Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke

by Patty Duke

Something even more emotionally significant for me, and much more wrenching, than John’s suicide attempt happened right about that time, in the summer of 1963. It involved a woman I felt extremely close to, Ethel’s mother, Gramma Howe. Whenever the Rosses didn’t like my behavior, they’d ship me off to Gramma Howe’s in Detroit. It was supposed to be a punishment, like the honor farm, but what they didn’t know was that Gramma would let me have all the things I wasn’t supposed to. The Rosses never wanted me to eat anything fattening, but Gramma made me stuffed pork chops and apple pie every day. Or she would invite boys over and we’d have a cookout on the tiny hibachi, in her living room no less. She was very domineering and very opinionated, much like Ethel in a lot of ways, but she also knew that most of what was going on in my upbringing was nonsense. Gramma Howe was the only person I knew who wasn’t afraid to ignore the Rosses’ orders, the only person I could count on to love me unconditionally. There was an unspoken pact between us: “Don’t tell.”

  Every week for months the Rosses would take me to a weird doctor in New Jersey who looked like Sam Jaffe and offered a procedure that was right out of a demented science fiction movie. The treatment rooms in his office had regular examining tables with the addition of metal coils on the top. You would lie on these coils, a switch would be turned on, they’d start to roll, and the combination of friction and body heat would make you sweat like a pig. The whole thing made me very crazy, because not only were you strapped to the table while this was happening but all the lights were turned out. I learned how to wiggle my hand out of the straps, listen if anybody was coming, and turn the machine off. I know this sounds nuts, but it’s the truth. If I asked questions about the treatments, I was told, “They’re supposed to make you better.” I said, “I’m not sick in the first place,” but nobody was listening.

  One cold, rainy day in September, Ethel’s mother, my friend and ally Gramma Howe, who was seventy-one, drove out to visit from Detroit and she went to this place with us. She and I were put in the same room, me on the table and Gramma in something that looked like an electric chair. She was strapped in as if she were going to be executed, and when the so-called doctor went out, she looked at me and said, “What … is … going … on here? Are they [meaning John and Ethel] completely out of their minds?” I laughed and said, “Oh, Gramma, I have to do this all the time.” And she said, “Get me out of this thing.”

  I unhooked her, but the machine had been on long enough to make her very sweaty. It was still cold and rainy when we left in the Rosses’ Lark convertible and, as usual, the Bloody Marys were popped open. By the time we got back to the apartment, Ethel was blind drunk and Gramma Howe was already having chills. Within an hour both John and Ethel were passed out and Gramma was vomiting and running a high fever. She was lying on the couch in the living room, getting sicker and sicker. I couldn’t wake up Ethel, so I went to John and said, “You have to call the doctor. Something’s very wrong with Gramma.” He roused Ethel and she said, “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with her, she always does this to me,” and passed out again.

  Gramma’s temperature was 105, she was sweaty and clammy. But even though I was almost seventeen, I didn’t feel I had the authority to call the doctor on my own. Then Gramma started to get delirious. I tried to wake up Ethel again—I said, “She’s calling for her mother, she’s talking nonsense”—and Ethel said, “Oh, she always does that. It’s just to get my attention. Don’t listen to her.” At which point I took a deep breath and called the doctor myself. He came over and said Gramma had the flu. He advised giving her little sips of Coca-Cola and keeping a cold cloth on her head, which I did.

  Then, at eleven-thirty, Ethel came out of the bedroom and said, “What are you doing?”

  And I said, “I’m sitting here with Gramma.”

  “You’re supposed to be in bed! You have to work tomorrow.”

  “But Gramma’s really sick, and I’m sitting here with her.”

  “YOU’RE NOT SITTING HERE WITH GRAMMA! YOU’RE GOING TO BED RIGHT NOW!”

  “Are you going to take care of her, then? Are you going to sit here?”

  “I’LL DECIDE WHAT I’M GOING TO DO! YOU’RE GOING TO BED, NOW!”

