It still looks like a scene out of a fairy tale: The handsome prince and the beautiful movie star, revealing the Cartier engagement ring he’s just given her — complete with a 10.47-carat emerald-cut diamond flanked by twin baguettes.
In their official January 1956 engagement photos, Grace Kelly — already an Oscar winner at 26 for “The Country Girl” — and His Serene Highness, Prince Rainier of Monaco, 32, look quietly content. The Hitchcock blonde’s mother, Margaret, smiles sweetly at her second-youngest child. But no one’s grin is bigger and jollier than that of John B. “Jack” Kelly Sr., Grace’s father. Not only was his girl about to become a princess, but here she was back in her very first palace — the stately Philadelphia mansion that Jack, a one-time bricklayer who had turned his trade into a fortune as a contractor — had built himself.
And now was his chance to show off the place. At Jack’s behest, dozens of photographers swarmed the Kelly mansion — flashbulbs blazing, demanding, “Grace, look over here!” They even called her prince “Joe,” as in “Give us a smile, Joe! Move your ass, Joe!”
Media-savvy Jack, a Democratic powerbroker who counted FDR among his associates, instructed the photographers to work in shifts.
“We’ll put all the TV men down in the basement and leave the still [photography] men on the second floor . . . It’s a good thing I built this house myself or we’d all be down in the basement by now,” the millionaire contractor declared, proudly thumping his chest about how solid the floors were under the weight of a battalion of photographers.
Now, some 60 years later, the once-grand red-brick Kelly house is once again in the spotlight. Grace and Rainier’s son, Prince Albert, the reigning monarch of Monaco, has purchased the home for $754,000, with plans to use it as the American offices for the Princess Grace Foundation, which awards grants and scholarships to young actors, directors, dancers and others in the entertainment field. He has said the place will also be open for public viewing “from time to time.”
Albert — who spent many a childhood Christmas at the house with his sisters, Princesses Caroline and Stéphanie — called the place “very special to our family,” adding that he was happy to have saved it “from a near-certain death or development.”
But not all the memories are happy ones, nor will Albert likely be willing to discuss the demons that darkened the Kellys’ platinum lives: alcoholism, philandering, runaway teens, maternal betrayal and a scandalous transsexual affair that brought down a promising political career.
Oh, if these walls could talk.
Because of the Kelly family’s power, privilege, politics, Irish Catholic heritage and many scandals, they’ve often been compared to the Kennedy clan.
And Grace was hardly the first of them to pursue a career in entertainment.
One of Jack’s brothers, Walter, became a well-known star — known as “The Virginia Judge” — in vaudeville, earning a tidy fortune. Yet he died penniless in a flophouse.
Another of his brothers, George, was a famous playwright who had won a Pulitzer for “Craig’s Wife” in 1926. Nonetheless, he was essentially banished by his generation of the family because of his homosexuality. Besides hiring his lover as his valet, he was said to have been blackmailed by a man with whom he had an affair.
Though George was said to be a misogynist and an anti-Semite, he was Grace’s favorite uncle, and she would often stay with him when she first began her career in California.
In just five short years — from 1951 to 1956 — the coolly beautiful actress managed to successfully woo Hollywood audiences, not to mention plenty of its leading men. Though she made just 11 films in her brief career, she was often linked to her co-stars. While some — like Clark Gable (“Mogambo”) or Bing Crosby (“High Society,” “The Country Girl”) — were single at the time, others including Gary Cooper (“High Noon”), William Holden (also “The Country Girl”) and Ray Milland (“Dial M for Murder”) were very much married.
As The New Yorker critic Anthony Lane wondered in a 2010 profile of the actress-turned-princess: “Slavering man-eater or virgin bride?”
Even Grace’s marriage has come into question since her death in a 1982 car accident near Monaco, at the age of 52. In his 2013 memoir “The Fat Lady Sang,” film producer Robert Evans claimed that the fairy-tale union was simply a business arrangement masterminded by Aristotle Onassis, who owned a lot of property in Monaco, to turn the postage-stamp-picturesque principality into a gambling mecca for the rich and famous.
“The right bride could do for Monaco’s tourism what the coronation of Queen Elizabeth did for Great Britain,” Rainier was told by Onassis, a partner in the syndicate that owned a casino in Monaco.
