by Patty Duke
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.
At last the call came to meet with Arthur Penn. I went to his office one evening, we sat down, and he wanted to know what I knew about Helen Keller. Well, the poor man, I just went and told him everything there was to know; I seemed to be this extraordinarily articulate child who knew all about frustrations and psyches and everything. He had no idea how intensively I’d been preparing for that question for nearly a year and a half. He’d ask me, “What would you say if you were Helen Keller?” and I’d come back with, “I wouldn’t say anything.” Penn was probably thinking, “This kid’s been well programmed,” but I was thinking, “He’s really buying all this.” I felt I had scored intellectually with this person. He was warm and charming and I already had a crush on him.
Finally, about a month after the first audition, the phone call came: “Okay, but if she grows another two inches, she’s out.” When the Rosses told me I’d gotten the part, I broke down. It was partly relief that the training was over, and partly exhilaration at having succeeded in pleasing them. But I was still scared. I’d never been on Broadway before. And the notion of working in front of a theater full of breathing humans was very, very intimidating.
NINE
Rehearsals for The Miracle Worker began in the very hot August of 1959 and I immediately felt that something important was happening here. For one thing, all my other work stopped, which was quite a relief. But more than that the experience was like walking into another world. This was “the theah-tah,” a sacred, almost magical place which to me had the feeling of uptown, of class. So even though no one intended it, I was initially intimidated. They’d all done this before, they talked a language I didn’t understand, things like “stage right” and “stage left,” which to this day I have trouble keeping straight. It was a neighborhood I’d never been in before, both literally and figuratively.
Given all that, I remember being surprised at how unglamorous the place was. The Playhouse dated back to 1911 and looked it. The theater where Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie had played for more than a year was always dark, with only one worklight. There were dinky little dressing rooms and iron steps that clanked when you stepped on them and everything smelled. Now I feel that as tradition and I love it, but then my reaction was, “This is how a Broadway star lives?” Also, given the nature of the part, with me always crawling on the floor, I ended up being dirty all the time and that hardly seemed glamorous.
We had to deal with two crises just before rehearsals started. One was my falling and breaking my arm while I was roller-skating. Both my mother and I were terrified to tell the Rosses that this had happened. It turned out to be a hairline fracture going straight up the arm, which wasn’t really noticeable but meant that I couldn’t hold anything. And if someone touched me, it hurt a lot.
The Rosses decided, however, that nothing would go on my arm, no cast or splint or wrapping, because I might lose the job. Ethel had a wrist injury at the same time—I think a toilet seat fell on her hand—and she was busy doing Christian Science on herself, so what they told me was, boom, you’re a Christian Scientist. I did all the praying and read my Mary Baker Eddy and decided I had indeed had a healing experience, even though the thing continued to hurt like nobody’s business. I got fairly involved in Christian Science because it linked up with my fear of death, but once I didn’t have any more broken bones, the Rosses lost interest, and it wasn’t until years later that I began to deal with what I came to see as a betrayal of my Roman Catholicism.
The other difficulty was that once I got the part I was told that Helen was to be played with eyes open and a fixed stare, while all my practicing had been done with my eyes closed. My initial reaction to the change was terror: could I learn a different way and could I learn it fast enough? Then it was step-up-the-drill time—I had to get to work on that look. I was able to develop it myself just by practicing staring at something for a long time, until my consciousness went elsewhere. Eventually I was able to keep that fixed stare and not refocus my eyes even when I moved my head. In some ways, the new method was a relief because I’d had some fears about doing the role with my eyes closed; the stage was on different levels, and the fight scene included chairs and plates and forks and knives flying all over the place. In retrospect it was a stupid oversight on our part not to have realized the role would have to be done with the eyes open. It was just too dangerous any other way.
I started the first week of rehearsals carrying my little doll and wearing my little ankle socks and my little short dress with my little panties showing. I don’t recall exactly what phrase Annie Bancroft finally used, but the essence of it was, “What the hell are you doing with that thing? Let’s get rid of the doll and get down to work.” To me it meant “the jig is up,” and I liked that very much. It was the beginning of a sense of camaraderie that was wonderful for me.
On every show I’d worked on, I’d found someone who was my channel of energy and love, and certainly Annie fulfilled that role on this one. She’s New York, she’s comfortable, she’s got that earthy Italian thing, and we became really close. Once we both learned the manual alphabet that Annie Sullivan teaches Helen, we used it to make little jokes to each other and drive Arthur Penn crazy. I really hero-worshipped her, every blink of her eyes mattered to me, and that’s a terrible burden to put on somebody. And even though I was very demanding, she had problems of her own, so I had to learn when to back off and not bother her. But she gave me a great deal and always tried to come up to the mark.
