The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (15 page)

Cyril made the introductions as I ran down the collective resumes in my mind. Cornelia Otis Skinner: famous for her performances in
Major Barbara
and
Lady Windermere’s Fan,
acclaimed for one-woman shows she had also written; stately carriage; gracious. Walter Abel—my stepfather in the play—had a forty-year career in theater and movies. I remembered Charlie Ruggles from movies I watched in Grandpa’s projection room. He twinkled in movies. Still did, I noticed. Cute Jerry Fujikawa was in the original
Teahouse of the August Moon.
What with Cyril’s twenty-year career, which included
Visit to a Small Planet
and Captain Hook in
Peter Pan
on Broadway, I was meeting over a century of theatrical stardom. Talk about intimidation
.

The other newcomer in the cast was George Peppard, who would be my fiancé in the play. I didn’t know a thing about him, but he was one good-looking guy—single, too, but it turned out we had no social life outside the theater. I always felt as if he was looking down his nose at me
.

The only familiar face that morning belonged to our costume designer who was also making her Broadway debut: Edith Head, who greeted me in front of the whole company with “Hi there, Junior!”, which gave me a stamp of approval
.

The Pleasure of His Company
may have been the last of an honored Broadway genre, the sophisticated comedy of manners that had nothing more serious on its mind than a good time. The drawing-room comedy presented simple human truths with wit and charm and was usually environmentally restricted to the upper class.
Pleasure
was written by Samuel Taylor—who had established his flair for the form with
Sabrina Fair
—and the coauthor was the show’s leading lady, Cornelia Otis Skinner. Ritchard, too, did double-duty as the director and star, playing Pogo Poole, an irresistible rogue of a playboy who descends on the San Francisco home of his ex-wife and their about-to-be-wed daughter he has not seen for many years. The plot concerns the giddy rapport of the reunited father and daughter, which threatens to break up her engagement, as well as his brief attempt to rekindle a spark in her mother.

Producing the play were the Playwrights’ Company and Fredrick Brisson. Prior to
Pleasure
, Brisson, the husband of actress Rosalind Russell, had produced only musicals. Two of them—
The Pajama Game
and
Damn Yankees!
—had been anointed with Tony Awards as the best musicals of the two preceding seasons. The Playwrights’ Company boasted a formidable list of founding members. Individually, Robert E. Sherwood, Elmer Rice, Sidney Howard, S.N. Behrman and Maxwell Anderson had written the most honored and respected American plays of the first half of the twentieth century. They founded the Playwrights’ Company in 1938, producing their own works and those of other major playwrights. In the seasons since, they had been responsible for more Tony- and Pulitzer-winning plays than any other producing organization.

—Also, Maxwell Anderson had written
Joan of Lorraine.

The company rehearsed on the Longacre stage they would occupy when the show opened. Within a few minutes of the first day, Ritchard called out to Dolores, “We can’t hear you, dear child.” She would hear that same remark, said with growing concern, throughout the day.

I seemed incapable of projecting my voice past the first few rows. At the end of rehearsal, Cyril came down to the stage and, in front of the entire company, announced that I would have to improve overnight or he would send me back to Paramount “jangling rosary beads”. I was devastated. The other actors politely smiled it off, but I was humiliated. I remembered Anna Magnani’s judgment: amateur
.

Suddenly I heard the echo of Robert Ryan’s voice. “If you ever need a vocal coach, call Alfred Dixon. Remember the name.” I contacted Mr. Dixon immediately, and he agreed to see me that same evening. He was a very pleasant man who tried to put me at ease by telling me even Katharine Hepburn had needed help
.

He looked over the script and asked what I was being paid. When I told him my rehearsal salary was $75 a week, he was stunned. He couldn’t believe that I had contracted for so many sides for so little money. Highway robbery, he called it. I confessed I had no money at the moment but promised he would be paid when I began receiving a performance salary, which he also found shockingly meager. He told me not to worry, promising that he could raise my projection level overnight
.

We worked for four hours on proper breathing exercises and making very loud mooing sounds. When I got back to the Algonquin, I continued the exercises in earnest. Within fifteen minutes, there was a gentleman from the front desk at the door, asking if there was anything wrong. Neighboring guests had complained of distressed sounds coming from my room. I assured him all was well. But I spent the rest of the night in the shower, water on full blast, mooing into a pillow until I was exhausted
.

Unbelievable as it seems, there was a small improvement in my projection the following day. Cyril didn’t mention the rosary beads once, and Robert Ryan became my patron saint. Cyril was so relieved, he promised that the company would pay for additional coaching. Mr. Dixon admitted he could teach me all I needed to know in three lessons, but to protest their “slave wages” he charged the Playwrights Company for ten weeks of tutoring
.

—
To this day, whenever I have to speak at a special occasion, I do Mr. Dixon’s exercises. The only difference is that here at the abbey we have a dairy, so there’s never a complaint
.

We rehearsed six days a week, from ten in the morning until six in the evening. Our elegant genius worked us like a madman, but I adored him. After rehearsals, I would meet with Mr. Dixon. On some days I didn’t seem able to get anything right, which made me wonder out loud why they picked me in the first place. On those days, Cornelia and Walter would be especially sweet, and my pet, dear Charlie, would shuffle over and, with a wink and an “Oh, phooey”, tell me not to let my disappointment get me down. All through the production, Charlie was my living report card. When I was good, I got a kiss
.

