Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke

by Patty Duke

  The problems with David had started even before Mackie was born. He was an unhappy kid and Suzanne was having a bad time with him; like me, she was a very volatile person with limited patience. Even before John and I were married she told him that she couldn’t deal with David, that we had to take him. So we did, and the good part of me wanted to help this kid, to be the Great All-American Heroine. The competitive part wanted to be a better mother than Suzie. But David and I did not get along; we never managed to get on the same wavelength. For a while one of us would be kind and the other would be difficult, and then we’d switch roles. John and I kept David for six months, and then he decided he wanted to go back and live with his mother, which was devastating to me.

  Then, after Mackie was born, came the real crisis. There are many versions of the story, and for all I know the kids may well have provoked her, but the upshot was that one day Suzanne told them to go live with their father. They called, and we ran to get them; we hardly had a choice. There was great excitement about whether she would show up at our house and create a scene, but, in fact, with very few exceptions, she had no contact with the kids until quite recently. Suzanne must have been in terrible pain, and though I don’t approve of her actions, I understand now, as I didn’t then, the kind of spiritual and emotional fatigue and depression that leads to such behavior.

  The major contact we had with Suzanne was in 1974, when it was determined that I would adopt the boys and she decided she wanted to fight it. The kids brought up the idea before I did. They had all kinds of quirky little emotional reasons like wanting to write mother instead of stepmother on forms at school. I thought it would make them feel more secure, and both John and I wanted it because in the event something happened to him, at that time I had no legal standing in regard to these three children—I would’ve been unable to retain custody. But I had no desire to alienate the kids further from their mother, so it was made very clear to the boys what this was all about, that it had to be their choice, and no one would be pressuring them to do anything.

  Adoption day was very difficult for everyone, initially because it was the first time the three boys had seen their mother in a long time. Suzie, who’s a very attractive woman, looked strained, even distraught. First the boys went in individually to the judge’s chambers, and then Suzie and I were called in while everyone else waited outside. And she proceeded to be the worst witness she could possibly have been for herself; I hated to see this poor woman in that kind of misery. I was so broken up that my lawyer, Mitchell Dawson, who treats me like an equal, not like a daughter, told me if I didn’t pull myself together, I was going to have to leave the courtroom.

  It was a few months before we heard that my petition to adopt had been approved. It was great to get the news. It felt like a milestone, a chance for a new beginning. I hoped maybe all the screaming and ranting and raving that had gone on between the kids and their mother wouldn’t be repeated with me, but it pains me to confess I was unable to handle the situation. The frustration level was so great, I would scream my brains out at them. I would try to whack David, but he was too fast for me. It was everything I swore my life would never be if I had children. My God, the years of misery that went on in that house while publicly we were a perfect couple with an adorable family!

  For one thing, I hated our house. It’s very pretty now, but then it looked like Tobacco Road or a movie set that had been aged to resemble a deteriorating building. We lived in a pigsty, the accumulated mess of dogs and cats and birds and rats in cages, not to mention five kids. My reaction followed cycles, and at certain points I’d try to be very detached and say, “Okay, fine, the hell with it. I don’t have to clean it up, I don’t have to yell about it.” Everyone thought that was wonderful, of course, but then I’d explode again, I’d scream, “Who can live in this mess?”

  If I’d thought about my position as a stepparent more realistically, it might have made things a whole lot easier. From the moment the kids arrived, I assumed I was going to feel exactly the same about them as I did about Sean and Mack. I thought it was a crime if I didn’t. John’s attitude was, “Isn’t it wonderful that she loves them all the same? They’re all brothers, they’re all sons,” but it simply wasn’t true and trying to make believe it was true was an enormous burden on me and eventually on everyone. If I’d treated them as I felt toward them, which is what all the experts now tell you to do, it would have been so much more honest, and a lot of the games that developed between us never would have gotten started.

