Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke

by Patty Duke

  When the interviewer came around, I performed like the perfectly trained young teenager who might have come from a finishing school for midgets. I would show him in, take his coat and hang it up, serve coffee and cookies or whatever. My manner was one step short of a curtsy, and I think if Ethel could have squeezed that in, she would have. While the interview was going on, John stayed in the background and never interrupted; that was so that no one could say he was interfering or that I was being manipulated. Having prepped me, he didn’t have to intrude. If I had a memory lapse and said the wrong thing, he wouldn’t contradict me, he’d just say, “Well, perhaps another way to look at it is …” and that would push the right button and I’d get the information out the way he had planned. Once I got the basic interview down, it would be updated, critiqued regularly, and there would be periodic refresher courses. People were not used to reading interviews with children that age. They were very taken with the idea of a kid who seemed to be at ease with the language—the Rosses’ footwork totally dazzled everyone.

  The Rosses were also adept at making up stories about me, like my getting a soap commercial because I was the only kid who showed up with a dirty face. They even had me lie at my first audition. To reinforce the impression my new clothes made, they told me to say I was six when I was eight, a lie that wasn’t caught until I testified before Congress in 1959. If I could unearth an eight-by-ten photo of me from that period, with credits on the back, fifty percent or more would be lies. Like Somebody. Up There Likes Me. I wasn’t in that movie, my brother was. A credit for The Arthur Murray Party, saying I appeared on it six times, stayed on my picture past The Miracle Worker. I was never on that show; I wouldn’t know Arthur Murray if I fell on him. And, of course, I had little anecdotes to go with each credit, in case somebody asked me a question.

  The Rosses tried to convince me I wasn’t being made to lie. They’d say, “Everybody does this,” or “It’s just so they’ll have something to talk about with you.” But I was always afraid I was going to get caught. With that strong Catholic upbringing, here I was telling bald-faced lies. I realize now that I never would have gotten caught because I was so good at it—I was acting. But at the time I was terrified. Every time I would hand my picture across the table to the person casting the part, I worried that I would forget which story went with which show. There were so many lies. They lied about my weight, they lied about my height, and, of course, they lied about my name.

  And though I didn’t feel it at first, that name change did indeed turn out to be a lightning bolt that reached deep into my mind and touched a major concern of mine, which was a fear of death so powerful it precipitated daily anxiety attacks from the early 1950s to 1983. I was obsessed, truly obsessed with my mortality. And guilty, as well, about not worrying about my parents’ deaths or my sister’s or brother’s or my children’s or anyone else’s. Just my own.

  Because when the Rosses said, “Anna Marie’s dead, you’re Patty now,” it was as if she really did die. When people take away your name, they are taking away your identity. That may seem like a lot of fuss over a bunch of letters strung together, but your name is an important symbol. What had happened to that Anna Marie person, I wanted to know. Could she be dead? Where’d she go? It was all part of the feeling that nothing about me was good enough for these people, not the way I talked, not the way I looked, and not the most important thing, my name. I felt as if they’d killed part of me, and in truth they had.

  My fear wasn’t ever-present. Life would be going along fine and then something, like passing those endless cemeteries out in Queens, would trigger it. Or maybe I’d be reading, and there would be a natural progression from that to contemplating life and the larger questions. All of a sudden the absolute realization of my own mortality would hit and I just felt impelled to scream. Sometimes it was what I’d call a bloody-murder scream, sometimes words like “No! No! No! No!” The screams served the purpose of relieving the fear a little bit, and then I’d force myself, before I got sucked back in again, to immediately think about something else.

  Occasionally, once I began working, the fear would hit when I’d be in a cab, say, going over the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan. I was a kid, but I’d get so crazed, I’d tell the driver to stop and I’d get out and run. I remember running over that bridge, running and running and running and running until I was so physically tired that I couldn’t think anymore, I couldn’t be scared.

