Each parlor with Reverend Mother made me recognize that there is another kind of confession other than sacramental confession. One can be open to confession to people of wisdom and understanding, which allows one to share the concerns of one’s heart.
Reverend Mother had a depth of understanding that astounded me. Without reciting “absolutes”, she could put the tension I was feeling into perspective for me. She had an incredible capacity for womanly assimilation, which made it easier for me to share my struggles to maintain a relationship with the Church and the Industry—with a capital I, which is what insiders called Hollywood. I hadn’t truly been able to integrate my professional life with what I was feeling about the Church. I had so many questions—though not theological ones. Mine were more like “What do you do when in confession a priest tells you your profession is an occasion of sin?” The bourgeois mentality in the institutional Church—that rigid, Jansenist thinking—was confusing to me.
I remember she smiled—even chuckled a bit—at that priest’s ominous caveat. She was completely down to earth in her replies—and very modern. She could be worldly in the most sophisticated, delightful way, but she could cut to the bone too. Above all, she communicated the sense that she lived in the presence of God and that was the central fact of her existence.
At first, my visits ended with a sense of tremendous satisfaction, the kind I used to have as a kid after a good report card or, later, when I knew I had done a good job in front of the camera or before an audience. It was the feeling that something good had happened and now I was free to look beyond to another cycle. That was comforting, but very much at a naïve level of intensity.
Over the next months, during the bus trips back to New York, my thoughts were more about what this Regina Laudis experience might mean in terms of seriously clarifying what it was that my life was about. Would I reenter my professional life with new values? Was the experience giving me a sense of further direction?
Or just more questions?
One thing I knew: what I was finding at Regina Laudis was the peace that had first attracted me to the Catholic Church, and when I went away I carried it with me.
When my contract with Pleasure was up, I knew I had to visit Regina Laudis before I returned home. With no performances to rush me back to New York, I took a full week there. It was odd—at the end of each day, right at 7:30, my thoughts ran back to the “half hour” call when I would be dressing and finishing my makeup. Instead I was in the tiny chapel listening to the nuns sing Compline, which had become the Office I liked the most. It is the only Office that doesn’t change; it is the same throughout the year. It is sung in the dark with eyes closed. I felt as if I were being rocked back and forth in a sea of feminine rhythms.
What, I asked Reverend Mother Benedict, is the meaning of the Benedictine expression contemptus mundi? “This does not mean contempt for the world,” she assured me, “but detachment from the world. We think of fruit as food but, to the tree, the pulp of an apple or pear is a cushion of protection around the seed’s life forming within. That is why a monastery is enclosed, to protect and nourish the life of the spirit that is forming inside you and to help it to grow, in its own terms, to its fullest expression.”
I came to appreciate that in Reverend Mother—this woman who had spent nearly twenty-five years in monastic enclosure—I was in touch with a spiritual master.
It was during our last parlor that I suddenly blurted out, “I worry that I might have a call. I know I’ve been looking for something deeper. I wonder, Am I material to enter the monastery? Could this be where I belong?”
“No, Dolores,” she replied, “go back to Hollywood, return to your career. And from time to time, come back and visit.”
Reverend Mother passed a card through the grille. I glanced at it as I left the parlor, but her handwriting was difficult to read—she was, after all, a doctor—so I put it away in my jacket pocket to examine more carefully at a later time.
At the end of my visit, Mother Placid gave me a gift—a card she had drawn in her strong, unique style. It said that a cross is planted in the soul. It takes root and grows.
On the plane home I felt exhausted. The end of this visit found me spiritually and physically dried out, and I didn’t know why. Looking back, I think it was just the Lord turning me inside out to shake off all the old clinging vines before He planted His bumper crop.
Ten
When she left Hollywood a year earlier, Dolores had just gotten her first star billing. Now she was returning home from a year’s run in a major Broadway hit, with a Tony nomination to boot.
She had a right to expect that producers would be knocking down her door with offers. But there was nothing waiting for her, not even with her boss, Hal Wallis. Her agent, Phil Gersh, told me that Hollywood producers fall all over themselves to grab a spanking-new Broadway actor for a movie debut—think Brando, Clift or Streisand—but the same moguls couldn’t care less about a movie actor returning home after an appearance on the New York stage.
Gersh recalled, “Lee J. Cobb, who was firmly established in movies, left Hollywood for Broadway, where he created the role of Willy Loman in the great American play Death of a Salesman. When Lee came back to Hollywood a year later, one producer greeted him with, ‘Good to see ya, Lee! Wha’d’ya been up to?’ ”
The shoulder Dolores cried on was Paul Nathan’s. He was genuinely upset that Perlberg and Seaton had passed her over for the movie version of Pleasure. But he said not to worry. They would find something.
—I made a suggestion: The Debbie Reynolds Story—and I would play Elizabeth Taylor.
Wallis, in fact, was considering loaning her out to Hammer Productions, the English company pumping out low-budget horror movies that were very successful at the box office. The film was Never Take Candy from a Stranger, starring the fine Shakespearean actor Felix Aylmer, who was obviously slumming.
