by Patty Duke
The publicist had tried to keep me from going to the press area, but the flow just pushed me there. Then I was up on a platform answering questions angrily and accusingly, telling the world I was rejecting the award. I said I was getting out of show business, I was going to be a doctor. It was as if some other creature took over inside me and was picking answers out of the air, the more outrageous the better.
Desi and I and the rest of the group went to a club called Pip’s to party, but I kept switching from hyper to angry to confused, making everybody, including Desi, very uncomfortable. A lot of whispering went on, and I kept demanding to know what everyone was whispering about all the time. We went home early, my mother and I stayed alone in my apartment, but I didn’t sleep. I cried a lot, but I didn’t know why. They were the kind of tears that come from a very old hurt.
The next day David Licht called and said he was coming over to see me at the apartment, which was highly unusual. When he arrived he asked me to please go into the Westwood Psychiatric Hospital again. I said, “Absolutely not.” I was feeling very lucid at this point, very clever, at least ten steps ahead of him. A couple of days later we had a similar encounter, and I told him I knew I needed help but I didn’t think the Westwood was the answer. He continued to implore, in fact, he became so distressed that I felt sorry for him. Finally I said, “Okay, screw it, what’s the difference? I’m not doing anything else this week anyhow.”
We showed up at the Westwood the same day. And as soon as I got there I knew there was no way I was going to stay in that place. So when they handed me the standard forms to sign, I decided I was going to read every last word on them. And as I read, I started to cross out things like their right to give me shock treatments and intravenous chemical therapy.
Finally David Licht said, “All right, what’s this game you’re playing now?” I told him I’d go in if he wanted me to, but I wasn’t going to allow them to do anything they pleased to me. He asked the staff person if that was okay and was told, “No, we can’t accept that. If she doesn’t sign the form as is, we can’t admit her.” Then David, this huge bear of a man, started literally begging me to sign, but I was adamant about shock and chemicals. Finally something acceptable was worked out and I was admitted, but from that very minute I started scheming how I was going to get out.
The next day I saw my old friend Grandpa again. The last time he’d seen me I was a frightened little girl who wouldn’t open her mouth. Now I was this terror, screaming, “I’m not taking your goddamn drugs.” You can imagine what must have been going through his mind.
I wound up being at the Westwood about three days, at the end of which I had a physical encounter with an attendant. I’m talking about fighting down halls and through doorways. I eventually managed to wiggle out of his grasp and escape. Like the time before, at Mount Sinai, the attendant was trying not to hurt me and I took every advantage of the situation. The amount of power a person has when she is so completely out of control is extraordinary. Once I got outside the building I just ran and ran and ran until I saw a cab and told the driver to take me to the Sierra Towers. I was eventually convinced to go back in, but that didn’t last very long either. I was way beyond anyone’s power to control, especially my own. I was as close to a severe nervous breakdown as I ever want to get, on the brink of losing my mind for real.
TWENTY-SIX
On June 24, 1970, a man I barely knew asked me to marry him. Less than five hours later we were husband and wife. The relationship lasted thirteen days. If he walked into a room today, I wouldn’t recognize him. His name was Michael Tell.
It all started earlier in June with The Paisley Convertible, a bedroom farce I was going to do onstage in Chicago only because I needed the money. As I was leaving the Sierra Towers one morning I heard a man asking the switchboard operator if there were any apartments available to sublet. I introduced myself and the man told me his name was Michael Tell. I said I might be gone for a couple of months, and asked if he’d like to see the place. He came up, said it was fine, and I told him I’d get back in touch if the play came through.
I called him in a day or two to say I was going to Chicago, and he asked if he could come over that evening to see the place again. Like a fool, I offered him a drink, which he took. He looked at the apartment, but how long can you look at a one-bedroom apartment? He told me he was a rock promoter; I didn’t even know what that meant. Could he buy me dinner? No, not really. Could he go out and get us some sandwiches? No thanks.
