Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (14 page)

Two major
Miracle Worker
events took place in my fourteenth year and I had strong feelings about both of them. The first, on March 7, 1960, was the raising of my name above the title of the play. Even though there were ego-reducing admonitions that this was just a good business move and didn’t change anything, the Rosses fought for it, they wanted me to be a star. They wanted me to be, in fact, the youngest child ever to have starred on Broadway. That would be another little P.R. phrase to throw into the hat.

I felt very good about that. Having star billing was quite a big deal. It was important to me to be equal; I felt I was doing an equal job and I didn’t want to be treated differently
because I was thirteen. What I hated was that the Rosses made me go up and pretend to paint my name on the marquee for a publicity picture. I didn’t see anybody else up there painting their names on marquees while flashbulbs went off. I’d just wanted to be like everyone else, and there I was, the youngest and littlest again. I still hate that picture, it wasn’t dignified. But I didn’t get to tell anybody that. I just kept smiling and saying, “Oh, isn’t this nice.”

Much worse than that, in fact, the worst thing that I could imagine, was that Anne Bancroft was planning to leave the play the following December. I was so upset about it that the waiting time while she decided whether to extend or not was excruciating. She finally agreed to stay on until the spring of 1961, and I put the problem right out of my head. Then the last month arrived and I lobbied strongly for her to stay even longer, I straight out begged her, “Don’t go, please don’t go.” As the time got closer she’d just say, “I have to, I have to do other things.” I knew realistically that it was time for her to move on—a year and a half is a long time to do a play—but I was distraught. I’d hinted to the Rosses that I wanted to get out, too, but there was just no way. And yet I didn’t want to be there without her. Once she left, the play was over.

At Annie’s final performance, I don’t know who was acting for me, because I was very busy being hysterical. During the last scene I was out of control, sobbing and sobbing and sobbing, but not so anyone could hear, “Please, please don’t go.” When they brought the curtain down, I thought I’d die. And when it was our turn to take our final bow together, it was some of the worst pain I’ve ever felt. I cried and I kept crying. It was a wrenching experience.

Annie’s replacement was Suzanne Pleshette, but given the way I felt, Suzie’s performance could have been the second coming of Christ and it wouldn’t have been good enough. I tried to be very nice to her on the surface, but my sense of rejection and resentment—“Where’s my Annie?”—wasn’t far underneath. We had very little rehearsal time together, Suzie was frail and not in training, and by that time I was a very strong little person. As a result, there were a couple of times when I pushed her in a scene, forgot to
compensate for the weight difference, and she lost her footing and went through one of those false walls. I think Suzie believed I’d done it on purpose, but there was definitely no thought-out viciousness on my part. There was the resentment of a child, which means I may not have gone out of my way to make her comfortable the way I normally would with another actress, but I certainly didn’t go out of my way to do her in either.

One area where we genuinely had a problem was Suzie’s nails. She was a flashy, very glamorous young woman, with great hairdos, lots of makeup, and
long
fingernails. Now, obviously she knew she couldn’t play Annie Sullivan with long red fingernails, so off came the polish and down came the nails. But not far enough down, because her nails not only scratched me, they were dangerous and they really hurt. For weeks, night after night, I would go to the stage manager and say, “Her nails are not short enough.” Probably if I had gone directly to her, we could have solved this at once, but I still wasn’t used to the fact that someone else was occupying Annie’s dressing room.

The problem was, she could have avoided hurting me only by cutting her nails so short they would be positively unattractive. Now that I have fingernails myself, I understand the great import of having them. I’m sure she wanted to go out on dates and wear jewelry and that’s a drag—jewelry doesn’t look right with short fingernails. I don’t think she meant to be obstinate about this or anything else—she thought she had done enough; it was hard for her to believe her nails had to be that short. Eventually we settled the matter. She was convinced, and the little war ended.

