Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (11 page)

Some aspects of our fights, like my pulling Annie’s hair, did require special techniques. I ended up really just holding her head but making it look as if I were gripping her hair. Then she’d put her hands on top of my wrists as she sank to the stage, supposedly in pain. What she was doing, actually, was pushing my hands away as she was going down, but if it worked properly, it looked as if I was tearing her hair out. Nobody told us how to do that, it’s something that just evolved because after the first two times I pulled she said, “Look, figure out something because that hurt! There must be a better way.”

A similar kind of cooperation was essential for the scene where I smack Annie with my doll. We used a doll with a soft head, but still, if you’re coming around with a haymaker, it’s crucial to have the timing just so. Still, if you do seven
hundred and some performances, even though I knew it was critical not to hit her in the ears or eyes, you’re gonna miss once in a while. And it was always devastating to me to hurt her.

We took whatever measures we could to minimize the fight damage. We found that using real eggs on the plates was too slippery—you couldn’t get them off the bottoms of your shoes—so we used bread crumbled up to look like scrambled eggs. Also to avoid slipping, we used a particular kind of rubber with a particular kind of waffle weave on the bottoms of our shoes. I wore shin guards, knee pads, and hip pads, plus a chest protector when I started to develop. All the padding had a plastic backing, so when the water hit my clothes, the padding wouldn’t get totally wet and could dry between shows. But that plastic made the padding very hot, and in the summer I’d start sweating and couldn’t stop.

Even things that may not have looked that awful, like Annie shoving spoons into my hands when she’s trying to teach me table manners, gave me painful blood blisters. And I had continual bruises on the backs of my legs from slamming into a chair or the chair slamming into me. In fact I got so black and blue that the Rosses made me wear knee socks and long sleeves even in the summer because they were afraid some authority might come in and put a halt to this child abuse.

The two of us did get physically fit during the play; we used to make jokes about having real muscles in our arms like Popeye. Still, accidents did happen. Once during rehearsals Annie ran into an upturned chair with such force that she was seriously injured. She got a lump the size of a goose egg on her instep and she had to rehearse sitting down for several days. Those poor chairs took a lot of punishment as well: even though we would brace and reinforce them, we’d break an average of one each performance. I’d be holding on to the chair and Annie would pick me up and swing both me and it from side to side to build up momentum, and once I let go, the chair would hit the table, which was solid as a rock, and either smash or splinter apart.

The one part of the fights that always had to be done for real, and was always horrible, was the slapping. From the
acting point of view the most difficult thing for both of us was concentrating hard enough so we didn’t flinch even though we knew we were going to take a whack right in the face. That never got any easier, and neither did the actual fact of getting hit. We were as good at it as anybody could be, we had gotten it down to a science, but even so, we were human; accidents happen. One person’s face isn’t exactly where it should be and you hit it where you shouldn’t. I have a cap in my mouth because one night I committed the ultimate sin: I gritted my teeth because I knew Annie’s slap was going to hurt and my jaw slid across and knocked off half a tooth. There really were moments when I felt, “How many times do we have to go through this? I give! I give!”

Close to a year into the run, we experienced a bad time when both Annie and I became a little paranoid and each thought the other was hitting to hurt. I don’t think either one of us knew how it began, or where, or why, but that suspicion kept building and building and then, out of the paranoia, we really began to be mean to each other: if you think someone is doing it to you, you’re going to do it back. Slaps got a little harder each time. When I pulled her chair out from the dinner table, I’d be rougher than I had to be, so that Annie would really fall on her ass.

Finally I reached the point of almost becoming phobic. I grew convinced that somehow or other she was going to literally kill me, and so I was afraid even to go to the theater. Of course, when Annie heard this she was extremely upset. She asked to come and see me and we hugged and kissed and cried. I couldn’t tell her what the hell was the matter with me. I didn’t know. I just knew that I was afraid. And she recognized that these kinds of feelings had been present on both sides, that it was just a series of insecurities on both our parts that had gotten us there. I went to work with her that night, we got through the fight scene, and it was a catharsis for both of us.

