Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke

by Patty Duke

  All of a sudden everything stopped and David Susskind, the producer, ran out, grabbed me, and said, very concerned, “What’s the matter, honey, what’s the matter?”

  “What?”

  “What’s the matter, honey?”

  “I’m acting!”

  What could he say but “Oh.” I felt like such a fool. He turned and walked away, but the whole place fell apart. “I’m acting! Get out of the way!” Oh, brother.

  Walter Pidgeon was the star of that show and I had a special rapport with him. He was my pop. He was tall and handsome and gentle, all those good fantasy things you want in a dad. Because we had a scene together in which we talked about tortoises and how long they live, he gave me a turtle-shaped hassock, which I still have, plus a gold turtle from Tiffany that was my first good piece of jewelry. The Rosses, naturally, took it away from me. It was mine, but it was to be worn only when I was told I could wear it.

  Actually Walter Pidgeon was only one of a series of surrogate fathers I created on almost every set I was on. I was very affectionate, and I was addicted to sitting on people’s laps. That became a running joke in my grown-up years. People still see me at parties and say, “She sat on my lap!” and someone else will chime in, “She sat on my lap too! She’d sit on anybody’s lap.” And it was true.

  I found another surrogate in one of the first major film roles I did, Happy Anniversary in 1959, and that was David Niven. He was even more elegant than the other dads. He and Mitzi Gaynor, who was the costar, and Mitzi’s husband, Jack Bean, were all loving, bright, sunshiny people. And Mitzi looked so glamorous. I remember her wearing a sort of negligee thing for a breakfast scene and my being so impressed with her breasts because they would rise and fall when she talked. I was mesmerized by that. Actually, the story line of the film had to do with sex, and the awful consequences of my blurting out on a television quiz show that my parents, David and Mitzi, had had premarital relations. I think I was smart enough to figure out what premarital relations were, but the Rosses led people to believe that I was a total innocent, all sweetness and light. So someone was delegated to take me aside and gingerly tell me that sex was something adults did and which I shouldn’t have mentioned, and that was all I needed to know in order to play the scene.

  Before Happy Anniversary, however, came The Goddess. The film was written by Paddy Chayefsky about a Marilyn Monroe-type movie star, played by Kim Stanley. I played her as an eight-year-old girl. It was shot at Ellicott City, Maryland, and my mother, who was delegated by the Rosses to take me there, freaked out on the airplane. It was her first time on a plane and she got frantic, saying, “I want to get off! I want to get off! I want to get off!” And I’d say, “Mama, you can’t get off. We’re ten thousand feet in the air.” Then she really started throwing a fit and the stewardess had to come over and calm her down. I was so embarrassed.

  My scene in the movie was a brief one, but it was lovely. I was Emily Ann, the little girl no one paid any attention to. She gets her report card at the end of the school term and she goes to tell her mother, who works in a five-and-dime store, that she got promoted to the next grade. Her mother is annoyed and tells her to go home. Then you see her at a girlfriend’s house, calling, “Sylvia! Sylvia!” But Sylvia never comes and Emily Ann has nobody to tell. She goes home and you see that she’s a latchkey kid before we had the phrase. She’s going to eat a snack in this depressing, hideous-looking kitchen, when suddenly a tough alley cat wanders in through an open window. A funny look comes over the girl’s face. She very carefully gets up from the table, finds a bowl, pours some milk into it, and puts it on the floor. While the cat is drinking, she swoops it up, envelops it in a hug, and says, “I got promoted today.”

  It’s a strong scene, just a little vignette but very well written, with a beginning, middle, and end. You could have had the whole movie stop there and you would have gotten the message. Getting that part, which involved a pantomime audition for Paddy Chayefsky, after which he called up and raved about me, was one of the few times I was aware that the Rosses were really excited, really proud of me. When I think about what was the first film I ever did, it’s always The Goddess.

