by Patty Duke
When the heating was finished, you poured this gray gruel onto a paper plate. Then you took Bambi out of her bed and put her not on the kitchen floor—too slippery!—but into the foyer, which doubled as my bedroom. You held the plate out and you said in a high voice, presumably at a pitch that dogs could hear, “Does Bambi want her dinner?” At which point, this poor decrepit thing jumped up, danced around in a circle, and begged.
Now, you kept saying this until someone threatened to murder you because of the screeching. Then you put down the plate and everybody had to stand there and watch her eat. When about a third of the stuff was gone, which was about all Bambi could handle, there was a serious discussion about whether or not she’d eaten less than usual and questions like, “Is she getting enough nutrition?” were asked.
Now came the pièce de résistance, asking Bambi, in that same high-pitched screechy voice, if she wanted to “make a river.” You cannot believe the instructions I used to get about this. One of my mother’s jobs was very neatly cutting up the newspapers used to line Bambi’s cat litter box, which was also kept in the foyer where I slept. We all had to stand there and watch Bambi make a river, and after she’d finally acquiesced, everybody had to tell her how good she was to have done it. And then, because no river was allowed to stay more than ten seconds, you would lift up and dispose of four pieces of the paper—no more, no less—so that Bambi’s box was always clean.
Finally, years later, Bambi became ill, even in the Rosses’ eyes, and they took her to a special vet in New Jersey: no one else could be used. They came back without her, heartbroken that Bambi had to stay overnight. That was one of the few times I reverted to my Catholicism, praying fervently that the dog would die. And she did. That really encouraged me and I started praying about the Rosses! If it worked on animals, maybe it would work on people too. Even though I was always giving interviews about how much Bambi meant to me, I really hated that dog. God, she was hideous. And the Rosses were much nicer to Bambi than they were to me: no demands were made on that animal, she didn’t have to perform any function. I’ll probably have to pay some karmic price for this, but I can’t help it. I loathed that dog.
Life with the Rosses provided few opportunities for escape, and sometimes they came in unlikely situations. In 1959 I made a curious little science fiction film called The 4-D Man, which starred Robert Lansing as a scientist who learns the secret of transposing matter and is able to walk through walls and things like that. Unfortunately, he needed human energy to revitalize his powers, and I played one of his victims: a little girl pushing a doll carriage. He takes one look at me and the next thing, my little legs are sticking out from some bushes, next to a broken carriage.
The producer of the film, Jack Harris, owned a studio out in rural Pennsylvania where he’d made The Blob and other movies. I was a city kid and this was my first extended time in the country. I hung around with one of the producer’s sons, riding bicycles, finding secret places, inhaling the smells of the Pennsylvania countryside. It was a wonderful experience for me because of the location and the tiny sense of freedom, but I always felt as if I were doing something terrible, that I would be caught and get into trouble for having fun.
The only other times I ever got away were occasional weekends when the Rosses would ship me home if they decided they wanted to be alone. My mother had moved to Queens by this time, but my visits weren’t like Lassie Come Home or the return of the prodigal daughter. It wasn’t that those visits were unhappy, they just weren’t much of anything, probably because it was obvious that they were only a stopover, that my mother had no autonomy and nothing was going to change. When I wanted to go out, she’d say, “What would the Rosses say?” Invariably the Rosses would have said, “Don’t leave the house.” Sometimes my mother would get brave and tell me, “The Rosses said you couldn’t go out, but go ahead anyway.” I’d go out and play with the neighborhood kids, maybe go to somebody’s basement and dance, but I was always looking over my shoulder, because I knew if they called and I wasn’t home, there’d be hell to pay.
And invariably there would be one call over the weekend and if I wasn’t around—how often can you use the she’s-in-the-bathroom routine?—my mother would be ordered to get me home immediately. I always let her know exactly where I’d be in case that call came, because Ethel would rant and rave at her. “How dare you let her go out! We told you she couldn’t go out!” We were like two little kids being punished because my keeper for the weekend hadn’t followed orders.
