—When he said, “You know, I’m going to marry you”, I was bowled over.
I laughed, but just to keep the door open, I suggested he ask me again at a later time.
We began dating, and I found that Don was basically one of the happiest persons I knew and, without a doubt, one of the finest. He was a fabulous catch. I can say that today because it is only in the light of consecrated life that one can see the grace of any man clearly.
Don had been educated by the Jesuits at Loyola Prep and Loyola University. He graduated in 1955 and had already served two years as a second lieutenant in the Air Force when he met Dolores. “I had more than a passing acquaintance with show business,” Don said, “having dated several actresses, including Margaret O’Brien and Anna Maria Alberghetti, and working at the William Morris Agency for a short period—long enough to realize that the agency business was not for me. I had a deep-seated love for architecture and design, but when I quit William Morris I joined my father in the family business, giving vent to my dream by decorating my parents’ new home which appeared on the cover of one of the top shelter magazines of the day. That opened up another career as a designer and decorator.”
Don was a member of a social club that I found snobby—I think he did too—and the Bel-Air Bay Club, where everyone played tennis except me. I sat, as I did as a child, covered up with a towel. Our favorite times were just dinner together and a movie. And I was truly grateful that I had someone dear to me sitting beside me at Mass every Sunday. Sundays were reserved for dinners at the Robinson family home.
—I attended my second Oscar ceremony with Don. I joked that I didn’t want to go unless I could come home with an Oscar. And I did. I swiped the gold centerpiece from our table and put it under my coat. On the way out, I noticed Mrs. Charlton Heston had a centerpiece Oscar under her coat too. But hers matched the one her husband carried, unhidden, as the year’s best actor.
Coincidentally, Harry Bernsen got his first look at my apartment. It put him in a state of shock. He insisted that I move into more suitable quarters immediately, something that said “rising young movie star”. Don knew of a beautifully designed Georgian building in Westwood with a vacancy. He helped decorate the space in Grecian mode—shades of white and my favorite color, lavender.
At this time, Mom and Pop were finally divorcing. The “big house” was sold, and Mom moved into an apartment in Beverly Hills, but Mom and Pop continued to see each other—for Mom it was another case of “can’t live with him or without him”. Since the divorce had left her financially shaky, she went back to work, at first as a manicurist and then as an assistant to a tailor. Most importantly, she didn’t feel sorry for herself and was staying off the booze.
The year 1960, which had gotten off to a shaky start personally and professionally, now offered optimistic change. Dolores had a new friend, a new beau and a new home. The Playhouse 90 was a critical success, and Where the Boys Are was a commercial hit. Dolores was invited to become a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Harry Bernsen was braced for an onslaught of offers for his client, who seemed poised to become the cinematic successor to the actress she had been likened to since high school. Things were decidedly looking up.
—So, of course, there was an actors’ strike.
Twelve
Dolores took advantage of the strike to study, this time with Actors Studio mentor Sandy Meisner, who was conducting classes at the Twentieth Century-Fox acting school. Her fellow students were Don Murray, Hope Lange, Joanne Woodward, Richard Beymer and Diane Varsi.
While she was studying at Fox, the studio head, Lew Schreiber, contacted Phil Gersh to say he had seen Dolores in The Pleasure of His Company and was interested in signing her to a two-picture contract for $100,000. At the same time MGM, reacting to studio buzz about her performance in Where the Boys Are, began negotiating with Harry Bernsen for four pictures at a total of $250,000. The sums would be paid to Wallis, of course, who was paying Dolores $1,250 a week at that time. He could hardly afford to put her into one of his own pictures when he was making that kind of a profit loaning her out.
The proffered contract at Twentieth Century-Fox included the role of Saint Clare in its upcoming religious drama, Francis of Assisi, based on the book The Joyful Beggar by Louis de Wohl. Not only was it planned as one of the major films for the year—by the studio that had produced The Robe a decade earlier—but the entire production would be shot in Italy, with exteriors in the actual locales of Assisi and Perugia and interiors at Cinecittà Studio in Rome.
