When it came time to enroll in school, Dolores told her mother she didn’t want to attend public school. Saint Francis de Sales was close to their Sherman Oaks home, but Dolores could not be enrolled because she was from a divorced home and had a Baptist mother and a Jewish stepfather.
This got Harriett’s Irish up, and she confronted the priest at Saint Francis de Sales and read him the riot act. “I may be a Baptist,” she said, “in fact, I may even be a heathen, and I am divorced and married to a Jew. But my kid is Catholic because she chose to be Catholic, and if you refuse her admittance because of me, you are defeating the message of your gospel. Jesus did not refuse the little children, and if you don’t take her, between the Baptist and the Jew, this kid won’t stand a chance. So you better find a way.”
Dolores was entered into the sixth grade, impressed that her mother had gotten through to him with her impassioned speech. But Harriett later confided that, when Dolores was out of earshot, she fired a final salvo at the startled priest: “If you don’t let her in, I’ll be down here in the morning and personally throw a brickbat through every one of your god-damned stained-glass windows.”
On my first day, I noticed a scroll on the wall of my classroom containing the words of Saint Francis de Sales: “The same everlasting Father who cares for you today will take care of you tomorrow and every day. Either he will shield you from suffering or he will give you unfailing strength to bear it.” I felt that message was somehow meant for me.
Her favorite teacher was Mother Anthony. When, in 2004, I spoke to Mother Anthony, who had become Sister Dorothy Bartels after Vatican II, she sounded no more than thirty as she recalled Dolores in the seventh and eighth grades, some fifty-five years before. “I seem to remember Dolores always on a bicycle, wearing one of those beanies that were so popular with the kids, with the tiny propeller on top. A very good student, curious about everything—and not at all ‘actressy’. I also remember that she used to doodle Shmoos—those shapeless cartoon figures in the Li’l Abner comic strip—on everything, including her homework and test papers.”
Dolores became part of a small group of kids who earned the nickname “Can-do Gang”, because of their fearlessness in tackling any challenge with humor and imagination. “Can-do” reflected the spirit of America at that time, having finally emerged from the Depression era. The Can-do kids became friends for life: Gail Lammerson, Arlene Howsley, Janne Shirley, Marilyn Finch, who also would become a nun, Judy Conway and Joseph Allegretti, the lone boy in the group, who had a reputation for helping people. A half century later, Joe remembered Dolores: “She was not only pretty but very quiet and serious and, yes, I thought, saintly.”
At Saint Francis de Sales I came across a book on the French actress Eleanora Duse. I thought it was the most wonderful book I had ever read, and I locked some of her sage observations inside me. Her art depended on intense naturalness—“I did not use paint. I made myself up morally.” That made sense to me. She recounted going to her mother’s funeral and being aware of her feelings and reactions to use later when she was acting. At the time I was horrified at her heartlessness—but also fascinated. It did seem a means to pack away difficult moments into a memory bank that could be called up when needed later. I vowed to store up memories of all the things that affected me, so I could use them when I was playing a role. Eleanora also said something else that I wrote down in my diary: “When we grow old, there can only be one regret—not to have given enough of ourselves.”
Way, way back in my mind, even that early, I was aware of the fact that my life was not for me, that it somehow was something outside of me. I remember walking up and down the ramp at the back of the Drake Theater and thinking that my life was meant for something else. I knew it was going to be ecstatic; I was sure of this because I had decided to be an actress. In my mind it was preordained.
Life was good for the next two years, living up to Dolores’ early hopes. Then cracks in Harriett’s marriage began to appear. Both Al and Harriett were social drinkers, but on occasion they would get what Dolores called “pie-eyed”. Arguments increased until finally, in 1951, the couple separated, Al and Martin moving out of the Hazeltine house.
During the separation Harriett’s drinking continued; her coffee-klatch sessions with the neighbor ladies were now afternoon happy hours, and her excursions to the beach were in the company of a beer-drinking buddy. Although Dolores knew the score, she euphemized Harriett’s behavior to younger Martin, telling him, “Mom is sick.”
