Twenty-Two
“Formation is from forever to forever.”
This expression is not literal in the monastery but one that indicates that a person entering an enclosure of monastic formation needs to accept the bond of another kind of observance guiding her life. The bond, of course, is love, and if I had not been motivated by love I would not have come through the gate.
But after I was inside the monastery, I found myself in a terrifying experience of aloneness. I could not believe that God could let me face the journey that lay ahead alone, and I prayed persistently for the strength to see me over the bumps in that road.
The first big bump came sooner than I had expected. Within weeks, Mother Placid was transferred to the Abbey of Jouarre for an unspecified time. Although our relationship had changed abruptly after my entrance and existed now almost entirely on bits of paper, this left me despondent. I had become reliant upon covertly passing notes to her that usually began with “You never said it would be like this!” Now I was to be completely without her. That was a blow.
The two women I was now dependent upon were the zelatrix and the mistress of novices. They are the women most involved in the postulant’s interior life and progress. Both women lived in the novitiate. Each guarded her realm. The first thing I learned was to be careful not to ask one for information that was the domain of the other.
—The second was discretion—or shut up.
The zelatrix interprets and teaches the monastic customs—the ropes, if you will, of how to navigate within the world of a monastery. She teaches the newcomer how to mark her books for the Divine Office and helps with material needs. Mother Miriam taught me the rubrics, which are literally the directions for a liturgical service but which have come to mean general procedures to follow, rules that establish protocol.
Mother Miriam also gradually initiated me into various Hours, and I quickly learned to memorize and to recite the Latin chants. It was like learning lines. But the meanings of the chants escaped me. I had no idea what the prayers meant; consequently, I just sang along in the Latin I had learned by rote.
As mistress of novices, Mother Anselm was in charge of Dolores’ monastic formation and her work schedule. She was the one whose permission Dolores needed to meet everyday spiritual wants and requirements.
From the very first, the older—and French—Mother Anselm found it particularly unsettling having to deal with a twenty-four-year-old who had come from Hollywood. It wasn’t long before she confided her prickly situation to Reverend Mother Benedict and requested some backup.
I think Mother Anselm was more comfortable teaching sisters how to sew numbers on clothes or “do” apples—“do” is just another word for various tasks: you “do” dishes, “do” numbers, “do” rocks. There was no official changeover in formation mothers, but I detected a collaboration because I was sometimes sent to Reverend Mother to unravel things that Mother Anselm didn’t want to deal with.
When I was with Reverend Mother, I felt I was under a microscope. I suspected she was making sure I kept my place. But she did seem to understand me. One of the first things she said to me when I began to meet with her was “You will have a great deal of trouble because you’re not always going to get the justice you feel is your due.”
—I’ve always felt this direct access to Reverend Mother from the very beginning made it easier for me to stay. I figured that the fact that she had also been a professional woman deepened her sensitivity to me.
In fact, as she told me several years ago, that sensitivity came from the reality that she saw, in you, a great deal of her younger self.
She never told me that.
All the bumps would, I prayed, merely take time to tolerate. It was difficult—but not impossible—to adjust to schedules and meals at regular times and those incessant bells that seemed to proclaim everything. My embarrassment over the shiny tunic was short-lived; it soon got as dusty as everybody else’s and wasn’t noticed. I could learn to live without the convenience of my own bathroom, having mail and telephone calls monitored, not having money for incidentals such as paper and pencils and even postage stamps. As letters were sent by regular mail, I began to ask friends to enclose stamps—then all of five cents each—if they expected replies via first class.
Affecting everything was lack of time to do what was expected. The compulsory sewing of your number on every piece of your clothing had to be done in two weeks, and although the stitching wasn’t a major chore—Granny had taught me to tat—finding time to do it was next to impossible. I sewed my number—47—over and over with white thread on black garments and black on white and found that Granny had been more lenient in judging my handiwork than Mother Anselm was. When my stitching didn’t pass muster, I had to do it again.
There was the problem of sleeping. My life on the outside allowed me to stay up late if I wanted to and sleep late because I could. Now I had to go to bed at dusk and get up before dawn—which I thought was just crazy. I used to brush my hair thoroughly at bedtime, but now I had all of five minutes for that plus washing my face and brushing my teeth before I got into bed. Many times I completed my ablutions in the dark. It wasn’t long before I needed sleep more than I needed to brush my hair, and eventually I didn’t give a tinker’s damn how I looked, but during those first months, I was overanxious to appear proper.
“I never talked to Miss Dolores at all when she came in”, Mother Abbess David confided. “It must have seemed hostile. The Community was not encouraged to interrelate. I recall she asked me one morning if her collar was on straight. I replied, rather curtly, ‘It doesn’t matter. Nobody will be looking at you here.’ ”
—The very first thing the movie star says is “How do I look?”
It was difficult to leave all reference to my previous life outside the gate, although I wasn’t that eager to answer questions about my career—not because I thought I shouldn’t be speaking of it or that it was now inconsequential, but because I had so much to learn that I hadn’t the need to talk about it.
—Still, you must have thought someone would ask what it was like to work with Montgomery Clift.