  It wasn’t until 1973, however, almost fifteen years after it was made, that I got to see The Goddess. I was in Milwaukee, doing a play, and one night I was lying on a motel room bed with the TV on, talking to one of my kids, when I heard a child’s voice that sounded vaguely familiar to me. I turned over so I could see the TV, and there I was. The Rosses, forever guarding against my getting too big a head, had never let me watch myself on the screen or even read any reviews.

  The Rosses couldn’t prevent people from coming up and complimenting me in person, but if according to their standards it had been done too much, there would invariably be a humbling session afterward. Or if my thank-yous were not appropriate, if I hadn’t said, “Thank you very much. I worked with my manager very hard,” the same thing would happen. It usually took place at dinner. Everything would be lighthearted and fine, and then, all of a sudden, I’d hear, “By the way, today you …” and the barrage would start. Immediately I would feel, “When am I going to do something right? Even when I do it right, it’s not good enough.” So I was always on my guard, always trying to figure out what it was they were looking for so that maybe once in a while I could be one step ahead of them.

  The cornerstone of these sessions was the idea that without them I’d be nothing. They’d told my brother Ray, “Without us, you’d end up a truck driver or in jail,” and with me it was, over and over again, “If it wasn’t for us, you’d be a hooker or you’d work in the five-and-dime.” Only once, when I was a teenager, did I have the nerve to say, “Well, I hope I would have chosen hooker.” Being twelve or thirteen and fairly independent when he started, Ray was much less vulnerable to them than I was. After all, what does a seven-year-old know? The Rosses’ threat was, “We will drop you and you’ll go back to oblivion,” and I came to believe that completely.

  SIX

  When I was young, I had a dream, a child’s nightmare: that I would be taken someplace away from my mother and never know if I was going to be with her again. That’s very spooky, considering what eventually happened.

  Living with the Rosses didn’t start right away, it evolved. First I began staying with them the night before a job, and if I got homesick, they’d make fun of me for being a baby who wanted to be with her mother. Then they started having me stay on weekends, weekends became three days, three days became five, five became seven. Always I was presented with the notion that spending more time with them would further my career. Once I became a Broadway star at age thirteen, that was it. The standard line was, “She’ll have to stay here now because the work is going to be so intense.” I never lived at home with my mother again.

  From the first apartment I met them in, on Seventy-fourth Street, the Rosses soon moved a few blocks to a sixth-floor apartment at 340 West 72 Street, at the corner of Riverside Drive. It was a nice place, but there never was a room for me. I spent innumerable nights there, all through my most successful years, but it was always on a couch in the hallway. I never had more than two drawers to call my own, with my sheets in one and my clothes in the other. Finally, in 1963, when I was sixteen, the Rosses moved to an apartment on Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, where I had my own room. But I was never allowed to close the door. I could close the bathroom door, but if I was in there longer than ten minutes, I had to open it. There was no genuine effort to make me feel at home.

  As far as my real mother was concerned, these years marked the beginning of a really dark period that is still very difficult and complicated for me to deal with. When it came to the boring work involved with my career, like baby-sitting me on a set, then she was brought into action. Mostly she sat there as if she were part of the wall. Never opened her mouth, never made a move, just sat there and read the Daily News and the Mirror. What she was was petrified, because the Rosses had literally told her, “You find a
chair, you put it in the corner, and you stay there and don’t say a word about anything.” That was the directive, and even when people would come up and compliment me, she’d say thank you and then close right up because she was afraid she’d get into trouble.

  That fear was in a sense contagious, because I was scared of my mother. She was very unpredictable emotionally, one step away from suicide most of the time, so I never knew what was going to happen. She might turn into an iceberg, with a really mean expression on her face and a rigid body, and withhold any and all affection. At other times everything would be fine and then all of a sudden she’d be screaming and yelling.

