Richard DeNeut--Client and Friend

Richard DeNeut passed away in January, and his ashes were laid to rest on Friday, Sept. 16 at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. He was an actor, a writer, a photographer, a photography executive, a veteran, and a terrific raconteur. He was also my client and my friend. Some of what you will read here I said at his gravesite.

I represented Dick and the Abbey of Regina Laudis as their attorney for the book The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey from Hollywood to Holy Vows by Mother Dolores Hart and Dick. In addition to reviewing, revising, and negotiating the contract, I was asked to be a mediator of sorts between Dick and everybody else. He could be demanding, primarily because he cared very dearly about his work. He could also be easy-going, compassionate, kind and fun. He was very gifted at all of his jobs.

Dick took to me gradually, finding that we were both movie fans. Soon, he was asking my opinion and advice. There was always an element of uncertainty when Dick called--happy or annoyed? Most of the time it was a joy to talk to him and to be with him. He would call or e-mail me about the film he had just seen at the Screenwriters Guild and send me his notes on the Oscar ceremonies. Other times he called--something was terribly wrong and I had to fix it!

As a child actor, he appeared at the age of 4 in the Meglin Kiddies short films and then moved on and was featured in six of the Hal Roach Our Gang comedies. His credit read "Dickie De Nuet."(At one point, he had four separate listings with different spellings of his name on the International Movie Database. Dick told me he had tried to get the IMDB to fix it without success. After Dick's death in January 2016, I tackled the IMDB correction process, and the changes were finally made.) He appeared in the Shirley Temple Film The Blue Bird in 1940 and in 1943 in The Song of Bernadette.

He attended UCLA and staged a college show in which his classmate Carol Burnett appeared. She later credited the show with giving her the performing bug. After army service in Alaska, he joined the staff of Globe Photos and eventually became its West Coast Bureau Chief. His work at Globe led to his being the compiler and editor of the coffee-table size photo book Inside Hollywood: 60 Years of Globe Photos (Konemann, 2001), which I have in front of me, a gift from my lovely wife. A photo of Marilyn Monroe that I had never seen before is on the slip cover.

In 1958, he met Dolores Hart, and they became life-long friends. She left a successful acting career in 1963 and became a cloistered Benedictine nun.

He also co-wrote in 1977 with Carl Gabler the screenplay for an exceptional tv movie titled Night Drive starring Valerie Harper about a housewife who witnesses the  murder of a highway patrol officer and is stalked by the murderer. In 1988, his-friend Mother Dolores Hart asked Dick to help pull together Patricia Neal's autobiography As I Am from tape recordings Neal had made while staying at the Abbey. I was told by a number of sources that the publisher insisted that he receive credit--"with Richard DeNeut"--and royalties, so impressed was the publisher with his work on what became a best seller.

In 2001, Mother Dolores Hart asked Dick to work with her on her autobiography, which became The Ear of the Heart. He fashioned it as a combination of Mother Dolores' and his voice narrating events and commenting on them to one another..

The book had a long gestation period, with Dick traveling from Hollywood to Connecticut several times a year and interviewing and forming strong relationships with members of the Abbey community; he worked with Mother Dolores in person, by phone, by mail and, eventually, by e-mail. I was brought in in February 2012. We settled on a publisher, negotiated the contract and the book was published in May 2013. It has gone into three printings

I'll always regret that Dick wasn't feeling up to recording his part of the dialogue of the audiobook for the Ear of the Heart, which was instead done by Mother Dolores and Matthew Arnold.

The last exchange of e-mails and phone calls I had with Dick was in October 2015. The book and audiobook were out and an option agreement on the film rights had been negotiated and signed. I was casting around for possible projects and read about a proposed and unrealized sequel to Come to the Stable, a 1949 highly fictionalized account of the founding of the Abbey of Regina Laudis made by 20th Century Fox and starring Loretta Young and Celeste Holm. One of the invented bits was about a composer who owns the land where the nuns, newly arrived from France, want to build a hospital. He resists until finds out that his hit song was based upon a Gregorian chant he heard the nuns singing during the war at their Abbey in France when he was stationed nearby. I mentioned to Dick that this there was a connection or at least a parallel between this Gregorian chant and the compact disks the Abbey of Regina Laudis released years later of its members singing Gregorian chant.

Dick--I mentioned that we were both film fans--e-mailed me back that the song, "Through a Long and Sleepless Night," was nominated for an Academy Award for best song but lost to Frank Loesser's "Baby, It's Cold Outside," which shouldn't have won because Loesser had written and performed it with his wife years before; this led the Academy to change the rules and require that a song must be written for the film to be nominated.

I answered that "Through a Long and Sleepless Night" shouldn't have won anyway because Alfred Newman's melody for the song was derived from the "Miserere" by Gregorio Allegri in the 1630s.

Ten minutes later, Dick sent me another e-mail that had the complete lyrics for the song. And ten minutes after that, he called me and sang the song all the way through, "just in case you thought I didn't know the melody." He added in both the e-mail and the phone call, "I don't know why I can remember this and sometimes I can't remember my own name."

I think I may know why. The lyrics have something of Dick about them--clever, romantic, sad but ultimately hopeful. It begins,

"Through a long and sleepless night, I whisper your name./Through a long and sleepless night/A fool is to blame./Can't help but wonder if you are lonely too./As I lie here and toss about/So at a loss about you."

And it ends,

"I know that someday my heart will see the light./ Until then I lie here sleepless/And I pray my heart will weep less/All through a long and lonely sleepless night."

Dick had a wonderful expression to end his e-mails : "Arms around you." Dick our heart's arms are around you and we know yours are around us.

Copyright 2016 by John T. Aquino