Gary Cooper's Authenticity

The screen legend had the human warmth and grace to make his conversion to Catholicism seem natural.
BY MARY CLAIRE KENDALL

Posted 7/21/11 at 11:21 AM
http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/gary-coopers-authenticity/

Gary Cooper playing beleaguered Marshall Will Kane in High Noon

Hollywood icon Gary Cooper, who died 50 years ago this year, had a refreshing authenticity that makes his conversion to Catholicism only natural.

Contrary to frequent reports asserting otherwise, his conversion was not prompted by illness. “No way,” his daughter, Maria Cooper Janis, said. “He was coming to this on his own, in his own time … bits and pieces of his own life that he wanted to put together in a new way.”

“He had a very real spirituality,” Maria said, “that wasn’t an ‘ism’ … that, I think, he was born with, that he grew up with, living out West in nature [and] having a very strong affinity to the American-Indian culture and spirituality.”

Born May 7, 1901, in Helena, Mont., as the Old West was fading, Cooper was an accidental star, coming to Hollywood to find work as a commercial artist and be closer to his parents.

After he landed some stunt work, the handsome, understated Cooper was soon “discovered,” and, in 1925, he began acting in uncredited roles.

His film career, spanning 36 years, took off with Wings (1928), winner of the first Best Picture Academy Award.

His scene was a short one — just two-and-a-half minutes long. But, as Paramount Pictures’ legend A.C. Lyles described it, “When he came on the screen, it just lit up with him.” With just 200 feet of film, Hollywood moguls knew they were looking at a star.

Indeed, they were.

He singlehandedly lifted Paramount’s sagging Depression-era fortunes, playing “everyman” heroes, perfectly capturing the era, such as Longfellow Deeds in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936); Long John Willoughby in Meet John Doe (1941) — both Frank Capra classics — and Alvin York in Sergeant York (1941), Cooper’s favorite role and one steeped in Christian spirituality, for which he won his first Oscar.

He came to embody the essence of the American character, especially that unique combination of rugged individualism and magnanimous selflessness — in his case, nurtured by the West and his English immigrant parents, who inculcated in him the elegant manners of a “gentleman.”

“With Gary, there are always wonderful hidden depths that you haven’t found yet,” Mr. Deeds Goes to Town co-star Jean Arthur said. “You feel like you’re resting on the Rock of Gibraltar.” (Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success by Joseph McBride)

Of the genre of film with which he was most identified — the Western — having starred in The Virginian (1931), the original, standard-setting Western, he said in a 1959 interview: “I like Westerns because the good ones are real … [telling] stories of … pioneers [who] braved the elements, and … [through] the Western picture … we realize that our country was and is full of people who believe in America.”

Cooper was a “great movie actor” because in screenwriter/director Richard Brooks’ view, “he can make you feel something, something visceral, something deep, something that matters. He is who he plays.”

High Noon, a flawless Western, considered his greatest film, for which he won his second Oscar, revealed the moral struggle in the victory of good over evil.

In contrast, recent box office flop Atlas Shrugged: Part I calls to mind the one role Cooper played — Howard Roark in Warner Bros. Pictures’ The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s other work — that did not reflect Cooper’s character at all.

As Maria said of her father, “While he stood for rugged individualism — the individual against the world — anything that smelled of selfishness or exclusively self-interest was not his thing.”

Cooper’s self-effacing nature permeated his life. In March 1961, dying of cancer, he flew to New York to record the off-camera narration for The Real West. TV producer Donald Hyatt recalled “his simplicity and lack of ‘big star’ pretentions.” For instance, when there was no room for his coat on the rack, Cooper said, “Don’t take another coat off: Just throw mine anywhere” (Gary Cooper: American Hero by Jeffrey Meyers).

But, like all heroes, mere mortals after all, Cooper had a fatal flaw, which, ironically, surfaced after the filming of The Fountainhead, when the two stars — the married Cooper and Patricia Neal, 25 years his junior — began an affair, creating, as Cooper’s daughter notes with wry understatement, a “complicated situation.”

As Richard Widmark summed it up in American Hero, “Cooper was “catnip to the ladies.” From the start, his leading ladies, including, for instance, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, Lupe Velez, Carole Lombard, Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly — and many other women along the way — warmed up quickly to him.

They were always brief affairs that went with the filmmaking territory, where falling in love on screen simply continued off screen.

The affair with Neal was different. It endured beyond filming.

It began in October 1948, after The Fountainhead wrapped, and continued until Christmas 1951, when Cooper, realizing the affair must end, gave Neal a fur coat and left for Europe — exactly a year after he had taken her to Cuba, seeking his good friend Ernest Hemingway’s approval of this long-term extramarital relationship, which he failed to get.

But God brought great good out of this “complicated situation,” which was extremely difficult on every individual involved — Cooper suffered debilitating ulcers; his family, along with Neal, endured intense emotional strain. Neal became pregnant and had an abortion in March 1950.

The spiritual brick bats — turning points — his weakness precipitated were nothing new.

He had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1931 due to Hollywood’s filmmaking demands on their new star and his non-stop romancing. As he wrote his nephew Howard: “I had drifted, taken advice, let people get at me through my emotions, my sympathy, my affections …”

As he would later, he sought solace and healing in Europe in 1931, having lived in England as a child for two years, some 20 years earlier. After a year away amidst high society, and fully rejuvenated, a key turning point in his life arrived in the form of the lovely Eastern socialite Veronica “Rocky” Balfe, niece of famed MGM art director Cedric Gibbons, who was 12 years his junior. He married her a year later on Dec. 15, 1933.

A Catholic, with refined manners — albeit some detractors criticized her perceived Eastern snobbery — she brought great stability and genuine love to Cooper’s life.

However, as Ted Nugent, a studio electrician at Paramount who observed him closely, commented in Gary Cooper: American Hero, “If he was born for the camera, he was born to make love. … He wanted to satisfy women … enjoyed looking at them, listening to them, pleasing them. … A guy like that does not change.”
Not without grace, that is.