Next day he was back, this time with a deposit for the apartment. I was cleaning out some shelves and he noticed a Monopoly game on the floor.
“Oh, I love Monopoly,” he said. “Don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Gee, we ought to get together a group and play before you go.”
“Yeah, that’d be fun.” Whatever.
Later that evening the phone rang and it was Mike. “I wanted to show some friends the place I’ll be renting. How’d you like to play some Monopoly?” I don’t know why I said yes, I just said yes. The game ended about three A.M. and he asked if I’d like to have lunch the next day. And still, no romantic thing ever clicked in my head. As I’ve said, it’s not the first thing that occurs to me. Not that I can’t be sensual or sexual when I want to be, it’s just that ever since high school I’ve thought of myself first as the buddy, the pal.
I went to Chicago, and Mike kept calling me there; it became apparent in the phone calls that he was attracted to me. I was charming back—this was a pal—but I was always aloof. I never felt anything for him romantically, not then or later. Meanwhile I was having problems of my own. I became a complete insomniac in Chicago, and on top of that I was beginning to experience morning sickness. I was physically exhausted, just bouncing off the walls.
I think I managed a whole two days of rehearsals but I’d been sleepless for at least ten days and it was obvious that I was sick and incapable of performing. David Licht was called and though the theater people were very angry, I was excused from the play. I was so out of it, I left my Oscar, which the theater had insisted on for a lobby display, as well as two dogs I’d acquired, behind in Chicago.
David Licht tried to talk me into going into a hospital, but I refused. I just wanted to go to bed. I’d called Mike and told him that while he wouldn’t have to get out of there in ten minutes, I needed the apartment back. When I arrived I asked him to call Desi and tell him I was there, and then I completely collapsed. I don’t have any idea how long I slept, it could have been days.
Then Desi called. I talked to him on the phone and got hysterical as usual. Mike was there, being very solicitous. Was I hungry? Did I want some coffee? Could he do anything for me? I sort of sat around staring for most of the day. Mike left and Desi came over and we argued about his spending more time with me, the regular stuff.
After Desi left, Mike came back and I was very upset, going on and on about being pregnant and not being married.
“You want to get married?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I answered. It was that simple. Never did the word love cross either set of lips.
“You mean it?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Great. We’ll go up to Vegas, we’ll call my parents, they’ll set it up.”
And within two hours we were on a plane to Las Vegas, where the ceremony took place in one of those silly chapels. His family was there—I remember being amazed how it had all been pulled together so fast. I think there was a bridal bouquet, but that’s as far as my memories go. I’ve been told the ring was borrowed, and that I talked through the entire ceremony, and while that’s entirely possible, I have no recollection of it. David Licht saw the news on TV and had a fit. He called Sandy Smith and said, “Where is she? She just married some asshole I never heard of!” Sandy said, “She didn’t tell me she was doing it either,” which was the truth. I hadn’t told anyone, I’d just gone and done it.
What was my reasoning, if you can call it that? Maybe I wanted to be the good little Catholic girl, which meant finding a husband since I was pregnant, but I don’t remember thinking that. What was in my head when I said, “Yeah,” the thought I didn’t say out loud, was, “I can get along with anybody. I can marry you or I can marry Joe Blow across the street or I can marry the waiter at Hamburger Hamlet. My life is worthless, it doesn’t matter anyway.” It was, on my part, at least, a purely self-destructive act.
As to Mike Tell’s motivations, it’s sheer speculation. I don’t know a thing about him, not a thing. Similarly, I don’t think the man could possibly have been in love with me: he didn’t know me. He had these Mike Todd delusions, had me telling people we were going to build an ark in the desert as a rock promotion because it was going to rain for forty days and forty nights. Maybe he was an operator who saw an easy mark. Or maybe he was just as crazy as I was.
