by Patty Duke
The one part of the fights that always had to be done for real, and was always horrible, was the slapping. From the acting point of view the most difficult thing for both of us was concentrating hard enough so we didn’t flinch even though we knew we were going to take a whack right in the face. That never got any easier, and neither did the actual fact of getting hit. We were as good at it as anybody could be, we had gotten it down to a science, but even so, we were human; accidents happen. One person’s face isn’t exactly where it should be and you hit it where you shouldn’t. I have a cap in my mouth because one night I committed the ultimate sin: I gritted my teeth because I knew Annie’s slap was going to hurt and my jaw slid across and knocked off half a tooth. There really were moments when I felt, “How many times do we have to go through this? I give! I give!”
Close to a year into the run, we experienced a bad time when both Annie and I became a little paranoid and each thought the other was hitting to hurt. I don’t think either one of us knew how it began, or where, or why, but that suspicion kept building and building and then, out of the paranoia, we really began to be mean to each other: if you think someone is doing it to you, you’re going to do it back. Slaps got a little harder each time. When I pulled her chair out from the dinner table, I’d be rougher than I had to be, so that Annie would really fall on her ass.
Finally I reached the point of almost becoming phobic. I grew convinced that somehow or other she was going to literally kill me, and so I was afraid even to go to the theater. Of course, when Annie heard this she was extremely upset. She asked to come and see me and we hugged and kissed and cried. I couldn’t tell her what the hell was the matter with me. I didn’t know. I just knew that I was afraid. And she recognized that these kinds of feelings had been present on both sides, that it was just a series of insecurities on both our parts that had gotten us there. I went to work with her that night, we got through the fight scene, and it was a catharsis for both of us.
Although it was a connection I didn’t make intellectually until much later on, those scenes with Annie were in many ways a saving grace, a needed release for me as a kid. I think one of the reasons I survived all those years with the Rosses was that I was able to get onstage every night, beat the bejesus out of an adult, and have people applaud and think I was brilliant. I certainly didn’t recognize it then—“Here, let me smack Annie because I really want to smack Ethel”—but there was horror happening at home and this was a way to get rid of it. Being able to get that stuff out of my system on a daily basis had to be helpful. Undoubtedly, one of the things that made my audition and my portrayal of Helen so different from other actresses’ was that I had so much anger in the first place and that it was so accessible. I guess I never got enough out, however, because there was so much left—and no place to get rid of it—that it all got turned in on me and eventually became self-destructive.
An example of what I was dealing with came in Philadelphia during our tryout there. I was alone with my mother most of the time, and she was very, very depressed. Not unusual for her, but this was one of the worst times. Ethel came down from New York at one point and had given my mother her usual persnickety instructions about doing the laundry just so. Ethel came back to the hotel after having had a couple of drinks, and when my mother told her that she’d done the laundry but hadn’t done the socks yet, all hell broke loose.
Ethel called my mother a lazy bitch, said she never did anything to pull her own weight: here was everybody else working so hard and what was she doing? All she’d been asked to do was wash some socks, her own daughter’s white socks. She was tired of doing my mother’s job for her and on and on and on. Ethel continued to drink during this diatribe. She finally decided that my mother had ruined everything and she called John and announced that she was going home to New York, she wasn’t going to take this crap from my mother anymore.
I watched this scene like a nightmare unfolding. I remember feeling really confused about where my loyalties should be. Was Ethel right? Was my mother right? I was furious at my mother, guilty at being angry with her, sorry that this other person was talking to her this way. And I strongly suspected that my mother really had ruined everything, and that now I was going to be stuck with her. And she was no fun. Not that Ethel was a barrel of laughs either, but by now my mother was completely emotionless, so depressed she simply did not communicate. It all seemed so hopeless.
