Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke

by Patty Duke

  One of the most lasting positive legacies I have from my time with the Rosses, aside from the great gift of acting, is an obsession with the truth. Because so much of my early life was filled with lies, clever distortions, and half-truths twisted to fit other people’s self-serving needs, I’ve sworn, “Goddamn you, now I will tell the truth.” I can take anything that anyone says to me, I may be hurt or ticked off, but I don’t completely reject the person. Unless they lie to me and I catch them. That’s absolutely intolerable.

  Both John and Ethel Ross have been dead for some time now, and it’s been more than two decades since they’ve had control over my life and career, yet I’m still not sure I can consider them with any kind of objectivity. A difficult fact that I’ve finally accepted is that there will never be a true resolution of my feelings, I’ll never finish with them till I’m dead. To me, there are people, and then there are the Rosses.

  Yet my feelings have become manageable and giving them their due, not compromising their integrity, is very important to me. I feel terribly responsible to people who are dead. Try as I might to be fair, I’m afraid they’re going to turn out to be the villains of this piece, and I wish that weren’t so. It’s obvious to me that had they not crossed my path, the likelihood of my becoming an actress was slim, and the joy of that far outweighs any of the pain. I know they started out with the best intentions toward me, but fame and success distorted their perspective.

  More than that, there is a goodness about them that they left behind in me, that they would have left behind in no one else. They made me into a real believer. I believe in hope, I believe you can change things. I saw what they did to me in a positive way and what they tried to do in a very negative one. Out of the agony that living with them became, a strength developed. I know that change can happen, and that you can recover.

  An example of that is my relationship with my mother. I’d made many overtures to her off and on during the years after I’d broken free of the Rosses, but either they were inept or she wasn’t ready or maybe she was afraid.

  About seven years ago I woke up one morning feeling very restless and needing to talk to my mother, who was living with my sister, Carol, in upstate New York at the time. I called and asked Carol, “What’s the matter with Momma? Something’s bothering me.” It turned out that my mother had become so severely depressed she had to be hospitalized at a psychiatric facility. I told Carol, “It’s my turn now. I’ll take over.”

  I called Dr. Arlen and told him what was happening. Then I called my mother, and her voice sounded so weak, it was as if she were willing herself to die. I really thought we were losing her this time. I kept her on the phone all day, until my sister could get over, and then I immediately flew to New York. Her room was tiny and barely lit, it looked like a funeral home. I took my mother’s hand and said, “You have to come with me. You have to trust me. I can help you.”

  We flew back to California together, and with Dr. Arlen’s help she made a complete turnaround in only four weeks. At times I lament that it took seventy years for her finally to get a lease on life, but on the other hand it’s certainly better that it happened late than never. She lives in her own apartment near my house and she’s a delight to have around—we laugh and have great times together. Things aren’t disguised anymore. When either one of us needs something, we speak up and deal with it. What with her hearing aid, cane, bifocals, and the rest, the kids call her the bionic grandma, but she plows right on.

  Having this reconciliation with my mother has been a kind of ultimate satisfaction for me. She’s the last, most important parental figure in my life, and when she dies there will have been a resolution that I was never able to achieve with any of the others. Our relationship has become almost too good to be true, and I cherish that.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Except for an occasional film role here and there, most of my adult career has been in television, not theatrical features, and my actor’s competitiveness has made that really bothersome at times. It was mind-boggling to have a whole market shut down to me. I think the problem has been that I’m perceived as “every-woman,” which is not the physical type of leading lady that’s been featured in movies for the last ten or fifteen years. I’m not exotic, I’m not a willowy Meryl Streep, I’ve got my own kind of sex appeal, but I’m not stereotypically sexy. That’s why I think if I’m ever going to be really hot in features, it’s going to be in my forties. Those are the types of mature roles I would really play well.

  Yet over the past several years I’ve stopped feeling like the bastard stepchild; I’m now comfortable being a television star. Of all the things done on TV, I get a crack at some of the best. I do some awfully good work and I’ve gotten eight Emmy nominations, more than any other straight dramatic actress, and it’s heartening to be respected by my peers. But what really has made the difference for me is my relationship with the public. When I walk around in a shopping mall or get on an airplane, there are no great crowds of screaming teenagers (or even screaming middle-aged folks) but rather a constant flow of people who find me very easy to approach and who tell me that when they see my name on a program, they know it’s something they want to watch. There is an awful lot to be said for feedback like that.

  Some of my roles, for all kinds of reasons, are more memorable than others. Who will ever forget (though I’d obviously like to) a Movie of the Week called Black Widow, in which I played a spider. Actually, I played a person who was a spider, but why quibble? Every day at six A.M. I’d report to a dark, freezing sound stage and have a piece of latex in the shape of an hourglass applied to my tummy. During the shooting the makeup man would lie on the floor, blow into a tube, and make the latex pulsate. Nice, Academy Award-winning actress standing there in black bikini underwear while a guy blows into a latex hourglass. Terrific stuff. And they wanted me to have some kind of a foreign accent, but I wasn’t allowed the time to develop one, so I sounded like my dog trying to do Marlene Dietrich. Oh, it was hideous, but I made some money.

