by Patty Duke
A fifteen-day schedule for a musical was a little crazy, and we ended up cutting a lot of corners. There were a couple of jazz/ballet dance routines; I was taught just enough to get through the opening and closing of the number and some closeups. For publicity purposes I was being tutored in track and field by Rafer Johnson, the gold-medal-winning Olympic decathlon star, but he was there just long enough to be photographed supposedly teaching me about the high jump. The attitude was, if she can stand on her feet on the track, that’s all we need. I did maybe half a dozen jumps over hurdles, enough to get medium shots, and then doubles did the rest.
One of my doubles was the best pole vaulter they had at L.A.’s University High, where we did the shooting. They made him shave his legs, put him in falsies and a wig, dressed him up in short shorts like me, and had him do my vaulting. Poor kid, I don’t think he ever lived it down. I got a letter from University High a few years ago. They were holding the twentieth reunion of that class, and they wanted me to come because they expected that this young man, whose life had been made utterly miserable by me, was going to be there. Twenty years later and it was still his claim to fame.
The worst thing for me, except for the continued agony of having to sing on the soundtrack, was what they did to my hair. It was bleached absolutely white but my eyebrows were inexplicably left dark. It was a very peculiar look, kind of like racing stripes, and I got sores on my scalp from having to bleach my hair every other day. Why my hair had to look that way, I’ll never know. While it might have been someone’s concept that athletes have lighter hair, what it felt like was just another case of powerlessness. I thought this was the kind of thing Ethel should object to, but what I didn’t realize was how intimidated she and John were by producers and directors. The two of them seemed to be calling all the shots, but that was hardly the case.
The night of the last day of filming, the Rosses and I had a huge blowup that effectively ended everything between us. I had just found out about the second phase of their counterattack against Harry: they’d decided to transfer The Patty Duke Show to Los Angeles for its third season, banking on the fact that it would be too difficult for Harry to reestablish himself professionally for him to attempt the move. Now the dam had really broken; there was no way to put things back together again, so I let it all out. I was crazed, I was just crazed.
Ethel was on one of her usual rampages that night. She ranted and raved, talked about how they’d given up everything for me and how could I be such an unappreciative little slut. Then, for the first time since it had happened, she brought up John’s suicide attempt and claimed it was my fault. She said I’d broken his heart by being disloyal and not working closely enough with him on the show, that I’d made him try and kill himself.
Our voices were very loud for two or three in the morning; John had long since gone to bed, and I was getting even louder on purpose, hoping to rouse him. I did. When he came out I said, “Your wife is accusing me of this and this,” and he kept looking at her and shaking his head and then he started to cry. “But worst of all, she said it’s my fault you tried to kill yourself.” It was clear she wanted to murder me for bringing that up, and he cried harder and said, “No, Ethel, you know that’s not true. I wrote you a letter. I wrote you a letter, too, Patty.” And I said, “Well, I didn’t see your letter; I didn’t see anybody’s letter.”
The hysteria continued on the part of the three of us. Ethel was appalled by my rebellion, but John was a broken man, very guilt-ridden and unwilling to argue anymore. Finally, I just snapped. I told them I hated them, I hated who I was with them, and from now on things were going to be different. I was eighteen and they didn’t own me anymore, I was going to live where I wanted to live, with whom I wanted to live, and if they were such goddamn good managers, they could manage to get me an apartment, and a car, and a plane reservation back to New York. Just hostile, hostile, hostile, all the way down the line. The worm had finally turned. My exit line, “I’m going to Fire Island, and I’m going to sleep with Harry,” was the first time I’d admitted that in so many words. I walked out, slammed the door, and that was the end of everything. I never returned to the Rosses again.
SEVENTEEN
After that triumphant exit, I went back to New York for the remainder of the summer. I was theoretically based at my mother’s apartment, but I spent most of my time with Harry in the city or at his place on Fire Island. When the summer ended, I went into town to get some of my clothes out of the Rosses’ Park Avenue apartment and that’s when I found out they’d moved. All the locks had been changed and I had to con the doorman into letting me in. All the furniture was gone and my clothes were in a heap on the floor of my room. The Rosses hadn’t necessarily wanted to be mysterious (they eventually called my mother and told her where they were), they just wanted the dramatic effect.
I’d had lots of thoughts about not returning to the show, but I knew that I couldn’t do that. I kept saying to Harry, “Please come, please come. They have assistant directors out there, you know.” Of course, he knew better than I how difficult that switch is, and he learned the hard way later on that he was right. I think Harry was both relieved and heartbroken about my leaving. He promised to come out and visit me, and as it turned out, absence did indeed make both our hearts grow fonder.
When I got to L.A., I moved into an apartment in the Doheny Towers, the luxury building of its time, located right at the foot of the Sunset Strip. Suzie Pleshette had told me about it, I told the Rosses to “manage” me an apartment there, and they did. Of course, I didn’t know anything about running a home. Jean Byron even had to help me go to Saks to buy sheets. Only Jean would choose Saks for that. I had four-hundred-dollar sheets on my bed, and that was in 1964. But after the first couple of days of setting up housekeeping in my own cute little dollhouse, living by myself turned into a horror. It was lonely and I’d never learned to be alone.
