The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey From Hollywood to Holy Vows (3 page)

Added to the English mix were Dutch, French, Irish, Welsh, and Norwegian, as well as a touch of the exotic—a red-headed Jewess from Spain and an American Indian. In 1871 the Atkins side of the family settled in Chicago, where they saw their home burned to the ground in the great fire.

The entire Atkins-Hicks tribe was churchgoing with religious convictions as varied as their nationalities: Catholic, Jewish and Protestant, as well as Christian Science and Mormon. Dolores’ great-grandparents, Reuben and Eliza Atkins, English converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, moved from England to Salt Lake City to join Brigham Young, but when that leader espoused polygamy, Atkins refused to take another wife, earning the leader’s wrath. The couple was ordered to leave Salt Lake City within twenty-four hours.

Jack Lyhan and Dolores’ paternal grandmother met in college, where Jack was a blackface performer in minstrel shows, giving vent to an urge to perform that had been thwarted by his parents’ insistence that he study to become a doctor. Mary Atkins, known as May, was the daughter of successful farmers. She had hoped to become an actress, traveling for a short time with a theatrical group performing at resorts in Indiana and Wisconsin. But, at the turn of the century, an actress was considered half a step above a trollop, so her family pushed her into a teaching career in speech and dramatic arts.

Jack, a Catholic, and May, a convert at marriage, produced three children: John, Bert and Betty. But Jack was not a model head of household. He was an abusive husband and father, whose main targets were his wife and second son, Bert, both of whom were subject to severe beatings. May, in turn, compensated for this abuse by overprotecting Bert, babying and spoiling him.

The cruelty and maltreatment over the next five years rose to such a level that finally even her priest advised May to divorce her husband. She took the priest’s advice, repeatedly refusing Jack’s pleas to reconcile, preferring to rear the children alone.

In 1929 May took a second husband, James Earl Hicks, whom she had met at a political convention. A tall man with Clark Gable good looks, Hicks didn’t have Lyhan’s formal education or moneyed background, but he promised to be a more affable family man.

May’s second union added three girls, Gladys, Shirley and Virginia, to her first family of three, all of whom Hicks adopted. Hicks turned out to be only a sometimes jolly parent. Gladys and Shirley remembered that he could be “unbelievably mean”. He too was rough on Bert, whose dependency upon his mother grew stronger. His siblings remember that Bert was always involved in some theatrical venture or another. He figured out early that all he needed to get by were his good looks and bad-boy charm, a tactic that separated him from his older brother, John, who was, even at an early age, ambitious and hardworking.

In the mid 1930s, after several successful years as a manufacturer of flavored butter spreads, Hicks lost his business. He was forced to move his family into a modest flat on the north side of Chicago. Money was scarce, though he managed to scrape together enough to have a nice Christmas in 1935. But on that Christmas Day, Hicks left the house on an errand and never came back, leaving May to raise all six children alone in the middle of the Great Depression.

—Of all my ancestral transgressors of laws or moral codes or commandments, the one I find difficult to forgive is Grandpa Hicks. He may have been suffering—he had just lost his business and couldn’t provide for his family—and perhaps felt he couldn’t live up to the tenets of his Christian Science beliefs. But he walked out on his family on Christmas, and, to my mind, that was not Christian. That was a sin
.

May Hicks could have taken her children and gone home to the family farm, but she was ferociously proud. She wouldn’t ask anyone, including her parents, for anything. She resolved to leave teaching for better-paying employment, but she went from one low-paying job to another until she and her children found themselves and all their belongings on the sidewalk. Young Bert was especially upset, flying into a rage, breaking windows and creating havoc. It was the first time the family became aware of his violent side.

The Salvation Army came to their aid, moving the family temporarily into their Home for Women and Children and helping May land a job demonstrating Singer sewing machines at the Marshall Field’s department store. May rose with regular promotions to the position of buyer in the furniture department. While she was working, her “first family” took on the responsibility of caring for her “second family” in their new home, a duplex on Chicago’s west side. But she never forfeited her position as matriarch and maintained a strong influence on her children, investing them with a keen awareness of the hard realities of life. She saw to it that all of them attended church every Sunday, and she passed on her signature optimism. Even during the blackest days, her mantra was “Things are going to get better.”

