by Patty Duke
The most unnerving mishap we experienced was an incident that actors still ask me about. They’ll come up and say, “I heard a story about you in The Miracle Worker that just flabbergasted me. Is it true?” This time it happens it is.
The incident took place one night in the third act, the scene in which, instead of spelling to Annie Sullivan, I’m spelling to the family dog, one of those white-with-dark-spots English setters. All of a sudden a cable let go and a row of lights crashed to the stage to the side of us. It made, as you can imagine, a very startling sound and everyone, I mean everyone, reacted. I did not. At least I did not have the normal reaction of jumping or being startled by an obviously dangerous noise. I was as terrified as anyone else would be but what I did for release was something that nobody saw. I squeezed the poor dog’s flank, and he screeched bloody blue murder and ran away. But the impression was that I had done nothing and people were astounded at that kind of concentration.
After the final curtain, a whole stream of visitors would come to our dressing rooms, whoever was really popular at the time. Often visitors would say, “How do you remember all those lines?” when in truth I didn’t have any. Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher made a big impression, mostly because she wore a mink-lined raincoat. And Cary Grant—we were all truly beside ourselves about his visit—when everyone in the place was going, “There he is!” He signed my autograph dog (it was a clear, simple signature, very forthright) and I just stared at him, amazed at how gorgeous he was, even better in person than he was in the movies. I kept saying, “Thank you” and thinking, “Can I live with you forever?” He spent a little more time with Patricia Neal and I hung around her doorway, listening to their conversation, just wanting to be in his pocket.
By this point I had been groomed so well by the Rosses to be the next Princess Grace that I didn’t need instructions about receiving my visitors, I knew exactly the appropriate behavior. “How do you do.… It’s very nice to meet you.… You’re very kind to come back and tell me that,” always in the form of the startlingly gracious child. I was invariably very humble as well; if the conversation went on at any length, I would start referring the compliments to Whoever was handiest. I think I was genuinely well trained by the Rosses—I have no resentment about learning basic manners—but some things were carried to ridiculous extremes. Part of what I did, the hugging and kissing of visitors, was my own. I just can’t help that, it’s how I am. I really like people, and there’s something about embracing them that feels good to me.
Easily the most memorable visit to result from The Miracle Worker took place outside of the theater, and that was my meeting with Helen Keller in the spring of 1960. Katharine Cornell, the great actress, was a neighbor and friend of hers at Aachen Ridge, Connecticut. Katharine Cornell came backstage one night after the play and asked if I would like to meet Helen Keller. What a question! She said that Helen had been rather reclusive since Polly Thompson, her companion after Annie Sullivan, had died, but that she would set it up. I thought it was just going to be a private meeting, but of course the Rosses got involved and all of a sudden the visit wound up as a big Life magazine piece. Everyone was there except, of course, my mother, who as usual had not been invited.
When I first saw Helen walking down the stairs, she looked almost regal. She was wearing a blue dress, pearls, and what I found out were her favorite red shoes. She was close to eighty years old by then, but she carried herself very straight. She had alabaster skin, very thin white hair, almost like an angel’s hair, and was very buxom with small hips and great-looking legs. And a terrific smile. And she was so jolly, like a jolly grandma. I’d expected serious or sweet, but not jolly. Not someone who was so much fun. Not someone who loved to laugh, and about everything, even the fact that we’d come before she’d had a chance to take her bras—rather large bras, I might add—in off the laundry line.
Helen hugged me and I hugged her and she told me that she’d heard from some friends how wonderful I was as her. Occasionally she would spell to me, just to be gracious and indulge me because I wanted her to, but mostly she would talk out loud. Her voice was very hard to understand, like a computer talking; she said she’d never been happy with the way it sounded. To understand me, she would put her thumb on my lips and her fingers on different vibration points. She didn’t miss a thing.
She introduced me to her dogs, labradors and golden retrievers, and we went for a walk in her gardens. They were fairly extensive, with railings all around, but very nicely done: nothing screamed “A blind person lives here!” She told me the name of every tree and bush and flower and talked about how at one she felt with nature. And she told me about her martinis. The doctor had told her that she shouldn’t have her martinis anymore, and she told the doctor that at her age, if she enjoyed a martini, she was going to have one. I loved that. I mean there she was, nearly eighty years old, deaf and blind, what the hell else could go wrong.
