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

by Hart, Dolores

  She would read to me—stories of the Creation, of Adam and Eve, of the saints and, my favorites, the wonderful and gory tales about the Christian martyrs. One in particular fascinated me. Saint Tarcisius, known as the boy saint, was a twelve year-old-acolyte who lived during the Roman persecutions of the third century and met a grisly death rather than give up the Eucharist to an angry mob. I was fascinated by this story of youthful courage and devotion. So impressed was I that I told Sister I wished I could live my life all over again because I would be so much better.

  —How old were you then?

  Six.

  Three

  My most vivid early memory of my mother is the care she took in looking after every detail in her grooming. It made her special.

  Something else that was special was the tattoo on her left thigh. It looked like an eye sitting on a triangle. I never ceased badgering her about what the tattoo meant, but she never told. Still I grew up knowing that most likely I had the only mother with a tattoo. She had a flair for glamor and created many faces for herself, each favoring the look of a current movie queen.

  She would have a new boyfriend to go with each new look and always brought them home to meet me, introducing them as Uncle John or Uncle Joe or Uncle Whoever. I knew they weren’t my real uncles, but I was too young to call them by their first names, and the situation was too informal for me to address them as “Mister”. The one I liked best was Don Sebastian, a handsome Spaniard.

  In Los Angeles I attended Beverly Vista Grammar School, which was ten blocks from our apartment, but Mom trusted me to take care of myself on the way to and from school. There was a boy, younger and smaller than I, who lived nearby. He was a nasty little fellow. One day he showed me a necklace he was wearing. It was moving. He had a necklace of live ladybugs around his neck! He had pierced each one, and the poor things were struggling to escape. I was horrified—and furious.

  A few days later I lay in wait for this murderer at his house. I grabbed him and twisted his arms behind him and pushed him down into his basement. Now he would get a taste of his own medicine. I tied him tight to a pole with a clothesline and left him there, yelling his lungs out.

  When I told my mother what I had done, she lectured me that I should have been more cautious. “Holy Toledo, sweetie, you should have considered that there could have been an accident while he was tied up, like the furnace exploding. No, you shouldn’t have done what you did. You should have just beaten the crap out of him.”

  This is the child who once carried a ladybug ten miles on the streetcar to show her little friend Amy Godshaw and then brought it back to Beverly Hills so it wouldn’t get lost.

  Bert had remarried after the divorce but remained in nonviolent contact with Harriett, who was friendly toward Bert’s new wife, offering sympathy and frequently first aid whenever Jan would appear with a black eye.

  Bert lingered under contract with Twentieth Century-Fox for a couple more years without catching on. It was back to walk-ons for the rest of his film career with two exceptions. He played the heavy opposite Robert Montgomery in Once More, My Darling, and he had one scene, albeit silent, as Anne Baxter’s cad of a lover in the episodic O. Henry’s Full House. He did a little stage work at the Pasadena Playhouse and with the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera before calling it a day. Coincidentally, his old army buddy, Freddy Cocozza, was beginning what would be a spectacular movie career just as Bert’s was fizzling out. Cocozza was now Bert’s brother-in-law, having married Betty Hicks, and he had a new name. He was now Mario Lanza.

  Dolores was spending most of each year in Chicago so the question of schooling was a chief consideration. The nearest public school was some distance from Hermitage Avenue, through busy streets and across streetcar tracks. Esther simply wouldn’t allow Dolores to walk there. There was a Catholic school closer to home with a safer route. So, for practical rather than religious reasons, Dolores was enrolled in Saint Gregory’s third-grade class.

  I wasn’t the only non-Catholic child in school, but there weren’t many, and I sensed a difference, maybe that the kids who were Catholic had a feeling of security that I lacked. I used to hang on every word they said when they talked to each other about their family life. It was different from mine. And I was shy and embarrassed that my clothes weren’t as nice as the other kids’. Granny’s philosophy was if you’re dressed warmly enough, that’s all that mattered.

  The teachers were stricter than those in public school, expected more and, one way or another, got more. Sister Celine was my favorite. She took special care with me because I didn’t have the advantage of a Catholic background and she didn’t want me to fall behind the other students. She also considered me musical and thought I should play an instrument. I made up my mind on the harp, but Grandpa nixed it. He couldn’t see me lugging the thing all over town, and he sure wasn’t going to be my bearer. He made up his mind on the clarinet, so the clarinet it was.

  Classes in religion were part of the curriculum at Saint Gregory’s. Each child had a Baltimore Catechism, a little blue book with questions such as “Who is God?”, “How many Persons in God?” and answers such as “God made me to know Him, to love Him, to serve Him and to live with Him for all days and even unto eternity.” It was something a child memorized—like the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Harder for me to accept was the edict that if you weren’t Catholic you couldn’t go to Heaven when you died. As taught in parochial schools then, you went to Hell and lived in eternal damnation.

  —When I heard those words, that non-Catholics couldn’t go to Heaven, I thought of Granny and Grandpa. It was a hard swallow.

