The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows by Dolores Hart, Richard DeNeut Read Free Book Online Page B

would always mean my father, so Al became “Pop”. Pop worked days at the liquor store and nights at the restaurant. Mom often joined him in the evenings to help out or just to have drinks with friends after closing .
    Harriett soon made friends with the neighborhood coffee-klatch ladies, who had been accommodating enough to loan her a sewing machine. The kids in the area were mostly boys, but they immediately accepted Dolores. Some years later, in a magazine interview, Harriett remembered her daughter “played football with boys before she dated them. She was always taking bikes apart and putting them together again. She would get on the roof and fix the TV antennae. The boys thought of her not as a girl but as their equal, a comrade who could whistle through her teeth just like they did.”
—Mom taught me how to whistle through my teeth—a loud, piercing, real-boy whistle that, later in life, I found effective for hailing cabs in New York City. I once whistled like that in the common room at the monastery, and food dropped from mouths .
    Older sister and younger brother bonded easily. Dolores and Martin were close in age, so there was no awkward initiation period. She was also enough of a tomboy to make for comfortable coexistence and sufficiently pretty to make him feel proud. They shared a fondness for Dragnet and I Love Lucy on TV, which Dolores got Jewish Martin to join her in giving up for Lent. Together they built a small stage in the garage, where they presented puppet shows to family and neighborhood friends.
    Pop took us on excursions to Rosarita Beach and Las Vegas. At holiday time, Mom would decorate the house like Macy’s department store. She even accompanied me to Mass on occasion. I was starting to experience the things the children at Saint Gregory’s spoke of when they talked about their families .
    I had, at long last, a strong sense that Mom and I were going to be all right, that we were finally going to make it as a family. All the stressful years that had taken their toll on Mom were over, and she seemed truly content for the first time in a long while. Our relationship, which had always been close when I was very young, got closer. I became her confidante, a younger sister .
    Dolores saw little of her father during this period. Bert had married yet again but still had not settled down. His drinking and his wife abuse continued—a sympathetic Harriett often administering to his battered third wife, Deena—and he went from job to job in Los Angeles and Chicago. He tried selling used cars for a short time and then sold pots and pans door-to-door, pretending to be a religious man. That was a brief career, ended abruptly by the authorities. Forever chasing the butterfly of success, he even tried his hand at gold mining in Alaska, but the Hicks Gold Mining Company was another short-lived addition to his many failed schemes.
—We got one thing out of the mining company—a lot of free stationery. I’m still using it for note paper .
    When it came time to enroll in school, Dolores told her mother she didn’t want to attend public school. Saint Francis de Sales was close to their Sherman Oaks home, but Dolores could not be enrolled because she was from a divorced home and had a Baptist mother and a Jewish stepfather.
    This got Harriett’s Irish up, and she confronted the priest at Saint Francis de Sales and read him the riot act. “I may be a Baptist,” she said, “in fact, I may even be a heathen, and I am divorced and married to a Jew. But my kid is Catholic because she chose to be Catholic, and if you refuse her admittance because of me, you are defeating the message of your gospel. Jesus did not refuse the little children, and if you don’t take her, between the Baptist and the Jew, this kid won’t stand a chance. So you better find a way.”
    Dolores was entered into the sixth grade, impressed that her mother had gotten through to him with her impassioned speech. But Harriett later