I saw Helen Keller only one more time, at an official eightieth birthday reception for her in New York. I have a picture from that meeting in which it looks as if I’m staring at God. I would write to her occasionally and get a handwritten note back. And then, several months after she died, one day a package showed up with a lovely jade bottle she had specified she wanted me to have. I would have loved to have known her better. She radiated a large, good spirit: just to be in the woman’s presence felt wonderful.
ELEVEN
Given the kind of schedule I had, even the Rosses knew I couldn’t do any other work while I was appearing on Broadway. But just once as I was starting The Miracle Worker stage run and just once as I was ending it, I appeared in prestigious TV productions that were too glamorous for John and Ethel to resist.
“One Red Rose For Christmas,” a U.S. Steel Hour I did with Helen Hayes, was a terrific tearjerker about a cranky nun and this one belligerent orphan in a sea of sad little waifs. The nun is mean to the troublesome tyke, who ends up accidentally setting fire to the orphanage, starting a blaze in which a sweet cherubic nun, who just happens to be the bad nun’s sister, dies. Finally, in whatever part of the place is left standing, Helen Hayes is on her knees praying to God for forgiveness because her hatred of me had led to this tragedy. Hating is bad if you’re a nun, I guess. She asks for a sign and, on Christmas Eve no less, I bring her one red rose. The show was such a hit in the fall of 1958 that we did it again a year later.
In 1961, toward the end of The Miracle Worker’s run, I appeared in the David Susskind production of Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory along with Julie Harris, George C. Scott, Keenan Wynn, and, most exciting of all, Laurence Olivier. It was just a brief scene (Olivier’s on the run and I bring him food) that they wrote in because Susskind, who liked to work with me, wanted the two of us in a scene together. I rehearsed during the week, performed on Broadway at night, and taped The Power and the Glory on a Sunday, my only day off.
I’d heard of Laurence Olivier, I knew this was a great actor, but I was just a kid and I’d never seen him in anything. The only image I had was a newspaper picture of him as Hamlet or somebody, looking very Shakespearean. We always rehearsed our live shows at Central Plaza, an all-purpose hall on Second Avenue right over Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant; it also hosted bar mitzvahs and wedding receptions. I showed up before anyone else on the first day of rehearsals and I was alternately looking at my script and looking at my schoolbooks, when the elevator door opened and this nondescript man got out. We nodded hello to each other and he went and sat at the end of the table.
More people started to arrive, chatting and taking their little coffee cups out of paper bags. There’s an inner room where people started rehearsing—a certain number of people would go in, a certain number would remain outside, and the whole time I was looking around wondering, “Where’s this Sir Laurence Olivier?” Finally I was called to rehearse my scene with him and there’s this little old man who was the first one out of the elevator. And I thought, “Gee, that’s not what I though
t he would look like, but if they say this is him, okay.”
We rehearsed that day and a few more, then on Sunday we went to Brooklyn to do the taping. I was waiting on the set when someone called for Sir Laurence and suddenly here was this amazing man, all dressed up in Mexican getup, with two pieces of rubber on his nose, a piece on his lip that made it fuller, little pieces of something on his eyelids to make them fuller, and suddenly I saw Sir Laurence Olivier. Here he was, he just came in pieces!
Even to a kid, Olivier was charming and lovely to work with, so comfortable and secure. In some ways, though, he had the same actor’s foibles that I did: we started the scene talking at a normal level, but every time he lowered his voice, I went lower still, each of us trying to underplay the other until the director had to come in over the loudspeaker and say, “Excuse us, the scene’s going beautifully, it’s just that none of us can hear what you’re saying.”
I’ve met Olivier only once since, at an event at the Motion Picture Academy while I was married to John Astin. I’m very shy about approaching people, even if I’ve worked with them, but I really wanted John to meet him, so I swallowed my reluctance and went right up. He was extremely gracious but he had a terrible problem with his hands, really painful arthritis, so when John naturally extended his own hand, Olivier said, “I’m so ashamed, I can’t shake your hand. But would you mind if I just touched you.” So John put out his hand and Olivier touched him lightly, because he couldn’t move his fingers. It was quite a moment.
