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

by Hart, Dolores

  On the set of The Plunderers I experienced the first in what would become a frequent where-am-I-going-what-am-I-doing sense of desperation. I was in my trailer dressing room combing my hair, and as I stared at my image in the mirror, I distinctly heard these words in my head: “You know this is not what you want.”

  “What is this?” I said to myself and then actually spoke back to my reflection: “I want to do this for the rest of my life.” I got up and moved away from the mirror, thinking I had gone cuckoo, and simply dismissed it.

  But that “voice” would be heard again and again over the next two years, never in the same way but bearing the same message.

  Eleven

  As soon as The Plunderers wrapped, I crawled back into the uncomfortable certainty that I would never work again. I needed activity to take my mind off the pain.

  Thankfully, Jim Stevens had some publicity assignments for me at the studio. I also signed up to participate in charity events.

  One was a benefit for parochial schools in Palmdale, California. I was partnered in a soft-shoe dance with a young actress I had met at a Cardinal McIntyre Communion Breakfast in Hollywood. Gigi Perreau had been a child actress in the movies since her debut, at eighteen months, in the 1943 film Madame Curie. Our performance that day served to make us friends for life.

  At another charity function, Dolores was seated at a table of young women whose conversation was about as stimulating as the Waldorf salads they were eating. Across the table, though, was a beautiful girl Dolores didn’t recognize, but from her manner and her quick wit she was obviously someone worth knowing. For the entire meal Dolores found herself wanting to converse with Maria Cooper, who was an art student at the Chouinard Institute in downtown Los Angeles and the daughter of Gary Cooper. As Maria felt the same way about Dolores, they set a luncheon date for the following week.

  Lunch day arrived, and I stopped by the Chouniard campus to pick up Maria. I found her waist high in a trash can, collecting paper. “You know, these students are terrible”, Maria called out to me. “They put two lines on a piece of paper and throw it away. Do you know how much paper costs?”

  —A person after my own heart.

  Maria was only a year older than I, but when I was in her presence I felt protected in a gentle and loving way. She knew her way around our town and was careful that I was taken care of, although I’m sure she never saw herself in the role of protector.

  Sometimes the girls would just walk a couple of blocks from Chouniard to nearby MacArthur Park, in recent years an area to be avoided because of gang activity but in 1960 a quiet, picturesque forty acres of green slopes, a small lake and loads of pigeons.

  “We brought sketchbooks, pencils and brown-bag lunches”, Maria recalled. “We would eat and sketch the pigeons in the park. She drew better pigeons than I did—ones with more character. And we would talk of life and meanings, turning our eyes and souls to the Mystery. There was such an ease of language between us. Were there other friends with whom I could discuss—or even bring up—the Mystery? No.

  “There’s a passage in The History of Impressionism by the art historian John Rewald that perfectly describes our friendship: ‘The two friends saw each other almost daily and communicated as much in the silence of their sensitivities as in the exchange of meditations or in the fraternity of enjoyment shared.’ That was us.”

  We talked a lot about books that dealt with the big questions of life, books by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that had meant a lot to us individually and which we now read over together, underlining meaningful passages. I introduced Maria to The Thirteenth Apostle, by Eugene Vale, because the story is about a painter, and she pointed me toward Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism. We both admired Francis Thompson’s “ The Hound of Heaven” and anything by Thomas Merton.

  —Merton’s No Man Is an Island had been tightly woven into my life. When I was younger I found him very appealing. But he found his way to God in isolation, and although I still appreciated his writing, ever since I visited Regina Laudis I realized that his search for God did not coincide with the way I needed to find Him.

  Maria and I usually attended Mass together, alternating between my West Hollywood parish, Saint Victor’s, where I now taught catechism class to youngsters, and her Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. I was seeing so much of Maria that Mom finally asked who my new friend was. I said her name was Maria Cooper and left it at that.

  As Maria’s mother was curious too, it wasn’t long before Maria invited me to tea at her home. I sensed that her mother wanted to check me out to see if I was the right kind of person for her daughter to spend time with. When I told Mom where I was going she couldn’t believe it. “You mean that girl you see is the daughter of Gary Cooper!?”