The fact that one of Dolores’ favorite films, The Song of Bernadette, had also been made by Fox figured into the mix, as did the circumstance that she would be working at both studios where her father had once been under contract. The strongest attraction, however, was the European location. She had never been out of the country and had long dreamed of seeing London, Paris and Rome. To say she was jubilant would not be overstating it.
I revered Saint Clare as a holy woman and respected the order she founded, the Poor Clares, but I didn’t have a personal devotion to her as a saint because my particular orientation was Benedictine. The Benedictines, I was pleased to learn, came to Clare’s personal aid during her flight from her family, which opposed her desire to become a nun.
The first thing I did was read The Joyful Beggar. Then I enrolled in a Berlitz course in Italian. Next, I went to see Father Salazar, a priest I met at Sheila’s wedding, who had become a close friend. Father Sal had a parish in downtown Los Angeles, near Olvera Street, and had begun coming with me to see Mom. He was young and hip and didn’t scare her off with church posturing. She liked and trusted him. Lately, she had been bouncing back and forth between good days and bad. I would feel I could trust her one week and the next be afraid to go even a short distance out of town. It was an immense relief when Father Sal assured me that he wouldn’t forget her while I was away in Europe.
Then, as quickly as it was on, the film was off. The studio pitched instead a bit of fluff called A Summer World, pairing Dolores with another young singer whose popularity had catapulted him into movies, Fabian. She was so disappointed that she rejected it, one of the rare times she did not cooperate with the management. To ease her frustration, she decided she needed to go somewhere. If not Italy, why not New York?
I had no sooner checked into the hotel than Harry called with the news that the Fox negotiations were on again. Before I could sigh with relief, however, everything was off again, apparently for good. It might have seemed funny, but when I was out the second time, I got mad. To heck with it, I decided, I would go to Europe anyway because it had always been my dream. With Paul Nathan’s help, I made all the necessary arrangements in a matter of hours and, with stuffed suitcase in hand, had a bon voyage dinner with Winnie in her Manhattan apartment.
Winnie and her husband had barely poured the second martini when we discovered I was overweight. Well, not me, not on two martinis. The bathroom scales showed thirty-seven excess pounds in my suitcase and given that it would cost me eighty-seven cents a pound, we decided to remove thirty two dollars and nineteen cents worth. Out came the travel iron, a book on Umbrian civilization and my riding boots. Smaller items, such as the travel clock, umbrella and a one-pound guide to Europe were stuffed into the clothing I would wear or carry on the plane.
Seven hours later I landed in France full of misplaced confidence that the gift of tongues had been miraculously bestowed upon me, until I was speeding toward Paris in a car arranged by Paul and didn’t understand one word the driver said in his flowing travelogue. I couldn’t get enough, however, of the beautiful way he said “Mademoiselle” before every exclamation. Soon I was checking in at the Palais d’Orsay, which I am embarrassed to admit I pronounced “Palace de Horsey”. The spacious lobby reminded me of hotels Ginger Rogers stayed at in her movies. I had $800 in traveler’s checks, one suitcase and shoes that hurt my feet. But I was in Paris!
It was hard to believe that, from my win
dow, I could look out over the Seine and see the Eiffel Tower in the distance. Too excited to sleep, I got out the guide, which proclaimed Paris the city to walk in, and bravely ventured out to find a church, keeping for reference the Tower within navigating view.
I must have walked for a couple of hours when I began to feel hungry. I stopped at a small bistro. The menu, of course, was in French, and I got out my French for Tourists. When the meal arrived, it was a bowl of dreadful-looking tiny fish in what could pass for motor oil. The full reality of my linguistic ignorance had sunk in. I paid the bill, fled the café and bought an apple from a street vendor. I just held out my hand full of francs, hoping he would take the proper amount. But he took the handful and was so effusive in his appreciation that I figured I must have just subsidized the education of one of his children. What was I doing in Paris? Alone! I had really gotten myself into a mess. I went back to the hotel and had a good cry.