Though professionally I was having enviable success across the board, that only created more problems with the Rosses. The more famous I got, the more neurotic they got. Perfectly nice people can do some pretty bizarre things when they’re mixing pills and booze, which is what the Rosses did. I’ve often tried to figure out why they couldn’t relax and enjoy my success, and the only thing that makes sense to me is that they felt guilty, and when you base your behavior on guilt, that means you’re afraid. The fear of losing me had to come from the fear that they had done something to drive me away, which, of course, they had.
Although John Ross was a heavy drinker and went through periods when he was sauced every night, he was able to quit from time to time. Or he’d parcel the liquor out for himself, sometimes just drinking beer in a small brandy snifter. Ethel, by contrast, drank more and more and more, to an incredible capacity, as the years went by. She was an Olympic-class drinker who preferred vodka martinis with a lemon twist; fifths of vodka would go in two days. From about age eleven, I was their bartender. I was given very strict instructions about how dry the mix should be; sometimes I used an atomizer for spraying the vermouth so it would be truly dry. To this day, I make a great martini.
Ethel was also cross-addicted. She took tons of pills—not a day went by without some barbiturate or other—and she sometimes spent the entire day in bed recovering. She would get boxes of all kinds of narcotics from a friend of hers in Detroit who was a nurse, things like phenobarbital, Stelazine, and Thorazine. She took Percodan, a heavy-duty, very addictive painkiller, eight or ten times a week for migraine headaches. Ethel was not in the best of shape.
Gradually, during the course of The Miracle Worker, when I was thirteen or fourteen, the Rosses involved me in their habits, They’d take me to Atlantic City, they’d be drinking, and they’d give me a little brandy snifter of my own with something innocuous in it at first, then later booze. Or they’d mix Bloody Marys and make a Virgin Mary for me, eventually adding vodka to it. Finally, they started giving me full-out drinks. I felt guilty at first, and then I didn’t care. These adults were giving it to me, after all. And whatever little buzz I got from it felt good.
The same kind of pattern developed with drugs. Early on, whenever there was even a hint of my being sick, if I sneezed or complained of a sore throat, they took me to a doctor who gave me shots. The Rosses claimed they were Vitamin B12 shots and maybe they were, but still it’s unusual to take a kid practically every week for injections to keep her healthy. They were also very quick to shoot me up with penicillin, which turned out to be unfortunate for me. At first it did its job, then I built up a tolerance, and finally an allergy, so I can’t take it at all anymore.
Eventually the Rosses started giving me Thorazine and Stelazine, both antipsychotic medications, as well as phenobarbital and Percodan. Ethel would say to me, “Okay, you have to take your happy pill now, because you’ve got to go to sleep so you’ll be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning.” It wasn’t a nightly event, it came in spurts over a period of about six years. Though I was never given enough to become addicted, it certainly wasn’t a healthy practice. I think the Rosses simply thought I was keyed up, or, given that I had trouble sleeping, wanted to insure that I had a good night’s rest. No one was educated then about how dangerous that stuff could be, so they probably weren’t acting from malice, just a combination of ignorance, greed, and bad judgment. It’s odd that even now I feel nervous about revealing this aspect of their behavior. I feel like I’m betraying them.
I didn’t find out specifically what kinds of pills they’d been giving me until years later, in 1965, when I was hospitalized in Los Angeles and given Stelazine and Thorazine in a little white cup. I thought those pills looked familiar, and then it hit me. I wondered if that stuff had somehow damaged me, if the depression I often felt came from those pills. And years later, when I learned I was manic-depressive, I wondered if the Thorazine and Stelazine had triggered those episodes in the first place. Although you’re born with the potential for manic-depressive behavior, many people go a whole lifetime without it’s being set off.
