by Patty Duke
Inside the auditorium on the night of April 8, I nodded to people, but there was no chatting. I felt like a little bitty lost person; I didn’t know what to do, so I figured the best thing was to sit down and shut up. But when the overture started, and all that glitz got going, it was impossible not to get excited. My category came up early, and since Angela Lansbury had been touted very heavily in the trade papers to be the winner for The Manchurian Candidate, I was sure I was going to lose. So when George Chakiris, the presenter of the best supporting actress award, was introduced and the nervousness, the heightened adrenaline rush, started up, all I wanted was to be able to maintain a “good sport” face when she won.
George started reading the names—Angela’s, mine, Mary Badham for To Kill a Mockingbird, Shirley Knight for Sweet Bird of Youth, Thelma Ritter for Birdman of Alcatraz—and for the first time I knew I really wanted it. Didn’t know why, didn’t give a damn, I just wanted it. And when George said my name, I hesitated to get up because I thought I’d been wishing so hard I’d made someone else’s name sound like mine. I was in a kind of dream state. That’s when John Ross leaned over to me and said, “They’re not gonna bring it to you, honey, you better go get it.” Well, as any actor knows, there are many ways to read that line, and the way he afterward related it to reporters was not the way he said it. The true reading was hardly avuncular, more like “If you don’t get up there, I’m gonna kick you.”
Of the rest, I have very little recollection. It was as if I’d gone into another dimension, never-never land. I know that “Thank you” was all I said because “Thank you” was all I had been instructed to say when I’d asked John Ross earlier that day, “Suppose a crazy thing happens and I win? I don’t want to say anything you’re not going to like.” I asked if I should say something about Arthur Penn or Annie Bancroft or Fred Coe, and he said no, just thank you. One of the nicest things that happened after that was that the card that said “The winner is …” had been left on the podium and Frank Sinatra, who was the master of ceremonies that night, made sure somebody got it to me. I had not met him at that point but he was to figure in my future.
The Miracle Worker had gotten four other nominations, for best actress, direction, screenplay, and costume design, but the only other winner was Annie Bancroft, who was in New York doing a play so Joan Crawford accepted for her. The ball afterward was a loud blur, a lot of handshaking and picture-taking and no eating. I remember seeing Arthur Penn and feeling uncomfortable because he’d lost and I’d won. I kept the Oscar with me the whole time, and because of all the commotion and chaos, for those hours at least the Rosses had no shot at “keeping me humble.”
Although I didn’t know it until years later, my father was able to watch the Oscars on TV. I was at the funeral of another relative and asked, “Do any of you know if Daddy ever knew that I won the Academy Award?” And my uncle Tommy said, “Yes, he was with us at our house.” He was in failing health—it turned out to be the last year of his life—but when I won he got very excited. He used his favorite nickname for me and said to Tommy, “That’s my Ree-Ree!”
I called my mother as soon as I could after the award, and it was not a good call because she was not where she belonged, out in California with me. I could tell that she was happy but she was also very tense, and no wonder. For me, it was the usual public/private phone call, monitored by the Rosses, with layer upon layer of coverup, so I couldn’t say, “God, I wish you were here! Why aren’t you here?” Throughout that evening there were fleeting moments of wishing my parents were there, of wishing that anybody were there but the Rosses. I’m not sure I missed them specifically as much as I missed feeling the warmth and support of a family around me. Here’s a major achievement, the youngest person ever to win an Academy Award, the biggest A plus I ever got, and I had only the Gestapo and the dog to share it with. And if the truth be known, I would have preferred a date!
FOURTEEN
Preparations for what was to become The Patty Duke Show began well before the Oscars. Because I was a popular young performer, ABC wanted to do a series with me even though no one at the network had the slightest idea what it ought to be about. The Rosses didn’t have a concept either, but they were taken with the idea of my becoming the youngest person in television history to have a prime time series named after her. The only person who wasn’t excited, as well as the only person who wasn’t given any choice, was me. I was never sure that the right thing was being done, that I shouldn’t have stayed with the movies instead of being committed to a TV series. But the Rosses were the experts and I still believed they knew what was best for my career.