Cyril was a hands-on director. He would virtually act out my part, with the precise line readings he wanted as well as every pause and reaction. One might expect an actress to be annoyed at being given every inflection and gesture to copy, but I was grateful
.

Privately, Ritchard remarked that Dolores had something he couldn’t teach her: “She had this quality of light. She shone from inside.”

To create a real girl to inhabit, I began a diary
as
Jessica and filled a sizable volume. I got up enough courage to show the entries to Cyril, and he said he liked them! I think he liked more the fact that I bothered than what I wrote, but it looked as if he would put up with me after all
.

By the tenth day, it seemed as if I were spending all my time either rehearsing or sleeping. I couldn’t remember ever working as relentlessly in my life. I was always fearful that my lack of stage experience would be broadcast to the entire company if I slowed down even for a moment. I was really giving two performances, one as Jessica and one as Dolores Hart, actress
.

Jessica crept into Dolores almost nightly letters to me, too.

The play has become so much a part of my life. I don’t think I’ve set foot outside the role since we started. It’s like I’m in a coma called Jessica Poole. Today was the first day I became myself again. All of a sudden I was terribly lonely, and that’s when I called you. It is pretty bad when you are lonely in your own company and can only remedy the situation by becoming someone else for a while. But maybe that’s why I like this business so much. Jessica can do all the things that I find so terribly difficult to do. Maybe I will learn something from her. She is so completely enraptured with everything in life. There is not a tiny thing that she lets go by unappreciated. She can live and laugh and love a great deal. Sometimes I wonder what I would do if I find this isn’t the business for me, or if I find that I am not any good. That I couldn’t stand. I think I would quit on the spot. I hate halfway houses. Oh, phooey, as Charlie would say, it’s getting on to the wee hours, and I am just writing down a lot of aimless thoughts. I am afraid my mood is quite similar to a few I had when I was with you on Flores Avenue—couldn’t make much sense then either.

The “sense” Dolores yearned for concerned our personal relationship. Although what we felt for one another had not been diminished by our separation, it was coming in for more critical evaluation, and small craft warnings were posted.

Shortly after arriving in New York, Dolores had searched for a church near the hotel where she could attend daily Mass. Saint Patrick’s, on Fifth Avenue, sufficed for a while until she found Saint Malachy’s Church on West Forty-Ninth Street. It was known as the Actors’ Chapel because it had a late-night Mass actors could attend after their final curtain. Announcements of auditions could be found near the entrance alongside the religious tracts and envelopes for donations.

Because the Algonquin was within walking distance of the theater, Dolores continued to live there through the rehearsal period and the opening of the play. She had the hotel’s cheapest rate, $10.50 a night, which was still above what she could afford on her rehearsal salary, so she cut corners wherever she could to keep from dipping too often into her Hollywood reserve.

—
The hotel laundry charges were way too rich for me, so I smuggled mine out in paper bags and took it to the Chinese laundry down the street
.

I knew no one in Manhattan except Winnie and the actors in the play, who invited me out infrequently. Once in a while, I would have to attend some professional function, and on those occasions dear Ray Powers, my agent with Famous Artists in New York, would be my escort. But most nights, when everyone went home after rehearsal, I went back to the Algonquin and ate dinner alone in my room
.

New Haven was the first stop for the company’s out-of-town tryouts, and their first dress rehearsal at the Schubert Theater was also their first time in front of an audience. There were only four hundred invited guests, but that was enough to render Dolores a mass of nerves. That day she wrote me two letters, before and after the performance.

[before] All day I’ve been waiting for the curtain to go up tonight. I feel like . . . every bone in my body, every corpuscle, every part of me has been put into a vat and bleached. And the sense of terror. Wanting to run so fast and so far. I think that I would if it wasn’t for the absolute duty to what I promised and the sense that this was a moment I have waited for since I can remember. Just before curtain, I went up to Cornelia backstage and told her how nervous I was and asked if there was a way to calm stage fright. She didn’t answer, just kind of stared at me. Then, suddenly, she snapped to and apologized, “I’m so sorry, dear, I didn’t hear a word you were saying. I’m too nervous.”

[after] When I made my first entrance I found the sight of those people in the dark absolutely breathtaking. Throughout the whole performance it was amazing to realize that you don’t lose yourself completely in the part because you are constantly aware of the audience too. It was an education to know those lovely moments when you have those people in the palm of your hand as well as the panic whenever you’ve let them slip away. . . . It was great to discover I could be funny. I have this witty line about my fiancé who raises prize bulls—“He sends his semen all over the world.” I got a big laugh.

Opening night in New Haven was spectacular in more ways than one. During a scene between Dolores and Cornelia Otis Skinner, an overloaded electrical switchboard blew out with a heavy report and a brilliant flash. The stage went black. In the audience there was not a sound, and no one moved. Elliot Norton, in the
Boston Herald-American
, reported it was because the two actresses went on with the scene, “missing not one syllable, much less a line.”