by Patty Duke
I don’t remember anything more until I regained consciousness after having my stomach pumped, but Sandy has told me the story many times. She got up in the morning and was suspicious about the way I looked; I seemed to be in a very deep sleep. She roused me with difficulty but I insisted I hadn’t done anything, I was just exhausted and needed some rest. She walked me from my cot into the bedroom and everything seemed fine.
Sandy left to talk to Joel, a hairdresser who was a mutual friend. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “It sounds like she took an overdose.” Sandy said I was up and walking, but he insisted she go back and look in on me again. And, in fact, what I’d done was hide some of the pills in my bathrobe pocket, and, when I realized I wasn’t dead, taken those while Sandy was gone. So by the time she got back I was absolutely out cold; she couldn’t wake me at all.
In a panic Sandy called everybody she could think of, including Joel, who came over and helped try to rouse me. She tried Harry, who’d had it by this point; he said he didn’t give a damn. She called my manager, who didn’t want a doctor brought in because an ambulance would mean adverse publicity. Finally, knowing I’d been dating Frank Sinatra, she called and reached him immediately. “Aw, Jesus Christ,” he said, and agreed to call somebody who could deal with the situation. And it was his doctor who got me quietly into Cedars, where I was on the critical list for close to a week. I do remember that doctor, a real show biz type, dressed to the teeth, with an attitude that suggested “I don’t have time for this kind of nonsense from you Beverly Hills broads.” It was not an approach I responded to.
According to Sandy I was literally foaming at the mouth because of all the pills I’d taken; she really thought I was going to die. And in terms of how long the pills were in my system, plus the fact that I’d changed my pattern and hadn’t alerted someone first but had done it while everyone was asleep, this was the most serious of all my suicide attempts. Yet, even this time, in my own mind killing myself was never an end, it was only the means toward a goal of being oblivious to the pain I felt. I didn’t want to live the way I was living, and there seemed to be no way out except to stop living, period.
Today I often think of how incredibly lucky I was. There was always, I guess, something inside of me that figured I’d be rescued, but if you play around that way long enough, you are going to have that terrible accident. I would always show remorse afterward, because that’s what was expected; if you don’t, they put you in the booby hatch. But inside, there was no sense of relief that I was alive. I didn’t think, “Oh, thank God, I’ve got another chance,” but rather, “Oh, shit! Now I gotta do this again.”
There is one thing that is truly and permanently awful about ever having attempted suicide, and that has to do with the people who love you. One of the things I treasure most is their faith in me, their trust in me, but there’s no way I can tell them, “I won’t do that again,” and be totally believed. They have to live with that fear, and I have to live with knowing that. The people you love most in the whole world—you’ve done something that will always cause them pain.
TWENTY-THREE
Harry didn’t come to see me while I was recuperating. It was a calculated choice, and I think the right one. He knew our marriage was finished, and felt it would be misleading and unkind to do anything that would lead me to think otherwise. And after our confrontation on that rainy night, all overtures toward him stopped. There may still have been a longing, a ray of false hope, but really I knew as well as he did that it was over.
When I think back on Harry and me, certainly the lion’s share of the disaster of that marriage was mine. Not that he wasn’t deficient in a lot of ways, but that was always over-shadowed by my illness. What he had to deal with was terrible, terrible—living with someone so troubled, perpetually in and out of crisis. I think Harry’s immaturity and the fact that his head got kind of turned around when he came to Hollywood didn’t help, but he’s no less a good person because of that. He was just at his wit’s end, worn out dealing with me.
I’d built myself the perfect storybook fantasy, and it wasn’t good enough. Why wasn’t it good enough? There’s really no way to explain that. I didn’t just have “emotional problems,” there was something wrong inside, things were out of balance. I had a disease, but no one knew it.
And the fact that I was so young certainly didn’t help, though my age was not so much the culprit as my lack of experience with life. It’s like being in a pod: someone opens it, or in my case you force it open, and there you are, in a completely alien world. There are things expected of you, or you think there are, and you haven’t a clue how to respond. You don’t know the language on the manner or the behavior. I believe if I’d somehow been able, then, to be more the person I am now, I would probably still be married to the man. Or we’d be divorced for different reasons, maybe because one of us outgrew the other. But we never got that far, we never got to figure out if anybody was outgrowing anybody. I still think I have excellent taste in husbands. It’s just that my timing leaves something to be desired.
For several months after I recovered from those pills, I went through a very lethargic period. I was overweight, I wasn’t working—it seemed like I couldn’t get a job. There was no night life to speak of, and no manic activity either. I was just sort of getting through every night and every day.
Then I got a call about My Sweet Charlie, which I’d previously missed out on because I’d been in the Westwood when the play was rehearsing for Broadway. Levinson and Link had now turned it into a TV movie and Bob Banner, the producer, wanted me for the female lead. I had to meet with Bob and Lamont Johnson, the director, at the same Stefanino’s restaurant where I’d been picked up by Frank Sinatra. Though nobody said it in so many words, I think they wanted to look me over and make sure I was functional.