Once the deal was made, Sidney Sheldon, a TV writer before he became a best-selling novelist, was called in to do the pilot. The Rosses sent me out to Los Angeles to spend time with Sidney, his wife, Jorga, and their daughter, Mary, in the hope that my presence would spark an idea. A very gracious household, such nice people. And though he tells it jokingly, I think it’s pretty much true that Sidney based the series on the me he got to know in those few days: he felt I was schizoid and that’s how he came up with the concept. There was the perky me and the corporate executive me and rarely the twain shall meet.
On the show I ended up playing identical cousins. There was Patty Lane, a bubbly American teenager who was the comic despair of her elders, and Cathy Lane, her demure, intellectual Scottish double. As Patty I had typical sitcom parents, a combative younger brother, and a loyal boyfriend. And I’m sure, though details don’t come to mind, that Cathy and Patty got into trouble a whole lot.
The show was shot in New York, and not just because the Rosses lived there. The production would save money because there were no child labor laws in New York, so I could be worked harder, often from seven A.M. to seven P.M., than I could in California, where a child can be used for only four hours a day. Even so, doing the first shows took forever. For one thing, there was a lot of technical stuff, split screen and all that, that had to be worked out. And then there was Bill Asher.
Bill was the director, full of piss and vinegar, someone who actually used, as part of normal everyday speech, expressions like “chickie-baby.” Bill ended up marrying Elizabeth Montgomery and doing Bewitched, but at the time he had a very complicated personal life, and there were days when we didn’t accomplish as much as we wanted to. Still, I had a great time with Bill; he made everything light and funny and nobody was finding a cure for cancer. For some reason, though, Bill had to leave the show on very short notice, so someone else was brought in to replace him, which I thought would make me very unhappy.
The new director (and producer) was Stanley Praeger. I absolutely adored him, he was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life; he could look at me and I would just burst out laughing. This was a man I was nuts about, but my fear of the Rosses was so great that when the chips were down I had no loyalty to him. Because not only did the Rosses have him fired, they made me do it. It’s among the ugliest things I’ve ever done.
The Rosses had Stanley fired because he was getting too close to me. They didn’t like him because I adored him; they were afraid if he really got too close he might find out our setup was a house of cards. So the Rosses set up a very formal suits-and-ties meeting with a bunch of guys from William Morris and a bunch of guys from United Artists. Ethel, of course, wasn’t there, but I had my orders from her about what I was to do. I went in and told everybody that I couldn’t stand to work with Stanley Praeger, that he made me nervous and very unhappy, and that I’d like him removed as both producer and director, or at least as director so he couldn’t come on the set anymore. And that’s what happened.
Stanley, who wasn’t there to defend himself, was, of course, in shock when he got the news. He’d been seeing this little girl who kissed him good-bye and laughed at his last joke and now this. It was dreadful. Even worse, as producer he would pass me in the building every day and I didn’t even say hi. We’d just look at each other, look down and walk on. A few yea
rs later, after I broke with the Rosses, I told him what I’d done and why I’d done it. I said I didn’t feel my fear excused my actions, but I wanted him to know that I was sorry. He was extremely gracious and forgiving, but I know it must have hurt.
Although the directors may have changed frequently, the cast remained steady, and I felt close to all of them, especially Jean Byron, who played my mother and will tell you at the drop of a hat that I’m the only daughter she’s ever had. She was a real grande dame, bawdy, outrageous, swore like a trooper, really my first experience with a woman who was able to maintain her grace and dignity and still be one of the guys.
