Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (16 page)

Naturally, once we’re onstage, all of a sudden I’m gone. I give the signal, and she doesn’t take it. I give it again, she still doesn’t take it. I could feel the heat coming up in my body and the blood rush to my face. I look to the stage manager in the wings, and either he hasn’t been given the scene or he’s lost it somewhere in his book, but at any rate there are pages flying everywhere and I’m dead. I was so flustered—the silence lasted for what felt like an eternity but was probably only a couple of minutes—before I came up with a way to begin a monologue that ended the scene.

When I got offstage I was furious. I was too young to
swear much but the air turned as blue as I could make it, it was one of the few times in my childhood when I was enraged at the unfairness of a situation and actually spoke up. I complained to the Rosses, the stage manager, even to the director, Jules Dassin, and to a person they all thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen, which made me feel even worse. Never again did I agree to take a scene and put it in the same day. I never wanted to have to go through that embarrassment again.

After four weeks of rehearsal and four weeks out of town,
Isle of Children
opened in New York at the Cort Theater on March 16, 1962, and lasted only eleven performances. I got some great notices, including one from Walter Kerr in
The New York Times
that said a theater ought to be named after me, but I didn’t read that until more than ten years later, when I was coming home from a lunch with John Astin: when I told him I’d never seen the review he immediately headed for the Beverly Hills library to show it to me on microfilm. Despite that, the overall word of mouth on the play was horrible; nobody wanted to see a one-teenager show and the audience stayed away in droves. Believe me, it’s humiliating to perform a play to maybe an eighth of a house. Arthur Penn came one night and handed me a folded leaflet someone had given him on the street. I opened it up and it said, “What to do about the Bomb!” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Still, I was stunned when
Isle of Children
closed, crushed is the only way I can describe it. Remember, I’m the one who thought eighteen curtain calls was normal. So this was a major shock. For the first time the sense of loss came not from the thought, “Gee, I won’t see these people anymore” but rather, “Hey, wait a minute, we didn’t finish with this yet.” I really wanted to keep playing that role. Plus I was out of a job, which meant the whole rigmarole had to start all over again.

It was only a few months later, though, that
The Miracle Worker
film was released. It was a very small opening—a few interviews but really no hoopla at all—but it was a picture that really snuck up on people. The first inkling of its considerable success came when I won the Hollywood Foreign
Press Association’s Golden Globe for Most Promising Future Star. It was exciting to be out on “the Coast” at last, exciting to wear a strapless dress and high heels for the first time, exciting to experience all the affirmation, all the adoration that comes with winning. You’re the darling, and if you’re someone who wants to be liked, it’s hog heaven.

But there’s something else going on inside of you that gives any award a double edge. In those final moments, when they’re reading off the nominees, you can’t help yourself—you really want it. It’s a sad state of affairs for the human spirit when you’re seduced into feeling an award matters that much, but that’s what happens. And once you start to be that needy and that greedy, you begin to lose respect for yourself.

Although I was conscious of those feelings even then, I was a long way from being able to articulate them, and when I learned I’d been nominated for an Oscar in the best supporting actress category for
The Miracle Worker
, I had other things on my mind. For one thing, the news was delivered to me along with the flat statement, “Your mother’s not going.” My assumption by then, based on experience, was that at any kind of occasion she would invariably be excluded. The Rosses felt she was an obstructionist and a constant problem. Coming from the Lower East Side, depressed all the time—she did not present a pretty picture. And just as I had no ally against the Rosses’ decisions, neither did my mother, not even in me. I’m sure she knew people who would’ve said, “Hey, you have a perfect right to go to the Academy Awards with your daughter,” but she was too petrified to talk to anyone else and I, out of embarrassment and fear, said nothing. And not only didn’t she get to go, but Bambi the dog did go, wearing a dress and a mink stole and being carried in a pyramid-shaped black leather bag. I’m not kidding; I wish I were. That Oscar situation, the fact that I couldn’t be a nobler person and stand up for my mother, has caused me great distress for a long, long time.

