The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (2 page)

“Yes”, I answered.

“I won’t do it without you”, she said.

“Then,” I said, with less trepidation than I would have expected, “you’ve got me.”

“Be careful,” she warned, her justifiably famous blue eyes sparkling as she nodded toward Mother Abbess, “I’ve got a good witness.”

Work on the memoir began in the summer of 2002. We made the decision to compile her recollections in a Q&A format—I was the Q—recording the interviews and using as our research base the extraordinary archive she has maintained since she was very young. Early in her childhood, she heard a voice telling her to “keep everything; you will have need of it someday.”

Her life from an early age to well into her monastic years is recorded in a host of spiral notebooks. She has kept every letter, and she was a prodigious correspondent; every note and sketch, and she was an inveterate doodler. Her mother had made a huge scrapbook about her career. There are leather-bound scripts full of notes in her tiny, scrunched up, analytically pregnant hand.

What she did not personally hoard came from family and friends. When her mother and grandmother died, all of her letters to them were returned to her. I found a box of her letters written to me the year she was on Broadway. A fan in Texas compiled twelve scrapbooks about her and generously sent them to her after she entered Regina Laudis. It took many, many months to sift through this treasure trove of memories.

You will hear two voices in the memoir—Mother Dolores’ and mine. Occasionally interrupting the narrative are casual exchanges taken directly from the tapes of our interviews.

Half of this collaboration is not Catholic and, at the beginning, was lamentably lacking in many facets of Catholic religious life, notably in my misunderstanding of the term
call
as used in expressions such as “I had a call” or “I was called.” I spoke to people in the Church and read what I could to enlighten me. But, frankly, it all sounded either highfalutin or fuzzy. I badgered Lady Abbess, the founder of Regina Laudis, to the point of exasperation—hers not mine. But after repeated queries, I hadn’t found an answer that I could relate to personally. Again I approached the abbess, this time using Mother Dolores as my emissary.

Upon hearing that I had that same old question, Lady Abbess heaved a weary sigh and said, “Mother, you tell Dick that a call can’t be explained any more than you can explain falling in love.”

Richard DeNeut

One

There is a tiny room in the basement of the abbey building at Regina Laudis, just down the hall from the laundry. It measures eight by ten feet but seems smaller because of all the things in it.

There are two tables that by themselves almost fill the space—one against a wall and the other, serving as a desk, in the center of the room. Half of the desk’s surface is taken up by a huge cage, home to an African gray parrot named Tobiel (Toby for short) whose vocabulary consists of “Toby’s sweet”, “Go to church!” and “Mazel tov!” On the second table sits another, even larger cage, home to eight pairs of finches of various descriptions, next to a cage of normal dimensions accommodating a sick bird—a kind of finch infirmary.

There is a tiled sink from the time the room was used as an art studio and two chairs—both larger than necessary but all that was available when the room became an office. High up are cupboards—one of which contains leather-bound scripts of fifteen movie and TV productions and one Broadway play, and another crammed with videotapes and DVDs of films sent by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. File cabinets of various sizes and styles fill the remaining wall space, providing surfaces for a small refrigerator, a fax machine, three telephones, and a heater; a globe of the world as it was known in the sixteenth century; an anti-pirating DVD player (also a gift from the Academy); books, scrapbooks, journals and framed photographs; a twenty-eight-volume DVD collection of the Carol Burnett TV show, a gift from the star herself; Christmas ornaments that picture Bob Hope and play his “Silver Bells”; and several floppy, wide-brimmed garden hats.

Hanging on hooks attached to the door are heavy aprons, a raincoat, craftsmen tools, farm utensils, bits of electrical wiring and some hand-knit sweaters in pastel pink and baby blue.

This is Corpus Christi, Mother Dolores’ office. It is where, as prioress, she communicates with the outside world, reads and evaluates requests from would-be visitors, arranges living accommodations for guests, oversees (she prefers to say “undersees”) the dramatic productions of the abbey’s Act Association and visits by professional artists who come to the abbey to give of their talents (the list is impressive), considers subjects for Education Deanery seminars, “undersees” the photo and video (now digital) recording of abbey life and, most importantly, gives her ear to any member of the Community who needs her. She is also available for anything the abbess asks of her.

—Might that include sweeping the floor?

   
She wouldn’t ask that
.

Too demeaning?

   
She wouldn’t trust me with her broom
.

Corpus Christi also served as my office for two or three months each year during the past ten years. In that time, for three hours each afternoon, it was the place where Mother Dolores and I worked together on this manuscript. Originally, out of respect for the cloister, we met in one of the abbey parlors, but taping her recollections separated by the grille, which was not recorder-friendly, became burdensome, so permission was given for us to work inside the enclosure—certainly a major exception to cloistered life and one that added a laptop and tape recorder to the room.

To describe the working area as cramped I need only say that when both of us were seated, it was impossible for either of us to move without the other having to move too.

Our chairs faced each other, which allowed me to study that face, framed by the wimple, as Mother Dolores spoke into the recorder. As a flattering device, nothing beats a wimple in focusing attention—and hiding wrinkles. Mother Dolores has very few of those, belying the fact that she is now in her seventies. Her face is still beautiful. Her blue eyes, large and expressive, settle into a thoughtful gaze as she delves into the past—now pensive as she conjures the odor of vanilla beans being ground into powder in her grandmother’s home; now bright and mischievous as she recalls a tomboy acing out the neighborhood roughnecks by being the last kid to get out of the way of an approaching train; now moist as she relives playing a clarinet solo on a late-night TV show for her grandfather as he lay dying; frequently troubled, hesitant at the prospect of speaking publicly about the mystery of enclosed religious life. They can flash, too, in an unexpected explosion of temper. The lady has a temper.

