The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (22 page)

—
Merton’s
No Man Is an Island
had been tightly woven into my life. When I was younger I found him very appealing. But he found his way to God in isolation, and although I still appreciated his writing, ever since I visited Regina Laudis I realized that his search for God did not coincide with the way I needed to find Him
.

Maria and I usually attended Mass together, alternating between my West Hollywood parish, Saint Victor’s, where I now taught catechism class to youngsters, and her Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. I was seeing so much of Maria that Mom finally asked who my new friend was. I said her name was Maria Cooper and left it at that
.

As Maria’s mother was curious too, it wasn’t long before Maria invited me to tea at her home. I sensed that her mother wanted to check me out to see if I was the right kind of person for her daughter to spend time with. When I told Mom where I was going she couldn’t believe it. “You mean that girl you see is the daughter of Gary Cooper!
?”

When I arrived at the Cooper home, there was a gardener working outside. I asked him if this was the home of Maria Cooper. “Yup”, he answered. I was looking into the face of Gary Cooper! I barely managed to introduce myself as Maria’s friend. He grinned and pointed the way to the front door
.

Maria showed me around the house, which was all warm wood and lots of glass, with Matisses and Gauguins and van Goghs on the walls and sofas splashed with colorful needlepoint pillows she and her mother had made themselves. We sat in the living room waiting for Maria’s mom and, as usual, I slipped off my shoes. When Mrs. Cooper entered, the first thing she said to me was, “Shoes are worn in this house
.”

—“Uh-oh,” I thought, “this isn’t Galesburg
.”

Maria’s mother was beautiful. She had been an actress when she met Maria’s father and gave up her career for marriage. She was charming, knowledgeable on many subjects—and mean as hell. That afternoon, she found a lot to criticize, including the way I dressed. “If you want to be an actress, you’ve got to learn how to dress. Obviously nobody taught you.” I was a little annoyed because Edith Head thought I looked nice. But I took it
.

—She wasn’t nicknamed Rocky for nothing
.

Over the next weeks, however, Mrs. Cooper thawed. I think the thing that broke the ice was that I could be submissive to her, and that made her comfortable. She enjoyed taking me on
.

Gary Cooper cottoned to me immediately. He was the second person to call me “Miss Dolores”, a name I had liked when Elvis used it. Now I loved it. I am proud to say that Gary and I enjoyed a very special relationship. He even asked me to be his godmother at his baptism when he converted to Catholicism in early 1961. He treated me like a daughter but also as a contemporary in the business. Always interested in my career, he would, as long as I knew him, greet me with the actor’s standard salutation: “Working
?”

Playhouse 90
was the most ambitious and arguably the most prestigious show of television’s Golden Age. Ninety minutes of theater broadcast live every Thursday night, the program spawned emerging writers and directors such as Rod Serling, Abby Mann, Reginald Rose, Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet. During its four-season reign,
Playhouse 90
produced 133 programs—all but four of which were originals,
Judgment at Nuremburg, The Miracle Worker, Requiem for a Heavyweight
and
Days of Wine and Roses
among them.

John Gay’s World War I love story
To the Sound of Trumpets
was part of
Playhouse 90
’s last-ditch effort to remain the stronghold of live original drama. The program held a hard core of loyal viewers, but when ratings were falling in its fourth season, producer Herbert Brodkin scheduled eight high-budgeted plays to lure its audience back. Sadly, the fourth season was its last.

Playhouse 90
also presented the cream of the acting crop from both coasts. Since the actors had to be trusted to perform live, almost all had stage experience. After her disappointing reentrance into Hollywood, Dolores fortune picked up when she was cast in a lead role in
To the Sound of Trumpets
. Brodkin and the director, Buzz Kulik, cast Dolores in spite of opposition from both the CBS brass and the sponsor’s advertising agency, both concerned over lack of name value. She joined a distinguished company that included Dame Judith Anderson, Boris Karloff, Dan O Herlihy and Stephen Boyd.

Stephen Boyd played a disillusioned British Army officer, wounded on a French battlefield, who plans to desert his unit. In a military hospital near Paris, he meets a young American volunteer nurse, Dolores character, who has been wrongly accused of administering unauthorized drugs to a patient. The two desert together and, through the ordeal of their flight, fall in love.

As challenging as it was, I was emboldened by the thought of performing live. It brought back the excitement of theater. The daunting fact was that I would be seen by more people in one night than had seen me on Broadway in a whole year
.

I was both thrilled and intimidated to work with Judith Anderson, who played the head nurse. Our scene together was her only appearance in the play and, as written, was my scene. I had all the fireworks. We rehearsed several times, and she played the scene exactly the same way in each rehearsal—menacingly soft-spoken, petting a cat she held in her arms. During the live performance, however, just as she was exiting, she took hold of the cat’s paw and pretended to scratch my arm, then sweetly scolded the animal, “Bad pussy. Bad pussy”, and walked off with the cat and the scene
.