Ordering my mother around was standard procedure for the Rosses. They would call and say, not, “Could you come in on Thursday?” but “Can you be here in forty-five minutes?” And that was not really a question. It meant, “You will be here.” And my mother, of course, never had the courage or whatever it would have taken to say, “No, I can’t. I have some things I’m doing.” She would stop whatever she was about, throw herself together, and go into the city. Sometimes they gave her all my fan mail to take care of. She’d take the letters home and sit up till three A.M., addressing envelopes and putting pictures in them, and then drag a suitcase full of them back to Manhattan on the subway the next morning.
After I moved in with the Rosses I mostly saw my mother when she showed up about once a week to do their laundry. She would do the hand laundry and Ethel insisted on most things, especially personal items like pajamas, underwear, and socks, being hand-washed. Not only was my mother never paid, this being kind of a “favor among colleagues,” she was given very specific instructions about how to do things and a critique when she was finished. It was always done in a very patronizing tone, with Ethel saying things like, “Oh, Mrs. Duke, would you mind very much? Oh, thank you so much, Mrs. Duke. Now, Mrs. Duke, you must use the Woolite here and you mustn’t use more than a capful.” No wonder my mother went deaf. Who wants to listen to that?
To this day my mother still gets furious over a phrase in the old stock publicity about me that says how filthy my white shoes and socks were before John and Ethel Ross began to manage me; ask her about the phrase “we took her and her dirty white shoes,” and you still get the whole chapter and verse. When I was a kid, I wondered, “Why is she making such a big deal about the shoes and socks? What does it matter?” But now I realize it mattered a whole lot. It was an attack on her motherhood, and it underlined her guilt about having relinquished that position with me. That tossed-off phrase did it; that was the stake through her heart.
The image comes to me often now of this woman who came from a shabby apartment in Elmhurst, or, later on, a basement place in Astoria to a seemingly flashy Manhattan apartment to launder the personal underwear of people with whom her child was living. It’s cold on West End Avenue, with the wind coming off the Hudson River, and I think of those awful lonely moments she must have had, cold in her heart as well as on the outside, walking those long blocks to the subway in her thin coat. And returning home to a place where there was no one. Who’s going to do her laundry? Who’s going to care if she’s had any dinner? What awful demons she must have been living with. It made me ache. It still makes me ache.
SEVEN
When I first started acting, my main motivation was fear, a feeling that if I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, something horrible was going to happen. But once I became a hot little number on live TV, once the work changed from “Daddy, I want ice cream,” to more meaningful parts and I began to feel myself understanding the concepts and getting better, the acting mechanism in me really clicked. I’ve never liked to think of myself as very ambitious, but it’s been there, underneath, and this was when the drive really kicked in. I was no longer doing the work just because the Rosses wanted me to; now I wanted it as well. I liked the feeling of walking into a studio and not only knowing that I belonged but also having other people know it.
That sense of belonging—the attention and affirmation—was really the key element for me. Most performers are very loving, very willing to show affection, and I made attachm
ents quickly. I would love everybody, and there would always be a couple of favorites who loved me back. They were like the family I’d never really had, so it was wrenching when each show came to an end. I was grief-stricken to the point of feeling inconsolable; every one of the good-byes was a real loss to me.
As determined a little person as I was, I didn’t get every part I wanted. One of my biggest disappointments came in 1959 when Pollyanna was being cast. Because of the way the Rosses worked, I’d prepared for weeks for that part. That meant not only reading the book but discussing it, imagining dialogue, learning to dress the way Pollyanna dressed and behave the way Pollyanna behaved. If I messed up, their response was, “Pollyanna wouldn’t do that, would she?” And after all that, I never even got to the audition. One was set up, with the help of David Niven, but I got very sick, possibly with hepatitis, and during the postponement Hayley Mills, whose look was more classically Pollyanna, was found. I was heartbroken, heartbroken at not playing that role. That had nothing to do with a fear of the Rosses’ reaction. Pollyanna would have meant going to California and working with Walt Disney! It took me a while to get over that one.