The test for The Story of Ruth, deemed a success by producer Sam Engel, who was less interested in Semitic authenticity than William Wyler had been, immediately cancelled her horror-flick career. It looked as if the part of Ruth was hers, but the next thing she knew, another actress, Elana Eden, was given the role.
—You know, shortly after my entrance into Regina Laudis, annual donations to the monastery were received from Sam Engel. As there was never a note with the checks, no one associated the contributions with me. I learned of his gifts only upon his death in 1984.
I met with King Vidor for the role of a young Jewish girl in Solomon and Sheba, to be filmed entirely in Europe. Just the possibility of seeing Paris sent me to a bookstore, where I got one of those little French-made-simple books and pored over it for days. Much of the emphasis was on pronunciation, and coincidentally I was asked to read for a part that called for a French accent at the La Jolla Playhouse, the Southern California summer-stock company formed by Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer. I had visions of spending four weeks in lovely La Jolla and twelve more in Europe. I didn’t get either part.
When she was asked to test for yet another Jewish character, the daughter in the screen adaptation of the play A Majority of One—her Broadway neighbor the previous year—she joked to friends that maybe she should convert. She was passed over for Madlyn Rhue. She was then up for the role of the nice girl opposite Paul Newman in From the Terrace but lost out to Ina Balin, who would become a close friend after Dolores entered Regina Laudis.
—I often felt that there were not a whole lot of happy stories that came out of Hollywood. Careers fade and people are discarded and some end up tragically. Ina was one of the good people of the world. She did fine work in films yet found her true calling outside of Hollywood. During the Vietnam War, she became involved with an orphanage in Saigon that she helped evacuate before the city fell to the Communists in 1975. She saved 217 children, three of whom she adopted.
Dolores was then announced for a movie about the Mafia, Brotherhood of Evil, to star Louis Jourdan and James Mason, wh
ich was already of concern to both the Legion of Decency and the world of crime. Some cast members, Dolores included, received anonymous letters—and not from the Catholic Church—“suggesting” that they not participate. For whatever reason, that script never made it to the screen.
There was a role in an upcoming Wallis production that I coveted: the seductive young girl in Tennessee Williams Summer and Smoke. Mr. Wallis thought I was too young for the role—which I took to mean not sexy enough—but agreed to let me do a test for the director, Peter Glenville. Paul warned me that I probably wouldn’t get it, but I wanted to prove I could do something for Mr. Wallis besides Presley girls. Mr. Wallis liked the test. But Mr. Glenville thought I was too old—which I took to mean not sexy enough. Pamela Tiffin was very good in the part.
Although I made light of being “at liberty”, I was pretty depressed. I had gotten used to being on the fast track in Hollywood without much effort. I had come back full of expectation, and the disappointment was enormous. Was I going to be just a flash in the pan?
Our first date following Dolores’ return from New York was at the funeral of her uncle Mario Lanza, who had succumbed to a heart attack at age thirty-eight in Italy but whose body had been transported back to this country for multiple services, ending in Los Angeles at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament some two weeks after his death. We had to file by the open casket, which bothered Dolores a great deal. As for me, I was completely oblivious to what a “funeral date” portended.
The open casket held a bloated, gray semblance of my uncle. Did fame make it necessary to show him in such a state? My adored, now distraught, Aunt Betty, who had fallen for the phony glamor of Hollywood, would join him in death barely five months later.
My father was an usher at the funeral, and I was aghast to see him take Mom to a front pew, where he seated her next to his second wife, who was seated next to his third. Throughout the Mass I prayed to keep my temper, but I was shaking with anger when I confronted my father. “You bastard!” I said. “How could you embarrass Mom that way?” He was unfazed and merely whispered in my ear, “Don’t be angry with me. You have to understand. Your mom was the only one. She was the virgin.” That he could understand the value of virginity surprised and actually touched me. For all his offenses, he did understand that, and before God that was going to be to his advantage.
When I got back home that night, Mom had already had a few scotches. She had been behaving since my return, but why should I have expected that to last? I knew I couldn’t stay at the house permanently. I had gotten too used to living on my own.
I helped Dolores move into a new apartment below the Sunset Strip, modest but nicer than the Black Hole and within walking distance of Saint Victor’s Church. As she was loath to buy new furniture because of low funds, we turned to garage sales to find cheap “antiques” such as an oak dining table that we cut down and refinished as a coffee table. She did purchase a nice print of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, which was hung in the bedroom. It had special meaning for her.
—To me, Christina’s World had always represented my genealogy. I saw all the Bowen women in her. The girl in the painting is reflective, contemplative, and I used to wonder if she was moving toward something or away from something?
Dick and I had become very close in a short time. A strong motivation for my going to New York to do the play was to make him proud of me. His praise for my performance meant more to me than anyone else’s, and by pleasing him I pleased myself.
To love is the most wonderful thing in the world. But the gift of love has to be like a fountain that flows between two people, and I believed with all my heart that the water that flows must have an eternal source or it will dry up.
