Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (21 page)

Now, of course, came the real problem: I had to find a way to ask the Rosses if I could go out with Harry. It’s hard to believe, since they usually knew everything about me, but I don’t think they had a clue what was going on in this case. We were up in the little Romper Room on the third floor where the show was shot; they were rarely there. I considered the “a group of us are going out to dinner” kind of lie, but I figured I might as well tell the truth.

I waited a few days and then I said, “You know, Harry Falk invited me to go out to dinner and a movie, and I’d really like to do that. Maybe I could do it next week sometime?” No answer. I chattered on about how really interested he was in foreign films, junk like that, and finally, I have no
idea why, they said yes. Maybe they thought Harry was so old (he was thirty-one to my seventeen, and by this time divorced) that he was safe. I was shocked when they agreed, but delighted.

I really agonized over what to wear. All the clothes I had looked like Patty’s and Cathy’s clothes, except for those black pants and turtlenecks, and I couldn’t very well leave the Rosses’ place wearing that. So I ended up being much too dressed up: I wore a blue straight skirt and a blue-and-white checked top with a blue tie and a white Peter Pan collar. Phew! By some coincidence, we went to a restaurant on Thirty-first Street and Second Avenue that used to be a bar my father hung out in. We ate paella and I got back home on time.

That date rapidly led to several more. I got bolder and bolder about letting the Rosses know I expected to be allowed to go. It must’ve become apparent to them that they’d better agree or else the real rebellion was going to start, because they let me go. Harry and I would talk about the age difference on our dates—he’d say, “Get outta here, you’re jailbait,” which was the first time I heard that phrase. There was a lot of heavy-duty kissing and stuff, we told each other we were in love, and it was apparent where things were going, but we hadn’t figured out the logistics yet.

Right in the middle of all this, the show had its vacation hiatus. The Rosses had planned to go to the Virgin Islands, charter a yacht and live aboard, which we had done before. But I said I didn’t want to go, which was the first time I’d ever even dreamed of doing such a thing. I told them I’d rather stay in New York and be with Harry. They were very upset and very angry; this was the first real teenage battle, a classic “I don’t want to do what you want me to do, I don’t even want to be with you” confrontation. And then, all of a sudden, they turned the tables on me by saying, “Hey, we’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you invite Harry to come with us?”

After I picked myself up off the floor, I did just that. Harry didn’t know if he wanted to go, it took him a while to make his decision, but he agreed. The Rosses by this time surely knew I had a crush on Harry, and I think their theory
was, “All right, we’ll play this one out and it’ll be over with. I mean, how far is this guy going to go with her? It’s ridiculous.” I couldn’t care less about their theories, I was in heaven. But predictably, that vacation turned out to be a terrible idea.

It’s not that the days weren’t wonderful. We spent them water-skiing and scuba diving and frolicking on the beach and all that. There were solitary walks and stolen moments. But the Rosses never closed their door at night, so Harry and I couldn’t even fool around, much less sleep together. There was some heavy-duty chemistry happening, though, and the Rosses would have had to be out to lunch not to notice what was going on.

The night after we got back from that frustrating trip—two people locked up on a boat for ten days who can’t touch each other—was the first time we made love. It was less than two months after we’d starting going out. We went to The Sign of the Dove, a very hotsy-totsy restaurant on Third Avenue, where we had a terrific dinner, we drank wine, we drank Black Russians, and I have no idea what the man said. Finally, he asked me, “Do you really want to go to a movie?” And I laughed.

We went back to his apartment, and even though I didn’t have a clue about what I was doing, one of the things that I’m ever grateful to Harry for is that my first sexual experience was all the nice things it’s supposed to be. There was all the nervousness you read about in romantic novels—How do you take your clothes off? Where do you put them? And now what do you do?—but Harry was just wonderful, he never made me feel any more self-conscious than I was making myself feel. And the experience was lovely, it was really lovely.

