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

by Hart, Dolores

  To describe the working area as cramped I need only say that when both of us were seated, it was impossible for either of us to move without the other having to move too.

  Our chairs faced each other, which allowed me to study that face, framed by the wimple, as Mother Dolores spoke into the recorder. As a flattering device, nothing beats a wimple in focusing attention—and hiding wrinkles. Mother Dolores has very few of those, belying the fact that she is now in her seventies. Her face is still beautiful. Her blue eyes, large and expressive, settle into a thoughtful gaze as she delves into the past—now pensive as she conjures the odor of vanilla beans being ground into powder in her grandmother’s home; now bright and mischievous as she recalls a tomboy acing out the neighborhood roughnecks by being the last kid to get out of the way of an approaching train; now moist as she relives playing a clarinet solo on a late-night TV show for her grandfather as he lay dying; frequently troubled, hesitant at the prospect of speaking publicly about the mystery of enclosed religious life. They can flash, too, in an unexpected explosion of temper. The lady has a temper.

  Now and then, my attention would be gently interrupted by the ever-so-slight movement of her feet. Her special shoes, sensible and protective, cannot conceal the motion of pain-plagued feet inside, moving constantly, trying without much success to find a comfortable resting place. It was something we never averred because this was our working time, our professional time.

  —Where shall we start?

  How about flashbacks in a movie? Tell me things I don’t know.

  Well, did you know I ran away from home once?

  I ran away from home when I was four years old. I ran away in the middle of the night with my mother. We were leaving my grandparents’ house on Hermitage Avenue in Chicago, where we had been living after Daddy left for Hollywood. He had gotten a contract with MGM studio, and Mommy and I were going to join him. We were running away because Granny and Grandpa were dead set against Daddy. They thought he was a good-for-nothing.

  We sneaked out of the house very quietly, but as soon as we reached the street I suddenly remembered I had left my panda bear behind in Granny’s bedroom. I started crying, so Mommy slipped back into the house and retrieved my beloved bear while Granny slept peacefully. I don’t remember if Mommy handed the bear to me or me to the bear; I was only two inches taller than Panda. The two of us had to sit on Mommy’s lap for most of the train trip because she could afford only one seat. But we didn’t care. We were going to see Daddy. In Hollywood!

  We rode for what seemed like years. It was the beginning of World War II, and I remember there were so many soldiers and sailors on the train, all so much taller than Panda and I that it was like a forest of uniformed pant legs. I remember looking out the window and seeing the beautiful California desert for the first time and then, against the background of a bright sunset, tall slender trees with feathers blooming on top. They were palms, and I was to discover that California had thousands and thousands of them. Over the next several years this route would become a familiar journey, but the sudden magic of the palm trees against the Pacific curtain of the sky would never fail to take my breath away.

  Four years earlier, in January of 1938, Dolores’ future parents were just graduating from high school, where they had been sweethearts since the eighth grade. Edmund Burdell Lyhan Hicks, nicknamed Bert, was seventeen years old. Harriett Lee Pittman was sixteen. Both had eye-catching good looks and shared tattoos acquired in a moment of youthful recklessness, decades before tattoos on teenagers came into vogue. Harriett’s tattoo, however, remained unfinished: while the tattoo artist was working on hers, Bert passed out and that ended the session.

  Shared, too, were dreams of marriage and careers in the movies. The latter was put temporarily on hold when they had to marry earlier than planned. This circumstance caused Harriett’s mother, Esther Bowen, and stepfather, Fred Kude, both of whom frowned on the relationship, a great deal of grief and spawned a serious but brief consideration of abortion. Harriett, in a characteristic show of defiance, totally rejected this advice. Esther and Fred reluctantly accepted “that wild good-for-nothing” as a son-in-law, even though there would never be any affection between them and him, and Esther paid for all the maternity expenses.

