Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke

by Patty Duke

  Given my mental state, it’s not surprising that I didn’t work much during those days. Even if I’d wanted to, I don’t think I would have been able. I did manage an episode of The Virginian (where I was upstaged by a horse) and I remember the triumph I would feel driving off the Universal lot in the evenings, having gotten through another day without letting anyone know that I was crazy as a bedbug.

  I also was a presenter at the Academy Awards that spring. I had trouble with the dress rehearsal—Harry had to talk to me for about four hours before I’d leave the house, and when I got there I realized I’d forgotten the shoes that went with my dress, which was critical because I couldn’t practice coming down the stairs in my sneakers. So an announcement was made over the P.A. system that Patty Duke didn’t have any shoes and could somebody please lend her a pair. And the shoes that were lent to me were Liza Minnelli’s. Silly though it may seem, that was a very meaningful gesture to me, because even though no one knew it, I was in a real emotional crisis. So I’ve always felt a terrific connection with Liza, and every time I hear she’s in a crisis of some sort, I keep wishing I could send her whatever she needs as much as I needed those shoes.

  By now I was also suffering from anorexia, though in those days we didn’t have a name for it. Harry made the mistake one day of saying, “Gee, you’re looking a little pudgy there.” I weighed about 105 pounds then, but I immediately went on a diet of coffee, cigarettes, and Diet-Rite cola and ended up weighing as little as 76 pounds before I got help. I know now that one of the explanations for anorexia is the refusal to grow up: you starve yourself to get smaller, you attempt to physically match how small you feel mentally, and I think that’s what I was doing.

  In the summer of 1966, the last summer before my twentieth birthday, we went back East to Fire Island to relax; you can imagine the kind of strain we had been living under. Ironically enough, Harry happened to be reading Catch-22 at the time, laughing and enjoying it, and I was in hell. He’d bought me a copy of the book so we could share the experience, but I couldn’t make sense out of the words on the paper, that’s how bad I was.

  Occasionally, I’d be able to come out of this state long enough to pick a fight or do something so crazy that he would lose his temper. One day Harry was just sitting out on the deck reading, and I was like a caged lion. I kept sitting down and getting up and sitting down, without any real purpose. I asked him a question and he didn’t answer me, he probably didn’t even hear me, but I got very hurt and angry. So I yelled at him about his book and he threw it in frustration.

  I ran back into the house, into the bathroom, locked the door, and swallowed half a bottle of whatever pills were handy. It was Valium, prescribed for me by a doctor in Los Angeles and not, as I found out later, a good drug for manic-depressives. But I felt as if there were some demonic engine driving me all the time, and the only escape, the only thing that would put me out of my misery for a while, was the peace of a Valium-induced sleep.

  If I’d taken all those pills without anyone’s knowledge, it would have been a genuine suicide attempt. But Harry could hear me, he knew what I was doing, and I knew that he could hear me and could stop me. I ended up throwing the pills up. Taking these pills was more of a gesture than anything else, an attempt to show what a real crisis I was in. A friend of Harry’s who was visiting at the time and had witnessed my behavior over several days suggested that something really had to be done, so we went in to the city on Monday morning to see a shrink.

  I had seen psychiatrists a couple of times in L.A. at Harry’s suggestion and I’d reacted violently against the experience. And by the time we got into this woman’s office, I could easily be diagnosed as catatonic: I was really angry, refusing to talk and allowing them to think that I couldn’t. What I was feeling was the culmination of lifelong feelings of rejection, abandonment, mismanagement, and bad parenting. I was completely ill-equipped to be an adult, and the infant in me was just enraged.

  This clown of a shrink said to Harry, right in front of me, “This is a very sick girl. She will come out of it and you can get her help from time to time, but this will always be a very, very sick girl.” Can you imagine? First of all, no one, I don’t care how good a therapist he or she is, can make a diagnosis like that in a half-hour meeting. No one. If they do, shame on them. The finality of that statement had an impact on me that lasted for fifteen years. And you can imagine the impact on Harry, who was not much more sophisticated about psychiatry than I was. The poor guy had married a defective piece of machinery. He was heartbroken.