  More positive experiences were three performances that brought me Emmy nominations. In 1976 there was Captains and the Kings, in which I played a character whose personality was supposedly modeled after Rose Kennedy. I aged from about sixteen to eighty-three and just had a ball waltzing around in those period clothes and playing the great lady. I was very surprised when the Emmy nomination came, and the night of the awards show I was as nervous as I’ve ever been professionally. Would I be able to wipe out the memory of 1970? All five kids went, all in tuxedos, and I wanted an Emmy just for getting them dressed. When I won, I finished my speech by saying I was the most grateful to my husband and my sons for their patience with a working mother, and then I thanked John for teaching me how to love and be loved in return. I had purged the past and completed the way back, and that made the evening very important to me.

  When I took the role of Martha Washington for the 1983 George Washington miniseries, I was surprised at how little had been written about her. Barry Bostwick had libraries and libraries to refer to on every detail and idiosyncrasy of George, and all I knew about Martha was that she was short and fat and had a lot of money. As far as typecasting goes, I guess they figured two out of three wasn’t bad. At any rate, I conjured up Martha and said, “Look, I don’t really know what to do with this. But George was younger than you, he was tall and gorgeous and did everything right, plus he was the Father of our Country, so I’m going to assume that you were just gaga over the guy and that’s how I’m going to play it.” I was astounded, absolutely astounded to be nominated for an Emmy, and even more astounded by Barry’s not getting a nod. Out of all the hundreds of actors in that series, I was the only one singled out.

  In 1979, between those two performances, came the one that was most special, and that was, once again, The Miracle Worker. Playing the Annie Sullivan part had always been a fantasy of mine. Even as a child playing Helen on Broadway, I’d put myself to sleep at night not by counting sheep but by going throug
h The Miracle Worker dialogue, from the first word all the way through to the last. Part of my interest in the role was very simplistic: that character had dialogue and I’d get tired of having to keep my mouth shut. But more than that, I was fantasizing about being a grown-up, feeling, “Boy, when I can do that, then I’ll be an adult.”

  Even in my adult years I’d invariably think about the play a couple of times a month, but whenever it came up in discussion the response was, “We’ll never find a kid small enough to play Helen to your Annie because you’re only five feet tall.” I never quite bought that, and from time to time as both Sean and Mack were growing up, I would think, “Jeez, he’s the right size now. We’ll let his hair grow and he could play Helen.”

  Then I found out that Melissa Gilbert of Little House on the Prairie had gotten control of the rights and she wanted me to do it with her as a film for TV. She was fourteen years old and exactly my height, but if you closed your eyes and listened, you could almost hear her growing. The deal was struck and after much discussion of billing it was determined that I was to be billed second. And I must say, even though billing is very rarely important to me, that one hurt. This was my baby, my Helen, my Annie, and I thought, who is this child from nowhere? I felt very possessive about the whole thing.

  Once I got to know Melissa, though, those feelings were quickly erased. She was a delightful kid who reminded me very much of myself, especially in the area of adult discipline: knowing what to say and when to say it, when to behave like a kid and when to act like an adult professional. Unfortunately, Paul Aaron, the director, with what I’m sure were good intentions, placed an arbitrary barrier between Melissa and me. His approach was, “You will not give this girl hints.” Initially, that appealed to me for several reasons. I had my own big job to do, contending with people who automatically look askance at the remaking of classic films. It also relieved me of assuming the practical responsibility of the mentor role with this child. That, plus my need to be the good girl, my need not to make waves, allowed me to agree to something I was to regret seriously later on.

  As you can imagine, everything about doing that play the second time around carried a terrific emotional charge for me, and that included sitting around a plain table at a rehearsal hall and going through the initial reading, something that is usually not much of an experience. Because I knew all the lines by heart, I had to pretend to read the script, and occasionally I got caught; someone would notice that I was on the wrong page yet had all the dialogue. I was petrified and thrilled at the same time.

  The most important thing to me in playing Annie Sullivan was that I not do an imitation of Anne Bancroft, so much so that even when it came to something I would have done quite naturally and organically, if it sounded the slightest bit close to a rhythm Anne had, I would change it. Sitting there during the reading, I heard all these ghosts in my head. Annie, certainly, but also Torin Thatcher, Patricia Neal, and all the rest. I could hear them in my head just as if there were a tape recorder playing. Plus there were all these live voices which were different from those I remembered; they weren’t lip-synching with the tapes in exactly the right way.

  It was an extraordinary sensation to be among strangers while experiencing the realization of such a private fantasy. At the end of the reading, I had to go into the bathroom for about forty-five minutes. I could not stop crying. It wasn’t the catharsis yet, but I was getting there.

  We’d rehearse the piece during the day and then I’d drive like a maniac so I could wash my hair, set it properly for the character, and perform across town in The Goodbye People, with Herschel Bernardi and Peter Bonerz, which was how I was spending my nights. I did that for three weeks, at the end of which I had lost twenty-three pounds and was utterly exhausted. We were four nights short of the end of the play’s run when I stood up onstage in the middle of a performance and my legs just gave out. “I can’t do it, guys,” I said. “I just can’t do it.” I finished that performance, but I just couldn’t go on doing both.

