Remembering Patricia Ripley — the star of her life
Editor’s note: Patricia T. Ripley Rodriguez, 92, of Taos, died Dec. 19.
When we moved into our house on Santistevan Lane 12 years ago, I met my neighbor Pat Ripley right off the bat. Her age was undetermined, but I knew she was in her late 70s. She gave a holiday party in our honor, at which I learned she had been an actress with a real career in film, most notably a role in “Splendor in the Grass” with Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty in which she played a rather austere nurse. In real life, Patricia was warm and vibrant. We saw her daily when she walked her doted upon lab mix pup, Petunia, across our lawn.
Over the next dozen years I learned about Pat’s professional history in snippets. She had preceded us moving into our neighborhood by only a few years because she had previously lived in Pilar. She enjoyed telling the story of how her friends and acquaintances told her it would be the end of her acting career when she settled in Pilar, because there was only a party line telephone system. How would she get calls from agents and directors, friends asked her. But in fact, her career prospered because neighbors heard when her agent called and someone always went to find her out with her horses, in her telling. She appeared in more than a dozen Hollywood pictures and twice as many plays and touring shows.
She talked about performing with Grace Kelly in the theater productions at Elitch Gardens in Denver. When I had heard she was once a favorite of the director Federico Fellini, she set me straight that he had called her in, but never offered her a part. She had loved working as an actress.
Pat starred in her own life, and it came as something of a surprise when at age 83 she got married for the first time. She had met Charlie, 15 years her junior, at mass. I marveled that a woman who had lived alone successfully would elect for marriage at her age, but when I said so, she gave me a knowing look and smiled. It was good to know she had a partner, especially someone to shovel the snow in her driveway in winter, something she had unfailingly done herself for a decade.
My most vivid memory of her was one summer when she was down the street collecting her mail. I’ll guess she was 84. She was wearing a straw hat, trousers and a cropped t-shirt that exposed four bare inches of her trim waistline. She could still get away with it. It was the first summer of her marriage and she made me laugh when I asked how she was doing and she said with mock horror, “Why didn’t you tell me I would never be alone!” Occasionally I walked over and sneaked a cigarette with her. She always wanted to know about my writing, our adult children, good books I’d read. She theatrically pronounced my name like the French word it is, rolling the r, drawing it out.
When I was writing my biography of Millicent Rogers, she liked hearing about Millicent’s days in Hollywood when she was chasing the actor Clark Gable. I shared a few facts about the way Millicent stalked Clark when he went out with other women. “Oh, I’ve done that,” she said unabashedly, taking me aback with her honesty. She took Pilates classes as recently as last May, and when she told the teacher that she had recently signed up for hospice, the instructor commented that hospice was for old people who were dying, not, she thought, for people practicing Pilates. Pat gave her that look with a wink tucked into it.
Photographer Lenny Foster took a photograph several summers back of Pat seated at the bottom of a big willow in our yard. Our son and his fiancé got married under that tree this past summer and Pat was excited about the prospect of the wedding, but she was too weak to walk over that day. Now death was stalking her.
I learned from our neighbors George and Jeanne Tallman about the fall and surgery she did not survive. This morning when I woke up in the darkness on one of the shortest days of the year, I looked over as I usually do at her house up the lane. For 12 years there has usually been a light on in it. This morning it was gone.
Burns is an author living in Taos.
