by Patty Duke
The show came together very quickly. I’d met with Paul Witt, Tony Thomas, and Susan Harris to discuss an earlier series, and we’d made a lasting good impression on each other. I had excellent relations with ABC, partially because their top programming executive, Lou Ehrlict, had a son who played baseball with my kids and John was their coach. And both Richard Crenna and I were represented by the same agency. So when the idea for a comedy about a high-powered chief of surgery married to an equally high-powered legal type came up, it took just a twenty-minute meeting before Ehrlict said to one of his henchmen, “Well, what are we all hanging around for? We’re going with this, aren’t we?” And that was it.
What I loved about It Takes Two was that not only was there a sophistication and intelligence to the characters and the situations we dealt with, but the show also dared to be a little old-fashioned. These folks were not insulting each other all the time, their love for each other and their children was apparent. The show was able to be nice without being saccharine. Even though my part had some problems, the bottom line was I woke up every morning, remembered where I was going, and grinned.
A total of twenty-two episodes of It Takes Two were filmed, and although we weren’t off the charts, our ratings were very healthy; even Cheers was invariably behind us. We were seemingly the fair-haired children of the network, and we thought we had a hit. Every once in a while we’d be lying in bed rehearsing and Crenna, whom I adored working with, and I would turn to each other and say with a giggle, “We could be doing this for ten years.” I would have been very, very happy to stay there, it felt that good.
Why the show was pulled after those twenty-two shows is something I’ve never gotten a satisfactory explanation for. What I believe happened is that ABC, panicked and committed to too many new shows, gave Witt-Thomas-Harris an impossible choice. They could have either another season of Benson, which would give that show five years, enough for very profitable syndication, or they could have a second year of It Takes Two. Not surprisingly, we became the sacrificial lamb. That was the year I was voted a People’s Choice Award as the most popular television actress for my work in It Takes Two. How do you decide not to stick with something so well liked one more time?
The manic attack I had during the series was touched off not by anything emotional but by an injection. I have suffered on and off from nodes on my vocal chords, and occasionally, when I’m smoking too much and working too hard, I will get laryngitis. We had a show that night, and I needed a quick cure. I went to a doctor who was recommended by someone at the studio, an extremely reputable man who didn’t know my history. He wasn’t the type who doled out cortisone left and right, but the “show must go on” stuff was being heavily laid on. I was insisting, “In two hours, I have to talk, and I have to talk well.” So he gave me a shot, and I did talk well, but since cortisone and manic-depression don’t go together at all, the injection instantly kicked off an episode.
Insomnia hit that night. By morning I began having severe diarrhea as well as an overwhelming feeling of nervousness and edginess. Had to go to work, couldn’t get out of the bathroom. I finally pulled myself together, but I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t drink, and I had that old familiar feeling of my motor running but not going in any particular direction.
These symptoms continued for about a week. By then I’d lost a good deal of weight, I was completely dehydrated, and if I wasn’t hallucinating, I was certainly paranoid and having extremely volatile encounters with John. Physically I was in such a weakened condition that even navigating was rough, so the show was giving me a ride to the studio. One day I was trying to read through the script but I kept rushing to the bathroom to be sick. Finally, I passed out there and was taken home. Dr. Harold Arlen, our psychiatrist, was called. He came to see me and it was agreed that if I felt well enough, I’d see him in his office the next day.
When I walked into Arlen’s office, I was very shaky. He said, “Now, I don’t want you to be frightened by what I’m about to say to you. I suspected this before, but because it’s such a delicate thing to pinpoint, and because it’s something you really don’t want to be wrong about, I wanted to be as sure as I could. I think you are manic-depressive.”
From that moment on, I wasn’t frightened at all. It was such a relief, almost like a miracle, really, for someone to give what I’d gone through a name and a treatment, and I am ever in Dr. Arlen’s debt for having the skill and insight to diagnose me. The odd thing is, when I was a kid and had those panic attacks, usually related to dying, I used to pray for a pill. I’d say to myself, “There must be a pill. There’s a pill for everything. There must be a pill for this.” It turns out that there was.
The best way to describe what goes on during manic episodes is to talk about the mood swings, from very high euphoria to very low depression. In the manic phase, you’re wired, you’re edgy, your speech pattern changes. You talk very quickly, almost as if you’re on speed, and one of the reasons I was often accused of being on drugs is because the behavior is similar to drug-induced activity. And when you’re in the real pit of the depression, you can look zonked out, as if you’re on Quaaludes.
Insomnia is a manic trait, as is spending a lot of money. Someone entering a phase will suddenly go on a wildly irrational shopping spree, buying things they not only don’t need or want but will never use. We’re not talking about spending too much money at the department store; we’re talking about buying five or six cars in a week or, in my case, flying all over the country in private planes to places I didn’t want to be with someone I didn’t want to be with. Yet even though it’s the disease that’s creating these situations, there’s a certain amount of responsibility I still insist on taking for the way I acted in them.
