by Patty Duke
My first real romance, and it certainly was a curious one, was with Frank Sinatra, Jr. I met him in 1964, when I was seventeen. It was during the second season of The Patty Duke Show, when we were using all Peter Lawford’s friends to punch up our appeal. It was quote-unquote love at first sight; though I’m tempted to say I liked him because he was male and interested in me, there’s a real sweetness in Frank, and a kindness that’s been in all the men I’ve fallen in love with. But although our relationship has lasted twenty-two years, it’s always been platonic, in the neighborhood of romance but never getting there. Maybe it’s because when we first met I was still under age and he got used to treating me that way. And though I don’t remember any discussions of marriage, it wasn’t a frivolous relationship either. It’s been almost the madonna kind of thing, and not the “Material Girl” Madonna either.
After the first time we met, he sent me a letter telling me how wonderful I was and a gift of a little charm with an angel on it that said, “You are my angel. Frank.” And he left and went on the road. Frank is a very gifted composer but what he does for a living is play a lot of one-nighters as a band singer backed up with huge arrangements. So then the relationship became a telephone romance, because Frank Sinatra, Jr., was the reason the Rosses finally agreed to connect the telephone in my room.
Remember, the Rosses had patterned me after Grace Kelly; they were always waiting for the ruler of some principality, or certainly some major mogul, to come calling. I think the reason they didn’t object to Frank was that he was Frank Sinatra, Jr.! In that way, the Rosses were as naive as people who had absolutely nothing to do with the business. They didn’t know he didn’t have any money, they didn’t know he probably didn’t have the kind of career his father had. To them, he was part of show biz royalty and that was okay, while some kid from Queens was not. So Frank would call me from Japan and places like that, he gave me the first stereo I ever had, sent me things he wanted me to listen to, like Respighi’s “Pines of Rome” and lots of his father’s stuff. I’d see him sporadically, whenever he was back on the East Coast, but mostly it was a long distance relationship.
I don’t know that I was boy crazy during that period, but I was certainly sexually alert. My knowledge about sex, however, was sketchy at best. I knew that sex existed, I knew that men and women did things, but the mechanics, exactly what they did, I didn’t learn until I actually went to bed with a man. There wasn’t any sex education in school, my mother certainly wasn’t going to talk about it, and as for the Rosses, they didn’t volunteer and I didn’t ask.
Although they considered themselves very free thinkers in that area, what the Rosses did in practice was something else again. The story of my first period is an example. Oh, that was a doozy. Initially, however, their attitude was fine. When I was packing for the Golden Globe Awards in California, Ethel said she needed to talk to me. We went into the kitchen and she said, “Girls your age begin menstruating and John and I have been talking about it, and we figure that the time must be coming pretty soon, so I wanted you to be prepared.” She had bought me some Kotex, which I’d seen in machines and been sent to buy as a little kid, with a note to the druggist. But it was a secret thing. Nobody had told me what you did with it.
That talk was very considerate on Ethel’s part; if I got my first period in California, I wouldn’t have to go get the supplies. But I was late in developing, all the girls in school had had their periods before me, and it didn’t happen on the trip to California. I completely forgot about the whole thing, and as a result I wasn’t prepared on a daily basis.
It was several months later, on a bus trip coming down to join the Rosses at a hotel they frequented in Atlantic City, that I got my first period. It was not a bus equipped with a bathroom, it did not make any stops, and by the time we got to Atlantic City I was close to hemorrhaging. And what would I be wearing but a white dress. And a blue sweater, which I tried to tie around my waist. Because I had nothing with me.
I didn’t get too worried when the bleeding started, because I thought, “Oh, well, nobody will see.” But once it became what it eventually became, I was frantic. It’s bad enough for something like that to happen when you’re anonymous, but some people on the bus had recognized me. So I could imagine the “I saw Patty Duke today and …” stories. I didn’t have the presence of mind to go to one of the women who’d spoken to me and ask for help; that didn’t even occur to me. When I arrived, there I was, in front of a busload of passengers, the driver, and all the people in the Atlantic City terminal, mortified, sobbing uncontrollably, and bleeding all over the place.
I got off the bus, and I saw the Rosses waiting by the car. Ethel said, “What are you crying ab—” and then she saw. And they laughed. I swear to you, they laughed. There was a beach towel in the car which I wrapped around me (they wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom in the bus station) and they laughed all the way to the hotel. I didn’t come out of the room the whole time we were there. I didn’t want to come out of any room ever again. And I was filled with hatred for them. Now, maybe they thought making light of the incident was the best thing to do, but they weren’t just making light: they laughed and laughed and laughed. And it was probably, if not the absolute beginning of our break, then certainly the most obvious moment when the bitterness against the Rosses began. It was truly the straw breaking the camel’s back.
As the years of The Patty Duke Show went on, I was in a constant haze of anger and depression, the same kind that I’d witnessed in my mother except that I was functional and my mother was on the borderline of not being. I went and did my job, but I felt lonely and hopeless, and I was becoming less facile at the charade. If you’re covering up, one layer won’t do after a while, more and more layers are needed, and that’s very wearing. Plus there was the strain of playing both sides of the street, of being duplicitous and telling the Rosses how much I loved them and missed them. I knew it was what they wanted to hear, so I played along; all I cared about was getting through it.
