From Katharine Hepburn to Red Auerbach: Ken Dooley memoir filled with fascinating encounters
NEWPORT — "The Gilded Age” now premiering on HBO is set among the city’s mansions, but eight years ago, then-Newport resident Ken Dooley was all ready to go with a film, “Bellevue Avenue,” which was to portray life among Newport's wealthy class in that era. A television series with the same name also was planned.
Dooley, the screenwriter and executive producer of the planned film, had lined up Richard Gere, Olympia Dukakis, and other notable actors to star in the film, but at the last minute, the financiers of the film, Giovanni Feroce, CEO of Alex & Ani, and Carolyn Rafaelian, founder and principal of the firm, backed out in early 2013. Feroce was fired as CEO that year and the firm went in another direction.
That story garners only a brief mention in Dooley’s newest book, Dooley Noted: Tales of an Ordinary Man Fortunate Enough to Meet a Lot of Extraordinary People in His Life’s Journey. Now 90, Dooley looks back on a long life filled with fascinating encounters with people from all walks of life.
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For example, Dooley became close to Red Auerbach, the legendary coach of the Boston Celtics, when he directed the 1981 film “Dedication Desire, The Story of Red Auerbach,” and wrote the books, MBA: Management by Auerbach and The Auerbach Dynasty.
'The Prettiest Girl on Bailey’s Beach'
Dooley lived full time in Newport from 2008 to 2020, when some health problems led him to living close his daughter, but his encounters with the city began at an early age. Back in the summer of 1939, when the Cooley family lived in Cranston and Dooley was 8 years old, his older sister, Eileen, got a summer job at the Newport mansion Seaweed as a parlor maid.
The first story of dozens and dozens in the 547-page Dooley Noted is called, “The Prettiest Girl on Bailey’s Beach.” One of the fringe benefits Eileen had as parlor maid was permission to swim at the exclusive beach. One day, a Providence Journal photographer took a photo of her at the beach and the cutline in a Sunday paper identified her as Eileen Dooley of Cranston.
Some of Newport’s high society at the time asked why the Journal would publish “a photograph of a maid instead of one of the young society debutantes” at the beach. The managing editor looked into it and said “the photographer explained that he was told to take a picture of the prettiest girl on the beach. And that’s exactly what he did.”
Eileen Dooley’s time as a parlor maid was short. Dooley writes his sister was fired for joining an effort “to unionize the servants, who at that time, worked six-and-one-half days a week for little money.”
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Dooley’s book is not chronological, but a series of fascinating snapshots of people with whom he had run-ins. In some cases, they were brief.
In 1982, he was on the board of directors of the Ivoryton Playhouse in Essex, Connecticut. He asked Katharine Houghton to perform her one-person play, “To Heaven in a Swing,” there. Houghton was the niece of the late four-time Oscar winner Katherine Hepburn, who arrived for opening night. Dooley had reserved a front seat for Hepburn, who he received at the door.
“You will be here, Mr. Doo-lee, at 1 minute before curtain to escort me,” Hepburn told him. “At the end of the play, you will take me to the dressing room to see my niece.”
“She sounded like the character she played in 'The Good Earth,' and I was one of her Chinese friends,” Dooley writes. “I didn’t salute, but I followed her orders.”
Stories of conversations with other celebrities such as Lee Iaccoca at Chrysler Corp. are more in-depth and meaningful.
Dooley’s work over the years has had an impact in multiple ways
He wrote and produced "The Murder Trial of John Gordon," a play that ran for 21 performances at the Park Theatre in Cranston beginning in January 2011, when Dooley was living in Newport.
In Dooley Noted, the author writes about how the play came about. It’s one of the longer stories in the book, starting when he was a boy and his mother used to sing a folk song to him called, “Poor Johnny Gordon.”
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Gordon, an Irish immigrant, was executed for the murder of Cranston industrialist Amasa Sprague on Dec.31, 1843. Dooley researched the case and the play’s portrayal makes the argument Gordon did not receive a fair trial and exculpatory evidence was ignored before his execution.
Then state Rep. Peter Martin of Newport, who said he saw the play seven times because he was so moved by Dooley's work, introduced a bill into the General Assembly asking then Gov. Lincoln Chafee to grant a pardon, which the governor did later in 2011.
Robert "Bob" Thorpe, an older brother of one of Dooley's Cranston friends Gil Thorpe, joined the 39th Fighting Squadron of the Fifth Air Force in World War II. The 20-year-old Thorpe was shot down on May 28, 1944, over New Guinea, crashing into the sea. The Air Force declared him "missing in action" and then "killed in action" after the war. The family never knew what happened to him.
Dooley, who writes about the Thorpe family in another of the book’s longer pieces, met Gil Thorpe again after a 40-year separation and started to dig. Using the Freedom of Information Act, he put together a 1,300-page dossier about Bob Thorpe's death. He learned 2nd Lt. Thorpe had been immediately captured by Japanese forces on the island, interrogated, tortured and beheaded.
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As a result of Dooley’s work, Bob Thorpe was awarded the state's highest military honor in 2013 and a stone marker at the state's Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Exeter.
Dooley, the author of 40 books besides his plays and screenplays, was inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2018. In the foreword to Dooley Noted, Patrick Conley, the state’s historian laureate, writes that Dooley “offers the reader vignettes that illustrate the history and temper of our own times.”
“Our worst fear isn’t the end of life but the end of memories,” writes Dooley in his book. “That quote from Tom Rackman has special meaning for me. I have so many great memories of the people I have met these past 90 years.”
The book can be purchased at kendooley.org, and Dooley says he will autograph all copies bought through the website. He added that all proceeds from the book will be donated to Rhode Island nonprofit organizations.