Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (12 page)

Matinee days, though, were hell, and it’s only now that I realize that because Annie was an adult and I was twelve, it must have been physically even harder for her than for me. I dreaded those days from the moment I got up. If I missed my nap between shows, I would feel as if I were going to die out there. The only pleasure to be found in matinee days was the battle scars, the being able to say, “Well, we did it twice today.”

Once I nearly missed a scheduled performance, and that was on a matinee day. It was a Wednesday, when the afternoon show starts earlier than on Saturday, but because I’d gotten the day off from school I was in a Saturday mode in my head. So Mom and I, thinking we were early, were taking our time getting to the theater, just sauntering along Sixth Avenue and looking into windows. I saw a clock and was about to say to my mother, “Gee, we still have a lot of time, we could go for an ice cream or something,” when it hit me:
this was Wednesday
.

I said, “Oh my God! It’s Wednesday!” and took off running down the street, leaving my mother in the dust. I ran the eight blocks to the theater nonstop, and sure enough my understudy was standing at the stage door, wearing my clothes and shoes and ready to go on. I said, “Thank you! Thank you!” and started literally ripping the clothes off her. I dressed onstage, in the dark, while the first scene was going on, trying not to huff and puff too loudly. That poor girl, standing there in her undies; Jack the Ripper had come along and stolen her clothes. By the time my mother showed up, I was already playing the scene. It was like
All About Eve
: There was no way anybody was going onstage for me if I had any control over it.

In fact my insecurity was so great that I took only one week off during the entire seven-hundred-performance run and I spent that whole time being worried that my understudy was better than me. The Rosses and I went to the Virgin Islands. It was our “Three Musketeers” period, when I was young enough not to miss having a friend along. Since I had no friends anyway, it didn’t really matter. We went boating, ate tropical food, sat on a balcony overlooking the Caribbean; it all suited me okay and it set the pattern for vacations we’d take throughout our relationship. The Rosses did know how to take vacations, they traveled very well, albeit on my money. This was not the tropics on five dollars a day—three hundred dollars a day was more like it.

Those times, the water-skiing and boating, were fun, but as I grew older I missed having someone my own age along for the ride. A kid wants to do what a kid wants to do, and that does not include four-hour très continental candlelit dinners for three that went on till one in the morning. The talk was always the same, because as far as the Rosses were concerned, show business was my life as well as theirs. Anything else, say, national politics or social issues, was unimportant, or, worse than that, a distraction. The TV didn’t go on until Johnny Carson (or Jack Parr before him), and if any political references were made, I didn’t get them. The same thing would happen when I heard actors talking during rehearsals; a topic like blacklisting would come up and I wouldn’t have a clue what it meant. We lived in a vacuum; no one so much as read a newspaper. There really wasn’t an outside world for us; it was that simple and that stupid.

The best time for me, clearly, was when I was onstage. I felt transported in that role, it came to be almost like a religious experience to play Helen. I think I could count on the fingers of one hand the times when Annie and I weren’t completely emotionally involved in that play. There was never a night when there weren’t tears—I can’t imagine playing the end of that show, when Annie Sullivan finally reaches Helen, and not crying. A real chord was struck at each performance.

The audience was very involved in the play as well,
particularly during the big fight scene. They would become very vocal, you’d hear a lot of “Oooh, uuuhhh, ooh, uuuhhh!” And when kids came on Saturday afternoons, it was a regular hoot ‘n’ holler matinee. Oh, how they would root—for me. When I hit the teacher, they just went bananas.

And then pieces of furniture or plates or spoons or eggs or who knows what would fly out into the audience. I’m sure a lot of people in the first few rows watched the
fight
scene with their hands over their faces because they were really getting it. One night a woman up front took more than her share of abuse. A chair landed in her lap, a spoon hit her, food got spit on her, the works. Finally, toward the end of the fight scene, she stood up and said, “That’s it! I’ve had it!” And we thought, “Oh, boy, she’s going to start throwing things back at us.” But she just sat down again and didn’t say or do another thing. She just had to vent her annoyance, that’s all.