  One New Year’s Eve my sister, who never went anywhere, was going out with the man who would become her fiancé, when my mother threw a tantrum. My sister decided not to go and I kept insisting she should. But when Carol started out the door, my mother began to attack herself—it was astounding to watch. She smashed her face against the doorjamb, pulled out her hair, beat her face until she’d broken her nose and was a bloody mess. Of course my sister came back in, and I kept saying, “Get outta here! Get outta here! If you go, she’ll stop.” And she went. And my mother stopped. And I took care of her. It was not the first time, and it wasn’t the last, that she acted that way.

  The other thing my mother did to terrible excess was crying. Relentless crying. For days and days and days on end. I’d be at the Rosses’, the doorbell would ring at ten A.M., and she’d be standing there in tears. She would come in and sit down, and it would be obvious that she’d been at it for quite a while. She would continue crying and the Rosses would get angrier and angrier. They would try every approach they could think of to defuse the situation. They’d leave her alone, go and do business, come back—she was still the same. Dinner would come and go, the evening would set in, it could be one or two o’clock in the morning, she was still crying. Once you unplugged the dam, this lady did not stop.

  My mother would never say why she was doing this, and I know now that she really didn’t know why, didn’t understand that it was not due to any single cause, it was because of everything. Her fear of the Rosses was ten times greater than mine; she is, in fact, still afraid of them. This was a terrified woman, someone with less than an eighth-grade education, who had no sense of self-worth. The Rosses managed to loom as authority figures; they appeared to her to be educated people of means. And my working represented income that was like a gift from God, which she didn’t want to jeopardize. My mother has always felt responsible for everything; anything in the world that goes wrong, she must have caused it. So the Rosses’ admonitions and warnings were taken very seriously by her. She figured she could wreck everything for me. Still, she resented the whole situation. There was a lot of fury in my mother in those days.

  What my mother’s behavior accomplished was exactly what the Rosses hoped it would: it drove an emotional wedge between me and her that made it easier for them to keep me away from home. Although my mother had signed a contract with the Rosses, which neither of us had ever read, they wanted more than that, they wanted to completely control me. But they could never dismiss the threat, minor though it was, that one day my mother might say, “I’ve come to my senses now. That’s my daughter and we’re leaving.” So they never tried to hide the contempt they had for her. They characterized her as mentally ill, unbalanced. “We just have to put up with Mrs. Duke” was one of their pet phrases.

  So even though it troubled me, even though part of me knew better, I bought that point of view. My mother made it easy to buy, especially in the early days before the Rosses got horrible. The Rosses laughed, life was happier at their place, eating dinner out every night was fabulous, at least at first, and on the other side was a woman out of Kafka. They didn’t have to do much to diminish her. My mother was giving the Rosses their ammunition; she loaded every gun for them.

  Also, my mother was a willing victim a lot of the time. She didn’t want to be poor, she wanted to be taken care of. Her weakness was that it was at almost any price, and that price included me. The Rosses saw to it that there was always some cash for Mrs. Duke, and Mrs. Duke would take her cash and go away, Even now she sometimes says things like, “I was her mother. I deserved some of that.” A lot of stage mothers have that attitude; it’s not unique to mine. But it’s more like a sibling attitude than what I think a mother’s should be.

  It took me a long time to realize the resentment I had against my mother. I was angry at her on the most important level there is, at the very bottom of my soul, and I think I had a right to be angry. A parent makes an unspoken agreement with a kid: “You’re here. I got you here. Now I’m going to take care of you.” The expectation isn’t, “Oh, by the way, there are these two people who live on Seventy-fourth Street who are going to make you an actress, but you have to go live with them and they’re going to take care of you—even though you’ve already given your allegiance to me, your mom.”

  And my mother still expected my loyalty. When the Rosses weren’t around, she would say, “I’m your mother, and I never see you. I’m your mother, and I told you to do this. I’m your mother …” It wasn’t in me to say then what I feel now, which is, “What are you talking about? I didn’t put me here. You did. I didn’t invite the Rosses into my life. You did.” When my mother was emotionally ill and needed to be hospitalized, she’d always say, “Don’t let them lock me up.” And the anger I felt came from the fact that she had locked me up. Turning me over to the Rosses was like taking me to Bellevue and throwing away the key.