Making me more miserable was the fact that I was living a life-style that was completely alien to me. I was staying out all night, flying to the East for weekends to see Harry, and trying to do a series during the day. When I was home I left the television on all night and ate mostly junk food; believe me, I did not dine like a sophisticated adult.
The worst time of all was midnight, the panic hour. I couldn’t sleep, there was nobody to talk to, it was too late to call anyone. The idea of sitting peacefully reading a book didn’t occur to me—there was a motor running inside that wouldn’t stop or even slow down. I’d take a walk or drive around and wind up at the beach in the middle of the night. I spent many a night just sitting there, afraid of being alone in my apartment.
This kind of behavior came partly from a sense of release, a feeling of “I’m going to taste it all at once, because somebody might slam the door again.” But it also indicated a serious problem: I was panicked at not being prepared to live life. I was fine on the set; I knew how to hit my marks and say my lines—this was where I belonged. But as soon as it was time to go home, I was lost.
It was at this time that I began traveling with the remnants of the Rat Pack. Because Peter Lawford was one of the show’s producers, I’d met him early on, but at first he was just a movie star to me, extremely handsome with that studied casualness that is so sexy and appealing—someone who didn’t wear socks but did wear velvet slippers with wolves on them. But during the filming of Billie, which he had a hand in, and the beginning of the show’s third season, I spent more time with him than I ever had. Also, Peter was much more vulnerable by then; Marilyn Monroe had died, J.F.K. had died, his world was crashing.
Carousing with these people was very heady for me; I didn’t realize I was palling around with the remnants, I thought this was it. It was dinner at Matteo’s every night, occasional visits from the likes of Warren Beatty, Lee Marvin, and Sammy Davis, Jr., lots of show biz and Kennedy stories, much drinking of Jack Daniel’s but, oddly enough, no sex. The drinking got so heavy that I was called on the carpet many times for looking
hung over during filming, because I was. My not-so-affectionate nickname on the show became the “little shit,” as in “get the little shit up here.”
During those days I met a woman named Molly Dunn, a friend of Peter’s, who was a good twenty years older than me. She became my stand-in on the show, we started hanging around together, and, frankly, Molly became much too involved in my life. She had a place of her own, but she stayed at mine a lot, and slept over so much when we’d go out drinking that she became like a part-time roomie. There was a period when you had to go through Molly to get to me; since I didn’t want to be bothered with anyone anyway, I figured, “Let big, bad Molly take care of it.” Rumors apparently cropped up, which I didn’t hear about until much later, that there was a lesbian relationship going on between us, which was simply not true.
I learned more than just drinking and cavorting with this group. I also started smoking. I’d never so much as sneaked a puff of a cigarette before, so I sat in my car and taught myself how. I threw up, got sick as a dog—for hours I practiced. When I came out, I was a smoker. Sick, but I was a smoker.
The same thing happened with swearing. Except for the night Gramma Howe died, I barely did it at all until I was eighteen, and, until the final blowups, not a single bad word passed my lips during the entire “reign of terror” with the Rosses. I even remember Harry once telling me in a startling statement, “You wouldn’t say shit if you had a mouthful.” But once I started to hang out with him and with the Rat Pack, where I was the smallest and youngest in the crowd, talking like a sailor, the same as smoking and drinking, was a way of saying, “I’m one of the gang. I’m a grown-up, too, even if you are much older than me.” One day, only a couple of years later, I was cooking for Harry and I dropped a whole pot of peas on the floor. They rolled all over the kitchen, and I let out with a colorful, cleverly tied together stream of eight- and ten-letter words that would’ve done justice to the entire Sixth Fleet. And from the dining room Harry says, “Jesus, Pat, you really ought to do something about your language.” Go figure it!
By the time I had to go on the set for the beginning of the third season, my determination to get back at the Rosses led me to overkill, and I came out with all kinds of demands, things like having Harry direct half the season. All the resentment that had been pent up for all those years came flying out. I turned down no opportunity to humiliate them or hurt them. If one or the other, usually John, would come on the set to ask me about something, I would refuse to speak to them. If he was standing there, I would turn and speak to someone else, ask that person to answer him. It was that petty, that rude. I eventually had them barred from the set; I said it was too upsetting for me to have them around. I turned into a loud, crass, borderline-manic young lady. It was their worst nightmare come true.
Things got so bad, the Rosses brought my mother out to L.A. at one point to try to talk me into going back with them. They wined and dined her, but it blew up in their faces, because she said, “I’m not doing this anymore, I’m not making her come back. You took her away from me. She wasn’t my business for all these years, and she’s not my business now.” Then I got into a fight with my mother and I put her in some dreadful motel room until I could get her on a plane the next day. People called it rebellion then, but I don’t think it was that at all. It was just total rejection of anyone who claimed to have loved me. I didn’t believe them for a minute.