  A crucial element in all this was that because I loved John and he loved me I wanted to do everything I could to please him, I wanted to be the good little wife. Taking the children in was what he wanted, so I wanted it too. As for adopting them, how could that be anything but pleasing to a man who says, “The most important thing is that if I die, you will raise them.”

  So I’d try and do things his way. Oh, how I tried to be reasonable and understanding and gentle and kind and rational—for the first fifty-six times I’d ask them to do something. Then, at the fifty-seventh time, I’d scream my bloody lungs out. And that’s when John would walk in the door and say, “Now, Anna, you’re supposed to be the adult here. There’s nothing wrong with the children; it’s you.” And then, of course, the heat would be off the kids because John and I would get into an argument that would last till morning.

  What you have to understand is that John had the capacity to tune things out to such a degree that it became a family joke. You could talk to him for ten minutes and then come back an hour later and say, “What do you think about what I asked you?” and he’d have no recollection that you had even been in the room. He did that with the children too. Of course he was patient with the kids. He didn’t hear them!

  When David and Alan made and set off genuine Molotov cocktails in the backyard, for instance, the extent of John’s reaction was: “Boys, I don’t think that’s something you should be doing.” I could see their eyes go blank, the way one actor sees another actor’s go blank when he doesn’t know the next line. They knew if they sat there long enough, John would get finished umming and aahing and pausing and rationalizing and they’d be set free. Which is exactly what always happened.

  Those kids never knew the meaning of limits, and it hurt them. When they started using marijuana, I said, “They’re doing drugs,” and John would answer, “No, they’re not. I asked them and they told me they weren’t.” I would persist, but he would flat out refuse to believe me over the boys. He would say, “Why don’t you like David?” He forgot I was closer to their age than I was to his, and even though I had had a very different childhood, I could see exactly what they were doing.

  David left the house when he was eighteen. It was one of the worst times I’ve ever been involved in, but I felt his leaving was the best thing. I knew staying wasn’t doing him any good. He’d come in at two in the morning with six or eight of his friends, waking up the little ones, maybe taking a dozen steaks out of the freezer and cooking dinner in the middle of the night. But more than any specific incidents, it was the way David manipulated John and me into hassles that I couldn’t bear anymore. John begged me not to do to David what his other mother already had, and the realization that I was doing that broke my heart, but finally I said, “Yes, I am. Because now I know how she feels.”

  Al, the next oldest, left without being asked; he didn’t want to be obligated to us and chose to live on his own. He’s a follower of Swami Muktananda, bright and sunny and happy as a clam. I have great admiration for Al; he’s fully self-supporting, he owes nothing to anyone. In fact, my relationship with all three of the boys, David and Tom as well as Al, has evolved so that it is now the best it’s ever been. We’re in touch often, and all the feelings between us are richer and more accepting. They’re either working or in school, they have ambition and initiative and goodness, and they’re doing fine. I just wish I could have made the road easier for them. I did not.

  THIRTY

  I was g
etting into my car outside a restaurant called The Bistro in Beverly Hills one afternoon near the end of 1970 when a man came up and started to talk to me. He said his name was Joe Stich, and I guessed he wanted a date, but somehow we started talking business talk and he gave me his card. And when I had a breakup with my manager, David Licht, I gave him a call. He and a guy named Bob Irwin (which turned out to be an alias) came to see me and convinced me they should be my business managers.

  What I knew about business could fit on the head of a pin, and in those days I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to realize that an attempted pickup in a restaurant parking lot is not the best recommendation for someone who is going to be given carte blanche to handle your money. I would sign anything these guys put in front of me. I just didn’t want to be bothered by what I felt were unimportant details.

