Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (44 page)

It was about three o’clock in the morning, we were lying in bed after having drilled some lines, and a song came on the radio. It was “I Just Called to Say I Love You” and I said to John, “Oh, just listen to these words. I want you to hear these words.” And, at three o’clock in the morning he picked up the phone and called his machine in Los Angeles and listened to his messages. And then he had a difficult time understanding why I was upset at being ignored. He said he really needed to hear his messages and I replied that it was considered bad form to return people’s calls at three in the morning. Push came to shove, as it usually did. He told me how selfish I was being and I told him to go to hell.

I slept on the couch that night, or tried to, and sort of patched things up the next morning. I helped him with his lines again, went to rehearsal with him, ate some vegetarian food, but when we got back to the apartment and I smoked a cigarette in the bathroom, he made a great show of coughing. I was feeling more and more uneasy, and then his mother called. He got on the phone with her, and I got angrier and angrier, thinking of all the past efforts I’d made. He came out of the bedroom and said something grand and unkind, I can’t remember what it was, and I punched him in the face.

I immediately apologized and made sure there was no damage done. He cursed me and left, but he called from the theater and said, “Please don’t do this to me, it’s opening night.” So even though I’d had every intention of leaving, I went there and ran through his lines with him one last time. I stood in the back of the theater, willing every word out of his mouth, and he did fine. I saw him back at the apartment
later and told him that I was going back to Los Angeles and filing for divorce. He didn’t believe me, but I did it.

With all these problems, why did we stay together for so long? Because I loved him and he loved me. It’s an elusive, indescribable ingredient, love is. It doesn’t come in words, I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s as sure as anything I can taste or smell or hear. There was a sense of security in being with him that permeated my body, my psyche, all my surroundings. I felt I could touch his steadfastness. All those things that we’re supposed to have as children, I was experiencing for the first time with John. There is something to be said for being adored, and he adored me.

On the day the decree became final, I walked in the door after being in court, and John was phoning me. He still couldn’t believe it. He said, “ ‘You didn’t really do it,” and I said, “Yeah, I did.” And he talked a lot about how divorce doesn’t mean forever. And that was it. The kind of love we had for each other never goes away, but although the kids, especially, have a hard time understanding this, being in love or loving isn’t necessarily enough. Quite simply, there was nothing more I could bring to his life, nor he to mine.

In the fall of 1985, I began work on a TV movie called
A Time to Triumph
. The SAG campaign was going on, that was certainly taking up time and energy, but I needed to work, I needed to act, and as usual I needed the money, so this was once again a godsend.
Triumph
was based on the true story of a woman who joined the army in her thirties so that she could get medical benefits for her ailing husband. That meant location work at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. It felt like quite an adventure, me the pacifist playing a soldier. I didn’t know the half of it.

My first day on the base I was introduced to a pair of drill sergeants whose job was to get me through different stages of basic training so I’d look as if I knew what I was doing when we did it on film. One of the sergeants did most of the talking. The other one, the quiet one, was named Michael Pearce. Married, age thirty-one, eight years younger than me, and an eleven-year army man, he’d just come out of drill sergeant’s school. He’d been sent there from Air-borne,
a much more exciting place, and much more to his liking. Mike had never wanted to be a drill sergeant, and I find it silly even to think of him that way—screaming in people’s faces is not what he does best. When he was told they needed a couple of drills to teach Patty Duke, he didn’t even want to go for the interview, but they said he had to and he ended up one of the two chosen.

When shooting started, the other sergeant had to be hospitalized and couldn’t be around, so Mike and I were thrown together for more time than we otherwise would have been. He was still just Mike-the-drill, but we went through a rigorous schedule together—I lost eleven pounds the first week—and when it came time to say good-bye after that part of the filming was over, the only thing he said to me was, “I’d hate to lose contact with you. Could you be my little sister?” And that, I thought, was the end.