All this was politically stupid, of course, because no one who was around the show knew the history that I knew, so it looked as though I were being nothing more than a smart-ass kid. I wasn’t trained to do anything but follow orders, but there I was, giving them, and ill equipped to do it. I was a little twerp. And until the last few years, when I made my peace with the reasons for that behavior, I used to be mortified that I’d ever acted like that. Those aren’t memories I’m proud of. Yes, I felt justified, it’s not as if the Rosses didn’t deserve to have to deal with my feelings, but for my own sake as well as theirs, I wish I’d done it some other way. I could, for instance, just as easily have killed them with kindness as overwhelmed them with bile; I could have been more clever instead of being so infantile.
What’s strange now is to look back and see that most of my bad behavior was textbook, it wasn’t creative at all. The smoking, drinking, swearing, and hostile actions were all attention-getting devices. It didn’t matter that it was bad attention I was attracting, it was attention all the same. So I was just running all hours, all directions, wanting to do it all and be the king. It was my turn to be in charge and I wasn’t going to let it pass.
In September of 1965, I had a ruptured appendix and, simultaneously, a corpus luteum cyst on my right ovary. Since being diagnosed as a manic-depressive was still nearly two decades away, I had no idea that any kind of a drug, especially an anesthetic, is very dangerous to someone with that condition. So after the surgery I headed into the first major manic episode I can now identify, the first time I exhibited the kinds of off-the-wall behavior that were to plague me until I got a handle on what was wrong with me.
I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I spent great sums of money, and even though I was still too physically uncomfortable to go running around town, I was on the phone constantly. Bill Schallert, my TV father, came to visit and thought I was behaving strangely. Then Bob Sweeney, the show’s producer, came out a few times and didn’t like what was going on either. So Bob invited me to come to recuperate at his and his wife Bev’s house. Actually, it was more than an invitation, it was “This is what we’re gonna do. Period.” And a good thing, too, because between their issuing the invitation and their arriving to pick me up, I lost it. Hallucinations, strange mental ramblings and rantings—really out-of-control behavior began.
I stayed with the Sweeneys for six weeks. They were very loving and fun, their house felt like a safe haven to me, and it was a really healthy environment in which to recover. Harry came out for a couple of visits after the surgery, and after the first one we became engaged. He came out again in November, and we got married.
My parents, John and Frances
Duke, on their wedding day.
The me that my managers, the Rosses, saw—young and eager to please. AP/WIDE WORLD
Proud as I can be at my First Communion, I wore a dress that, to my horror, was later dyed pink by Ethel Ross for an early acting role.
The four faces of Patty. An early publicity photo with credits, not all of them genuine, listed on the back. © JUSTIN KERR
Travels with Bambi, the dog I couldn’t escape: a staged showing of her to my mother, my sister Carol, and my brother Ray, and shopping for an appropriate carrying bag for the beast with Ethel Ross (below). NEW YORK DAILY NEWS (above) JACK STAGER/GLOBE PHOTOS (below)
The pleasure of comparing $32,000 checks with cowinner Eddie Hodges (left) was followed by the agony of testifying before Congress when the show we won them on, The $64,000 Challenge, was found to be fixed. John Ross is on the right, my lawyer on the left. PICTORIAL PARADE (left), AP/WIDE WORLD
Acting with Helen Hayes in One Red Rose for Christmas was a highlight of my television career. The show was so well received we did it twice. AP/WIDE WORLD
Appearing with Anne Bancroft in the Broadway version of The Miracle Worker was the experience of a lifetime. AP/WIDE WORLD
Posing with a sign company executive, I officially became a star on Broadway. I was happy for the recognition, but I hated the kind of publicity—like this picture—that made me seem different from the rest of the cast. AP/WIDE WORLD
Anne Bancroft tries to teach me table manners in the film version of The Miracle Worker. LOUIS GOLDMAN
Posing in the dress I hated, with Oscar cowinners Gregory Peck and Ed Begley, and Joan Crawford, who accepted for Anne Bancroft. AP/WIDE WORLD
At the post-awards party, I celebrated with Ethel while John (directly behind me) chatted. I would’ve rather had a date! AP/WIDE WORLD
I danced with Joey Trent in a photo session designed to mak
e it seem that I had a normal teenager’s life.
JACK STAGER/GLOBE PHOTOS
“Cousins, identical cousins.…” I costarred with myself on The Patty Duke Show, playing two halves that equaled less than one as far as I was concerned. PICTORIAL PARADE
Frank Sinatra, Jr., was my first beau and a lifelong friend. His attentions were responsible for the Rosses’ finally connecting my phone. AP/WIDE WORLD
I knew I’d marry Harry Falk from the moment I saw him.
JOHN R. HAMILTON/GLOBE PHOTOS
Barbara Parkins and Sharon Tate were my costars in Valley of the Dolls. TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX
This mournful shot from Me, Natalie was taken the morning after I’d attempted suicide. NATIONAL GENERAL-CINEMA CENTER
Acting with Al Freeman in My Sweet Charlie was a terrific experience, but accepting the Emmy I won turned into a nationally televised nightmare. UNIVERSAL (above), AP/WIDE WORLD (below)
My relationship with Desi Arnaz, Jr., was a romance the tabloids couldn’t get enough of. PICTORIAL PARADE