I trusted Dick completely and found it easy to confide in him on professional matters and personal problems, including the reality that his not being Catholic would jeopardize a permanent relationship. But I didn’t speak to him of my thoughts of vocation or my visits to Regina Laudis. I was afraid to. I felt there was no way he could understand.
I had tried to reach Dolores in New York by phone one Sunday and the following Monday, too. When I finally reached her, she told me she had been out of town—she said “upstate”.
Over the next several months, there were times, always at the end of a weekend, when she was unreachable. I was under the impression she was regularly spending time with Cornelia Otis Skinner at her upstate New York home, and Dolores never corrected me. In fact, when I was in New York for the Tony Awards, I personally thanked Cornelia for taking care of my girl, which was met with a blank stare. “She is such a dear,” Cornelia said with a smile, “poor Catholic thing.” I thought it was a funny line and left it at that.
I had been advised against our liaison often by priests in the confessional, but Dick felt strongly that two adults could adjust if they worked at it. I didn’t doubt his sincerity, but I knew he would have to discover for himself what demands would be asked of him. I had written to him from New York suggesting he speak to the pastor at Saint Victor’s Church. And then I had a Mass said for us—a prayer that our Lord might deign to help out a couple of wandering waifs who are stranded all alone and three thousand miles apart to boot.
I did meet with the priest. I was not as serious as the situation merited and didn’t earn any points when I admitted that I was unable to buy in wholeheartedly but would “join up” if necessary. The good padre recommended I not fake it and ended the meeting then and there. Then, as usual, I put off thinking about it.
I remember that Dolores and I once discussed children. She had concerns about children growing up in a divided family and getting different signals from each parent. I asked her, since she had been allowed to decide for herself about religion, why she wouldn’t give her children the same opportunity. She answered in a flash: “Because I found the true way, and I am able to show them the truth so they won’t have to struggle to find it.”
I recalled wonderful mommies and daddies that I used to watch as they came to church with kids my age. Those kids didn’t have to wonder why they had to get up and go to church when one parent didn’t. That unity is what I missed then, and it was what I was missing now. The only thing I was ever able to believe and trust in completely was my faith. It was sad that Dick and I saw eye to eye on everything except the one thing that meant most to me in life. For me that was an insurmountable problem.
One thing I was sure of: I could never marry outside my religion. It would be like sand and ball bearings. If we did go forward, I would only box him into a corner by inflicting my answers on him, and I knew it would never be fair to him. The only answer I could come up with was to move out of the relationship.
My option was dropped. We separated as loving friends, but I was convinced that it was not the end of the line for us. I felt confident that, in time, we would be together again.
As it turned out, I saw Dolores only twice in the next three years. The first time was when she visited me at UCLA Medical Center, where I resided for three months following a 1961 New Year’s Eve accident. She and Jan Shepard, Valerie Allen and artist-actor Bill Stephens brought me a huge poster Bill had painted duplicating the ad for the film Ben-Hur. My poster read, in huge stone letters, “BEN-HURT”.
The second time was in the fall of 1962, when she invited me to lunch at Villa Frascati—“our place”, she said. My euphoria at the prospect of seeing her again didn’t last long. She only wanted to tell me she was going to be married before it broke in the newspapers.
I did continue to set up photo layouts, though, and kept up with her career. It looked pretty shaky for a while. There were frequent mentions in the trades of possible roles, but nothing materialized. Finally I saw her name in the cast of a movie called The Plunderers.
The Plunderers, for which Wallis had loaned her out to minor league Allied Artists, was a low-budget western that fell in a gray area between the top and bottom half of a double bill. It featured Jeff Chandler and John Saxon, one of D
olores’ fan-magazine “dates”. Also in the cast was Marsha Hunt, a bright lady with an infectious sense of humor who immediately became Dolores’ buddy and the beneficiary of the Granny stories.
Marsha recalled, “I was so taken with Dolores that I could think of no better gift to give my husband, Robert Presnell, than an introduction. For a while we were the Three Musketeers.” This friendship is the only reason The Plunderers remains a memorable experience for Dolores. Coincidentally, Marsha Hunt had been the star of A Letter for Evie, which featured an early Bert Hicks appearance. Bert, as a matter of fact, visited the Plunderers set, the only time he ever watched his daughter work in a film.
All through the filming of The Plunderers, I knew there was a lack of the nervous energy that usually kept me edgy, but I chalked my listlessness up to the difference between a movie set and the stage. I thought that was what was bothering me.
I had been in constant touch with Mother Placid, and she suggested I visit another Benedictine abbey, Saint Andrew’s, in nearby Valyermo. I thought it made sense, but I didn’t go to Saint Andrew’s with the conscious objective of testing Benedictine life against, say, Franciscan or Dominican. There was no doubt that, since my visits to Regina Laudis, I thought of myself as Benedictine. But that weekend at Saint Andrew’s made one thing crystal clear: other places did not have the meaning for me that Regina Laudis did.
The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows Page 14