After separating from his family in May 1951, in the wake of his affair with Neal, Cooper came to realize his life’s emptiness. His character Will Kane in High Noon (1952), filmed in the fall of 1951, perfectly reflected the moral conflict he was feeling.

Gary Cooper and family meeting
Pope Pius XII on June 26, 1953

On June 26, 1953, while on a publicity tour, joined by his family to promote High Noon, he visited the Vatican and met Pope Pius XII, which made a deep impression on him.

Everyone in Hollywood was begging for a memento. At the papal audience, Maria reminisced, “my father had rosaries up his arm,” while grasping other mementos. But, because of a bad back, he had trouble genuflecting and, as he did, “everything just fell — the medals and the rosaries and the holy cards …” While Cooper was scrambling on all fours, “suddenly,” she humorously recalled, he encountered “this scarlet shoe and a robe.”

In early 1954, after filming Return to Paradise (1953), coincidentally about a father who returns to take care of his 16-year-old daughter, he returned to his family and his own 16-year-old daughter.

After settling back into married life, he strayed again, now going for less-refined women — his affair with the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg the most salient example. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he told his wife with that classic boyish innocence.

She wasn’t amused.

Realizing the stress his wandering placed on his family, Cooper began going to church with Rocky and Maria outside of the ordinary Christmas and Easter routine.

Though he never talked about it, Maria senses he turned to religion because “he probably was looking for some more stability than he found personally.”

It happened very naturally. After Sunday Mass together, she said, “we’d joke about” the “very erudite, funny” Father Harold Ford — “a real man,” whom her father dubbed “Father Tough Stuff.”

Cooper was intrigued and said, “Oh, I’d like to hear him some day,” prompting Rocky to respond, “Well, come along.”

Father Ford’s sermons, Maria said, made him think.

Contrary to some accounts, Rocky did not engineer Cooper’s conversion. “It wasn’t knocking him over the head,” Maria said. “Because, believe me, no one made my father do what he didn’t want to do.”

Soon Rocky invited Father Ford over to their home, thinking the two men might share some spiritual reflections. Instead, they shared their mutual interest in guns, hunting, fishing and scuba diving!

In the midst of cavorting, the talk occasionally began to drift toward religion, mirroring the path followed by Sgt. Alvin York, who said, “A fellow can’t go looking for it; it’s just got to come to a fellow.” Sure enough, Father Ford and “Coop” began getting together for longer discussions — for instance, on drives up to Malibu.

Gradually, Cooper evidently concluded, in Ma York’s famous words, “a little religion wouldn’t do him no hurt” and, on April 9, 1959, was formally admitted into the Catholic Church.

Close family friend Shirley Burden — Cornelius Vanderbilt’s great-great-grandson, married to Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s niece — who was himself a convert, served as Cooper’s godfather at his baptism.

Later that year, Cooper explained his conversion, saying: “I’d spent all my waking hours, year after year, doing almost exactly what I, personally, wanted to do; and what I wanted to do wasn’t always the most polite thing either. … This past winter I began to dwell a little more on what’s been in my mind for a long time [and thought], Coop, old boy, you owe somebody something for all your good fortune. I’ll never be anything like a saint. … The only thing I can say for me is that I’m trying to be a little better. Maybe I’ll succeed.” (The Hollywood Greats by Barry Norman).

In April 1961, a visibly moved Jimmy Stewart appeared at the Academy Awards to accept Cooper’s honorary Oscar and to “drop the hint” that his friend was seriously ill. The next day newspaper headlines around the world blared: “Gary Cooper Has Cancer.”

Visitors started coming, and messages poured in from friends and well-wishers around the world, including Pope John XXIII, Queen Elizabeth, John Wayne, Ernest Hemingway, former President Dwight Eisenhower, Bob Hope, Audrey Hepburn and many others. Even President John F. Kennedy called from Washington, finally getting through a day later.

Friends, expecting to find gloom at the Cooper home, instead found light and sunshine, crisp flowers and cheerful music, as the family faced this profoundly difficult time with faith. Billy Wilder “recalled that [Cooper] dressed in stylish pajamas and robe and seemed more composed than his guests.” As Rocky told Hedda Hopper, “What helped him most was his religion.” As his illness progressed, “He never asked ‘Why me?’ and never complained” and was spiritually enriched by the sacraments and books such as Bishop Fulton Sheen’s Peace of Soul. (Gary Cooper: American Hero; "How I Faced Tomorrow," interview with Veronica Cooper and Maria Cooper Janis)

“I know,” announced Cooper as he lay dying, “that what is happening is God’s will. I am not afraid of the future” (The Straits Times, May 6, 1961).

Gary Cooper died of prostate and colon cancer on May 13, 1961, and is beloved for the indelible portrait he gave us of what it is to be an authentic American hero — a portrait that’s incomplete without the story of his last heroic days.

Mary Claire Kendall writes from Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2011 Circle Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

Patricia Neal’s Heart

Oscar-winning actress’ journey was one of healing and forgiveness.
BY MARY CLAIRE KENDALL

Posted 8/10/11 at 4:56 PM
http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/patricia-neals-heart/

Patricia Neal in The Fountainhead

Patricia Neal, who died a year ago this August, was one of the 20th century’s most gifted actresses of stage and screen. But soaring achievement was met with heart-rending tragedy, including three strokes that nearly ended her life at age 39.

Through it all — in a plan that only God could have written — she secured her greatest achievement of all: a surpassing quality of love, guided, after she hit rock bottom, by the richness of Catholicism.

It was a most unexpected development, making her remarkable life even more so.

Patricia Neal — christened “Patsy Louise” — was born on Jan. 20, 1926, in the small town of Packard, Ky., a close-knit community in the heart of coal country, where neighbor looked after neighbor and life’s pleasures were simple.

“Life in Packard,” she wrote in her critically acclaimed autobiography As I Am, “was very good.” The hub of activity was the church — “of course, Baptist” — and general store.

