Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (27 page)

I spent the first few days in my room, day in and day out, night in and night out, just crying. The first time I ventured into the cafeteria, someone said, “Aren’t you Patty Duke?” and that was it, I was back in my room. I would see my friend Grandpa every day, and every day I’d wail. He’d talk a little, try to stimulate some anger or any emotion besides this depression, but to no avail. I never talked to him.

The first progress I made came when Grandpa went on vacation and a rolypoly doctor named Goldman took over for a week and tried a whole new approach. He’d come and talk a little show business, things like opera or Gilbert and Sullivan as well as the movies. Finally, about the third day, he said, very simply, “Why don’t you talk to me? I talk to you. How come you don’t talk to me?” I just stared at him for a while and then I said, “Okay. Why me? Why is this happening to me?” And he said, “Why not you? Of all the millions of people in the world, why should you be excluded?” I started having conversations with him after that, not dealing in any real depth with what was wrong, but at least I was talking.

Whenever Harry came to visit I’d say, “Please, I want to
go home, I want to go home.” When I saw Grandpa again, I’d say, “See, I’m not doing anything bad. I want to go home.” Yet in the area of activities, which is one of the ways they measure how you’re progressing, I was really antisocial. I kept saying, “I don’t want to play with the clay, I don’t know how to do things with clay.” There was a sense of sameness at the Westwood, nothing changing, every day like the one before.

One of the activities you have to participate in is volleyball. Playing the game with ten people jacked up on Thorazine is really a great way to spend an August afternoon. One poor son of a bitch, a character right out of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, always wore three shirts, a T-shirt, a sweater, and a jacket every time we played. In August!

The attendants, believe it or not, really got off on this so-called game. I guess it was one of the few things they had to look forward to every day. The way a lot of points would end was that someone would spike the ball really hard at this guy with all the shirts and sweater and jacket and then everybody would laugh. It didn’t seem to bother him, he just sort of wandered around and stared. But one afternoon, after five weeks in the place, they did it one time too many for me, and I finally freaked out. Out of this sweet little girl who kept whimpering, “I wanna go home, I wanna go home,” came “You motherfucking bastards,” this veritable torrent of rage.

When you’re on the inside, everyone gets involved with everyone else’s problems, and it was no secret that my thing was, “She can’t get angry.” So when that outburst happened, it was like a scene from a movie: everybody (except the guy with the sweater!) stood there applauding because I’d broken through. I started to really function, to demonstrate that I was no longer suicidal, that I was coming out of my depression, and most of all that I was willing to work within the system. A week after that volleyball game I left the Westwood, I hoped for good.

N
ow that I was out of the Westwood everyone assumed that I was, for all intents and purposes, “cured.” Harry and I began a “riding the crest” period. We belonged to all the hot clubs like The Factory and The Daisy, we began developing social acquaintances, playing Monopoly and giving dinner parties: in between bouts with shrinks and hanging around in the closet I’d learned how to set a table and how to cook. I never could make rice, though. I’d go down to Ah Fong’s in Beverly Hills and buy enough for sixteen people and everyone thought I made the best rice in town. Things were good for us, the way we thought they would be when we’d first gotten married. What I was experiencing was one of those stable periods that sometimes occurs between untreated manic and depressed moods. I had come out of the tunnel and I thought this was the way it was going to be for the rest of my life.

I wasn’t having much luck in my career, though. I had been announced for a play called
My Sweet Charlie
on Broadway, and I really wanted to do it, but I was in the Westwood when it was rehearsing. The producer, Bob Banner, was very gracious, he hung in and waited for me as long as he could, but finally it was announced that I was “ill” and the role went to Bonnie Bedelia, who’d been my understudy
on
Isle of Children
, That was difficult for me, and what made it harder was that I was out of the Westwood by the time the run began and even saw the play the night before it opened. At least I’d shown I was functioning, though, and attending that play gave me a feeling of triumph.

