Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (3 page)

The bar was on Third Avenue and Thirty-first Street and I’d gotten strict instructions from my very angry mother that I wasn’t allowed to go in. I had to tap on the window and let him know I was there. It took a while for him to turn around, but others did, too, they began waving, and finally his attention was diverted. We hadn’t seen each other for a
long time, so when he came out he wanted to hug me, but I wouldn’t let him. He smelled of booze. I took the ten dollars and went back the way I’d come. I’ve felt guilty and ashamed about that from that day to this because I think that’s the last time I saw him on his feet, the last time I could’ve had a hug. If only he knew how important he was to me. But I don’t think he did, I don’t think he was able to get outside of all that chaos he was in, to notice how much he meant.

My father’s drinking has had an effect on us all. My brother, Ray, who had to be brought over from his army post in Germany to identify my father’s body when he died about ten years later, hasn’t drunk at all since then. Not a drop. With me, part of the legacy is an awareness that I’m an addictive personality so I better keep on my toes. I drink too much coffee, smoke too many cigarettes, and if I’d ever gotten involved in drugs, I would have ended up seriously addicted or dead. But because of my dad I have a built-in censor that says, “No, I don’t think you should be doing this.” What I’d seen firsthand wouldn’t allow it.

Yet the fact that I come from a very long line of alcoholics means that I have had some problems with liquor. I have gone through periods of drinking very heavily, never while I’m working, but either in the privacy of my own home or at parties. And when I drink, my personality is sometimes altered to such an extent as to be destructive or disruptive. I could be funny, witty, the belle of the ball, but then, the minute I’d get in the car to go home, I’d become venomous. Every vicious thing I could think of to say, every injustice that I could recall—I was Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde. When I finally recognized the effect drinking has on me, which was more than a dozen years ago now, I just stopped cold. Never missed it. Though I now seem able to have a glass of wine, if I never have another drink, I won’t even notice. That ability to say, “Whoa, let me stop now and see if I can stop,” that’s one of the things my dad left me, because I’d witnessed what happened to someone who couldn’t.

I have just a few pictures of Dad: sitting at a desk; dancing at a party; the wedding portrait, with the two of them standing together like little leprechauns. He was always a sharp dresser. I remember gray suits with very sharp creases
in the pants, spiffy-looking fedoras: there was no such thing as going to Daddy with sticky hands, you would wash first.

When I look at those pictures, when I talk about him, I still feel the sadness; tears are always very close. And it makes me mad, too; I wonder how long this process has to take. When people ask me when I realized my parents’ separation was final, I tell them I’m still not buying it. I’ve never stopped wrestling with the loss and inevitable romanticization of my father, and I’m sure it’s interfered with my marriages: as long as that idealistic figure exists, who could live up to that?

Yet, on the other hand, I think that some of my drive, which in part comes from wanting to succeed for myself, also has a lot to do with evening the score for my father. It’s like what Annie Sullivan says at one point in The Miracle Worker, talking about the loss of her brother: “I think God must owe me a resurrection.” I don’t know what made my father the way he was, if it was character flaws or lack of societal knowledge about alcoholism or something else. Whatever it was, my need is to say, through my life and my work, “This was a magnificent soul who didn’t get a chance.”

M
y father, as it turned out, was not the only parent with problems. My mother, though you’d never know it to look at her today, had episodes of severe depression. There were times when my mother could be warm and wonderful and generous, both of spirit and with things like ice cream cones and dolls, but much of the time she was not. She now takes medication that regulates her moods, but before that she did a lot of what we call “acting out.” She’s had to be hospitalized three times, the first when I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old.

We had a fireplace in our apartment, boarded up as many are in New York, and a big cedar chest in front of it. We kids thought this was a great piece of furniture, but at times it was the dreaded cedar chest because whenever any thing went wrong—if my parents had had a fight for instance—the three of us were awakened, taken out of our beds, and lined up by that chest. He would be gone, she would be sitting in the chair, and we’d have to sit up all night with her.