Later, I approached the venerable actress to tell her what an honor it was to work with her and casually mentioned the surprise business with the cat. “My dear,” Dame Judith purred, “I had only one scene. I had to do something
.”

Stephen Boyd was extremely attractive and very professional. We shared most of the scenes in the play, and he was such a generous actor. He was also a bit of a cutup. As we approached performance day, I confessed my habitual stage fright to him. Just before air time, a telegram was delivered to me. It was from Stephen. “Relax dear. Twenty million Chinese don’t give a damn
.”

On February 9, 1960,
To the Sound of Trumpets
was aired live from CBS Television City to the East Coast at 6:00
P.M.
Pacific Time. The show ended at 7:30
P.M.
, which gave the actors the opportunity to see the performance when it was aired on the West Coast at nine o’clock. Actors had to scramble to get out of costume and makeup and rush to a TV monitor somewhere. Maria Cooper, Gigi Perreau and her husband, Frank Gallo, actor David Hedison and young actress Judy Lewis, the daughter of Loretta Young, threw together a TV viewing party, giving Dolores this advantage over stage actors, who never get to see their own work.

If her Elvis Presley connection would be the one most recalled by the press at the time of her entrance into Regina Laudis, her next picture would be the movie most mentioned.
Where the Boys Are
was a modestly budgeted comedy-drama about the annual Easter pilgrimage of college students to Florida beaches. Coming as it did at the end of cinema censorship by the Hays Office, it was one of the first teen films to explore premarital sex. Its producer was the veteran Joe Pasternak, who had his own unit at MGM, producing among others the films of the studio’s top star of the fifties, Dolores’ uncle Mario Lanza.

Directing would be Henry Levin, a serviceable craftsman who specialized in frothy sex comedies and enjoyed an enviable reputation of bringing films in on budget. As Levin was handled by the Gersh Agency, Harry Bernsen got an early look at the script and felt the pivotal role would be perfect for Dolores. Levin agreed and suggested her to Pasternak, who coincidentally had just met Dolores at a party and was struck by her charm. Up to that point, Pasternak had had his eye on Jane Fonda for the role.

Hal Wallis was only too happy to loan her out, and Paul Nathan thought exposure in a glossy MGM film aimed at the massive youth audience could only enhance her status, especially since she would have top billing. Harry Bernsen was sure this was the break he had been working for since her return from Broadway.

Her coworkers were Paula Prentiss, Yvette Mimieux, Connie Francis, Jim Hutton, George Hamilton and Frank Gorshin. It was Henry Levin’s style to run a happy set. He felt strongly that if the actors liked each other, it would come across on the screen. This worked especially well for the girls, whose on-screen chemistry was complimented by several reviewers.

Paula Prentiss has bright memories of those days. “Shortly after the start of the movie, which was my first one, I came down with one lulu of a cold. Dolores would drop by my apartment bringing chicken soup and sympathy. She was so open and loving. As I was fresh out of school and not acquainted with Hollywood, her caring gesture was as surprising as it was welcome.

“I had been raised a Catholic but had been away from Catholicism for a while. I felt deep down that if God really wanted me back, He would send a sign. I’ve always thought that Dolores was that sign. I knew I should cling to such a person.” Though Paula didn’t return to Catholicism then—she married Richard Benjamin, a Jew, and raised two children in the Jewish faith—she is once again Catholic and visits her former costar at Regina Laudis.

In an interview with
Night Moves
on the occasion of the film’s thirtieth anniversary, Mother Dolores made the statement that she has always thought
Where the Boys Are
was a “message film”.

From the first reading of the script, I felt it took a strong moral tone, which was passed on to its youthful audience in a comedic way. Teenage girls, especially, could find something to think about as they struggled with personal-relationship puzzles, and most of the “message” lines were spoken by my character, Merritt Andrews, a liberal-thinking but strongly moral student
.

Where the Boys Are
was a very good experience for all of us at a time in our country’s life when we trusted our innocence and believed in the meaning of lasting friendships. That is the one lingering memory I have of that film—that we all did become friends
.

One man may have hoped for more. Some cast members were sure Henry Levin entertained romantic notions about Dolores. She remains mum on this subject.

—All I know is I got a lot of close-ups
.

In the final days of production, I experienced a second “haunting”. Sister Dolores Marie visited during filming. She was on the set for the hospital scene with Yvette. It had gone well, but I hadn’t felt any satisfaction. I seemed to be separated from what was happening on the soundstage and had to struggle to relate to what was going on around me. Suddenly I had this overwhelming feeling not to fight it, to let the drifting apart happen. Inside me, I heard the words, barely whispered, “Don’t fight it. Don’t fight it
.”

I felt I had to share these odd happenings with someone who might possibly understand. I told Sister Dolores Marie about the “voice in the mirror” and what had just happened and confided that I feared I might have a vocation to religious life. Sister looked into my eyes and warned, “You better think that over, Dolores. Give it a long, long thought
.”