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

young man at the door, at the end of an evening. Boys were trained in the right way to ask a girl to dance, and classes in decorum were routinely held in schools.
    In the spring of 1944, at the height of World War II, Harper graduated from school, joined the navy and was sent abroad. Not long after returning, he contracted multiple sclerosis, from which he suffered until his death in 1953. Grace visited him often during his confinement and attended his funeral. “He was the first boy I ever loved, and I’ll never forget him,” she said.
    The relationship with Harper, like other dates during her high school years, was entirely chaste, for Grace had not yet tested the waters of sexual experience. Such reticence was typical of the time, especially in polite circles: young people’s sexual urges did not tend to lurch into full throttle, nor did they race, as it was said, to go “all the way.” Reliable methods of contraception were not readily or widely available, and the fear of pregnancy, venereal disease and an indecent reputation kept the reins on youthful impulses. In addition, penicillin, later the drug of choice against sexually transmitted infections, had only recently been developed, and it was reserved for men injured in combat. Civilian physicians had access to it for the general public only after 1946.
    This is not to say that the standards of Queen Victoria and Mrs. Grundy were everywhere observed; it is simply to state the obvious—that sexual intercourse for American teenagers in the 1940s was not as commonplace as it later became. When Grace graduated from high school, she was still a virgin, although she had easily and often fallen in love. “My sister Lizanne loved only one, the boy she married—but Peggy and I were in and out of love every other day.”
    On June 5, 1947, Grace graduated from Stevens; her classmates predicted, in the senior yearbook, that she was certain “to become a stage and screen star.” The following month, she made her first trip to Europe, along with her entire family. The journey was occasioned by Kell’s entry into the Henley Regatta after he had received the James E. Sullivan Award earlier that year, which named him the foremost amateur athlete in America. Before and after his navy service during World War II, Kell was relentlessly, even ruthlessly, trained and driven by his father. He won the United States single sculls title in 1946, and Jack Kelly got his revenge for the episode of 1920 during that summer of 1947, when Kell won the Diamond ChallengeSculls—a victory he repeated two years later. “There was never any doubt what Jack wanted,” Margaret said later. “He always insisted he would have a son to make the Diamond Sculls.”
    Despite impressive post-Henley achievements, Kell never won an Olympic gold medal. “It was a failure my father’s contemporaries won’t let me forget,” he said in 1971. “My father was a tough act to follow—a big, strong guy, fine-looking, eminently successful. There was always pressure to excel, to keep up. I’ve been competing with him all my life. Living in his shadow made losing harder when I lost, which wasn’t very often, but I was humiliated for both of us.” That summer, Jack saw that his son’s presence in England was documented by the press. “I could never understand my father, letting photographers take pictures of Kell shaving in the bathroom,” Grace said. Jack’s influence, added Margaret, “was not always good for Kell. I often told Jack that he leaned too hard on the boy, trained him too hard for the Olympics—and it hurt Kell.” Arthur Lewis, who knew the whole family, was blunter: Jack “messed up his only son’s life by forging him into an instrument of personal revenge.”
    As also required by his father, Kell later joined the family business while continuing an involvement in sports. He was president of the Amateur Athletic Union, and he won a bronze medal in the 1956 summer Olympics. He became