Suzie used her glamour as an avenue to reach me. She had things like brocade-lined mink coats and six-inch-high heels that she let me try on; it was real dress-up time, and that was a lot of fun. And, though there was something cute and very disarming about the way she did it, Suzie was into real profanity. Whew! If Helen Keller could have heard her, Suzie could have
cursed
her into the miracle. She was a tough cookie but a good soul, and awfully sweet to me. I had a lot of laughs with Suzie, and I got to love her, but in a very different way than I loved Annie.

I did about three months of
The Miracle Worker
with Suzie, and by the time my last performance came around, I was tired and relieved. Most of the original cast had left before me, but there were still lots of tears and gifts. I’d lived intimately with those people for a long time, during a very remarkable period of my life, and even though I was ready to leave, it was hard to go.

At that moment I didn’t at all realize the importance
The Miracle Worker
was going to have in my life. As for the future, I didn’t think much further than “Well, I’m sure I’ll get another job because this has gone so well.” And I kept wondering, deep down inside, “Why am I successful? Is it them or is it me? Am I nothing without them? Could I have the acting without the rest of the bad stuff?” Because what I had realized with absolute certainty during
The Miracle Worker
’s run was that I would never give acting up, ever.

T
hough there were always rumblings about turning
The Miracle Worker
into a film, it wasn’t until a couple of months before I left the play that it became official: the movie was the main reason, in fact, that the Rosses were willing to let me leave at all. The filming and especially being reunited with Annie sounded exciting, almost like reliving the experience from the beginning, only better, because we’d already gotten through a lot of the hard parts.

Even after the film was set, it wasn’t clear whether or not I was going to be in it. There were negotiations similar to the ones before the play opened: “She looks too old, she’s too tall, she’s this, she’s that, shall we take a chance?” Finally someone said, “Who are we kidding? If we’re going with Annie Bancroft, we’ve got to go with the kid.” If another actress had played Helen Keller, I would have been devastated. Not so much about missing out on a movie but because I felt the part as well as that ensemble experience was mine. The idea that I might become a movie star was nowhere in my thinking.

The filming began in the summer of 1961. The interiors were done at a studio on West Twenty-ninth Street in Manhattan, and the Rosses let me travel there by myself. I took a
cab down the West Side Highway to the studio every morning, and you have no idea how much that meant to me. It was early in the day, the air was fresh, and the feeling of freedom, just being able to go from the apartment to the cab door alone, was best of all. I kept wondering, “How come I’m being allowed to do this?” The answer was that filming schedules begin a lot earlier in the day than theatrical schedules, and the Rosses didn’t want to get up at that hour.

The exteriors, shot over ten days in Middletown, New Jersey, were also fun. I spent most of my off time just hanging around in the back of a nearby apple orchard. There was an old black lady who lived there in a little shack up on cinder blocks. She must have had upward of sixty cats; she called them her “chirruns.”

This woman lived in one room—I’d never met anybody that poor before—and on the walls were nothing but pictures of people in caskets. Just the way you or I would hang pictures of our children or our friends, she was hanging them, too, but in caskets. It was spooky to me, because there was also no light in this place and it smelled funny from all those cats. But I loved this lady and every day, when I’d come to see her, she’d call out, “Chirruns, chirruns, chirruns, come on! Little girl’s here to play with you! Chirruns!” And these sixty cats would come from everywhere. She wanted to give me a kitty, but the Rosses, of course, wouldn’t allow it.

After doing the play all that time onstage, we hardly needed any preparation before shooting started. Though there were some trims made, including some lines of Annie’s that I was in love with, the basic text is the same for the two versions. And because almost everyone involved had done films before, Arthur Penn didn’t have to dwell on the difference in technique involved. Occasionally he’d step in with a comment like “You know, we have to bring it down for the camera,” but that was it.

As the filming progressed, people began to worry for real that I was getting too tall. I think a lot of blocking choices were made with that in mind, for example, placing me next to Inga Swenson, who played my mother, because she was taller than Annie. And even though I spent a number of scenes all scrunched up, there were still some shots in which
my legs look suspiciously lanky for someone who’s supposed to be seven.