—
I remember her as genteel and high class, in many ways the perfect foil for my other grandmother, who had more than a passing acquaintance with the mean streets of Chicago
.

Esther Pittman Brown Kude née Bowen, though of a different class, was on a par in rank with May. She was also a beauty, but what made the two women close was that Esther was an equally proud and strong lady. Having been born poor, she learned early how not to get pushed around.

—
She loved to tell the story of how she walked to school without shoes in 18-degree weather, not because she didn’t have shoes—she had one pair—but just to show the kids how tough she was
.

Esther was thrice wed, the first time at age sixteen to Lee Pittman, Harriett’s father. Shortly after Harriett’s birth, Pittman got a teenage girl pregnant. When Esther learned of this she did two things. She demanded he shave every hair off his body because “if he was going to behave like a baby, he was going to look like one.”

—And he did as he was told
.

Then Esther divorced him so that he could marry the pregnant girl, Helen, with whom he had a long, happy marriage and seven children. The resilient Esther remained friendly with her first husband, now a Catholic convert, and saw to it that Harriett did the same. Harriett and her father were close for his entire life, and she often brought Dolores with her when she visited his home in Williamsfield, Illinois.

When Harriett was nine, Esther married her second husband, Paul Brown, who was a preacher and a wife beater. One day Brown took off for California and never came back. Alone, with mounting bills, Esther got a job as a waitress at a local bar and grill called the Round Table, a job she would keep for the rest of her life.

After Esther’s second divorce, Fred Kude, a projectionist at a local movie house, entered her life. This union would provide the stable core in Dolores’ early years.

When Dolores was two years old, Bert and Harriett separated, the first of many partings in their turbulent union. Those two years had been frustrating ones for Bert, who drifted from one meaningless job to another, increasingly fearful that fame and fortune would elude him. He began to drink more and more heavily and was as abusive to his wife as his father had been to his mother. But, his brother remembered, “Bert had to get drunk to be as cruel as our father was sober.” At one time or another, Dolores’ paternal aunts all witnessed violent outbreaks, with Harriett running screaming from Bert’s attacks, sometimes carrying tiny Dolores in her arms.

Harriett filed for divorce, charging cruelty. Before it was granted, however, the judge called the couple into his chambers and effected a reconciliation. He wrote up a Code of Conduct that both the eighteen-year-old wife and nineteen-year-old husband had to sign. Convinced that the paper was a good foundation for future stability, the judge dismissed the suit. The story made the Chicago newspapers, which printed the agreement. Under the terms of the Code of Conduct, (1) Bert had to attend church voluntarily for one year, (2) both had to agree not to run to their parents to settle future domestic problems but (3) allow Bert’s lawyer to act as arbiter of any dispute.

The well-intentioned judge’s code would not ultimately save the marriage, nor would it end Bert’s violence toward Harriett. But the fresh start was benefited by Bert’s getting a job as a commercial model, something for which he was suited. He posed as the attractive suitor admiring the soft hands of the beautiful girl in magazine ads for Jergens lotion. He filled the same role in ads for Lady Esther 4-Purpose Face Cream and Trushay hand lotion. He also began appearing in the popular, photo-illustrated romance novelettes, featured in women’s magazines such as
McCall’s
and
Good Housekeeping
. These photos dramatized scenes from the stories. They were not a particularly impressive showcase, but Bert achieved minor star status, which fed his ego, and the jobs brought him into contact with a lot of pretty and available girls, which set him on the road to chronic infidelity. He basked in this attention and no longer minded having to take the occasional regular job when he wasn’t working as a model.

While Bert was moonlighting as a soda jerk at the Aragon Ballroom, a job he took as a way of meeting influential people, he was discovered by the Chicago-based talent scout for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Definitely the matinee-idol type at six foot two, Bert bore a striking resemblance to one of that studio’s biggest stars, Robert Taylor, especially with the mustache he grew at the talent scout’s request. Thirty-something Taylor was about to depart MGM for the army. Presumably as a twenty-one-year-old replacement for him, Bert was tested and signed by MGM to a stock player contract. In the days when studios had stables of actors under contract, it was a usual practice to keep their stars in line by having a similar—and often younger—type in the wings. James Craig was MGM’s threat to Clark Gable. Warner Bros. had Dane Clark for defense against John Garfield. Sheree North, in her blonde-bombshell period, was signed by Twentieth Century-Fox when Marilyn Monroe was misbehaving. Rarely did any of the threats go beyond being just that.