After we got married, the first thing I did was go around to various casinos paying off his markers. Wherever we were, Mike was always on the phone, wheeling and dealing. He never ate, the guy weighed like eleven pounds. And that was before he’d go into the steam room and “shvitz.” Really, he made Gandhi look fat. Though what was visible between us on the surface was a forced, hysterical kind of gaiety, in fact our whole time together was a most unpleasant experience. I remember not excitement, not happiness, but utter panic. It was like being pinned to the side of a centrifuge, unable to escape.
At one point Mike decided he wanted to see his relatives in New Jersey, and, not wanting to deprive my new husband of anything—this new husband in a marriage which incidentally was never consummated—I figured, what the hell. He thought it would be fun to rent a Learjet. And while we were at it, we’d pick up my dogs in Chicago. It was on the way, wasn’t it? The total bill, I’ve been told, came to fourteen thousand dollars.
Things really fell apart in New York. I did a Dick Cavett Show on which I said very few things which made any sense and Cavett was ruthlessly unsympatheic; he just used it for all it was worth. John Astin, I later learned, happened to see this show and couldn’t figure out what had happened. What was I doing married to this guy? I announced on the air that I was pregnant, but who was the father? John wondered. And why was I behaving so strangely?
After the show Mike and I went back to our hotel and had a huge argument. There was a table set up like a bar in the suite and I just started taking glasses off it and throwing them at the plate glass window. I’m talking about forty glasses; the window did not break but there was shattered glass everywhere. Then, panicked, I called Annie Bancroft; I hadn’t seen her in a long time, but I told her I was in real trouble. And she helped me. She came to the hotel and got in touch with David Licht and arrangements were made for me to fly back to Los Angeles immediately and be hospitalized for rest.
I told Mike he had to get out of my apartment, that this marriage was insane and I was going to divorce him if I couldn’t get an annulment (which I did receive about a year later). There was no conscious decision-making process going on for me here; something inside simply said, “Whatever roller coaster this is you’re on, it’s over. You have to stop this. Now.” And I never saw or heard from Michael Tell again. Not a word.
Physically, emotionally, even financially—because David Licht had put a stop to my account—I was looking at the biggest accumulation of trouble even I’d ever seen. As far as I knew, there was absolutely no way out of this feeling of hopelessness, craziness, and loss. If I hadn’t been pregnant, I would have committed suicide. Not one of those “someone will save me” attempts, but for real. And it turned out that it was being pregnant that finally provided me with the start of a way out.
TWENTY-SEVEN
From the moment my pregnancy became public knowledge, the question of who the father was was on everyone’s lips. The fan magazines really had a field day with that one. I didn’t have to read them to be aware of what they were saying; people didn’t hesitate to let me know. And there was such a glut of stories that for a while you couldn’t go into a supermarket without seeing the headlines or collages of pictures of me and Desi or me and Lucy that looked as if we might have been together although we really weren’t.
I considered those stories to be sleazy, slimy, and scurrilous; I suffered a great deal from them and I still do. People who tell you that stuff doesn’t affect them are either lying because it’s necessary to cover their feelings, or else they’ve been through so much that they have become inured to it to a certain degree. Why did a woman as famous and respected as Carol Burnett sue the National Enquirer and go through all that trouble over a line in an article that probably was meaningless to all the rest of us? Because it wounded her deeply in an area that was important.
My crime during that time—and it was indeed a crime—was that out of fear I allowed people to assume the baby was Desi’s when I knew otherwise. In fact, there were times when I would nod in agreement or say something in such a way that, without straight-out declaring, “This is Desi’s kid,” I was implying as much. And I took no active part in disclaiming Desi as the father, which when you get right down to it was just as bad. One of the ways that I’m able to live with that and everything else that went on during our relationship is that Desi knew then and knows now that no matter how screwed up I was, or how thoroughly I might have been messing up his life, those were the actions of a person who really did love him but who was too sick to be fully in control of her actions.