Although it was a connection I didn’t make intellectually until much later on, those scenes with Annie were in many ways a saving grace, a needed release for me as a kid. I think one of the reasons I survived all those years with the Rosses was that I was able to get onstage every night, beat
the bejesus out of an adult, and have people applaud and think I was brilliant. I certainly didn’t recognize it then—“Here, let me smack Annie because I really want to smack Ethel”—but there was horror happening at home and this was a way to get rid of it. Being able to get that stuff out of my system on a daily basis had to be helpful. Undoubtedly, one of the things that made my audition and my portrayal of Helen so different from other actresses’ was that I had so much anger in the first place and that it was so accessible. I guess I never got enough out, however, because there was so much left—and no place to get rid of it—that it all got turned in on me and eventually became self-destructive.

An example of what I was dealing with came in Philadelphia during our tryout there. I was alone with my mother most of the time, and she was very, very depressed. Not unusual for her, but this was one of the worst times. Ethel came down from New York at one point and had given my mother her usual persnickety instructions about doing the laundry just so. Ethel came back to the hotel after having had a couple of drinks, and when my mother told her that she’d done the laundry but hadn’t done the socks yet, all hell broke loose.

Ethel called my mother a lazy bitch, said she never did anything to pull her own weight: here was everybody else working so hard and what was she doing? All she’d been asked to do was wash some socks, her own daughter’s white socks. She was tired of doing my mother’s job for her and on and on and on. Ethel continued to drink during this diatribe. She finally decided that my mother had ruined everything and she called John and announced that she was going home to New York, she wasn’t going to take this crap from my mother anymore.

I watched this scene like a nightmare unfolding. I remember feeling really confused about where my loyalties should be. Was Ethel right? Was my mother right? I was furious at my mother, guilty at being angry with her, sorry that this other person was talking to her this way. And I strongly suspected that my mother really had ruined everything, and that now I was going to be stuck with her. And she was no fun. Not that Ethel was a barrel of laughs either,
but by now my mother was completely emotionless, so depressed she simply did not communicate. It all seemed so hopeless.

As far as the play itself was concerned, nobody had a clue about what the opening-night reaction in Philadelphia was going to be. There were still lingering doubts as to whether anyone would pay $9.60 to see a story about a blind deaf-mute. And because this was a huge show to mount, with an extraordinary number of light and set cues, almost like a musical, we were all there until four or five A.M. the morning before the opening, trying to solve all the technical problems.

Our advance ticket sales were not very good, including opening night, and then we got a most unusual break. Across town in another theater Melvyn Douglas was appearing in a play, and because he was a huge star they were doing a land-office business. But it was ungodly hot in Philadelphia that week and on the day of our opening, Douglas collapsed from the heat. They had to cancel that night’s performance, and when the audience showed up, they were given tickets to our show.

So our opening-night crowd was larger than it would have been, but it was far from a stacked house. It was, in fact, a theater full of people who were very disgruntled and even somewhat hostile. That play wasn’t where they wanted to be, but they’d already paid the baby-sitter so they took a chance. After the final curtain, however, they went bananas. I mean, I’d heard “Author, author” only in the movies, but they yelled “Director,” “Producer.” They called for everybody but the cleaning crew. There were eighteen curtain calls, and since I’d never been in front of an audience before, I sort of assumed this was what being onstage was like.

After it was over, Kathleen Comegys, a wonderful old woman who played Aunt Ev, set me straight. She and I went up those long, seemingly endless flights of iron stairs to the top of the theater where we had our dressing rooms. Kathleen was just behind me and she said very quietly, “Well, my little dear, I want you to take a moment and really remember this, because it doesn’t happen very often.” Which was the understatement. It didn’t take me too many years to find out
that not many plays get eighteen curtain calls on the opening night of a tryout.