As far as the play itself was concerned, nobody had a clue about what the opening-night reaction in Philadelphia was going to be. There were still lingering doubts as to whether anyone would pay $9.60 to see a story about a blind deaf-mute. And because this was a huge show to mount, with an extraordinary number of light and set cues, almost like a musical, we were all there until four or five A.M. the morning before the opening, trying to solve all the technical problems.
Our advance ticket sales were not very good, including opening night, and then we got a most unusual break. Across town in another theater Melvyn Douglas was appearing in a play, and because he was a huge star they were doing a land-office business. But it was ungodly hot in Philadelphia that week and on the day of our opening, Douglas collapsed from the heat. They had to cancel that night’s performance, and when the audience showed up, they were given tickets to our show.
So our opening-night crowd was larger than it would have been, but it was far from a stacked house. It was, in fact, a theater full of people who were very disgruntled and even somewhat hostile. That play wasn’t where they wanted to be, but they’d already paid the baby-sitter so they took a chance. After the final curtain, however, they went bananas. I mean, I’d heard “Author, author” only in the movies, but they yelled “Director,” “Producer.” They called for everybody but the cleaning crew. There were eighteen curtain calls, and since I’d never been in front of an audience before, I sort of assumed this was what being onstage was like.
After it was over, Kathleen Comegys, a wonderful old woman who played Aunt Ev, set me straight. She and I went up those long, seemingly endless flights of iron stairs to the top of the theater where we had our dressing rooms. Kathleen was just behind me and she said very quietly, “Well, my little dear, I want you to take a moment and really remember this, because it doesn’t happen very often.” Which was the understatement. It didn’t take me too many years to find out that not many plays get eighteen curtain calls on the opening night of a tryout.
It really wasn’t until that opening night that I realized my importance to The Miracle Worker. Up to then I’d felt like a kid; now I felt part of a team. All my previous work had been on TV, and whatever praise I’d gotten was from co-workers or, if it came from the Rosses, was always tempered with “But in the third act, you could have done such-and-such.” I’d never experienced the exhilaration of real live human beings I didn’t know screaming, “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!” for all those curtain calls. It was the best moment of my life and I started to feel tears that came from I don’t know where. They weren’t little-girl tears, they were tears of real revelation, of relief, of true joy at receiving that kind of acceptance. John Ross wasn’t up there, Ethel Ross wasn’t up there, I was up there. I didn’t have the words then and I don’t have them now for what it felt like to stand there on that stage amid all the pandemonium. Staggering, astounding, astonishing—it was certainly all of that. I don’t know when my feet touched the floor again.
TEN
If there was ever any chance of my head being turned, that night in Philadelphia was the time. It didn’t happen because the Rosses were always just around the corner. They redoubled their efforts; in fact they cornered me that very night and said, “Well, they may all think you’re great, but we know the truth.” I was very hurt by that, and also confused. Should I believe the Rosses—or all those people screaming their admiration? I think that was the first time I allowed myself to hold a thought that was contrary to theirs. If I’d known the phrase, I might have said, “Don’t rain on my parade.” And when my own kids w
in awards these days, I’m very careful to allow them to wallow in it, as well they should.
Back then, however, I knew I had to go on living with the Rosses, so I said, “They were applauding only because I did what you told me to do,” and everything was fine. These were very frightened people, and a success beyond even their imaginings had just occurred. They first felt, “My God, if she’s this successful, where are we going to be?” and then, “Quick, lash out, keep her in tow.” They knew our relationship was built on sand, so they were always sandbagging in every sense of the word.
Because we had done so well out of town, we knew there was a lot of excitement surrounding The Miracle Worker as the October 19th New York opening neared, which gave that night a different kind of dynamic from the Philadelphia opening. We weren’t unknown anymore, so we experienced a different kind of insecurity, the “Oh my God, they may be expecting more than we’re about to deliver” variety. The day that preceded opening night was endless, and we breathed a heightened, rarefied air. Our dressing rooms were all filled with flowers, like a gangster’s funeral. It seemed we would never get to the moment when that curtain would go up.