  Students spent some time each day in the adjacent church, and I went along with them. I didn’t understand the Mass but did pretty much what they all did, copying their postures. When they would stand, I would stand; when they kneeled, I kneeled. I found these prayerful movements and the ritual of the service very appealing. In fact, I was finding most everything about the Catholic Church engaging, and I started to go into the chapel when no one else was there.

  As young as I was, I was taken by a special presence in the sanctuary, and I grew to understand that this presence came from the place where the candle was lighted and was holy. It made me feel secure. Although that feeling certainly contributed to my entering the Church, it wasn’t the main reason.

  When I began school, all the children who received Communion at Mass in the morning, and most of them did, fasted from midnight until they broke the fast with Communion. Then they would all have hot chocolate and sweet rolls for breakfast right there at school. Non-Catholic kids were supposed to eat before Mass and weren’t invited to breakfast. The sweet bread looked very good, so I asked one of the sisters if I could have bread with the other children. She thought I meant that I would like to receive the Eucharist and asked me if I wanted to become a Catholic. I said I would ask my grandmother.

  Granny didn’t care. She said whatever I wanted to do, I could do: “Just because we never found anything, that doesn’t mean we should deny you the right to try.” Mom gave me the same answer she always had as long as I could remember: “You should do what you know in your heart is right.” When I learned that I would be allowed to convert, I got down on my knees and said aloud all the Catholic prayers I had memorized.

  Dolores was entered in First Communion classes, a first step toward the conversion that began, not with a strong religious incentive, but two practical ones: don’t cross dangerous streets and have breakfast with the children.

  Sister Dolores Marie was ecstatic. Every day she would get me on my knees and teach me the Rosary, which we did in the back bedroom closet so Grandpa wouldn’t hear.

  At Mass I watched when the children received Communion. I began to put together the fact that the presence I experienced when I was alone in the church—the reassurance, the well-being—was somehow associated with the wafer the children ate. Soon I would be able to participate in a new way—not only going into the church but
actually receiving the wafer kept in that box, the tabernacle. It was hard to explain as a child—there I was finding this wonderful thing, and there I was eating it.

  —It’s hard to explain as a grown-up too.

  After school, some of the Saint Gregory kids would go swimming at the YMCA, and not wanting to be left out, Dolores went with them, never admitting that she didn’t know how to swim. One day, she took a dare and jumped off the high board. She bumped into the side of the pool and was taken home, badly shaken and very groggy. When she didn’t recover as quickly as Esther expected, a doctor was called. The doctor administered penicillin, unaware that Dolores was allergic to the new drug. That night she had a serious reaction and great difficulty moving. Esther was sure it was polio. In the 1940s there was a polio epidemic in America, and public swimming pools were high on the list of places to contract the disease.

  I remember everybody being so sad. Granny slept on cushions on the floor next to my bed, and whenever she couldn’t be there, her friend Lola Menary was. The atmosphere was decidedly gloomy, and I couldn’t help but pick up on it. When a playmate slipped in and placed a lily on my chest, causing Granny to burst into tears, I believed I was going to die. I couldn’t explain it, but I felt the presence of something that I accepted as the presence of authority—the presence of God. I spoke—not prayed, but spoke—to God: “If You want me to go to You, I’ll go. I’m not afraid.”

  I had awakened to the possibility of that kind of direct communication during the times I had sat alone in the chapel at Saint Gregory’s. But this was the first time I knew I could speak directly to God, that I had that privilege. Out of that moment I found the gift of faith. Out of that moment I became a Catholic.

  That same day Dolores was given Benadryl to counteract the penicillin and decrease swelling. Within a short time she was fully recovered. She didn’t realize until many years later, after her entrance into the monastery, that this unusual, casual, direct conversation with God had been her first interior response.

  I was baptized at Saint Gregory’s Church on October 4, 1948, a few days before my tenth birthday. When the priest sprinkled me with holy water, it was the greatest moment of joy in my ten years of life. I experienced a sensation of acceptance that any child, and especially a child in my circumstances, would find quite empowering. Even though my grandfather, grandmother and mother all had approved, I had crossed a boundary that was really of my own doing. I had found something that was now my own place, above and beyond all that had been cruel and dishonorable in my parents home.

  By the time I was ten years old, I had a very dramatic imagination. In becoming a Catholic, I thought of myself as part of a colorful new cast of characters in an exciting new story. I was a member of the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of the Saints, the Kingdom of the Angels.

  When I was first introduced to the sacrament of confession, I had difficulty grasping some of the things the sisters taught us. I knew stealing was wrong and sassing your mother, forgetting to feed a pet and being mean to somebody—that all made sense. But I did not understand why the sisters were always warning us to keep our bodies covered, as if there were something sinful about the body. Mom had always taught me that the body was natural, something to rejoice in.

  I started to keep a list of usual sins, but when I looked at it, I found I hadn’t done any of those things. So what to confess? I thought I could confess something I might easily do if I had the chance. If sins were expected, I would make up a few.

  —I took it so seriously, so very seriously.

  I was confirmed at Saint Gregory’s on April 24, 1949. The bishop welcomed me to the altar and, after confirming me, slapped my face. The slap said: “You’ll take a beating; be strong.” My cheeks burned with bravery. Now I was a real soldier of Christ.