  So arrangements were made for us to return to Los Angeles and for me to be admitted to Mount Sinai (now Cedars-Sinai) Hospital. I fought those plans as much as I could, but I was in a very weakened state physically as well as emotionally; I felt as if I were living all wrapped up in old bubble gum. There was no such thing as having a conversation with me, I was a wreck all the way back on the plane. Harry wanted me to go right from the airport to the hospital, but I begged to go back to the house first. I don’t remember what excuse I used, but he acquiesced.

  When we got home I started talking a little bit, trying to cajole him into not making me go. And he told me how much he loved me and how important it was to him that I get well. He promised me that the hospital was not going to be a snake pit or anything like that. I would be in a regular hospital room where I would be able to rest, and a doctor would come and talk to me about how to approach my problem. Harry had had several phone conversations with the doctor, and finally he begged me, he just begged me, to go. And as much as I didn’t want to, I trusted him and I bought that promise. To this day I trust him. I think he believed what he was told, I don’t think he knew.

  I remember standing outside the car at Mount Sinai, waiting to go in there, pleading with him not to make me, saying all those terrible “If you love me, you won’t do this” emotional blackmail things that people say. He finally convinced me that the shoe was on the other foot now; if I loved him, I would do this.

  So we went in and, of course, it was a fully locked, secure ward with cell-like rooms that smelled antiseptic. And when I saw the keys turn in the locks, I just looked at Harry accusingly, as if to say, “How could you do this? You promised, and it was a lie.” And his face was like a frightened deer’s; he realized, “My God, I promised her this and it’s not what I said it was.”

  The nurses and attendants are always so sweet when you first go in. They introduced themselves and showed us up and down the hall—this was the occupational therapy dayroom, this was the kitchen, if you ever wanted a snack you were certainly welcome to go in. And then the residents came out of the showers, and they looked a lot crazier than I felt. I’d been holding Harry’s hand but I let go of it to move out of the way as all these people trooped down the hall. And when I turned around, the attendant was closing the door of the ward and Harry was on the other side. I could just see his face in the little window, and then, obviously distraught, he turned away.

  All of a sudden, and to this day I don’t know where the strength and the confidence and the sanity came from, there was nothing wrong with me. I decided I had to be very careful and cautious, so as not to seem crazy. I went up to a nurse and I said, “I think there’s been a mistake, I’m not sure I really belong here,” which is, of course, the classic line. And she gave me a nice, all-knowing smile and replied, “Things are going to be fine, dear.” That’s when I realized I really was in serious trouble.

  There was a large male attendant at the door, and I went over and stood by him. Somebody with a key was unlocking the door from the outside and as he opened it, I managed to wedge myself halfway out. Then a struggle began with the attendant, and I suspect the guy was half afraid of hurting me since I was so little, because I wound up outside.

  All this happened so quickly that Harry was still standing there, waiting for the elevator. I begged him to come back inside so he could see what it was really like. If he insisted I stay there after that, I would. The attendant
motioned it would be okay, the unspoken plan being, “You get her back inside and we’ll get you out.”

  But once I got back inside, I began talking with great clarity and sense. I announced that I wanted to speak to my lawyer, that I’d been brought here under what I considered to be false pretenses, etc. All this stuff just started coming out of me, and Harry was in shock. It might have been a year since I’d talked in any kind of adult fashion, weeks since I’d talked at all except to say “Help me,” or “Please don’t make me,” and he was thrilled just to hear me speak.

  I got on the phone with David Licht, my lawyer at the time, and very coherently explained the situation. He talked to Harry for a while, and Harry by now had weakened. He wanted out of there too—it was as if some miracle shock treatment had me suddenly behaving normally again. And though they wouldn’t let me leave without emphasizing the threat that I’d have to come back if I couldn’t pull myself together, I got out of there; I didn’t have to spend the night.

