In Grace Kelly’s family, an ongoing reckoning over her uncle’s ‘unspoken’ sexuality

George Kelly was a star in a Philadelphia family full of them. He was a vaudeville actor-turned-playwright who, upon learning from an Inquirer reporter that he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1926 “uttered a noncommittal ‘that’s nice’ — that’s all,” The Inquirer reported at the time.

One of 10 children raised by striving Irish immigrant parents in East Falls, Kelly was actress and princess Grace Kelly’s beloved uncle and godfather. He was the one who “first tried to dissuade her, then introduced her to people” in Hollywood when she was determined to become an actress, The Philadelphia Daily News wrote in 1982.

He was also a closeted gay man — a fact known but effectively refused by his family during his lifetime. Kelly’s lover of more than 50 years, William E. Weagly, was referred to by the Kelly family as his “valet,” and ate in the kitchen with the servants when he and Kelly visited the family’s grand East Falls home.

It was in that East Falls home this weekend that Kelly’s identity as a man who loved men was finally illuminated and celebrated, more than 50 years after Kelly’s death in 1974.

The home is typically not open to the public, but the Rosenbach Museum & Library and the Delaware Valley Legacy Fund opened it for a program quippily called "Grace’s Guncle," offering analysis of the man who helped shape Grace Kelly’s life but lived his own partially obscured.

“There’s always more to the story than at first appears,” said Alexander Lawrence Ames, director of outreach & engagement at the Rosenbach.

George Kelly was “tall and rather handsome; self-effacing and unobtrusive,” someone with a quick sense of humor who kept to himself, according to the 1926 Inquirer article about his Pulitzer win.

His great-niece, Susan Kelly von Medicus, who helped set up the Rosenbach event, described him as “a very elegant and exotic creature from New York.”

She remembered his lover, Weagly, too.

“In my childhood, he was referred to as ‘Uncle George’s secretary’, which is maybe a little elevated from ‘valet,’” Kelly von Medicus said. “Within the family, George’s gayness was known but unspoken.”

During his life, George was doubly closeted: both because of his sexuality, and because of his Irishness, which was an identity to be hidden in stratified Philadelphia in the late 1800s and early 1900s, said Mary Burke, a professor of Irish literature at the University of Connecticut, who spoke at the Rosenbach program.

Because of that, some of what we know about George’s life now is pieced together from memory and inference. The playwright burned all his personal papers.

“All we can do is look at George’s context. Of course, he was a private person,” Burke said. “And of course, maybe we’re projecting backward — but I think we’re not.”

John B. Kelly III, known as JB, said he never met his great-uncle George when he was a child, because George didn’t fit into the mold his elders wanted to project.

“My grandfather [John Kelly, Grace’s father], of all the ones in the family, was the one who was a publicist of his own image. And he was unforgiving of others who didn’t fit the image that he sought,” JB Kelly said.

Unlike in Philadelphia, when Weagly and Kelly hosted dinners at their home in California, Weagly served as co-host. But when George Kelly died in 1974, according to Grace’s biographers, the family did not invite Weagly to his funeral; his longtime partner slipped in and sat in the last row, weeping.

Weagly’s 1975 obituary described him as “employed by the late George Kelly as personal secretary and traveling companion for 34 years.”

In some cases, the historical record seems deliberately misleading. Kelly’s obituary in the New York Times included a tidbit about his romantic life planted by his family, perhaps to silence, once and for all, the rumors that their relative was gay.

“According to his family, he had a long romance with Tallulah Bankhead, who starred in Reflected Glory," his obituary read, “but never seriously entertained the notion of marriage, perhaps because no wife could live up to his exacting standards of behavior.”