Another night, a man put his hat, a gray fedora, on the stage and left it there. Before the curtain went up, that area looked like part of the apron, so he might not have immediately realized what he’d done. But all during the first act and the second act the hat remained there and it drove Annie crazy. There’s a moment at the end of the second act when her character feels she’d had a victory and walks proudly downstage, blesses herself, and turns around to look back at the garden house. As Annie marched downstage, she put first her right foot and then her left foot on that hat, then she smushed and smushed and smushed it before she finally turned around and got off. The man was still there for the third act, but his hat was gone.

Some of the things I liked best about the play were bits almost no one knew I did. I played the offstage voice of Jimmie, Annie Sullivan’s lost brother. And near the end of the second act, when as Helen I’m supposedly lying in my bed asleep and Annie picks up my doll, I make the “ma-ma” sound for the doll. I’d keep one eye open under the covers so I’d see just when Annie would pick it up. You can’t know how much I looked forward to that “ma-ma” every night. It was such a relief to say something.

Despite all our planning and timing, there were nights when things did go wrong. During the second act fight scene, Helen gropes her way first to the front door and then to the rear one and finds them both locked. Every once in a while, though, one of the doors would be accidentally left open and I’d have no choice but to go out through it. Annie wouldn’t know I was gone, she’d be distracted picking up a plate or something, then she’d get up and find she was playing the scene by herself. I’d be backstage, laughing, trying not to pee in my pants. She’d come after me, cursing out loud backstage, “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch!” Once I got so hysterical I did wet my pants and had to go back onstage that way.

Another time we had just the opposite problem. The door that we were supposed to leave through at the end of the scene had been locked with a key as well as bolted and wouldn’t open. Annie, of course, was trying to find the right key on the ring of six she carried and was being very profane, saying, “Goddamn son of a bitch” under her breath while I made my guttural sounds very loudly because I was afraid the audience was going to hear her. Finally she just said, “Screw it.” She picked me up, walked to the window and, in full view of everybody, pushed me out and dove out right behind. So much for the romance of live theater.

The most unnerving mishap we experienced was an incident that actors still ask me about. They’ll come up and say, “I heard a story about you in
The Miracle Worker
that just flabbergasted me. Is it true?” This time it happens it is.

The incident took place one night in the third act, the scene in which, instead of spelling to Annie Sullivan, I’m spelling to the family dog, one of those white-with-dark-spots English setters. All of a sudden a cable let go and a row of lights crashed to the stage to the side of us. It made, as you can imagine, a very startling sound and everyone, I mean everyone, reacted. I did not. At least I did not have the normal reaction of jumping or being startled by an obviously dangerous noise. I was as terrified as anyone else would be but what I did for release was something that nobody saw. I
squeezed the poor dog’s flank, and he screeched bloody blue murder and ran away. But the impression was that I had done nothing and people were astounded at that kind of concentration.

After the final curtain, a whole stream of visitors would come to our dressing rooms, whoever was really popular at the time. Often visitors would say, “How do you remember all those lines?” when in truth I didn’t have any. Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher made a big impression, mostly because she wore a mink-lined raincoat. And Cary Grant—we were all truly beside ourselves about his visit—when everyone in the place was going, “There he is!” He signed my autograph dog (it was a clear, simple signature, very forthright) and I just stared at him, amazed at how gorgeous he was, even better in person than he was in the movies. I kept saying, “Thank you” and thinking, “Can I live with you forever?” He spent a little more time with Patricia Neal and I hung around her doorway, listening to their conversation, just wanting to be in his pocket.