Though I tried not to show it, I was depressed and insecure a lot of the time during The Miracle Worker’s run. But the facade, like the show, had to go on. In fact the Rosses used to tell what they thought was an adorable story about how everyone in The Miracle Worker cast was seeing psychiatrists and how I had come home once and asked, “How old do you have to be to be in analysis?” Their answer was, “You’ll never need a shrink. People who are in analysis just don’t feel loved. And you always have all the love you need.”
Perhaps coincidentally, but probably not, this was the time in my life when my weight first became a problem. Annie at one point complained that I was getting too heavy for her to lift, and the Rosses, of course, decided I was too fat. They pretended not to notice that a year had gone by, and I might simply be growing, which was actually what had happened. It wasn’t a thrill at thirteen to be told to cut out ice cream and candy and eat grapefruit and cottage cheese, especially when I wasn’t overweight. Ethel invented what she called the lettuce sandwich, which was baloney on lettuce with mustard. Whenever I could, I’d go to the nearest candy stand on the subway platform and fill up on Hershey bars. I was starving!
That was the beginning of life-long dieting and self-consciousness about weight. My weight has fluctuated as much as forty pounds from time to time, which on my frame makes a major difference. I really peaked in 1979. I went to the market one day, probably for more garbage to eat, and a woman standing behind me at the checkout counter very sweetly asked, “And when is your baby due?” I came home and I really had to face the truth. I couldn’t pretend any longer by wearing bigger clothes, not looking in the mirror, not getting on the scale. By coincidence my next project was a TV movie about a woman who was fat and got skinny. I lost those forty pounds and I’ve never been that overweight again.
Contributing to my state of mind was the continuing unhappy situation with my parents. My mother was backstage with me all the time, staring at the walls in utter misery. She’d read the papers and doze; she rarely watched the show—I think it made her nervous. I was always anxious when people came backstage, in case she might make a scene. She always had an angry face and I was always trying to do something to make that face, or the mean face, or the sad face, go away. Always checking with her, “Is this okay, Mom? Is that okay?” and almost never getting an answer.
We took a cab after the th
eater. Usually my mother would drop me off at the Rosses’ but sometimes we’d go home to Queens. We’d have fun for a few minutes during the ride. I’d stop for ice cream and she’d stop for pig’s knuckles, really gross, and we’d have a little bit of a lighthearted time. But once we’d get home, she’d retreat to that miserable place in her mind, wherever it was, and I’d fiddle around, trying to get geared down to go to bed.
The incident I remember most clearly from that period was the one time the Rosses gave my mother permission to take me away for a long weekend. We went to a lake in New Jersey, with little cabins around it. I wasn’t a very strong swimmer to begin with, and one day, for some reason, I got into trouble out on the lake. My mother, who can’t swim at all, remembers this thought going through her head as she watched me start to go under: “Oh, my God, what am I going to tell the Rosses?”
With my father, the situation was more complicated, though I didn’t know it at the time. The last time I’d seen him was when I was about eight. He was in a hospital and had all these scary-looking tubes in him. I remember I brought him rice pudding, which may not have been too practical—the guy had tubes everywhere, how’s he going to eat rice pudding?—but I knew my daddy liked rice pudding without raisins, which, of course, I love to this day, so I had to bring him some.
After the Rosses took control of my life, they told me in so many words that my father just didn’t exist. “We don’t know where he is” was the exact quote, which turned out to be a lie, because my father would surface periodically, sometimes to get fifty dollars or so from the Rosses, sometimes just to talk. He wasn’t, after all, forbidden by law to see me, even though that might have been his perception. I think it was a combination of his own embarrassment, his own feelings of inadequacy, and the Rosses’ callous manipulation of those feelings that kept him away: “If you love her, Mr. Duke, if you’re a responsible person, you’ll stay away from her. If you want things to remain as comfortable as they are now, you’ll just let sleeping dogs lie.” That’s the way I’m able to sort out in my head what the Rosses did. Certainly they were capable of such behavior. In 1961 my sister wanted to bring her future husband to meet my father, and the Rosses, who’d been told this by my mother, made a big to-do and in their paranoia refused to allow it; they were afraid my father might be encouraged to rock the boat. Momma begged Carol, “Please, please, you’ll make trouble,” so Carol didn’t push. The Rosses had the whole family that firmly under their thumbs.
