The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (32 page)

She took a few days in January for the first of two pre-entrance retreats at the monastery, with Mothers Columba and Placid and now Mother Anselm, the mistress of novices, who would be her formation mother during her postulancy. Mother Anselm was one of the group of nuns from the Abbey of Jouarre.

I met a young woman, Catherine Nugent, a guest in Saint Gregory’s. Catherine was a researcher at the Center for Naval Analyses in Washington, DC. She also was considering the possibility of a religious vocation at Regina Laudis, and when I learned she not only was fluent in Latin but had even taught it, I said a few prayers for her to reach an affirmative decision
.

—In 1965, she did enter the monastery and is now Mother Maria Nugent, our dean of liturgy. And she has been, on occasion, my Latin tutor
.

Back in Los Angeles, it was a hectic time—yet delicate. I felt constantly out of breath from all the juggling. I didn’t see much of Don. I wasn’t avoiding him; I just had much to do. I had little time to see friends, and when I did see them, I had to be mindful of how little I could share with them. I was so absorbed in preparing for the monastery that my heart was hardly able to contain anything else. It was the only thing I thought of, and it was the one thing I couldn’t speak about
.

Besides her lawyer, only four friends were privy to Dolores decision: Maria, Winnie, Suzanne Zada and Valerie Imbleau, the young woman who had been the technical consultant on
Come Fly with Me
. Valerie had earlier relocated to New York, begun a new career as a photographer and revived her friendship with Dolores. She had even accompanied Dolores on a visit to Regina Laudis.

Maria remembered, “I felt her call deeply. We had spoken of it metaphorically as hanging on to a branch of a tree, letting go one finger at a time. As long as she had one finger on the branch, she hadn’t let go completely. I knew at some moment a decision had to be made to keep holding or finally to let go.” Winnie was not surprised either; she had been aware of Dolores visits to the monastery. “I felt her decision was thoughtfully made over a period of time,” Winnie said, “and I was proud of her daring to run toward a genuine calling.”

Valerie felt Dolores’ call on a profoundly personal level. Val was seriously considering entering religious life herself.

Suzanne Zada, however, was aghast. “It was horrible that she was giving up a life that had so much promise. She was in full blossom, and to dig a hole and go into a monastery where she could be seen only through a grille—to me that was horrible. I looked upon the nuns at Regina Laudis as the enemy.”

—
Monastic life is a difficult and mysterious concept for many people and conjures up frightening images of austerity and isolation. I would come to hear over and over the concern that I had not chosen a more active life in the Church—teaching, nursing, social service. But I had thought of these only fitfully. There were areas of the active life that I found distracting and personally insufficient for my aims. I was choosing a contemplative life because of a desire to seek God in a pure and direct way and because of an instinct that I could neither define nor explain, except to say that it was the Spirit of God pressing me to find Him—and Regina Laudis was the way
.

It was decided that “D-day”—the date for my entrance—would be June 13, 1963. That would give me less than six months to close down one life and prepare for another
.

—Your cloak-and-dagger period.

   
Don’t laugh. I probably would have made a good CIA agent
.

“Scripts and offers were being received with a regularity that should have put Dolores on cloud nine,” recalled Harry Bernsen, “but she kept putting everything off. I couldn’t understand why she was behaving that way. Just a few months earlier she had been ecstatic about the way the career was going.” Harry had four scripts from MGM alone. Joe Pasternak sent two scripts for comedies boasting major directors:
A Ticklish Affair
directed by George Sidney and
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
directed by Vincente Minnelli (Shirley Jones got both roles). Boris Sagal was interested in her for
Twilight of Honor
(Yvette Mimieux was cast). And Henry Levin was still waiting for her to sign on for
Honeymoon Hotel
. Although Harry had no scripts on his desk from Twentieth Century-Fox at that moment, Dolores still owed that studio a third movie on her three-picture deal.

