Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke

by Patty Duke

  I said to my activist gay women friends, who were essential to carrying the movement for a long time, “I know we’re Johnny-come-latelys, but just as a political maneuver, step into the background and let us more mainstream-looking folks go into the Midwest and talk about our husbands and our children. As long as the means are honorable, isn’t the result all that counts?” Unfortunately, I didn’t have the power and the confidence to go out and recruit more women like me, and I never got a lot of support for my position. I understand that, but given how things turned—or didn’t turn—out, I think it’s regrettable.

  Though over the years I’ve gotten myself involved in so much public service work I’ve grown fearful of becoming “caused out,” two areas still get as much attention as I can possibly muster. One is fund-raising for AIDS research and awareness; any group that comes to me about that gets my help. The other cause is nuclear disarmament, and what involved me there was a promise I made to my son Mackie.

  Mackie was having something called “night terrors.” He would start out of his sleep, absolutely terrified, and no amount of consoling helped. We’d just have to wait until the screaming was spent. Unlike my own early fears, he at first didn’t seem to be terrorized by anything specific.

  But eventually it became apparent to me from conversations while we were watching the news that Mackie was not just concerned by the potential of nuclear holocaust the way most of us are, he really was quite preoccupied with it. He’s always been very articulate, but instead of talking about his fear, he’d ask a lot of questions. Did I think anyone in power was crazy enough to push the button? What if someone flipped out and did it? What if this, what if that? From my experience with the Rosses I knew telling him not to worry wasn’t going to help, but I didn’t know what to say. Frankly, I was just as scared as he was.

  One week Newsweek came out with a cover story about The Day After, the TV movie about post-holocaust society. Mackie saw the magazine lying on the breakfast table and started asking me these questions again, until I felt, “If he asks me one more like that, I’m going to scream.” And then he said, “How come you’re not involved in any of the nuclear freeze groups? You do the E.R.A. and famine relief, you do this and you do that, but what good is it going to do if we all melt?”

  “Mackie, please. I can’t get involved in one more cause. There are people out there doing it.”

  “Yeah, but there aren’t enough people doing it.”

  “Mackie, you know I have little enough time at home. Don’t send me out there. I can’t do this.”

  And he kept challenging me and challenging me. Then tears welled up in his eyes, he started to cry, and he told me how tired he was of being afraid. Finally, he just said straight out, “What are you going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know what to do about it,” I said, “but I’ll find out.”

  I said I couldn’t promise him that there wasn’t going to be a nuclear holocaust, or that we’re not all going to drop dead from who knows what, but that if there was anything I could do in my limited way, I would. And I did, and Mackie has fewer night terrors now. I have nothing really to offer the nuclear freeze movement except one more voice, one more person with the ability to show up and give a speech, and Mackie’s smart enough to know that. But that someone who loves him is making an effort is a consolation to him. It’s that simple.

  Although I’ve now been a Screen Actors Guild member for twenty-five years, I had absolutely nothing to do with the union until the second half of the It Takes Two season. That’s when one of the show’s regulars, Richard MacKenzie, and a friend of his, Paul Kreppel, who years later became my campaign manager, asked me to become involved with an organization that was formed to support the merger of SAG with AFTRA, one of the two other actors’ unions. That’s how my appetite got whetted to understand not only the purpose of unions but also what goes on in them.

  Several things attracted me to working for SAG. For one thing, although doing a series and running a family might seem like enough for anyone, it wasn’t for a person with my high energy level. And after I’d gotten involved, what hooked me was a combination of enjoying the sense of personal affirmation and seeing that I had an effect. “My God,” I said to myself, “I can make a difference.” I began staying abreast of and taking a serious interest in union matters, and I stopped throwing away mail from SAG that didn’t say “residual” on it.

  I’d been seriously involved in union work for about three years when I got a call on a Saturday morning from Ed Asner, the outgoing SAG president. I could hear a hubbub in the background and Ed began, “A group of us are in a meeting here …” Ed and I had met several times at various functions and although he’d never said word one about me succeeding him, my intuition plus the tone of his voice and the circumstances of the call made me guess what was on his mind, so I jokingly said, “You’ve got the wrong number.” Then he said, “I don’t want to pressure you,” and I said, “Oh, my God,” because I realized my guess was right. I told him that I needed a couple of hours to think it over, or a hundred years.

  Once I decided I would run for the office, I really wanted it. I didn’t want to even think about losing. Although I was sure that some people might be voting for me because they recognized my name or admired my work or thought I was good on talk shows, I was determined to be totally prepared. I worked really hard doing my homework. I gathered boxes and files and stacks of material, and come nine o’clock every night I was in my room reading. It was exhausting, but I didn’t want to be standing at a press conference taking questions and have to say, “I don’t know. Let me ask my press secretary.” I have too much ego not to get completely behind anything I begin.