  So I kissed Gramma and went to bed. But what Ethel didn’t know was that right before she came out, Gramma had spoken. Her head had cleared and she’d told me, “You’ve got to get away from these people.” I said, “Gramma, that’s not possible. Where would I go?” She said, “I don’t care where you go, you’ve got to get away from these people. They are crazy.” It was like the last words of wisdom from a guru before the spirit leaves the body. She was the one authority figure who told me that I wasn’t hallucinating, I wasn’t nuts. I knew then that my desire to get away from the Rosses was an intelligent one. Up to that point, no matter how much I disliked the Rosses, my loyalty had always been to them. All that was going to change.

  I slept especially soundly that night, but at three A.M. Gramma Howe had a heart attack and died there at the apartment. The doctor was called again, a fire department emergency crew tromped through the apartment, and I slept through all of it. In the morning, I sensed someone in my room and woke up. It was John, leaning down to pick up my alarm clock, which was on the floor next to my bed. Ethel stood in the doorway.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “I have to get up!”

  “No, you can sleep in. You don’t have to go to work today.”

  I looked at Ethel, and she said softly, “I’m sorry.”

  “You killed her,” I said very quietly. “She’s dead because you killed her. You get out of my way, you get out of my room.”

  I went in to see where Gramma was but the body had been moved, and now I began screaming, “Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?” And they kept saying, “Calm down.” Finally I just screamed, “FUCK YOU!” First time ever.

  They told me then she was at the morgue at Bellevue, where my father had been taken, the hospital where I was born. And I said, “Then get the fuck out of my way.” Once I used the word, it started to come very naturally. And I got dressed and went to work. Never again did the Rosses have the kind of hold on me they used to. It took me another six or eight months to accomplish getting away from them, but with Gramma Howe’s voice ringing in my ears, it suddenly became inevitable.

  SIXTEEN

  It happened in the early days of The Patty Duke Show. I glanced in the mirror one morning and said to Nancy Littlefield (then a second assistant director but now New York City’s Film Commissioner), “Who’s that guy with the blue eyes?” She said, “That’s Harry Falk. He’s here to see about the first assistant director’s job.” And I said, “I’m going to marry him.” Never mind that he was fourteen years older than me and already taken. I was determined. It may have taken me a while, but I did it.

  Harry was spectacularly good-looking, six foot one with big blue eyes, the kind of guy who turned heads. He was great in terms of what we called “attitude”—just the way he stood was very sexy. And he knew it; he had that aura of quiet confidence that comes with being aware of the power of one’s own masculinity. Yet I think he partly resented that; he felt, “Okay, I know I’m good at this, but I want to be good at other things.” Harry was very quiet and painfully shy, which made him seem mysterious. And he had this giant dog, an Irish wolfhound named Finn, that weighed about 185 pounds and stood over six feet tall on his hind legs.

  Even though I probably now subscribe to the “search-for-the-father” explanation for why I got involved with Harry, part of the reason was simply that no boys were hanging around the show. Men were hanging around. That was the field in which my sexual appetite was whetted. It was a real animal magnetism attraction for me with Harry, and, of course, having had no experience at all with the opposite sex, Steve Curry’s kiss notwithstanding, I had no idea how to go about this conquest. I’m sure I acted like a lovesick puppy for the whole season.

  No matter where Harry went on the set, I always knew where he was, always. I c
ould be acting in a three-minute scene, and I knew exactly where he was standing, whether it was in the light or in the dark. When we weren’t shooting, I always managed to be in the vicinity of where he was, sort of following him around, trying to think of subjects to engage him in conversation. Stanley Praeger was directing the show then, so we had his jokes and one-liners going for us; laughing and enjoying them was something we could have in common.

  More than that I dared not do. I thought I had been so quiet and clever that no one had guessed what was on my mind. We had the summer off, and when I showed up for the first day of the second season, I found out Harry wasn’t coming back. He had left us to work on a more intellectual series called East Side, West Side. It also meant more money and was a one-hour show, but I, of course, thought he’d made the switch because he hated me. I was inconsolable, and within an hour I realized that everyone had known all along that I had this crush on Harry. People kept coming up to me and saying, “Don’t worry, honey, maybe the show he’s on won’t work out and he’ll be back.” And I kept saying very primly, “Who? Who? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  It was during the hiatus from Harry that I became involved with Frank Sinatra, Jr. He was so grand and gracious, so smitten and so romantic. The attention was lovely, but while on most levels my thoughts about Harry were “Well, that’ll never work out, I don’t even know where the man is,” I really hadn’t given up on him. That’s where the passion was. And I did manage to find Harry’s phone number and call him. I didn’t know what the hell to say when he answered the phone, I simply blurted out, “Hi, I just wanted to tell you that we were all sorry you didn’t come back.” He sounded very guilty.

