The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (20 page)

I felt like walking and headed in the direction of lush green woods, which I happily discovered opened onto a golden field. I was locked in my thoughts and hadn’t seen the young nun coming toward me until she suddenly appeared at my side
.

It was Mother David Serna, who is now the abbess of Regina Laudis. “I was walking on the road next to Saint Pius Field,” she recalled, “when I saw this young woman, probably, I thought, a visitor at the monastery who had wandered off the beaten path. Not all the grounds surrounding the monastery buildings are open to visitors. There are areas that are within the enclosure and should not be trespassed upon. They are marked with signs, which she had obviously ignored. I simply said to her, ‘I don’t think you want to be here.’ She retreated immediately. But later that day, Reverend Mother Benedict said to me, ‘I’ve just met your blond counterpart.’ I had no idea what she meant.”

Throughout 1959, I had several parlors with Reverend Mother Benedict, who, I quickly learned, was anything but a poor, naïve woman. On the contrary, this woman was well educated and cultured. She had learned the works of Bach and Ravel when most kids were learning to play with blocks. Her mother took her at age nine to the Louvre to appreciate the French Impressionists. American thought, as far as Reverend Mother was concerned, was overly linear and childish
.

Both introspective and pragmatic, Reverend Mother shared stories of her early life as a medical student in Paris and then as a Benedictine nun and doctor at the Abbey of Jouarre. She and Mother Mary Aline were true heroines during the German occupation of the abbey, and I listened with fascination as she told of chilling exploits in dodging the Nazis. Once, late at night, on a street with no place to hide from view, she and Mother Mary Aline had to cling like shadows to a wall to conceal their white wimples from Gestapo soldiers driving by on patrol
.

It was from one of her hiding places, the abbey bell tower, that she heard sounds of an advancing army and looked over the casement to see which troops were approaching. At first, she couldn’t identify the convoy, and then, there it was, on the back of a military truck: an American flag
.

At that precise moment she vowed to establish a Benedictine monastery in America. She chose the name
Regina Laudis,
which means “Queen of Praise”, even before coming to this country because, she told me, “Mary is the exemplar of praise for the Lord; she did nothing else but live to meet God’s terms
.”

Life at Regina Laudis was extremely difficult in those early years. Many nights their supper consisted only of soup made from nettles that grew profusely on the property. The nuns planted vegetable gardens and orchards, raised a flock of sheep, and pursued various crafts—carpentry, spinning and weaving, even blacksmithing—out of necessity. Monastic life may be the summit of holiness, but the realities of such an existence make considerable demands
.

I wondered how she had managed to keep from feeling defeated, and Reverend Mother told me, “I had no special method to do it, except to do it. The secret to keeping this place going was to do the next thing that had to be done—without wasting time worrying. Founding a monastery is a continuous process of sawing to build and, at the same time, trying to dispose of the sawdust. If you do something concrete, that opens the possibilities. You don’t know what God is doing on the other side, but He’s doing something. You have to keep a sense of obligation on the one hand, and trust on the other. I lean on one of Saint John of the Cross basic principles. He said that in a situation where there is no love
, you
put in love and love will be there
.”

Each parlor with Reverend Mother made me recognize that there is another kind of confession other than sacramental confession. One can be open to confession to people of wisdom and understanding, which allows one to share the concerns of one’s heart
.

Reverend Mother had a depth of understanding that astounded me. Without reciting “absolutes”, she could put the tension I was feeling into perspective for me. She had an incredible capacity for womanly assimilation, which made it easier for me to share my struggles to maintain a relationship with the Church and the Industry—with a capital
I,
which is what insiders called Hollywood. I hadn’t truly been able to integrate my professional life with what I was feeling about the Church. I had so many questions—though not theological ones. Mine were more like “What do you do when in confession a priest tells you your profession is an occasion of sin?” The bourgeois mentality in the institutional Church—that rigid, Jansenist thinking—was confusing to me
.

I remember she smiled—even chuckled a bit—at that priest’s ominous caveat. She was completely down to earth in her replies—and very modern. She could be worldly in the most sophisticated, delightful way, but she could cut to the bone too. Above all, she communicated the sense that she lived in the presence of God and that was the central fact of her existence
.

At first, my visits ended with a sense of tremendous satisfaction, the kind I used to have as a kid after a good report card or, later, when I knew I had done a good job in front of the camera or before an audience. It was the feeling that something good had happened and now I was free to look beyond to another cycle. That was comforting, but very much at a naïve level of intensity
.

Over the next months, during the bus trips back to New York, my thoughts were more about what this Regina Laudis experience might mean in terms of seriously clarifying what it was that my life was about. Would I reenter my professional life with new values? Was the experience giving me a sense of further direction
?

Or just more questions
?

One thing I knew: what I was finding at Regina Laudis was the peace that had first attracted me to the Catholic Church, and when I went away I carried it with me
.

When my contract with
Pleasure
was up, I knew I had to visit Regina Laudis before I returned home. With no performances to rush me back to New York, I took a full week there. It was odd—at the end of each day, right at 7:30, my thoughts ran back to the “half hour” call when I would be dressing and finishing my makeup. Instead I was in the tiny chapel listening to the nuns sing Compline, which had become the Office I liked the most. It is the only Office that doesn’t change; it is the same throughout the year. It is sung in the dark with eyes closed. I felt as if I were being rocked back and forth in a sea of feminine rhythms
.