  Inevitably, though, it happened at night, on the way to sleep. I’d scream every night of my life. I’d be lying there in bed, thinking about what I had to do the next day, and this feeling would come over me. From that moment I wasn’t actually thinking anymore, thoughts didn’t come, I was overtaken by abject terror. After the scream I’d pretend that I’d been asleep and had had a bad dream. To cover the sound I developed a really annoying habit of making a horrible clearing-my-throat noise that bordered on hyperventilation.

  The men in my life have been very comforting and helpful about this, even when I’d bolt out of bed and run right across the night table. John Astin many times had to hold me down on the floor and tell me that whatever it was, it was all right. My children know about it, of course, and feel free to explore answers that suit them. The only people who weren’t sympathetic were the Rosses. Finally, one night Ethel had had enough of that strange, strangled sound and she said, “What’s the matter with you? Stop that.” And I said, “I have something in my throat.” She told me, “No, you don’t. You do that all the time.” And I finally said, “I’m afraid of dying.” And she said, “That’s just too bad. You don’t have to worry about that for a lot of years.” Great, I thought, should I wait until the day I’m dying to start? All I could think, was “I’m in agony, somebody help me.”

  When I went through a cursory basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1985, to prepare me for a TV movie I did called A Time to Triumph, I was reminded of my own early training. The idea was the same: taking away individuality, breaking the will in order to have control, erasing the slate so it could be filled in by the authorities. Everyone wears the same clothes, the hair is shaved so everybody looks the same, the goal being the loss of ego and becoming one with your unit. And that was very much like what the Rosses did to me. I was stripped of my parents, I was stripped of my name, I was eventually stripped of my religion, and they had a blank slate to do with as they wished.

  When I was with the Rosses, I quickly went into a kind of limbo, similar to the mind-set of people who are in jail or even mental hospitals. You simply cannot think about the bad things because there is nothing you can do about them, you have to live in the reality that you’re in. You don’t make a conscious decision not to think, you just stop thinking. What you do is lock it all out, put a solid vault door between your feelings and what you’re expected to say and do. That led, especially as I got older, to a constant internal tug-of-war, a resentment against myself as part of me began to feel I could in fact do something about it. I could have said, “I don’t want to do this anymore” or “I’m going to tell people what you’re doing,” but my fear was always greater than my intelligence.

  I can imagine people reading all this and saying, “For heaven’s sake, why didn’t she say something, say she wanted to make a phone call, say she wanted to be with her mother? She was on a set every day with forty people—why didn’t she tell somebody?” It’s just not that simple. For one thing, there were practical reasons. I was a kid. They were adults. It was my word against theirs. But it’s also more complicated than that. It’s almost impossible to understand, unless you’ve walked in those shoes for a while, that once you’ve been successfully indoctrinated, it simply no longer enters your mind to act in another way. You know what your sentence is, and you live it out.

  The overwhelming irony of the Rosses’ plans and schemes is that they genuinely thought they were doing the right thing with all their disparaging comments, helping me become a solid citizen by keeping things in perspective for
me. They weren’t out-and-out monsters, thinking, “Okay, let’s get the little bitch and humiliate her,” even though that was often the result. In their heads there was a lot of self-righteousness. When they built this cocoon around me, they probably thought they were saving me from a lot of the difficulties of growing up, but that was really the opposite of what was necessary. I was never allowed to grow and learn at my own pace, the pace of a child. They often talked of the injustice of their not having children because they knew what children needed. But everything they gave me in the way of love was very superficial. I used to think, They never loved me. It was all a lie. It was all a scam. But I think now that they really did love me, they just didn’t know how.

  FIVE

  Opinions, as far as the Rosses were concerned, were a luxury I wasn’t allowed. I remember once voicing one, who remembers about what, and being sat down in the kitchen and told there was no such thing as an opinion for me. Period. I was to do what I was told. Period. I’m a parent myself, and I can imagine saying to my own children, “You’re a kid, you’re being very opinionated and you’re not seeing the whole picture.” But this was, “No opinions about what you wear, how you look, what you say, how often you change your underwear. That’s it. None.” We’re talking about the most basic things here, even down to the kind of toothpaste I used. “You don’t like the taste? We’ll tell you what taste you like.” And especially no opinions about acting.

