The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows

by Hart, Dolores

  I settled in on the top floor of the Subiaco Hotel, overlooking the most beautiful city I would ever see. Only 115 miles from Rome, Assisi was another world. Except for traffic lights and telephone poles, which were camouflaged for the filming, little had changed in the town’s narrow, winding streets since the thirteenth century. I can’t remember ever having been so moved by the realization of the existence of God on earth. It was no wonder Francis and Clare were saints. They lived in paradise.

  Not a hundred feet from the hotel stood the Church of Saint Francis. I heard the bells ringing in the tower in a voice grown rusty over eight centuries. I closed my eyes, and suddenly the words of Saint Paul were with me: “Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, nor has it entered into the mind of man the things that are waiting for them that love him.” It made so much sense there.

  The weather was another thing. During the entire month they shot in Assisi, cold, drizzling rain greeted the actors every morning. But when they reached the location for that day’s filming, Dolores and Brad remember vividly, it was always bathed in sunlight. “It was sort of supernatural”, said Brad. “Maybe not a miracle, but Dolores would tell me God was certainly watching over the production.”

  The third star of the film, Stuart Whitman, was very sweet and attentive from the first day—so attentive that I began to steel myself for a pass. But Stuart wasn’t a pouncer. He was the perfect gentleman. As a matter of fact, in my entire time in Hollywood, I had to fight off advances only once. I think it was simply that the men were afraid to risk being rejected, and their assumption was that they would be. Their egos guarded against the embarrassment of being turned down, and as a result, they treated me like a lady.

  Besides my friendship with Brad, another lasting relationship came out of Francis of Assisi—with Geraldine Bogdanovich Brent, the only other American woman on location. Gerry had a small role as a nun but did not have sights on an acting career. Gerry was the Tuna Queen; her family owned StarKist. In fact, she created the character Charlie the Tuna for the ads and became known as “Charlie’s mother”. After I entered Regina Laudis, Gerry became a patron of the monastery, subsidizing many practical needs of the Community.

  Great pains were taken to ensure the film would be historically and geographically accurate. With the cooperation of the Franciscan fathers, the company was allowed to film in Assisi’s ancient churches and shrines. The Palm Sunday prayer of Saint Francis was recreated in the Church of San Pietro, which necessitated clearing the building of pews because thirteenth-century worshippers knelt on the floor. Even a number of the Franciscan monks appeared before the camera.

  To make sure the film was ecclesiastically correct, the company had an adviser assigned by the Vatican, Father Vincenzo Labella.

  When I first read the script, I thought the screenwriters had added a romantic tone to the personal relationship between Francis and Clare to titillate the audience, but after studying The Joyful Beggar I found that the love between them was, in fact, addressed in the book. Nevertheless, our Vatican adviser kept close watch lest delicate lines be crossed.

  Father Labella specifically instructed Brad and me to watch our language when we were filming in the town and never to smoke when we were in costume. I didn’t smoke anyway, but Brad did and was very steadfast in maintaining the proper image. I got a kick out of watching him sneak behind buildings to smoke like a guilty teenager. The reason for Father Labella’s request was obvious. The deeply religious townspeople were proud of their heritage and were very respectful toward Brad and me. We could not risk offending them. The children, not as sophisticated as their elders, behaved in an almost worshipful manner, certain that the saints had come to life. When they asked for autographs, they wouldn’t be satisfied until we also signed “Saint Francis” and “Saint Clare”. It was very humbling.

  One morning a group of children, each with an animal in tow, arrived on the set. The young spokesman for the group asked Brad to bless his pet. Brad turned to Father Labella and said, “I can’t do that.”

  “Oh yes, you can”, the priest assured him. Filming that day was delayed for over an hour while Saint Brad of Assisi blessed all those dogs and cats, pigs and goats, donkeys and cows, even chickens.

  Whenever I wasn’t scheduled to work, I would walk alone through the town. It took no time at all to tour Assisi; what took time was appreciating what I saw and stamping it in my memory. Very special was Santa Chiara, the Gothic church that contains the tomb of Saint Clare. Her 708-year-old body was laid out in a glass coffin. It was a wonder to see, uncorrupted and amazingly beautiful.

