Read High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood for Free Online

a Philadelphia city councilman, and, briefly, he was president of the United States Olympic Committee.
    Kell’s personal life was complicated and disordered. He married a champion swimmer and had six children, but then one day, without warning or explanation, he walked out on his family and never returned. He became a notorious playboy, had a serious problem with alcohol, and on May 2, 1985, at the age of fifty-seven, John B. Kelly Jr. dropped down dead whilejogging to the Athletic Club after his customary morning row on the Schuylkill River. He was posthumously inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame, and Philadelphia’s Kelly Drive was named in his honor. He and his father are the only parent-child athletes in the Olympic Hall of Fame.
    “Kell never had to grow up,” Grace said. “He was naïve, he confused attention with loyalty, he tried too hard to make people like him—and he didn’t have Father’s toughness, sense of humor or resilience.”
    Peggy’s story, too, was unhappy. After two failed marriages, she sank into alcoholism and died of a stroke at the age of sixty-six, in 1991. Lizanne was then the only surviving offspring of the Kelly-Majer marriage.
    A FTER H ENLEY that summer of 1947, Margaret took her daughters to Switzerland while the men returned to Philadelphia. The holiday was intended as a kind of consolation prize for Grace, whose low grades in mathematics prevented her matriculation to Bennington College in Vermont, to which she had applied because of its highly regarded drama department.
    But Grace really needed no solace. As soon as she received the exceedingly polite rejection letter from Bennington, she began making inquiries about enrollment at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. When she finally brought up the subject with her parents, they were not at all pleased—perhaps because of the unorthodox, unconventional life of Jack’s brother George. “Daddy was uncomfortable around theatre people for one simple reason: he didn’t understand them,” said Lizanne. Judith Quine was more explicit: “Jack Kelly saw acting as a slim cut above streetwalker.”
    “She wouldn’t let her Uncle George help her prepare” forthe American Academy, recalled Jack. “She was determined to go places without leaning on anybody or using influence.” Added Judith, “She left a prominent Philadelphia family to become a struggling actress in New York. It was an independent move. She had a certain amount of maverick in her, and she was entirely self-sufficient. She knew how to depend on herself.” Grace was single-minded in her ambition to succeed as a professional actress. “I rebelled against my family and went to New York to find out who I was—and who I wasn’t.”
    Margaret intervened to temper her husband’s disapproval, which could have become an outright veto. “Oh, Jack—it’s not as if she’s going to Hollywood , after all,” her daughters remembered their mother saying. “Let Grace go—this won’t amount to anything, and she’ll be home in a week.”
    The idea of a career in the theatre was disturbing enough to her father, but pursuing it in New York, and not just with an amateur group in the Pennsylvania provinces—well, that combined Sodom with Gomorrah. Manhattan was no more than ninety minutes by train from Philadelphia, but it was no place for a proper young lady on her own. Why wouldn’t she settle down in Philadelphia and marry a nice, rich Catholic boy? “I hear some of your school chums are coming out,” Jack said to Grace, raising the prospect of the formal entrance into polite society that was common at the time. “Do you want to come out, too?”
    Her reply was firm: “I am out! Do you think that to get a date I have to use those women who sell mailing lists of boys’ names?” No, she had other plans and was not to be stopped.
    “I was saved from professional perdition,” Grace said, “because there happened to be a place in New York