The most generous thing Annie did was to allow me to come into her dressing room a half hour before every curtain and just hang around, fiddle with her makeup, and things like that while she was opening her mail and getting dressed. I’d say ninety percent of actors won’t let you do that, especially not a kid, but never did she say, “No, you can’t come in now.” I loved watching her get ready, sitting there in her Merry Widow, putting her braid on and making it a bun, applying what little bit of makeup she wore. Those were treasured moments, like being in the inner sanctum. There’s a line in Our Town: “Do we know every minute of every day?” That half hour I knew. The whole feeling of the room, the temperature, the smells, the perfume, the costumes, and her, just her.
What I felt from Annie, the sense that it was truly possible for someone to care about and accept me, to want me to be intelligent and mature, has stood me in good stead ever since. I’d tell her my current woes, talk about my romantic life, which I didn’t have, and she’d listen and kid around with me. I was allowed to be twelve, or thirteen, or whatever age I was as the months went by, instead of always having to be ten. She treated me the way she knew a kid that age wanted to be treated.
I also worshipped Patricia Neal, who played my mother, Kate, but it was a different, less needy sort of admiration. She was indeed patrician-looking, stately and tall, yet there was an earth-mother aura about her as well. She had nifty things on her dressing table, antique sterling and expensive brushes. And she wore Femme, a wonderful perfume. There’s a scene in which I had to sense my mother’s arrival after having been kept from her for a cou
ple of weeks, and she always made it easy for me because I could smell her coming across the stage. And she had a great command of four-letter words, but they sounded like poetry coming from her.
There’s a famous story that Pat Neal often told about Torin Thatcher, who played Captain Keller, my father. We’d been running about three months, which is one of the key concentration trouble spots because the bloom is off the rose by then. I don’t know where Torin’s mind was, but suddenly he couldn’t remember a scene he’d never had trouble with before. There were a bunch of us, maybe five people, onstage with him, and instead of asking for help from someone who was sighted and hearing and speaking, he asked little Helen Keller, and all he got out of little Helen was a gurgle. And then he got mad at me and whispered loudly, “What do I say, child? What do I say?” Pat wanted to kill him. “Of all the people to ask, Torin!”
And then there was Caswell Fairweather, who played Percy, a young teenaged servant. He looked just like Muhammad Ali, but because he was the only guy among the backstage gang of half a dozen or so kids, he hated us all. We made his life miserable, I know we did. We would tease him terribly and do awful little-girl things behind his back and get him in trouble. If we did something wrong or something got broken, we just said, “Caswell did it.” And who’s not going to believe four little blind girls and two little black girls and a little star? The play called for me to beat up on him sometimes, and he spent the whole run convinced I was going to kill him right there onstage.
One person I really couldn’t figure out was Fred Coe, the producer. He was big and overweight and “suth’n,” with a great lap to sit on. But he was a complete mystery to me as a kid. I had no idea what producers do and it seemed to me he just sat around all the time. He was usually quiet and easygoing, but occasionally, on a technical rehearsal night when it would be approaching two o’clock in the morning and things like lighting and sound cues weren’t getting finished, he would lose his temper and it was something to behold. Much later on, in 1968, Fred became a very good friend to me when I really needed one.
Now, Arthur Penn. Arthur was something else. I just thought he was the most handsome, the most sexy man ever. I even loved the clothes he wore, khaki pants and a white shirt, and the way he stood in his white tennis shoes, with one foot turned a little bit in. He’d walk by and my little heart would absolutely flutter. I was very inarticulate around him after that first meeting; isn’t it funny what a twelve-year-old girl’s psyche will do when she’s smitten? I even used to screw things up just so he’d come talk to me and give me more direction.
Arthur Penn never spoke above a whisper. He knew that it’s easier to penetrate someone’s private area by being really quiet and gentle. Then the person would let you right in, which is what I did. And he’d always say to me, “Duke! You’re all right—for a girl.” I wasn’t sure I knew what that meant, but I loved it because whatever it meant, it was obviously a compliment.
If a director’s supposed to be a father, Arthur was a good, fair father. I don’t ever remember feeling I’d been talked down to or treated as if I didn’t have the same intellect as the rest of the cast. Being talked down to, being talked around, or having people discuss me as if I weren’t there, as in “What would she like for lunch?” were situations I resented more and more as I got to be a teenager. I also don’t remember being treated as if I were any better than anybody else, or even feeling that Annie, the star of the piece, was getting preferential direction or concessions. It was a working situation and everybody worked together.
Arthur was also a director who’d let you go your own way a long time without his interrupting to intellectualize. He was a fine-tuner, and when he gave directions, they were very simple, very basic. One particular time, when he helped me to say “wah-wah,” the otherworldly sound Helen makes that signifies the miracle, it was the single most embarrassing direction I’ve ever received, before or since.