I was also upset by what I’d been told I had to wear. Ethel made me a hideous-looking mint-green dress. The bottom of it actually had a quite pretty overlay of voile, and the top was supposed to be the same, but when Ethel saw the
bodice she liked it so well she decided it didn’t need to be finished. It looked as if I were wearing the lining of a jacket. The hairdo she arranged for made me look like my mother’s mother, as if I were trying to play Annie Sullivan already. Remember, those elements that sound so trite and silly were very real to a sixteen-year-old kid in 1963. I would hint around, saying, “Couldn’t we do this,” or “Couldn’t we do that,” but since there was no way for me to say “I don’t like this dress,” I knew the bottom line was that I was going to wear it and I was going to be embarrassed and humiliated, and I was. I remember standing in the lobby of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium being photographed with everyone else for a fashion layout, smiling and being little Miss Goody Two-Shoes but just wanting to die. Every time I see a picture of the dress, I cringe when I remember that I actually paraded around in front of people at that auspicious occasion looking like that.

Inside the auditorium on the night of April 8, I nodded to people, but there was no chatting. I felt like a little bitty lost person; I didn’t know what to do, so I figured the best thing was to sit down and shut up. But when the overture started, and all that glitz got going, it was impossible not to get excited. My category came up early, and since Angela Lansbury had been touted very heavily in the trade papers to be the winner for
The Manchurian Candidate
, I was sure I was going to lose. So when George Chakiris, the presenter of the best supporting actress award, was introduced and the nervousness, the heightened adrenaline rush, started up, all I wanted was to be able to maintain a “good sport” face when she won.

George started reading the names—Angela’s, mine, Mary Badham for
To Kill a Mockingbird
, Shirley Knight for
Sweet Bird of Youth
, Thelma Ritter for
Birdman of Alcatraz
—and for the first time I knew I really wanted it. Didn’t know why, didn’t give a damn, I just wanted it. And when George said my name, I hesitated to get up because I thought I’d been wishing so hard I’d made someone else’s name sound like mine. I was in a kind of dream state. That’s when John Ross leaned over to me and said, “They’re not gonna bring it to you, honey, you better go get it.” Well, as any actor knows,
there are many ways to read that line, and the way he afterward related it to reporters was not the way he said it. The true reading was hardly avuncular, more like “If you don’t get up there, I’m gonna kick you.”

Of the rest, I have very little recollection. It was as if I’d gone into another dimension, never-never land. I know that “Thank you” was all I said because “Thank you” was all I had been instructed to say when I’d asked John Ross earlier that day, “Suppose a crazy thing happens and I win? I don’t want to say anything you’re not going to like.” I asked if I should say something about Arthur Penn or Annie Bancroft or Fred Coe, and he said no, just thank you. One of the nicest things that happened after that was that the card that said “The winner is …” had been left on the podium and Frank Sinatra, who was the master of ceremonies that night, made sure somebody got it to me. I had not met him at that point but he was to figure in my future.

The Miracle Worker
had gotten four other nominations, for best actress, direction, screenplay, and costume design, but the only other winner was Annie Bancroft, who was in New York doing a play so Joan Crawford accepted for her. The ball afterward was a loud blur, a lot of handshaking and picture-taking and no eating. I remember seeing Arthur Penn and feeling uncomfortable because he’d lost and I’d won. I kept the Oscar with me the whole time, and because of all the commotion and chaos, for those hours at least the Rosses had no shot at “keeping me humble.”

Although I didn’t know it until years later, my father was able to watch the Oscars on TV. I was at the funeral of another relative and asked, “Do any of you know if Daddy ever knew that I won the Academy Award?” And my uncle Tommy said, “Yes, he was with us at our house.” He was in failing health—it turned out to be the last year of his life—but when I won he got very excited. He used his favorite nickname for me and said to Tommy, “That’s my Ree-Ree!”