Bert Hicks would not prove an exception. In his first year under contract, he did bit parts in four MGM movies before the studio dropped his option. Almost immediately he was signed by Twentieth Century-Fox, and he appeared in a walk-on with Betty Grable in
Sweet Rosie O’Grady
before World War II interrupted his career. He joined the Army Air Forces and took his training at Sheppard Field in Texas.

In 1943, Broadway’s Moss Hart wrote and put into production the US Army Air Forces’
Winged Victory
, which followed a group of air cadets through their training to the nightly raids on Germany and Japan. A call went out to Air Forces servicemen who had been actors to fill the cast. When the show opened in November 1943, the cast featured 209 members of the armed forces, including future stars Karl Malden, Edmond O’Brien, Red Buttons, Don Taylor, Gary Merrill, Barry Nelson, Lee J. Cobb, Kevin McCarthy and Peter Lind Hayes. Two of those, Malden and Taylor, would work with Dolores a decade and a half later.

Private Bert Hicks had a small part in the play, and a close buddy, Alfred Arnold Cocozza, nicknamed Freddy, sang in the chorus. Malden and fellow cast member Phyllis Avery remembered Bert as being gregarious and fun but also an irresponsible actor. He would miss performances and, without his wife and child near, most of his free time was spent drinking and womanizing.

Winged Victory
became the megahit of the 1943 Broadway season, winning critics and audiences alike. When the show closed in May 1944, Bert brought his buddy Freddy Cocozza home to Chicago to meet his sister Betty, whose photo had taken Freddy’s fancy. He was a hefty man with a voice that had been compared to Enrico Caruso’s and wasn’t shy about showing off his talent.

—
In fact, he used to sing so often—and so loud—that Granny once told him to shut up when he all but shattered her wine glasses. Aunt Betty, however, was more than impressed. Aunt Betty was in love
.

The entire cast of
Winged Victory
transferred to the screen when Bert’s home studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, made the movie version in 1944. Bert’s role barely survived in one scene. Directed by George Cukor, the movie is the typically patriotic, sentimental fare of the war years, but its cast includes five future Oscar winners: Malden, O’Brien, Buttons, Judy Holliday in her film debut and Cukor, who would also be one of Dolores’ future directors.

Bert Hicks might have been starring in movies if the war hadn’t interrupted his career at Fox. After the war, the return of Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power and Victor Mature shoved Bert back to stock-player status, acting in B movies and appearing opposite aspiring actresses in screen tests. But his name popped up with regularity in the columns, usually preceded with the words “heartthrob” or “sigh guy”.

Harriett was always supportive of Bert, subordinating her own dreams of a career to his. After she and Dolores joined Bert in Los Angeles, she committed herself to making the marriage work, hoping that Bert would change. Bert’s infidelity was, of course, beyond Dolores’ comprehension. It wasn’t until she was in her teen years that Harriett confided to her that her father had been unfaithful during their entire married life.

I remember the fights, the yelling, but I don’t think I really connected them with the bruises I would often see on my mother. I remember, too, long periods of silence and waiting for the next explosion. It always came. But as violent as he would get with my mother, my father never lifted a hand to me. He never struck me or even said a cross word to me. I was never afraid of him. I always knew that he loved me and had a sense of pride in me. But I don’t remember Daddy being a constant presence in my life
.

We did have happy times as a family, especially when things were going well for him at the studio. Most of those memories are centered on trips to the beach. Both my parents adored the ocean, Mommy especially because she loved looking tan. They would pack me and my new favorite toy, Bulgy, a huge pop-eyed red rubber whale who had replaced Panda in my affections, in the rumble seat of our secondhand car, and off we would go for a day at Santa Monica Beach. While Mommy and Daddy sunned and swam, I was kept literally under wraps because I would sunburn in five minutes
.