Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (12 page)

From the moment he had noticed her in the elevator, Richardson had been idly analyzing Grace’s features with the eye of a professional. Her jaw, he had considered, was perhaps rather strong and square—her nose just a little too small. But suddenly the drama coach had no reservations. “Her body was stunning. She was like something sculptured by Rodin. She had the most beautiful, delicate figure—small breasts, small hips—and her skin was almost translucent. She was the most beautiful girl that I had ever seen naked. So I was lying there and discovering that I was in love, that this was not just getting laid. I felt involved with this girl. I was in love with her wrists. I was in love with her ankles. I was in love with the blood flowing through her fine, transparent skin. I felt that I had to look after her, that I had to protect her—and she seemed to be madly in love with me. So that night was just sheer ecstasy. She didn’t go back to the Barbizon at all.”

Next morning Richardson suffered a severe attack of remorse. “I realized that I had done something dreadful. I was this girl’s teacher. It was like a psychiatrist having an affair with a patient.”

So the affair had to develop furtively. Grace and Richardson tried to pretend not to notice each other when their paths crossed at the Academy, where Grace continued seeing her student boyfriend, Herbie Miller—without telling Richardson about it. “Herbie was definitely Grace’s ‘steady,’” remembers Murr Sinclair. “We did not find out about Don until later.” If anybody thought twice about Grace’s relationship with the young director, it was in the context of her acting career. “When I saw them together,” remembers Rachel Taylor, “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, so she’s already in with the professional crowd.’”

Most weekends Grace would sneak down to Thirty-third Street to spend Saturday night with Richardson in his austere and scruffy bachelor quarters. “We made love in this broken-down place with this horrible furniture,” remembers Richardson. “Raskolnikov’s lair in
Crime and Punishment
!
The setting was anything but romantic.”

Grace Kelly brought the romance with her, in the form of 78 rpm records to which she would dance after they had made love— Hawaiian melodies when she was just playful, “The Great Gate at Kiev” when she was in a martial mood. “The Great Gate” was a classical composition by Modest Mussorgsky, its music grand and imperious, conjuring up visions of fur-coated Cossacks as they processed insolently through the great gate. Drums and trumpets, clashing cymbals—Grace would sway around the room as the music reached its climax. She was the Eastern princess, the dancing princess, a sensuous queen of angels glorying in her nakedness in the flickering light of the fire.

“When she was modeling,” recalls Richardson, “she used to wear a Merry Widow corset with a cinch to pull her waist in. People liked that kind of pinched look then. So she would strip down to nothing but her Merry Widow and run around the place, cooking and cleaning and all that, with her buttocks only barely covered. She was marvelously endowed in that department.”

Grace’s workdays were patchworked with her professional modeling engagements, and sometimes, between photo sessions, she managed to steal away to Thirty-third Street. “I would have hot Campbell’s vegetable soup waiting for her,” Richardson remembers. “I would feed it to her out of the can, and then we would go to bed and make love. Afterward she would jump up again, put on her clothes, and go back to model. She used to say that it put lights in her eyes.”

Richardson never discussed religion with his new girlfriend, but he soon discovered what a devout Catholic she was. “She always wore a crucifix,” he says. “It was a tiny little gold crucifix, and on Sunday mornings, when we spent the weekend together, she would jump out of bed to go to church. She would throw her clothes on, run and make the mass, then come back. I’d still be asleep, and she would jump right back into bed beside me, naked with the crucifix.”

Grace told her lover of her sexual initiation in Philadelphia— the rainy afternoon encounter with the husband of her friend— and she also told him that he, Richardson, was only the second man that she had been to bed with. “I do not now believe that,” says Richardson. “I mean, a girl who was as busy in bed as she was . . . I am not saying that she was a nymphomaniac. During my life, I have known two of those, and they both had this characteristic of never being satisfied. They would get desperate and sad. They needed to go on and on and on.

“That was not Grace. She was happy in bed, and she always knew when she’d had enough. We were young, and after, say, four times, well, that was just fine for her. She was perfectly normal. She had her orgasms, and she enjoyed them. But, though this may sound strange, I do not think it was sex that she was doing it for. There was something else.

“If you read
After the Fall,
Arthur Miller has his Marilyn Monroe figure say something like, ‘Just lie on top of me. You don’t have to do anything.’ And I think that is the key. Grace wanted somebody’s arms around her—the security. That is what she really craved. She enjoyed getting laid, all right. But I think that for her the truly important part was the arms around her.”

Richardson diagnosed a similar need in himself. His wife had recently left him for an older man, and he was bogged down in a divorce. His normally robust self-esteem had been in tatters until Grace’s arrival. “I was desperate for affection,” he says. “We were both lost souls when we met—two devastated people.”

Clear in his own mind about the nature of his problems, Richardson started to analyze what might be wrong with Grace, and he could not help noticing how vague and reticent she became when talking about her close family, and about her father in particular. She had lots to say about her show-business uncles—Uncle Walter, the Virginia Judge, and Uncle George, the playwright, so stylish and theatrical. But there was a deadness when it came to Jack Kelly. Grace seemed to lose her focus, getting vague and changing the subject, and Richardson concluded that this must reflect some component of her father’s attitude toward her. “Grace was just a chip in his game, as I saw it,” says Richardson. “So that meant she was always looking for somebody with a father image, somebody who could replace Papa.”

