On October 18, 1962, TWA flight 801 from Rome touched down at New York’s Idlewild Airport. Among the passengers was an actress by the name of Dolores Hart, and she was more anxious on the ground than she was in the air. Hart was the star of MGM’s forthcoming sex romp, Come Fly With Me (Henry Levin, 1963), about three airline hostesses looking to score rich husbands. The film had wrapped in Vienna in August, and Hart was scheduled for a grueling cross-country promotional campaign. But that wasn’t what had her anxious. Just days before her 24th birthday, Hart was wrestling with the idea of ditching the film industry and—despite smooching Elvis Presley in Loving You (Hal Kanter, 1957), defending a girl’s right to make out in Where the Boys Are (Henry Levin, 1960), and seducing a smuggler in Come Fly With Me—becoming a nun. But how was she going to manage it?
For every Meryl Streep or Robert De Niro who’ve continued to build on their craft year after year, there are others who, having tasted the wine of success, decide to become teetotalers. Whether leaving the film industry has been for God, politics, love, one’s own integrity, or a sense of ennui, it has required a series of steps and explanations to fully break free. The effort has gotten more difficult over the years. For Gene Gauntier, one of the very first movie stars, it was relatively painless to bow out in 1920. The studio era was just coming into existence by that time, bringing with it a regimentation that Gauntier couldn’t abide and an attention from the public that she found overbearing. So, she simply quit, shocking the industry, and turned her attention to writing novels that warned of the costs of stardom.
Gauntier had left before long-term studio contracts. Dolores Hart, however, as she stepped off that plane, was legally bound to not one but two studios. Could contracts be broken by claiming it was God’s will? A year or so earlier, Hart had had a spiritual epiphany visiting the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. It wasn’t that she’d been unhappy in her movie career—she was often called “the new Grace Kelly”—but she’d consistently found something missing. Not even the pay raise her agent Harry Bernsen was negotiating, or a prospective marriage to “a swell guy” satisfied her. “I was held by a kind of madness that I could not express,” Hart wrote in her memoir. The spirit and tranquility of Regina Laudis had moved her in ways she hadn’t expected, and she’d come to believe that only a religious vocation could bring her peace and contentment.