I called my mother as soon as I could after the award, and it was not a good call because she was not where she belonged, out in California with me. I could tell that she was happy but she was also very tense, and no wonder. For me, it was the usual /files/22/79/51/f227951/public/private phone call, monitored by the
Rosses, with layer upon layer of coverup, so I couldn’t say, “God, I wish you were here! Why aren’t you here?” Throughout that evening there were fleeting moments of wishing my parents were there, of wishing that anybody were there but the Rosses. I’m not sure I missed them specifically as much as I missed feeling the warmth and support of a family around me. Here’s a major achievement, the youngest person ever to win an Academy Award, the biggest A plus I ever got, and I had only the Gestapo and the dog to share it with. And if the truth be known, I would have preferred a date!

P
reparations for what was to become The Patty Duke Show began well before the Oscars. Because I was a popular young performer, ABC wanted to do a series with me even though no one at the network had the slightest idea what it ought to be about. The Rosses didn’t have a concept either, but they were taken with the idea of my becoming the youngest person in television history to have a prime time series named after her. The only person who wasn’t excited, as well as the only person who wasn’t given any choice, was me. I was never sure that the right thing was being done, that I shouldn’t have stayed with the movies instead of being committed to a TV series. But the Rosses were the experts and I still believed they knew what was best for my career.

Once the deal was made, Sidney Sheldon, a TV writer before he became a best-selling novelist, was called in to do the pilot. The Rosses sent me out to Los Angeles to spend time with Sidney, his wife, Jorga, and their daughter, Mary, in the hope that my presence would spark an idea. A very gracious household, such nice people. And though he tells it jokingly, I think it’s pretty much true that Sidney based the series on the me he got to know in those few days: he felt I was schizoid and that’s how he came up with the concept.
There was the perky me and the corporate executive me and rarely the twain shall meet.

On the show I ended up playing identical cousins. There was Patty Lane, a bubbly American teenager who was the comic despair of her elders, and Cathy Lane, her demure, intellectual Scottish double. As Patty I had typical sitcom parents, a combative younger brother, and a loyal boyfriend. And I’m sure, though details don’t come to mind, that Cathy and Patty got into trouble a whole lot.

The show was shot in New York, and not just because the Rosses lived there. The production would save money because there were no child labor laws in New York, so I could be worked harder, often from seven A.M. to seven P.M., than I could in California, where a child can be used for only four hours a day. Even so, doing the first shows took forever. For one thing, there was a lot of technical stuff, split screen and all that, that had to be worked out. And then there was Bill Asher.

Bill was the director, full of piss and vinegar, someone who actually used, as part of normal everyday speech, expressions like “chickie-baby.” Bill ended up marrying Elizabeth Montgomery and doing
Bewitched
, but at the time he had a very complicated personal life, and there were days when we didn’t accomplish as much as we wanted to. Still, I had a great time with Bill; he made everything light and funny and nobody was finding a cure for cancer. For some reason, though, Bill had to leave the show on very short notice, so someone else was brought in to replace him, which I thought would make me very unhappy.

The new director (and producer) was Stanley Praeger. I absolutely adored him, he was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life; he could look at me and I would just burst out laughing. This was a man I was nuts about, but my fear of the Rosses was so great that when the chips were down I had no loyalty to him. Because not only did the Rosses have him fired, they made me do it. It’s among the ugliest things I’ve ever done.

The Rosses had Stanley fired because he was getting too close to me. They didn’t like him because I adored him; they were afraid if he really got too close he might find out our
setup was a house of cards. So the Rosses set up a very formal suits-and-ties meeting with a bunch of guys from William Morris and a bunch of guys from United Artists. Ethel, of course, wasn’t there, but I had my orders from her about what I was to do. I went in and told everybody that I couldn’t stand to work with Stanley Praeger, that he made me nervous and very unhappy, and that I’d like him removed as both producer and director, or at least as director so he couldn’t come on the set anymore. And that’s what happened.

Stanley, who wasn’t there to defend himself, was, of course, in shock when he got the news. He’d been seeing this little girl who kissed him good-bye and laughed at his last joke and now this. It was dreadful. Even worse, as producer he would pass me in the building every day and I didn’t even say hi. We’d just look at each other, look down and walk on. A few years later, after I broke with the Rosses, I told him what I’d done and why I’d done it. I said I didn’t feel my fear excused my actions, but I wanted him to know that I was sorry. He was extremely gracious and forgiving, but I know it must have hurt.