Consequently, there was a real sense of unrest in the Park Avenue apartment. Occasionally the Rosses would chalk it up to “a phase,” and I’d hear about how I was not allowed to have phases, but never before had my anger been so apparent or so steady. The only hope I had was that if I were lucky, I’d get to be eighteen someday. But then what was I going to do? I didn’t know any way out.
It was about this time that a habit I’d gotten into when The Miracle Worker ended reached full force. My situation at the Rosses’ apartment felt so unbearable that I would escape by sleeping all weekend, from the moment I got home on Friday until it was time to go to work on Monday. No food, no nothing. Occasionally I got up to go to the toilet, but rarely. My whole body just shut down; when I got up on Monday I felt as if I were coming out of a coma. This went on for two years. It wasn’t like some wondrous and refreshing yoga feat, it was classic emotional exhaustion and escape, the only running away I could do. And I knew, even though the Rosses never questioned it, that there was something seriously wrong with that kind of behavior. Healthy people don’t sleep for forty-eight hours and more.
Although I wasn’t informed, it was about this time, late in 1962 and near the end of his life, that my father reappeared on the scene. Contact had been reestablished, not between my father and my mother but between my father and the Rosses. My mother, in fact, was so dominated by the Rosses that even though she would occasionally recognize his voice on the phone, she never said, “John Patrick, this is Frances,” or tried to have a conversation. “Oh, no, no,” was her feeling, “I couldn’t do that.” Apparently the Rosses had begun giving him something like fifty dollars a month; suddenly, after all these years, they decided he should be bought off.
I didn’t find out what the Rosses probably had in mind until a few months later, when they announced they wanted a lifetime contract with me. Most of the time I was feeling so hopeless I was still saying, “Sure, anything you want.” They got in touch with a Wall Street lawyer
named Bill Marrin, who did work for the Kennedys from time to time and had probably been suggested by Peter Lawford. Marrin insisted on meeting with me alone and that really bothered Ethel. I think she expected me to say that I wouldn’t go without her and John, but I didn’t and she had to agree.
Bill Marrin, it turned out, was outraged by the whole concept of this contract. I don’t think he wanted to betray the Rosses’ confidence, but he also felt a responsibility to someone who was still a minor and he urged me to look deeply into what was going on. I kept insisting everything was okay, but finally I agreed to hold off. So I went home and told the Rosses I wasn’t signing it and everything hit the fan; it turned into another one of Ethel’s crazy, marauding nights.
Ethel didn’t stoop to profanity, but she had a wicked tongue. She went straight for the most vulnerable, insecure parts of you and just chewed them up. She told me what a little tramp I had become, how ungrateful I was—how could I have come so far with them and not realize who the real talent was? John, as usual, sort of wandered around, blending into the background as much as possible. Occasionally he’d look at me and raise his eyes to the heavens, as if to say, “Well, we’re just putting up with another Ethel tantrum.” But he wouldn’t challenge her. Ever.
What I finally figured out, with the help of Bill Marrin’s hints, was that paying off my father was the groundwork the Rosses were laying for trying to adopt me. They wanted him to agree to a legal separation from my mother, which would get him out of the picture once and for all and give my mother custody. Then they would have my mother declared incompetent, commit her to a sanitarium, and boom, they would have legal guardianship of me. It was crazy, when you consider that I was getting close to being legally of age, but that was their plan.
It turns out that the Rosses needn’t have been so concerned about my father, because he died on February 2, 1963. The date of record is February 7, because that’s when his body was found. He died alone in a rooming house in the old neighborhood, but the only next-of-kin identification he had in his room, besides a signed picture of me, was a letter from my brother, Ray. Ray was in the service in Germany, but he was brought back to identify the body. There was a single shot missing from a new bottle of rye, and Ray figures that that was the last drink my father had before he died. Someone may have been kind and written coronary thrombosis on his death certificate, but I don’t care what it says there. What he died of was alcoholism.
Within twenty-four hours or so of Ray’s return I was told the news. It was evening, I was in the kitchen, and the telephone rang. John answered it, and when he hung up, he looked very grim. He said, “We have to tell you something. We just got word that your father died.” There was very little emotion on my part, not then, not in front of them. They told me that arrangements for a wake were being made at Skelly & Larney’s. The neighborhood wasn’t there anymore, but Skelly & Larney’s still was.
Although I didn’t fully realize it at the time, the Rosses choreographed both the wake and my father’s funeral just for my entrances and exits. First of all, they wanted me to go to the wake after work, when fewer people would be there. The funeral home was in a New York brownstone, narrow, close, the history of thousands upon thousands of flowers reeking in the woodwork. People always passed out in there, and now I knew why.
I went in and knelt by my father’s casket. It was closed, with a flag draped over it. I cried and I felt hypocritical for crying, because it had been ten or eleven years and I hadn’t made any effort to see him; I didn’t even know who that was in there. Sure, I had fleeting, really nice memories of being Daddy’s little girl, but I had no real knowledge of this man, nor he of me, and now it was too late.