  Then it came time for my seventeenth birthday party at the studio and he was the surprise: I just turned around and there he was. My heart skipped several beats, and I did all those teenage things when I saw him. And his face got very red, as it always does when he’s embarrassed. I tried to be friendly but ever so cool, yet I must have asked him eighteen different ways how he liked his new show and when was he coming back to ours. I had never looked at ratings before, but suddenly they were of great interest to me. And then his show was canceled, and somehow—it certainly had nothing to do with me—Harry was brought back as our first A.D. and my life was made.

  This time I determined to be more aggressive. I became much more conscious of how I looked. I disliked Patty’s and Cathy’s clothes even more now, because they weren’t sophisticated enough and I certainly didn’t want to look like a kid in front of Harry. I started wearing black a lot, black turtlenecks and black pants, a very Greenwich Village bohemian look that I remembered Annie Bancroft wearing several years before. I would strike up conversations with Harry in a much more blatantly flirtatious way. I didn’t have to deal with hiding my feelings anymore, because everyone had guessed, so I had nothing to lose. Then I started making hints about going out to the movies, and finally, in the most casual way, he invited me to go to dinner. I thought I would die.

  Now, of course, came the real problem: I had to find a way to ask the Rosses if I could go out with Harry. It’s hard to believe, since they usually knew everything about me, but I don’t think they had a clue what was going on in this case. We were up in the little Romper Room on the third floor where the show was shot; they were rarely there. I considered the “a group of us are going out to dinner” kind of lie, but I figured I might as well tell the truth.

  I waited a few days and then I said, “You know, Harry Falk invited me to go out to dinner and a movie, and I’d really like to do that. Maybe I could do it next week sometime?” No answer. I chattered on about how really interested he was in foreign films, junk like that, and finally, I have no idea why, they said yes. Maybe they thought Harry was so old (he was thirty-one to my seventeen, and by this time divorced) that he was safe. I was shocked when they agreed, but delighted.

  I really agonized over what to wear. All the clothes I had looked like Patty’s and Cathy’s clothes, except for those black pants and turtlenecks, and I couldn’t very well leave the Rosses’ place wearing that. So I ended up being much too dressed up: I wore a blue straight skirt and a blue-and-white checked top with a blue tie and a white Peter Pan collar. Phew! By some coincidence, we went to a restaurant on Thirty-first Street and Second Avenue that used to be a bar my father hung out in. We ate paella and I got back home on time.

  That date rapidly led to several more. I got bolder and bolder about letting the Rosses know I expected to be allowed to go. It must’ve become apparent to them that they’d better agree or else the real rebellion was going to start, because they let me go. Harry and I would talk about the age difference on our dates—he’d say, “Get outta here, you’re jailbait,” which was the first time I heard that phrase. There was a lot of heavy-duty kissing and stuff, we told each other we were in love, and it was apparent where things were going, but we hadn’t figured out the logistics yet.

  Right in the middle of all this, the show had its vacation hiatus. The Rosses had planned to go to the Virgin Islands, charter a yacht and live aboard, which we had done before. But I said I didn’t want to go, which was the first time I’d ever even dreamed of doing such a thing. I told them I’d rather stay in New York and be with Harry. They were very upset and very angry; this was the first real teenage battle, a classic “I don’t want to do what you want me to do, I don’t even want to be with you” confrontation. And then, all of a sudden, they turned the tables on me by saying, “Hey, we’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you invite Harry to come with us?”