  And for a few days at least, I really did function okay. But my problems were real, they were all manic-depressive episodes of one form or another, even though no one knew it at the time. So I went right back to the kinds of behavior that got me into Mount Sinai in the first place. I’d find myself in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard, for instance, trying to drive home and not knowing where I was, just sitting in the car with everyone honking at me. It really was like something out of a B movie.

  Harry and I limped along with a series of psychiatrists;they each got three shots at me and that was it. The one I liked best was a kindly, elderly man I thought of as Grandpa. I didn’t have to do or say anything, I’d just go there and sob and Grandpa would say, “There, there” and give me some new medication. He didn’t give it to me, actually, he gave it to Harry to dole out, because I was too depressed to be trusted. Naturally I resented that; here I was wanting to be an infant and at the same time wanting to control whether or not I took my medicine. But Harry put it away someplace I didn’t know about. Or so he thought.

  And, of course, some nonsensical argument erupted, provoked by me, I’m sure. I don’t mean to paint Harry as a perfect white knight, but he was just not equipped to deal with a lot of this. And he didn’t pick fights. I picked fights. After this one I wasn’t as obvious about the pills as I had been the last time. I didn’t storm out of the room and slam the door to do it. I waited until Harry went to the bathroom, then got the pills from where he’d hidden them, took about thirty five-milligram Valiums, and quickly got into bed. Yet even though I went about it more quietly this time, this episode still wasn’t so much a wish to die as a wish simply not to hurt anymore.

  Several hours passed and the Valium was on its way to doing its thing before Harry went to get my medication, discovered the pills were missing, and really got crazed.

  “Where are they? What have you done with them?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Where are the pills?”

  “What pills?”

  But by now I was slurring my speech and it was obvious that I’d taken them, so then the argument about throwing up began.

  “No, I’m not throwing up.”

  “Yes, you are throwing up.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Back and forth and back and forth. He finally did get me to vomit some of them up, but the effect of the pills already in my system lasted for about three days, at which point I awakened to a psychiatric nurse in the house, the idea being to keep the celebrity out of the booby hatch. For, despite advice to the contrary, Harry had insisted: “I’m not going to commit her. I promised her I wouldn’t. She’s broken her promise to me by doing this, but there must be another way.”

  Doris was great, kind and gentle but very demanding. She would demand that I get up and take a shower, demand that I get dressed, demand that I eat, because if these things didn’t come in the form of demands, I wouldn’t respond. I had a kind of love-hate relationship with this woman, and deep respect, but I did it to her too. There was another prescription in the house and I managed to find out where those pills were being kept. And that time was the last straw for Harry. He realized he’d gone as far as he could, he no longer wanted to take responsibility for an awful accident. I pleaded and carried on—to hear me tell it, no one ever listened to me, no one cared—but Harry was very strong; he walked away. So, without a breath of publicity, I was taken to Westwood Psychiatric Hospital and committed.

  I spent the first few days in my room, day in and day out, night in and night out, just crying. The first time I ventured into the cafeteria, someone said, “Aren’t you Patty Duke?” and that was it, I was back in my room. I would see my friend Grandpa every day, and every day I’d wail. He’d talk a little, try to stimulate some anger or any emotion besides this depression, but to no avail. I never talked to him.

  The first progress I made came when Grandpa went on vacation and a rolypoly doctor named Goldman took over for a week and tried a whole new approach. He’d come and talk a little show business, things like opera or Gilbert and Sullivan as well as the movies. Finally, about the third day, he said, very simply, “Why don’t you talk to me? I talk to you. How come you don’t talk to me?” I just stared at him for a while and then I said, “Okay. Why me? Why is this happening to me?” And he said, “Why not you? Of all the millions of people in the world, why should you be excluded?” I started having conversations with him after that, not dealing in any real depth with what was wrong, but at least I was talking.