  One evening about dusk, I was roaming the crooked streets and happened to pass a church that looked closed. As a tiny gate was open, I decided to investigate. Inside the darkened church, I followed a faint stream of light and found myself in a frescoed archway lit by a single 60-watt bulb. Just as I turned to leave, a sound swelled into the room; it was so overpowering that I almost jumped out of my skin. The sound came from an organ in a dark corner where a lone padre was playing with the aid of a tiny flashlight. I stood transfixed. It was quite exciting there in the dim glow of the church, hearing his music and feeling the vibrations throbbing in the floorboards. I could feel a part of it myself, maybe because I was an actress. Somehow an actress absorbs a moment like that. I watched and listened for a long while and then left silently. I never made my presence known to the priest.

  Little by little these private experiences were beginning to have a disturbing effect on her enthusiasm for the film she was making and even on the life she was living. There were no voices, no reflections in a mirror, but a growing awareness that the comforting sanctuary of her work was eroding.

  We would shoot inside a church where Clare and Francis actually stood and watch its sanctity stripped away as it was “cleansed” for the movie. The dignity of the frescoed walls was compromised by being made too perfect. It seemed to me that the old Gothic arches winced at the repeated hosannas echoing from the portable record player.

  A prop man lighted dummy wax candles on the altar, and the shadows they threw were too even. I knelt in front of a real altar now made phony. I knelt alone, but there were a hundred people watching. I pretended to believe what I do believe so thoroughly. I caught a reflection of a caricature in a mirror and thought, “I’m the caricature, a dressed-up form of this lady who existed outside the whim of a director.”

  I wanted to cry out, “Here is a soul. They’re not easy to find, and I have this wonderful one for a while. Please don’t trample it with reloading and retakes because there’s a hair in the aperture.”

  Years later, I would often be asked if one particular scene in Francis of Assisi had any influence on my decision to enter religious life, if somehow it had been a mystical moment. The scene in question is when Clare has her hair cut off during her Investiture. The queries usually came from people not connected with show business. Professionals recognize that, although I wore my own waist-long hair throughout the film, it was plastered down and a wig placed over it for this scene. It was the wig that was cut. I can’t deny that a moment like this is poignant for the actress recreating it, but the only mystical impact the scene had was the realization that an actress, like a religious, is a servant.

  After production wound up at Cinecittà, Christmas 1960 was spent in Rome. Christmas Eve approached under the tide of a violent rainstorm. Boredom and frustration set in among the cast and crew. I was pained because the work on Francis of Assisi was ending. Our makeup man, Hal Lierley, sadly confided that it would be an especially hard Christmas because most of the company was planning to go out carousing.

  Almost simultaneously, we decided that this Christmas could not end up a dead end for our friends, that we had to do something to keep the company together. We pooled our week’s salary, jumped into a cab to Piazza Navona and bought gifts and Christmas decorations by the box load. Back at the hotel, the Spirit seemed to take over, and soon everyone was decorating the tree and wrapping presents.
My Assisi family celebrated the birth of Christ together, and on Christmas morning everyone felt clean. It was, for me, one of the most piercing experiences of community I had ever known.

  I seemed to be forever searching for a way in which committed relationships could come to a holding pattern together—a continuity. I believe that search was the drive that brought me to Benedictine life.

  Fourteen

  Twentieth Century-Fox gave Francis a major send-off with both a world premiere in the saint’s namesake city, San Francisco, and simultaneous premiere showings in twelve international cities—from Dublin to Bombay, Manila to Johannesburg, Boston to Sydney. The mayors of each proclaimed the day of the opening Saint Francis Day.

  Dolores attended the premiere in Los Angeles, a benefit for the Sisters Servants of Mary Guild, where she was grateful for compliments from the evening’s hostesses, now her good friends, Irene Dunne and Loretta Young.