Why’d she do it? I’m not sure even she knows. Either she didn’t want to be alone or she needed to take revenge, and if she couldn’t take it on him, she could take it out on those closest to him. But it was also terribly self-destructive:
how much worse can you make yourself feel than by having your three innocent kids sitting there crying, unable to go to bed, worrying, “Is he gonna come back? Are they gonna throw things?”

Usually these episodes happened after she threw him out, but there was one time when he said enough was enough and he left. That was it for her. She lined us up by the cedar chest, said, “We’re all going together,” and turned on the gas. Now, she also left the windows open, but I didn’t know that, I thought this was it. And we sat there for hours.

I don’t remember if someone finally called us or if she made the call because she wasn’t getting the attention she wanted, but they came from Bellevue, took her away, and hospitalized her for a week of observation. That had to have been a nightmare, because when she came back, though her temper still existed, the outbursts were fewer and farther between. I think she was petrified of going back to the hospital. She suffered deeply after each of these episodes.

Other times when she was feeling melancholy, my mother used the city bus as a form of recreation. At one or two in the morning, when she was having insomnia, she’d wake me up and we’d take the Lexington Avenue bus back and forth all night from one end of the route to the other until she felt safe enough or relieved enough to go home. After a few trips the excitement of being up late was replaced by a feeling of sadness, and I’d just want to get back.

But the funny thing was, that didn’t matter; it really didn’t as long as I was with her. Because I was desperately emotionally attached to my mother. If she was around, my hand was always in her hand. It wasn’t always the nicest hand-holding, there was a lot of tension in her, but my hand was there, even when she did some things that were very hard for me to forgive. She took my dog, Skippy, to the Bide-A-Wee because nobody would walk him and nobody would feed him, and that was a major drama—I cried and cried and cried. In fact, every New Year’s Eve until I was fifteen, when all the grown-ups had something to cry about when they played “Auld Lang Syne” and I didn’t, I used to cry about Skippy. I couldn’t even remember what he looked
like anymore, but when the ball went down in Times Square, I cried.

One thing that was ultra-important to both my parents was religion; Dad even showed up for church on Sundays, though I’m not sure if he ever went to confession. What fascinated me at church was the ritual, what we now in the eighties call the bells and smells. It was drama and show biz rolled into one, with the mystique of Latin thrown in for good measure.

Our church was Sacred Heart, and the grade school there, The Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary, was the first one I went to. My poor sister went to Immaculata, a high school in the same building, and every time I wet my pants, which I did a lot whenever I got nervous, she would have to be taken out of class to bring me home. Each school had a navy and white uniform. The little girls wore jumpers over a blouse and the older kids wore a skirt and a blouse, and the blouse had to be clean and starched every morning; I can’t believe there’s any starch left in the world. Every morning would find my sister crying because she was ironing her blouse and she was late. I don’t ever remember my sister as being young, being a kid. She was always the responsible one. We used to tease her that she’d be carrying her ironing board down the aisle at her wedding.

When I look at pictures of me at that time, I can see I had a spark and pizzazz, but I never thought of myself that way then. I had skinny, skinny legs and knobby knees, and my mother cut my hair so I looked like Buster Brown, the kid in the shoe. Only I was missing the dog. I felt very mousy, I felt very nervous, I felt very little. Even though my father had always called me Ree-Ree, a diminutive of Marie, it’s only when you go to school that you really know you’re small. Everybody’s calling you Pee Wee or Shrimp, and patting you on the head—they’re still doing that—and you get to be first in line. That part was good, especially at church events, because you got to see the most.

As a child I had the kind of acceptance that Catholic priests pray for in their little parishioners. We were supposed to have blind faith and I did, I really believed all the things they told me. I was the first in my class to learn the Confiteor
in Latin. The priest would come in to teach it to the boys while the girls were supposed to be practicing their Palmer Method penmanship. It wasn’t going very well in our class. We had kids like Joey Gallo, who’d smart-mouth the nuns (an attitude I found very attractive) and who wore his uniform just a little more rakishly than the next guy. One Wednesday the priest said to the boys, “Okay, when I come back next Wednesday, I’m going to give a prize to the first person who knows the Confiteor.” Notice he did not say “boy,” he said “person.”