We’d been at it a few weeks, working on this critical sound, and I just wasn’t getting it. Arthur must have been very frustrated, because he stopped everything, trotted from the back of the darkened theater, and hopped up onstage. Very dramatically, with an intensity that indicated that he’d found the miracle. He came over, bent down, and whispered into my ear, “I want you to make this sound as if you’re very constipated and you’ve been constipated for a long time.”
Well, I thought I would die. This was a twelve-year-old girl in 1959, and nobody, least of all a grown man, said “constipated” out loud. My face, I’m sure, was purple, because I could feel the heat. I was grateful that the directions hadn’t been said out loud but at the same time I felt that everyone knew what he’d said. But when we began again, his advice worked, it really worked. Arthur’s gift is that he truly keeps it simple. I can’t think of any other way to get a child to understand that sound.
More than anything else, Arthur respected the process that actors go through, and respected that I happened to be a kid who went through the same process as everyone else. He talked to me very quietly and sensitively, telling me about how Helen didn’t want to be taken away from her mother and asking me, “Have you ever been separated from your mother?” He didn’t know he was asking the sixty-four-dollar question. He talked to me as if I were a grown-up; he could have told me to walk off the top of the second story and I would have done it.
We rehearsed The Miracle Worker in New York into September, then had a two-week tryout in Philadelphia followed by two weeks in Boston, the traditional pre-Broadway route. The parts of Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller were fine as written; what needed to be wrestled with were the other family members, especially James, Helen’s wishy-washy half-brother, a role which by now has gone through twenty-five years worth of changes without anyone being able to solve the problem. Maybe the two principal parts are so dynamic that the rest of the play is bound to feel like filler.
For Annie Bancroft and me, The Miracle Worker was as exhausting physically as it was emotionally. The heart of the play, both for us and for the audience, is the big fight scene in the second act, when Annie Sullivan stands up to one of Helen’s more impressive dinnertime tantrums. The battle lasts a full ten minutes onstage and although it’s realistic enough to scare the life out of you, it was as intricately choreographed as a ballet. Little movements might get altered a bit depending on where the plates or spoons or food might fly, but every single moment in it was written by Bill Gibson.
Each movement had a thought behind it; nobody went anywhere on that stage without a reason. The printed directions alone take up more than four full pages. There were a few things that had to be done by count, such as how many times I tried to get out of my chair, how many times I bolted for the door, or how many times Annie chased me around the table, but mostly what the scene required was keeping track of its logic, remembering where it was going, and that your goal was the next step. That may sound complicated, but after a month of doing the scene, it made perfect sense; we knew exactly where we belonged.
Some aspects of our fights, like my pulling Annie’s hair, did require special techniques. I ended up really just holding her head but making it look as if I were gripping her hair. Then she’d put her hands on top of my wrists as she sank to the stage, supposedly in pain. What she was doing, actually, was pushing my hands away as she was going down, but if it worked properly, it looked as if I was tearing her hair out. Nobody told us how to do that, it’s something that just evolved because after the first two times I pulled she said, “Look, figure out something because that hurt! There must be a better way.”
A similar kind of cooperation was essential for the scene where I smack Annie with my doll. We used a doll with a soft head, but still, if you’re coming around with a haymaker, it’s crucial to have the timing just so. Still, if you do seven hundred and some performances, even though I knew it was critical not to hit her in the ears or eyes, you’re gonna miss once in a while. And it was always devastating to me to hurt her.
We took w
hatever measures we could to minimize the fight damage. We found that using real eggs on the plates was too slippery—you couldn’t get them off the bottoms of your shoes—so we used bread crumbled up to look like scrambled eggs. Also to avoid slipping, we used a particular kind of rubber with a particular kind of waffle weave on the bottoms of our shoes. I wore shin guards, knee pads, and hip pads, plus a chest protector when I started to develop. All the padding had a plastic backing, so when the water hit my clothes, the padding wouldn’t get totally wet and could dry between shows. But that plastic made the padding very hot, and in the summer I’d start sweating and couldn’t stop.
Even things that may not have looked that awful, like Annie shoving spoons into my hands when she’s trying to teach me table manners, gave me painful blood blisters. And I had continual bruises on the backs of my legs from slamming into a chair or the chair slamming into me. In fact I got so black and blue that the Rosses made me wear knee socks and long sleeves even in the summer because they were afraid some authority might come in and put a halt to this child abuse.
The two of us did get physically fit during the play; we used to make jokes about having real muscles in our arms like Popeye. Still, accidents did happen. Once during rehearsals Annie ran into an upturned chair with such force that she was seriously injured. She got a lump the size of a goose egg on her instep and she had to rehearse sitting down for several days. Those poor chairs took a lot of punishment as well: even though we would brace and reinforce them, we’d break an average of one each performance. I’d be holding on to the chair and Annie would pick me up and swing both me and it from side to side to build up momentum, and once I let go, the chair would hit the table, which was solid as a rock, and either smash or splinter apart.
