Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (6 page)

I’ve always been grateful that I began acting during what’s come to be known as the “golden age” of live TV. You got to work with terrific people, like playing opposite Myrna Loy and dancing with Ed Wynn in “Meet Me in St. Louis,” plus there was an excitement about it unlike anything I’ve ever experienced professionally. The electricity in the studio the date the show was going on the air built and built and built all day long, till it was “Fifteen seconds, stand by,” at which point, of course, I had to go to the bathroom but couldn’t. Being on those elite shows like the Armstrong Circle Theater, The U.S. Steel Hour, David Susskind Presents, and the Hallmark Hall of Fame was a real high, scary as hell and fun, all at the same time.

Most of the time, I appeared in TV versions of the
classics and those were wonderful for me. In “The Prince and the Pauper” in 1957 I was a little girl in a loft, watching the sun bounce off the windowpanes and having a conversation with the prince. I had my hair down for once and I was wearing a long peasant dress, so I thought it was all very romantic, a feeling I’ve always loved.

The next year came something even better, “Wuthering Heights,” starring Richard Burton and Rosemary Harris. Even today, the romance of that story is really transporting. If I watch the Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon version on late night TV, I can’t go out of the house the next day because my eyes are so red. And Richard Burton was, well, Burton, bigger than life and exciting to look at. I played Cathy as a child and even though I was crazy about Rosemary Harris, who was the older Cathy, I also resented it when it was time for her to take over. I wanted to do those love scenes with Richard Burton.

Besides Burton, what I really enjoyed about “Wuthering Heights” was the rain. Heathcliff kept running away, I’d follow him, and it would rain and rain on the moors during our preteen love scenes. But if you want to talk serious rain, there was “The Swiss Family Robinson” later in 1957. We created a real hurricane, with trees blowing over, the treehouse swaying as if it were going to collapse, monkeys and all kinds of exotic birds flying around. The wind machines were turned on, then the rain, and we all climbed up rope ladders. I cried out, “Help me! Help me! Help me!”

All of a sudden everything stopped and David Susskind, the producer, ran out, grabbed me, and said, very concerned, “What’s the matter, honey, what’s the matter?”

“What?”

“What’s the matter, honey?”

“I’m acting!”

What could he say but “Oh.” I felt like such a fool. He turned and walked away, but the whole place fell apart. “I’m acting! Get out of the way!” Oh, brother.

Walter Pidgeon was the star of that show and I had a special rapport with him. He was my pop. He was tall and handsome and gentle, all those good fantasy things you want in a dad. Because we had a scene together in which we
talked about tortoises and how long they live, he gave me a turtle-shaped hassock, which I still have, plus a gold turtle from Tiffany that was my first good piece of jewelry. The Rosses, naturally, took it away from me. It was mine, but it was to be worn only when I was told I could wear it.

Actually Walter Pidgeon was only one of a series of surrogate fathers I created on almost every set I was on. I was very affectionate, and I was addicted to sitting on people’s laps. That became a running joke in my grown-up years. People still see me at parties and say, “She sat on my lap!” and someone else will chime in, “She sat on my lap too! She’d sit on anybody’s lap.” And it was true.

I found another surrogate in one of the first major film roles I did, Happy Anniversary in 1959, and that was David Niven. He was even more elegant than the other dads. He and Mitzi Gaynor, who was the costar, and Mitzi’s husband, Jack Bean, were all loving, bright, sunshiny people. And Mitzi looked so glamorous. I remember her wearing a sort of negligee thing for a breakfast scene and my being so impressed with her breasts because they would rise and fall when she talked. I was mesmerized by that. Actually, the story line of the film had to do with sex, and the awful consequences of my blurting out on a television quiz show that my parents, David and Mitzi, had had premarital relations. I think I was smart enough to figure out what premarital relations were, but the Rosses led people to believe that I was a total innocent, all sweetness and light. So someone was delegated to take me aside and gingerly tell me that sex was something adults did and which I shouldn’t have mentioned, and that was all I needed to know in order to play the scene.