Yes, that is the second most-asked question.
And the first?
What it was like to kiss Elvis.
I was allowed to talk about career with Mother Anselm because it directly affected who I was. And many months later, I learned that Mother Mary Aline, though she did not introduce the subject, was quite curious about my movie background. She had long harbored an ambition to found a monastery in Hollywood!
Dolores was kept up-to-date on Hollywood news, courtesy of her friend Sonia Wolfson, who wrote regularly. The enclosed postulant was aware of the sale of the Twentieth Century-Fox back lot—the result of the Cleopatra fiasco—to make room for Century City skyscrapers. She knew of Joan Crawford’s retreat from a second teaming with Bette Davis and when Stephen Boyd began shooting Fantastic Voyage with Raquel Welch. But she was increasingly conscious of her ignorance of what else was happening in the world.
Mother Ida’s news of the day didn’t cut it for me. How enlightening it could be, I thought, if what was happening in the world came to us through the consciousness of those nuns interested in particular issues. I was interested in films. When it was Oscar time, I could bring the Community a taste of what was happening. I wondered why no one had thought of this, and I had no way of knowing if any of the other women felt the same way.
Of course, I was keenly aware of being restricted. I used to love jumping into my car and zipping down to Malibu Beach to forget my woes. But you can’t run away from your woes in the enclosure. If you get angry at someone, there’s no way to hang up on her. You may have to sit next to her in chapel or do dishes with her all week. Since you knew nothing of a person’s life before she entered, there was no way to understand her behavior.
“In those days,” Mother Placid said, “we usually knew very little about the backgrounds of our novices. Once in a while, you would fi
nd out that a novice was, say, a lawyer, like Lucille Matarese, who is now Mother Maria Immaculata, our subprioress. But she didn’t generate the whispers Miss Dolores did. It was the ‘actress’ thing, the ‘princess’ thing.”
Dolores found it hard to ignore the scarcely disguised hostility that fueled those whispers. No one actually said anything, but there was no mistaking the message: “We aren’t impressed that you were an actress.” The few Community women she had come in contact with prior to entering were considerate and nonjudgmental. The majority of the nuns making up this Community, she was dismayed to find, could be, for all their culture and education, petty.
—That’s not to say they were not good women. But—they were women.
Mother Dorcas Roselund, in describing the pitfalls of monastic life, summed it up another way. A gastroenterologist before she entered Regina Laudis, she is now the Community’s baker. Life in a monastery is “the new martyrdom”, she said. “They used to throw Christians to the lions. Now they make us live together.”
It was a help to be able to write letters to Maria, the one person with whom I could share my intimate thoughts, but there was barely five minutes a day that I could steal for that; so I wrote them without pondering whether they “sounded right”, something I used to spend considerable time doing. And my already tiny script got even smaller and more cramped because I had to use whatever scraps of paper I could get my hands on.
But even with Maria, Dolores was careful not to go overboard with complaints about life in the monastery. She tempered criticism with agreeable commentary, such as sharing her surprise and pleasure when Mother Agnes, the mistress of ceremonies, asked her to serve as reader at suppertime. Usually only professed nuns were readers. On occasion novices read, but it was highly unusual for a postulant to read.
Dolores didn’t mention the constant thoughts of leaving or the nightly tears, but she asked Maria to pray that she would have “the guts to continue”. Maria’s keen and sympathetic eye recognized Dolores’ struggle, and her almost daily letters were full of encouragement. She was Dolores’ first visitor, within weeks of entrance. And she came bearing a gift, a small cactus plant—fittingly called the Crown of Thorns.
Most of my friends and colleagues looked upon my move as if I had disappeared into a foreign country, and they didn’t think they could visit. Visits were not really encouraged anyway, as the superiors felt it was difficult enough to get integrated, much less to try to introduce the monastery to others.
Visits by Valerie Imbleau didn’t pose such a problem. The Come Fly with Me adviser had accompanied Dolores to the monastery in the past and needed no introduction. She had shared her own thoughts of vocation with Dolores and now, in the fall of 1963, was preparing to enter Regina Laudis herself. Val did just that the following year but later left the Community.
Among her other visitors during her first months were Fathers Mike Doody and Armando Salazar, and Gerry Brent, the Tuna Queen from her Francis of Assisi days.
—You know, there’s a notation by Miss Brent’s name in the monastery guest book identifying her as “a friend of Dolores Hart—a real one.”
Father Mike tried to come at times when we didn’t have a chaplain so that he could offer Mass for us. During his visits throughout my postulancy, he tried to talk me out of taking vows. He had not changed his position that I could do more good for the Church by returning to Hollywood than by writing letters or visiting in a parlor as a cloistered nun.
Winnie Allen, Dolores’ New York roommate, was also an early visitor, one who came under a dark cloud. “After my divorce,” Winnie reflected, “I anguished that, because of the Church’s stand on divorce, my relationship with Dolores could be at stake because I had broken my vows. She insisted that her feelings for me would be unchanged but was unsure about what the official Church position might force upon her. She asked for a meeting with Reverend Mother Benedict. Mother Benedict acknowledged the stand against divorce but readily assured her that she would not dictate what Dolores’ personal reaction should be and would back whatever she decided.”