  The newlyweds were forced to move in with the Kudes, but as soon as they could afford it, they set up housekeeping in a small apartment in Chicago, adjacent to well-traveled train tracks. Harriett found employment as a secretary, while Bert tried various endeavors, including truck driver, furniture mover and salesman for ladies’ shoes. He did not, however, settle down to the responsibilities of marriage, and this, combined with his drinking, caused increasingly frequent arguments between the young couple. Instead of trying to work things out themselves, the two kids—which is what they were—took their gripes, Rashomon-style, to their respective families, who were not stingy with advice.

  After particularly violent arguments when Bert, drunk, would strike her, Harriett would run back home to Esther and Fred. The next day, refusing their advice to leave him, she would go back to her husband. Despite the increasing abuse, sometimes provoking police intervention, Harriett remained in love with him.

  The arrival of Dolores Marie Hicks at 10:30 A.M. on October 20, 1938, was cause for great celebration in both the Hicks and the Bowen clans. She was the first grandchild and served temporarily to patch the cracks in her parents’ marriage. Bert adored his daughter. With huge blue eyes, she was a beautiful baby, beneficiary of the drop-dead-gorgeous genes that ran so generously through both sides of her family.

  To my father I was “Punkin”, but I was named after my great-aunt Frieda, who that same year became Sister Dolores Marie in the order of Saint Joseph of Carondelet in Saint Louis. Mommy brought me to her Investiture because my aunt was hopeful that I could be baptized in the Church at the same time. There was precedent. Daddy had been baptized Catholic. He was even an altar boy, though he had never practiced his religion enough even to be considered “fallen away”. The baptism wasn’t destined to happen, however, not then. The Church didn’t allow it. So I wasn’t baptized until ten years later.

  Dolores was born into families that could easily be the hard-edged versions of the zany Sycamores in that year’s Oscar-winning picture, You Can’t Take It with You. Her paternal grandfather, John W. Lyhan, called Jack, came from a wealthy railroad clan. The family line dated back to nineteenth-century England and Sir Thomas Atkins, a member of Queen Victoria’s palace guard. His service to the queen earned Tommy, as he was called, such royal affection that he was knighted. Additionally, Her Majesty presented him with the christening gown of baby Prince Alfred, which has been passed down through generations of Dolores’ family. Legend has it that “Tommy”, the universally used nickname for British soldiers, in wide currency from the 1880s through World War I, was in honor of Sir Thomas and immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in his 1892 Barrack-Room Ballads.

  Added to the English mix were Dutch, French, Irish, Welsh, and Norwegian, as well as a touch of the exotic—a red-headed Jewess from Spain and an American Indian. In 1871 the Atkins side of the family settled in Chicago, where they saw their home burned to the ground in the great fire.

  The entire Atkins-Hicks tribe was churchgoing with religious convictions as varied as their nationalities: Catholic, Jewish and Protestant, as well as Christian Science and Mormon. Dolores’ great-grandparents, Reuben and Eliza Atkins, English converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, moved from England to Salt Lake City to join Brigham Young, but when that leader espoused polygamy, Atkins refused to take another wife, earning the leader’s wrath. The couple was ordered to leave Salt Lake City within twenty-four hours.

  Jack Lyhan and Dolores’ paternal grandmother met in college, where Jack was a blackface performer in minstrel shows, giving vent to an urge to perform that had been thwarted by his parents’ insistence that he study to become a doctor. Mary Atkins, known as May, was the daughter of successful farmers. S
he had hoped to become an actress, traveling for a short time with a theatrical group performing at resorts in Indiana and Wisconsin. But, at the turn of the century, an actress was considered half a step above a trollop, so her family pushed her into a teaching career in speech and dramatic arts.

  Jack, a Catholic, and May, a convert at marriage, produced three children: John, Bert and Betty. But Jack was not a model head of household. He was an abusive husband and father, whose main targets were his wife and second son, Bert, both of whom were subject to severe beatings. May, in turn, compensated for this abuse by overprotecting Bert, babying and spoiling him.

  The cruelty and maltreatment over the next five years rose to such a level that finally even her priest advised May to divorce her husband. She took the priest’s advice, repeatedly refusing Jack’s pleas to reconcile, preferring to rear the children alone.

