Atlantic City Weekly

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Atlantic City Weekly's July 2006 cover story on Grace Kelly and her Ocean City connections.

Princes and princesses inhabit our earliest storylands, a sensibility that all but the jaded tend to carry into adulthood. When Kate and William hitched their joint star to the House of Windsor two weeks ago, it recalled a royal wedding of seashore import that took place five-and-a-half decades ago. That would be the nuptials of Grace and Rainier, which similarly galvanized the globe’s attention.


Rather than at the Jersey shore, of course, the G&R bash held forth in Monaco, where Prince Rainier Grimaldi ruled the fairy-tale principality on the French Riviera. Rainier, a seemingly sweet-tempered unprepossessing fellow, had met Grace Kelly when she was in the vicinity for the 1955 Cannes Film Festival, soon after the stunning actress had completed filming To Catch A Thief, her third outing with director Alfred Hitchcock. In short order, she found herself at the palace for a photo spread. When she returned to the States, the movie star and the prince began a correspondence.


If Thief co-star Cary Grant was the most debonair of leading men, Rainier was strictly a character actor. But Grace, though Hollywood royalty, was in search of her own real-life prince. A couple who owned a home in Margate and were close friends of the Kellys went to the Riviera later that year and convinced Rainier to come calling at the traditional Kelly Christmas party back in Philadelphia during his already scheduled trip to America. Indeed, he was a bachelor and in the market for a princess.


Grace was the middle daughter and third child of the House of Kelly — the brickworks empire built by her father, John B. Kelly, Olympic oarsman, self-made business tycoon, and progenitor of the Atlantic City Race Course. 


Summers were for Ocean City, where Jack Kelly Jr. (“Kell”) sparkled in the South Jersey Lifeguard Championships, representing the local beach patrol established by his father, who had built a Spanish-style manse in 1931 at 26th Street and Wesley Avenue, then on the beachfront. By the 1940s, the Kellys were down-home members of the summertime community — the girls jarred produce at the fruit stand, and Kell’s lifeguard buddies eyed them along the beach. Grace grew from a coltish girl to a trim teen to a breathtaking beauty. In a few short years, she’d be paired on-screen with the likes of Gary Cooper and Clark Gable.