  After I picked myself up off the floor, I did just that. Harry didn’t know if he wanted to go, it took him a while to make his decision, but he agreed. The Rosses by this time surely knew I had a crush on Harry, and I think their theory was, “All right, we’ll play this one out and it’ll be over with. I mean, how far is this guy going to go with her? It’s ridiculous.” I couldn’t care less about their theories, I was in heaven. But predictably, that vacation turned out to be a terrible idea.

  It’s not that the days weren’t wonderful. We spent them water-skiing and scuba diving and frolicking on the beach and all that. There were solitary walks and stolen moments. But the Rosses never closed their door at night, so Harry and I couldn’t even fool around, much less sleep together. There was some heavy-duty chemistry happening, though, and the Rosses would have had to be out to lunch not to notice what was going on.

  The night after we got back from that frustrating trip—two people locked up on a boat for ten days who can’t touch each other—was the first time we made love. It was less than two months after we’d starting going out. We went to The Sign of the Dove, a very hotsy-totsy restaurant on Third Avenue, where we had a terrific dinner, we drank wine, we drank Black Russians, and I have no idea what the man said. Finally, he asked me, “Do you really want to go to a movie?” And I laughed.

  We went back to his apartment, and even though I didn’t have a clue about what I was doing, one of the things that I’m ever grateful to Harry for is that my first sexual experience was all the nice things it’s supposed to be. There was all the nervousness you read about in romantic novels—How do you take your clothes off? Where do you put them? And now what do you do?—but Harry was just wonderful, he never made me feel any more self-conscious than I was making myself feel. And the experience was lovely, it was really lovely.

  Then, of course, came the problem of how to get dressed gracefully and the panicky awareness that I should have been home two hours ago. So Harry got out Cue magazine and we picked out a movie to make believe we’d been to. We read the synopsis and then picked out a second one, because unless we’d gone to two movies I was in deep trouble about where I’d been. I didn’t realize that since it would have been so out of character for me to be deceitful with the Rosses, I needn’t have worried. I went home on cloud nine, the happiest I’d ever been.

  Although Harry never talked about it and, much as I was dying to scream it from
the rooftops, neither did I, it was soon very apparent to everyone that there had been a change in our relationship. And it wasn’t that long before we started talking about marriage, though in very casual ways, kind of testing the waters. When he’d bring up the age difference, I told him it didn’t matter to me, and he eventually said it didn’t matter to him either. His best friend initially said, “Oh, my God! What are you doing?” But once we’d met and spent time together, the friend admitted, “This is not exactly the average seventeen-year-old.”

  Which, of course, was true, but in some ways the friend had been absolutely right in his first reaction, as was everyone else who said, “Don’t do this.” I don’t think I was being contrary—it wasn’t as if the more they said no the more I said yes—but I do remember being very defiant and very defensive. I’d seen the man in the mirror, I’d said I was going to marry him, and that was it as far as I was concerned.

  The Rosses, not surprisingly, got very nervous. They said, “You’re not going to see him anymore,” and I said, “Yes, I am.” They said, “No, you’re not,” and I said, “Yes, I am.” If I’d thought about it, I would have been surprised at my assertiveness, but I had such tunnel vision when it came to Harry that no consequences mattered anymore. All I could think was, “This is not going to be taken away from me. This is not going to be destroyed by them.”

  Arguments with the Rosses followed, and then came threats. They were going to talk to Harry. Inside, that terrified me, but outside, I said, “Go right ahead. He feels the same way I do.” And, of course, I had the clock on my side, so my real answer to their threats was, “I’m almost eighteen. You can stop me now, but you can’t stop me in six months, in three months, in two months.” And eventually they just gave up. I thought.

  The first thing the Rosses did to counterattack was to take me out to Los Angeles during the summer of 1964, between the second and third seasons of the show, to do Billie, a quickie movie musical adapted from a play called Time Out for Ginger. The film version is about a father, played by Jim Backus, who’d always wanted a son, and his daughter, who wants to run track with the guys. She has a method for running, she uses a particular beat in her head that she moves to, and because of that and because she’s so strongly motivated, she’s able to beat the boys which, until she relents and reveals her secret, thoroughly alienates them. It teaches a moral to everyone, especially to the father, who learns he should have been glad to accept the girl, and for the girl, who learns that the teenage years are awful for everybody!