The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (12 page)

Seven

Dolores was again cast opposite Elvis Presley in the musical drama
King Creole
, loosely based on Harold Robbins’
A Stone for Danny Fisher
. The property had been announced numerous times for production with various young actors slated for the lead role, James Dean and Tony Curtis among them.

Before filming started, I caught up a little on Elvis. I listened to his recordings and went to my first and only Presley concert. The next day I was surprised and not a little outraged when I read a review that called him “vulgar”. I found nothing vulgar in his performance. I thought that his rather innocent sexual energy moved to the soul of the new youth culture and that he gave that culture a voice
.

Her casting interested several of the bigger agencies in Hollywood, all of which came calling. The advice from Wallis, Nathan and others at the studio was unanimous: she should change agents. The most recommended name among them was Phil Gersh at Famous Artists. Dolores liked Gersh and agreed that a stronger agency could certainly do more for her. Alvarado immediately sued Gersh for stealing his client and damaging his reputation. Ultimately an arrangement was worked out, though Alvarado privately felt Dolores was an ingrate. At this point, she was hardly a moneymaker for any agency, but everyone at Famous Artists, especially Harry Bernsen, was convinced she was going to make it big. Bernsen began canvassing the town for TV roles for their new client before
King Creole
started shooting.

I trusted Harry’s counsel because he was obviously more interested in building my career than he was in the money. I mean, there
was
no money. He wanted to put me into big pictures eventually but felt exposure on television could only help make me better known. Remembering what Tony Quinn told me about the theater, I asked Harry if he could also check out summer-stock possibilities for me
.

Dolores first TV job was on the popular anthology series
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
. In the mystery “Silent Witness”, she played a babysitter who was murdered in the first act. Her costar was Don Taylor, who fifteen years earlier had worked with her father in
Winged Victory
. “Silent Witness” was followed by “Man on a Rack” with Tony Curtis and Everett Sloane on the
Schlitz Playhouse of Stars
.

Dolores would ultimately appear in only two other filmed television shows—in 1959 on
The Dupont Show with June Allyson
and in 1963 on a segment of
The Virginian
. She also made three appearances on
The Christophers
, the long-running Sunday morning program of interviews and readings featuring Catholic stars such as Rosalind Russell, Ann Blyth and Pat O’Brien.

With the release of
Loving You,
I started to receive fan letters, ten or fifteen a week, most of them requesting autographed photos. I took them home and answered them myself in longhand. I ordered and paid for personal copies of publicity photos shot by Paramount’s portrait photographer, Bud Fraker, and purchased the needed envelopes and postage
.

But Dolores soon found that she couldn’t keep up with the demand for photos and enlisted her stepbrother Martin to autograph them, paying him a nickel for each one he signed. He had to sign a hundred to make five bucks, but he did it. Years later he saw a “genuine autographed photo of Dolores Hart” offered for sale on the Internet and recognized the signature as one he had forged. Harriett got into the act too. She set up a makeshift office in the family garage and formed The Dolores Hart Fan Club with herself, under a pseudonym, as president.

Dolores kept some pieces of fan mail, which turned up in shoe boxes when I was researching her archive at the abbey. One I particularly liked was short and sweet: “You are my favorite movie star and Jane Russell is my second favorite.”

—
Well, we were the same type
.

As the fan mail increased, Dolores became concerned about the dollars-and-cents aspect. One day on the lot, she confided this to another Hal Wallis contractee, Shirley MacLaine, who told Dolores that the studio was happy to pay for fan mail expenses, including photos, envelopes and postage.

I had no sense at all about perks in the movie business. Because of Granny’s influence, I never lost sight of what something cost; even if the studio was footing the bill, I was careful not to take advantage. I preferred not to be thought of as an irritating property who made expensive demands
.

Whenever the studio would send me to, say, New York for publicity, however, I would ask to be routed through Chicago. It didn’t cost the studio anything extra, and I could visit Granny without having to pay for my ticket. Not wanting to be thought of as uncooperative, I never turned down a request from the publicity department, though I was fast finding that those assignments had nothing to do with making movies. I shot a layout with Valerie Allen in Sun Valley to promote the popular winter resort as a year-round vacation spot and got an education in being a starlet. When you ‘re a Hollywood starlet, you’re expected to do cheesecake—slang for bathing-suit art in those days. The difference between Val’s figure and mine hadn’t escaped me, so each time the photographer would ask for more cleavage, I would cheerfully pass him on to her. I knew I looked better in jeans and boots than I did in a bikini
.

She was also growing weary of another aspect of starletdom. She didn’t much like going to parties as window dressing. She could understand cutting ribbons at an opening. She had something to do, a function. But she thought mingling at parties was like being a geisha.

It was about this time that Dolores and I met. I was just out of the army, having done to the day my two years of drafted service following graduation from UCLA, and I was working for Globe Photos, which led to our meeting at the Susie Grobstein night-on-the-town photo layout.

A week after our meeting, I was still thinking about Dolores and dropped her a note. She replied in kind. A flurry of short notes were exchanged that led to our first date, after which I received a handmade card “from D to D”, which is what we began calling each other. It featured a big-headed figure with a silly grin saying: “I’m so happy.” On the inside, it read: “And it’s all your fault.”

