by Patty Duke
When the last day came, I tried to be professional but it was very hard. In fact I can pinpoint the scene of the chick being hatched in my hand as being shot at that time because I can see how swollen my eyes were. The heightened emotion of watching something being born, which I’d never seen before, coupled with the impending grief of being separated, made for two really beautiful faces on the screen. I don’t think Annie and I look as vulnerable anywhere else in the movie as we do there.
Later that same day, I’d recovered enough to at least attend a poolside wrap party. John Ross used to tell the story that when I came out in this little leopard-patterned bathing suit, Arthur Penn supposedly said, “Whoo, we just made it!” I looked like a teenager—small, but a teenager nonetheless.
If anything bothers me about the film version of The Miracle Worker as opposed to the play, it’s what they did to the very last scene. It upset me then and it upsets me now. In the play, everything happens at once, a kind of whirling dervish of excitement: Helen says “wah-wah,” she spells half a dozen objects, the parents are called out, Annie screams, “She knows!” and the bow is all tied up with teacher’s, “I love Helen, forever and ever.” The crisis and the catharsis are happening right there for the audience.
In the movie what they did was break it up. The miracle happens, the crescendo builds, and suddenly the family takes the child away. Though it may be dramatically accurate that her mother and father are excited and want Helen to themselves for a while, somehow it cuts everything off and there isn’t the chance to gear up again. You just go right into a nighttime scene, Annie’s sitting on the porch looking much older than the Annie we’ve seen all through the movie. Then this perfectly well-behaved child comes out, kisses her on the cheek, and Annie says, as she spells it, “I love you, Helen.” She doesn’t even say “forever and ever,” even the poetry of that moment is missing. They may have done that because the movie was short and they wanted an additional scene, because of a misguided desire to put a button on the thing, or because it’s more historically accurate, but if dramatic license is ever permissible, it certainly is there. The whole intensity of that scene is simply gone.
Still, I get very emotionally involved with that film whenever I watch it; it’s almost like a potion for me. If people talk while we’re viewing it, I get annoyed, and none of my other roles affects me that way. Moreover, if I ever have to enter a scene crying, I will very often repeat to myself Annie’s speech at the end, where she says to Helen, “Reach, reach, I wanted to teach you everything the earth is full of,” and it’s like turning a key and unlocking something inside me—the tears always come. Part of that is the identification I’ve always had with the desperation of this woman who’s done everything she can think of—it’s almost there but it’s not and it never will be. That’s very painful to me, but beautiful also, because she won’t give up, and won’t let Helen give up. Most of all, I connect with that desire to enlighten and to be enlightened before you die, so that you leave something behind.
Over the years I’ve gotten a lot of compliments about my role as Helen Keller, but I think the one that means the most was what my son Mack said after he saw the film when he was very little, maybe three or four.
“Mom,” he wanted to know, “when did you get over being blind?”
Never, Mack. I’m still searching.
THIRTEEN
As The Miracle Worker filming progressed, the Rosses began drinking even more heavily than usual. Mornings were impossible for them because they were so hung over, but sometimes in the afternoon they’d wander out to the set and talk more to me about my behavior on the set than my behavior in front of the camera. “Why are you running around like that?” “Don’t play with those cats!” “Go sit over there!” Never anything positive, except their standard phrase, “Love ya!” which I heard all the time. Alcohol always made Ethel abusive, while John by contrast got really mellow and faded into the woodwork. The only problem was, when John drank, he would get increasingly sexual with me.
What happened to me was minor compared to the real horror stories some kids have gone through. But the trauma was the same; I was about as molested as I ever want a little girl to get. It’s always been very difficult for me to discuss these “incestuous” attempts, which is what they felt like; it’s very disturbing to me still. In fact I spent years in therapy without even remembering them—I had totally blocked them out. Nothing came back to me until John Astin and I were watching television one night. He was flipping the channels and stopped at a discussion of incest and I freaked out. I screamed, “Change the channel! Change the channel!” I got really frantic, and John kept saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay. What’s the matter? Why does this bother you so much?” I felt ashamed and embarrassed and all of a sudden I remembered why.
It started comparatively innocently, usually after nights of drinking. John would wear these short pajamas that were very revealing, I would be standing at the sink or getting something out of the closet, and he would accidentally on purpose brush up against me for just those few seconds too long for it to be an accident. There had to be something off-center about these incidents for me to catch what was going on, because I wasn’t sophisticated enough sexually to make up something like that.
The first real incident that’s clear in my mind took place while we were in New Jersey on The Miracle Worker location. The rest of the crew was in one hotel and the Rosses and I were in another. It was a broiling hot Sunday and we were sitting around the pool, reading the papers and chitchatting. They started making banana daiquiries, which I liked because they were sweet, and all of us got pretty well plotzed. And sunburned, So much so that Ethel finally noticed and said, “Boy, you better go in and put Sea ‘n’ Ski on. Take a shower first and use a lot of soap, that’ll take the sting out.” She had theories about everything.