Then, of course, came the problem of how to get dressed gracefully and the panicky awareness that I should have been home two hours ago. So Harry got out Cue magazine and we picked out a movie to make believe we’d been to. We read the synopsis and then picked out a second one, because unless we’d gone to two movies I was in deep trouble about where I’d been. I didn’t realize that since it would have been so out of character for me to be deceitful with the Rosses, I
needn’t have worried. I went home on cloud nine, the happiest I’d ever been.

Although Harry never talked about it and, much as I was dying to scream it from the rooftops, neither did I, it was soon very apparent to everyone that there had been a change in our relationship. And it wasn’t that long before we started talking about marriage, though in very casual ways, kind of testing the waters. When he’d bring up the age difference, I told him it didn’t matter to me, and he eventually said it didn’t matter to him either. His best friend initially said, “Oh, my God! What are you doing?” But once we’d met and spent time together, the friend admitted, “This is not exactly the average seventeen-year-old.”

Which, of course, was true, but in some ways the friend had been absolutely right in his first reaction, as was everyone else who said, “Don’t do this.” I don’t think I was being contrary—it wasn’t as if the more they said no the more I said yes—but I do remember being very defiant and very defensive. I’d seen the man in the mirror, I’d said I was going to marry him, and that was it as far as I was concerned.

The Rosses, not surprisingly, got very nervous. They said, “You’re not going to see him anymore,” and I said, “Yes, I am.” They said, “No, you’re not,” and I said, “Yes, I am.” If I’d thought about it, I would have been surprised at my assertiveness, but I had such tunnel vision when it came to Harry that no consequences mattered anymore. All I could think was, “This is not going to be taken away from me. This is not going to be destroyed by them.”

Arguments with the Rosses followed, and then came threats. They were going to talk to Harry. Inside, that terrified me, but outside, I said, “Go right ahead. He feels the same way I do.” And, of course, I had the clock on my side, so my real answer to their threats was, “I’m almost eighteen. You can stop me now, but you can’t stop me in six months, in three months, in two months.” And eventually they just gave up. I thought.

The first thing the Rosses did to counterattack was to take me out to Los Angeles during the summer of 1964, between the second and third seasons of the show, to do
Billie
, a quickie movie musical adapted from a play called
Time Out for Ginger
. The film version is about a father, played by Jim Backus, who’d always wanted a son, and his daughter, who wants to run track with the guys. She has a method for running, she uses a particular beat in her head that she moves to, and because of that and because she’s so strongly motivated, she’s able to beat the boys which, until she relents and reveals her secret, thoroughly alienates them. It teaches a moral to everyone, especially to the father, who learns he should have been glad to accept the girl, and for the girl, who learns that the teenage years are awful for everybody!

A fifteen-day schedule for a musical was a little crazy, and we ended up cutting a lot of corners. There were a couple of jazz/ballet dance routines; I was taught just enough to get through the opening and closing of the number and some closeups. For publicity purposes I was being tutored in track and field by Rafer Johnson, the gold-medal-winning Olympic decathlon star, but he was there just long enough to be photographed supposedly teaching me about the high jump. The attitude was, if she can stand on her feet on the track, that’s all we need. I did maybe half a dozen jumps over hurdles, enough to get medium shots, and then doubles did the rest.

One of my doubles was the best pole vaulter they had at L.A.’s University High, where we did the shooting. They made him shave his legs, put him in falsies and a wig, dressed him up in short shorts like me, and had him do my vaulting. Poor kid, I don’t think he ever lived it down. I got a letter from University High a few years ago. They were holding the twentieth reunion of that class, and they wanted me to come because they expected that this young man, whose life had been made utterly miserable by me, was going to be there. Twenty years later and it was still his claim to fame.

The worst thing for me, except for the continued agony of having to sing on the soundtrack, was what they did to my hair. It was bleached absolutely white but my eyebrows were inexplicably left dark. It was a very peculiar look, kind of like racing stripes, and I got sores on my scalp from having to bleach my hair every other day. Why my hair had to look that way, I’ll never know. While it might have been someone’s
concept that athletes have lighter hair, what it felt like was just another case of powerlessness. I thought this was the kind of thing Ethel should object to, but what I didn’t realize was how intimidated she and John were by producers and directors. The two of them seemed to be calling all the shots, but that was hardly the case.