  In 1929 May took a second husband, James Earl Hicks, whom she had met at a political convention. A tall man with Clark Gable good looks, Hicks didn’t have Lyhan’s formal education or moneyed background, but he promised to be a more affable family man.

  May’s second union added three girls, Gladys, Shirley and Virginia, to her first family of three, all of whom Hicks adopted. Hicks turned out to be only a sometimes jolly parent. Gladys and Shirley remembered that he could be “unbelievably mean”. He too was rough on Bert, whose dependency upon his mother grew stronger. His siblings remember that Bert was always involved in some theatrical venture or another. He figured out early that all he needed to get by were his good looks and bad-boy charm, a tactic that separated him from his older brother, John, who was, even at an early age, ambitious and hardworking.

  In the mid 1930s, after several successful years as a manufacturer of flavored butter spreads, Hicks lost his business. He was forced to move his family into a modest flat on the north side of Chicago. Money was scarce, though he managed to scrape together enough to have a nice Christmas in 1935. But on that Christmas Day, Hicks left the house on an errand and never came back, leaving May to raise all six children alone in the middle of the Great Depression.

  —Of all my ancestral transgressors of laws or moral codes or commandments, the one I find difficult to forgive is Grandpa Hicks. He may have been suffering—he had just lost his business and couldn’t provide for his family—and perhaps felt he couldn’t live up to the tenets of his Christian Science beliefs. But he walked out on his family on Christmas, and, to my mind, that was not Christian. That was a sin.

  May Hicks could have taken her children and gone home to the family farm, but she was ferociously proud. She wouldn’t ask anyone, including her parents, for anything. She resolved to leave teaching for better-paying employment, but she went from one low-paying job to another until she and her children found themselves and all their belongings on the sidewalk. Young Bert was especially upset, flying into a rage, breaking windows and creating havoc. It was the first time the family became aware of his violent side.

  The Salvation Army came to their aid, moving the family temporarily into their Home for Women and Children and helping May land a job demonstrating Singer sewing machines at the Marshall Field’s department store. May rose with regular promotions to the position of buyer in the furniture department. While she was working, her “first family” took on the responsibility of caring for her “second family” in their new home, a duplex on Chicago’s west side. But she never forfeited her position as matriarch and maintained a strong influence on her children, investing them with a keen awareness of the hard realities of life. She saw to it that all of them attended church every Sunday, and she passed on her signature optimism. Even during the blackest days, her mantra was “Things are going to get better.”

  —I remember her as genteel and high class, in many ways the perfect foil for my other grandmother, who had more than a passing acquaintance with the mean streets of Chicago.

  Esther Pittman Brown Kude née Bowen, though of a different class, was on a par in rank with May. She was also a beauty, but what made the two women close was that Esther was an equally proud and strong lady. Having been born poor, she learned early how not to get pushed around.

  —She loved to tell the story of how she walked to school without shoes in 18-degree weather, not because she didn’t have shoes—she had one pair—but just to show the kids how tough she was.

  Esther was thrice wed, the first time at age sixteen to Lee Pittman, Harriett’s father. Shortly after Harriett’s birth, Pittman got a teenage girl pregnant. When Esther learned of this she did two things. She demanded he shave every hair off his body because “if he was going to behave like a baby, he was going to look like one.”

  —And he did as he was told.

  Then Esther divorced him so that he could marry the pregnant girl, Helen, with whom he had a long, happy marriage and seven children. The resilient Esther remained friendly with her first husband, now a Catholic convert, and saw to it that Harriett did the same. Harriett and her father were close for his entire life, and she often brought Dolores with her when she visited his home in Williamsfield, Illinois.

  When Harriett was nine, Esther married her second husband, Paul Brown, who was a preacher and a wife beater. One day Brown took off for California and never came back. Alone, with mounting bills, Esther got a job as a waitress at a local bar and grill called the Round Table, a job she would keep for the rest of her life.

  After Esther’s second divorce, Fred Kude, a projectionist at a local movie house, entered her life. This union would provide the stable core in Dolores’ early years.