  When the roles I was going to try out for were discussed, I never had any input. It would simply be announced that “you have an audition for this” or “you’re going to do that three weeks from Thursday.” Even considerations like “Gee, I have tests coming up in school” weren’t allowed. I would take my shiny patent leather Mary Janes and a pair of clean socks with me in my school bag, and I would call in and find out what auditions I had that afternoon. If the part was really good, I’d meet John Ross at the audition and we’d work on the script in the stairwell or someplace. But if the audition was just for a commercial, I’d go by myself or with my mother. Then there would be the last-minute reminders. “Are your socks clean?” Ethel was fixated on socks. “Remember, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed! Sparkle! Sparkle-sparkle-sparkle!” It sounds like a bad “movie of the week,” but I took it seriously, I became like some mechanical doll run amuck with my eyes rocketing in my head. Sparkle-sparkle-sparkle.

  Many of the first jobs I got when I began to work in the mid-1950s were on commercials. And because this was the heyday of live TV, a lot of the spots were live as well. They made me really nervous, but I’m sure they were even scarier for the people who hired children to do them: “Okay, hold your breath, let’s see what the kid’s gonna do this time!” The worst was for Esquire shoe polish. The announcer talked about how using the polish was so simple, a child could do it, and I’d stand there and polish the shoes on live television, terrified that I would go right up my arm with the stuff. I did get it all over my dress once, and that got me in a lot of trouble.

  The spot most people remember me from was for a cleaner called Lestoil. It was memorable for me, too, because it was done in Springfield, Massachusetts, but nobody thought to tell me that. We got in a cab, we headed out to Queens, we went to LaGuardia airport, and we were preparing to take off—yes, actually take off—before John Ross finally said to me, “We’re going to Massachusetts by airplane. Isn’t that a great surprise?” Surprise? I’d never been on a plane in my life and I was petrified, absolutely petrified. It was one of those four-engine prop jobs where they served you a box lunch and a lot of people barfed it up. But I kept saying, “What a great surprise! This is terrific!”

  The setup was a prissy little 1950s girl having a tea party with her dolls. I would serve them ice cream and one of the dolls would drop her portion on the floor. I’d say in a very sophisticated voice, “Dolls are so messy, you know,” and I’d clean up with Lestoil. Let me tell you, the smell of Lestoil and ice cream is something that cannot be beat. It was really an annoying commercial but it ran forever in New York. People would scream at their TVs, “Let’s make the kid drink that stuff.”

  Commercials in which I actually had to eat and drink presented challenges of their own. One that was really disgusting was for Beanie-Weanies, a product that was exactly what it sounds like, a canned frankfurter and beans combination. Though I didn’t know it at the time, my husband-to-be, Harry Falk, was a prop man on that shoot. The real problem here was that this was a Friday and I was still Catholic. Another client of the Rosses, a boy named Joey Trent, was working with me, and he wouldn’t do any more than pretend. But I ate them, feeling really guilty but also thinking, “Oh, boy, Joey’s going to get in real trouble. At least I’m eating.” I was more afraid of the Rosses than I was of God.

  The commercial that was the worst, however, was for Minute Maid orange juice. After about four glasses of Minute Maid under those hot lights, I started to throw up. I spent the whole day throwing up, drinking more orange juice, and throwing up. Actually, from as early as I can remember, I’d throw up at the drop of a hat. It was the way I dealt with everything that upset me. It certainly was a safe way to take a break—nobody can pick on you for throwing up. You’re sick. And the people I dealt with weren’t sophisticated enough to know the vomiting was psychologically motivated. To this day, when I’m doing a play I become physically ill from head to toe on opening night. You don’t want to be near me. I’m not unpleasant, except that I spend all my time in the bathroom. When in doubt, vomit.

