Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (9 page)

As for me and John Ross, I was in a no-win situation. I remember leaving the room and not being able to look at him. Although I had freed my conscience, I had betrayed him and the other people who were supposedly hanging tough together. On the ride to the airport and the flight back, there was a lot of heavy whispering between John and the lawyer, who had also been lied to and was afraid he was going to be disbarred. What I did was never mentioned again. It was the unspoken judgment that was awful. In my heart I knew I had done what was right, yet I felt dreadful. Not only because of the public humiliation, which was certainly punishment enough for my crime—if I’d committed one—but because it didn’t seem to matter that I’d done right; I’d still done wrong. It was a bleak and confusing time.

E
arly in 1958 John Ross clipped a small article out of
Backstage
, the theatrical newspaper. It talked about a search that was going to be mounted for a nonprofessional actress to play the young Helen Keller on Broadway. John commented that there was no way they were going to be able to make that work and he taped the article to a long fluorescent light over his desk.

I had never heard of Helen Keller, though I later discovered that there’d already been a
Playhouse 90
version of her story on TV. Our work began with Helen Keller’s autobiography,
The Story of My Life
, plus a couple of other books. John Ross had an interesting philosophy: he didn’t want me to have more information than I needed, so he instructed me to read only the portions of the books that dealt with her childhood. He put bookmarks in each volume and I wasn’t allowed to go past the point he had marked. And I didn’t peek either; that’s the kind of kid I was. So I didn’t realize that Helen Keller grew up to be a famous writer and social activist, a much-loved world figure, just that as a small child she’d suffered an illness that left her unable to hear, see, or speak.

John’s approach was to work separately on the deprivation of each sense. The first was blindness. That meant
spending a specified amount of time every day going about my regular routine—putting my schoolbooks away, or cleaning up my area of the foyer, or washing the dishes—but doing it all with my eyes closed. Once I got good at that, the Rosses began to rearrange the apartment, which included everything from moving chairs and tables to putting my toothbrush where it wasn’t supposed to be to using a couple of cardboard boxes from the supermarket as obstacles. Sometimes they’d move things around while I was asleep, other times they just made me go into another room. Then it became a game—“Uh-uh, we saw you peek. If you hadn’t peeked, you would have fallen over that.”

The idea, of course, was to see how a person responds when she can’t see. You bump into something—what do you do? Do you want to know what it is you hit? Do you bend down and feel it or do you just plow right through? Eventually I actually got too good at all that; the Helen who was wanted for the play was supposed to be clumsier than I was. So once I got the part, I had to regress. But that obstacle-training helped for more than getting used to blindness: it gave me an insight into frustration that I was able to use in other ways in the role.

Dealing with blindness, however, was simpler than what came next: deafness. We never used earplugs or anything like that. It was a matter of my concentrating as the Rosses created disturbing sounds. That was especially hard because when you’re twelve years old, you respond easily to stimuli. If I reacted, I got ten demerits. If I didn’t, I gained points.

These practice periods lasted one or two hours. Sometimes I’d get hooked and it became fun; we’d all laugh about my response or lack of it. At other times it was real drudgery. Loud, annoying noises were the Rosses’ specialty. They’d smash a hammer on the floor, and if I didn’t react, that was worth twenty-five Brownie points. They had two phone lines and they’d use one to ring the other. And they’d bang pot covers so close to my ears that they’d ring as well. Another drill was to shoot questions at me. Ethel would ask if I wanted a Coke and I couldn’t respond. Direct orders like “Go pick up your socks” presented a real dilemma: Should I
do it and get busted for hearing, or not do it and get busted for not picking up my socks? A real judgment call.

All this was undeniably effective, but also a little sadistic because of the intensity of the exercise and the length of time it lasted and because there was no payoff for the kid in me, no reward of, “Okay, now you can go play outside.” When we finished we’d start on another role. Sometimes, when I’m working with my own kids, I find myself slipping into some of the old Ross patterns, being overly insistent and not sensitive to the fact that either the kid is tired or he isn’t getting it. An adult shouldn’t be saying things like “What’s the matter with you? It’s so simple.” If it’s that simple, madam, there must be a better way to impart the information.