  When I arrived at the Cooper home, there was a gardener working outside. I asked him if this was the home of Maria Cooper. “Yup”, he answered. I was looking into the face of Gary Cooper! I barely managed to introduce myself as Maria’s friend. He grinned and pointed the way to the front door.

  Maria showed me around the house, which was all warm wood and lots of glass, with Matisses and Gauguins and van Goghs on the walls and sofas splashed with colorful needlepoint pillows she and her mother had made themselves. We sat in the living room waiting for Maria’s mom and, as usual, I slipped off my shoes. When Mrs. Cooper entered, the first thing she said to me was, “Shoes are worn in this house.”

  —“Uh-oh,” I thought, “this isn’t Galesburg.”

  Maria’s mother was beautiful. She had been an actress when she met Maria’s father and gave up her career for marriage. She was charming, knowledgeable on many subjects—and mean as hell. That afternoon, she found a lot to criticize, including the way I dressed. “If you want to be an actress, you’ve got to learn how to dress. Obviously nobody taught you.” I was a little annoyed because Edith Head thought I looked nice. But I took it.

  —She wasn’t nicknamed Rocky for nothing.

  Over the next weeks, however, Mrs. Cooper thawed. I think the thing that broke the ice was that I could be submissive to her, and that made her comfortable. She enjoyed taking me on.

  Gary Cooper cottoned to me immediately. He was the second person to call me “Miss Dolores”, a name I had liked when Elvis used it. Now I loved it. I am proud to say that Gary and I enjoyed a very special relationship. He even asked me to be his godmother at his baptism when he converted to Catholicism in early 1961. He treated me like a daughter but also as a contemporary in the business. Always interested in my career, he would, as long as I knew him, greet me with the actor’s standard salutation: “Working?”

  Playhouse 90 was the most ambitious and arguably the most prestigious show of television’s Golden Age. Ninety minutes of theater broadcast live every Thursday night, the program spawned emerging writers and directors such as Rod Serling, Abby Mann, Reginald Rose, Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet. During its four-season reign, Playhouse 90 produced 133 programs—all but four of which were originals, Judgment at Nuremburg, The Miracle Worker, Requiem for a Heavyweight and Days of Wine and Roses among them.

  John Gay’s World War I love story To the Sound of Trumpets was part of Playhouse 90’s last-ditch effort to remain the stronghold of live original drama. The program held a hard core of loyal viewers, but when ratings were falling in its fourth season, producer Herbert Brodkin scheduled eight high-budgeted plays to lure its audience back. Sadly, the fourth season was its last.

  Playhouse 90 also presented the cream of the acting crop from both coasts. Since the actors had to be trusted to perform live, almost all had stage experience. After her disappointing reentrance into Hollywood, Dolores fortune picked up when she was cast in a lead role in To the Sound of Trumpets. Brodkin and the director, Buzz Kulik, cast Dolores in spite of opposition from both the CBS brass and the sponsor’s advertising agency, both concerned over lack of name value. She joined a distinguished company that included Dame Judith Anderson, Boris Karloff, Dan O Herlihy and Stephen Boyd
.

  Stephen Boyd played a disillusioned British Army officer, wounded on a French battlefield, who plans to desert his unit. In a military hospital near Paris, he meets a young American volunteer nurse, Dolores character, who has been wrongly accused of administering unauthorized drugs to a patient. The two desert together and, through the ordeal of their flight, fall in love.

  As challenging as it was, I was emboldened by the thought of performing live. It brought back the excitement of theater. The daunting fact was that I would be seen by more people in one night than had seen me on Broadway in a whole year.

  I was both thrilled and intimidated to work with Judith Anderson, who played the head nurse. Our scene together was her only appearance in the play and, as written, was my scene. I had all the fireworks. We rehearsed several times, and she played the scene exactly the same way in each rehearsal—menacingly soft-spoken, petting a cat she held in her arms. During the live performance, however, just as she was exiting, she took hold of the cat’s paw and pretended to scratch my arm, then sweetly scolded the animal, “Bad pussy. Bad pussy”, and walked off with the cat and the scene.