It really wasn’t until that opening night that I realized my importance to The Miracle Worker. Up to then I’d felt like a kid; now I felt part of a team. All my previous work had been on TV, and whatever praise I’d gotten was from co-workers or, if it came from the Rosses, was always tempered with “But in the third act, you could have done such-and-such.” I’d never experienced the exhilaration of real live human beings I didn’t know screaming, “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!” for all those curtain calls. It was the best moment of my life and I started to feel tears that came from I don’t know where. They weren’t little-girl tears, they were tears of real revelation, of relief, of true joy at receiving that kind of acceptance. John Ross wasn’t up there, Ethel Ross wasn’t up there, I was up there. I didn’t have the words then and I don’t have them now for what it felt like to stand there on that stage amid all the pandemonium. Staggering, astounding, astonishing—it was certainly all of that. I don’t know when my feet touched the floor again.

I
f there was ever any chance of my head being turned, that night in Philadelphia was the time. It didn’t happen because the Rosses were always just around the corner. They redoubled their efforts; in fact they cornered me that very night and said, “Well, they may all think you’re great, but we know the truth.” I was very hurt by that, and also confused. Should I believe the Rosses—or all those people screaming their admiration? I think that was the first time I allowed myself to hold a thought that was contrary to theirs. If I’d known the phrase, I might have said, “Don’t rain on my parade.” And when my own kids win awards these days, I’m very careful to allow them to wallow in it, as well they should.

Back then, however, I knew I had to go on living with the Rosses, so I said, “They were applauding only because I did what you told me to do,” and everything was fine. These were very frightened people, and a success beyond even their imaginings had just occurred. They first felt, “My God, if she’s this successful, where are we going to be?” and then, “Quick, lash out, keep her in tow.” They knew our relationship was built on sand, so they were always sandbagging in every sense of the word.

Because we had done so well out of town, we knew
there was a lot of excitement surrounding
The Miracle Worker
as the October 19th New York opening neared, which gave that night a different kind of dynamic from the Philadelphia opening. We weren’t unknown anymore, so we experienced a different kind of insecurity, the “Oh my God, they may be expecting more than we’re about to deliver” variety. The day that preceded opening night was endless, and we breathed a heightened, rarefied air. Our dressing rooms were all filled with flowers, like a gangster’s funeral. It seemed we would never get to the moment when that curtain would go up.

Once we got started, the audience was so responsive right off the bat that their reaction kicked us into another gear. At one point I threw a pitcher of water at Annie and I nailed Rosalind Russell, who was sitting in the front row. People nearby tried to help her, but she was so enthralled she wouldn’t let anyone interrupt what was going on onstage, she just sat there drenched, with water dripping off the hat she was wearing. She also got spoons thrown at her, and at one point, concerned that we’d run out of them, she very gently reached up and put one back on the stage.

We got thirteen curtain calls that night, which was the talk of Broadway, unheard-of for a straight play, but after the eighteen in Philadelphia it was a
real
disappointment to me. The party afterward across the street at the Absinthe House was fun, I may even have sat on Mel Brooks’s lap, but by the Rosses’ usual orders I wasn’t allowed to listen to the reviews.

The Rosses, however, could shield me only so far, and as
The Miracle Worker
became the play of the year, they couldn’t stop people from recognizing me in restaurants or on the street and coming up to offer congratulations. I did have some sense of myself as the darling of Broadway, which I loved and took great pride in. But I had to hide that pride, it had to be very secret in me. I had to seem rigorously humble and willing—not to say eager—to instantly pass all kudos along to the Rosses or Arthur or Annie. If I didn’t, I risked Ethel’s coming down hard on me for being egocentric or having a big head or any one of the forty phrases she’d pop up with that said the same thing. I felt like a “poor little
rich girl,” on top of the world but not really free to enjoy it.

As soon as the play got established on Broadway, so did my routine. I’d have my coffee in the morning, spend three hours in school, and then immediately call the Rosses to check in. I’d get to the Playhouse about two, it would be just me and my mom in this darkened theater. I’d do my school-work, eat an early dinner, take a nap, and then get ready for my half hour with Annie and the show.