  The Rosses coached other kids besides me and my brother, and occasionally they’d have four or five of us there of a night. That was fun, like the Hollywood Canteen, with all the actor kids hanging out together. But a kind of attrition took place for two reasons. One was that once my success started to happen, the Rosses’ energies grew so focused on me that the other kids just fell away. The other was that these kids, like Joey Trent, the gorgeous boy from the Beanie-Weanie commercial, came from very strong families: there was no way that kid was going to live with anybody but his mother and father, no matter how much the Rosses claimed it was hampering his career. The same thing happened with Susan Melvin, a quite talented little girl whose mother was one of the few people who would say, “What are you doing, John and Ethel? This is weird. My kid is not gonna stay here. She has a home. Tell me where you want her and I’ll bring her there, but I’m not leaving her here.”

  The only kid who stayed over at all regularly was a little boy named Billy McNally whom the Rosses discovered shining shoes in front of the Metropole on Broadway near Times Square. His family was also very poor, so the Rosses struck up the same kind of agreement with them that they had with my mother, and Billy came to live with us. He was about two years younger than me, and I adored him because I wasn’t alone anymore, I had a colleague, somebody my own age who also thought the Rosses were a little nuts. When they’d go to bed at night we’d get together and whisper. “What’d they say about this?” “What’d they say about that?” “Can you believe what she did?” Billy stayed with us until he reached that “awkward age” young actors do. His presence was very comforting, one of the rare confirmations I got that I wasn’t crazy. Before his arrival I sometimes felt like a movie heroine pleading with the psychiatrist, “Doctor, someone is chasing me.”

  Because the Rosses watched me so closely, one of the most difficult things I’ve had to learn later in life is how to be alone. During my first marriage I would take a bath with the door open, and just being by myself in any room was almost impossible for me until quite recently. When you’ve been watched and monitored for all your formative years, it’s very hard to get used to not being watched and monitored, very hard to be without the background noise of chatter. If you’re alone, then you must have thoughts of your own. And those were not permitted when I was growing up.

  Though I was the principal earner in the Ross household, I was hardly the center of attention: that honor went to Bambi. Bambi was a
light fawn-colored chihuahua that was made, I swear, out of toothpicks and papier-mâché. Bambi would stare at you from her big wet weepy brown eyes and ooze from every orifice. I don’t remember a time when this dog wasn’t frail and ailing, but she went everyplace with the Rosses, even, eventually, to the Oscars. If the dog couldn’t go, we didn’t go. Whenever we’d go shopping for anything and happen to notice a purse that Bambi might fit into, Ethel bought it. And when we went traveling, Bambi had her own wardrobe: a dress, a mink stole, a hat.

  Bambi rarely walked anyplace, she was carried in her daytime bed: a wicker basket covered by, depending on the temperature, two or three little infant receiving blankets. Bambi had practically no teeth and her tongue hung permanently outside her mouth. I mean, she never even brought it in to get it wet. So when the time came to feed her, which was quite some ritual in itself, the first thing you had to do was get a glass of water and dip Bambi’s tongue in it so she could eat at all!

  Now, it was a great honor to be among the chosen few who could feed Bambi, who, of course, ate only a special diet. With God as my judge, feeding her was an hour-and-a-half event. First you opened the can at both ends and squished all the food onto wax paper, because Bambi could eat only a can a week and the rest had to be carefully saved. Then you sliced off just the right amount and put it into a special little frying pan that was only for Bambi’s food; nothing else could be cooked in this pan. You’d add a tiny bit of water and mush up the food, but not too much, because Bambi didn’t like it if it had been mushed up too much. Then you would heat it, but very carefully, because she couldn’t feel anything on her tongue, which was like plaster of Paris, and you might bum her.