Another area we worked on was Helen’s guttural speech. Many of the girls who are cast in this role choose to play it absolutely silent, and I can see why. Getting the sounds right was very difficult for me; I had to practice them a lot. Not only are they embarrassing, they certainly don’t come naturally to a child, whose voice is very thin. John Ross was very helpful with this. He had a remarkable ear and he could create or reproduce sounds well. My work was almost a direct imitation of the sounds he was making.

The most positive effect of all that work with the Rosses was not so much the specific things they wanted to teach me. It doesn’t take that long to learn not to look around you and not to react to sound. What took longer but turned out to be more valuable was developing the ability to concentrate. I was eventually able, through trial and error, to put myself in another place mentally, to practice pure concentration bordering on meditation.

While I wasn’t eager to do the work involved, I was obedient. If the Rosses said, “Do it,” I did it. Boredom was frequent; a year is a long time to be bumping into walls. And I never really entertained the idea of a reward. I often thought, “It’s really dumb to be doing all this work without any real promise. What if the show never goes on, or they don’t even let me come and audition?”

But to say, “When is this going to be over?” was to incur the Rosses’ wrath. That was simply a question you didn’t ask, especially since the importance of this particular assignment
was apparent from the very beginning. John Ross would often say, “You have to really study, because this can be it. You couldn’t play The Bad Seed in Long Branch, but this is the one that’s going to take you to Broadway.” As far as he was concerned, the whole thing was preordained.

Even though the play’s qualities made an enormous and lasting impression on me, I don’t remember the moment of first reading
The Miracle Worker
. Maybe that was because I’d worked on my character so long, the practice blended into the play, or maybe just because I didn’t have any words to remember. Dialogue or not, however, once I became familiar with the play I fell in love with it.

The Miracle Worker
’s first act opens in the Keller family homestead in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in the 1880s. Captain Keller and his new young wife, Kate, are concerned about their daughter, Helen, who’s been struck by fever. The doctor says she’ll be fine, but Kate, to her horror, discovers that her little girl can now no longer see or hear.

When we first see Helen, she is a violent, unkempt six-and-a-half-year-old who speaks only in crude grunts. A law unto herself, she is the tantrum-throwing terror and despair of the entire Keller household, including her half-brother, James, who thinks she ought to be institutionalized as a mental defective for her own and everyone else’s good.

The scene now switches to Boston, where twenty-year-old Annie Sullivan, herself just graduated from a school for the visually impaired, is being prepared for her first governess assignment: young Helen Keller. “She is like a little safe, locked, that no one can open. Perhaps there is a treasure inside,” Annie is told. “Maybe it’s empty too?” is her response.

Back in Tuscumbia, Annie’s youth, inexperience, and handicap combine to make not the best of impressions on Captain Keller, who growls, “Here’s a houseful of grown-ups can’t cope with the child, how can an inexperienced, half-blind Yankee schoolgirl manage her?” Undaunted, Annie begins to try to teach Helen the manual alphabet, spelling letters into her hand, but Helen responds by furiously swatting Annie with a doll, locking her in an upstairs room, and calmly dropping the key down a well.

Annie Sullivan, herself the product of a terrifying public
asylum where her brother died, is not to be so easily gotten rid of, and the second act finds her contending not only with an obstreperous Helen but the well-meaning obstructionism of her parents, who give in to Helen’s whims as the only way to have even a semblance of peace in the house. Finally, Annie confronts the Kellers over Helen’s grasping behavior at the breakfast table. “I can’t unteach her six years of pity,” she said, “if you can’t stand up to one tantrum!” She insists the Kellers leave the room and, after a prolonged and furious free-for-all that includes hair-pulling, chair-throwing and Helen spitting a mouthful of water at Annie (who responds by throwing a pitcherful back), Annie is able to report to the Kellers that Helen “ate from her own plate. She ate with a spoon. Herself. And she folded her napkin.… The room’s a wreck, but her napkin is folded.”

Confronting the Kellers, she tells them she’s convinced of Helen’s innate intelligence. “I don’t think Helen’s worst handicap is deafness or blindness,” she says. “I think it’s your love. And pity.” Though the captain is of half a mind to fire Annie, just for general sassiness and because Helen now flees from her very presence, a compromise is reached. Annie will have the girl all to herself, with no parental interference, in the garden house on the Keller property for a period of two weeks. “Two weeks. For only one miracle?” Annie asks before agreeing to the deal. “I’ll get her to tolerate me.”

