “not placed”—but that could be fixed. The director of admissions was quite won over. “Lovely child,” he noted. “Good and promising youthful symptoms. Should develop well.”

Quite against the odds, Grace had accomplished the goal she did not know she had six months earlier when she had applied to Bennington to pursue a career in dance. Grace Patricia Kelly was registered for entry at the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts for the semester beginning in October 1947.

There was just one other piece of business to get tidied away. Reminiscing in later years to a lover whom she met at the American Academy, Grace recalled how she had lost her virginity shortly before she went away to New York.

“It happened very quickly,” she related. “I went round to a friend’s house to pick her up, and I found that she wasn’t there. It was raining outside, and her husband told me she would be gone for the rest of the day. I stayed talking to him, and somehow we fell into bed together, without understanding quite why.”

Grace did not sleep with the man again, though she stayed on polite terms with the couple. The episode for her was a rite of passage, a secret and only incidentally passionate matter that she had to take care of as she said goodbye to childhood and made ready for the big city. Ever since the ending of her relationship with Harper Davis she had been playing with sex, seeing what it felt like when separated from true commitment, and this was just the conclusion of the game. Little Gracie was moving on.

Jack Kelly had always been patronizing toward his daughter’s acting ambitions, and he did not rate her nick-of-time entry to one of America’s leading drama schools as one of the major Kelly accomplishments of 1947. “Oh, no, no!” had been his reaction when his wife had returned to Philadelphia and told him the outcome of the last-minute college-fishing trip. “I don’t think that is quite the place for her,” he said.

“Let her go now,” cajoled Ma Kelly. “She’ll be back in only a month, dear. You know she’s very timid.”

But brother Kell, who was basking in his glory as the hero of the moment, knew Grace rather better, and he came to appreciate what his younger sister managed to achieve. Asked in later years why Grace had “turned out differently” from the rest of the family, he replied without hesitation, “she got away from home early.”

Kell, of all people, realized what a victory that represented for a child of Jack and Margaret Kelly. “None of the rest of us,” he explained, “managed to do that.”

4

DRAMATIC BEGINNINGS

I
n 1947 The American Academy of Dramatic Arts seemed as bohemian and artistic as a drama school could be. Packed into the attics above Carnegie Hall, it was a maze of wood-floored studios, with high, arching windows, exposed pipes, and echoing fire-escape staircases. Creaky and dusty, the place positively reeked of “backstage.”

“You could see, smell, and touch theater,” remembers Rachel Taylor, who was a fellow student of Grace’s. “It was as if you could hear the voices of actors past. You felt you were part of a real and creative activity that lifted you above ordinary things.”

The inspiration of the American Academy was Charles Jehlinger, one of the founding fathers of the modern American theater. A pint-sized, white-haired, and ferociously concentrated German Jew, Jehlinger had been a student in the very first class of the Academy in 1884, and he had been the director of instruction since 1890. “Jelly,” as he was known behind his back, focused particularly on the students who were approaching graduation, but his ideas set the tone for the whole school. Aristide d’Angelo, one of his principal lieutenants, used to welcome his students to their first-year studies with an apparently banal exercise that took them straight to the heart of the matter.

A volunteer would go out of the room while a pencil was hidden, and would return to be guided toward its hiding place by his fellow students calling out “cold,” “warm,” or “hot” in the manner of the party game. Then the pencil would be left where it was, and the volunteer would have to repeat the search with an equal display of doubt and confusion—now knowing full well where the pencil was, but giving a performance that was convincing enough for him to keep commanding the help of the rest of the class.

D’Angelo was illustrating the fundamental challenge to every actor. The audience knows, rationally, that the play has been rehearsed many times before, that the movie is just patterns of light that are being projected through a roll of celluloid that lives in a can. But it is the actor’s job to suspend disbelief so that this rational truth is never actually registered with the audience, even for an instant.

For Charles Jehlinger, acting was a grand and mystical version of conjuring. “The Actor,” he wrote in the high-flown and occasionally incomprehensible prospectus to his Academy, “is, all that is, at will.” But, like the best illusionists, Jehlinger knew that the secret of successful conjuring lay in such strictly practical matters as hard work and rehearsal—the battery of skills that he liked to call the “firm foundation.” So his students found their lives consumed by hours of exercises and drills that sometimes took them a long way from Hamlet. “We would be assigned to go to the Bowery and observe a drunk and then come back and act out a drunk,” Grace later remembered, describing a class that went by the name of “Pantomimic Expression: Life Study.”