Her larger-than-life father William Burdette “Coot” Neal was from southern Virginia, where his family owned a tobacco plantation near Danville; and her earnest, warm-hearted mother, Eura Mildred Petrey, was from Packard, where her father, “Pappy,” was the town doctor.

“Remember what the Psalmist says,” Pappy would remind her. “‘He changes desert into pools of water.’”

At age 11, now living in Knoxville, Tenn., “I saw a glorious lady giving monologues, and that’s all I wanted to do …” she told Turner Classic Movies’ host Robert Osborne in a 2004 Private Screenings interview. Her father’s boss’ daughter, just back from New York, was giving drama lessons, which her parents green-lighted Christmas 1937. “My monologues,” she wrote, “graduated from the front yard to Aunt Maude’s drawing room, and my audiences were growing. I got great notices the first play I did, so I knew I wanted to be an actress.”

During her first year at Northwestern University, her “daddy” — “the rock upon which anything good about me has been built” — died of a heart attack. Though eager to get to New York, she studied another year at Northwestern, at her family’s request, where drama teacher Alvina Krause was starting a summer theater and brought her along. From there she headed for New York, where she quickly landed an understudy role in The Voice of the Turtle and acquired her new name —”Patricia” — which the producer, Alfred de Liagre, thought matched her regal manner.

“Applause,” she wrote, “was love. It was approval by everybody. And I bathed in it.”

She also wanted the real thing. In New York, at age 19, when her first “boyfriend,” the son of an abortionist, told her he loved her more than anyone else, she traded in her virginity for “love.” When he dumped her for his virginal high-school sweetheart, she was deeply wounded.

Trusting her well-formed, sensitive theatrical instincts, she soon made her theatrical mark, landing a starring role in Another Part of the Forest (1946), for which she won a Tony in the first such awards ceremony; while, at the same time, hardened in “love,” she pursued romance without conscience and wrecked two marriages.

The offers started pouring in from Hollywood, and she landed a contract with Warner Bros. and the starring role in John Loves Mary opposite Ronald Reagan, whom she met on New Year’s Eve 1947 when she first arrived in Hollywood.

A year later, director King Vidor introduced her to Gary Cooper when she was testing for The Fountainhead, and, after filming wrapped, she began a legendary affair with her married co-star.

“When the young doctor took my virginity and made me a bad woman,” she wrote in As I Am, “I made up my mind I would never get hurt like that again. … Gary touched my heart as no one else had done before. I was really in love, and it was like I was innocent again.”

Predictably, the affair brought great turmoil to the lives of all involved — Patricia suffered a nervous breakdown when it came to an end, as it had to, by Christmas 1951; and Gary’s young daughter Maria famously spit on Patricia in public, according to Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life by Stephen Michael Shearer. “Gary adored her,” she wrote in As I Am. And, as she told Osborne, “He loved Rocky (his wife).” In 1959, during a chance encounter from afar in New York, Maria glowered at her, evidencing how raw the wound still was.

After Warner Bros. failed to renew her contract, , she returned to New York and the stage she loved so much, this time starring in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour and soon met and fell and love with renowned writer Roald Dahl, whom she married on July 2, 1953.

The marriage had some initial bumps — Roald asking for a divorce the first year — but, crisis averted, their children began making their grand entrances: Olivia Twenty, born on April 20, 1955; Chantal Tessa Sophia, born on April 11, 1957; Theo Matthew Dahl, born on July 30, 1960.

Then tragedy struck on Dec. 5, 1960, when their son Theo — her “beautiful boy,” just 4 months old — was struck by a taxi as the family au pair was strolling him along a New York City street. He suffered brain damage, occasioning many surgeries and the family’s move back to England.

As Theo recovered, aided by Roald’s development of a successful therapeutic intervention, both career and family thrived: Patricia played Mrs. Failenson in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and they continued settling into a marvelous life in their white cottage with plush gardens at Great Missenden, not far from London, as, charmingly, Roald began testing his stories out on his children and writing some hit children’s books.

However, tragedy again struck the following year when Olivia, not qualifying for a scarce measles vaccine, contracted and died of the disease on Nov. 17, 1962.

Roald was utterly devastated. But, as they gradually picked up the pieces, Patricia landed the role of Alma Brown in Hud (1963), for which she won a Best Actress Oscar. The director Martin Ritt kindly scheduled filming in segments so she could take care of her most cherished role: that of mother and wife. A year later, Ophelia Magdalena was born on May 12, 1964.

As if the brain-damaging accident and death of Theo and Olivia, respectively, were not enough, on Feb. 17, 1965, while bathing Tessa, she suffered three near-fatal burst cerebral aneurysms and was in a coma for three weeks.

She had only that week begun filming John Ford’s Seven Women and was pregnant — a fact known only to her and Roald.

Just 39 years old, her life had changed inexorably.

As she worked to recover, she was guided by the strong, firm hand of Roald — sometimes seemingly too much so.

Then, one day she received a letter that would change her life — spiritually and emotionally.

It was from Maria Cooper, and while Roald later burned it, she will never forget the letter’s three key words: “I forgive you.”

“The grace of God in Maria,” according to Benedictine Mother Dolores Hart, a former Paramount actress, is what prompted this amazing gesture, as she stated in a 2010 "The World Over" interview. “Maria knew that ‘forgiveness demands an action,’ and I think that is one of the deepest realities of Christian love.”

On Aug. 4, 1965, having survived her stroke, Lucy Neal was born. As her precious baby grew, Patricia continued to heal physically, making her return speech in 1966 at The Waldorf Astoria in New York. It was a signal achievement for someone who had had to learn how to walk and speak again. As she noted in her speech — for which she had prepped and practiced to a wearying degree, “Tennessee hillbillies don’t conk out that easy.”

When she finished, she wrote, “I knew my life had been given back to me for one reason,” though she was unsure what that was.”

Later she recognized, among other purposes, her stroke brought attention to this all-too-common, debilitating medical emergency, serving as a catalyst for the building of many hospitals, including the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center in Knoxville.