Before Happy Anniversary, however, came The Goddess. The film was written by Paddy Chayefsky about a Marilyn Monroe-type movie star, played by Kim Stanley. I played her as an eight-year-old girl. It was shot at Ellicott City, Maryland, and my mother, who was delegated by the Rosses to take me there, freaked out on the airplane. It was her first time on a plane and she got frantic, saying, “I want to get off! I want to get off! I want to get off!” And I’d say, “Mama, you can’t get off. We’re ten thousand feet in the air.” Then
she really started throwing a fit and the stewardess had to come over and calm her down. I was so embarrassed.

My scene in the movie was a brief one, but it was lovely. I was Emily Ann, the little girl no one paid any attention to. She gets her report card at the end of the school term and she goes to tell her mother, who works in a five-and-dime store, that she got promoted to the next grade. Her mother is annoyed and tells her to go home. Then you see her at a girlfriend’s house, calling, “Sylvia! Sylvia!” But Sylvia never comes and Emily Ann has nobody to tell. She goes home and you see that she’s a latchkey kid before we had the phrase. She’s going to eat a snack in this depressing, hideous-looking kitchen, when suddenly a tough alley cat wanders in through an open window. A funny look comes over the girl’s face. She very carefully gets up from the table, finds a bowl, pours some milk into it, and puts it on the floor. While the cat is drinking, she swoops it up, envelops it in a hug, and says, “I got promoted today.”

It’s a strong scene, just a little vignette but very well written, with a beginning, middle, and end. You could have had the whole movie stop there and you would have gotten the message. Getting that part, which involved a pantomime audition for Paddy Chayefsky, after which he called up and raved about me, was one of the few times I was aware that the Rosses were really excited, really proud of me. When I think about what was the first film I ever did, it’s always The Goddess.

It wasn’t until 1973, however, almost fifteen years after it was made, that I got to see The Goddess. I was in Milwaukee, doing a play, and one night I was lying on a motel room bed with the TV on, talking to one of my kids, when I heard a child’s voice that sounded vaguely familiar to me. I turned over so I could see the TV, and there I was. The Rosses, forever guarding against my getting too big a head, had never let me watch myself on the screen or even read any reviews.

The Rosses couldn’t prevent people from coming up and complimenting me in person, but if according to their standards it had been done too much, there would invariably be a humbling session afterward. Or if my thank-yous were not appropriate, if I hadn’t said, “Thank you very much. I worked
with my manager very hard,” the same thing would happen. It usually took place at dinner. Everything would be lighthearted and fine, and then, all of a sudden, I’d hear, “By the way, today you …” and the barrage would start. Immediately I would feel, “When am I going to do something right? Even when I do it right, it’s not good enough.” So I was always on my guard, always trying to figure out what it was they were looking for so that maybe once in a while I could be one step ahead of them.

The cornerstone of these sessions was the idea that without them I’d be nothing. They’d told my brother Ray, “Without us, you’d end up a truck driver or in jail,” and with me it was, over and over again, “If it wasn’t for us, you’d be a hooker or you’d work in the five-and-dime.” Only once, when I was a teenager, did I have the nerve to say, “Well, I hope I would have chosen hooker.” Being twelve or thirteen and fairly independent when he started, Ray was much less vulnerable to them than I was. After all, what does a seven-year-old know? The Rosses’ threat was, “We will drop you and you’ll go back to oblivion,” and I came to believe that completely.

W
hen I was young, I had a dream, a child’s nightmare: that I would be taken someplace away from my mother and never know if I was going to be with her again. That’s very spooky, considering what eventually happened.

Living with the Rosses didn’t start right away, it evolved. First I began staying with them the night before a job, and if I got homesick, they’d make fun of me for being a baby who wanted to be with her mother. Then they started having me stay on weekends, weekends became three days, three days became five, five became seven. Always I was presented with the notion that spending more time with them would further my career. Once I became a Broadway star at age thirteen, that was it. The standard line was, “She’ll have to stay here now because the work is going to be so intense.” I never lived at home with my mother again.