The motive for my behavior was all kinds of terror. I was unmarried, pregnant, and I thought, “I can’t tell John, John’s married. I can’t tell Desi, because if I tell Desi about John, he’ll throw me over and then where will I be? Desi doesn’t seem to mind the way things are, maybe I can just leave it alone and it’ll go away.” I was out of touch with reality, allowing the world to believe what it wanted to believe; like an addict, I would agree to anything if it would get me through the next hour. If you said I had three heads, I’d agree with you. If you said, “Let’s get married this afternoon,” I’d agree with you. If you said, “It’s Desi’s baby,” I’d agree with you.
Although I have always been hurt by the speculations about Sean’s parentage, not the least of those affected by the cloud I created has obviously been Sean himself. He’s, of course, well aware of all the rumor and the scandal, although when he was little he used to get confused. He’d watch I Love Lucy and when Desi, Sr., came on, he’d say, half horrified, “Mom, that one?” or he’d get Desi confused with all those other Hollywood “juniors”; once Sean saw Sammy Davis, Jr. on some show and said, “Now, that’s the guy everyone thinks is my father, right?” Other people also get mixed up; they lose track of time and ask my younger son, Mack, “Isn’t Lucille Ball your grandmother?”
Once John and I got together we started talking to Sean about all this when he was quite young; we wanted to safeguard him against some kid bringing it up in a playground, the way children repeat things they hear. We knew we couldn’t stop people from speculating till the cows come home, but we wanted him to hear the truth. So he knows about my confusion at the time, about my certainty that John is his father because of the timing of conception, and as far as he’s concerned, John Astin is his father, period. He can be very sweet about it also. He said to me recently, “Dad’s my father because he’s been my father, because he changed my diapers and taught me Little League. I believe that his sperm made me, too, but even if I didn’t, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s my dad.”
Still, we’re all aware that the more popular Sean gets, and the more interviews he has, the greater the possibility that he’ll be asked the sixty-four-dollar question with greater frequency. But he’s a remarkable kid, and he’s got his own way of not so much putting on blinders as separating the wheat from the chaff. He considers what kind of a person it is who’d be asking a question like that, and doesn’t allow himself to be hurt by someone who shouldn’t be in a position to hurt him. His attitude
is, “I’ve got other things to do, I can’t be bothered with this stuff.”
Even so, I myself haven’t quite stopped worrying that this issue of his parentage may come up again for Sean in a crisis, the way it sometimes does for children who are adopted. And in truth, John had to adopt him, because there was only one name—mine—on his birth certificate. Sean has talked to me about that too. “Isn’t it silly that my own father had to adopt me!” As I said, he’s a remarkable kid.
Just because I’d managed to extricate myself from Michael Tell didn’t mean that I’d succeeded in calming myself down. I’d still do things like rent a plane to take me from Las Vegas to Palm Springs when there was no urgency about the trip whatsoever. That was purely manic behavior—spending money for things you don’t need, having no idea why you’re spending it, just feeling compelled to buy, to do, to go. On one particular trip there was a stewardess who went by the name of Bobbie Jo. She was a tough, nasty cookie, with platinum hair with black roots, and eyebrows that were all tweezed out and then penciled in. She claimed to be the daughter of a famous gangster, and she certainly looked the part.
Bobbie Jo, however, told me a very sad story about the trouble she was having supporting herself and her baby. Now, I didn’t know this woman from a hole in the wall, and the flight from Vegas to Palm Springs is not very long, but before we landed I’d invited her to live with me. I told her we’d take the plane back to Vegas, pick up her child, and then find a house in the desert where we could raise our babies together.
And that’s exactly what I did, except that in the next two weeks we made friends with yet another stray woman and invited her to stay with us too. Not to mention the four dogs we had somehow accumulated. Then the other woman left and I had to go back to L.A. to be near my obstetrician, so Bobbie Jo was left in charge. Right before Sean was born I got a message through my agent that there had been a problem with the house and all the dogs were in the veterinarian’s kennel in Palm Desert.