Now and then, my attention would be gently interrupted by the ever-so-slight movement of her feet. Her special shoes, sensible and protective, cannot conceal the motion of pain-plagued feet inside, moving constantly, trying without much success to find a comfortable resting place. It was something we never averred because this was our working time, our professional time.

—Where shall we start
?

   How about flashbacks in a movie? Tell me things I don’t know.

Well, did you know I ran away from home once
?

I ran away from home when I was four years old. I ran away in the middle of the night with my mother. We were leaving my grandparents’ house on Hermitage Avenue in Chicago, where we had been living after Daddy left for Hollywood. He had gotten a contract with MGM studio, and Mommy and I were going to join him. We were running away because Granny and Grandpa were dead set against Daddy. They thought he was a good-for-nothing
.

We sneaked out of the house very quietly, but as soon as we reached the street I suddenly remembered I had left my panda bear behind in Granny’s bedroom. I started crying, so Mommy slipped back into the house and retrieved my beloved bear while Granny slept peacefully. I don’t remember if Mommy handed the bear to me or me to the bear; I was only two inches taller than Panda. The two of us had to sit on Mommy’s lap for most of the train trip because she could afford only one seat. But we didn’t care. We were going to see Daddy. In Hollywood!

We rode for what seemed like years. It was the beginning of World War II, and I remember there were so many soldiers and sailors on the train, all so much taller than Panda and I that it was like a forest of uniformed pant legs. I remember looking out the window and seeing the beautiful California desert for the first time and then, against the background of a bright sunset, tall slender trees with feathers blooming on top. They were palms, and I was to discover that California had thousands and thousands of them. Over the next several years this route would become a familiar journey, but the sudden magic of the palm trees against the Pacific curtain of the sky would never fail to take my breath away
.

Four years earlier, in January of 1938, Dolores’ future parents were just graduating from high school, where they had been sweethearts since the eighth grade. Edmund Burdell Lyhan Hicks, nicknamed Bert, was seventeen years old. Harriett Lee Pittman was sixteen. Both had eye-catching good looks and shared tattoos acquired in a moment of youthful recklessness, decades before tattoos on teenagers came into vogue. Harriett’s tattoo, however, remained unfinished: while the tattoo artist was working on hers, Bert passed out and that ended the session.

Shared, too, were dreams of marriage and careers in the movies. The latter was put temporarily on hold when they had to marry earlier than planned. This circumstance caused Harriett’s mother, Esther Bowen, and stepfather, Fred Kude, both of whom frowned on the relationship, a great deal of grief and spawned a serious but brief consideration of abortion. Harriett, in a characteristic show of defiance, totally rejected this advice. Esther and Fred reluctantly accepted “that wild good-for-nothing” as a son-in-law, even though there would never be any affection between them and him, and Esther paid for all the maternity expenses.

The newlyweds were forced to move in with the Kudes, but as soon as they could afford it, they set up housekeeping in a small apartment in Chicago, adjacent to well-traveled train tracks. Harriett found employment as a secretary, while Bert tried various endeavors, including truck driver, furniture mover and salesman for ladies’ shoes. He did not, however, settle down to the responsibilities of marriage, and this, combined with his drinking, caused increasingly frequent arguments between the young couple. Instead of trying to work things out themselves, the two kids—which is what they were—took their gripes,
Rashomon
-style, to their respective families, who were not stingy with advice.

After particularly violent arguments when Bert, drunk, would strike her, Harriett would run back home to Esther and Fred. The next day, refusing their advice to leave him, she would go back to her husband. Despite the increasing abuse, sometimes provoking police intervention, Harriett remained in love with him.

The arrival of Dolores Marie Hicks at 10:30
A.M.
on October 20, 1938, was cause for great celebration in both the Hicks and the Bowen clans. She was the first grandchild and served temporarily to patch the cracks in her parents’ marriage. Bert adored his daughter. With huge blue eyes, she was a beautiful baby, beneficiary of the drop-dead-gorgeous genes that ran so generously through both sides of her family.

To my father I was “Punkin”, but I was named after my great-aunt Frieda, who that same year became Sister Dolores Marie in the order of Saint Joseph of Carondelet in Saint Louis. Mommy brought me to her Investiture because my aunt was hopeful that I could be baptized in the Church at the same time. There was precedent. Daddy had been baptized Catholic. He was even an altar boy, though he had never practiced his religion enough even to be considered “fallen away”. The baptism wasn’t destined to happen, however, not then. The Church didn’t allow it. So I wasn’t baptized until ten years later
.

Dolores was born into families that could easily be the hard-edged versions of the zany Sycamores in that year’s Oscar-winning picture,
You Can’t Take It with You
. Her paternal grandfather, John W. Lyhan, called Jack, came from a wealthy railroad clan. The family line dated back to nineteenth-century England and Sir Thomas Atkins, a member of Queen Victoria’s palace guard. His service to the queen earned Tommy, as he was called, such royal affection that he was knighted. Additionally, Her Majesty presented him with the christening gown of baby Prince Alfred, which has been passed down through generations of Dolores’ family. Legend has it that “Tommy”, the universally used nickname for British soldiers, in wide currency from the 1880s through World War I, was in honor of Sir Thomas and immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in his 1892
Barrack-Room Ballads
.