Another role that got away was in
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
, which was about a young woman with psychiatric problems. The book had initially been sent to me just after the wedding, but I sent it back unread, saying, “Thank you for thinking that I might be interested in this, but I recently married and I’m not planning to work for quite a while.” Then I went into the Westwood, and since the book is practically required reading for psychiatric nurses, I saw it around a lot. When I came home I finally bought myself a copy and read it and, of course, I knew exactly who should play that part.

The problem was, I was never able to get my hands on the property again; it always seemed to be tied up. Natalie Wood owned it for a while, and then at one point I was brought to New York to meet one of those fancy-shmancy European directors. We had a warm, fabulous meeting, walked through Central Park together, I told him my experiences at the funny farm, and I thought this was it. Then I came back to L.A. and found that he was not at all interested in me for the part, he had his eye on Liza Minnelli. Then the whole project died, the rights changed hands again and again, and it didn’t finally get done until years later with Kathleen Quinlan, who I thought did a fabulous job.

Despite all this, I wasn’t worrying that I’d never work again, or, why my career was in the toilet. For one thing, I had become obsessed with the idea of having a baby—that was the main thing on my mind—and I’d worked often enough—that
Virginian
episode and a few variety shows—to have some sense of my career continuing. Harry and I had talked a lot about my getting out of television and the fact that my career had to take a different turn now that I was older. I bought into all of that, which is how I came to be involved in what I think of now as “Valley of the Dreck.”

I think it was Joanna Barnes, who was always plugged into whatever was hot, who first started talking about the
Jackie Susann novel and suggested that I play the Judy-Garland-who-wasn’t-Judy-Garland part of Neely, the young singer who was a victim of booze and pills. Both Harry and I liked the idea, the book was a big best seller, and we suggested to my representatives at William Morris that “this is the part we should really go after. It’ll be so startling, I’ll make the transition to adult roles overnight.” If we only knew.

I still believe that the novel
Valley of the Dolls
, trash though it may be, was far superior to the film, that it did a real service in its pop psychological approach to exploring what it was in the life-styles of its characters that drew them into addiction. And Neely was the best part in the book. No matter what anyone says, and even though I myself learned very convincingly to proclaim, “No, this is a prototype, this isn’t based on anyone real,” the part was indeed based on Judy Garland and some of the excitement about the role was reenacting the dynamics of this woman. I don’t think we’ve yet begun to scratch the surface of Judy; there was a wild bunch of cells thrown together in that lady. Playing that, plus figuring out how someone so seemingly stable and bright could get sucked into such a destructive life-style, was instinctively appealing to me.

The first crisis was the announcement that no one would play a role in this piece without having an audition and screen test. Of course there was a great hue and cry of “How dare they! An Academy Award winner … if they don’t know her ability …” Finally my representatives said, “We understand you haven’t seen her play this kind of role, and it is someone older, so Patty would be willing to come meet with you and maybe you can convince her to test.”

That was as much to soothe me as the production company. The age range in the book is approximately eighteen to fifty and I think one of the reasons my performance suffered so from the critics is that the filmmakers were unwilling to modify the ages. If at age twelve I looked seven, in my twenties I looked fifteen.

However, my screen test was probably better than anything I did in the finished film and it was decided that I was going to play the part. It was also established that I would
not do the singing, which was fine with me. I believed a dynamic Judy Garland kind of voice was needed. There was great P.R. excitement about my casting, and I was excited myself. This was going to be my big chance to break into adult roles, to be accepted as an adult, which after years of mandatory infancy was incredibly important to me.

We started shooting with some location work in New York, plus some interiors (though I didn’t realize it until he told me years later, Marvin Hamlisch was the skinny piano player in my opening scene) and when I first arrived in the city it really thrilled me—going back to my old haunts as the conquering hero. I had the best part, the best-looking husband, had left the home in California to go on location, was driven around in a limousine.… I was the Sparkle Plenty little bride who had the world knocked up.