  The critical reception for Francis was fair, the best being the Motion Picture Herald’s assessment as a “first rate example of the art of motion picture making.” Newsweek complimented the film’s “pervading beauty”. The New York Times singled out the cinematography’s “reverence, spirituality and adherence to fact as authentic as the Giotto frescoes and Umbrian landscapes the film so vividly captures” but also found the film “as static as ancient tapestries”. Personal notices for the players were respectable, with Brad Dillman coming off particularly well.

  For the second movie under her two-picture contract with Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio offered Dolores the part of Rosemary in the film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Thinking she wasn’t right for the part, she asked Harry to pass on it.

  I was shocked when I got a phone call from the studio’s president, Spyros Skouras, who bawled me out for turning it down. He told me it was their most important picture of the year, and the part of Rosemary would make me a star.

  As a mea culpa, I agreed to go on a personal appearance tour for Francis. The gesture was not magnanimous; I was eager to visit the monastery again. I arrived in time for a parlor with Mother Placid, and then, before Vespers, I was able to do something I had become accustomed to and looked forward to—take a walk in the quiet hills around the monastery. I think I began to love the land of Regina Laudis long before I met its nuns.

  There were a number of other guests at Saint Gregory’s, including Helen Boothroyd, who had served as an army nurse in World War II. In fact, she was among the Americans who stormed the Normandy Beach on D-Day. When she met Dolores, she was a nurse at Boston Hospital. “I was mulling around the monastery because God was calling me there”, she said. “I was aware that Dolores was an actress and found her very sophisticated. I was also impressed with her humanness and her considerate way of integrating with all of us in Saint Gregory’s.”

  Dolores follow-up to Francis of Assisi was Sail a Crooked Ship, a contemporary farce by Columbia Pictures. It was not a big film and hardly in the same league as Tender Is the Night, but it fit in with a series of minor comedies currently in vogue that were low budget and earned a nice profit.

  Crooked Ship was based on the novel by Nathaniel Benchley, son of Algonquin Round Table’s Robert Benchley and father of Peter Benchley, the future author of Jaws. The cast included Ernie Kovacs, Carolyn Jones, Frankie Avalon, Robert Wagner and Frank Gorshin. Jean Seberg had been originally penciled in for Dolores’ role; thus, their professional paths that had begun with Saint Joan were still crossing.

  When I reported for work at Columbia, there was a lot of discussion about my hair and makeup to make me more glamorous. I overheard suggestions to pluck my eyebrows and bleach my hair. I also heard myself referred to as “the Wallis girl”, something I thought identified me as his girlfriend but soon learned meant “hands off; leave her alone, or you’ll have Hal Wallis to answer to”. My “look” remained natural.

  Pat Barto, my role model from Paramount, designed my wardrobe, this time getting full credit. She also picked out a silver mink coat for me to wear. The price tag read $6,500. I remember seeing my reflection during costume and makeup tests and thinking, “Wow, this is a different person!” I looked like a glamor girl even if I didn’t feel like one. I was hardly a sex goddess.

  —I once went to a costume party as Brigitte Bardot, and nobody guessed who I was. Just as well. Any actress who has so much attention focused on her has to get away from herself to survive. Otherwise she just joins the worshippers.

  I thought the script read like a screwball comedy of the thirties, but the movie deteriorated into slapstick. Even so, making it was a lark. It marked a happy reunion with my King Creole costar Carolyn Jones, thus strengthening a happy relationship on screen as well as off. This time I got the better billing, but Carolyn again had the better role.

  My favorite was that consummate clown Ernie Kovacs. He kept everything moving at breakneck pace, always taking an improvisational detour from the script that kept the rest of us on our toes—when we weren’t cracking up. He was probably the most inventive actor I’ve ever worked with, an absolute joy. Sadly, Sail a Crooked Ship would be his last film. A month after it was released, Ernie was killed in an automobile accident.

  About halfway through the shoot, Pat Barto began hinting that now was the time I should finally ask for a perk—specifically the silver mink. Other actresses asked for and got their movie wardrobes, she noted—why shouldn’t I? I was too embarrassed, but she wouldn’t let up on it. She nagged and nagged until I finally screwed up enough courage to “suggest” to Mr. Wallis that I wouldn’t turn down the coat should he feel I had earned a bonus. He didn’t reply, but asked me to lunch at the studio the next day.