  Later, I approached the venerable actress to tell her what an honor it was to work with her and casually mentioned the surprise business with the cat. “My dear,” Dame Judith purred, “I had only one scene. I had to do something.”

  Stephen Boyd was extremely attractive and very professional. We shared most of the scenes in the play, and he was such a generous actor. He was also a bit of a cutup. As we approached performance day, I confessed my habitual stage fright to him. Just before air time, a telegram was delivered to me. It was from Stephen. “Relax dear. Twenty million Chinese don’t give a damn.”

  On February 9, 1960, To the Sound of Trumpets was aired live from CBS Television City to the East Coast at 6:00 P.M. Pacific Time. The show ended at 7:30 P.M., which gave the actors the opportunity to see the performance when it was aired on the West Coast at nine o’clock. Actors had to scramble to get out of costume and makeup and rush to a TV monitor somewhere. Maria Cooper, Gigi Perreau and her husband, Frank Gallo, actor David Hedison and young actress Judy Lewis, the daughter of Loretta Young, threw together a TV viewing party, giving Dolores this advantage over stage actors, who never get to see their own work.

  If her Elvis Presley connection would be the one most recalled by the press at the time of her entrance into Regina Laudis, her next picture would be the movie most mentioned. Where the Boys Are was a modestly budgeted comedy-drama about the annual Easter pilgrimage of college students to Florida beaches. Coming as it did at the end of cinema censorship by the Hays Office, it was one of the first teen films to explore premarital sex. Its producer was the veteran Joe Pasternak, who had his own unit at MGM, producing among others the films of the studio’s top star of the fifties, Dolores’ uncle Mario Lanza.

  Directing would be Henry Levin, a serviceable craftsman who specialized in frothy sex comedies and enjoyed an enviable reputation of bringing films in on budget. As Levin was handled by the Gersh Agency, Harry Bernsen got an early look at the script and felt the pivotal role would be perfect for Dolores. Levin agreed and suggested her to Pasternak, who coincidentally had just met Dolores at a party and was struck by her charm. Up to that point, Pasternak had had his eye on Jane Fonda for the role.

  Hal Wallis was only too happy to loan her out, and Paul Nathan thought exposure in a glossy MGM film aimed at the massive youth audience could only enhance her status, especially since she would have top billing. Harry Bernsen was sure this was the break he had been working for since her return from Broadway.

  Her coworkers were Paula Prentiss, Yvette Mimieux, Connie Francis, Jim Hutton, George Hamilton and Frank Gorshin. It was Henry Levin’s style to run a happy set. He felt strongly that if the actors liked each other, it would come across on the screen. This worked especially well for the girls, whose on-screen chemistry was complimented by several reviewers.

  Paula Prentiss has bright memories of those days. “Shortly after the start of the movie, which was my first one, I came down with one lulu of a cold. Dolores would drop by my apartment bringing chicken soup and sympathy. She was so open and loving. As I was fresh out of school and not acquainted with Hollywood, her caring gesture was as surprising as it was welcome.

  “I had been raised a Catholic but had been away from Catholicism for a while. I felt deep down that if God really wanted me back, He would send a sign. I’ve always thought that Dolores was that sign. I knew I should cling to such a person.” Though Paula didn’t return to Catholicism then—she married Richard Benjamin, a Jew, and raised two children in the Jewish faith—she is once again Catholic and visits her former costar at Regina Laudis.

  In an interview with Night Moves on the occasion of the film’s thirtieth anniversary, Mother Dolores made the statement that she has always thought Where the Boys Are was a “message film”.

  From the first reading of the script, I felt it took a strong moral tone, which was passed on to its youthful audience in a comedic way. Teenage girls, especially, could find something to think about as they struggled with personal-relationship puzzles, and most of the “message” lines were spoken by my character, Merritt Andrews, a liberal-thinking but strongly moral student.

  Where the Boys Are was a very good experience for all of us at a time in our country’s life when we trusted our innocence and believed in the meaning of lasting friendships. That is the one lingering memory I have of that film—that we all did become friends.