So the priest came back next week and sure enough none of those clowns knew it, and I kept waving my hand and saying, “Fahda, Fahda, would you please, Fahda.” Finally, he decided to use me to humiliate the boys. What did I know then? I hadn’t learned politics yet, I just wanted that prize. I said the Confiteor letter-perfect and he had to give it to me: a huge, hideous Mary that glowed in the dark. I’ll never forget it; it scared the life out of me for years.

But my imagination, which did wonderful things to make me believe, also worked against me. I was really convinced that anything you did that didn’t exactly follow what the Commandments said or what the nuns said or what your mother said was going to cause you, truly, to burn in hell. My imagination flourished in this state of absolute terror. In our church there was a case displaying a sculpture of purgatory, complete with fire and tortured souls, people reaching out with scorched arms and anguished faces. I remember going there after school, around four o’clock, with an extra dime. I’d light a candle—there were lots nearby—and kneel there until, in that kind of light, my eyes started to play tricks on me. I’d swear the people were moving. To this day I can see that purgatory scene.

J
ohn and Ethel Ross lived on one floor of an old mansion on Seventy-fourth Street off Riverside Drive. It was a stylish part of Manhattan and a fabulous apartment, all pinks and grays with a round rug: I’d never seen one of those before. It should have seemed like a fairyland to a seven-year-old girl, but when I think back to my first meeting with the Rosses, what I remember most vividly was the sinking feeling I had in the pit of my stomach when my mother and I walked through the big iron grillwork door and into a tiny elevator to go up to their place. If there ever was a premonition I should have paid attention to, that was it.

It was only because of my brother, Ray, that I was meeting with the Rosses in the first place. Ray was the first of us to have an interest in dramatics. He started acting at about age seven at the Madison Square Boys Club, a big building with a gym and a swimming pool on Twenty-ninth Street between First and Second avenues. Some well-known folks, everyone from Ben Gazzara to Huntz Hall of the Bowery Boys, came out of that place. Ray caught the attention of a kind of talent scout named Irving Harris, who hung around the club. He introduced Ray to John and Ethel Ross, managers who worked with child actors. The Rosses, especially
Ethel, liked him and, over the next several years, he worked in dozens and dozens of shows and commercials, including Studio One, Armstrong Circle Theater, and The U. S. Steel Hour.

Many people believe I began acting because I wanted all the goodies Ray was getting as a result of his career. Here’s what I told Lillian Ross and Helen Ross (no relation to John and Ethel) in 1961 for their book, The Player: “Ray went all the way to Bermuda on a plane (for a TV series called Crunch and Dez) and when he came back, he told us how wonderful the plane trip was, and how he had fished in Bermuda and gone swimming, and how beautiful the water was, and he told us about how he had driven a boat. It sounded like such fun to me.” Maybe that’s true, but I don’t remember thinking or feeling that. I don’t remember any sibling rivalry. When Ray was acting, he just wasn’t there with the rest of us—that’s all I was aware of.

My father had left by this time, and my mother, even though she worked for a while as a cashier in Wanamaker’s department store, needed and eventually depended on the money Ray earned. Though I had none of Ray’s passion for acting, he mentioned me to the Rosses and my mother took me to meet them.

They were close to forty, the same age as my parents, but the similarity ended there. Ethel was an ex-dancer, possibly even a former Ziegfeld girl, and she did have great legs. Her background was midwestern; she grew up in a suburb of Detroit with a father who worked in the Ford plant and a mother who made the best apple pie in the world. She must have been about five foot six, but to my little-girl’s perspective she seemed very tall and thin, slender except for a pot belly that, oddly enough, looked about like mine does now. The shape of her face was like Loretta Young’s, with a tiny nose; she stood very straight; and she had great-looking hands with very shapely fingers. Coming from an era in which women shaved or drastically plucked their eyebrows, she had a very hard look. At first I was very impressed with her clothes, because they were much more sophisticated than the clothes I saw at home. Later I realized they weren’t really so elegant.