The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (21 page)

Although I made light of being “at liberty”, I was pretty depressed. I had gotten used to being on the fast track in Hollywood without much effort. I had come back full of expectation, and the disappointment was enormous. Was I going to be just a flash in the pan
?

Our first date following Dolores’ return from New York was at the funeral of her uncle Mario Lanza, who had succumbed to a heart attack at age thirty-eight in Italy but whose body had been transported back to this country for multiple services, ending in Los Angeles at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament some two weeks after his death. We had to file by the open casket, which bothered Dolores a great deal. As for me, I was completely oblivious to what a “funeral date” portended.

The open casket held a bloated, gray semblance of my uncle. Did fame make it necessary to show him in such a state? My adored, now distraught, Aunt Betty, who had fallen for the phony glamor of Hollywood, would join him in death barely five months later
.

My father was an usher at the funeral, and I was aghast to see him take Mom to a front pew, where he seated her next to his second wife, who was seated next to his third. Throughout the Mass I prayed to keep my temper, but I was shaking with anger when I confronted my father. “You bastard!” I said. “How could you embarrass Mom that way?” He was unfazed and merely whispered in my ear, “Don’t be angry with me. You have to understand. Your mom was the only one. She was the virgin.” That he could understand the value of virginity surprised and actually touched me. For all his offenses, he did understand that, and before God that was going to be to his advantage
.

When I got back home that night, Mom had already had a few scotches. She had been behaving since my return, but why should I have expected that to last? I knew I couldn’t stay at the house permanently. I had gotten too used to living on my own
.

I helped Dolores move into a new apartment below the Sunset Strip, modest but nicer than the Black Hole and within walking distance of Saint Victor’s Church. As she was loath to buy new furniture because of low funds, we turned to garage sales to find cheap “antiques” such as an oak dining table that we cut down and refinished as a coffee table. She did purchase a nice print of Andrew Wyeth’s
Christina’s World
, which was hung in the bedroom. It had special meaning for her.

—
To me
, Christina’s World
had always represented my genealogy. I saw all the Bowen women in her. The girl in the painting is reflective, contemplative, and I used to wonder if she was moving
toward
something or
away from
something
?

Dick and I had become very close in a short time. A strong motivation for my going to New York to do the play was to make him proud of me. His praise for my performance meant more to me than anyone else’s, and by pleasing him I pleased myself
.

To love is the most wonderful thing in the world. But the gift of love has to be like a fountain that flows between two people, and I believed with all my heart that the water that flows must have an eternal source or it will dry up
.

I trusted Dick completely and found it easy to confide in him on professional matters and personal problems, including the reality that his not being Catholic would jeopardize a permanent relationship. But I didn’t speak to him of my thoughts of vocation or my visits to Regina Laudis. I was afraid to. I felt there was no way he could understand
.

I had tried to reach Dolores in New York by phone one Sunday and the following Monday, too. When I finally reached her, she told me she had been out of town—she said “upstate”.

Over the next several months, there were times, always at the end of a weekend, when she was unreachable. I was under the impression she was regularly spending time with Cornelia Otis Skinner at her upstate New York home, and Dolores never corrected me. In fact, when I was in New York for the Tony Awards, I personally thanked Cornelia for taking care of my girl, which was met with a blank stare. “She is such a dear,” Cornelia said with a smile, “poor Catholic thing.” I thought it was a funny line and left it at that.

I had been advised against our liaison often by priests in the confessional, but Dick felt strongly that two adults could adjust if they worked at it. I didn’t doubt his sincerity, but I knew he would have to discover for himself what demands would be asked of him. I had written to him from New York suggesting he speak to the pastor at Saint Victor’s Church. And then I had a Mass said for us—a prayer that our Lord might deign to help out a couple of wandering waifs who are stranded all alone and three thousand miles apart to boot
.

I did meet with the priest. I was not as serious as the situation merited and didn’t earn any points when I admitted that I was unable to buy in wholeheartedly but would “join up” if necessary. The good padre recommended I not fake it and ended the meeting then and there. Then, as usual, I put off thinking about it.

I remember that Dolores and I once discussed children. She had concerns about children growing up in a divided family and getting different signals from each parent. I asked her, since she had been allowed to decide for herself about religion, why she wouldn’t give her children the same opportunity. She answered in a flash: “Because I found the true way, and I am able to show them the truth so they won’t have to struggle to find it.”

I recalled wonderful mommies and daddies that I used to watch as they came to church with kids my age. Those kids didn’t have to wonder why they had to get up and go to church when one parent didn’t. That
unity
is what I missed then, and it was what I was missing now. The only thing I was ever able to believe and trust in completely was my faith. It was sad that Dick and I saw eye to eye on everything except the one thing that meant most to me in life. For me that was an insurmountable problem
.

One thing I was sure of: I could never marry outside my religion. It would be like sand and ball bearings. If we did go forward, I would only box him into a corner by inflicting my answers on him, and I knew it would never be fair to him. The only answer I could come up with was to move out of the relationship
.

My option was dropped. We separated as loving friends, but I was convinced that it was not the end of the line for us. I felt confident that, in time, we would be together again.

As it turned out, I saw Dolores only twice in the next three years. The first time was when she visited me at UCLA Medical Center, where I resided for three months following a 1961 New Year’s Eve accident. She and Jan Shepard, Valerie Allen and artist-actor Bill Stephens brought me a huge poster Bill had painted duplicating the ad for the film
Ben-Hur
. My poster read, in huge stone letters, “BEN-HURT”.

The second time was in the fall of 1962, when she invited me to lunch at Villa Frascati—“our place”, she said. My euphoria at the prospect of seeing her again didn’t last long. She only wanted to tell me she was going to be married before it broke in the newspapers.

I did continue to set up photo layouts, though, and kept up with her career. It looked pretty shaky for a while. There were frequent mentions in the trades of possible roles, but nothing materialized. Finally I saw her name in the cast of a movie called
The Plunderers
.

The Plunderers
, for which Wallis had loaned her out to minor league Allied Artists, was a low-budget western that fell in a gray area between the top and bottom half of a double bill. It featured Jeff Chandler and John Saxon, one of Dolores’ fan-magazine “dates”. Also in the cast was Marsha Hunt, a bright lady with an infectious sense of humor who immediately became Dolores’ buddy and the beneficiary of the Granny stories.

Marsha recalled, “I was so taken with Dolores that I could think of no better gift to give my husband, Robert Presnell, than an introduction. For a while we were the Three Musketeers.” This friendship is the only reason
The Plunderers
remains a memorable experience for Dolores. Coincidentally, Marsha Hunt had been the star of
A Letter for Evie
, which featured an early Bert Hicks appearance. Bert, as a matter of fact, visited the
Plunderers
set, the only time he ever watched his daughter work in a film.

All through the filming of
The Plunderers,
I knew there was a lack of the nervous energy that usually kept me edgy, but I chalked my listlessness up to the difference between a movie set and the stage. I thought that was what was bothering me
.

I had been in constant touch with Mother Placid, and she suggested I visit another Benedictine abbey, Saint Andrew’s, in nearby Valyermo. I thought it made sense, but I didn’t go to Saint Andrew’s with the conscious objective of testing Benedictine life against, say, Franciscan or Dominican. There was no doubt that, since my visits to Regina Laudis, I thought of myself as Benedictine. But that weekend at Saint Andrew’s made one thing crystal clear: other places did not have the meaning for me that Regina Laudis did
.

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
.