One Sunday morning, Mike called and said that he and his two daughters, Rayleen and Charlene, were out doing errands. Could he bring them by to say hello? I said sure, and when he asked if he could bring me anything, I asked for some Fudgsicles. When they showed up, Mike told me his wife was in the car and I said of course he should bring her in too. We visited a little, but it felt very awkward and I didn’t know why. After they left, I hung around my room, kind of hungry but too lazy to go out for dinner, so I settled for a Fudgsicle. I was lying in bed reading and eating, when I suddenly sat up, startled, and thought, “Holy shit. I’m in love with Mike Pearce.” I told myself I was crazy, to forget about the whole thing. Then, a while later, there was a knock on the door. I went to open it and it was Mike. “I’m not going to fight fate, are you,” I said. And that was it.

I’ve been aware from the beginning that the combination of Mike and me seems like culture shock to the nth degree, but the fact is that the passion we feel has been so strong it’s had the ability to push everything else aside. We are like epoxy for each other, the attraction is that strong; it heightens all my senses, including the sixth one. And although he’s turned out to be one of the more complicated people I’ve met, there’s also a what-you-see-is-what-you-get quality, a welcome simplicity about Mike. There’s such purity
and goodness in him, and those qualities come out in the letters he’s written to me; they’re publishable poetry. It’s hard to believe that a drill sergeant can be thought of as a gentle soul, but he is, and that’s what I fell in love with.

But while part of me needed Mike and felt this was someone who was meant to be in my life, there was another part that wanted to be very honorable and wasn’t at all sure about getting involved with a man who had a wife and children and the army. How was his wife going to compete with this kind of romantic interlude with a movie star? It turned out that he and his wife had been estranged for quite a while, which was the reason for the tension I’d felt that Sunday morning. But I insisted he go back and really talk to her, have them both realize that once our traveling circus left town, they might be able to pretend this hadn’t happened, or at least learn something from it. I would have hated not to see him again, but I loved him so much, I could have done it. But things between them had gone too far, and the papers for the divorce were signed soon after I left Georgia.

When our engagement was first announced, I’d have conversations like this once I got back to Los Angeles:

“I understand you’re engaged.”

“Yes, I am.”

“And what’s his name?”

“Michael Pearce.”

“What does he do?”

For a while I cheated and said, “He works for the government,” but then, after a long pause to set them up, I said, “He’s a drill sergeant in the army.”

“He’s what?” came the invariable response.

“Drill sergeant—you know, like Lou Gossett in the movie.”

“Now, let me get this straight. You’re going to marry a drill sergeant?”

“Yep.” I’d find myself laughing. “The pacifist and the drill sergeant.”

Actually, it didn’t matter to me what people thought as long as it didn’t hurt Mike. We talked about how that would be inevitable sometimes, how it would probably hurt both of us. But what I really thought was, if I can feel so good in the
company of this man, and feel so good about loving him after I thought that part of my life was over, then I pity those people who don’t get it, because it’s their loss. That’s really how I feel.

Although it took the better part of a year until Mike was able to get out of the army and move to Los Angeles, we talked a good deal early on about his fitting in. Never was there a question about who was going to change life-styles; I could just tell Fort Benning wasn’t for me. And even though I’m not the Hollywood party type, occasionally I do have to go to them, and I wanted to feel that he’d be able to survive in my world without smothering who he is. We’ve come to call that “crossing the Big Street,” and though it hasn’t been easy by any means, Mike’s been able to do it, not just because he looks so good in a tuxedo but because he feels comfortable within himself. Watching him work at that, exploring who he is and what he wants, is watching true bravery.

Mike and I were married on March 15, 1986, about six months after we met. We thought about waiting, but our separation, his being in Georgia and my being in Los Angeles, had been very hard on us, so our getting married that fast was, in part, indulging our insecurities. That hardly means, however, that it was done thoughtlessly; I mean, it seemed pretty damn fast to me too. And it was important to me to consider all the ugly things that I or anyone else might come up with and be able to address them honestly. I wondered if maybe I wasn’t doing this for shock value, or to get even with John. I worried about the age difference for all of the hackneyed reasons, like my not looking as good as he does for as long as he does. I worried about inflicting the same kind of Pygmalion experience I’d been through on someone else. But against this was: if it felt right to both of us, then why wait? Of all the reasons that were logical and practical, we couldn’t find any that was strong enough to counteract the feeling of wanting to go ahead and be man and wife.

