Where the Boys Aren’t

Actress Dolores Hart, left, escorted by banker and investor Serge Semenenko, arrives for premiere of Lawrence of Arabia, in Hollywood on Dec. 21, 1962. Hart walked away from stardom in 1963 to become a nun at an abbey in rural Bethlehem, Conn., which needs millions of dollars in renovations to meet safety code upgrades.

How do you marry God after you’ve kissed the King?

Easy. Just ask Dolores Hart.

The 73-year-old Benedictine nun is planning to attend the Oscars next Sunday. She will be a lot more covered up than she was the last time she went to the ceremony — in 1959, as a presenter and a gorgeous starlet who had given a blushing Elvis his first screen kiss.

Grace Kelly deserted Hollywood at 26 to become the bride of a prince. Hart, dubbed “the next Grace Kelly,” deserted Hollywood at 24 to become a bride of Christ.

That stunning spiritual elopement is the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary called “God Is Bigger Than Elvis,” a rare look behind the walls of the cloistered abbey in rural Connecticut where Hart has lived for half a century. (It will be shown on HBO in April.)

“God was the vehicle,” she said of her odyssey. “He was the bigger Elvis.”

Nuns in America are a dying breed, and the church’s antediluvian male hierarchy gets more worked up about allowing Catholic women contraceptives than investigating sexual abuse of children by priests.

But Hart soldiers on at the bucolic Abbey of Regina Laudis, a Benedictine monastery and working farm in Bethlehem, Conn., which observes three periods of silence a day. She is a mother prioress and spiritual guide to 38 other nuns (and she is the only nun who is a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences).

Audrey Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman played luminous nuns in movies, but Hart was the luminous beauty who, in real life, cut her hair and put on the habit. When I was little, we would watch her old movies on TV — especially “King Creole,” “Where The Boys Are” and “Come Fly With Me” — and puzzle over why anyone would leave sparkly Hollywood for a strict nunnery.

The British tabloids considered it such lunacy that they kept trying to scout out the “real” reason, reporting on a rumor that Hart had scurried off to the convent in shame after bearing Elvis’s love child.

“If anybody knew me, I mean, I was just too Catholic,” she said, denying the gossip to ABC’s “20/20” in 2002.

The documentary begins with Hollywood publicity shots and clips showing Hart — with her big blue eyes, creamy voice and lithe figure — draped in furs, gowns and men. Flash forward to the senior citizen in her old-school habit, leavened with a jaunty black beret decorated with three bird pins. As you watch her playing cancan music for a pet parrot, you wonder: Could she be the only woman who starred in movies who has never had any cosmetic enhancements? [more]

SOURCE

NY Times