One of the Rosses’ better traits was that they were surprisingly reasonable about rejection. Before I’d go in to try out for something, they’d deliver an effective kind of coach’s pep talk, saying, “Okay, it’s your part, just go claim it.” I’ve used a similar thing with my own kids when they want to get a hit in Little League: “It’s yours, just go do it.” And if I didn’t succeed, they never openly said, “You blew it.” I would feel very frustrated and discouraged, something I now know adult actors go through also, because you never find out why you didn’t get the part. Were you too tall, too short, too fat, too skinny, or did your reading stink? Or were you great and they didn’t know it? John Ross was very philosophical about all this. He’d say, “Hey, there’s another one coming. Don’t worry about it.”
We went to Long Branch, New Jersey, to audition for a summer stock production of The Bad Seed. We’d worked on the part a lot, drilling for days and nights, so I did extremely well, and the reaction was so good afterward that I thought I had the part. We all went out into the lobby and John Ross and the producer went into a corner to talk. I thought they were making a deal, because in the theater in those days, talking in a corner was how all deals were made. I was sitting on a bench, anticipating the summer and my first stage role, when all of a sudden the producer walked up to say good-bye. I said good-bye back in my best Sparkle Plenty manner, but I noticed that John was acting really disturbed.
We walked down the gravel driveway to the waiting taxi to go to the train station, and John, to his credit, told me how wonderful I had been and how thrilled and proud of me he was, but that I didn’t get the part because I had no previous stage experience. He said there was no point in arguing with these people, their minds were set; they were afraid I wouldn’t be able to cut it when there was an audience in the house. Actually, that was probably one of the moments when he thought he should have put more lies on my credits.
Not getting that role was another tremendous disappointment because I knew I’d been good, I knew that this was a real injustice. We got on the train and Ross said, “Don’t you worry, honey. You’ll open on Broadway, and you’ll never have to set foot on a summer stock stage.”
Nineteen fifty-nine was also the year in which, though I didn’t know it at the time, I would make the front page of The New York Times. It had all started the year before, with Irving Harris, the man who had introduced my brother to the Rosses. Harris had connections with The $64,000 Challenge, a TV quiz show that was the successor to The $64,000 Question, and he arranged for me to go to a kind of audition, really just to see if I had the personality they were looking for. Then I was informed that I was going to do the show and the producers were trying to decide on a category of expertise for me; naturally, I didn’t get to volunteer what I thought I’d be good at. In a few days I was told that popular music had been chosen. It could have been anything; they might as well have said Chinese.
The person I dealt with most on the show was a woman named Shirley Bernstein, who was the associate producer and composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein’s sister. She was very attractive, an elegant-looking high-class New York lady with a husky voice who was always willing to caress me or pat me on the head when I needed it. We had several meetings the week before each show. At the first one I was told about material “it would be a good idea for you to familiarize yourself with.” It was never “This is what you must know,” rather, “Maybe you ought to read x or y in Cashbox or Billboard,” or “You might want to get hold of these ten records.” I would also be asked specific questions, things like what label ‘Shaboom, Shaboom’ was on or what instrument was featured in a particular arrangement. If I answered correctly, they’d let me know I was right and wasn’t that good that I was right. If I gave a wrong answer or didn’t know, they wouldn’t supply the answer but they’d say, “Gee, it might be a good idea for you to study some more in that area.” And I’d go tell John Ross what they’d said and we’d go home and study the material furiously.
John Ross was never present at these meetings and I was discouraged from taking notes. Why they didn’t want me to write down information I was supposed to know didn’t make a lot of sense to me then. What I know now is that they wanted to have deniability in case any of this came out. Which, of course, it did.