  At confirmation you take the name of a saint who holds personal meaning for you. It signifies your devotion to that saint, who will help you in your mission in life. I took for my confirmation name Therese, after Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who was just a little older than I when she entered the convent. She was described as a child who found Christ not through great healing miracles but through doing humble, simple things. She had such a sense of mission and purpose. The rigorous, sticky French spirituality of her time made it difficult to be an individual, and I suppose her stamina was very appealing to me.

  After my conversion, I had my first reflection about vocation: the act of being fully Catholic would be, of course, to become a nun. But I reasoned that that was what I should be thinking, so the reflection vanished as quickly as it had flared, not to materialize again until I was in college. Yet I still knew that I had something I had been missing. I had been deeply impressed by the sense of belonging that the other children derived from the practice of their religion; and as I participated with them, I began to feel that I too belonged there with them. My aunts had exposed me to other religions, but it was only as a Catholic that this sense of joyousness and purpose came over me.

  —Some people are quick to say that any child who had no more stability than I would clutch at anything with a sound foundation. That never bothers me because they are only confirming that the Church has strength and solidity.

  Four

  For the first time in her life Dolores had lived in one place long enough to have a sense of belonging. When Dolores was eleven, however, she returned to California to live with her mother, who was planning to remarry.

  Harriett had been establishing a new life for herself, one that eventually would include Dolores, but since the divorce, she had enjoyed the single life that marrying at an early age had denied her. She played the field and had a number of suitors, but when she met Albert Gordon, a divorced man raising a nine-year-old son, she thought she had found the man who would give her a home and security.

  Harriett met Al while she was working as a cashier at Gordon’s, a restaurant in Beverly Hills. Al and his two brothers, Gene and Bernie, owned Gordon’s, as well as liquor stores and a small deli.

  I was unhappy about leaving Chicago, which I now thought of as home, but one thing cheered me: I would again be near Hollywood, where movies were made. I used to read the movie magazines all the time. I never let my family see me reading them, though. I was afraid they would think I was funny. The only Nancy Drew book I read was Nancy Drew in Hollywood, and I read that under the covers.

  —If truth were known, my dream was to be a movie star. I used to say I wanted to be an actress, but that was just to hide the pretension of “star”.

  After the wedding, the two families moved into a bungalow on Hazeltine Avenue in Sherman Oaks. One of Al’s liquor stores was on the corner. The cheery yellow house had a large backyard with fruit trees that supplied Harriett with an abundance of fruit for preserving.

  Al Gordon was a good man—Jewish, but he did not practice his faith. At first glance, with his dark looks and large brown eyes, one might have taken him for a dandy. He was, however, all work. I liked my stepfather and wanted to call him something besides Al. “Daddy” would always mean my father, so Al became “Pop”. Pop worked days at the liquor store and nights at the restaurant. Mom often joined him in the evenings to help out or just to have drinks with friends after closing.

  Harriett soon made friends with the neighborhood coffee-klatch ladies, who had been accommodating enough to loan her a sewing machine. The kids in the area were mostly boys, but they immediately accepted Dolores. Some years later, in a magazine interview, Harriett remembered her daughter “played football with boys before she dated them. She was always taking bikes apart and putting them together again. She would get on the roof and fix the TV antennae. The boys thought of her not as a girl but as their equal, a comrade who could whistle through her teeth just like they did.”

  —Mom taught me how to whistle through my teeth—a loud, piercing, real-boy whistle that, later in life, I found effective for hailing cabs in New York City. I once whistled like that in the common room at the monastery, and food dr
opped from mouths.

  Older sister and younger brother bonded easily. Dolores and Martin were close in age, so there was no awkward initiation period. She was also enough of a tomboy to make for comfortable coexistence and sufficiently pretty to make him feel proud. They shared a fondness for Dragnet and I Love Lucy on TV, which Dolores got Jewish Martin to join her in giving up for Lent. Together they built a small stage in the garage, where they presented puppet shows to family and neighborhood friends.

  Pop took us on excursions to Rosarita Beach and Las Vegas. At holiday time, Mom would decorate the house like Macy’s department store. She even accompanied me to Mass on occasion. I was starting to experience the things the children at Saint Gregory’s spoke of when they talked about their families.

  I had, at long last, a strong sense that Mom and I were going to be all right, that we were finally going to make it as a family. All the stressful years that had taken their toll on Mom were over, and she seemed truly content for the first time in a long while. Our relationship, which had always been close when I was very young, got closer. I became her confidante, a younger sister.

  Dolores saw little of her father during this period. Bert had married yet again but still had not settled down. His drinking and his wife abuse continued—a sympathetic Harriett often administering to his battered third wife, Deena—and he went from job to job in Los Angeles and Chicago. He tried selling used cars for a short time and then sold pots and pans door-to-door, pretending to be a religious man. That was a brief career, ended abruptly by the authorities. Forever chasing the butterfly of success, he even tried his hand at gold mining in Alaska, but the Hicks Gold Mining Company was another short-lived addition to his many failed schemes.

  —We got one thing out of the mining company—a lot of free stationery. I’m still using it for note paper.