The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (58 page)

—
Dawn was right. The Douglases have been immensely important in our lives. Not only did they become oblates; they also were named, in 1971, our first monastic scholars
.

A Caprice
became the first full production performed at our fair. It was quite ambitious and was greeted with enthusiasm by a small but very supportive audience. With this acceptance, James and Dawn began thinking about forming a repertory company at Regina Laudis. It was just a germ of an idea, but over the next few summers we presented another comedy of manners, a medieval mystery play and three Shakespeare plays. Attendance steadily grew. There was no denying that the plays were becoming a centering force for the fairs
.

Thirty-Five

Maria Cooper Janis confided she would like to introduce someone to Regina Laudis—the actress Patricia Neal
.

I knew who Patricia Neal was, of course, but had never met her or even seen the film for which she won her Oscar because I was already inside the monastery when it was released
. Hud
has since been shown to the Community, and Patricia is perfection in it
.

In 1963 Patricia, four months pregnant with her fifth child, suffered a series of massive strokes that left her incapacitated for several years. She gave birth to the beautiful Lucy, known in the press as the “miracle baby”, and over time recovered with the support and help of her husband, the writer Roald Dahl. She eventually returned to her career, which resulted in a second Oscar nomination
.

Maria’s request to introduce Patricia came as a shock. Many years earlier, Patricia had been romantically involved with Maria’s father, and Maria once vented her anger at Patricia by spitting at her. Over the years, Maria never spoke of her
.

But, while accompanying Byron on a European concert tour, she had literally bumped into Patricia. Patricia’s straightforward desire to connect and Maria’s intuitive sense that her former enemy was in deep emotional distress had fomented a close friendship. Maria was sincerely concerned about Patricia’s well-being and felt that she would gain much comfort by visiting the abbey. I wrote a letter to Patricia at her Great Missenden home in England, inviting her to visit when she was next in the States
.

That spring, Patricia came to America to receive an honorary doctorate from Rockford College in Illinois and accepted my invitation
.

“I thought I was looking forward to the visit,” Patricia remembered, “but on the drive up to the abbey from New York I suddenly panicked and wondered what the hell I was doing, going to a Catholic nunnery.

“Upon arrival, I was taken to meet the nun who had written to me. I remembered her face. I had gone to see
Lonelyhearts
because my good friend Maureen Stapleton was in it and was quite taken by the work of the young ingenue. Now, face-to-face, I looked into the most astonishing blue eyes I had ever seen.

“Over the next year, whenever I was back in America, I arranged the trip to have a few days at my nunnery. When my marriage to Roald ended, I was hit very hard. I left England for good and returned to the States. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the rest of my life. The only professional work offered me was in commercials, one for a coffee company and the other, fittingly, for headache tablets. I was a real basket case. I called Mother Dolores to say I desperately needed to come for a long visit.”

It wasn’t difficult to see that this woman was in deep pain over her personal life, but she was also an actress chomping at the bit to get back on stage. I sensed she had to return to her profession if only in something presented to the Community before she could be open to rebuilding her life. I asked Dick to suggest something and perhaps come back and work with her
.

I had long admired Patricia Neal, and although the possibility of working with her was daunting, it was too tempting to turn down. I recommended a reading rather than a more demanding full play and suggested a scene from
Anastasia
—the “recognition scene” between the woman who claims to be the only surviving heir of Czar Nicholas II, who was murdered along with his family during the Russian Revolution, and the dowager empress, whose recognition Anastasia desperately needs. Wonderful scene—and only two characters, both women. Mother Dolores asked me—a little too innocently, I thought—who I would want to play Anastasia. As if she didn’t know.

With permission to break the Great Silence, the three of us met after Compline every evening for a week to rehearse in Cosmas and Damian, the small hut inside the enclosure used for chant classes. It would be a staged reading, Mother Dolores and Patricia carrying their scripts, but both memorized their lines quickly.

