Nun’s journey: From movie stardom to the monastery

Reviewed by Gunther Simmermacher

As a young actress, Dolores Hart appeared in films with the likes of Elvis Presley and Montgomery Clift  and then suddenly abandoned her career to enter the religious life.

Half a century later, Benedictine Mother Dolores Hart recounts her life with the help of an old friend, Richard DeNeut, in a book whose title refers to a quote by St Benedict. Mother Dolores certainly has lived an astonishing life.

Her childhood was marked by turmoil, with an absent father and an alcoholic mother. Attending a Catholic school in Chicago  although her aunt was a nun, it was purely for convenience  Dolores converted to Catholicism when she was ten, based on a misunderstanding!

In her account of that period in her life we encounter a succession of movie stars from the late 1950s and early 60s, including Gary Cooper, Anthony Quinn, Karl Malden, Myrna Loy, George Peppard, Tab Hunter and Peter Sellers, directors such as George Cukor and Michael Curtiz (a bully), and producer Hal Wallis, at whose urging she changed her surname from Hicks to Hart. She gave Presley his first screen kiss. Inevitably Elvis, the enthusiastic womaniser, asked her out. She turned him down.

It was during a one-year run in a Broadway show that Dolores began a relationship with the Benedictine Regina Laudis monastery in Connecticut, that over a few years grew into her joining the order there.

Her call to a religious vocation, instead of married life with fiance Don Robinson, received a boost when she met Pope John XXIII while playing St Clare in a film on St Francis of Assisi.

The process leading up to following the call to the religious life, with all tensions and fears and hopes and inexorableness this involved, is described in some candid detail, as are her experiences of the novitiate, during which she cried herself to sleep every night for years because of a terrifying experience of aloneness.

Over the years at Regina Laudis, Mother Dolores would assume positions of leadership, being part of a group that modernised the self-sufficient community in which nuns have been known to drive tractors and fell trees. Her contacts, which she managed to maintain despite living in an encloistered community, have helped what is now an abbey to build and maintain an amateur theatre.

The glimpses into the religious life which the book provides are gratifying, and in some ways quite unexpected. Mother Dolores openness in this regard especially is a gift.

The Ear of the Heart adopts an unusual narrative style over its excessive length of 539 pages, which would have been well-served by some ruthless editing.

DeNeut is the lead voice, narrating Mother Dolores life with sometimes intrusive personal interjections. This is interspersed by paragraphs in Mother Dolores voice (in italics), and, randomly, unnecessary interview-style exchanges. That structure doesnt work well; though one is never left in doubt about who is speaking, it is distracting. A more traditional structure might have been painful to negotiate, but it would have produced a better book.

Nonetheless, the book succeeds in telling the extraordinary story of a nun whose honesty, spirituality, humour, courage and generosity are thoroughly appealing and frequently inspiring.