The marital separation was short lived, and when Al and Martin moved back, Harriett went on the wagon. Dolores once again felt hopeful.
Hopeful, yes, but I wasn’t stupid. I could see that our life wasn’t going to be what it had been for that first little while. For one thing, Pop and his brothers opened two new restaurants, the Rainbow Inn in the Valley and the Beefeater Inn on restaurant row in West Hollywood. The Beefeater was Pop’s very successful baby, and he couldn’t be pried away from it night or day. Pop had expected Mom to give up drinking, but he continued to drink with his friends at the restaurant, coming home later and later. I resented his behavior because I felt he was giving her a reason to drink. Mom thrived on attention, and Pop just wasn’t around to give that to her.
I got away to Chicago whenever I could. It was a godsend to be back with Granny and Grandpa. On one trip, I even got a job helping Granny out as busgirl at the Round Table. I think they created the job just to make Granny happy, but I got $2.50 a day.
Until she was fired. Customers would continually interfere with her work to tell her how much she looked like Grace Kelly. Finally, when she tried to avoid yet another Grace Kelly comparison, she backed right into a tray full of dishes. The management decided they couldn’t afford her any longer.
Each time I returned to California, I would find the situation at home much the same. There was so much tension. So I went in for scholarship and all the school activity I could to keep occupied. I became active in dramatics and the band, and I began writing for the school paper. I also began a very happy relationship with my young Lanza cousins.
Mom had kept close contact with Betty and Mario while I was living in Chicago. Uncle Mario’s movie career had skyrocketed, and he was becoming the most famous singer in the world. The Lanza family now included two daughters and two sons, whom I often babysat.
Colleen and Ellisa Lanza were not really babies at all but young girls with wonderful minds of their own. I don’t remember Uncle Mario being present a lot, and the Aunt Betty I knew as a child seemed far away in the opulent Beverly Hills home. They were rarely there when I visited. The kids seemed almost orphaned, so I made sure they knew that I cared and that life was about something more than thirty-foot, Saks-decorated Christmas trees and wagons full of toys.
“We were pampered as children”, Ellisa Lanza Bregman recalled. “Everything was done for us. My brothers couldn’t even tie their own shoelaces. Our mother was a party girl and loved entertaining. Our parties were grand affairs with all the trimmings, and holidays were extravagantly mounted.
“But we wanted to be with Dolores on Sundays. She would pick us up for Mass and sometimes would even have breakfast with us after services or take us shopping. When she became an actress, I think we were more impressed with her career than our father’s—because of Elvis Presley. We would beg her to get his autograph for us and for our friends, and we loved to boast about our cousin knowing Elvis.”
The bonding with Ellisa and Colleen was interrupted when Uncle Mario moved the family to Italy after his career in films began to wane. As his career declined, his drinking increased, and his excessive weight gains and losses did great harm to his health. So he quit Hollywood for Italy, where he enjoyed a resurgence in his singing career through concert performances. I was happy for Mario and Betty, but I missed the girls.
Two new pets helped to take my attention away from problems at home. One, a mouse I crowned Mouse Deputz, would actually pray with me. At least she seemed
to. Whenever I said the Rosary, Deputz would lay her head down and looked as if she were praying too. The other was Doc Doc, a duck little more than the size of an egg, an Easter present from Mom. When fully grown he was a real pet, accustomed to wearing a red tie around his neck and waiting for me to come home from school. Doc Doc followed me when I went to the grocery store and waited patiently outside. But I could take him inside Pop’s liquor store on the corner because they didn’t mind.
Graduation from middle school to high school took Dolores from Saint Francis de Sales to Corvallis, an all-girl Catholic school in Studio City. The Saint Francis lads transferred to the all-boys high school, Notre Dame, but they were still present in the girls’ lives.
I always trusted in God’s power, so at Corvallis I did a lot of praying for Notre Dame to win football games. I may have said one or two prayers for help in religion and Latin too. I was getting good grades—As and Bs—in all my classes except religion and Latin.
—I did end up with an A in religion, but no amount of praying could help me with Latin.