The treatment for manic-depression is a carefully regulated, twice-a-day dose of a chemical already present in the body, Lithium. New tests are run periodically to make sure the level of treatment is safe, because everything from climate to stress to how you’re eating can affect the dose. This is not a drug that makes you high or alters your mood; if you’ve got daily irritations—your children aren’t listening and the dog is eating the rug—you don’t take Lithium and feel better. All Lithium does is help correct an imbalance that’s already present in your body’s biological systems. Most people who have this condition are born with it, but it can remain dormant, in some cases forever. Different things can trigger it, and by the time I was twenty-four, I’d experienced every trauma on the list, including the separation of my parents and feeling abandoned first by my father and then by my mother.
There are, however, people who are definitely diagnosed as manic and who, for whatever reason, choose not to take their Lithium. Some people are talked out of it by nutritionists who feel there is a natural way to deal with the problem, some people get tired of the pill-taking routine, some people resist the whole notion. Eventually, however, and it could be as long as a year or so later, all of a sudden there’s a manic attack or a depression, and they’re right back to square one.
For myself, I would rather accept this as a condition I have, recognize the tremendous positive change in me, and say to myself, “This is it. For the rest of my life I take a pill in the morning and a pill at night.” Some creative people are especially resistant to Lithium; they believe that creativity is born of nutsiness and if you’re insane, you’re a genius. In fact, I’ve found that my creativity has been enhanced by the treatment, that the comfort I now feel with myself allows me to take much bigger risks than I ever would have before. The down side of the drug is so small compared to the release of my power over myself, why mess around?
The difference Lithium has made in my life starts with the absolute basics: being able to get up in the morning and not be afraid, not having the very first thought in my head when I wake and the very last thought before I go to sleep be of death. I have a sense of self-control in every area of my life—control of eating habits, control of sleeping habits, control of money-spending—that I ne
ver experienced until after Lithium therapy began. Even basic organization, something as simple as listing ten things and doing them, used to be impossible for me because I couldn’t organize my thoughts.
And while I still have a great deal of anger in me, much of it left over from what I went through with the Rosses, my ability to control my temper is light-years ahead of what it was. The only people who would probably give a bigger testimonial for Lithium than me are my kids. These are the people who witnessed and suffered the most during those times when their mother was out of control.
One night, a few months after I’d begun with Lithium, it was around midnight and I kept hearing a thumping from the wall my bedroom shares with Sean’s. I opened the door and I saw a person half-in and half-out of Sean’s window, and I let go with the most blood-curdling, unearthly scream I have ever produced. The person dropped to the ground and I ran to the front door and started screaming, “Call the police, call the police!” Then as the intruder fled around the corner, I recognized his shirt and realized it belonged to one of Sean’s friends. Now I wanted to kill Sean because his friend had scared me to death. I started yelling, “Sean, you little shit, get up!” On my way to Sean’s room I ran smack into Mackenzie, who was sobbing and howling, his whole body just racked with agony. I turned to him and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, I thought it was a burglar.” And he said, “A burglar? Oh, thank God! I thought you forgot to take your Lithium.”
All of which emphasizes one of the key points about Lithium. It’s not a panacea, it doesn’t do away with life’s little (and not so little) problems. When I started my Lithium therapy, it didn’t mean I ended my fruitful psychiatric work with Dr. Arlen, it meant I could begin. I could face life as a garden-variety neurotic, not a green, squirrely monster. Lithium is not a cure for living. It’s a tool.
THIRTY-FIVE
That man in the White House may not have noticed, but in my life 1985 was a presidential year, and not once but twice. I played America’s first female president in Hail to the Chief, and then I became the real-life president of the Screen Actors Guild. Not bad, I couldn’t help thinking, for a scrawny kid from East Thirty-first Street.
Hail to the Chief was like manna from heaven. Just when my usual money problems were peaking, boom, there’s a series. Not only was it a Witt-Thomas-Harris production again, but the cast was a group of creative actors I enjoyed working with, high-powered, high-performance horses every one. I thought the pilot was the best thing I’d ever read for half-hour television. We came out of the chute very well, and then, just like It Takes Two, suddenly the show was off the air for no apparent reason.
Not that we didn’t have our problems. For one thing, the follow-up scripts didn’t have the genius of the pilot. The reason for that depends on whom you listen to, whether we made the network nervous and they clamped down or Susan Harris went off and gave most of her attention to Golden Girls. Whatever the cause, we wound up with a very poor bastardization of what had gone before, a show that wasn’t even bizarre anymore, just silly.
The other difficulty was that even though I enjoyed the show, I did not like my part. My character became deadly dull. The woman never took a stand on anything, she never even had a position in family arguments. The writers chickened out, they were afraid to give me any kind of character quirks because I was the president. Since they didn’t know what else to do with me, I became the roll-call person. If you needed to know who the characters in a scene were, just wait a second and the president will tell you. My entire part was a memory contest for what name goes with what face.