She credited “Roald the Rotten” for throwing her back in the deep water “where I belonged.” Indeed, by 1967, she was cast to play the leading role in The Subject Was Roses (1968). While it was difficult to learn lines, she quipped in her book, “I was a hit … just for being alive.”

However, when she won the starring role in the television pilot of "The Waltons" (1971), she was not asked to play the role in the TV series because executives worried her health would not bear up under the pressure.

Nor did her marriage bear up under the pressure; in 1972 Roald secretly began an affair with Catholic divorcee Felicity Crosland, the London-based freelance coordinator for David Ogilvy’s ad agency, who worked with Patricia when she began filming commercials for Maxim coffee.

In 1973, as the Maxim campaign was thriving, Patricia found herself returning every three weeks to New York, and wrote to Maria Cooper asking to get together. Maria replied, “I very much want to see you.”

Finally, after many attempts, Maria agreed to join Patricia for breakfast in her hotel suite. Upon arriving, Patricia wrote, she “spread her arms open to me. She held me, and the years of emptiness between me and Gary was over.”

“An amazing grace” occurred during that meeting, as she realized for the first time since her stroke, its gift: “Somehow, a memory that once had the power to wound me now passed benignly through my head.”

The memory was also being set right, as Patricia poignantly recounted in As I Am:

“Maria finally asked, ‘Is it true that you were pregnant by my father?’”

“Yes, I am sorry I didn’t have it.”

“It’s my loss, too. I’m the only one.”

Before the meeting ended, Maria asked her to promise to write to her mother, who was now “Mrs. John Converse.”

Five years later, while in Nice, France, in the summer of 1978, she again ran into Maria Cooper, now married to the accomplished pianist Byron Janis. Sensing Patricia’s inner turmoil, Maria asked her about her “faith in God,” and, told she was struggling with it, given all the tragedy in her life, Maria suggested she visit the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Conn.

In the fall of 1978, Maria said that Patricia, suffering under the weight of her crumbling marriage, called her and asked about that abbey. Maria gave her the contact information for her good friend, Dolores Hart, who had lived at the abbey in consecrated life for 15 years. “Through grace or whatever,” Maria said, “she was the one who picked up the phone and made the appointment and took herself to the abbey.” Her role, she said, was to “give her the opportunity,” but after that “it was Pat’s party.”

As the date of her scheduled visit neared, she wrote, “I suddenly wondered what the hell I was doing, going to a Catholic nunnery.”

When she arrived at the abbey in May 1979, she wrote, “I was taken to have a parlor with the nun who had written to me. She greeted me from behind a grille and had the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen.” She outlined the plan for the three day visit and in response to Patricia’s query about smoking told her, “while it was a ‘prohibiting law’, the abbess ‘knew from real sin,’ and she was sure a way to indulge my vice could be found.”

During prayers in the monastery chapel, “filled with flowers beautifully arranged … (and) calming strains of Gregorian chant … from behind a large grille …” Patricia wrote, “I remember thinking it was the first time I had felt close to peace in a long time.” And, the meals, she wrote, were wonderful, especially the fresh bread!

On second day, she wrote, “I worked up courage to talk about the struggle my marriage had become.” The nun — the same one with the beautiful eyes — only listened.

Later when she did a reading of Helen Keller for the abbey, her goal became clear: “At other times,” Keller wrote, “things that I have been taught … and learned … drop away, as the lizard sheds its skin, and I see my soul as God sees it.”

On the third day, when the nun took her to the garden, Patricia “carefully avoided mentioning the affair with Gary …” But, the nun suggested, Patricia wrote, “I would have to go … even further back than the stroke to find the seeds of my discontent” — after which the affair with Gary Cooper spilled out. Patricia lamented “there was no way we could have been together.” The nun “corrected” her by saying “‘But there was’” a way, i.e., spiritually. “I never forgot that conversation,” Patricia wrote.

Before she left, Patricia chose a flower from the greenhouse as a remembrance of Olivia. “That evening at vespers, I saw it had been placed right in front of the altar. I went back to my little room and wept.” Later, as she was packing up, she realized she had forgotten all about “the booze” she had brought to help her endure the three days at the abbey!

A few years later, having benefited from the abbey’s consistent guidance, when Patricia was again in New York for filming on Ghost Story, she happened to see the death notice for Rocky’s second husband, Dr. John Marquis Converse on Feb. 1, 1981. With that, she finally fulfilled the promise she made to Maria years earlier and wrote to Rocky.

After Rocky received her letter, Maria told Patricia her mother was so moved, that she read it “over and over.” Amazingly, Patricia told Osborne, Rocky wrote her back on April 20, “my Olivia’s birthday.”

“After some time had passed,” Maria said, “she and my mother arranged to meet.” This lovely ending to such a difficult personal trial for all involved was “so good,” Patricia told Osborne — “what life’s made of.”

In 1983, after Roald asked Patricia for a divorce, she was utterly devastated, and, as Mother Dolores recounts, she returned to the States intent on writing a scathing autobiography. But Mother Benedict Duss, the abbess and founder of Regina Laudis, told her writing such a book would be a decidedly bad idea. Instead, she instructed her to calm down and write her autobiography with Mother Dolores, who urged her “to remember it all” — a grueling process that took five long years and 1,200 pages.

At the outset, as she wrote this book and recovered from her “pits” in the wake of her divorce, she lived at the abbey for a few months and followed the routine of a postulant as best she could. Mother Dolores recalled with delight on "The World Over with Raymond Arroyo" shortly after Patricia’s death, how she cleaned the monastery grille better than anyone ever had. She also went to work cleaning the cobwebs out of her soul, facing, with brutal honesty, what she needed to set right in her life and becoming a willing participant in the process by which the Holy Spirit would “change desert into pools of water,” as her Pappy had counseled some five decades earlier.

She told Mother Dolores she wanted to be buried at the abbey. But Mother Dolores told her she first needed to become a Catholic. “Ooohhh. Well … I’ll work on that,” Mother Dolores said she replied, doing a marvelous imitation of that inimitable voice and style.