  There were many epiphanies during that rehearsal period, but two instances especially stand out. First was putting on the underclothes prior to trying on my costume. For me, wearing a Merry Widow like the one I’d watched Annie Bancroft put on all those nights when I visited her dressing room just before the curtain, that was the passing of the mantle, and when the wardrobe woman held it out to me, I lost it.

  The other moment came the first time we got to the miracle and Annie Sullivan screamed, “She knows!” The pain in my chest from this wild combination of a heavy heart and an enormous sense of release was, I thought, more than I was going to be able to bear. The years of wishing to play it, wishing to have that stature, the years of screwing up my life, and then this great gift, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, this moment of forgiveness for my transgressions. I thought I would die. Wherever it went from there, no matter what anyone thinks of my performance, that moment in rehearsal, that was my orgasm.

  The next step after rehearsals was going to Florida, where we were going to perform the play onstage for two weeks prior to returning to L.A. for the filming. Melissa, however, was having difficulty with her role; there was almost a dullness of heart in her work. I could sense her anxiousness, and in addition I’d very quickly gotten to like her and wanted to help if I could. I was also trying to fill a giant’s shoes, but she had the giant standing in front of her, staring her in the face every day. God knows what went on in her head.

  I had so far kept my promise to the director, but it turned out he wasn’t helping her either. I’d come home every night and say to John, “When is he going to tell her what to do?” It’s all very well to want actors to find things for themselves, but this is not a treasure hunt. In my opinion there comes a moment when the search is over, and if the person hasn’t found the key to the role, then you have to tell them where it is. Melissa was a very bright young lady. If you told her what to do, she would do it brilliantly and bring her own creativity to the task, but she wasn’t used to plunging in on her own. One time I slipped and started talking to Melissa’s mother, who would continually ask me how her daughter was faring. Finally I said, “Barbara, she needs help. She can’t find it by herself.” She said, “Tell her.” And I said, “I can’t.”

  Among the specific problems Melissa had was, paradoxically, that she is very graceful. Helen was not graceful, at least not in the elegant way Melissa was. Melissa had very long hair, and in those days she had a habit that many young girls have when their hair falls into their faces of swinging their head and brushing it back so the hair flies through the air. It’s very romantic-looking, but it isn’t Helen Keller. It should have been a very jerky move, as if she were annoyed by it, not a Farrah Fawcett fling. A more serious problem, however, was that Melissa was not getting the correct sound for that critical “wah-wah” moment.

  The combination of all these factors made me feel loaded for bear when our plane took off for the trip to Florida. I sat next to Charlie Siebert, who played Captain Keller, and who has since become a valued friend, and as I was working on my third glass of wine I told him my problem, which by that time was no secret to anyone. Melissa was sitting directly in front of me, baby-sitting her little sister, and finally I turned and said, “The hell with it, Charlie. I’m gonna tell her.”

  I tapped Melissa on the shoulder and I said, “When you get a chance a little later, I want to talk to you about your part. I’m going to have to break a promise I made to the director, but I feel I’m more honor bound to you than I am to that.” And she said, “Oh, great, thank you, thank you. I’ll just give Sarah to my mother and we can talk right now.”

  And she turned around and over the back of the seat we began to chat. The first thing I said was, “If you touch your goddamn hair again, I’m going to break your hand!” She laughed, and I gave her some other notes, both general and specific. Most important, I gave her Arthur Penn’s direction for me for the wah-wah sound. I’d never told anyone that—it was Arthur
’s and my secret, complicated for me by my crush on him. It was very hard for me to do, like giving her a love letter. And, of course, she was embarrassed by it just as I’d been when Arthur gave it to me. But when we began rehearsing in Florida, there were immediate results. She took those couple of little tips, put them to work for herself, and continued to improve until we opened.

  Opening night for me was what opening nights are always for me, tripled. John flew out, nominally for the performance, but what he really came for was to hold my head while I barfed. I spent two or three hours that day in my dressing room bathroom, with my costume protected by a huge barber’s cape. There was no threat of my forgetting lines here, they’d been engraved in my head for twenty years, but still there was real terror.

  And wouldn’t you know it, there was trouble even before I got onstage. During the opening scene, with baby Helen still in her crib and the doctor talking to Mrs. Keller, he accidentally knocked his bag off the table and everything the actor had insisted on putting inside, bottles and stethoscopes and little mallets fell from the second floor of the set bouncing and rolling all over the stage. So while the baby was going blind and deaf, the audience was roaring with laughter. I turned to Charlie Siebert and I said, “That’s it! That’s it! I’m not going out there! That’s it.”

  When I did first walk out on that stage, I felt tiny, and my voice was shaky. I copied a few things from Annie as a tribute to her, very private and backstage, like sitting on my suitcase the way she’d sat on hers. A lot of that first performance was a blur, I was driven purely by adrenaline, but there were moments of sheer ecstasy just knowing that I was doing it. We got a standing ovation when it ended, lots of curtain calls and all that kind of fun.