  Aside from the things that had initially interested me in union work, I realized that part of the attraction was that it would be a great way to practice politics in a relatively safe environment. I’d had thoughts of running for public office, and this would be a way to see how I liked the political process. And what I’ve found since I’ve been elected is, quite frankly, that given how stressful and time-consuming an experience it’s turned out to be, I think I’ve had enough. Besides, being a manic-depressive is a political liability. I know that Lithium works, but convincing voters of that is a different story. The New Yorker did run a charming piece comparing my career to Ronald Reagan’s, and people began asking me if I’d thought about national politics. But now that I’ve experienced the kind of pummeling that goes with the territory, I’m not at all sure I want to be king, or even queen.

  Winning the SAG election, however, felt great. It wasn’t quite like getting an Oscar or an Emmy, because there was an element of worry attached to the excitement. Now I had to put my money where my mouth was. Personally, the most important thing was finally receiving indisputable proof from my peers that I was respectable, respectable enough to be the leader of the fifth largest union in the United States. That was very moving and important to me.

  I can remember going in to work at SAG the morning after the election to accept the gavel from Ed Asner, driving along Sunset Boulevard and passing all the houses that had some, usually unpleasant, memory for me. This person had said I was unstable, that person had called me a dingbat, that manic episode had happened—I was ticking them off as I drove. I wish I could say that I was thinking about what a victory for liberalism the election was, or that it was great for the women’s movement, but I didn’t feel any of that. The sense of triumph was intensely personal.

  A similar thing happened when I won the Southern California chapter of Americans for Democratic Action’s first Eleanor Roosevelt Award for my political and social commitments. When a group of people dedicated to a particular ideal that matters to me, that denotes responsibility and value to society, gives me an honor like that, it affects me at the very core of who I am and who I need to be. It legitimizes my father’s short life, it does the same for my mother’s seemingly ignorant existence. And it also makes me recognize that I don’t have the right
to attempt suicide, that in whatever infinitesimal way, I’m making a difference. And that makes a difference to me.

  THIRTY-SIX

  John and I were great at the big issues. The spiritual connection between us was so strong it genuinely felt as if it must predate this lifetime. It was the everyday living that we couldn’t handle. We never lived a day—not a day—in our relationship without real stress. Coasting was unheard-of. There was always at least one crisis going on, whether it was precipitated by me or by a kid or by our finances. Still, we shared the undying hope that the time would come when the crises would clear and we would have peace. It never did.

  One of the first areas where stress became apparent is in what I now see as a search on my part for limits. Sometimes, when we were touring, I’d get really haughty with John if he was directing me and say, “I’m not doing that. I don’t give a damn what you want, I’m not doing it.” When you’ve got a stage manager and other people standing there, that’s very embarrassing, almost as if I were saying, “Wanna see castration? I’ll show you castration!” But John had the ability to tune out, and although my hostility would have stopped a lot sooner if he’d addressed the situation with a “Hey! That’s rude, you little bitch! Quit it!” he invariably just let it all slide.

  The worst example of this kind of behavior occurred in 1978, on the pilot for a series called Rossetti & Ryan that John was directing and I was doing a guest shot on. There was one scene for which I’d done two takes that we both knew were very good, and then he leaned over and whispered that he’d like me to do it one more time. If any other director had said that, even if it bugged me, I would have swallowed the bug and done it. But although I responded quietly, so no one could see, I turned on him with great force, saying, “How dare you ask me to do it again? You know it was terrific. How dare you humiliate me this way in front of other people.” Of course, I did the third take and because I was so angry and upset, it was the best of the lot.

  We went to see dailies the next day, and it turned out some of the better takes weren’t usable because the angle of the camera wasn’t what it should have been, and once again I was livid, exhibiting a “how could you do that to me” kind of ugliness that I never would have shown with another director. During the drive home I opened the car door and tried to get out while we were doing sixty-five miles per hour on the freeway.

  Some of this can be chalked up to my illness; people in a manic episode tend to pick fights. But some of it was also a way of punishing John for his infuriating distance, for not noticing a host of other problems or not wanting to deal with them if he did. Even more basically, I was asking him just how far he could be pushed: How far can I go before you don’t love me anymore? How many times can I shoot a clever, witty one-liner and embarrass you before you pull the plug?

  And, of course, there never was a limit. As the years went on, my respect for him diminished greatly because he didn’t stand up for himself. He didn’t say, “Look, I’m a person too. There are days when I’d like to commit suicide. You gonna love me?” It’s tragic, because I’m sure his tolerance was based on love, but that limit became more and more important to me.

  In 1978 I had a hysterectomy, which was traumatic because the ability to have babies had been a fail-safe mechanism for me, a way I could be sure of feeling attached and loved. On the other hand, it was a relief to be finished with surgeries in that department and not to have to worry about cervical cancer or, for that matter, contraception, because I think that in the back of my mind I was for the first time entertaining the idea of either leaving John or not being faithful.

  It was another year before the real intention of having an affair occurred to me, and though I went as far as arranging an assignation, I chose someone who was impotent. Wasn’t that clever of me? Who knows what makes the world work the way it does? The idea was certainly there and I’m responsible for that. But the fact that the act was never completed made the guilt a thousand times less.