The night of the last day of filming, the Rosses and I had a huge blowup that effectively ended everything between us. I had just found out about the second phase of their counterattack against Harry: they’d decided to transfer
The Patty Duke Show
to Los Angeles for its third season, banking on the fact that it would be too difficult for Harry to reestablish himself professionally for him to attempt the move. Now the dam had really broken; there was no way to put things back together again, so I let it all out. I was crazed, I was just crazed.

Ethel was on one of her usual rampages that night. She ranted and raved, talked about how they’d given up everything for me and how could I be such an unappreciative little slut. Then, for the first time since it had happened, she brought up John’s suicide attempt and claimed it was my fault. She said I’d broken his heart by being disloyal and not working closely enough with him on the show, that I’d made him try and kill himself.

Our voices were very loud for two or three in the morning; John had long since gone to bed, and I was getting even louder on purpose, hoping to rouse him. I did. When he came out I said, “Your wife is accusing me of this and this,” and he kept looking at her and shaking his head and then he started to cry. “But worst of all, she said it’s my fault you tried to kill yourself.” It was clear she wanted to murder me for bringing that up, and he cried harder and said, “No, Ethel, you know that’s not true. I wrote you a letter. I wrote you a letter, too, Patty.” And I said, “Well, I didn’t see your letter; I didn’t see anybody’s letter.”

The hysteria continued on the part of the three of us. Ethel was appalled by my rebellion, but John was a broken man, very guilt-ridden and unwilling to argue anymore. Finally, I just snapped. I told them I hated them, I hated who I was with them, and from now on things were going to be
different. I was eighteen and they didn’t own me anymore, I was going to live where I wanted to live, with whom I wanted to live, and if they were such goddamn good managers, they could manage to get me an apartment, and a car, and a plane reservation back to New York. Just hostile, hostile, hostile, all the way down the line. The worm had finally turned. My exit line, “I’m going to Fire Island, and I’m going to sleep with Harry,” was the first time I’d admitted that in so many words. I walked out, slammed the door, and that was the end of everything. I never returned to the Rosses again.

A
fter that triumphant exit, I went back to New York for the remainder of the summer. I was theoretically based at my mother’s apartment, but I spent most of my time with Harry in the city or at his place on Fire Island. When the summer ended, I went into town to get some of my clothes out of the Rosses’ Park Avenue apartment and that’s when I found out they’d moved. All the locks had been changed and I had to con the doorman into letting me in. All the furniture was gone and my clothes were in a heap on the floor of my room. The Rosses hadn’t necessarily wanted to be mysterious (they eventually called my mother and told her where they were), they just wanted the dramatic effect.

I’d had lots of thoughts about not returning to the show, but I knew that I couldn’t do that. I kept saying to Harry, “Please come, please come. They have assistant directors out there, you know.” Of course, he knew better than I how difficult that switch is, and he learned the hard way later on that he was right. I think Harry was both relieved and heartbroken about my leaving. He promised to come out and visit me, and as it turned out, absence did indeed make both our hearts grow fonder.

When I got to L.A., I moved into an apartment in the
Doheny Towers, the luxury building of its time, located right at the foot of the Sunset Strip. Suzie Pleshette had told me about it, I told the Rosses to “manage” me an apartment there, and they did. Of course, I didn’t know anything about running a home. Jean Byron even had to help me go to Saks to buy sheets. Only Jean would choose Saks for that. I had four-hundred-dollar sheets on my bed, and that was in 1964. But after the first couple of days of setting up housekeeping in my own cute little dollhouse, living by myself turned into a horror. It was lonely and I’d never learned to be alone.

Making me more miserable was the fact that I was living a life-style that was completely alien to me. I was staying out all night, flying to the East for weekends to see Harry, and trying to do a series during the day. When I was home I left the television on all night and ate mostly junk food; believe me, I did not dine like a sophisticated adult.