It was decided that the scene would be videotaped to show to the Community at a later date. To familiarize myself with the videotaping procedure, I had to begin taping our rehearsals. Since there was no tape-editing equipment at the abbey, I would have to edit the scene in the camera, stopping and starting to include close-ups within master shots as we went along. This is not a comfortable procedure for any actor, and it hobbled us all.

I was struck at how alike their techniques were—both instinctive actors through and through. It was fascinating to watch them playing with and against each other and yet somehow uncomfortably tense. The atmosphere became more like a Hollywood soundstage than a monastery hut. Patricia, for all her enthusiasm at the beginning, became aggressive and demanding, monopolizing my attention and all but snubbing her coplayer. Mother Dolores, reacting to Patricia’s antagonism, became impatient, distant. Arguments sprang up between them.

I seemed to be the target of Patricia’s discontent, and her edginess was rubbing off on me. Tension grew between us—really, to the boiling point. In rehearsal, Dick framed a close-up of Patricia, an over-the-shoulder shot, and although I would just be feeding lines and my face wouldn’t be in the frame, I had been trained to give the same performance I would give when the camera was on me. When the reverse angle was shot for my close-up, Patricia dismissively read her lines in a dry monotone while she looked out the window. That got my inner diva’s Irish up. I sharply reminded Patricia of her craft. She took exception to that, liberally sprinkling her remarks with one particular four-letter expletive. Over and over and over
.

All of a sudden I heard Mother Dolores’ voice in a surprisingly curse-laden tirade that ended with “I am sick and tired of
your
miserable attitude. Why don’t you leave?” Patricia stomped out into the night. A few moments later, Mother Dolores also exited, leaving me frozen in the middle of the room.

I had the sickening feeling in my stomach that I had, in a stupid outburst, ruined further communication with Patricia. I had no idea when she walked out after my flaying words that this confrontation between two actresses would be crucial to our ultimate connection
.

I looked for Patricia, but she had obviously left the enclosure. An hour later, I was summoned to the abbey entrance. It was Patricia at our front door. “I am a dreadful woman”, she began. “Please forgive me. I don’ want to leave
.”

How did this happen? How had she found the key to come back? The answer is one you would expect. It was a person of Christ, someone who loved me and loved the abbey, who had intercepted Patricia. It was Dawn Douglas. Dawn was just leaving the abbey property when Patricia shot out of the enclosure gate. She intercepted Pat and calmed her down, ultimately urging her back. A coincidence? No. But what a mystery of friendship and love
.

“Dawn helped me put my behavior into perspective”, Patricia said. “Mother Dolores had welcomed me into their hospitality, and in exchange I brought anger and bitterness with me. I couldn’t get the thought of the woman who broke up my marriage out of my mind. Like a venom, it poisoned everything I did.”

Our rehearsals continued uninterrupted, and I became aware that I was witnessing not only a professional alliance of two actresses working in far less than ideal circumstances yet giving thoughtful—and generous—performances but also the birth of a remarkable relationship between two women. Over the thirty years since
Anastasia
, I’ve marveled at how loving their relationship is. It can get edgy at times, but the bantering is civil, firmly based in the respect of one formidable fighter for another. They are honest women who share one indispensable ingredient for enduring friendship: a sense of humor.

“It was Mother Dolores’ scheme, I’m sure,” Patricia continued, “but Lady Abbess invited me to spend an entire month at Regina Laudis, and not merely as a guest, she said. If I accepted, I would live in the monastery like a prepostulant.

“I traded my street clothes for the black dress of the postulant and moved into a bare cell. I followed a strict regimen of work and prayer, kept the Great Silence, helped bake bread and weed the garden, and every morning, after church, I met with Mother Dolores. There were times when I felt I never wanted to return to the outside world.

“She challenged me. ‘You haven’t lost yourself’, she insisted. ‘You haven’t lost your talent. You cannot lose what you have given your body to bring into being—you haven’t lost your children. You can give life forever—if you will stop trying to even out the score. You must remember everything, not just the bad parts.’