One thing I’ve never been able to do is live my life by looking down the road. Of course, it is the nature of this business not to be able to look too far into the future, and you do tend to live in the style of your profession. But I also
think that, without sadness or fear, I recognize the fragility of life. When I was thirty, ten years seemed so far away, and here I was at the end of those ten years, pushing forty. What was I waiting for? What was the worst that could happen? That I would experience similar unhappiness—and cause similar pain—to what I came through with John. But if that was the worst that might happen, I didn’t want to sacrifice the best that could happen right now. Because couldn’t the worst happen anyway? None of this means, though, that I for one minute thought our marriage was going to be easy. It’s worth whatever Mike and I have to endure for it, but it’s not going to be simple.

We got married at Lake Tahoe, in the middle of a snowstorm so big it closed the airport. I got my first look at the chapel the morning of the ceremony, and it was hideously overdecorated. “Take it out, take it
all
out, everything,” I screamed. “I want it to look very Presbyterian!” And by seven o’clock they were ready. I, however, was not. Having decided that I couldn’t get through the day without a glass of champagne, I was just getting into the shower ten minutes after I was due at the chapel. Mike called. He thought I’d changed my mind. And when I did finally arrive, you could hear everybody laughing because the organist had lost the sheet music for “Here Comes the Bride.” To top it all off, the ceremony was performed by a Reverend Love. And everybody cried.

We’d rented seven Lincolns for the wedding party, and, looking like a gangster’s funeral, we went from the chapel to Caesars Palace, where we had a great party. We just hooted and hollered and jumped around and danced and laughed. And on the way out, my mother won 150 quarters in a slot machine. The next day, when it was time to head back to Los Angeles, we discovered that even the Reno Airport had been snowed in. Undaunted, we rented a Greyhound-size bus which we dubbed “Camp Run-A-Muck.” The ride home took eleven hours, but the kids entertained us most of the way, singing and telling jokes and carrying on. Even though we got in at six in the morning, nobody was complaining.

*  *  *  

Embarking on a fourth marriage is not exactly what you have in mind when you’re sixteen and fantasizing the way you’re going to live your life, and financially, I’ve always been in a mess and I still am. Up until very recently I’ve been very unsuccessful at life as we prescribe it in our society. But ever since I was eight years old, the one thing I’ve done that guaranteed I’d feel alive and part of a family structure was acting. It is as vital to me as having the right amount of oxygen in the air. I’m not a dancer, but A Chorus Line put me away, because I so identified with the life force that dancing represented to those kids. That’s what acting is to me. It’s what I was sent here for.

Looking back now at the ebb and flow of my life, it exhausts me in precisely the way you get tired when you hear someone else talk about a particularly daunting trip they took. Because so much of it now seems to have happened to someone else. I know that history is part and parcel of my being, but I can’t feel the pain anymore, and I can remember wondering if that would ever happen.

And there’s another part of me that’s really tickled by the whole thing, that can say, “Yup, wasn’t that funny? Wasn’t that terrible? Isn’t it amazing that I survived at all?” I’m still my own harshest critic and most demanding taskmaster, but I have moved into a time of being much more accepting of whoever it is I am. I have horrible times, I have great times, I have so-so times, but I wouldn’t trade my life today for anyone’s, not anyone’s.

I’ve survived. I’ve beaten my own bad system and on some days, on most days, that feels like a miracle.

K
ENNETH
T
URAN
, the film critic for Gentleman’s Quarterly, has been a staff writer for the Washington Post and TV Guide, film critic for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” and served for a year as the interim editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He is the co-author for several books.