Another thing that hurt the show, something I heard constantly from folks on the street, who in general liked the absurdity of the thing, was that they were uncomfortable with my husband, the First Man, if you will, screwing around on his wife all the time. It worked in the pilot because you never saw the other woman, but once she was brought into our living rooms, it set people off. Now I was in a very awkward position, because if I said that to the writers, it would look as if I had an ego problem, that I was afraid my part wasn’t big enough because the bimbo of the week was getting that airtime. And that really wasn’t the case at all. My position was, if you want the American public to respect and like this woman, if you want them to buy the premise that she’s the president, her husband can’t be that disrespectful or none of your big jokes will work. I kept quiet, however, and I think I did myself and the show a disservice.
Despite all of this, I was shocked when the show was canceled after seven episodes. Everyone in the cast was in shock, every single one of us. I haven’t a clue why we were dropped, to this day no one has even tried to explain. I never expected to see ten years out of that show as I had with It Takes Two, because the material was too bizarre, but I did expect a full season. Afterward I told myself, “I need to know why this happened so that it won’t happen again,” but really, there’s no formula you can learn from. What am I going to say? That I won’t work for ABC again? Who am I kidding? It’s one of the three shops in town. The next person willing to pay the price gets the body. That’s the reality.
* * *
Despite my abortive appearance for Robert Kennedy and some sporadic antiwar rallies during the Vietnam era, I really date my serious political involvement from my involvement with John. There was much political discussion in our house on a daily basis, and not just around the dinner table. The discussions that went on between John and his brother Sandy and Sandy’s wife, Lena, and eventually me were truly exciting and inspirational. They made me want to go out and mix it up in the world.
John’s an extremely well-educated man, a stimulated and stimulating thinker, but I’m a doer, so I stole from his thinking and went and did. I don’t love danger, I don’t want to commit professional suicide, but I’ve had to face the fact that I no longer like playing it safe either. If a situation arises in which I can be involved, and it’s something that I feel is vital to me or my kids or just other people, I’ll take a shot at it, even if somebody says, “Hey, you may not work on such-and-such network anymore.” I really want to know that I’ve participated.
Something very critical to my letting go of apathy happened in 1980, during my return to Catholicism. Three celebrities, LeVar Burton, Dick Van Patten, and I were asked by Catholic Relief Services to go to Mauritania, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Kenya to make public service announcements and help raise money to fight famine in Africa. I’d been asked to go the year before, and frankly, I just hadn’t felt equipped to do it. The second time I was asked, I felt a combination of being too embarrassed to say no again and wanting to be able to deal with it. I desperately wanted to stretch and grow and find other purposes for my existence. I was looking for the larger picture, and for answers to the questions, and they were not to be found, as I used to think, in the bathroom puking up overdoses. So even though I was very fearful, I went.
Before I got to the relief camps, I tried to steel myself to imagine the worst, most horrifying thing I was going to see, so that the reality would be less of a shock. I thought the sight of all these thousands of starving people would be the first assault, or the noise they make, the wailing and agony that sounds otherworldly. But the first assault was the smell. It wasn’t the smell of excrement, it was the smell of decay, of death. The total impact of the camps was so overwhelming, so grotesque, I couldn’t even begin to absorb it.
Very shortly after the visit to the first camp, in Mauritania, a headache began that stayed with me for two weeks, a headache that no amount of aspirin or anything else could get rid of. Sitting under the stars one night in Kenya, stars so close you feel you don’t even have to straighten your arm to touch them, I had to face the fact that what this headache was caused by was repressed rage.
First there was my own impotence. I mean, what goddamn good was my public service announcement going to do in the face of all this, no matter how much money it raised? Then there was the anger at man’s inhumanity to man, at the way none of the systems we’ve set
up really work. I’d even confronted Father Kaiser, the Catholic priest who was with us, in the middle of a shantytown where death was happening all around. “What do you say to these people?” I demanded. “What’s the answer? You’re supposed to know.”
But this one night under the stars in Kenya, there were a bunch of us sitting around the camp, and we began to hear really boisterous singing off in the distance. Someone got curious so we jumped into the Land-Rover and headed off. We found maybe two hundred people, members of the Kakama tribe, people whose children were dying during the day, singing and doing this ritual jumping dance with such jubilation, such joy.
We pulled up and they were thrilled to have visitors. They loved Father Kaiser because he was big and gawky and silly-looking in the hat he always wore. They wanted him to jump with them, and since the man can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, his attempts had them just roaring with laughter. Then they wanted the “little mama” (guess who) to do it, and I was just bent over double, I was laughing so hard. Then I stood up, and my headache was gone.
What I realized then was that for all my bleeding-heart concern, I couldn’t begin to make a difference in the lives of these people, and past doing what I could to feed them, maybe I didn’t even want to. They were sick and dying and yet something inside them came alive and celebrated the stars and the moon and the fact that they can jump three feet off the ground. I’d never experienced anything like that night.
That trip to Africa lasted a little more than two weeks; my next serious political involvement took eighteen months. That’s the amount of time I took off in 1981 and ’82 to work for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Given my chronic lack of financial stability, that was quite a decision. But I believed that if we changed the packaging and the P.R. for the movement, something the right wing is so adept at doing, and made it less threatening to the mainstream, we could turn the tide.
