by Patty Duke
One of the reasons Twentieth Century Fox had shown me the film was that they wanted me to fly to Miami and join a press junket on a cruise ship going from there to the Bahamas. Well, of course, after I saw it I wasn’t going to cross the street to be part of that junket. But then all kinds of pressure was applied from the studio, my P.R. people, my agents, all of them saying, “Hey, it’s a cruise! You’ve never been on a cruise before! It’ll be fun!” Finally, I agreed to go. We’re such suckers, we actors, we really are.
It was fun to see Sharon and Barbara Parkins and the rest of the cast again, but those of us who’d already seen the film couldn’t look one another in the eye because we knew how awful it was. The cruise started, it was enjoyable and romantic, the food was wonderful, and I was indeed forgetting about my recent personal tragedy when it came time to view the movie. They packed us and all these press folks into this tiny theater, turned on the projector, and, wouldn’t you know it, it ran too fast. Not enough to bother the visuals, but enough to make all the voices sound several tones higher: Paul Burke came out like Minnie Mouse, I had a voice only dogs could hear, it was ridiculous.
And remember, it’s not as if we were still at the dock or had dinghies at our disposal. They’d long since pulled up the gangplank, and we were stuck in the middle of the ocean, watching this turkey. This was truly purgatory. People laughed at all the serious parts. Jackie Susann got up at one point and left the screening: once people started laughing when the demented guy in the mental hospital scene was drooling and I was singing to him, it was enough to drive any best-selling author to her “dolls.” I’ve read since in her husband Irving Mansfield’s book that she had cancer then and was going through her own horror. At any rate, she went to her room, took a bunch of sleeping pills, and I never saw her again until it was time to get off the boat.
The rest of us, however, just got silly. We kept running around the companionways, trying to stay away from the press—we certainly didn’t want to be interviewed about this—and have our own good time. Sooner or later, though, we all got trapped and had to talk, and lie, about the socially redeeming value of this movie.
Although it amazes me, there are a number of people who got something out of that picture. Whenever someone comes up to me and says, “I saw you in Valley of the Dolls,” my instinctive reaction is to say, “I’m sorry you wasted your money.” But I found I have to be really careful, because there are those who actually made a connection. There is in fact a cult following for this film. There are “Valley of the Dolls” parties and people dress up as Neely on Halloween. Extraordinary!
Personally, I try my damnedest never to see that movie. Almost everything I’ve done, even if my work could have been better, I can look at and not feel ill at ease. But there are a few things—still photos from The Patty Duke Show, those album covers, and Valley of the Dolls—that I can’t to this day look at comfortably. I can’t even look back and say, “Wasn’t that a gawky kid?” or “Yeah, she had a silly hairstyle but she was all right.” You would think after a certain amount of time you could get past the embarrassment, but it’s still very hard for me. It’s not a question of dealing with my history, I do that every day. It’s that I feel I look silly and my work is bad. I take a great deal of pride in my work, and I can’t have much about that nonsense.
TWENTY-ONE
The summer of 1968 started on an up note. Once again, Harry and I were supposed to live together in New York. He would be hanging around with his old buddies, and he was working on a script (though it was going nowhere fast) and I was going to star in a film called Me, Natalie.
The project was produced and directed by Fred Coe, the Miracle Worker producer with the great lap, and I took it because I loved the part of Natalie. I really clicked into this lady. She’s described as an ugly Jewish girl from Brooklyn, and certainly, when people looked at me, that wasn’t their first thought. But her lost, waiflike quality, with an edge of humor and sarcasm, was something I could very easily relate to, as was the film’s premise of recognizing the pain that’s making you feel ugly when you’re not. Which is probably why I was able to do the work despite the crises that developed.
Determined to find herself, Natalie moves to the Village and becomes a hippie. Then an artist moves in upstairs, this Italian god played by James Farentino, whom I knew very well and adored, and a charming love story develops, different from anything I’d ever played before. There are a lot of crises; it turns out he’s married but he says he’s going to get a divorce, and Natalie tries to kill herself by jumping into the East River, but she can’t even do that because it’s only ankle-deep.
One of my clearest memories of the film concerns a high school dance Natalie goes to where she really looks like the dog of all time, I mean the makeup and costume people really went out of their way for this one. And this hoody-looking kid comes up and says, “Hey, wanna dance?” She looks around to make sure he’s talking to her and says, “Sure, why not. I’m not doing anything else.” They dance a little and he says, “So. You put out or what.” And she says, “What? You put out or what? You mean, at least.” And she walks away. The actor who played the kid was Al Pacino. He was doing something off-Broadway, but no one really knew who he was. Yet he had real presence, he made quite an impact with those two or three lines. I remember thinking, and saying, “Jesus Christ, this guy’s good.”
By the end of the picture Natalie’s happy being herself, but she gives up the artist, which is something I argued vehemently against. There’s no way that young woman would give up that man. Staying together may not be as noble an ending, but it’s real, and I think it would have made a more successful picture. But by that time I’d lost all my credibility with the producers; my daily behavior was such that no one was interested in what I thought the ending should be.