The first thing that went wrong was the appearance of a huge fever blister on the right side of my bottom lip. Ever since my first commercial as a tiny kid, that blister’s been with me every time I begin a job, and it can be horrendous, truly a plague. You’re dealing with the human beast here, and though as actors our anxiety isn’t permitted to show (you could swear there wasn’t a nerve in our bodies), the tension comes out in other ways. When I feel one coming on now, I resort to holistic techniques and the miracle is, I don’t get a blister on my mouth anymore, I get it on my hands; why I can’t get the thing the rest of the way off my body I’ll never know. At that time, though, all they could do was try to cover it up with a lot of makeup, but still, one side of the lip was so much more voluptuous than the other, it looked dreadful.

And almost from day one, I was miserable working with Mark Robson, the director. There was a brief grace period when I was the fair-haired girl, “the theater actress,” but that went away pretty quickly and he turned into a nasty, unkind man. He was someone who used humiliation for effect, who could be insulting about your physical appearance and who wouldn’t hesitate to bite your head off in front of everyone. I’d play a scene and he’d say something unpleasant to me like, “You may have been able to do that when you had your own show, but we’re really working here.” His mentality was,
“I have to get a performance out of these girls.” I don’t know about anybody else, but you don’t have to get a performance out of me, I’ll give it to you. You can help me or you can hinder me, but you certainly don’t have to go get it. And even though I wasn’t aware of chauvinism or anything else at that point, I happened to notice he did not have that attitude toward the men in the cast.

I don’t know if it was the role rubbing off on me or me rubbing off on the role, but the meaner he got, the more frustrated I got. I was too afraid to fight back, however, in anything but little sneaky ways. Like eating. It was almost a joke on the set. If Robson insulted me, you could be sure that within the next two minutes I’d be at the doughnut box—and I didn’t even like doughnuts. I gained thirty pounds during that picture. Thirty pounds!

Sharon Tate, however, got it even worse than I did. She was a gentle, gentle creature—you could be mean to her and she would never retaliate. I was crazy about her and I didn’t know anyone but our director who wasn’t. What’s to dislike? She was an exquisitely beautiful girl who was so comfortable with her beauty that you weren’t intimidated by it. Robson, however, continually treated her like an imbecile, which she definitely was not, and she was very attuned and sensitive to that treatment.

I did a scene with Sharon one day that ended up going into the night because Robson was so rigid. Not only did he want it played in exactly one minute and eighteen seconds—who knows how he picked that figure—but he instructed her to enter on her right foot and say “Hi,” move to her left foot to say “Neely,” unbutton her top button for “did,” the next one for “you” and so on for “…    have a nice day?” It was truly demeaning, like the old “Can she walk and chew gum at the same time?” line.

Robson also wanted Sharon’s body revealed in a certain way. Well, explain it to the girl, for heaven’s sake. She’s the one walking around with the body, she knows how to reveal it. All he had to do was say the feeling he wanted; she would have given it to him. But he never took the time even to consider that as a possibility. There were other actors in that scene but he just picked on her. Finally, after hours of this
nonsense, Sharon wound up in tears, as would anyone who’d been badgered that way. We were always making faces at Robson and giving him the evil eye behind his back, but he had the last laugh: we were the ones who ended up looking ridiculous.

This was just a prelude to what happened with Judy Garland, who joined the company several weeks into the schedule as the legendary older singer, Helen Lawson. We never spoke about whether or not Neely was based on her, partially because I had my own ambivalent feelings about Judy being in the picture at all. She obviously needed the money, that was why she had accepted, but I thought it was cheap and tawdry to ask her to play the part. And it made me sad that she had reached the point of having to take this stupid role, playing opposite someone who was reputedly playing her. It’s tacky, it’s degrading, and it’s undignified to have to do such a thing, and even though she did a lot of undignified things, she was basically a dignified person.

At this particular time Judy was not in very good shape, to say the least; she was all the insecure things we’ve read about her. But she was also so sweet, cute, and funny, you just wanted to hug her all the time. She came on the set for three days before she was actually due to shoot in order to get used to the rest of the cast. After all, she was joining a group that had been working together awhile, and that would be a tough position for John Wayne. There was no entourage surrounding her. Her husband, Sid Luft, brought her, but there was no one else.