  Whenever Harry came to visit I’d say, “Please, I want to go home, I want to go home.” When I saw Grandpa again, I’d say, “See, I’m not doing anything bad. I want to go home.” Yet in the area of activities, which is one of the ways they measure how you’re progressing, I was really antisocial. I kept saying, “I don’t want to play with the clay, I don’t know how to do things with clay.” There was a sense of sameness at the Westwood, nothing changing, every day like the one before.

  One of the activities you have to participate in is volleyball. Playing the game with ten people jacked up on Thorazine is really a great way to spend an August afternoon. One poor son of a bitch, a character right out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, always wore three shirts, a T-shirt, a sweater, and a jacket every time we played. In August!

  The attendants, believe it or not, really got off on this so-called game. I guess it was one of the few things they had to look forward to every day. The way a lot of points would end was that someone would spike the ball really hard at this guy with all the shirts and sweater and jacket and then everybody would laugh. It didn’t seem to bother him, he just sort of wandered around and stared. But one afternoon, after five weeks in the place, they did it one time too many for me, and I finally freaked out. Out of this sweet little girl who kept whimpering, “I wanna go home, I wanna go home,” came “You motherfucking bastards,” this veritable torrent of rage.

  When you’re on the inside, everyone gets involved with everyone else’s problems, and it was no secret that my thing was, “She can’t get angry.” So when that outburst happened, it was like a scene from a movie: everybody (except the guy with the sweater!) stood there applauding because I’d broken through. I started to really function, to demonstrate that I was no longer suicidal, that I was coming out of my depression, and most of all that I was willing to work within the system. A week after that volleyball game I left the Westwood, I hoped for good.

  TWENTY

  Now that I was out of the Westwood everyone assumed that I was, for all intents and purposes, “cured.” Harry and I began a “riding the crest” period. We belonged to all the hot clubs like The Factory and The Daisy, we began developing social acquaintances, playing Monopoly and giving dinner parties: in between bouts with shrinks and hanging around in the closet I’d learned how to set a table and how to cook. I never could make rice, though. I’d go down to Ah Fong’s in Beverly Hills and buy enough for sixteen people and everyone thought
I made the best rice in town. Things were good for us, the way we thought they would be when we’d first gotten married. What I was experiencing was one of those stable periods that sometimes occurs between untreated manic and depressed moods. I had come out of the tunnel and I thought this was the way it was going to be for the rest of my life.

  I wasn’t having much luck in my career, though. I had been announced for a play called My Sweet Charlie on Broadway, and I really wanted to do it, but I was in the Westwood when it was rehearsing. The producer, Bob Banner, was very gracious, he hung in and waited for me as long as he could, but finally it was announced that I was “ill” and the role went to Bonnie Bedelia, who’d been my understudy on Isle of Children, That was difficult for me, and what made it harder was that I was out of the Westwood by the time the run began and even saw the play the night before it opened. At least I’d shown I was functioning, though, and attending that play gave me a feeling of triumph.

  Another role that got away was in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which was about a young woman with psychiatric problems. The book had initially been sent to me just after the wedding, but I sent it back unread, saying, “Thank you for thinking that I might be interested in this, but I recently married and I’m not planning to work for quite a while.” Then I went into the Westwood, and since the book is practically required reading for psychiatric nurses, I saw it around a lot. When I came home I finally bought myself a copy and read it and, of course, I knew exactly who should play that part.

  The problem was, I was never able to get my hands on the property again; it always seemed to be tied up. Natalie Wood owned it for a while, and then at one point I was brought to New York to meet one of those fancy-shmancy European directors. We had a warm, fabulous meeting, walked through Central Park together, I told him my experiences at the funny farm, and I thought this was it. Then I came back to L.A. and found that he was not at all interested in me for the part, he had his eye on Liza Minnelli. Then the whole project died, the rights changed hands again and again, and it didn’t finally get done until years later with Kathleen Quinlan, who I thought did a fabulous job.