Our cinematographer was a Cuban with a thick accent named Ernesto Caparos. He was terribly charming, very dedicated to his work, but although he adored Arthur, they fought constantly because Arthur wanted a very particular dark, moody look. I’m sure he explained that to Ernesto but after a point there is something in a cinematographer, unless he works for Ingmar Bergman, that says, “I can’t stand these shadows anymore, I gotta see the people.”

So they’d go out on location, Ernesto would walk around making disapproving noises, and Arthur would finally say, “Do you have a problem, Ernie?”

“Chados, Arthur, there’s too many chados. All the time she’s in the chade.”

And Arthur would generally laugh and walk away and get what he wanted. But occasionally they would square off toe-to-toe. Ernie would be screaming, “Too many chados!” and, “She’s in the chade!” and Arthur would be yelling right back, complete with the accent, “I want the chade! The chados are the whole point!”

One thing that characterized the look of
The Miracle Worker
was a lack of closeups. There was criticism at the time that this made the movie look too much like the play, but I don’t agree. As I see it, Arthur concentrated on telling the story instead of punching it up every two minutes. Both as an actor and part of the audience, I never missed the closeups at all. There’s so much action that to cut in is distracting. Also, there’s so much going on psychologically between these two people that when you cut away to one or the other, you lose something of the dynamic. And boy, does it ever work when one of those rare closeups appears. You’re so startled by it, you almost gasp.

One closeup I had my own reasons for enjoying is the scene in which, mimicking Annie, I do first a good girl’s face and then a bad girl’s. Audiences in the theater always loved that, but since I made the bad girl face by rolling my eyes back in my head, there was never any way, not even by looking in the mirror, to see what everyone thought was so funny. So it was great for me the first time I saw the movie to
be able to say, “Oh, that’s what they’re laughing at.” It is pretty funny.

The tantrum scenes were the most complex to film. The major one in the second act was shot over four consecutive days, working mornings only. I was in great shape and at an age when you can usually refuel in five minutes anyhow, so when I think about how tired I got, Annie must have felt fifty times worse. I was very quick, and God bless her, she kept up with me. There is one particular moment when I’m going hellbent for election around that table and Annie cuts me off. Now, she had longer legs, but just the breathing power to do that is not easy to come by.

And it wasn’t just the actors who needed to rest, there were guys with cameras on their shoulders who were as physically involved as we were. A lot of the film was shot with hand-held equipment, with the operators sitting in wheelchairs because they were small and mobile enough to get into corners. Often we’d get half or three-quarters of the way through a complicated take and have to start all over again because one of us didn’t hit a position we thought we were going to hit or the wheelchairs missed their marks or the camera tilted or was jolted in some way. That scene was just exhausting for everyone.

The most complicated camera move, however, comes not in the fight scene but in the one in which Helen first enters the garden house and circles it wildly like a caged bird. The camera is in the center, following the flight around and around. Then suddenly I charge the camera, fall to the floor, and the camera follows me in one unbroken shot so you see my face all the way down to the ground. You accept it, you’re expecting to see the girl’s face, but it took some very clever planning for that to work. The camera was placed on a platform, and as I fell to the floor a trapdoor slowly opened, the cameraman stepped out of the wheelchair, bent his knees, and got down to the floor level with me. It’s an extremely effective shot because it doesn’t jump off the screen at you as a camera trick; you don’t even notice it.

A couple of times in the film, if you look closely, you can see accidents that were left in. In the fight scene, Annie starts laughing from sheer exhaustion, something that was
not in the script. It was decided, rightly I think, that it was entirely possible that that would have happened, and it also shows that the character has a sense of humor. In one of the outdoor scenes, Annie says “shit” when she accidentally falls into a stream of extremely icy water. We didn’t have microphones on and the scene was used with a voice-over, so you really have to look to see it. I love looking, of course, and I giggle every time.