I’ve since abused the privilege, but it was from Jean that I first learned the many uses of certain four-letter words. Much more important, Jean would talk with me about her intimate relationships, something I certainly didn’t get from my mother or Ethel. I vicariously enjoyed the excitement of romance and also learned about the down side, the weeks and weeks of agony when a relationship is breaking up. She was very generous in allowing a teenage kid in on that, treating me like an adult but also knowing that she was instructing me at the same time. I may have been sixteen or seventeen chronologically, but in terms of emotional experience I’d been frozen at age twelve.
William Schallert, who played the father and who now works with me on the Screen Actors Guild board, was another one of those daddy role models, very warm and cerebral, the wise old owl. I’d confide in him occasionally, but mostly I would just hang around or literally hang on him. There are similarities between Bill and John Astin, whom I later married; if you ask them what time it is, they start with the invention of the sun dial. Now you’re getting a good deal of information, and it’s all very interesting, but in the meantime you’re twenty-five minutes late for wherever you’re going. Both those men can waste an hour of my time, and I’ll be absolutely fascinated, while at the same time I’m thinking, “Son of a bitch—get to the point!”
Bill did something else that drove me absolutely berserk and that was to pretend he was a monkey. He’s basically a dignified person but he had this way of lengthening his arms and making screeching noises. And, of course, the minute he got a rise out of me, which was always, he was gone. He would chase me up and down three flights of stairs, all over the building and onto the roof. I’d run into the ladies’ room and he’d bang on the door, all the time doing this hideous monkey screech. Finally the assistant director and everybody else would say, “Bill, stop it now! We’re trying to get some control here!” Oh, God, I hated it. I’d try to figure out what I was doing to trigger that monkey act, but I never did. In fact, he’s still doing it to me at the Guild and I’m still screaming, Stop it!
When it came to casting my boyfriend, Richard, I was initially very disappointed that Tommy Rettig, the guy from Lassie, didn’t get the part. Whew! He looked terrific and I figured I could just instantly have a crush on him and it’d be a built-in romance. Instead, they chose Eddie Applegate, who turned out to be very sweet and wonderful to work with. But although he had a Dorian Grey ability not to look it, he was a good ten years older than me and married. Eddie really looked like the typical dumb blond of that era and he behaved off-camera exactly the way he did on-camera, really goofy and ditso. I’ll bet his agent said to him, “Hey, don’t start acting your age around the set or you’ll get canned.” He got divorced during the last season, and we teased the hell out of him because he’d discovered partying on the Sunset Strip.
Then there was Paul O’Keefe, who played my brother, Ross, a name I tried to avoid saying. That poor kid, he worked all the time, worse than me. If you didn’t see him on the set, he was off making a commercial somewhere. I remember yelling at him because his ears were dirty, and someone said, “This kid doesn’t have time to take a shower. He’s got another gig!” He was always late, always looked half-asleep or all-asleep, and we were always teasing him to wake up. Or about his complexion. “You look like a bottle a’ milk! Go to makeup! You look like a bottle a’ milk!”
It was a true sibling relationship between me and Paul, because I loved him and I hated him. He could be a pain-in-the-ass little brother; every time I’d try to have a conversation on an adult level, there he’d be. But he was also a midget Einstein, very bright, playing chess with some of the guys on the set to amuse himself. He wore glasses and was very disappointed when he found out that pilots have to have twenty-twenty vision. He’d often show up in a leather flight jacket and one of those old-fashioned helmets with the ear-flaps that come out. He wanted to be a pilot in the worst way.
Occasionally it was nice to be just warm and loving with Paul, but we didn’t let people see that too often. A couple of times we had shows in which we had to go at each other physically, and whatever it was we were feeling for each other came out. Once we were told to kick, and I’m telling you our shins were bloody when it was over. I’d say, “Stop kicking so hard!” And he’d say, “I’m not!” Then I’d kick him even harder and he’d kick me even harder back and say, “You’re supposed to be the older one!” Poor kid.
