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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