  When Dolores was two years old, Bert and Harriett separated, the first of many partings in their turbulent union. Those two years had been frustrating ones for Bert, who drifted from one meaningless job to another, increasingly fearful that fame and fortune would elude him. He began to drink more and more heavily and was as abusive to his wife as his father had been to his mother. But, his brother remembered, “Bert had to get drunk to be as cruel as our father was sober.” At one time or another, Dolores’ paternal aunts all witnessed violent outbreaks, with Harriett running screaming from Bert’s attacks, sometimes carrying tiny Dolores in her arms.

  Harriett filed for divorce, charging cruelty. Before it was granted, however, the judge called the couple into his chambers and effected a reconciliation. He wrote up a Code of Conduct that both the eighteen-year-old wife and nineteen-year-old husband had to sign. Convinced that the paper was a good foundation for future stability, the judge dismissed the suit. The story made the Chicago newspapers, which printed the agreement. Under the terms of the Code of Conduct, (1) Bert had to attend church voluntarily for one year, (2) both had to agree not to run to their parents to settle future domestic problems but (3) allow Bert’s lawyer to act as arbiter of any dispute.

  The well-intentioned judge’s code would not ultimately save the marriage, nor would it end Bert’s violence toward Harriett. But the fresh start was benefited by Bert’s getting a job as a commercial model, something for which he was suited. He posed as the attractive suitor admiring the soft hands of the beautiful girl in magazine ads for Jergens lotion. He filled the same role in ads for Lady Esther 4-Purpose Face Cream and Trushay hand lotion. He also began appearing in the popular, photo-illustrated romance novelettes, featured in women’s magazines such as McCall’s and Good Housekeeping. These photos dramatized scenes from the stories. They were not a particularly impressive showcase, but Bert achieved minor star status, which fed his ego, and the jobs brought him into contact with a lot of pretty and available girls, which set him on the road to chronic infidelity. He basked in this attention and no longer minded having to take the occasional regular job when he wasn’t working as a model.

  While Bert was moonlighting as a soda jerk at the Aragon Ballroom, a job he took as a way of meeting influential people, he was discovered by the Chicago-based talent scout for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Definitely the matinee-idol type at six foot two, Bert bore a striking resemblance to one of that s
tudio’s biggest stars, Robert Taylor, especially with the mustache he grew at the talent scout’s request. Thirty-something Taylor was about to depart MGM for the army. Presumably as a twenty-one-year-old replacement for him, Bert was tested and signed by MGM to a stock player contract. In the days when studios had stables of actors under contract, it was a usual practice to keep their stars in line by having a similar—and often younger—type in the wings. James Craig was MGM’s threat to Clark Gable. Warner Bros. had Dane Clark for defense against John Garfield. Sheree North, in her blonde-bombshell period, was signed by Twentieth Century-Fox when Marilyn Monroe was misbehaving. Rarely did any of the threats go beyond being just that.

  Bert Hicks would not prove an exception. In his first year under contract, he did bit parts in four MGM movies before the studio dropped his option. Almost immediately he was signed by Twentieth Century-Fox, and he appeared in a walk-on with Betty Grable in Sweet Rosie O’Grady before World War II interrupted his career. He joined the Army Air Forces and took his training at Sheppard Field in Texas.

  In 1943, Broadway’s Moss Hart wrote and put into production the US Army Air Forces’ Winged Victory, which followed a group of air cadets through their training to the nightly raids on Germany and Japan. A call went out to Air Forces servicemen who had been actors to fill the cast. When the show opened in November 1943, the cast featured 209 members of the armed forces, including future stars Karl Malden, Edmond O’Brien, Red Buttons, Don Taylor, Gary Merrill, Barry Nelson, Lee J. Cobb, Kevin McCarthy and Peter Lind Hayes. Two of those, Malden and Taylor, would work with Dolores a decade and a half later.

  Private Bert Hicks had a small part in the play, and a close buddy, Alfred Arnold Cocozza, nicknamed Freddy, sang in the chorus. Malden and fellow cast member Phyllis Avery remembered Bert as being gregarious and fun but also an irresponsible actor. He would miss performances and, without his wife and child near, most of his free time was spent drinking and womanizing.