The first snag that happened on this New York fantasy trip was that Harry didn’t come east with me. He said he was staying behind to rent out our house, something he was having difficulty doing. So, very disappointed, I went to New York without him but with very specific instructions to find an apartment in the East Sixties, between Fifth and Park avenues, but preferably close to Fifth, plus a house on Fire Island. Meanwhile I was having my teeth fitted and my nose fixed and my eyebrows bleached and trying to develop a character. But I pounded the pavements with a real estate person and came up with his dream apartment on East Sixty-eighth, and I also rented Annie Bancroft’s beach place on Fire Island. That made it all the more imperative to find someone for the house in Los Angeles, so I would call home every day and talk to Harry, but he still wasn’t having any luck.
I was also getting very involved with Bobby Kennedy’s primary campaign. Except for really unavoidable events like the Cuban missile crisis, when all the kids at school made plans to die together, politics was virgin territory to me, I had at best a smattering of awareness. I knew, for instance, who Martin Luther King was, but I had to do catchup work on exactly what King was doing in Selma, Alabama. This was also the period of my trying to make up for the college that I didn’t go to, I read and studied and worked hard at increasing my knowledge. And I truly did believe that Bobby could sweep the primaries, become president, and continue maybe a slightly different Camelot.
Right before I went to New York someone involved with the campaign asked me to go up to the University of Oregon in Eugene and speak for Bobby. I think my appeal to them was as the prototypical successful young woman: “We need people in the youth market, she’s good on talk shows, she’ll be good at this.” For my part, I was thrilled to be “stumping for a Kennedy.” I mean, my father was a cab driver, so this was quite a stretch.
I went up to Eugene and I made my little pitch, all very heady and exhilarating; my voice was shaking but it was obvious that I was sincere. It was supposed to go swimmingly for the senator, and like “Patty” and “Cathy,” I thought I’d be accepted everywhere, but when the open forum started, it was a disaster. I had walked into Eugene McCarthy territory, I
got hit with all the charges of “Kennedy ruthlessness,” and I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I was simply not sufficiently prepared, I didn’t have the facts to back me up, and I got wiped out. They hooted and booed and chanted and carried on until I was a wreck. I had been sent out to appeal to the youth element and I’d really fixed that for him, hadn’t I? I was just heartbroken. Obviously at this point I had single-handedly cost Bobby the election.
Until the New York apartment was ready, I was living very well, thank you, in the Sherry Netherland Hotel. On the night of the California primary, June 5, I was having dinner with one of my agents and some friends. There was a lot of stimulating political talk and speculation, but we were all eager to get back to our respective televisions and watch what had been predicted as a Kennedy victory.
I hadn’t been in my hotel room for fifteen minutes before Bobby was declared the winner, and I called Harry. No answer. I was kind of disappointed that I couldn’t share this with him and wondered where he was. Then the candidate started speaking, and it was thrilling, and I was dialing again and I still didn’t get Harry. Then they followed Bobby through the kitchen and he was shot and I lost it. I thought I had hallucinated what I saw. I called Harry and there was still no answer. I got the operator and begged her to stay on the phone with me, I became truly hysterical. I kept saying, “They did it! They killed him, they killed him, they killed him, they killed him!” The operator didn’t know what I was talking about, I couldn’t get the name out, and then her switchboard went crazy and she had to leave me.
Even once I got some semblance of control, I wouldn’t turn off the television. Wallowing in it was important to me, especially because the Rosses, without offering any reason, hadn’t let me watch any of the J.F.K. coverage, not even the funeral. The entire world had a communal catharsis, and I didn’t get to participate. So part of my mania about Bobby was a determination that not one more thing was going to happen without my paying attention.
Besides watching the coverage, I was obsessed with finding Harry. I kept dialing him at home, then I called everyplace I knew of that he could possibly be, and either got no answer or people saying, “No, he’s not here, haven’t seen him.” I did that continually until nine o’clock in the morning (six A.M. California time), when he finally answered the phone.
As soon as I heard Harry’s voice, I got hysterical all over again. He kept saying, “Yes, yes, it’s terrible,” and then I remembered to ask, “And where were you when all this happened?” It never occurred to me that he was anyplace he shouldn’t have been, but when he told me he’d been at a party at the Playboy Mansion it sounded terrible to a wife who was three thousand miles away. I’ve been there since and I know that not very much really goes on, but at the time it was enough to send me into absolute fits. At the goddamn Playboy Mansion? Partying? No, he told me, he was out so late because he was watching the coverage. And I bought it. I certainly didn’t want to even think he was screwing around.
Once I calmed down, I called a woman named Sandy Smith. We’d met quite recently but we became close friends very fast—we were like Munchkins together. I arranged to go out to see her at her house on Fire Island for the weekend, and once there we shared the kind of hysteria you see at Irish wakes, denial via a little too much hilarity and partying. That weekend and the one after it I also met her husband, Lucky Lewis, who was adorable and fun and seemed incredibly wealthy. Sandy didn’t have to say a word and she got anything she could possibly desire; she just breathed and she got a boat, a house, round-the-clock limo service, I mean, this was Diamond Jim Brady. But, of course, I’m married to Mr. Beautiful, so it doesn’t matter that we don’t have any money, all’s right with the world.