  That morning the coat was delivered to the apartment, and I was wearing it when I arrived at the commissary to find Mr. Wallis at the head of a long table of company men I didn’t know, and no other women. My boss introduced me as his new star and then suggestively added, “She’s the first one who got the mink and didn’t.” The guys howled. I thought I would die. Mr. W. looked pleased as punch. He got his laugh from the men and the mortified blush from me.

  —But it cost him sixty-five hundred bucks to do it.

  At the 1961 Oscar ceremonies, James Stewart all but broke down accepting an honorary award for Gary Cooper. Stewart’s emotional words to his old friend alerted the Industry that the ailing Cooper was near death.

  The last time I saw Gary was in his Brentwood home, where I had once mistaken him for a gardener. He was a man who just fit in with nature, yet was so comfortable around people. To me, Gary Cooper was comfort. He always treated me with respect, kindness and affection. It was devastating to say goodbye to him. As I approached his bed in the dimly lit bedroom, he reached out and took my hand. “Hello, Miss Dolores,” he said with a smile, “working?”

  Gary Cooper was laid to rest on May 16, 1961. At his funeral, I held a religious relic in my hand. A relic is a sacred piece of matter from the body of a saint—it can be a bit of bone or hair or something that was close to that person’s body in life. The Church considers relics very precious because through them we can come into contact with the holiness of the person. The relic I held tightly was Gary’s relic of Saint Thérèse. Rocky had given it to me at the time of his death. It means a great deal to me still.

  Maria Cooper recalled, “My father had felt very paternalistic toward Dolores. He knew how close we were, and he felt kind of like she was a younger daughter, maybe much younger than her calendar years because she had not had the family environment that would have given her a kind of sophistication about the ‘ways of the world’ that her beauty and talent were leading her into. Although he recognized that she had the ‘street smarts her difficult life had provided, he still felt protective of her in terms of the ‘business’; he knew she didn’t have the training to move easily in the circles he foresaw as her road to being a really big star.”

  Near the end of production of Sail a Crooked Ship, Dolores got a call from Harry
Bernsen telling her that producer Mark Robson and director Philip Dunne wanted to meet with her to discuss their upcoming film The Inspector. She had been aware through the trade papers that the film was in preproduction because Natalie Wood was scheduled for it. Wood had abruptly pulled out of the project, and Robson and Dunne were interested in Dolores for a lead role.

  The problem was that the film was scheduled to begin almost immediately, and I was shooting Crooked Ship. It didn’t seem possible that I could ready myself for another movie so quickly. But when I read the script, I knew I should do it, that it was decidedly a major jump toward the more demanding roles I coveted. I did note with some trepidation that the heroine was Jewish and feared that, once I tested, out I would go.

  But the meeting was not an audition. I wasn’t asked to test or even to read for the part. Mr. Dunne and Mr. Robson had already decided they wanted me for the role of the Jewish refugee, Lisa Held. The meeting was to see how soon I could get ready for the European start of production, scheduled in three weeks. Amazingly, Sail a Crooked Ship was to wrap in exactly three weeks.

  Mr. Dunne and Mr. Robson asked if I would object to having my hair practically shaved off for a flashback sequence in a concentration camp. Apparently they thought I would be horrified. If they had only known how glad I would be to have it off. On this film, I wouldn’t have to check it constantly.

  —Besides, I was finally going to play a Jewish girl.

  I finished my last scene for Sail a Crooked Ship on Friday evening. The next morning I was on a plane for London and shaking with more fear than I had had since the night I left for Broadway.

  Fifteen

  Based on the novel by Jan de Hartog, The Inspector was a straight-line suspense drama of a Dutch secret policeman who rescues a World War II concentration camp survivor from the clutches of a white slaver and smuggles her into Palestine. The production was scheduled to shoot in the Netherlands, London, Wales, Tangiers and along the Mediterranean. Interiors would be shot at Elstree Studio near London.