  One man may have hoped for more. Some cast members were sure Henry Levin entertained romantic notions about Dolores. She remains mum on this subject.

  —All I know is I got a lot of close-ups.

  In the final days of production, I experienced a second “haunting”. Sister Dolores Marie visited during filming. She was on the set for the hospital scene with Yvette. It had gone well, but I hadn’t felt any satisfaction. I seemed to be separated from what was happening on the soundstage and had to struggle to relate to what was going on around me. Suddenly I had this overwhelming feeling not to fight it, to let the drifting apart happen. Inside me, I heard the words, barely whispered, “Don’t fight it. Don’t fight it.”

  I felt I had to share these odd happenings with someone who might possibly understand. I told Sister Dolores Marie about the “voice in the mirror” and what had just happened and confided that I feared I might have a vocation to religious life. Sister looked into my eyes and warned, “You better think that over, Dolores. Give it a long, long thought.”

  The Film Bulletin trade review judgment that MGM’s comedy was “surefire box-office magic” was prophetic. Where the Boys Are was a bona fide “sleeper”—the once-in-a-while movie that opens unheralded and ends up a commercial hit. It was MGM’s highest grossing picture of 1961.

  Paula Prentiss got the lion’s share of good notices, but Dolores reviews fully justified her top billing, with Box Office Digest proclaiming, “Dolores Hart proves she is stellar movie material.” Mainstream critics were generous in their estimation that she was “refreshing”, “charming” and had a “bright future”. Columnist Sidney Skolsky labeled her “the Junior Miss Princess Grace”. The film went on to receive a Golden Laurel Award from the Producers Guild of America as one of the year’s top comedies. Where the Boys Are is now considered one of the classic teen flicks.

  Dolores’ fan base had been building consistently since Loving You. Two studios, Paramount and now MGM, were forwarding bags of fan letters to the Hazeltine address. Going nuts trying to keep up with photo requests, Harriet was relieved when a woman by the name of Gladys Hart asked to create a national fan club. The official Dolores Hart Fan Club was formed, with Gladys as its committed president. Gladys became a friend whose relationship with Dolores continued after she entered the monastery.

  Dolores’ social life was again in an accelerated mode. There were the usual potential suitors in the Industry and a couple outside the business, Adlai Stevenson Jr., the
son of the two-time presidential candidate, and the young Aga Khan, son of Aly Khan, who, a decade earlier, had turned movie queen Rita Hayworth into a real-life princess. Then, one night Dolores went on a blind date.

  Don Robinson was supposed to meet Dolores on two separate occasions before their actual meeting. He was a high school friend of Sheila Hart’s husband, Bob McGuire, and had been invited to their wedding in Santa Barbara but had been unable to attend. Another friend promised an introduction during the Broadway run of The Pleasure of His Company, but Dolores had left the cast before Don made the trip to New York. He also might have met her through Maria Cooper or Judy Lewis, both close friends of his, but neither had mentioned her name.

  The introduction was finally arranged as a blind date by mutual friends Jody McCrea and Jennifer Lea. It was to be a double date with Jody and Jennifer, but at the last minute they had to cancel. Rather than miss another chance to meet her, Don kept the date with Dolores.

  “When I picked her up at her West Hollywood apartment, Dolores wasn’t quite ready”, remembered Don. “There were clothes hanging on strings stretched across the living room. The place looked more like the home of a costume assistant than a movie star.” Don took her to dinner at a little French restaurant on the Sunset Strip. It was an evening when everything clicked.

  Don put me in mind of John F. Kennedy. Not so much in looks as bearing. Like JFK, he was tall and lanky and had that same attractive brotherly quality that made girls like him. He also had a glint in his eyes.

  Don Robinson was a deeply religious Catholic who went to Mass almost every day. He was born in Los Angeles to strict Catholic parents who had married young and were still married to each other when death parted them. The family business, Robinson and Sons, was in moving and trucking. The foundation of the Robinson family was as solid as Dolores was shaky. As for the glint in his eyes, Don proposed to her on that first date—even before the salad had been served.