Soon we were going out a lot, mostly spending time alone or with my close friends, all of whom took to her. I knew very few of her friends. I was uncomfortably certain that I had to be making half of what she was earning, so our dinner dates were at Villa Frascati, on the Sunset Strip, because I had a press card that gave me a discount there, a perk of my profession. And I was able to take her to press screenings of upcoming films and to play openings, also perks. Her knowledge of theater was woefully lacking, and I found her taste in movies suspect. I made a list of essential films that we began tracking down—not a simple task in the days before DVDs. Her favorite actors then were Kim Novak and Rock Hudson. I made sure she was aware of Kim Stanley and Jason Robards too. And I was happy to set her right about the red-headed actress in
Blithe Spirit
—Kay Hammond, not Lucille Ball.

We enrolled in extension classes at UCLA, our favorite being a course in film criticism taught by the dean of West Coast critics, Edwin Schallert of the
Los Angeles Times
. We both still adhere to Schallert’s rule that the word
unique
does not take a modifier.

During the next several months, Jim Stevens and I set up photo layout after photo layout with Dolores. For “date” layouts, a staple of the movie magazines, we paired her with every young actor in town: Tab Hunter, Tony Perkins, John Saxon, Patrick Wayne, Ty Hungerford (who became Ty Hardin), Earl Holliman. Usually it was the only time she would ever see the actor. Holliman was an exception. He became a close friend.

Thanks also to Jim Stevens, I began accepting “handouts”—studio production stills—of Dolores to beef up Globe’s features on her. The publicity departments at all the studios then handed out photos to agencies in hopes that they would be published. Globe Photos had not accepted these before, preferring (somewhat snobbily) to represent only exclusive material produced in-house. But I now had a personal interest in helping Dolores’ career along.

Unless the studio deemed it essential for her to be on the arm of a young actor, I would escort Dolores to occasional Hollywood functions. At those events, she usually kept her hand snugly in mine, not only as a romantic gesture but so she could squeeze my hand whenever someone she recognized, but whose name she couldn’t remember, approached. Dolores rarely wore her glasses when she went out, and her desperate squeeze signaled she needed identification before her glazed expression gave her away. I was more than repaid for this service; Dolores gave a great neck massage.

I took her to meet my family in Eagle Rock, a suburb of Los Angeles, and Dolores and my mother connected straightaway. Mom took me aside after dinner and confided, very seriously, that she had “just met an angel”. An angel, I might add, who helped with the dishes that evening and, a week later without my knowing, drove back to Eagle Rock and spent the day helping my mother scrape wallpaper off the dining room walls.

I ate Thanksgiving dinner that year with Dolores’ family. The meal was wonderful—Harriett was a great cook—and the house looked festive. But there was something unpleasantly familiar about the gathering. I realized that, as the dinner progressed, the atmosphere grew more and more tense. Based on my experiences with my father, I recognized it as the tension that all families of a drinker share at holiday time. Harriett had been nipping in the kitchen, and watching Dolores watch Harriett was depressing.

—Mom would spend days meticulously decorating the house, and I loved her for that effort, but I got so angry that the preparations were ultimately such a fraud. She usually got so drunk she didn’t enjoy the celebrations. Neither did anyone else
.

So D and D were “going together”, but few people in the Industry were aware of it. About the only studio folk we saw were Jim Stevens and his wife, Delores with an
e
. Once in a while, there would be a mention of us as a couple in a gossip column, but that was offset by the many published date layouts with young actors (most of which I was setting up). As our relationship grew closer, the subject of religion came up with increasing regularity. As a non-Catholic I was not the most promising suitor she could have chosen. Dolores and I would discuss religion in general, Catholicism in particular. Actually, “spar” might be a better word because we would keep it light. Never did we argue about it. As long as we kept company, that subject was earmarked “to be continued”.

Our romance was marked by a series of those delightful cards she drew. Ever since she was a tot, she doodled little cartoon figures and fashioned them into personal cards for friends and family. She sent one to Paul Nathan that crossed the desk of a coworker, Don Bradford, who had once worked for a card company and thought her sketches were terrific. One day he asked if she had ever thought about turning her doodles into commercial greeting cards.

—He said that I should think of doing something as a sideline because actors are always without jobs and need some way of getting an extra dollar. Of course, the minute he said that, he had my undivided attention
.

For a combined investment of $250, Don and Dolores went into the greeting-card business. Hal Wallis smiled his consent and suggested that she use her own name in the trademark in order to cash in on her movie publicity. The line was christened Sweetharts. Decision making was left up to Don. Dolores’ contribution, apart from the sketches and greetings, was to appear at gift shows to promote the line. They didn’t make Hallmark nervous, but Sweetharts was doing well until Don’s untimely death in 1960.

King Creole
began shooting exactly one year after
Loving You
and found Dolores in a part that was an extension of her first two roles, though Nellie had a pinch more dimension. Nellie, unlike Susie and Angie, was desperate to change her life. Nellie was also faced with a decision that neither of the other two ingenues had to make: Should she do it with Presley’s character or not?