  Still, John found out about it, and we had a marathon confrontation session that lasted close to twenty-eight hours. I told him I didn’t feel attractive anymore in a house filled with unkempt boys who were noisy and uncaring, that I was tired of his analyzing my every move, I was eager for someone who accepted me as I was. Though he was absolutely devastated, John was a mensch about it and we decided to use the situation as a way to start all over again. We embarked on a new approach with each other. We spent more real time together, not just taking up the same space. And even though it didn’t last, for a while I fell in love with him all over again.

  What finally happened to our relationship was that many of the very good things about it turned into very bad ones. At first John’s love seemed unconditional, but eventually I found out what the conditions were. Although for years I was very defensive when people suggested this, I came to believe that there was indeed a strong father-daughter link between us. The all-knowing, all-seeing, all-protective and God-like idea I had of John, an idea that I so craved at first, eventually turned out to be abhorrent to me when I was old enough to want to be an equal partner.

  As long as I was dependent and subservient and John was the caretaker, everything was fine. Even though he was always as supportive as he could be, he’d become so comfortable with the father-daughter, patient-doctor, mentor-student relationship, he couldn’t let go of it. If I got too healthy or too strong, there was no basis for the relationship anymore. I’m a much more productive person since I’m not married to John. It’s astonishing to me what I’ve been able to accomplish in every area of my life since the divorce. The false dependency between us was very enervating; instead of feeding, we bled each other.

  John and I had a few brief separations, and during those crises and all others, my across-the-street neighbor and best friend, Mary Lou Pinckert, would simply be there. We had an “I’ll just run across and see if Mary Lou is making a cheese-cake” kind of back-fence closeness. She had the kind of homespun, very basic bottom-line approach to life that really was a ground to me. I would be wandering around the backyard thinking of the most inventive way to kill myself and Mary Lou would be inside the house coping. That kind of selflessness is something I’d never witnessed before.

  The final conflict, the one that irrevocably broke John and me apart, came in 1984, when he joined a Buddhist group. John’s father, whom he’d been extremely close to, had just died, and I came home late one night to find John sitting in the den. He told me that he’d found “the answer” and that it was Buddhism. I began to weep and it turned into one of the heaviest crying sessions I’ve ever had, sobbing that lasted for hours until my face was swollen and distorted. I was enormously relieved that he’d found something that was spiritually important to him, that he wasn’t going to die not believing.

  But within a few days I began to feel very threatened. John maintained it was because Buddhism was alien to my culture, but that wasn’t the problem at all. It was a deep feeling inside of me that this espousal of Buddhism was not so much a full revelation as a thinly veiled substitute for his father, for me, for everyone, that it was an attempt to isolate himself still further from the kinds of everyday concerns he’d never wanted to deal with anyway. I see nothing wrong with chanting, it does have a very salutary effect on people, but John became so obsessed with the procedure that everything revolved around it. If you said, “I’m going to have a cup of coffee,” it somehow related to one of the sutras.

  Also, John determined that he wanted to proselytize and convert all of us. The great ecumenical spokesperson of this household, the parent who’d insisted our children not be forced into any religion, was now beating us all over the head with his chanting. And this was the man who’d belittled and refused to take seriously what I felt was my own spiritual revelation. I was enraged. Buddhism became the new battleground.

  John was already a complete vegetarian and he now wanted the equivalent of two totally separate kitchens in the house, meaning two sets of dishes, two sets
of utensils, even two refrigerators, one in which there would be no meat or meat by-products, and one for the rest of us. That was fine with me; if I’d wanted to eat cat food, I wouldn’t want somebody picking on me for that. The problem I had was with John’s gohonzon, the Buddhist shrine he wanted to put in our living room and make available to complete strangers to chant at whenever they felt like it.

  “Why can’t you have it in the upstairs room?”

  “It has to be in a more prominent place.”

  “Don’t you have a whole building in Santa Monica? Go play over there anytime you want.”

  “So you’re not going to allow me to worship as I see fit in my own house?”

  John felt he couldn’t live with that kind of religious oppression and that I still had a lot of straightening out of my head to do. And we kind of left it at that.

  John and I had endless discussions during this period, and during one of them I finally asked a very basic question: “What do you want out of life?” And he said, “I want to contemplate.” And for the first time in our marriage, I recognized the age difference. It finally hit me that the man was going to be fifty-six years old. He didn’t have to stay on the out-of-control treadmill; he’d earned the right to contemplate if that’s what he wanted to do. What I also realized was that it’s not my time to contemplate, it’s my time to do. I still have to gather all those little nuts before I can sit down and look them over.

  Then, in January of 1985, John went up to San Francisco to do a play. He was still a notoriously slow study, so a couple of nights before he was to open I went up there on a mission. Within forty-eight hours he had to have all those words in his head. That was my olive branch, my gift to him because I loved him.