Robert Rossen asked her to test for the title character opposite Warren Beatty in
Lilith
. He thought Dolores natural girl-next-door quality would make for an intriguing contrast with the character of a young schizophrenic in a New England sanatorium. Harry urged her to do the test for Rossen, but she asked him to beg off for her (Rossen’s other choice for the role, Jean Seberg, was cast).

Hal Wallis changed his mind again. Instead of casting her in
A Girl Named Tamiko
, he decided to loan her to Universal Pictures for the romantic comedy
King of the Mountain
opposite Marlon Brando and David Niven. Its release title was
Bedtime Story
, but it didn’t ring any bells until it was remade in 1988 as
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
and later musicalized for Broadway. That offer carried a deal for two additional films that would have given Dolores multiple-picture commitments with three major studios plus Hal Wallis, who had drawn up a new contract giving him a picture a year for four years and put Dolores in line for a pay raise to $7,000 a week.

I knew I was creating chaos, but I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to tell Harry, or anyone in the business for that matter—certainly not the truth. Harry was under pressure and in a constant state of frustration. I knew the agency was going to be furious and not only over lost commissions. I could make them look foolish by letting them negotiate commitments that I wasn’t going to fulfill
.

But how could I sign those contracts? I couldn’t tell the truth because I hadn’t yet been officially accepted into the monastery; I would have been burning bridges behind and in front of me. Professionally, I was walking a very precarious tightrope. How I wished I had the security of knowing the thing was going to happen. No one was telling me, go ahead; this is right! Or no, it’s not to be; hold on to your day job
.

The only one I could unburden my heart to was, of course, Maria. I must have written her every other day. I told her I had to know that if everything fell through, and I was in the poorhouse instead of the monastery, she would bring me an ice cream cake—with a file in it. I was also speaking pretty regularly with her father during my prayers, asking him to advise me or, if he already had influence upstairs, to put Someone Else on my case
.

Even though she had no intention of doing the Brando film, in order to quell any suspicions at the agency she did keep an appointment with Larry Germain, the hairstylist at Universal, for preliminary wig fittings. Jan Shepard went to the studio with her, and afterward the girls stopped at nearby Dupar’s restaurant. There, over hot-fudge sundaes, Dolores confided that she wasn’t going to do the film.

“I couldn’t believe it when she said she was turning down a costarring role with Marlon Brando”, Jan related. “I thought she had gone off the deep end. I asked her why, and she answered, ‘Because I’m getting married.’

“Well, knowing the engagement with Don was off, I asked Dolores whom she was marrying. She said, ‘Christ.’ It was then she told me about her visits to the monastery and that she had found there what she had long been searching for. She also swore me to secrecy. I didn’t even tell my husband.”

Without giving any explanation, Dolores asked Harry to put everyone off as long as he could—which he reluctantly did. The agents were having a tough time buying her vague references to “personal reasons”, but the head honcho, Phil Gersh, was sympathetic. In his best fatherly manner, he told her that the agency would give her a hiatus from professional involvements and slow down on drumming up activity in the business—stop the pressure but remain behind her with no questions asked. Gersh told me many years later that he thought that Dolores was going through a severe depression over the breakup but that he and Harry were confident that she was on the threshold of becoming a major star.

There was one offer Harry had that I could do. It was a segment on the filmed TV series
The Virginian,
which would take only a week. It was the least I could do for all of Harry’s efforts on my behalf, and the timing couldn’t have been better. The show was the perfect answer to the disorder in my life, and the role so undemanding that I could have phoned it in
.

Shooting began the week of February 23, 1963. February 23 had been the date for the wedding. I wrote to Mother Columba
,

Wow, I really don’t know how the people on the series maintain their sanity. We don’t finish shooting until 7:30 or 8 at night, and by the time I get home and study the dialogue for the next day, it is past 11, and up again at 5:30. The routine at Regina Laudis will seem easy in comparison—well, I can dream, can’t I? By the way, James Drury, our leading man, got an attack of the flu yesterday right after our love scene. Couldn’t help but think it was the Regina Laudis bug and he didn’t even know it
.

