The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows Read Online Free PDF Page B

them out myself, copying the expressions of the actresses. I began to work out the reasons for pausing or holding a certain look, which allowed for a feeling to be portrayed. I can’t believe I was thinking about those things in the second grade .
    My favorites were Myrna Loy, Gary Cooper and Loretta Young. I loved The Song of Bernadette. I had never seen a human being as ethereal as Jennifer Jones. I loved Miracle on 34th Street and The Bishop’s Wife and a year or so later , The Snake Pit and Sunset Boulevard, darker dramas I wasn’t supposed to see. My very favorite movie, though, was Blithe Spirit. I loved the actress who played the ghost, and for years I thought she was Lucille Ball because of her bright red hair .
— The single performance, however, that made me want to be an actress was Gene Tierney’s in Laura.
    Grandpa got me my first job—at age seven—washing tombstones at the cemetery behind our duplex. I got a nickel a marker, and when I earned two dollars I bought a Tinkertoy set. Grandpa was a mechanical mastermind and had a workshop in our basement. He motorized everything, including my Tinkertoys—together we built a working Ferris wheel. I would stand and watch him, and whenever he asked for a “gozinta” I would hop to it .
—Gozinta?
That’s something that goes into something else .
    Although Harriett thought that she was sending Dolores to Chicago on a temporary basis, when it came time to return her to Los Angeles, Esther balked. Harriett made a beeline for Chicago. Tug-of-war was declared.
    I sensed very early that a battle was going on for me. Mommy and Granny were very much alike, each fiercely protective of her territory. The two of them could write the most affectionate letters to one another and exchange extravagant expressions of love on the phone yet, within minutes in each other’s company, turn into snarling competitors. How often I heard “This is my daughter, not your daughter” or “She’s more mine than yours.” I instinctively knew I needed both of them and somehow managed to referee .
    For five years, Dolores bounced between them like a tennis ball, except that the rackets were swung at one another. At first, she spent school terms in Los Angeles, vacations in Chicago. When she hit the third grade, the schedule reversed.
    When Mother Dolores looked back on those years from the vantage point of a half century, she determined that she had had the best of both worlds. The Kude household provided her with family and stable roots. In Los Angeles, Harriett was a constantly available presence, as much a girlfriend as a mother—she was, after all, in her early twenties—and their time together produced a solid bond that stood strong against later assaults that would have permanently alienated most mothers and daughters.
    Those years also provided Dolores with an opportunity to get to know her extended family, both sides offering dramatically rich characters. Her maternal great-grandmother, Louella May DeWitt Bowen, called Nellie, was another strong-willed beauty, five foot ten and as thin as the rails she would chop for firewood. She was of real pioneer stock, having come east from Kansas to Illinois in a covered wagon to marry Casper Bowen, a blind coffin maker and fiddle player who regained his sight in his fortieth year and found he had a wandering eye. Once, during World War II, a nephew went AWOL and fled to Colorado to hide out. Grandma Bowen, determined to help him but with no money to make the trip, accepted a friend’s offer to take her the thousand miles—on his motorcycle. It’s not difficult to see where daughter Esther got her pluck. Unfortunately, the parallel didn’t stop there. During Grandma’s absence, Grandpa Bowen dallied.
    When I met them, they shared a three-room house—with warped linoleum-covered floors, a potbellied stove and an outhouse—across from the railroad station in Galesburg, some three hundred miles from Chicago. There was one old, old