Lucky and I would travel back to the city together and on the second trip he said he was going to be in the city all week and if I was lonely, he’d love to take me to dinner, did I like lobster, he knew a lot of great places. The next day there were flowers waiting for me when I got home from work and a card that said, “I love getting to know you,” with a scribbled signature I finally figured out to be “Lucky.” I thought that was nice and then I forgot about it.
About a week later Harry, who’d managed to make a special appearance for Bobby Kennedy’s funeral and then was quickly back in California again, showed up for good. He loved the apartment, which was done in a very stark but elegant way, and after he’d been there awhile he noticed the card from the florist. The flowers were long dead and thrown away but the card was in full view on the dining room table.
“What’s this?” he said, and held up the card.
“Oh, it came with some flowers.”
“Who were they from?” with that edge in his voice.
“I think they’re from Sandy’s husband, but I’m not sure.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I met him at their beach house, he’s a really nice guy.”
I went on chattering and he was just staring at me. Finally I stopped and he said, “Why did he send you flowers? What did you do for him?”
“What do you mean? I didn’t do anything for him. Are you accusing me of having an affair with Lucky Lewis?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. I just have a right to know who sent you flowers and why.”
He kept digging and digging until finally he had me saying something like “Go to hell” and then denying over and over again that I’d done anything wrong. It was a very tense evening, with a lot of ugly energy underneath. The next morning, which was the start of the July Fourth weekend, Harry picked up the card again and said, “You can tell me. What’s this all about?” I kept repeating that there was nothing to talk about and he kept insisting that there was.
We were out all day on this little scooter I’d learned to ride for the movie, but in the evening, sitting around the apartment, having wine and making plans for the Fourth, he started in again.
“Look, you really can tell me.”
“I’m telling you, nothing happened.”
“Maybe it isn’t Lucky. Who is it?”
“It’s no one! I’ve been working! I put a funny nose and funny teeth on! I’ve been finding houses and apartments and going to the supermarket! I didn’t do anything!”
And then he said, “But you’d like to, wouldn’t you?”
At that point we got into almost an encounter session, a deep, seemingly loving conversation in which Harry asked for my trust in him and admitted that during his first marriage he had screwed around a lot. He said that while he’d acted on his wishes, some people just think about it, and there’s no crime in thinking about it.
“Have you ever thought about it, Pat?”
“No, I don’t think so—maybe.”
And that was it. All of a sudden the tone changed.
“Oh. So you do think about it.”
“Well, no. You asked me, and it’s possible that I’ve thought about it. I was just trying to be honest.”
Then it deteriorated into, “That’s it, it’s all over,” and he left, saying he couldn’t talk to me anymore, he needed to cool off. Whether he was really convinced that I’d had an affair, or just wanted me to think that he was convinced, I’ll never know.
What I did eventually discover was the reason he took so long to get to New York: he had a lady in Los Angeles. When I did go back to California after Me, Natalie ended and went to the house to pick up some things, the pool man asked me if that blond-haired woman who’d been staying at the house while I was gone was my sister. “Oh, her,” I said casually. “No, no, she’s not my sister.” I had no idea who she was, but I soon found out. I think that what all those accusations were about was that Harry was looking for a way out. The best defense, they say, is a good offense, and it was much easier to have me be the bad guy than him.
There were some phone conversations after he left, I begged and I pleaded, and Harry came back. He said he realized he was wrong, and we had a great day just riding around the city. But something had happened o
n both sides, something important had been lost for me as well. My heart was broken. I thought I was madly in love with him, and I guess, considering what I knew of love at the time, I was. But you can’t play that kind of cat-and-mouse game and catch the mouse and have the mouse trust you anymore.
The result was that I started wondering, asking myself questions. If this is over, what the hell am I going to do? Jeez, could I sleep with someone else? And then I began to play the game with him. When he started again, my answer, instead of being, “No, I didn’t,” was “What if I did?” We baited each other until there was just a huge explosion of screaming and yelling and throwing things—we practically destroyed the elegant Fifth Avenue apartment—ending with his screaming, “Go fuck yourself,” and my coming back with “I’ll learn.” When I fight with a spouse, there is a deadly turn of phrase that comes to me, and I won’t edit anything. He left, and that was it. I never lived in that great house in L. A. again. That was the end.
We did have a couple of brief return bouts. One weekend he came out to Fire Island, we made love, and fought, and made love, and fought. Or I’d get him to come over to the apartment for an evening, to try to talk rationally, and a fight would erupt. I’d threaten to take sleeping pills (I’d concocted some cock-and-bull story and gotten someone on the set to give me some) and there would be huge fights over that. “You’re manipulating me,” he’d say. “You’re toying with me, you’re not going to do this. Stop calling me, call a psychiatrist.” One time I actually attempted to take pills in front of him. Not enough to kill, only enough to aggravate. But he never knew how many there were and I certainly wasn’t going to tell him the truth.