Once we got started, the audience was so responsive right off the bat that their reaction kicked us into another gear. At one point I threw a pitcher of water at Annie and I nailed Rosalind Russell, who was sitting in the front row. People nearby tried to help her, but she was so enthralled she wouldn’t let anyone interrupt what was going on onstage, she just sat there drenched, with water dripping off the hat she was wearing. She also got spoons thrown at her, and at one point, concerned that we’d run out of them, she very gently reached up and put one back on the stage.
We got thirteen curtain calls that night, which was the talk of Broadway, unheard-of for a straight play, but after the eighteen in Philadelphia it was a real disappointment to me. The party afterward across the street at the Absinthe House was fun, I may even have sat on Mel Brooks’s lap, but by the Rosses’ usual orders I wasn’t allowed to listen to the reviews.
The Rosses, however, could shield me only so far, and as The Miracle Worker became the play of the year, they couldn’t stop people from recognizing me in restaurants or on the street and coming up to offer congratulations. I did have some sense of myself as the darling of Broadway, which I loved and took great pride in. But I had to hide that pride, it had to be very secret in me. I had to seem rigorously humble and willing—not to say eager—to instantly pass all kudos along to the Rosses or Arthur or Annie. If I didn’t, I risked Ethel’s coming down hard on me for being egocentric or having a big head or any one of the forty phrases she’d pop up with that said the same thing. I felt like a “poor little rich girl,” on top of the world but not really free to enjoy it.
As soon as the play got established on Broadway, so did my routine. I’d have my coffee in the morning, spend three hours in school, and then immediately call the Rosses to check in. I’d get to the Playhouse about two, it would be just me and my mom in this darkened theater. I’d do my school-work, eat an early dinner, take a nap, and then get ready for my half hour with Annie and the show.
Matinee days, though, were hell, and it’s only now that I realize that because Annie was an adult and I was twelve, it must have been physically even harder for her than for me. I dreaded those days from the moment I got up. If I missed my nap between shows, I would feel as if I were going to die out there. The only pleasure to be found in matinee days was the battle scars, the being able to say, “Well, we did it twice today.”
Once I nearly missed a scheduled performance, and that was on a matinee day. It was a Wednesday, when the afternoon show starts earlier than on Saturday, but because I’d gotten the day off from school I was in a Saturday mode in my head. So Mom and I, thinking we were early, were taking our time getting to the theater, just sauntering along Sixth Avenue and looking into windows. I saw a clock and was about to say to my mother, “Gee, we still have a lot of time, we could go for an ice cream or something,” when it hit me: this was Wednesday.
I said, “Oh my God! It’s Wednesday!” and took off running down the street, leaving my mother in the dust. I ran the eight blocks to the theater nonstop, and sure enough my understudy was standing at the stage door, wearing my clothes and shoes and ready to go on. I said, “Thank you! Thank you!” and started literally ripping the clothes off her. I dressed onstage, in the dark, while the first scene was going on, trying not to huff and puff too loudly. That poor girl, standing there in her undies; Jack the Ripper had come along and stolen her clothes. By the time my mother showed up, I was already playing the scene. It was like All About Eve: There was no way anybody was going onstage for me if I had any control over it.
In fact my insecurity was so great that I took only one week off during the entire seven-hundred-performance run and I spent that whole time being worried that my understudy was better than me. The Rosses and I went to the Virgin Islands. It was our “Three Musketeers” period, when I was young enough not to miss having a friend along. Since I had no friends anyway, it didn’t really matter. We went boating, ate tropical food, sat on a balcony overlooking the Caribbean; it all suited me okay and it set the pattern for vacations we’d take throughout our relationship. The Rosses did know how to take vacations, they traveled very well, albeit on my money. This was not the tropics on five dollars a day—three hundred dollars a day was more like it.