Whenever we traveled we all stayed in one room, John and Ethel on two big beds and me on a cot. The shower helped a little, I put on the Sea ‘n’ Ski, but because of all that alcohol I was feeling pretty sick to my stomach. I got in bed and turned out the lights because they were hurting my eyes. The smell of rum and suntan oil was heavy in the air, and I felt close to vomiting.
I heard the door open and when they came in I pretended to be asleep, because if I had to talk to them, I’d throw up for sure. The room was really flying now. I was desperately trying to regulate my breathing, anything to make this sensation go away. John came out of the shower and they began to bicker. She said something like “I don’t care, I’m taking a nap” and got into bed with me. Then he came around and got in bed on the other side.
They were both lying very close to me, and I made some noises to indicate discomfort but nobody changed positions. Then he began to fondle me, and he got an erection, which was up against my rear end. My whole body felt very hot, not just from my sunburn but from the inside, as if all the capillaries were bursting. I was terrified, I didn’t know what to do. Meanwhile Ethel was making similar moves on her side. I made another noise, as if I were asleep but uncomfortable, but he pursued and put his leg over me. And I sat bolt upright and threw up all over him. Thank God for a weak stomach.
Not a word was ever mentioned, then or later, about what happened between us. I never said anything to either of them. I allowed them to believe I had been asleep; we pretended that I’d simply been sick and thrown up. If I hadn’t done that, I’ve never wanted to think what might have happened. And there was another incident, about a year later in Palm Springs, when John left their bed in the middle of the night and got into mine. At first I kept hoping he was going to go away and when he didn’t I just gave him a real kick. He got the message.
On the one hand, it seems impossible that John would have pursued things far enough to really rape me in either situation, because the potential consequences were too dangerous, but that first time it’s entirely possible he was too drunk to care. I really don’t know. I don’t use Sea ‘n’ Ski anymore; that smell brings it back
to me. And for years banana daiquiris were one drink I just couldn’t touch.
I think Arthur Penn and Annie and a few people who had contact with me on a steady basis probably surmised that there was trouble in paradise, but they were hard-pressed to do anything about it. People have said to me through the years, “Why the hell didn’t somebody try to help you?” but when you think about it, on a practical level, what were they going to do? No one witnessed any actual abuse, that was certainly well guarded, even by me. If anybody had made an accusation against the Rosses to me, I would have denied it or been very defensive. Because I had the classic reaction: guilt. “I know this is wrong, but it must be my fault, so I better not tell anybody.” So what was anybody going to do? They’d open up a can of worms they’d have no control over.
Ever since The Miracle Worker ended, the Rosses had been searching for a stage role of equal impact, and in 1962 they thought they’d found it. I’m not sure how Isle of Children, written by Robert L. Joseph, came to their attention, but I wasn’t given any choice as to whether I would do the play. Their treatment of me was a briskly patronizing “This is what we’re doing today,” like a nurse saying, “How are we today? Do we have our blue eyes open?”
The play was about a well-to-do couple and their cherished only child who was dying of some unknown disease. Unwilling to admit, as the girl does, that this is happening, her parents schlepp her around the world, searching for a cure. The mother especially is tilting at windmills, and the marriage is not going well because of that and because the girl adores her father and leaves poor mom out in the cold.
The part of Deirdre Striden, the little girl, was a tour de force role. It was a wonderful opportunity for any kid, but especially for this one, because it dealt with death, which was the topic for me, and I was able to hear it explored and discussed in ways that I did not hear in the house I lived in. But more than that, Deirdre was the perfect child you dream about. She was pretty, she was smart, she danced, she told jokes, she did accents and imitated baseball players. I mean, the loss of this child would be felt by every human being in the whole world because she was just this mystical being who could do it all.
Deirdre had a charming scene, beautifully written, that made people terribly uncomfortable. She invites a boy up to her bedroom and asks him to lie down next to her because she’s not going to live long enough to get married and have sex and she wants an idea of what the experience feels like. Deirdre’s emotions went from A to? and back again in that play, so I got to do all kinds of things and show many different sides of myself, and that was part of what was wrong. It was really a one-woman show more than a play; there was nothing for anyone else to do.
The other problem with Isle of Children was that if there were fifty people involved with the play, there were fifty different opinions on what the play was about, and so many different versions of the ending I have trouble remembering them myself. Although I was still too terrified to have an opinion of my own, even as a fifteen-year-old I sensed that the piece was too scattered and didn’t have the courage of its convictions.
The solution that everyone came up with during our pre-Broadway tryout in Wilmington was to introduce a Chinese play within a play for Deirdre’s birthday. To this day I don’t understand why they did that. All of a sudden there’s a bunch of people, the mother, the father, and the maid, all running around in Chinese outfits. The girl had never spoken about anything Chinese, she didn’t even talk about Chinese food! I was playing it and I didn’t know what the hell it was about. I thought I was hallucinating, it was that bizarre.
One of the worst experiences I’ve ever had onstage came during the Wilmington tryout. The play was in such chaos we had new pages and scenes every day. Since I had an excellent memory as a kid, my burden usually was to put all the new material in that same night. One new scene involved Norma Crane, who played my mother. She had to say things like “Yes, dear” and “We’ll see” and I had two pages of dialogue, so much that I wanted to wait until the next day to put it in. Norma, however, strongly wanted it in that night and I agreed to try, with a fail-safe system. If I suddenly lost my place, I would scratch my ear and we’d go back to a prearranged spot in the previous version.