Grace famously married a prince, but her brother, John B. Kelly Jr. (known as “Kell” to his inner circle), had an infamous love affair with a “queen” that ignited a family feud and cost him the chance to become mayor of Philadelphia.
Long before Caitlyn Jenner, there was Rachel Harlow — nee Richard Finnochio, a South Philly pretty boy who earned his royal sobriquet when he won a drag-show beauty contest in New York that was the subject of an award-winning 1968 documentary called “The Queen.”
Harlow later had sex-reassignment surgery and became the hostess of a ’70s Philadelphia disco called Harlow’s. That’s where Kell — a renowned womanizer, as well as a popular politician like his father, Jack — fell for her after abandoning his wife, son and five daughters to live the playboy life.
Kell, who had won a bronze medal in rowing at the 1956 Olympics, had hoped to become mayor of Philadelphia, running against a popular tough-guy former cop, the incumbent Frank Rizzo.
However, in February 1975, a story appeared in one of the city’s dailies, declaring: “If Jack Kelly never becomes mayor he will probably have his mother to blame.”
The Kelly family matriarch, Margaret, was beside herself over her son’s affair — so much so that she contacted two influential Democratic Party members and asked that Kell not receive the party’s endorsement for mayor. Publicly, she said she did it because politics disrupts family life.
Privately, she had found out about a campaign poster being prepared by Rizzo’s administration that read: “Will the First Lady Be Harlow?”
Margaret didn’t want her daughter, the princess, to be embarrassed by Kell’s relationship with a transsexual blonde.
A friend of Kell’s told a journalist that the Kelly matriarch “destroyed her son [and] treated him like an erring little boy. He defied her and she was going to fix him . . . Kell was totally devastated.”
Harlow and Kell’s relationship disintegrated, much like his political career. In March 1985, while out jogging, Kell collapsed and died of a heart attack. He was 57.
Despite Grace’s fame, Jack Sr.’s favorite child was his and Margaret’s first-born, Peggy, who endured two turbulent marriages that ended in divorce, including one to a heavy drinker who was nearly killed in a drunken car crash.
One of Peggy’s twin daughters, Mary Lee, made headlines when she ran away from home at 15 — only to be found a month later working as a waitress in a Des Moines, Iowa, coffee shop and living with her 18-year-old boyfriend.
When the young couple married a month later, Peggy refused to attend. She died of alcoholism in 1991.
The baby of the Kelly family, Elizabeth (known mostly as Lizanne), was closest to Grace. They acted together in local theater productions, and later she accompanied her starlet sister to movie sets. When Grace was killed, it was Lizanne, a stockbroker’s wife, who picked up the phone and heard a tearful Princess Caroline say, “Mommy died.” Lizanne passed away from cancer in 2009.
When Prince Albert visited the family abode last fall, it was the first time a Kelly family member had been “home” in decades. An official city plaque stands on the property, honoring the Kelly family’s accomplishments. The house itself, though, has a long road ahead of it before it can return to its glory days.
After the Kellys sold the place in 1973, things went downhill. For years, the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals received complaints about a possible animal-hoarding situation. When investigators finally entered the manse — where her Serene Highness, Princess Grace of Monaco, had grown up with servants and a chauffeur — in 2013, they discovered a flea-infested, feces-covered horror house.
Agents seized 14 live cats, one dog and one dead cat, and owner Marjorie Bamont was involuntarily committed for psychiatric evaluation and subsequently convicted on 16 counts of animal cruelty. She pleaded no contest to the charges, but soon filed a $1 million civil suit against the SPCA, alleging illegal seizure of her menagerie.
It was after Bamont passed away last year that Albert purchased the toxic six-bedroom, 2½-story Colonial homestead custom-built by his maternal grandfather.
“The first thing is to get it back in shape,” a Kelly cousin told a TV reporter, as the wallpaper and paint in the front hall date back to 1925.
Prince Albert is ready for the challenge, and the chance to honor the happy memories of his heritage.
“The house is filled with little moments,” he said. “Moments of being a family.”
Jerry Oppenheimer is a bestselling author whose latest book, “The Kardashians: An American Drama,” will be published in September.