Princess Grace returns to her Ocean City roots
By Bill Kelly
The arrival in Ocean City of Princess Grace of Monaco was met with no fanfare as she routinely returned to her childhood stomping grounds every Labor Day weekend since she married Prince Rainier in 1956.
As usual, her sister, Lizanne Kelly Levine, and her husband Donald picked her and the two children up at the airport in Philly. As they drove across the Walt Whitman Bridge she looked out the window while they passed Jack’s Twin Bar in Gloucester City where she used to visit her old boyfriend, Dick Boccelli, who played drums with Bill Haley and His Comets before they were famous.
When they got to the fork in the road, Don asked if he should take the Black Horse Pike or the new, year-old Atlantic City Expressway. Grace chose the Pike so they could stop for hot dogs and ice cream at the roadside stand their father always stopped at on the way to the Jersey Shore.
As Don Levine veered to the right, he looked over at the entrance to the Atlantic City Expressway and took notice of the shiny new sign that read: “Motorcycles Prohibited.” It featured a black silhouette of a man on a motorcycle in a circle with a slash across it.
When they got to Somers Point they had to wait for the Ocean City Causeway drawbridge to open and close, so some of them got out of the car, went to the railing and waved at the people on the boat going through below. Don Levine shook his head, thinking how they could have lowered their rigging a few feet and went under the bridge with no problem, but just had to open the bridge because they had the right of way.
It was the start of a huge Labor Day weekend traffic jam that backed up from the Somers Point Circle to Route 9. Although it took an hour to get it untangled, tempers didn’t flare. Everyone just breathed in the salt air, took advantage of the view from the bridge and listened to the radio.
Once they were moving again, Levine drove down Ninth Street, passed the Chatterbox and made a right on Wesley Avenue. As they passed 11th Street, Grace could see the Flanders Hotel. Pulling up in front of their house at 26th and Wesley for a moment, Grace tried to imagine what it was like in 1929, the year she was born, when her father bought the lot and built the house, then the only one south of 14th Street.
The house with a fence around it was made of brick. “Kelly For Brickwork” was the motto of the company started by her father, John B. as he was known. It was built in the Spanish Revival style, as was the Music Pier, Chatterbox, the Copper Kettle Fudge building and the Flanders Hotel. There was a terracotta parapet roof from where you could see the stars. It was a grand, great house where so many children had so much fun for so many seasons. Another summer was coming to an end and, as usual, would go out with much fanfare.
John B. built his house on the barren south dunes because all of the other major Philadelphia Main Line society millionaires had homes in the North End Gardens section of Ocean City, or in Margate or Longport, just as he built his Philly home in East Falls rather than on the Main Line. He had riparian rights to the water’s edge.
While the house was at one time on the beach, when they put in Wesley Avenue, he owned the beach lot on the other side of the street and eventually built a big, two-story brick house there. So by 1965, with the two houses, it was like the Kelly Family Compound, except there was no security and anybody could come and go and generally did: brothers, sisters, cousins and friends – all part of the Kelly Clan.
Since her father passed away, her mother, Margaret Kelly, had assumed the role of matriarch and leader of the family. After greeting her mother, who was sitting in the shade reading a book, she said hello to her brother John Jr. Jack or “Kell” as he was known to most, was lifting weights in the garage. She then gathered up her two children and a few other straggling cousins and walked down the beach to the Boardwalk.
It was a short hike, but an exciting one knowing what was in store – a chance to sample a box of fudge from Copper Kettle, pizza from Mack & Manco’s and walk down the Boardwalk to the rides – the Ferris wheel, bumper cars and carnival candy just like all the shoebies and other tourists did.
Switching into routine, Grace Kelly let the children run free while she would visit her tailor, Mr. Talese, on Asbury Avenue, buy some new dresses and t-shirts for all of her maids, butlers, drivers and chefs back at the Prince’s Palace in Monaco. Her children knew the routine now, and looked forward to riding their skateboards and bicycles, having lunch and a banana split at the Chatterbox, “where Mom used to work.” They moaned whenever the Chatterbox was mentioned.