As she worked on her conversion, in 1990, shortly before Theo turned 30, she finally decided to call Roald and his now-wife Felicity, and let bygones be bygones. She talked to Roald three more times before his death later that year. Nov.17 was “the last time I hung up on my love” — coincidentally the anniversary of Olivia’s death, as well as that of his mother.

On March 30, 2010, she was finally admitted to the Church.

Four months later, on Aug. 8, 2010, she died of lung cancer at the age of 84 in her beloved Martha’s Vineyard. She was laid to rest at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Conn.

Mary Claire Kendall is a Washington-based journalist and screenwriter. This piece serves as a companion to “Gary Cooper’s Authenticity.”

Copyright © 2011 Circle Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

Patricia Neal's Legacy

Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center: "A House of Heroes"

By Mary Claire Kendall



Patricia Neal as "Alma Brown" in Hud. 
Credit: Paramount Pictures

Patricia Neal, exquisite actress of stage and film, known for Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Hud (1963), for which she won a Best Actress Oscar, died some forty-five years after she suffered three debilitating strokes in one day—on February 17, 1965—that nearly took her life. At the time, just 39, she was pregnant with her daughter Lucy Neal, whom she gave birth to six months later on August 4, 1965.

“I was as one dead,” she wrote in her classic autobiography, As I Am. “My right side was completely paralyzed and I had been left with maddeningly double vision. I had not power of speech and my mind just didn’t’ work.”

Hers was a miraculous recovery—the fruit of sheer grit, determination, and just plain stubbornness.

She also had amazing support systems. Valerie Eaton Griffith, her tutor, helped lift her “out of the cabbage patch,” she wrote. “A master (her husband’s role) can tell you what he expects… a teacher though awakens your own expectations.”

“Suddenly Patricia Neal wanted to live,” Life Magazine headlined its feature story about her. Patricia countered, it would be truer to say, “Suddenly I realized I was, in fact, living and was starting to like the experience again.”

She returned to public life with her debut speech in March 1966 at The Waldorf Astoria in New York. The occasion was “An Evening with Patricia Neal.” It was a signal achievement for someone who had had to learn how to walk and speak again—and, perhaps most dauntingly of all for an actress, remember lines.

“Tennessee hillbillies don't conk out that easy,” she quipped at that pivotal moment dramatizing her triumph over the tragedy.

Cover photo of As I Am.
From the Author's Collection; Globe Photos

When she finished her speech, she wrote, “I knew my life had been given back to me for one reason.” Unsure what it was at the time, she credited her husband, Roald Dahl, famed writer of children’s books, for throwing her back into the deep water “where I belonged.”

As her post-stroke life unfolded, besides resuming her acting career with a notable performance in The Subject Was Roses (1968), she began bringing the reality of stroke to the public’s attention in speeches around the country in the 1970s, spotlighting its debilitating effects and how to surmount the practical obstacles to resuming normal life, or a semblance thereof, in the wake of a stroke’s neurological devastation.

Patricia Neal as "Nettie Cleary" in The Subject Was Roses.
Credit: Metro Goldwyn Mayer

Her story—initially publicized in the Life Magazine article, from which flowed a cascade of publicity—not only served as an inspiration to stroke victims worldwide, but soon began to catalyze the establishment of many hospitals and centers focused on helping patients rehabilitate to the fullest extent possible.

One such hospital is the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center in Knoxville—one of the finest in the country, according to surveyors for the Council on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF).

When Fort Sanders Presbyterian Hospital in Knoxville—now the Fort Sanders Regional Medical Center—wrote Patricia to inform her they were building a wing dedicated to rehabilitation and wanted to name it after her, she replied “Great, Great, Great, Great.”

In her speech at the dedication ceremony, she dubbed it a “House of Heroes,” which the center put on an engraved plaque in the foyer.

This “House of Heroes” is one her most enduring legacies.

Since its opening in 1978, it has offered a comprehensive, team approach to care, whereby physical, occupational, recreational, behavioral medicine and speech language therapists work with physicians to develop individual plans of care designed to return patients to as normal a lifestyle as possible.

Ironically, on February 17, 2005—forty years to the day after she suffered her three massive, nearly fatal, strokes—Patricia Neal was admitted to the center for two weeks of therapy helping her recover from recent surgeries with complications.

“I was so thrilled to learn that I would be able to come to my hospital for treatment,” Patricia said. “I’ve always said there is no better place for rehabilitation patients …and now I have experienced that care personally!”

Patricia Neal proudly displays her
“House for Heroes” medallion.
The medallions are presented to patients
who are completing their inpatient therapy
at Patricia Neal Rehab Center

Dr. Mary Dillon, PNRC Medical Director, recalled, “She went through therapy just as any of our other patients do, and progressed beautifully. She also brightened the spirits of PNRC patients with whom she worked side by side.”

At the time, Patricia was splitting her time between New York City and Martha’s Vineyard, where she participated in Theater Guild “Theatre at Sea” programs. In May 2005, she traveled to Hollywood to receive a star on the Walk of Fame. While she told the Center’s “News,” she was “thrilled,” she also added, with that hearty laugh of hers, “It’s about time!”

Every year she attended the Patricia Neal Golf Classic in August that brings Tennessee pro golfers together with local amateurs for a worthwhile cause at one of the state’s top courses—raising more than $3 million in net proceeds since 1985 to support the many programs and services of the rehab center.

In 2011, they held the tournament on August 8, the first anniversary of her death. It was a special occasion—honoring a woman who helped other stroke victims survive and thrive, just like her, the ‘Tennessee hillbilly,’ who rose to become one of the 20th century’s greatest actresses of stage and film.

Mary Claire Kendall has written about notable stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, including, most recently, screen legend Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal.

Mary Surratt: 'An Innocent Woman'

Robin Wright and James McAvoy in The Conspirator (2011)

Robert Redford's latest film, The Conspirator — released just days after the Sesquicentennial of the attack on Fort Sumter, the Civil War's start — stirred many childhood memories.