Don Richardson was very happy to try to play that role himself. The Svengali in him was entranced by the idea of making his girlfriend a star. “She seemed just magical,” he remembers. “She was a marvelous blank canvas on which anyone could paint their own picture.”

As Grace worked with Richardson at the Academy in his acting company, she began to develop her own fantasy about the future—that she and Don would start up and run a stock theater together in Philadelphia. She would be the leading actress, Don would be the director—and Uncle George would write the material. “Making her mark in Philadelphia and getting accepted. That always mattered a lot to her,” remembers Richardson, who did not see himself as an out-of-town repertory manager.

Richardson had quickly registered the direction of Grace’s ambition from some of her mannerisms—the aristocratic voice that she had constructed for herself, with her posture to match. “She
marched,”
he remembers. “She did not walk. She had begun to take a great interest in sitting up straight, in being almost regal. She clearly had this notion of what she wanted to be. When she danced the Great Gate, she was actually pretending that she was a mid-Eastern princess. She told me so. She said it was her fantasy. I thought nothing of it at the time, but now I can see that she was already working on building the mythical Grace Kelly.”

Richardson had a major problem with the high hopes he was nursing for his girlfriend’s theatrical career. When he looked at Grace’s abilities with the fish-eyed skepticism of an impresario, he had serious doubts as to whether she had the technical armory to make it on the stage. “I never felt that Grace had more than minimal acting talent,” he says today. “Great looks and style, yes, but no vocal horsepower—no voice projection. She would never have had a career in the theater.”

Then one day Richardson went to the local drugstore to pick up some photographs he had recently taken of Grace, one of them a head and shoulders that he had shot in the apartment without any special light. “That night, when she wasn’t there, I sat down and studied this picture, and I noticed something miraculous. It came out in the photograph—the difference between what she was in reality, and the way that she imagined herself to be. You could see it there in the print. When you looked at that picture, you were not looking at her. You were looking at the illusion of her, which is another way of putting that old Hollywood thing, that the camera loved her. And the thing about Grace was, the camera did more than love her. It was insane about her—just like I was. When I looked at that photograph, I knew that her future would have to be in pictures.”

That weekend Richardson escorted Grace to Penn Station. She went home to see her parents at least once a month, and Richardson would go along to kiss her goodbye. “She was crying,” he remembers. “Worrying about going home, worrying about her career, and playing that game I came to recognize, winding me up to help her. She seemed such a waif, sitting there on the bench in her white gloves, sobbing, saying that she would never make it, that she wasn’t getting anywhere. So I promised that next week, when she got back, I would take her to meet an agent.”

Richardson brought his drugstore photograph along when he took Grace to the office of Toni Ward at the William Morris Agency in Radio City. Ward represented some major Broadway talent, and Richardson went straight into action. “‘Toni,’ I said, ‘I have a girl sitting outside who is going to be a very important movie star!’”

“Bring in this paragon!” responded the agent, who had clearly been treated to this style of introduction before. Ten minutes later Grace was outside in the corridor again, sobbing. Toni Ward had not been impressed.

Undeterred, Richardson took Grace on to the offices of MCA, where his contact was another powerful agent, Edie Van Cleve—and this time his technique got results. “Edie had a perception about feminine beauty,” he recalls. “When I brought Grace in, I knew that I had struck something. I could see it in Edie’s eyes.”

It was half an hour before Grace came out of Edie van Cleve’s office—and this time she was smiling. “She wants to be my agent,” she said.

“That’s marvelous,” said Richardson.

“I’ll have to ask my father first, of course,” said Grace.

The climax of every student’s career at the American Academy came toward the end of their second year when they played a leading role in a production that was known as their graduation play— and Don Richardson knew exactly the role and the play for Grace. Philip Barry’s
The Philadelphia Story
had been a Broadway hit in 1939 and had been made into an equally successful movie the following year, with Katharine Hepburn playing the heroine, Tracy Lord, on both stage and screen. Tracy Lord was based on a real person, Hope Montgomery, a pretty, young Philadelphia socialite, and Richardson felt that Grace was ideal for the part. “She was too young for it really. She was only nineteen, and Tracy Lord is getting up toward her thirties, just ending one marriage and planning a new one. Hepburn was the right age when she acted it. But it all played so well to Grace’s dreams and illusions—everything from the white gloves to the camelhair coat. Grace had the look of the part.”

Grace’s graduating performance was held in the little theater under Carnegie Hall, in the presence of the entire student body of the Academy, with the faculty headed by Charles Jehlinger. Jack and Margaret Kelly came up to see their daughter’s mimicking of a Philadelphia socialite, and this might have been an ideal moment for Grace to introduce them to the handsome and accomplished director of her graduation play. But her affair with her teacher was still supposed to be a secret.

“On the day of the play, we went to lunch together,” Richardson remembers, “several blocks away from the Academy, to an Automat where nobody went. Then I wished her luck, and she went to the back stage to get ready.”

Grace was reluctant to give her parents any clue about her relationship with Don Richardson—but she had not reckoned on a mother’s intuition. Margaret Kelly had been noticing the change in her daughter in recent months. “Whenever she came home on weekends,” she later related, “her mind seemed to have remained in New York.”

Ma Kelly recognized the symptoms. “Gracie,” she asked her daughter, “there’s a man, isn’t there?”

“Yes,” Grace replied, “there is.” And out it came tumbling, the story of the young director at the Academy, his faith in her, his plans for her career, their hopes of getting married.