  In early 1972, when John and I were together but unmarried, I was on location in Duluth shooting a scary film called You’ll Like My Mother about a young pregnant girl who was in all kinds of jeopardy. I got sick with what turned out to be a kidney infection, but the production company thought I was malingering so they called Irwin, my business manager, who told them—and me—that in his opinion, John was the real problem, that he was jealous of the working relationship I had with Irwin and was causing me unnecessary grief. “It’s all his fault, look what he’s doing to you,” Irwin said. “If you weren’t taking care of John’s kid David as well as Sean, you wouldn’t be exhausted all the time.” I happened to be going through a period of doubt about my relationship with John, and here was an ally saying, “See? See? Poor thing, look what he’s doing to you.” The reason Irwin attacked John so roundly, I later found out, was that John had become suspicious of how he and Stich were handling, or mishandling, my finances and had started to snoop around. Irwin retaliated by trying to poison my mind against John. Unfortunately, I bought it, hook, line, and sinker.

  So when John came to Duluth to see me, I wasn’t able to just calmly talk this out with him. A major scene developed, with some of it, unfortunately, taking place at the hotel, where other people could hear. The upshot was that the company told John that he had to get out of town because he was upsetting me, that I wasn’t working up to my capacity. None of this was true, but the scene between John and me was not something you’d want others to witness, and John got a bad reputation for disrupting a production.

  I was able to confront these men only months later after I was brought into an office in a Sears store in Los Angeles where I was trying to buy paint. The Sears people took my card away, said, “Come with us,” and informed me how long it had been since Sears had seen any of my money. That was the day John finally decided he had to tell me what he’d known for a long time but had hesitated to bring up. He’d been afraid that I wouldn’t believe him and that that whole Duluth chasm would open up all over again.

  The embezzlement scheme used against me was complex enough that it took the district attorney’s office two years to prepare the indictment. Over the three years those guys had been my business managers, I’d accumulated six hundred thousand dollars worth of bills, hadn’t paid my taxes for three years, and was in danger of having my house foreclosed on. Once the grand jury acted against Irwin and Stich, they immediately brought a countersuit against me for two million dollars for slander. The reason they sued was to be able to take my deposition, during the course of which questions were asked which were designed to spook me.

  “Isn’t it true that you slept with Mr. Stich?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t it true that you were hospitalized for alcoholism?” “No.”

  “Isn’t it true that you were hospitalized for drug addiction?”

  “No! You can get the records.”

  “We’re not interested in records. We just want to know what you have to say.”

  The plan was obviously to get me so upset I’d drop the case rather than have to go through questioning like that in open court. And I did freak out, I went home on the Friday afternoon before the trial and didn’t get up until Monday morning except to beg John to find some way out so I wouldn’t have to do this. There was much hysteria that weekend. Monday came and the attorneys didn’t want me down at the courthouse until it was close to my time to testify, so I waited at home, a nervous wreck, with John. Even though I felt, “If I did it with a porcupine, what does that have to do with the fact that these people stole my money,” I sort of accepted the fact that I was going to be humiliated in court.

  Then the phone rang—the sound almost sent me through the roof—and John answered it and said, “Oh, I see. Uh-huh. Okay, okay. Well, you fill me in later.” It turned out my former managers had pleaded nolo contendere at the last minute. It was the only piece of justice I ever got. As for getting my money back, I received three checks through the Department of Correction. One was for fifty dollars, one for seventy-five and one for twenty-five. That was it.

  The money crunch, already hideous because of the embezzlement, got worse in 1973 when a Writers Guild strike in Hollywood made it impossible for us to work because we weren’t going to cross any picket lines. So John started asking agents about theatrical work, and that’s how our five years as touring actors, a regular Lunt and Fontanne, began. The official story was that we loved the theater so much we couldn’t resist dragging the whole platoon on the road, but the fact of the matter was, we started because we were flat broke.