Harriett became pregnant in 1954 and was optimistic that the baby would stabilize the marriage. But she suffered medical problems early in the pregnancy. She was in her third month when she was rushed to the hospital, in critical condition. Rather than take any risks, Al immediately decided to end the pregnancy.
Mom was bitter about not being consulted and carried her resentment toward Pop, that it was his decision and not hers, through her life. I didn’t blame Pop, because he did what he thought best. He wasn’t Catholic, so all that mattered to him was Mom’s safety. Mom later admitted to me that this was when she knew their marriage was over.
Harriett’s drinking accelerated after the loss of the baby, causing severe mood swings. She could be gay and friendly when Dolores or Martin brought chums to the house, preparing snacks for the visitors, yet within a split second, raging at them that she wasn’t a hired hand to be taken advantage of. Dolores tried to explain to Martin, who was not aware of the abortion, that there was a cause for everything, even her drinking.
Dolores’ first realization that her mother was a solitary drinker came as a result of caring for Doc Doc. The pet duck was housed in the orchard, and on a routine gathering of mulch for Doc Doc’s nest, Dolores came upon a bottle of whiskey hidden under the straw and leaves.
I knew intuitively it was Mom’s bottle. I had seen her drink with Pop at the Beefeater and sometimes come home tipsy, but the fact that the bottle was hidden scared me. I finally asked her about it, and she admitted to drinking but insisted that she wasn’t drinking to excess and would stop. But every time she went out, I could always find a bottle somewhere. Angry and hurt, I would empty it down the drain. Mom invariably found out, which would result in a nasty confrontation. She said many times that she would stop drinking and over the years made repeated attempts to get help from Alcoholics Anonymous without success.
My elemental, deep-seated love for Mom was permanent—nothing would ever change that—but I became more independent, not only emotionally, but also financially. Mom inadvertently aided this goal. For my sixteenth birthday, she bought me a used ‘38 Chevy and taught me to drive. This new freedom allowed me to add tutoring to my resume. I tutored a boy in the neighborhood and drove him on his early-morning paper route. I also got one part-time job in the bakery of Ralph’s Market for $1.75 an hour and another at a stable in Toluca Lake, grooming the horses and mucking out the stalls, for a dollar an hour plus free rides. Some evenings, on my own, I would drive up to Mulholland Drive, atop the mountain separating Los Angeles from the San Fernando Valley, and park just to watch the searchlights in Hollywood light up the sky for a movie premiere and pretend it was all for me.
At school, I volunteered for everything. I was on the student council and in the Catholic Scholarship Federation. I attended the Girls State conference in Sacramento, a program to introduce students to the workings of government. I was pitcher for the softball team—I couldn’t hit or catch worth a damn—and, briefly, a cheerleader. Arlene Howsley and I volunteered at Saint Anne’s Home for Unwed Mothers. We were Red Cross and Community Chest volunteers too. I found the time and money to enroll in a modeling course during summer vacation and, with three friends, formed a small pop band—piano, accordion, drums and clarinet. We wore outlandish old clothes and called ourselves the Ragamuffin Band.
I was a member of the Science Club, the Spanish Club, the San Fernando Valley Youth Band, the YMCA (yes, YMCA—this predated the establishment of the YWCA) and, still faithful to Al Capp, the Secret Society of Super Shmoo. I belonged to anything I could. The reason I was so engaged in all this extracurricular activity was, of course, to delay going home.
Her backbreaking schedule didn’t stop Dolores from going to Mass almost every day, even if she had to get up at 6:00 A.M. to do it. In fact, when she did not make Mass, it was an occasion worth noting in her diary.
—The comfort I felt when I was alone with God seemed stronger in the church. I had come to rely on that direct communication with Him, which always reassured me that I would be able to deal with hard times.
Social life during high school was more problematic than anyone knew. I wanted to be accepted, but there was always the possibility that someone would see Mom drunk. When girls would come over for slumber parties, Mom would curb the drinking, but as the evening went on, she would sneak enough drinks to be a little too giddy. My greatest fear was that I might be blackballed by my classmates. At the dances at school, I sat in the gym bleachers that were the farthest back. Then at least I could have an excuse if no one asked me to dance.