I was very nervous about being scrutinized that way, but I was excited when I passed the test and pleased that I was going to do a job and make some money. But there wasn’t the feeling in me that exists now when I’m going to act, the anticipation of the process of creation. I was just sort of moving through time. I didn’t really kick into high gear till we got to our location at Port Bolivar, Texas, just outside Galveston.
Essentially My Sweet Charlie is a two-character drama. A teenage girl, I guess she would be considered poor white trash, takes refuge in an unoccupied house after being kicked out by her father, a hard-shell Baptist, because she’s pregnant. One night a black man in a three-piece suit breaks into the same house. He’s an elegant individual from the North who came down to be in a peace march and, in self-defense, killed a white man. He’s pretty bloodied, on the run from the police, and he needs this haven as much as she does.
So we have these two adversaries, the sophisticated black man and the bigoted white trash girl. In fact, my first line of dialogue was, “It’s a nigger,” which was very hard for me to say, it made me feel very self-conscious. Predictably, things develop between these two, from each not being able to stand the other to the point where, without ever touching each other, without even sitting next to each other, it’s obvious that they’ve fallen in love. She even teaches him to talk like a “nigra” so he can pass for a local and go shopping at the store.
He finally decides he has to go back up North, and there’s a very moving scene in which they say good-bye to each other. She goes into labor the morning he leaves, and he stops by the store to try to get a doctor for her. This time the locals get suspicious and the man ends up fleeing and being shot in the back. The last image you see is of the girl being helped into a police car. There’s a discussion about what she’s going to do with the baby, and you know she’s going to keep it and call it Charlie. It was a lovely story, as much a love story as a racial statement about the times. And in some ways the real-life relationship between me and Al Freeman, Jr., who played Charlie, paralleled what was happening in the piece.
When I arrived in Port Bolivar I was not terribly attractive. I was overw
eight and looked, a lot of people said, very much like Janis Joplin. Also, I had a fever blister the size of New Jersey on my lip. Lamont, Al, the writers, and I went out to dinner the first night and Al, though pleasant enough, had a very arrogant kind of attitude that put us all off. We were so paranoid that he was going to think we were bigots that we overcompensated, even pandered to Al, which made him even more arrogant. Yet I felt my liberal heart was in the right place: even though there’d been some racial trouble in the area, I’d insisted that I wouldn’t stay at a hotel unless he could stay at the same one if he so chose.
After dinner we adjourned to the producer’s suite to do a preliminary read-through of the script. There’s no way you’re going to hear award-winning performances the first time around, but everyone ends up expecting them anyway. As I said, I wasn’t the most appealing-looking person in the world, plus my clothes looked awful because I’d flown in them all day. And aesthetics turned out to be very important to Al; he himself was dressed to the nines and looked marvelous.
I don’t think we’d gotten ten pages into the script when Al stopped and went into his “black power” rhetoric. He felt his character was too much of an Uncle Tom, a sellout to the white world. Levinson and Link were defending their script and I was trying to interject some comments, so I could be part of the club, and Al kept snapping at me—“You don’t quite understand what it is I’m discussing here” or “I’m not talking to you.” I was not nearly as articulate in those days as I hope I am now, and I was easily intimidated, so my first reaction was to sniffle, and the effort I made in holding back the tears was obvious.
Whenever Al raised an objection, the powers that be kept calmly saying, “We’ll deal with that later.” But halfway through the script a screaming fight erupted, provoked by Al, and, once again, I tried to interject my opinion. And Al turned around and told me to shut up. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about and—this was the coup de grâce—why didn’t I go away and grow another fever blister.
At that point I told Al, at a vocal level that could not be misunderstood, that he could go fuck himself. I threw the script across the room, swept up the ugly little dog I’d brought with me from L.A.—which Al had also insulted—and stormed out of the room. Frankly, I was justified, but it would have been nice if I could have done it in a more gracious way.
I stood waiting by the elevator, my heart pounding in my ears. I was sure the boom was going to be lowered on this bad little girl. I could hear my agent saying, “You did what?” Maybe it was a holdover from my years with the Rosses, but I never felt that I was going to receive support if I made trouble, even if my actions were completely justified. And yet I knew that in this case I was right. This was not part of the creative process, the man was simply a rude son of a bitch.
While my mind was racing, the elevator was taking forever. It was one of those old relics that just eeeek their way down. Then I heard the door from the suite open and slam back against the wall. I kept pushing the button and looking straight at the elevator door: there was no way I was going to look down the hall and see who’d come out. And before I knew it, standing beside me was Al Freeman, Jr.
“We need to talk.”
“I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want to talk to anybody. I’m too angry and upset.”
The elevator finally arrived, I got in, and he did too. And he followed me all the way to my room, talking the whole time, apologizing, recognizing that he’d been a prick (his word) but insisting that though this thing had gotten out of hand he was sure if I was willing to work at it we could put it back together again.
By now, of course, I was in tears and felt I had nothing left to lose. So I invited him into my room and we talked for about twenty more minutes. I told him how deeply he’d hurt me, that I was not thrilled to have a fever blister myself. Then he said, “Let me just call the producers and tell them we’re at least talking to each other, because they’re all pissing in their pants upstairs.” That made me laugh for the first time.