My great-grandmother, Lillian Webster Keane (pictured left), who was a longtime Washingtonian, frequently spoke about the injustice the film portrays.

Fittingly, The Conspirator opened April 15 — the same day, 146 years earlier, President Abraham Lincoln was celebrating the end of the Civil War.

The bloody conflict that ripped our nation apart for four years, North against South, was now over — ending officially on April 9, 1865, when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

After enjoying a pleasant carriage ride with first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, soaking in springtime Washington, this president, a lover of literature, was soaking in Our American Cousin at his box in the new Ford's Theatre.

Of course, drama of an epic nature would soon envelop the audience, when Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and familiar face at the theater, slipped into Lincoln's box and fatally shot him, yelling, "Sic semper tyrannus" (thus always to tyrants), as he plunged onto the stage and injured his leg, limping to his well-planned escape.

In the ensuing investigation into the tragedy, Mary Surratt, a Maryland Catholic, was accused and convicted of conspiring to kill the president. She was executed by hanging on July 7, 1865. She is played by Robin Wright in Redford's film.

Lillian Webster knew Father Jacob Walter, who was close to Surratt. (In fact, he heard Surratt's last confession before she was executed.) Lillian said Father Walter always contended, "They hung an innocent woman."

Ironically, Lincoln foreshadowed this injustice.

As he wrote to close friend Joshua Speed 10 years earlier, "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'All men are created equal.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'All men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

My great-grandmother's father, Bradshaw Hall Webster, had worked on Lincoln's presidential campaign fresh out of college. In the course of campaigning, this son of the North met my great-great-grandmother, Martha Mungen Starrett, whose family owned a plantation in Jacksonville, Fla.

When Bradshaw's lumber mill in Orono, Maine, burned down, he took up the cause of temperance, as a "writer and orator," traveling up and down the Eastern seaboard. After Martha died in 1881, the 33rd-degree Mason remarried — of all things, a Catholic, whom he met through the convent school his daughters attended.

Lillian, born in 1878, was only 3 at the time of her father's remarriage, and she soon became a Catholic. She noted in her diary how the faith "lightened the burdens of life." In 1888, after President Benjamin Harrison's election, Bradshaw moved his family to Washington.

So it is that my "blue blood" great-grandmother, related to Daniel Webster and President William Henry Harrison, grew up in a social and cultural milieu in which the Civil War conflict still burned brightly so many years later.

She mingled with Washington's Catholic community, which included friends of the wrongfully accused and executed Southern sympathizer Mary Surratt, and dated the son of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the doctor who set Booth's broken leg.

After Lincoln's assassination, the desire for retribution was so intense, a kangaroo military tribunal, portrayed in The Conspirator, sent Surratt to her death — a fate she faced with faith, clinging to her constantly held rosary beads and praying until the end.

As my great-grandmother always wisely counseled, "Two wrongs don't make a right."

Her daughter, my grandmother Helena (shown left), like Surratt, died much too young — the victim not of injustice, but of a heart weakened by rheumatic fever that just stopped one day, on the way home from grandma's, as she held my mother, then 6 months old, in her arms.

Like Dr. Mudd, whose ancestors have tried in vain posthumously to overturn his conviction — though President Andrew Johnson pardoned him in 1869 largely because of his work saving yellow-fever victims at his military prison, as portrayed in The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) — Mary Surratt's name is still mud — something The Conspirator will hopefully help correct.

Thus would she finally rest in peace right there in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Northeast Washington, not far from where my grandmother Helena is buried.

"The Conspirator" DVD is being released on August 16, 2011.

---

This article was originally published under the title, "Mary Surratt, 'An Innocent Woman'" in the National Catholic Register, July 3-16, 2011 Issue 

There Be Saints and Sinners

By Mary Claire Kendall

There Be Dragons, like a fine delicacy, can only be fully appreciated, it seems, through an acquired taste.

This newly released film, written and directed by Roland Joffe, of Oscar-nominated The Killing Fields and The Mission fame, tells the story of St. Josemaria Escriva, who founded “The Work of God” (“Opus Dei” in Latin), a world-wide phenomenon infused with the spirit of early Christians, where God is found in ordinary work.

That Escriva’s approach is utterly grounded in what it means to be human is revealed in the opening Oscar Wilde quote, “Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future”—a recurring theme, which provides the rationale for the quest for God, given our weak human nature, and the corresponding role God gives each of us.In Escriva’s case, the role was rather large; thus the epic nature of the film.

When There Be Dragons opens, it’s 1975. Escriva has just keeled over from a heart attack whereupon his cause of canonization surges—the requisite miracle for “beatification” provided when a nun with a tumor prays to God through Escriva’s intercession, and is cured. A journalist, who’s writing about him, realizing his father is from the same town, decides to try and reconnect with his estranged elder to see what, if anything, he knows about Escriva: A mother lode, it so happens.

Some critics have less appreciation for Joffe’s substantial achievement—if not a masterpiece, then certainly masterful—because their base of understanding is limited.

Manolo, St. Josemaria's friend, played by Wes Bentley

But, for those, for instance, whose lives were directly and intimately affected by the Spanish Civil War—Spain devastated; beloved relatives, one of 500,000 souls, lost forever in the fighting—the appreciation is immense. As one Spaniard commented on The Hollywood Reporter review, rating the film full of missing pieces, it had one piece right, namely: “… from most Spanish people’s point of view (it) is the best approach Hollywood has done to our civil war.”

While the film is not without its flaws, as a screenwriter, I marveled at the craft Joffe brought to the story: the element of surprise, conflict, and more conflict—the very essence of drama—and directorial skill and cinematic vision on par with David Lean.

Of course, flashbacks are generally a “no, no.” That’s because the action derives from the storyline—in this case an artifice—from which you are flashing back, lessening the forward-momentum.

And, while Charlie Cox, who played Escriva, gave an overall masterful performance, sometimes he seemed to translate Escriva’s cheerfulness without enough reference to the weight of his human frailty, making that smile he would flash seem more a preternatural gift than a triumph over weakness—for love.