The telephone interrupted my tears. The caller was Earl Holliman, who was on a vacation in Paris and had learned from Paul Nathan that I was en route. He put himself at my disposal for my entire stay. That dried up the tears very quickly.
Earl was at the hotel in twenty minutes. He brought along a friend, Bob Oliveira, a musician and conductor who lived in Paris. I could not have had more attentive—or attractive—escorts. Knowing the city inside and out, Bob led us to Saint-Germain-des-Prés and a little sidewalk café for omelettes and martinis rouges and a fascinating parade of straggly haired French girls and gaunt, bearded young artists.
Overnight, I went from being Cinderella with only an apple for supper to the belle of the ball. With Earl and Bob, I got to experience not only the magnificent Louvre, Montmartre and the great flying buttresses of Notre Dame, but also special little places Bob knew. His favorite, L’Abbaye, was a tiny basement club on Rue Jacob where the audience showed its appreciation for the folk singers not by clapping, but by snapping fingers—in consideration for the upstairs neighbors. We stayed out until dawn and ended up at Les Halles, the early-morning flower market. Now I was really in Paris.
Oliveira suggested what would be the highlight of Dolores’ French adventure. As a conductor, he admired Gregorian chant, and he thought she should hear the chant sung at the Abbey of Solesmes, several hours outside of Paris. The three of them piled into Oliveira’s car and headed there, stopping in Chartres to see the legendary stained-glass windows of its medieval cathedral.
I’ll never forget my first sight of the famous mismatched spires of the Chartres Cathedral, which seemed to appear suddenly on the horizon. It was like seeing Oz.
As we approached Chartres, a storm was threatening. It got so dark that by the time we drove into the city, it was like night. Then began the rain. We were allowed into the cathedral but warned that it was a waste of our time, for without sunlight we would not get the full impact of the windows. We went in anyway, and as we entered, a flash of lightning lit up the entire church. The magnificent windows looked as though they had been ignited.
The moon was high when we reached Solesmes, the abbey outlined against the now clear sky. We stood on a riverbank transfixed by the abbey’s wavy reflection in the moonlit water as its bells tolled a welcome. The next morning we went to ten o’clock Mass at the abbey. For the first time since I was at Regina Laudis, I heard Gregorian chant—but now sung by monks. With the sound of their voices I thought my heart would swirl up into the arches of the ancient Gothic church.
I could not have asked for more: first, the sight of the Chartres spires all but puncturing the floor of Heaven, then those massive glass windows illuminated by God’s light and now the simple beauty of His music.
But more was coming. There must have been an angel on my shoulder. A message from Maria Cooper was waiting for me when I returned to Paris. Maria and her parents were in the city, and I joined them for dinner that very evening.
That night I became the Rocky Cooper project. Rocky is impossible to condense into a Reader’s Digest character. She’s the flavor of a delicious soup as well as the sting on the tip of the tongue when the soup’s too hot. She had long been displeased with my wardrobe. At dinner she asked how much money I had with me. About eight hundred dollars, I told her. “Good,” she said, “we’ll spend it.”
Rocky was an astute shopper with incredible taste in clothes—I was her paper doll, and she didn’t give a damn about my budget. She selected; I handed over the francs—at Givenchy, the House of Dior, Balmain, Lanvin. The eight hundred was gone in a day, but at the end of our spree I had the smartest wardrobe any young woman could wish for.
The on-again, off-again Fox contract and Francis of Assisi was on again. Bernsen wired that the part of Clare was definitely hers. Plato Skouras, the producer of Francis, sent a wire welcoming her to the company and instructing her to stay put because arrangements were being made for her hair to be done by the famous Alexandre de Paris. Her light-brown tresses were to be dyed to match Saint Clare’s blond hair, locks of which still existed in Assisi.
Since she still had four days before she had to report for costume and makeup tests at Cinecittà, she was invited to spend them with the Coopers in London, where Gary would be filming what would be his last movie, The Naked Edge. The Coopers were living at the Savoy and booked Dolores there.
