Word: gelsey
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...Gelsey marched on Dec. 29, 1952, in a Bethlehem, Pa., hospital. Her father Jack was a playwright who had scored handsomely as adapter of Tobacco Road for Broadway; her mother Nancy, a onetime actress, had retired from the stage to become Jack's fifth wife. A sister, Johnna, was nearly four when Gelsey was born; she has a brother, Marshall, 16 months younger...
Home was a rambling place in Bucks County, Pa., shared by three of Jack's children from earlier marriages and four grandchildren. Carloads of theater friends and Kirkland's fellow writers arrived regularly from New York for extended house parties. Amid all the drinking and countryside romping, Gelsey stood out as the poker-faced toddler. "Her seriousness was always a source of kidding," says Brother-in-Law Don Bevan. "But she would never encourage it. She would never give the adults satisfaction. You could never get her to sit on your lap and be cuddly...
...Kirklands moved to an apartment on the West Side of Manhattan. There, Jack decided that both girls should be prepared for a life in the theater. He took a special interest in Johnna, whose easygoing gregariousness matched his own. "I was my father's child," says Johnna, "and Gelsey was my mother's child." The younger daughter's obsessiveness taxed a mother's patience. First it was ice skating. Tummy sticking out and a frown on her large face, Gelsey learned to whirl around the Wollman rink in Central Park. "She had no fun doing it," recalls Nancy, the long...
Next came horseback riding, at summer camp in New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Johnna had begun taking dance lessons at the prestigious School of American Ballet. An idle observer at first, Gelsey was soon trying steps in front of a mirror. Weiss remembers her as "the little sister who always hung around and got in the way." Before too long, Gelsey decided that Johnna's way belonged...
...became totally absorbed in a craft as demanding and stubborn as she was. Regular schooling was a chore she impatiently endured; she eventually dropped out in the eleventh grade. At home, Jack's royalties were dwindling. Nancy took a job and found work for Gelsey as a child model. She detested it "because it was so upsetting to miss a class." A dance scholarship came to the rescue and put her in classes 12½ hours a week. Twice a day she and her classmate Meg Gordon donned rubber sweat pants and took turns stretching each other's legs, an ordeal...