City Safari: Philadelphia Free Press
The
Kelly house at 3901
Henry Avenue East Falls Germantown Monaco
My great aunt, who loved stories about royal
families the world over, loved Princess Grace about as much as she loved Queen
Elizabeth. Princess Grace, however, was her favorite because she was Roman
Catholic.
As a boy I’d stay with her on long weekends
when she would drive me around town in her cream colored Chevorlet Impala. During
these trips she’d often find an excuse to drive into East Falls
This past weekend I found myself inside one
of the upstairs sitting rooms at 3901 Henry. The event I was attending was two
flights down in the old Kelly family den. Invitees were encouraged to tour the
house so I took advantage of that, going from room to room.
The
six-bedroom house was built in 1928 by John B. Kelly, an Irish brick layer.
John and his wife Margaret raised six children in the house, which was sold by
the family in 1973. The house had a number of owners after that, including a
crazy cat woman who turned the home into a feral animal farm. The animals left
a path of destruction of breaking news proportions. In 2016, Prince Albert of
Monaco, Princess Grace’s son, bought the house for $755,000 and had it
remodeled to look like it did in the 1950s. Many of the original features can
still be seen including the famous linen closet door with Grace’s height recorded
over the years.
In several
of the bedrooms I noticed freshly painted icons in the Byzantine tradition. Two
of the icons were quite large and could have been part of the iconostasis in a
church. They were not part of the original Kelly family décor but were painted
by Grace’s niece, Susan Kelly vonMedicus, an icon writer and teacher at the
Center for Irish Studies and the Department of Theatre and Studio Art at Villanova University
My self-guided tour included a contemplative
moment sitting in a chair in a small anteroom off one of the bedrooms. When you
sit down in a house like this, away from other event goers, your first impulse
is to try to imagine the past and then conjecture what might have happened in
the room in question. If only the past could be summoned up genii-like; if only
we had access to an incantation or chant that would present the past to us as
it really happened.
The Kelly family has been compared to the
Kennedy family. Jack B. Kelly’s brother, George, was a Pulitzer Prize winning
playwright but his homosexuality caused him to be regarded as a family pariah
despite the fact that he was Grace’s favorite uncle. Many families have stories
like these. I recall an uncle on my mother’s side who committed suicide in a
motel room because of his pariah label.
A
main feature of the event was the showing of old Kelly family films on a wide
screen TV in the family den. I watched sunburned children playing leap frog in
the backyard; various Kelly family members relaxing or partying in the very den
that I was standing in; the same brick walled den where Prince Rainer and Grace
Kelly gave a a television interview after the announcement of their
engagement.
Kelly
for Brick Work napkins were piled up on the old ‘Kelly Tavern,’ the bar
just off the den that Jack Kelly built to offset the absurdities of
Prohibition. The bar in those days was stocked with large kegs of beer.
Susan
Kelly Von Medicus was the event bartender. I didn’t know this at first although
my sense was that the woman pouring me a glass of red was indeed a Kelly. There
was some identity confusion later on in the evening when I introduced myself to
a tall man standing alone, his Irish ginger hair aglow with some kind of Kelly
aura and his fine taste in clothes—a pin stripped shirt and a tie of the
highest Brooks Brothers quality. I asked him if he was a Kelly, and he said he
was, he was Susan’s brother, John B. Kelly, III , or JB. When e got chatting, he mentioned that the dazzling antique
Packard car parked in front of the house was not his but his girlfriend’s. When I spotted the car after getting off the
32 bus, my first thought was, “Ah, this looks like a staged Woody Allen set for
a film about F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
I told JB the story of how many great aunt, so
enamored of royalty, had once reached out and touched Princess Grace on the
elbow when she found herself standing behind her at an outdoor ceremony at
Saints Peter and Paul cathedral. I told him how Grace turned around and gave my
great aunt a scolding, castigating look.
This was a predominately Irish event
sponsored by Villanova’s Center for Irish Studies, so Irish heads were
everywhere: Blue eyes, red heads, gingers, black Irish, a smart smattering of
over 65 white haired gentlemen. In my mind I did a quick comparison of the Irish
crowd to the mainly ‘English’ crowds I
had observed at English Speaking Union of Philadelphia receptions. The vibes
were similar, I decided, only with the Irish there was a bit more of a helter
skelter element: more jostling and moving about and at a slightly faster pace,
too. The trio of musicians playing Irish music near where the family videos
were showing set a fast and furious tone. The melodies caused one woman to dance
a jig while they gave my picking at the food table a jerky, Chaplinesque
quality.
When I told a friend that I had attended a
reception at the Kelly house he expressed a great amount of interest. “I’ve
always wanted to see the inside,” he said, but like so many other people, he
only got to view the exterior in quick glimpse drive-bys in cars or buses.
“But,” he said, in a tone of voice that
commanded attention,” I must tell you that years and years ago when I lived in Germantown
lamp maker in the area who
told me that one of his customers was Grace’s mother. She was an eccentric
woman, very persnickety and exact. Every time I took a lamp shade to him for
repair he had another Kelly story. It’s too bad I don’t remember most of what
he said.”
I was the last to leave the event mainly
because I needed directions to the Center City-bound 32 bus. Susan suggested I
ask JB for directions.
Together we went into ‘Kelly’s Tavern’
where I spotted JB in the back room washing glasses. Now, that’s a prince!
Susan asked JB about the 32. “You know,”
she said, “the bus that you take when you go back to town.”
Thom Nickels
Contributing Editor