From the first apartment I met them in, on Seventy-fourth Street, the Rosses soon moved a few blocks to a sixth-floor apartment at 340 West 72 Street, at the corner of Riverside Drive. It was a nice place, but there never was a room for me. I spent innumerable nights there, all through my most successful years, but it was always on a couch in the hallway. I never had more than two drawers to call my own,
with my sheets in one and my clothes in the other. Finally, in 1963, when I was sixteen, the Rosses moved to an apartment on Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, where I had my own room. But I was never allowed to close the door. I could close the bathroom door, but if I was in there longer than ten minutes, I had to open it. There was no genuine effort to make me feel at home.

As far as my real mother was concerned, these years marked the beginning of a really dark period that is still very difficult and complicated for me to deal with. When it came to the boring work involved with my career, like baby-sitting me on a set, then she was brought into action. Mostly she sat there as if she were part of the wall. Never opened her mouth, never made a move, just sat there and read the Daily News and the Mirror. What she was was petrified, because the Rosses had literally told her, “You find a chair, you put it in the corner, and you stay there and don’t say a word about anything.” That was the directive, and even when people would come up and compliment me, she’d say thank you and then close right up because she was afraid she’d get into trouble.

That fear was in a sense contagious, because I was scared of my mother. She was very unpredictable emotionally, one step away from suicide most of the time, so I never knew what was going to happen. She might turn into an iceberg, with a really mean expression on her face and a rigid body, and withhold any and all affection. At other times everything would be fine and then all of a sudden she’d be screaming and yelling.

One New Year’s Eve my sister, who never went anywhere, was going out with the man who would become her fiancé, when my mother threw a tantrum. My sister decided not to go and I kept insisting she should. But when Carol started out the door, my mother began to attack herself—it was astounding to watch. She smashed her face against the doorjamb, pulled out her hair, beat her face until she’d broken her nose and was a bloody mess. Of course my sister came back in, and I kept saying, “Get outta here! Get
outta
here! If you go, she’ll stop.” And she went. And my mother
stopped. And I took care of her. It was not the first time, and it wasn’t the last, that she acted that way.

The other thing my mother did to terrible excess was crying. Relentless crying. For days and days and days on end. I’d be at the Rosses’, the doorbell would ring at ten A.M., and she’d be standing there in tears. She would come in and sit down, and it would be obvious that she’d been at it for quite a while. She would continue crying and the Rosses would get angrier and angrier. They would try every approach they could think of to defuse the situation. They’d leave her alone, go and do business, come back—she was still the same. Dinner would come and go, the evening would set in, it could be one or two o’clock in the morning, she was still crying. Once you unplugged the dam, this lady did not stop.

My mother would never say why she was doing this, and I know now that she really didn’t know why, didn’t understand that it was not due to any single cause, it was because of everything. Her fear of the Rosses was ten times greater than mine; she is, in fact, still afraid of them. This was a terrified woman, someone with less than an eighth-grade education, who had no sense of self-worth. The Rosses managed to loom as authority figures; they appeared to her to be educated people of means. And my working represented income that was like a gift from God, which she didn’t want to jeopardize. My mother has always felt responsible for everything; anything in the world that goes wrong, she must have caused it. So the Rosses’ admonitions and warnings were taken very seriously by her. She figured she could wreck everything for me. Still, she resented the whole situation. There was a lot of fury in my mother in those days.

What my mother’s behavior accomplished was exactly what the Rosses hoped it would: it drove an emotional wedge between me and her that made it easier for them to keep me away from home. Although my mother had signed a contract with the Rosses, which neither of us had ever read, they wanted more than that, they wanted to completely control me. But they could never dismiss the threat, minor though it was, that one day my mother might say, “I’ve come to my senses now. That’s my daughter and we’re leaving.” So they never tried to hide the contempt they had for her. They
characterized her as mentally ill, unbalanced. “We just have to put up with Mrs. Duke” was one of their pet phrases.

So even though it troubled me, even though part of me knew better, I bought that point of view. My mother made it easy to buy, especially in the early days before the Rosses got horrible. The Rosses laughed, life was happier at their place, eating dinner out every night was fabulous, at least at first, and on the other side was a woman out of Kafka. They didn’t have to do much to diminish her. My mother was giving the Rosses their ammunition; she loaded every gun for them.