The Miracle Worker
’s third and final act begins at the end of those two weeks. Not only does Helen now tolerate Annie, she has learned cleanliness and obedience as well, but though the Kellers are ecstatic, Annie Sullivan is not. Above all else, she wanted to teach Helen the manual alphabet, to give her the gift of knowledge. “One word,” she says, “and I can—put the world in your hand.” The Kellers, however, insist on having Helen back at the main house. But at the family’s first celebratory meal together, Helen once again begins misbehaving and ends by flinging a pitcher of water at Annie, who insists on taking her outside to fill it up again.

As the water at the pump douses Helen’s hand, Annie automatically does what she has so many times before: she spells w-a-t-e-r into Helen’s free palm. This time, however,
the miracle happens. Helen understands, and uncovering what the stage directions call “a baby sound buried under the debris of years of dumbness,” actually says the word “wah-wah.” In her joy Helen rings the farm bell, tries to be everywhere and identify everything at once. She finds her parents and Annie spells first “mother” and then “papa” for her. When she points to her, Annie spells out “teacher” and then, tentatively at first, the two embrace. As the play ends, Annie spells into the child’s hand, “I love Helen. Forever, and—ever.”

It was finally determined that they would not use a nonactor for Helen after all, so the call went out for every professional in that age group. And they came in droves, well over one hundred girls, I believe. My turn came around four o’clock in the afternoon at the Booth Theater, a tiny, tiny place, where Anne Bancroft, who’d already been cast as Annie Sullivan, was doing
Two for the Seesaw.
And even though John Ross had given me the traditional “It’s your part, all you have to do is go claim it” pep talk, I was extremely nervous when the stage manager led me onto that cold stage.

Out there in the traditional darkness of the theater were Bancroft, director Arthur Penn, writer William Gibson, and producer Fred Coe. I was just cuter than a bug, Little Miss Adorable in a short dress with lots of petticoats. They asked me the obvious questions, name, age, experience, and then Arthur came up on stage with Anne and asked us if we’d do part of the second act fight scene. We went right into the scene, slapping each other and wrestling on the floor. Then there was some laughter, embarrassed comments like “Boy, you’re strong!” and “Yeah, so are you!” They thanked me, I thanked them, and I left without even a clue as to how I’d done.

It turned out I had to return twice more. The first time, a couple of weeks later, was almost an exact replay of the previous audition, except the Rosses were called and told, “We really like her, but we’re very concerned about her size vis-à-vis Anne. If Patty grows, we’re in trouble.” This was one of those times when the Rosses’ lack of truthfulness worked against them, because everyone thought I was a tall
ten-year-old who might spurt further, when in fact I was already twelve. But John Ross must have done a rain dance or something, because he convinced them to look at me again, and this time I came prepared.

I think my height at the time was fifty inches and the worry was what would I look like if I grew two inches more. So John took a pair of my Mary Janes down to the neighborhood shoemaker and asked him to put on a two-inch block heel. The little Italian shoemaker didn’t want to do that because he thought it was dangerous for a child, and John had to keep explaining, “She’s not going to wear them to walk, she’s just going to show somebody how tall she can look.” He thought he was convincing, but when he came back to pick the shoes up, the heels were only an inch and a quarter and the shoemaker kept insisting, “You don’t understand, more than this and she’ll fall down.”

Finally John got an exact two inches and I took the shoes with me in a brown bag to the Booth for the third audition. My instructions were that under no circumstances was I to leave that theater without having shown what I looked like in those shoes. There was a little more chitchat this time, just to see what kind of brain I had, if any, and after they said good-bye, I had to pipe up, very embarrassedly, and say, “Excuse me—uh—I really—um—would like to show you, I know you’re concerned about—uh—the possibility that I might grow and be too tall and—um—my manager wanted me to show you what I would look like if I were two inches taller.” There was some chuckling in the dark and I said, “If you wouldn’t mind, it’ll only take a minute.” So I put the shoes on, walked over and stood next to Anne, and assured everyone that the heels had been measured, they were exactly two inches. More whispering and chuckling out in the house, a warm good-bye from Anne and that was it.