And so it was with much dismay when Katie, the mayor’s daughter, arrived for work as a waitress at the Chatterbox and discovered that Grace Kelly was there with her kids but had just left.
A few days later, unlike the unassuming arrival of Princess Grace, Prince Rainier III of Monaco was greeted with fanfare and security. As a visiting head of state, his bulletproof limo had a motorcycle escort that was given special dispensation by the governor to use the Atlantic City Expressway since motorcycles were prohibited from state highways.
The prince was an agreeable enough chap as the heir to a castle, kingdom and casino by the sea. Grace assured the royal bloodline would continue according to script when she gave birth to a male heir, Albert, in 1958.
The story goes back to 1297 when one of Rainier’s ancestors took over the Monaco castle in a bloodless coup. Francois Grimaldi, arrived in Monaco. Disguised as a monk, he took control of the fortress situated high above the Mediterranean, the very location where the current royal palace stands.
Now, hundreds of years and a dozen generations later, the kingdom was passed to Rainier, who rather late in life met and married Grace Kelly.
She was invited to the palace while she was doing work leading up to the Cannes Film Festival. The American actress had been in Monaco making an Alfred Hitchcock movie, “To Catch A Thief” with Cary Grant.
Rainier first came to Ocean City to meet John B. Kelly and ask for the hand of his daughter in marriage. John B. leased a steamship to take his family and friends to Monaco for the storybook, “Wedding of the Century,” as they called it.
Once in Ocean City the prince was taken to a private residence on the beach that belonged to an out-of-town friend and neighbor of the Kellys. It afforded him much more privacy and security than the Kelly Compound, which was overrun with children.
The prince was met by John B. Kelly, Jr. (Grace and Lizanne’s brother Kell). Kell had been an Ocean City lifeguard on this very beach, rowed single and double sculls on the Schuylkill River, was a silver medal Olympic champion, and famously won the Diamond Sculls at Henley in England after his father was denied entry because he was a “working man” and not a “gentleman,” at least what a gentleman was considered to be in that era.
Like John B., Don Levine was a horseman and steward at the Atlantic City Race Course, who had met his wife Lizanne while working as a lifeguard at the Flanders. Margaret, now the head of the household, had been a gym teacher at the University of Pennsylvania where she instituted most of the athletic programs for women.
The prince cut muster as he, too, was a “man’s man,” unlike some of the other dates that Grace had brought home – like the fashion designer who was shunned and ignored by the Kelly men.
The prince was a betting sportsman who immediately won over the Kelly men by asking to go to the race track. Since John B. built the track, and was co-owner with Bob Hope, Hap Farley and Sonny Fraser, the prince was the guest of honor in the owner’s box at the Atlantic City Race Course that day, with over 30,000 paid attendance.
While Lizanne and her sister and mother kept the children and cousins busy back at the Kelly Clan Compound and on the beach, Grace went to the track with her husband Prince Rainier, her brother Kell and brother-in-law Don Levine and cousin John Lehman. The same group had gone together to the Kentucky Derby in May, flying on a private plane and keeping a John B. Kelly annual tradition, so they knew how to have a good time together and did. The prince fit in well with this group and after a few drinks was just one of the guys, as was Grace.
The prince took a liking to a particular jockey who went on to win six of the races that day, giving the prince a nice payout, especially on two long shots his jockey won, so the prince picked up the tab for dinner at Zaberers Restaurant that night.
“Good luck had just stung me, to the race track I did go. She bet on one horse to win and I bet on another to show. The odds were in my favor, I had ‘em five to one, when that Nag to win came around the track, sure enough she had won. I took up all my winnings, and gave my Bessie half, but she tore it up and threw it in my face just for a laugh.”
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