I sort of looked at people whose faces were vaguely familiar and they turned out to be relatives I hadn’t been allowed to see since my involvement with the Rosses. I said hello to my mother and my sister, who was pregnant at the time, and then it was time to go. I wasn’t supposed to return the next night, but I begged, so the same scene was repeated, though this time they made sure the room was cleared out when I went in and a few minutes later I was gone. There wasn’t the usual wake thing of sitting there talking about the dead person. No feeling of family or mourning. Everything was staged to accommodate the comings and goings of the little TV star.
The day of the funeral was much the same. I was instructed to go to the studio very early to be fully made up, costumed, and wigged, and then I was driven by limousine the three blocks to the funeral home. I fell in line with my brother in the procession into the church. It was the first time I’d seen him in uniform and, because the Rosses hadn’t wanted us to communicate, the first time I’d seen him at all in three years. After the typical Catholic mass, and the recessional, everyone else went on to the cemetery but I said good-bye and went to work. I begged to go to the cemetery and the Rosses said no. The show couldn’t afford the time.
Even if I could have fully played out the drama, however, even if I could have gone to mourn and heard taps played at his graveside, it wouldn’t have filled the void left by all those years of separation. In the time between then and now, I’ve had to deal with my resentment toward my father. I was busy blaming everyone else for not letting me see my dad, but he was a grown-up. He could have done whatever a father does to make contact with his kid. For a long time that was just too hard for me to accept.
In the aftermath of my father’s death a fan magazine ran a contest culminating in a series of articles with the theme “Find Patty Duke’s father; she wants to be reunited with him.” The payoff was a picture of the rooming house where he died and his grave. When I first heard about it, I was embarrassed and my mother was upset. I was especially ashamed because of the last article, which said he’d died alone and that he didn’t even have a television on which to watch his famous daughter. That last part wasn’t true, I know, because a few years before, as kind of a hometown-girl-makes-good stunt, I went back to the local Madison Square Boys Club, where my brother was discovered, and drew raffle tickets. And the ticket that won a color TV set had my father’s name on it and the address of a bar on Third Avenue. He wasn’t there to accept, but I made sure they got the set to him. He may have hocked it, but he had a television.
Later that same year, I almost lost John Ross as well. He and Ethel had a huge fight that lasted an entire weekend. I wasn’t privy to all that much of it because I was in my sleeping mode, but still it was unusual to witness a dispute between them; usually I was sent someplace else if there was going to be a major scene. I woke up for a few hours late on Sunday and he wasn’t there. Ethel tried to make light of it, but she admitted she wasn’t exactly sure where he was. Monday came and went and he still didn’t show up. I finally did the unheard-of, I asked what was going on, but she still wouldn’t tell me.
Then, on Tuesday after work, John Ross’s secretary, John Phillips, picked me up and said we were going to meet Ethel in Newark, New Jersey. He told me that J.R., as I called him then, was in the hospital, but he didn’t go into any detail. The hospital looked like Bellevue, very stark with bars on the windows. I waited in a room by myself for a long time and then Ethel came in. She told me that John had gone to a motel in Newark and attempted suicide and that he wasn’t expected to live. He had taken phenobarbital, Nembutal, Seconal, Stelazine, Thorazine, and, I believe, Valium, all the pills she was getting from her friend the nurse, any batch of which could kill a person. This was not a cry for help; he took everything in the place—he meant to die. Why the man lived, no one knows.
Later that day, John Phillips told me that before J.R. took the pills, he had written several letters—one to Ethel, one to the police, one to an accountant, and one to me—and he told me their contents. The letter to the accountant talked about how they had played fast and loose with the money earned by Billy McNally, my little friend the Rosses had discovered outside the Metropole in Times Square. The letter to me was basically an apology for not allowing me to grow up, for keeping me from being a n
ormal child, for not being stronger in allying himself with me against Ethel and her restrictions. I never got to see that letter; it and all the others were destroyed by Ethel. She covered it all up; money changed hands to keep the incident off the police blotter and to keep it quiet around the hospital. News of the attempt never came out.
John remained in that hospital for three days and started to rally. I was never allowed to see him, and after that first night I was never allowed to return. Ethel was afraid I’d be spotted. From there John was transferred to Gracie Square Hospital, one of the top places in the city, very expensive. He was there for six weeks and given God knows how many shock treatments.
The last week before John came back I started to get instructions from Ethel about what my behavior was to be once he arrived home. Contrary to any kind of therapy I know of, there was to be no discussion of any suicide attempt. I was never to mention it or the hospitalization—we were all to pretend that none of this had ever taken place. Which we did. And to the best of my knowledge, the man never had any follow-up psychiatric care, not a single session, until a number of years later when they were living in California and he apparently had another breakdown. And irony of ironies, although I never saw him, I’ve heard from several sources that at the time I was hospitalized in Los Angeles under psychiatric care, he was an outpatient undergoing schock treatment at the same hospital.