Those times, the water-skiing and boating, were fun, but as I grew older I missed having someone my own age along for the ride. A kid wants to do what a kid wants to do, and that does not include four-hour très continental candlelit dinners for three that went on till one in the morning. The talk was always the same, because as far as the Rosses were concerned, show business was my life as well as theirs. Anything else, say, national politics or social issues, was unimportant, or, worse than that, a distraction. The TV didn’t go on until Johnny Carson (or Jack Parr before him), and if any political references were made, I didn’t get them. The same thing would happen when I heard actors talking during rehearsals; a topic like blacklisting would come up and I wouldn’t have a clue what it meant. We lived in a vacuum; no one so much as read a newspaper. There really wasn’t an outside world for us; it was that simple and that stupid.
The best time for me, clearly, was when I was onstage. I felt transported in that role, it came to be almost like a religious experience to play Helen. I think I could count on the fingers of one hand the times when Annie and I weren’t completely emotionally involved in that play. There was never a night when there weren’t tears—I can’t imagine playing the end of that show, when Annie Sullivan finally reaches Helen, and not crying. A real chord was struck at each performance.
The audience was very involved in the play as well, particularly during the big fight scene. They would become very vocal, you’d hear a lot of “Oooh, uuuhhh, ooh, uuuhhh!” And when kids came on Saturday afternoons, it was a regular hoot ‘n’ holler matinee. Oh, how they would root—for me. When I hit the teacher, they just went bananas.
And then pieces of furniture or plates or spoons or eggs or who knows what would fly out into the audience. I’m sure a lot of people in the first few rows watched the fight scene with their hands over their faces because they were really getting it. One night a woman up front took more than her share of abuse. A chair landed in her lap, a spoon hit her, food got spit on her, the works. Finally, toward the end of the fight scene, she stood up and said, “That’s it! I’ve had it!” And we thought, “Oh, boy, she’s going to start throwing things back at us.” But she just sat down again and didn’t say or do another thing. She just had to vent her annoyance, that’s all.
Another night, a man put his hat, a gray fedora, on the stage and left it there. Before the curtain went up, that area looked like part of the apron, so he might not have immediately realized what he’d done. But all during the first act and the second act the hat remained there and it drove Annie crazy. There’s a moment at the end of the second
act when her character feels she’d had a victory and walks proudly downstage, blesses herself, and turns around to look back at the garden house. As Annie marched downstage, she put first her right foot and then her left foot on that hat, then she smushed and smushed and smushed it before she finally turned around and got off. The man was still there for the third act, but his hat was gone.
Some of the things I liked best about the play were bits almost no one knew I did. I played the offstage voice of Jimmie, Annie Sullivan’s lost brother. And near the end of the second act, when as Helen I’m supposedly lying in my bed asleep and Annie picks up my doll, I make the “ma-ma” sound for the doll. I’d keep one eye open under the covers so I’d see just when Annie would pick it up. You can’t know how much I looked forward to that “ma-ma” every night. It was such a relief to say something.
Despite all our planning and timing, there were nights when things did go wrong. During the second act fight scene, Helen gropes her way first to the front door and then to the rear one and finds them both locked. Every once in a while, though, one of the doors would be accidentally left open and I’d have no choice but to go out through it. Annie wouldn’t know I was gone, she’d be distracted picking up a plate or something, then she’d get up and find she was playing the scene by herself. I’d be backstage, laughing, trying not to pee in my pants. She’d come after me, cursing out loud backstage, “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!” Once I got so hysterical I did wet my pants and had to go back onstage that way.
Another time we had just the opposite problem. The door that we were supposed to leave through at the end of the scene had been locked with a key as well as bolted and wouldn’t open. Annie, of course, was trying to find the right key on the ring of six she carried and was being very profane, saying, “Goddamn son of a bitch” under her breath while I made my guttural sounds very loudly because I was afraid the audience was going to hear her. Finally she just said, “Screw it.” She picked me up, walked to the window and, in full view of everybody, pushed me out and dove out right behind. So much for the romance of live theater.