At first The Patty Duke Show was exciting to do because those guys were fun people to be with, and I was out of the house. And the Rosses were rarely around. But because of what I felt were the inherent limitations of the roles, I got bored very quickly. And the longer it went on, the more I began to hate it. I hated being less intelligent than I was, I hated pretending I was younger than I was, I hated not being consulted about anything, having no choice in how I looked or what I wore, I hated being trapped. As opposed to The Miracle Worker, which felt so true I never stopped learning new lessons from it, The Patty Duke Show had no connection to any reality I’d experienced or even heard about. I didn’t want the series to be canceled—I had a sense of loyalty to the other people involved and enough ego investment not to want to be in a flop show that had my name on it—but it felt like a trap.
The show ended up running for 104 episodes, all the way through 1966. It was one of the most popular series of its day, so much so that parents apparently used it as a weapon (as in “You better do your homework or you’re not going to watch The Patty Duke Show”) but I never had an idea of the size of its audience. More than that, I honest to God don’t remember any of the episodes, largely because to prevent my head from being turned I was never allowed to watch it. That was a flat-out edict from the Rosses, who’d send me to my room, where I could hear but not see what was going on. Except for watching ten minutes of it in Japanese when I went to Japan on a publicity tour, I never saw any of the shows until just a few years ago.
The story that I did a lot of work to prepare for my dual role is true, but it turned out to be useless research. I wrote lengthy bios for each girl, but they were more silly than anything else. I went to the Scottish Rites Organization’s dances and socials, learned the sword dance and the Highland fling from Ethel, even practiced the bagpipes—that was a trip. It turns out no one ever gets good at the bagpipes, you have to be born a Blackwatch or forget it. All that went into the dumper after the pilot. The same thing with my accent. I learned a true Scottish burr, and then everyone got nervous that the viewers wouldn’t like or understand it so they decided on a general European nothing accent, a kind of “anyplace but America” speech. That always bothered me, I didn’t feel it was professional to be doing an accent like that. I mean, Cathy should be from someplace. That’s one of the reasons I tend to think of my work in that show the same way I do the split screens we used, as part of the trick as opposed to genuine performance.
Actually it was the Patty role, for which I did no research, that proved to be the more difficult for me. As glib as I was for a person my age, I was really not that outgoing, and certainly not about teenage pursuits. I didn’t know how sixteen-year-olds danced. How would I know? I Never went to a dance. I listened to rock music only when I visited my mother; with the Rosses it was almost never allowed. I wasn’t a teenager of my era, I was too busy talking with forty-year-olds. If I was anything, I was a t
eenager of John and Ethel’s era. I had no more idea than the middle-aged screenwriters what someone my age should say, so what I was speaking was a Writers Guild idea of teenage talk. It had nothing to do with kids of my generation.
So the Cathy character, which everyone thought was the more difficult because she was so polished and la-di-da, that was the easier one. I liked Cathy better because she was more sedate, seemed older and was less silly. She was kind of boring, but at least she wasn’t called upon to do things that I felt were demeaning and scatterbrained.
The same thing went for the clothes I wore. Frankly, I preferred Cathy’s because they were more conservative in color and style. Others might think they were boring, but that was less offensive than skirts that were too short and too wide, things that were in general stiff and unreal. To me they were trick clothes, an extension of the trick photography and my trick accent. None of it had anything to do with the way a human being of that age really moves or thinks or chooses clothing. Not only did I hate those clothes, but they put my name on some and successfully merchandized them, so a lot of other poor girls were walking around with the same ugly clothes I was. But that’s because they saw them on television, like one of my kids taking a diamond earring of mine because he wanted to look like Mr. T. Kids will imitate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they think what they’re copying is any good.
Aside from the clothing and the accents, I separated the characters by examining my own mannerisms and then figuring out which ones I would be able to give up in order to animate the other character. One takes longer strides and when she sits down, she doesn’t necessarily cross her legs. The other wouldn’t dream of sitting down without crossing her legs at the ankles. One has very erect posture, the other slumps. One is very vivacious, the other looks more cerebral. One is going to talk louder and be left-handed, the other the reverse.