As the current prelate of Opus Dei, Bishop Javier Echeverria, commented on the portrayal of Escriva, while it was impressive, he was “mucho mas!”

All of which means, Escriva’s story will just have to be told free of the artifice, dramatic though it may be.

Joffe certainly whets the appetite for that story!

For more information on There Be Dragons, including cinema locations and times, see http://dragonsresources.com/.

Published in The Wanderer on Sunday, May 26, 2011.

Here’s a PDF version of the published article
http://www.stjosemaria.org/dragons/pdf/ThereBeSaintsandSinners.pdf.

Mary Surratt, 'An Innocent Woman'



Robin Wright and James McAvoy in The Conspirator
Note: DVD being released on August 16, 2011


 http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/mary-surratt-an-innocent-woman/

National Catholic Register
July 3-16, 2011 Issue
Posted 6/24/11 at 4:53 PM

BY Mary Claire Kendall

Robert Redford’s latest film, The Conspirator — released just days after the Sesquicentennial of the attack on Fort Sumter, the Civil War’s start — stirred many childhood memories.

My great-grandmother, Lillian Webster Keane, who was a longtime Washingtonian, frequently spoke about the injustice the film portrays.

Lillian Webster Keane, c. 1938

Fittingly, The Conspirator opened April 15 — the same day, 146 years earlier, President Abraham Lincoln was celebrating the end of the Civil War.

The bloody conflict that ripped our nation apart for four years, North against South, was now over — ending officially on April 9, 1865, when Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.

After enjoying a pleasant carriage ride with first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, soaking in springtime Washington, this president, a lover of literature, was soaking in Our American Cousin at his box in the new Ford’s Theatre.

Of course, drama of an epic nature would soon envelop the audience, when Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and familiar face at the theater, slipped into Lincoln’s box and fatally shot him, yelling, “Sic semper tyrannus” (thus always to tyrants), as he plunged onto the stage and injured his leg, limping to his well-planned escape.

In the ensuing investigation into the tragedy, Mary Surratt, a Maryland Catholic, was accused and convicted of conspiring to kill the president. She was executed by hanging on July 7, 1865. She is played by Robin Wright in Redford’s film.

Lillian Webster knew Father Jacob Walter, who was close to Surratt. (In fact, he heard Surratt’s last confession before she was executed.) Lillian said Father Walter always contended, “They hung an innocent woman.”

Ironically, Lincoln foreshadowed this injustice.

As he wrote to close friend Joshua Speed 10 years earlier, “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘All men are created equal.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘All men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

My great-grandmother’s father, Bradshaw Hall Webster, had worked on Lincoln’s presidential campaign fresh out of college. In the course of campaigning, this son of the North met my great-great-grandmother, Martha Mungen Starrett, whose family owned a plantation in Jacksonville, Fla.

When Bradshaw’s lumber mill in Orono, Maine, burned down, he took up the cause of temperance, as a “writer and orator,” traveling up and down the Eastern seaboard. After Martha died in 1881, the 33rd-degree Mason remarried — of all things, a Catholic, whom he met through the convent school his daughters attended.

Lillian, born in 1878, was only 3 at the time of her father’s remarriage, and she soon became a Catholic. She noted in her diary how the faith “lightened the burdens of life.” In 1888, after President Benjamin Harrison’s election, Bradshaw moved his family to Washington.

So it is that my “blue blood” great-grandmother, related to Daniel Webster and President William Henry Harrison, grew up in a social and cultural milieu in which the Civil War conflict still burned brightly so many years later.

She mingled with Washington’s Catholic community, which included friends of the wrongfully accused and executed Southern sympathizer Mary Surratt, and dated the son of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the doctor who set Booth’s broken leg.

After Lincoln’s assassination, the desire for retribution was so intense, a kangaroo military tribunal, portrayed in The Conspirator, sent Surratt to her death — a fate she faced with faith, clinging to her constantly held rosary beads and praying until the end.

As my great-grandmother always wisely counseled, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Her daughter, my grandmother Helena, like Surratt, died much too young — the victim not of injustice, but of a heart weakened by rheumatic fever that just stopped one day, on the way home from grandma’s, as she held my mother, then 6 months old, in her arms.

Helena Keane Biberstein, c. 1920

Like Dr. Mudd, whose ancestors have tried in vain posthumously to overturn his conviction — though President Andrew Johnson pardoned him in 1869 largely because of his work saving yellow-fever victims at his military prison, as portrayed in The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) — Mary Surratt’s name is still mud — something The Conspirator will hopefully help correct.

Thus would she finally rest in peace right there in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Northeast Washington, not far from where my grandmother Helena is buried.

Mary Claire Kendall is a Washington-based journalist and screenwriter.

Copyright © 2011 Circle Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

John Tracy's Inspiring Life

By Mary Claire Kendall

It is said—our strength is our weakness. In the case of Spencer Tracy and his son John Ten Broeck Tracy, who died in Acton, California on June 15, 2007—five days after the 40th anniversary of his father’s death—nothing could be truer.

“Spence was considered by many to be the greatest actor the screen had ever seen,” his good friend, 82-year Paramount veteran, A.C. Lyles told me.

Yet, the painful emotion he felt upon learning, in 1925, that his baby son, John, was deaf was the hardest of blows. The only thing Spencer Tracy was not good at, he candidly admitted, was “life.”

Spencer Tracy with his son John, c. 1928-29,

prior to his film debut in 1930 in Up the River

His son John, on the other hand—dealt a whole series of setbacks, in what, at age 22, he would term “My Complicated Life”—was great at life.

If only Spencer Tracy could have read the script, he would have discovered John would soon hear the voice of God a little more loudly; see with the eyes of faith a little more clearly; and grow a big heart, drenched with hope and optimism.

As John’s daughter-in-law Cyndi Tracy said, “he just always had an uncanny ability to accept God’s love and always knew (his suffering) was going to be for a greater good.” It was never “Why me?” or “Poor me.”

God, he felt certain, had a plan.