  So when Mackie was two weeks old we hit the road with A Shot in the Dark. Our first stop was one of the oldest summer stock theaters in the country, Elitch’s Gardens in Denver, which had a wonderful history but happened to be located in an amusement park, where a roller coaster inevitably drowned out our best lines. The play was a piece of utter fluff but it was surprisingly difficult to do, like keeping up an old, cold soufflé. And the real problem was, because of my experience in Miracle Worker-type dramas, audiences thought they were coming to see the more serious Wait Until Dark. So it took a good twenty minutes to get people off the dime and realize that this was only a silly airhead comedy. Until then, there was dead silence out there. It felt like playing to a backdrop.

  The burden of keeping the play alive fell largely to John. Both in that play and the others we did, I was a very good straight man, and most of the time I was comfortable with that. There were occasional skirmishes, however. I’d come offstage and shriek at him for killing my one and only laugh, and if he could manage a word in edgewise, he’d point out to me that in fact I’d stepped on my own laugh, which would really annoy me.

  Most of the time, though, I thought he was an exceptional performer and I stood in awe of his gift. He taught me an awful lot about timing in those kinds of plays, about having the courage to wait, take a line, get the laugh, and then get off. All in all, we worked very well together and while we were performing we almost always had fun. If nothing else, being onstage was one of the few times during the day when we could talk to each other without being interrupted, even if the dialogue wasn’t our own. Nobody said, “Mom! Dad!” There may have been a whole audience of people out there, but we were alone.

  We got through the first season making, I think, ten thousand dollars a week plus a piece of the house, and that was all John needed to know. This was going to be our new way of life. Next came The Marriage Gambol, which we did for two seasons until I really got bored with it. The last place we played it was Seattle, and not only was that the one time we were not a hit, we were a big, bad bomb. I wasn’t used to that, I was very spoiled, and I couldn’t handle the failure. Within the space of hours I’d switch from deep depression and lethargy to crying and running around the house, threatening to kill myself, to finally taking the car and driving off in the ever-present rain. And then I said I wasn’t going to do the show. “I don’t have to do the show. There’s nobody to see the show. They hate me. I’m not doing it.” I was really in a bad way.

  As a sign of rebellion, I decided to get my ears pierced. John didn’t want me to. We had an a
rgument in the tea shop next door to the place I was going to get it done, and finally we accosted some old lady who was sitting there, minding her own business, having tea and crumpets. I said, “Excuse me. Could we ask you your opinion? This is my husband. I want to get my ears pierced, and he really has severe reservations about it. What do you think?” Now, mind you, I’d checked her ears out before I asked and they were indeed pierced. But she said sweetly to me, “I think you should do as your husband says.” It was the first time I had the urge to punch an old lady!

  Instead, I turned to John, who was sitting there smiling, and said, “The hell with you, I’m getting my ears pierced.” The process really hurt, and wouldn’t you know it, I got a dreadful infection and had lobes the size of grapefruit. But John never said a reproachful word, just, “Poor thing. Did you use your alcohol? Aw, poor thing.” And I thought, “Oooh, I’m gonna kill him.”

  While all this was going on, John and I got sent the script for My Fat Friend, which Lynn Redgrave had done on Broadway and which was currently the hot play on the circuit. I read it and I hated it, I thought it was the most vicious, ugliest play I’d ever read in my life. But since we were in this for the money and everyone was saying we’d be fools not to do it, I figured, what the hell. And it was not until John and I started playing the piece that I recognized that this was a much more profound play than I had ever realized, that what I’d thought of as viciousness had its roots in genuine understanding.

  Although there are other characters, the heart of My Fat Friend is the relationship between (what else but) a fat woman who runs a bookstore and her neighbor, a gay man who’s in the closet during the day but a flaming queen at night. A gorgeous young man comes into the bookstore and he and the fat lady fall madly in love. He goes off for a while and the gay man puts her on a regimen so that she loses a lot of weight and becomes a very attractive woman. But when the young man comes back, it turns out he didn’t love her: what he’d loved was her fat. And that’s when you realize that what you’ve been watching is a beautiful love story between the woman and the gay guy. Without actually saying the words, they tell each other about that love, but with the realization that the relationship can never go any further.