Attention wasn’t as difficult to come by as she implies. There was a constant flow of boys at the Hazeltine door—Martin joked that it was more like a river. She didn’t lack for dates to dances and parties and football games and—if it was up to her—movies. Decades later she could still remember names.
—Burt Glannon, Jim Adams and Donald Boyles were my movie dates. I would see a movie I particularly liked with each of them. I must have seen Roman Holiday and The Rose Tattoo ten times each. I was in a dance contest with Bob Saunders. We were second in waltz, third in rumba.
Harriett always insisted that she trusted Dolores and her boyfriends. She gave them freedom. This modern approach, however, was undermined when, with a few drinks in her, Harriett would flirt with Dolores’ dates.
This was so embarrassing for the boy and humiliating for me. She could also pick up the phone and very easily pretend to be me with one of my boyfriends, which she thought was funny.
Privately and soberly, Mom gave me one warning—“too easy, too late”—and that was sufficient. I wasn’t in the market for a steady relationship anyway. It wasn’t until Chris, a young telephone repairman, did some work at the house that I dated seriously. Two years older than I and a high school dropout, Chris had a way about him, a lively joie de vivre—and he was Catholic. I was infatuated. But when I showed up at a school dance with Chris as my escort, I got some flack from Mother Phillip, the principal at Corvallis, who thought Chris wasn’t an appropriate companion, emphasizing that, as a dropout, he had no sound future. I’ve often wondered whether she sensed something about the direction my life was to take, if perhaps I had a religious vocation. She never mentioned that to me, but she minced no words about the telephone repairman. She told me to get rid of him because my life was going somewhere beyond him.
Reluctantly, I did, which happily allowed me to meet one of the nicest boys I’ve ever known. On a trip home from Chicago, I sat next to Jack Lynch, a young sailor from Wisconsin en route to San Pedro Naval Base. For the few months that Jack was stationed in California, we dated and went to Mass together. I saw On the Waterfront with him. I remember thinking my world had changed because of that film and Brando, Eva Marie Saint and Karl Malden, who showed us truth. Usually movies didn’t speak to me that way. I was riveted and inspired by Eva Marie’s performance. That was the kind of role I wanted to play someday.
Jack was my date for the senior prom, which was a big deal. I mean, to show up at the prom with a sailor in dress uniform was a very big deal. That night Jack and I crowned the prom queen—which disappointed Grandpa. He wrote that I shouldn’t have crowned the queen; I should have been the queen. The lovely part is that Jack Lynch became a wonderful friend to both Mom and me. Through the years we stayed in touch, until his death in 1998.
Father Charles White, a Paulist priest from a parish in Westwood, came to Corvallis to conduct a retreat, a series of seminars devoted to religious topics. He looked like a head-on collision between the youthful John Paul II and Bing Crosby. I admired him greatly; he was one of the most loving people I ever knew. He was an orphan, so the world became his family.
In her senior year at Corvallis, Dolores was elected president of the student body. She also began a relationship with Joan of Arc, first in a scene from George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, suggested to her by the new speech and drama teacher, Beverly Zanoline. Dolores had earlier won a speech contest and had gone on to represent Corvallis in a final competition at the Lions Club. There were so many contestants that evening that she was almost asleep when her turn came. Approaching the podium she suddenly realized she couldn’t remember what she had prepared.
All I could do was stand there and say miserably, “I forgot my speech.” I ran from the stage and collapsed in tears in the backseat of our car. I vowed to my mother that I would never set foot on a stage again.
“Cripes,” she said, “it’s no big deal. After twenty-five speeches, everyone wanted to go home anyway. You’re not a failure, kiddo; you’re a prize.” Miss Zanoline apparently agreed with Mom because she scheduled a scene from Saint Joan for the class to present to the student body and cast me as the French Maid of Orleans. Everyone thought that the kids would never sit still for the “King of Heaven” scene; but, with reborn confidence, I insisted that they wouldn’t dare not sit still. I was the school president after all.
The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows Page 5