The Plan’s Unfolding

When Louise Treadwell met Spencer Tracy, her theatrical star was rising. Spencer, four years her junior, was just starting out.

It was early 1923. They were both arriving in Grand Rapids, Michigan to play in the same stock company. As fate would have it, they alighted the train station platform simultaneously.

The attraction between these two polar opposites, descended from, respectively, English blue bloods and working-class Irishmen, was immediate. Six weeks later, in between the matinee and evening shows in Cincinnati, Ohio, they got married. Nine months and two weeks hence, on June 26, 1924, in Spencer’s hometown of Milwaukee, their little bundle of joy arrived.

Turning Point

One day, while John lay napping, the screen door accidentally slammed behind Louise and he kept peacefully slumbering on. She immediately, instinctively knew he was deaf. The diagnosis came back as nerve damage of unknown origin. Unbeknownst to them, he had what’s known as Usher Syndrome, which also causes gradual blindness due to Retinitis Pigmentosa—starting at birth.

The doctors said the Tracy’s best option was to place John in an institution for retarded children at age six. The Tracys would hear none of that and promptly went to work talking to him, reading him nursery rhymes, playing games with him… loving him.

“Spence,” said Lyles, “was absolutely marvelous with him;” but “gave all credit to (Louise)” for John’s progress.

Early on she “kept repeating the word ‘talk’… a hundred… sometimes three hundred times” in twice or thrice daily “exercises.” One day, said Lyles, when she finished, John, then 3 or 4, leaned his head close to hers and said, “talk”—his very first word.

Tragedy again visited when John contracted polio at age six, leaving him with a withered right leg. That same year, Lyles recounted, Louise “gave up her career to devote herself entirely to her son and studied everything she could get her hands on about (educating deaf children).” No institution existed that worked with parents of deaf children, teaching them how to help their children develop a bridge to the speaking, hearing world.

Meanwhile, John’s travails motivated Spencer to work that much harder so he could give his son all the financial help he needed to overcome his disability. Thus did he overcome what his good friend and fellow actor Lynne Overman said was a tendency toward laziness, thereby becoming the acting legend he was.

John learned how to lip-read perfectly and to speak, read and write and was fully functioning by age 11, when he began to write his daily journals. Three years later, he started “publishing” his “Newsy News” for friends and family.

When John was 17, Louise first spoke publicly, in her lovely English-accented tones, about raising and educating a deaf child. Her speech at the University of Southern California led her, a year later, in 1942, to found, in a campus bungalow, with Spencer’s money, the John Tracy Clinic. http://www.jtc.org/ It became the only such entity worldwide to provide gratis service to parents of infants and preschool children born with hearing losses.

Walt Disney, with whom the family played polo at the Will Rogers Ranch and The Riviera Polo Club, was one of the original board members.

In 1975, poignancy overflowing, Louise was the first recipient of the Father Flanagan Award for her special service to youth; and, around the same time, she helped establish the Boys Town National Research Hospital for Usher Syndrome: Boys Town, saved from bankruptcy and oblivion by Spencer Tracy’s Oscar-winning performance as Father Flanagan, was now rescuing those who suffer John’s same sensory afflictions.

“Our Everyday Blessing”

John was always intent, as his son and fellow artist, Joseph Spencer Tracy, characterized it, on living “each day to the fullest, regardless” of his daily challenges.

“I’m an artist, writer, photographer; I played polo, tennis; swim, water-ski, dance,” he wrote in his journal in 1975. “ I got married, had a family. I’m also profoundly deaf, going blind, had polio. What can you do?”

Well, apparently everything!

Endowed with a high IQ and an athlete’s body, he energetically poured himself into life, blissfully unaware of his multiple disabilities until he was in his twenties.

He loved horses, which mirrored his own “gentle” spirit, and the invigorating sense of freedom riding gave him: It reminded him of his “favorite” times of life at the family ranch in Encino (1936-1955), so full of fond memories like the day he started playing polo at age 12. (He had only begun riding three years earlier.) That day, one of the players was injured and Spencer summoned him to come on down!

Through it all, he had, said Cyndi, a “tremendous sense of humor” and the “charm of an angel.” Fittingly, he did a dead-on impersonation of his father, which no professional comedian has ever attempted.

John graduated from Pasadena City College then attended Chouinard Art Institute, graduating in 1955, the same year his son was born. He subsequently worked at Walt Disney Studios in the props department for nearly five years, until his eyesight started failing. But, he continued doing his watercolor paintings and pen and ink and pencil drawings, as he was able to: He was declared legally blind in the early eighties and, by 1994, was totally blind.

John Tracy in 2004

“The moment you met him,” said Cyndi, “your life was changed. You knew that you were in the company of someone… great, who was, at the same time, the most humble person you would ever meet.” Quite simply, he had no idea how positively he impacted others’ lives.

“Pa Pa Johnny,” said Cyndi, “was truly ‘our everyday blessing.’”

John attended Sunday services at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills for decades with his mother, who died in 1983. He would also pray nightly in an elaborate ritual that, Cyndi said, revealed his “darling personality.” The family—Joe’s family, sister Susie, the cousins, among others—“was lined up in the (same) order every night.” But “all his friends and acquaintances were always jockeying for position.”

“He was strong until the end,” said Joe, and “always prayed for other people, didn’t pray for himself”—a lesson in selflessness he communicated to his three grandchildren.

As for actually communicating with words, John could talk, but his deafness combined with his blindness required some special techniques for his family to reply back.

Cyndi described how he loved to converse and remembered with particular warmth those special times, often at the end of a long day, she would be perched next to him as he would regale her with fascinating stories. And, she would reply by spelling words on his back. Or, for shorter responses, she would spell words on his hand—a hand that so often held her hand, while tapping her other hand, as he said, “God bless you, Cyndi. Thank you. ”

For, whatever else he was, John Tracy was always profoundly grateful for all life’s blessings.

Originally published in DBI Review, Number 45, January-June 2010. http://www.deafblindinternational.org/

Today is the 111th anniversary of Spencer Tracy's birth. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on April 5, 1900.