By Saturday morning, the day before the show, I would’ve accumulated an incredible amount of knowledge. And I’d go down to the show’s offices, there’d be nobody around but me and Shirley, and she would narrow it down to, say, ten items I was most secure about. Then I would go home again and Ross would just drill me to death, on and on and on until the wee small hours of Sunday morning, when I was bleary-eyed from it all. I was allowed to sleep in after that and late Sunday afternoon, just before the show, I was taken to the studio and Shirley would ask me just four questions. Usually I knew the answers by then, but a couple of times, when I faltered, Shirley got really nervous. And that would finally be the time when she would supply the answers.
By the time the show went on the air, my guts would be in an uproar. Not only was I intimidated by stuff like orchestrations and arrangements, I didn’t understand in general why the Rosses had changed their style for this show, why they suddenly didn’t want to be present for all meetings and know every single detail. But still I’d go on with Eddie Hodges of The Music Man; I’d be adorable, and everybody would go “ooh” and he’d be adorable, and everyone would go “aah.”
After a few weeks Eddie and I progressed far enough to go into the isolation booths, where it had to be 112 degrees. They had a little fan going in one corner and a lot of Wash ’n Dris in front of you; the whole place smelled of Wash ’n Dris. One week, when we were up to $32,000, I almost blew it. My mouth was very dry, so I licked my lips before answering, but I moved too close to the microphone and got a shock. I was very startled and jumped back and when I told Ralph Story, the emcee, he said, “A lot of people have gotten shocks in these booths,” which was very funny except that I now couldn’t remember what he’d asked me and he wouldn’t repeat the question. I really thought, “They’re gonna kill me. I can’t even get out of this booth and they’re gonna kill me.” And suddenly, just when I was about to cry, I remembered the question and out came the answer.
Eddie and I both answered all our questions (no surprise here), so the last show ended with us splitting the $64,000. It’s difficult to describe how relieved I was when that show was over. The pressure I’d felt was enormous, much worse than anything involved with acting. For one thing, the hype for those high-stakes game shows was pretty hefty then—people didn’t leave their homes when they were on—and the award money seemed astronomical to me. My winnings were supposed to go into a trust fund but, like the rest of my earnings, what really happened to them is a mystery.
So while I may have seemed to be a very composed little gi
rl, with pigtails and bows and perfect little dresses, I was actually much too terrified to be anything like excited. I was afraid of the Rosses and their browbeating kind of consequences if I messed up: “You didn’t study enough.” “You didn’t practice hard enough.” “You knew that answer, how could you be so stupid?” “If you had done what we told you, you wouldn’t be in this mess.”
I knew the difference between right and wrong; I’d taken tests in school and knew you weren’t supposed to give the answers to anybody. But whom could I tell about what was going on? Whom could I tell about being so afraid? My mother? When I finally told John they were giving me the answers, what he said was, “It’s a secret, you mustn’t tell anyone.” Eventually, though, not only did it come out, but everyone in America knew.
Things began to fall apart in 1959, the year after my appearance, when first the New York district attorney’s office and then a grand jury began to investigate both The $64,000 Challenge and Twenty-one. John Ross said to me, “We’ve got to go to the district attorney. All the people connected with the show are going to tell the same story, that you were not given the answers, you were only given general areas to study.” Later, when the whole thing burst wide open, he said, “Remember, you would come out of the meetings and say that what went on was a secret, that you couldn’t tell me.” Which, of course, wasn’t true, but it was my cue. Now I could see how he expected me to play this game.
By the time I went to see the district attorney in one of those ancient New York municipal buildings, I was seriously scared. His office was stark, with those brown wooden chairs with arms that smell from all the sweaty palms that have been rubbed over them. My feet didn’t touch the ground, so I couldn’t even feel physically grounded. The meeting was very brief and, as instructed, I lied to him about what went on before the show.