Naturally, once we’re onstage, all of a sudden I’m gone. I give the signal, and she doesn’t take it. I give it again, she still doesn’t take it. I could feel the heat coming up in my body and the blood rush to my face. I look to the stage manager in the wings, and either he hasn’t been given the scene or he’s lost it somewhere in his book, but at any rate there are pages flying everywhere and I’m dead. I was so flustered—the silence lasted for what felt like an eternity but was probably only a couple of minutes—before I came up with a way to begin a monologue that ended the scene.
When I got offstage I was furious. I was too young to swear much but the air turned as blue as I could make it, it was one of the few times in my childhood when I was enraged at the unfairness of a situation and actually spoke up. I complained to the Rosses, the stage manager, even to the director, Jules Dassin, and to a person they all thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen, which made me feel even worse. Never again did I agree to take a scene and put it in the same day. I never wanted to have to go through that embarrassment again.
After four weeks of rehearsal and four weeks out of town, Isle of Children opened in New York at the Cort Theater on March 16, 1962, and lasted only eleven performances. I got some great notices, including one from Walter Kerr in The New York Times that said a theater ought to be named after me, but I didn’t read that until more than ten years later, when I was coming home from a lunch with John Astin: when I told him I’d never seen the review he immediately headed for the Beverly Hills library to show it to me on microfilm. Despite that, the overall word of mouth on the play was horrible; nobody wanted to see a one-teenager show and the audience stayed away in droves. Believe me, it’s humiliating to perform a play to maybe an eighth of a house. Arthur Penn came one night and handed me a folded leaflet someone had given him on the street. I opened it up and it said, “What to do about the Bomb!” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Still, I was stunned when Isle of Children closed, crushed is the only way I can describe it. Remember, I’m the one who thought eighteen curtain calls was normal. So this was a major shock. For the first time the sense of loss came not from the thought, “Gee, I won’t see these people anymore” but rather, “Hey, wait a minute, we didn’t finish with this yet.” I really wanted to keep playing that role. Plus I was out of a job, which meant the whole rigmarole had to start all over again.
It was only a few months later, though, that The Miracle Worker film was released. It was a very small opening—a few interviews but really no hoopla at all—but it was a picture that really snuck up on people. The first inkling of its considerable success came when I won the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globe for Most Promising Future Star. It was exciting to be out on “the Coast” at last, exciting to wear a strapless dress and high heels for the first time, exciting to experience all the affirmation, all the adoration that comes with winning. You’re the darling, and if you’re someone who wants to be liked, it’s hog heaven.
But there’s something else going on inside of you that gives any award a double edge. In those final moments, when they’re reading off the nominees, you can’t help yourself—you really want it. It’s a sad state of affairs for the human spirit when you’re seduced into feeling an award matters that much, but that’s what happens. And once you start to be that needy and that greedy, you begin to lose respect for yourself.
Although I was conscious of those feelings even then, I was a long way from being able to articulate them, and when I learned I’d been nominated for an Oscar in the best supporting actress category for The Miracle Worker, I had other things on my mind. For one thing, the news was delivered to me along with the flat statement, “Your mother’s not going.” My assumption by then, based on exper
ience, was that at any kind of occasion she would invariably be excluded. The Rosses felt she was an obstructionist and a constant problem. Coming from the Lower East Side, depressed all the time—she did not present a pretty picture. And just as I had no ally against the Rosses’ decisions, neither did my mother, not even in me. I’m sure she knew people who would’ve said, “Hey, you have a perfect right to go to the Academy Awards with your daughter,” but she was too petrified to talk to anyone else and I, out of embarrassment and fear, said nothing. And not only didn’t she get to go, but Bambi the dog did go, wearing a dress and a mink stole and being carried in a pyramid-shaped black leather bag. I’m not kidding; I wish I were. That Oscar situation, the fact that I couldn’t be a nobler person and stand up for my mother, has caused me great distress for a long, long time.
I was also upset by what I’d been told I had to wear. Ethel made me a hideous-looking mint-green dress. The bottom of it actually had a quite pretty overlay of voile, and the top was supposed to be the same, but when Ethel saw the bodice she liked it so well she decided it didn’t need to be finished. It looked as if I were wearing the lining of a jacket. The hairdo she arranged for made me look like my mother’s mother, as if I were trying to play Annie Sullivan already. Remember, those elements that sound so trite and silly were very real to a sixteen-year-old kid in 1963. I would hint around, saying, “Couldn’t we do this,” or “Couldn’t we do that,” but since there was no way for me to say “I don’t like this dress,” I knew the bottom line was that I was going to wear it and I was going to be embarrassed and humiliated, and I was. I remember standing in the lobby of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium being photographed with everyone else for a fashion layout, smiling and being little Miss Goody Two-Shoes but just wanting to die. Every time I see a picture of the dress, I cringe when I remember that I actually paraded around in front of people at that auspicious occasion looking like that.