  People have told me they heard that I stopped working for about six months early on because I lost interest in acting, that I said, “I hate this, I don’t want to do it anymore.” Not true. I was too scared to say that. I would have loved to, which is probably why at one point I believed I did. But the fact of the matter was that for a while there were simply no jobs, and I think the Rosses ran out of ideas about how to package this little number.

  Then, all of a sudden, as if someone found the lights in a dark room, I would just go on auditions and knock ’em off, one right after another. My first speaking role came in 1956, when I was nine. I played an Italian waif on the Armstrong Circle Theater’s production of “The S.S. Andrea Doria.” There was more excitement than usual on this production because the sinking had just occurred plus there was a great big ship on the set. I played a little girl who gets separated from her mother but then at the last moment, naturally, is rescued and lowered over the side. I remember feeling at first that this was a really big part, but after three days of saying things like “Mama!” and “Help!,” in an Italian accent no less, I was thinking, “Is this all there is?”

  I also got a continuing role in a soap called The Brighter Day. It was done live, without a TelePrompTer, and one day I forgot my lines. I had a 104-degree fever and this time I was sick for real. I’d throw up just before I made an entrance and once again after I made an exit. You know, they say when a person is drowning, his whole life flashes in front of him. That’s what happened to me. It was a short life, because I was only a kid, but God, the moment was awful. I was supposed to introduce Hal Holbrook’s character, the Reverend Dennis, but I was so sick I couldn’t remember even that much. I said, “I’ve been with … I’ve been with … I’ve been with …” and I looked over at Hal. He wanted to save me, but the terror was contagious. He had the same scared look on his face I did and now he couldn’t remember his name either. He kept saying, “I’m … I’m … I’m …” and then from nowhere he blurted out, “She’s been with—me!”

  I’ve always been grateful that I began acting during what’s come to be known as the “golden age” of live TV. You got to work with terrific people, like playing opposite Myrna Loy and dancing with Ed Wynn in “Meet Me in St. Louis,” plus there was an excitement about it unlike anything I’ve ever experienced professionally. The electricity in the studio the date the show was going on the air built and built and built all day long, till it was “Fifteen seconds, stand by,” at which point, of course, I had
to go to the bathroom but couldn’t. Being on those elite shows like the Armstrong Circle Theater, The U.S. Steel Hour, David Susskind Presents, and the Hallmark Hall of Fame was a real high, scary as hell and fun, all at the same time.

  Most of the time, I appeared in TV versions of the classics and those were wonderful for me. In “The Prince and the Pauper” in 1957 I was a little girl in a loft, watching the sun bounce off the windowpanes and having a conversation with the prince. I had my hair down for once and I was wearing a long peasant dress, so I thought it was all very romantic, a feeling I’ve always loved.

  The next year came something even better, “Wuthering Heights,” starring Richard Burton and Rosemary Harris. Even today, the romance of that story is really transporting. If I watch the Laurence Olivier/Merle Oberon version on late night TV, I can’t go out of the house the next day because my eyes are so red. And Richard Burton was, well, Burton, bigger than life and exciting to look at. I played Cathy as a child and even though I was crazy about Rosemary Harris, who was the older Cathy, I also resented it when it was time for her to take over. I wanted to do those love scenes with Richard Burton.

  Besides Burton, what I really enjoyed about “Wuthering Heights” was the rain. Heathcliff kept running away, I’d follow him, and it would rain and rain on the moors during our preteen love scenes. But if you want to talk serious rain, there was “The Swiss Family Robinson” later in 1957. We created a real hurricane, with trees blowing over, the treehouse swaying as if it were going to collapse, monkeys and all kinds of exotic birds flying around. The wind machines were turned on, then the rain, and we all climbed up rope ladders. I cried out, “Help me! Help me! Help me!”