“To remember? I didn’t think that was possible for me any longer. My strokes had robbed me of my past, and I had gotten used to not even trying to remember. She felt the stroke was the key, that I would never have come into the reflective dimension of an enclosure except for the stroke. I would be just another aging actress fighting other aging actresses for a guest spot on
The Love Boat
.”

Since all postulants are asked to write about their lives in order to begin to understand who they are and what they are called to be in this life, I suggested that Patricia do that. Because she found writing difficult, we gave Patricia a recorder to speak her memories into. Whenever she visited, she would add to that memory bank
.

It began to occur to me that Patricia’s growing library of audiotapes might be the basis for an autobiography. A friend of the abbey took the idea to the publisher Simon and Schuster and got a firm and unusual commitment: Patricia would have five years to complete the memoir, and the publisher would not have the right to read any of the work in progress until the due date
.

Over the next three years, Patricia made many visits to the abbey. We kept a room for her at Sheepfold, the small no-frills farmhouse that had been Lauren Ford’s home. All the work was done at the abbey and, therefore, subject to Patricia’s schedule and the restrictions on my availability when she was here
.

As we approached the end of the third year of collaboration with little but an extraordinary cache of notes, I realized that we would never make our deadline. That’s when I asked Dick to come aboard as our partner. For the next two years, he and Patricia would meet at Sheepfold, and drafts would fly by fax machines between Bethlehem and Los Angeles until the due date for the manuscript was upon us
.

We three spent the last week going over the text word by word, huddled together in Corpus Christi. Three days before the manuscript had to be delivered, Patricia stumbled in the darkened basement hallway and fractured her wrist. She was taken to Saint Mary’s Hospital in Waterbury, where the remainder of the last-minute corrections were made at her bedside
.

I drove into New York City and presented the finished manuscript of
As I Am
to our editor—whom we had never met—on the exact date it was due. A week later, we received a letter from her that began, “I must be the happiest editor in New York City.” Not one change in our draft was requested.
As I Am
was published in 1988.

Thirty-Six

The abbey theater did not come into existence because I had had some kind of plan. When I entered the monastery, I believed that I had put acting behind me forever and that I was going to live a life of quiet contemplation
.

Our theater happened—as is often the case in Benedictine life—because other people had a vocation that came into relationship with my vocation. It was the synergy created by our mutual love for the theater that brought our theater into being
.

Since our
Anastasia
tape had not been shown to the Community (everything in its own time at the abbey), I asked Patricia Neal if she would perform her one-woman show about Helen Keller for us. Patricia was devoted to Helen Keller. She had played Helen’s mother in the original Broadway production of
The Miracle Worker
and, following her recovery from the strokes, performed readings dedicated to Miss Keller’s life that Roald Dahl had written for her
.

Patricia gave the performance several times in the Unicorn tent on a hill outside the enclosure, before an audience of not only the Community, which supplied singing interludes for the readings, but many outside guests who were very generous with donations after the show
.

During the last performance, an electrical storm with heavy rain knocked out electricity in the area. But it did not stop Patricia’s presentation. She moved, with her audience, inside the abbey chapel where, lit by candles, she completed the show to a packed house
.

Following the performance, Patricia, exhausted but exhilarated, turned to me and said, “You can’ let that happen again. You can’ have performances rained out. You have to build a theater here, right on this hill
.”

Our theater was built the following year with the help of Patricia and several other benefactors. It is an open-air theater that can seat two hundred people. It was designed by Mother Placid to capture the character of a country barn, and Father Prokes kept a watchful eye during construction to be sure her vision was honored. The stage opens at the rear to the woods on our property so that the trees and the birds—and sometimes the insects—are a part of the theatrical world we create. Patricia made it happen. It bears the name she gave it that day—The Gary-The Olivia—honoring Gary Cooper and her daughter who died so very young
.