It was necessary for me to get the approval of my parish priest to be eligible for acceptance into the monastery. Monsignor Devlin had left no doubt that he would reject that request. When I advised Reverend Mother that I was empty-handed as far as approval was concerned, she felt my best course of action would be to get permission from the Archdiocese of Hartford on my next trip east, using the monastery address as my residence. Mother Columba wrote to the archbishop of Hartford and received an appointment for me to meet him at the end of the month
.

—
It was the right time. I had just found a gray hair, which I took as a sure sign of a vocation to monastic life
.

I had agreed to go out on the road for a twelve-city personal appearance tour for
Come Fly with Me,
and I hoped staying out of Hollywood for a few weeks would contribute to my disappearing act. I arranged to have some time off during the trip in order to spend the few days on retreat and sneak up to Hartford. In anticipation, I packed an extra suitcase with country clothes I would need in Connecticut and sent it ahead to the monastery to keep Sonia Wolfson, the publicity woman on the tour, from wondering about my two wardrobes. I felt guilty about hiding something from Sonia, who had become a good friend and, as a press agent, always seemed to go that extra mile for me
.

We hit three cities a day, doing radio and TV spots, newspaper interviews and autograph sessions before climbing back into a plane for the next stop. I was relieved to have gotten through each day without any serious gaffes. Whenever someone backed me into a corner about my plans, I would mention that I would like to take some time off in the south of France. This was usually interpreted as my wanting to get “a breath of fresh air” after the broken engagement. I did nothing to correct the misconception and even began to have a little fun with the Q&A. If a reporter asked if I was seeing anyone new, I would admit that there was someone in my life. It was then assumed I was getting married, and I couldn’t honestly deny it. Once, I was asked if my intended was wealthy. Oh, yes, I said, very rich
.

MGM gave Dolores time off when she finished the Chicago leg of the tour. As always when she was in Chicago, she used her hotel room for interviews but stayed with her grandmother. All through the visit, Dolores was gleeful about the roaring success of the
Come Fly with Me
preview. The studio, she told Granny, felt it was going to be very successful commercially—good news, she confided, for it never hurt to have her name associated with money, and she hadn’t had a hit since
Where the Boys Are
. She coolly chattered on about having to be careful to choose the right projects and not just take whatever was offered—with full knowledge that
Come Fly with Me
was going to be her last film.

Her New York agent unintentionally abetted her ruse when he tracked her down in Chicago to tell her he had two possibilities for a return to Broadway. One was a comedy entitled
Cloris
, and the other was a revival of
John Brown’s Body
, Stephen Vincent Benét’s narrative poem of the Civil War that had been a success on Broadway ten years earlier with Tyrone Power, Judith Anderson and Raymond Massey. The director, Lloyd Richards, wanted to meet Dolores about appearing in his restaging of the piece.

It was the perfect excuse! I would go to Connecticut via New York City. I told the agent that I didn’t think I would be available for a play, though I did confess that I was planning on a little getaway for a day or two and needed an alibi. Bless him, he thought I was having a clandestine affair and said not to worry, he would take care of it. MGM gave me the use of a car and driver to take me to see “friends in Connecticut”
.

First stop was the monastery, where I finally got Reverend Mother Benedict’s official invitation to enter—on the condition of Archbishop Henry O’Brien’s approval. The friendly but clueless MGM driver was happy to take me to Hartford and didn’t bother to check with the studio first. During the trip, I had but one thought in my head: if I’ve come this far, turned down so much, gotten rid of everything and spun my life upside down, and I walk into his office and he says no—oh, my God—I will be so relieved
.

I waited over two hours to find I didn’t have an appointment with Archbishop O ‘Brien, but with Monsignor Joseph Lacy, the vicar of religious. The archbishop didn’t waste his time on candidates; the monsignor evaluated whether someone had a vocation
.