After he hung up, he called room service, ordered some brandy for himself and Coke for me, and proceeded to absolutely enrapture me. He talked for hours and hours and I was just agog. His manner, his eloquence, the obvious brilliance of his mind, his grasp of politics and black history, were dazzling. And he applied all that to the script, talked about how we could make it better, it didn’t have to be this white-bread thing they were trying to shove down everyone’s throats, we could really make a statement here.
Before Al left that room, we’d become allies. We were united for a cause and we stayed that way throughout the picture. I cleaned up my act, lost weight, and the whole experience became a very intellectual, very stimulating time. I couldn’t wait to get up and go to work, to meet Al on the ferry going from Galveston to Port Bolivar and have him talk to me about what he’d seen in The New York Times. The crush I had on him was really more for his brain and his charm than wanting a physical thing, and gradually I realized that I’d rather have the crush than the actual love affair.
Al and I spent almost all our time together. We rarely hung around with the rest of the folks in the company, which is unlike me; I usually pal around with everybody. Because of the racial situation, being with Al was difficult in Port Bolivar, which was a depressing place anyway because of the weather. The air is so heavy there that you’re wet all the time, sweaty and smelly, and your clothes are wet, too, even hanging in the closet they’re wet. Al and I were flat out told we’d get in trouble at certain clubs: “You go one night, you go another, just don’t go there together.”
Al made a lot of trouble for Lamont Johnson, and I, of course, was now his cohort, so I was always backing him up. There were long discussions and arguments about scenes, and the poor guy was trying to direct on a television schedule. When Lamont wouldn’t agree with him, Al would say, “Okay, the hell with it. If that’s the way you want it, I’ll do it,” and then just walk through the scene. But when push came to shove, and the cameras were rolling for what was obviously going to be a valid take, he’d pull it together and give a performance and so would I. Basically, though, we were “the defiant ones” all over again.
Which was too bad because Lamont Johnson is the type of director I like to work with. He is a very urbane man, with a magnificent voice, and he knows enough not to plumb your soul with endless discussions. He gives you an idea of what he believes the scene is about, and then he has the courage to let you do what you do. I’ve worked with a lot of directors who don’t have that much sense, who go in there and just stomp on your sensitivities. Not that I believe actors are all little rosebuds that need to be handled with velvet gloves, but just as people need a physical space around them, actors need that same kind of space emotionally. If, without my being overpowered by a director’s affection, there exists a healthy respect and confidence between the two of us, so he doesn’t interrupt when I’m playing a scene, he’s going to get what he wants and he knows it.
The My Sweet Charlie shoot lasted four weeks, and one day, with only a week left, Bob Banner, the producer, came into my motor home. He’d always been very friendly to me, warm hugs and stuff like that, but this time there was something in the air. We chitchatted for a while, and then he said, “What I’m about to tell you is very confidential, but I feel you should be filled in. It’s suspected that at least one person in this company is involved with drugs. We’re not sure how far it’s spread, but there is a great deal of concern. The police have become involved, it’s a very touchy situation.”
“Really?” I said. “Who?”
“Well, I’m not exactly sure.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“Marijuana.”
“No kidding.”
Now, Bob must have been thinking, “Jesus Christ, this woman is either absolutely psychotic or the most brilliant actress I have ever met.” Because what I didn’t know was that prior to his coming to see me, the local police, acting on a tip, had searched my hotel room and t
aken a stash of grass out of my closet. The one thing I had going for me, however, was my height, or rather lack of it. The shelf was so high that even if I stood on a chair it would have been impossible for me to reach the stuff.
Bob didn’t tell me any of this. I didn’t learn what had happened until much, much later, so I went on asking these innocent questions and assuring him that I would put the word out that everyone should clean up his act. Because in those days drugs were not all over the place the way they are now, especially not in the South.
I don’t know if I’d convinced Bob or if he just wanted to finish his picture and get out of Port Bolivar as gracefully as possible. But he called Universal, and the story is that someone there called the governor, and the governor called the local authorities and said, “Lay off that company, and lay off the girl.”
I’ve never had any idea who planted the drugs in my room, or tried to find out why; maybe some of the townspeople thought Al and I were having an affair and felt threatened by that. Nor, once I returned home, did I make any effort to clear my name. It hadn’t occurred to me that it’d been muddied, but indeed it had. People at Universal thought I was using drugs, and for years I had the reputation of being a doper.
If it hadn’t been so damaging, that would have been funny, considering that the only time I’d tried marijuana, years before at a party, it had made me nauseated, and I didn’t know what a bong was until my kids told me. As for cocaine, I never even saw any until a driver on a TV show offered it to me, and his ears must still be burning. If I had been doing drugs during those crazy years, that would have been easy compared to what I went through. As dreadful as any addiction is, at least you know what you’re dealing with.
During the filming Al told me that his next project was directing a brief run of the LeRoi Jones play, Dutchman, in Cincinnati, and he asked if I wanted to costar with Cleavon Little. I was incredibly honored, even if I wasn’t paid very much. Al could have asked me to stand at the top of the Empire State Building and whistle “Dixie” and I would have done it.