What, I asked Reverend Mother Benedict, is the meaning of the Benedictine expression
contemptus mundi? “
This does not mean contempt for the world,” she assured me, “but detachment from the world. We think of fruit as food but, to the tree, the pulp of an apple or pear is a cushion of protection around the seed’s life forming within. That is why a monastery is enclosed, to protect and nourish the life of the spirit that is forming inside you and to help it to grow, in its own terms, to its fullest expression
.”

I came to appreciate that in Reverend Mother—this woman who had spent nearly twenty-five years in monastic enclosure—I was in touch with a spiritual master
.

It was during our last parlor that I suddenly blurted out, “I worry that I might have a call. I know I’ve been looking for something deeper. I wonder, Am I material to enter the monastery? Could this be where I belong
?”

“No, Dolores,” she replied, “go back to Hollywood, return to your career. And from time to time, come back and visit.”

Reverend Mother passed a card through the grille. I glanced at it as I left the parlor, but her handwriting was difficult to read—she was, after all, a doctor—so I put it away in my jacket pocket to examine more carefully at a later time
.

At the end of my visit, Mother Placid gave me a gift—a card she had drawn in her strong, unique style. It said that a cross is planted in the soul. It takes root and grows
.

On the plane home I felt exhausted. The end of this visit found me spiritually and physically dried out, and I didn’t know why. Looking back, I think it was just the Lord turning me inside out to shake off all the old clinging vines before He planted His bumper crop
.

Ten

When she left Hollywood a year earlier, Dolores had just gotten her first star billing. Now she was returning home from a year’s run in a major Broadway hit, with a Tony nomination to boot.

She had a right to expect that producers would be knocking down her door with offers. But there was nothing waiting for her, not even with her boss, Hal Wallis. Her agent, Phil Gersh, told me that Hollywood producers fall all over themselves to grab a spanking-new Broadway actor for a movie debut—think Brando, Clift or Streisand—but the same moguls couldn’t care less about a movie actor returning home after an appearance on the New York stage.

Gersh recalled, “Lee J. Cobb, who was firmly established in movies, left Hollywood for Broadway, where he created the role of Willy Loman in the great American play
Death of a Salesman
. When Lee came back to Hollywood a year later, one producer greeted him with, ‘Good to see ya, Lee! Wha’d’ya been up to?’ ”

The shoulder Dolores cried on was Paul Nathan’s. He was genuinely upset that Perlberg and Seaton had passed her over for the movie version of
Pleasure
. But he said not to worry. They would find something.

—
I made a suggestion
: The Debbie Reynolds Story
—and I would play Elizabeth Taylor
.

Wallis, in fact, was considering loaning her out to Hammer Productions, the English company pumping out low-budget horror movies that were very successful at the box office. The film was
Never Take Candy from a Stranger
, starring the fine Shakespearean actor Felix Aylmer, who was obviously slumming.

The test for
The Story of Ruth
, deemed a success by producer Sam Engel, who was less interested in Semitic authenticity than William Wyler had been, immediately cancelled her horror-flick career. It looked as if the part of Ruth was hers, but the next thing she knew, another actress, Elana Eden, was given the role.

—
You know, shortly after my entrance into Regina Laudis, annual donations to the monastery were received from Sam Engel. As there was never a note with the checks, no one associated the contributions with me. I learned of his gifts only upon his death in 1984
.

I met with King Vidor for the role of a young Jewish girl in
Solomon and Sheba,
to be filmed entirely in Europe. Just the possibility of seeing Paris sent me to a bookstore, where I got one of those little French-made-simple books and pored over it for days. Much of the emphasis was on pronunciation, and coincidentally I was asked to read for a part that called for a French accent at the La Jolla Playhouse, the Southern California summer-stock company formed by Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer. I had visions of spending four weeks in lovely La Jolla and twelve more in Europe. I didn’t get either part
.

When she was asked to test for yet another Jewish character, the daughter in the screen adaptation of the play
A Majority of One
—her Broadway neighbor the previous year—she joked to friends that maybe she should convert. She was passed over for Madlyn Rhue. She was then up for the role of the nice girl opposite Paul Newman in
From the Terrace
but lost out to Ina Balin, who would become a close friend after Dolores entered Regina Laudis.

—
I often felt that there were not a whole lot of happy stories that came out of Hollywood. Careers fade and people are discarded and some end up tragically. Ina was one of the good people of the world. She did fine work in films yet found her true calling outside of Hollywood. During the Vietnam War, she became involved with an orphanage in Saigon that she helped evacuate before the city fell to the Communists in 1975. She saved 217 children, three of whom she adopted
.

Dolores was then announced for a movie about the Mafia,
Brotherhood of Evil
, to star Louis Jourdan and James Mason, which was already of concern to both the Legion of Decency and the world of crime. Some cast members, Dolores included, received anonymous letters—and not from the Catholic Church—“suggesting” that they not participate. For whatever reason, that script never made it to the screen.

There was a role in an upcoming Wallis production that I coveted: the seductive young girl in Tennessee Williams
Summer and Smoke
. Mr. Wallis thought I was too young for the role—which I took to mean not sexy enough—but agreed to let me do a test for the director, Peter Glenville. Paul warned me that I probably wouldn’t get it, but I wanted to prove I could do something for Mr. Wallis besides Presley girls. Mr. Wallis liked the test. But Mr. Glenville thought I was too old—which I took to mean not sexy enough. Pamela Tiffin was very good in the part
.