—In so doing, Reverend Mother gave me another early sign that, although formed in the strictest classical way, she could make space for the new generation to exist in comfort. My relationship with Winnie has only grown over the years, and, in fact, she and Mother Benedict became very close friends, too.
Our mutual friend Merv Kaufman, of the Kaufman and Hart Oscar party in New York, had one hell of a time arranging a visit. Whenever he called, Mother Mary Aline mistook him for a reporter who had been making annoying requests for an interview and put him off with her firm “Miss Hart is not available.” His letters were likewise suspect, and it wasn’t until Dolores confirmed his credentials as a friend that permission to visit was granted.
They had a parlor in Saint Anthony’s, and Merv was surprised when Dolores announced she had just been assigned, for personal spiritual reading, the entertainment section of the Sunday New York Times. Reverend Mother Benedict had become convinced that the instrument for receiving the Word of God was tuned to past experiences.
“At the end of our visit,” Merv recalled, “I asked her if I could send her anything. ‘What do you mean?’ she wondered. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘is there anything you want, anything you need?’ Dolores furtively peeked over each shoulder and then leaned in close to the grille and whispered softly, ‘A vodka martini—very dry.’ ”
A postulant is not a member of the professed Community. Although I came in daily contact with the mothers, sometimes worked alongside them, we didn’t speak to one another, and that made me uneasy. We postulants and novices had our own common room, where we sat together and talked—but only about our work. If little or nothing happened to me on a particular day, I didn’t contribute anything. I just listened.
My uneasiness was compounded by the fact that Reverend Mother, a Francophile of the first water, and the very French Mother Mary Aline tried to outdo each other in being monastic. The difference between them, or so it seemed to me, was that Mother Mary Aline was constantly trying to show what being monastic meant while Reverend Mother was truly and effortlessly monastic whether she was leading a discussion of the Rule or arranging flowers in the chapel. I thought Mother Mary Aline was a bit of an act.
Whenever we came into contact, there was something about her demeanor that I took as jealousy. She whipped me with caustic looks. I thought I understood the reason, since she had wanted to be an actress when she was younger.
—She did remind me a little of Hermione Gingold.
Mother Mary Aline once accused me of doing something improper. I had not done it, and I told her so. She said I was not to argue with her. “When I tell you that you did something wrong, you did it!”
I replied with all the cool resentment of Bette Davis, “And I am telling you that I did not do it, and you don’t tell me I did it when I did not.”
She pointed to the floor. “Get down on your knees right now, you impudent American.”
I got down on my knees and glared. She said I was a worm. I said that made me the greatest thing according to the Rule, a true daughter of Saint Benedict! She swept out of the room.
—Was this resolved?
That night I found a piece of chocolate on my pillow with a note saying that no argument must ever go unresolved beyond the setting of the sun. Many versions of this scene, however, were repeated over the years—right up to Mother Mary Aline’s death.
Within a very short time my skin broke out badly. It was probably the change in diet—but I couldn’t rule out all that chocolate Mother Mary Aline was leaving on my pillow. Before, I was careful not to eat chocolate, and I stayed away from all fat. Here I had no choice; I had to eat whatever was put in front of me. I wrote Mom to send Clearasil. She did, along with some moisturizing creams that I was permitted to use. Reverend Mother was sensible about anything one needed to maintain a healthy body.
Mother Columba, however, was frantic and wanted a doctor to look a
t me. She was afraid that, should I not make it in the monastery and return to Hollywood, everyone there would think they had ruined me. Concern for my acne was now, surprisingly, the only personal focus of our relationship. I thought we had grown very close. It was a mystery why she drifted away from me after I entered. She had been assigned to tutor me in Latin, but other than that, it was as if I had become invisible to her.
As fall approached I found there was no heat in the cells, only a single electric heater in the hallway. When I returned from Matins in the middle of the night, I had to sit on the thing to get warm before I got back into bed. It seemed I was always battling sore throats, and the sinus attacks that had started in New York raged at times.
I became very thin and drawn. As there was some concern that I was on the verge of anemia, I was permitted additional meat in my diet. The regular diet for the Benedictine Order is vegetarian, but postulants were allowed meat twice a week.
The garden obedience was often the toughest time. Some of the work, such as lifting and moving large rocks and boulders to prepare the ground for planting, was a major struggle for me. I think New England must grow rocks. I wasn’t very strong, but I was stubborn. I vowed to keep up with the pace set by Mother Stephen if it killed me.
“Hard work”, Mother Abbess David verified, “was the order of the day because we had to subsist. We were a foundation; food was short, and we existed on what we got out of the land or what someone gave us. If someone gave us a sack of potatoes it was cause for a big celebration.
“I remember when I worked in the garden doing rocks. All that lifting was backbreaking, and I was always thinking of ways to do the job with the least exertion. Once I rigged up a long plank and rolled the rocks and boulders rather than lift them. Mother Stephen said that was not work. I could maybe have argued about it, but I didn’t usually. I just stood back. It wasn’t building me up as an independent person; it was building me up as a slave.
The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows Page 25