“We would have to pretend that we were an ape,” remembers Bettina Thompson, who was a friend of Grace’s. “So we would all walk around the studio with our backs straight, our fanny tucked in, and our arms dangling along the floor.” Murr Sinclair, another friend, remembers complicated and painful classes in how to fall down stairs.

Jehlinger and his Academy were considered hopelessly technical and old-fashioned by the avant garde in the American theater. The vogue in the years after World War II was for the “Method” school of acting, as developed in America by Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, and later brought to the popular audience by the moody performances of James Dean and Marlon Brando. Stage “business” was scorned as artificial. It was
feeling
that mattered. The key to the “Method” was the idea that the actor should reach back into his own personal experience to locate authentic expressions of joy, shame, anger, or whatever emotion his part required.

But Jehlinger, like Strasberg’s many critics, felt that “Method”—style introspection produced self-obsessed performances which often meant more to the actor than they did to the audience. It was the job of the actor to entertain, and Jelly had no time for mumbling or stumbling. He saw his job as the imparting of a professional code of acting techniques and behavior to his students— from “the habit of consulting the dictionary” to the style in which his charges presented themselves to the world, both offstage and on.

“The actor and actress should know how to dress with fitness, good taste, and sincerity,” read his prospectus for 1947-48. Jehlinger’s pupils might be artistic and even bohemian, but they were also expected to remain young ladies and gentlemen. “There were guest lectures,” remembers Murr Sinclair. “People like Helen Hayes would come and talk to us, and then the girls were expected to dress up properly, in hats and little white gloves.”

Yet again, Grace Kelly’s education was set in a structure where manners and etiquette were taken very seriously. The American Academy’s roster of famous graduates included Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Kirk Douglas, and Lauren Bacall. In the year that Grace joined the Academy, Don Rickles and Jason Robards were the stars of the graduating class. None of these actors or actresses could be described as overmannered in their professional style. But it was the traditional and formalistic element in Jehlinger’s teaching that seemed to strike a chord in Grace. She loved the school’s old-fashioned “Fencing and Stage Dueling” lessons, and she always credited the Academy with her upright posture and eerily regal gait. “I was a ‘swayback,’” she would relate. “When I was lying as flat as I could, this teacher used to get down on the floor and would say, ‘I can see air.’ This meant that I’d have to try and lie even flatter.”

“Technique, technique,” remembers Rachel Taylor. “That was what the Academy was all about. I remember one exercise where they would throw open those big windows onto Fifty-seventh Street and tell us to breathe. And I thought, ‘I am coming to New York to learn how to breathe?’ It was thanks to the Academy that we all fell in love with the theater, but we also came to realize that the only way to learn how to act—to really act—was to go out and do it.”

Grace Kelly certainly came to feel this herself. Blessed and cursed by her father’s demanding and perfectionist nature, she was always asking more of herself and of her own personal command of her craft. Her career as an actress turned out to be a constant process of learning, much of it accomplished in the years after she left the American Academy. But it was during her months in the musty studios above Carnegie Hall that she acquired several of the components of her dramatic persona, and the most important of these was the voice that was to become her trademark—the Grace Kelly accent.

“It takes a trained ear to detect all errors of pronunciation, accent, and emphasis,” read the Academy’s prospectus for 1947, “but by careful and persistent criticism, the dialects of Pennsylvania or New England, of Canada or the South, are at last dethroned.” Aristide d’Angelo was the voice coach in charge of dethroning, aided by Edward Goodman, a short and elegant Englishman who carried a silver-topped cane containing a phial of ready-mixed martinis of which he partook regularly. Goodman spoke with a perfectly modulated Oxbridge accent, and he did not mince his words. He listened to Grace just once, then delivered his verdict without hesitation: “You have got to get rid of that
terrible
twang!”

Pitch and diction were the elements that Goodman attacked in the revoicing of Grace. He had an elaborate relaxation exercise that he got his students to perform while sitting in a straight-backed chair. This lowered Grace’s voice, correcting her tendency toward squeakiness, while she also worked through a series of vowel and consonant drills that taught her how to isolate the components of every word that she said.

“The effect of these classes,” boasted Jehlinger’s prospectus, “is sometimes little short of magical”—and so it proved with Grace. By the time her Academy voice tutors were finished with her, her professional stage and screen accent was a triumphant confection—high class and bell-like, with the precise enunciation of those grand English actresses who end up as Dames. When Grace Kelly pronounced the word “rotten” you could hear every single ‘t’ and a few more beside, while her vowel sounds, tugged firmly away from East Falls by the example of Edward Goodman, had ventured out across the Atlantic to hover remarkably close to the British coast.