Everything in London looked like a CinemaScope movie shown on a regular screen. The people were long and thin, with long, thin umbrellas and shoes and mustaches. Even their words were long and thin. My a‘s were already broadening by the time I checked into the Savoy and “awsked” if there were any messages.
All the clichés fell beautifully into place. Maria and I went to the Tower of London and London Bridge, saw the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, visited the London Zoo, and browsed art galleries and antique shops. Maria found a little church all but hidden on a small side street where I joined the Coopers for a lovely Mass. On the spur of the moment, Maria and I decided to have a picnic in spite of the threatening clouds amassing above. We bought chestnuts, tarts, cookies, ice cream and, as a concession to our waistlines, a grapefruit, and headed for Hyde Park. Raindrops began just as we were spreading our blanket. A short while later, the same blanket and goodies were spread on the floor of my hotel room and the English picnic commenced. There were so many golden moments like this with the Coopers that complemented the dream of mine that was coming wondrously true.
Between costume fittings and makeup tests in Rome, I went sightseeing, once again in the company of Earl Holliman, whose extended holiday had taken him to Italy. But all the monuments and statues and fountains we saw paled before the highlight of my time in Rome—the day I spent at the Vatican.
I received an unexpected invitation to tour the Vatican from Monsignor William A. Carew, of the Vatican Secretariat of State. I was overjoyed and assumed that the invitation was extended at the request of a VIP at the studio. Imagine my surprise when Monsignor Carew told me that my friend Father Salazar was behind it and that the tour would also include an audience with Pope John XXIII.
On the day of the audience, I met Monsignor Carew, who not only was as courteous a gentleman as I had ever met, but was as handsome as George Peppard, with wavy blond hair and a broad smile that showcased his glistening teeth. If he had been an actor, he could have gotten any part he wanted. During the tour, I asked Monsignor Carew what it took to be a successful Vatican delegate. He winked and said, “The Holy Spirit”. Then he reached in his pocket, pulled out a small comb and added, “And this, of course.”
Monsignor Carew escorted Dolores and Earl into the Hall of Benediction, where a number of people were already assembled. Pope John XXIII was the pontiff who had announced from the pulpit that everyone—not only Catholics—has a way to Heaven if the condition for Christ is in his heart. Thus, he was the man who had relieved Dolores of a troubling concern ever since her conversion.
The pope was carried into the room on his portable throne, and just as he passed us, his slipper fell to the floor. His
Holiness rocked with laughter, and Monsignor Carew seized that moment to introduce me as the Hollywood actress who would be filming a movie on the life of Saint Francis. “Ah,” Pope John smiled, taking my hand, “Chiara.”
I thought he had misunderstood. “Oh no, Your Holiness, my name is Dolores Hart.”
“No, no,” he repeated, “you are Chiara.”
“Dolores, Your Holiness.”
“Chiara.”
Years later I recalled that, up to that moment, I had not the slightest awareness of any religious significance that my involvement in the film might have for me personally. I thought of my participation on a professional level only. Might there have been another level of meaning? It was a piercing thought.
—You don’t usually get your vocation from the Holy Father.
Thirteen
Production on Francis of Assisi began on October 26, 1960, one week after Dolores twenty-second birthday. The cast included Bradford Dillman as Francis, Stuart Whitman, Pedro Armendáriz, Finlay Currie and Cecil Kellaway. The director was Michael Curtiz, who three years earlier had tried to get Dolores fired from the cast of King Creole. This time he was enthusiastic about her casting.
But Dolores, mindful of how crude Curtiz could be, wondered about his suitability for this particular film. Brad Dillman voiced a stronger opinion. “He was a calamitous choice. Foul-mouthed and vulgar and here he was, directing the life of a saint.”
Almost immediately upon their introduction, Brad learned to rely on Dolores, because of her past association with the director, for translations of Michael Curtizisms. On a shared ride to Assisi, Curtiz looked out the car window and said, to no one in particular, what sounded like “The ships are crazy.” Dolores saw Brad’s face go blank. She pointed out the window and whispered, “The sheep are grazing.”
The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows Page 16