High Society: Grace Kelly and Hollywood Read Online Free PDF Page A

then as one of America’s most successful playwrights, George was a completely different man from Walter; indeed, they had so little in common that they never made any efforts to keep in touch.
    “George Kelly was a very gracious, highly educated person,” recalled Rupert Allan, “well read and very witty, but also exceptionally elegant and cultivated. Grace just adored him.” Rita Gam agreed: “George was a perceptive and enormously kind man, and he took a great interest in Grace’s youthful dramatic escapades.”
    George Kelly was born in 1887 and toured nationally as an actor from 1911 on. After military service in France during World War I, he wrote, directed and starred in his own one-act plays, several of which (The Flattering Word, Poor Aubrey, Mrs. Ritter Appears and The Weak Spot) have stood time’s test and are occasionally presented in repertory and by school and amateur groups. His first full-length Broadway play, The Torch-Bearers (1922), which he also directed, is a mordantly funny indictment of amateur theatricals and self-absorbed nonprofessionals. The play reflects George’s profound respect for the stage and his lightly veiled contempt for untalented amateurs; ironically, ever since its premiere it has been most often performed by precisely the nonprofessional “little theatre” groups it skewers. “I loved that play as much as I loved Uncle George,” Grace said, passing over any mention of Walter when she discussed family history.
    Two years after The Torch-Bearers , Kelly directed his play The Show-Off , which had a Broadway run of almost six hundred performances and was staged with equal success in London; like The Torch-Bearers , it has been revived very often. This was soon followed by his production of Craig’s Wife , which won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for drama and was the basis for the 1950 movie Harriet Craig , which gave Joan Crawford one of her most intense roles as the archetypal middle-class, middle-aged, domineering wife who places domestic perfection above all relationships.
    More plays followed, but the last decades of George Kelly’s life, while comfortable and personally fulfilling, were professionally static. His plays were neither epigrammatic nor vulgar, and audiences had to sit patiently, listening to long acts in which both characters and social commentaries were revealed through dialogue. He was, in other words, a man of a specific kind of theatre, ferociously moralistic and poorly suited to the later different styles of (for example) Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and William Inge. “I won’t put my plays out for production because the theater has changed so much,” he said in 1970. “I just don’t want to become involved [in an era] that is frightful,shallow and sensationalistic.” The truth was that the styles of popular comedy and drama had moved beyond him, and he had no desire to keep up with changing theatrical fashion.
    One might presume that Margaret and Jack Kelly took pride in their connection to George. But in fact they were less than enthusiastic about him, for he was exclusively homosexual, living for decades with his partner, William Weagley. At that time, having a gay relative was too terrible to contemplate for all but a few enlightened American families, and a man who was “sensitive” (the tip-off code word) could be endured only if the most insistent silence about the awful truth was maintained. When George died in 1974, Weagley was not invited to the funeral; he crept into the church and took a back seat, weeping quietly and completely ignored. He died a year later.
    During her childhood and adolescence, Grace heard the whispers and cruel giggles about Uncle George. These she deeply resented, cherishing his visits to Henry Avenue, when he advised her on plays to read, cued her lines when she was in rehearsal, made lists of roles she might undertake in the future and was the only one in the family to take her acting aspirations seriously.