By this point I had been groomed so well by the Rosses to be the next Princess Grace that I didn’t need instructions about receiving my visitors, I knew exactly the appropriate behavior. “How do you do.… It’s very nice to meet you.… You’re very kind to come back and tell me that,” always in the form of the startlingly gracious child. I was invariably very humble as well; if the conversation went on at any length, I would start referring the compliments to Whoever was handiest. I think I was genuinely well trained by the Rosses—I have no resentment about learning basic manners—but some things were carried to ridiculous extremes. Part of what I did, the hugging and kissing of visitors, was my own. I just can’t help that, it’s how I am. I really like people, and there’s something about embracing them that feels good to me.

Easily the most memorable visit to result from
The Miracle Worker
took place outside of the theater, and that was my meeting with Helen Keller in the spring of 1960. Katharine Cornell, the great actress, was a neighbor and friend of hers at Aachen Ridge, Connecticut. Katharine Cornell came backstage
one night after the play and asked if I would like to meet Helen Keller. What a question! She said that Helen had been rather reclusive since Polly Thompson, her companion after Annie Sullivan, had died, but that she would set it up. I thought it was just going to be a private meeting, but of course the Rosses got involved and all of a sudden the visit wound up as a big
Life
magazine piece. Everyone was there except, of course, my mother, who as usual had not been invited.

When I first saw Helen walking down the stairs, she looked almost regal. She was wearing a blue dress, pearls, and what I found out were her favorite red shoes. She was close to eighty years old by then, but she carried herself very straight. She had alabaster skin, very thin white hair, almost like an angel’s hair, and was very buxom with small hips and great-looking legs. And a terrific smile. And she was so jolly, like a jolly grandma. I’d expected serious or sweet, but not jolly. Not someone who was so much fun. Not someone who loved to laugh, and about everything, even the fact that we’d come before she’d had a chance to take her bras—rather large bras, I might add—in off the laundry line.

Helen hugged me and I hugged her and she told me that she’d heard from some friends how wonderful I was as her. Occasionally she would spell to me, just to be gracious and indulge me because I wanted her to, but mostly she would talk out loud. Her voice was very hard to understand, like a computer talking; she said she’d never been happy with the way it sounded. To understand me, she would put her thumb on my lips and her fingers on different vibration points. She didn’t miss a thing.

She introduced me to her dogs, labradors and golden retrievers, and we went for a walk in her gardens. They were fairly extensive, with railings all around, but very nicely done: nothing screamed “A blind person lives here!” She told me the name of every tree and bush and flower and talked about how at one she felt with nature. And she told me about her martinis. The doctor had told her that she shouldn’t have her martinis anymore, and she told the doctor that at her age, if she enjoyed a martini, she was going to
have one. I loved that. I mean there she was, nearly eighty years old, deaf and blind, what the hell else could go wrong.

I saw Helen Keller only one more time, at an official eightieth birthday reception for her in New York. I have a picture from that meeting in which it looks as if I’m staring at God. I would write to her occasionally and get a handwritten note back. And then, several months after she died, one day a package showed up with a lovely jade bottle she had specified she wanted me to have. I would have loved to have known her better. She radiated a large, good spirit: just to be in the woman’s presence felt wonderful.

G
iven the kind of schedule I had, even the Rosses knew I couldn’t do any other work while I was appearing on Broadway. But just once as I was starting
The Miracle Worker
stage run and just once as I was ending it, I appeared in prestigious TV productions that were too glamorous for John and Ethel to resist.

“One Red Rose For Christmas,” a
U.S. Steel Hour
I did with Helen Hayes, was a terrific tearjerker about a cranky nun and this one belligerent orphan in a sea of sad little waifs. The nun is mean to the troublesome tyke, who ends up accidentally setting fire to the orphanage, starting a blaze in which a sweet cherubic nun, who just happens to be the bad nun’s sister, dies. Finally, in whatever part of the place is left standing, Helen Hayes is on her knees praying to God for forgiveness because her hatred of me had led to this tragedy. Hating is bad if you’re a nun, I guess. She asks for a sign and, on Christmas Eve no less, I bring her one red rose. The show was such a hit in the fall of 1958 that we did it again a year later.

In 1961, toward the end of
The Miracle Worker
’s run, I appeared in the David Susskind production of Graham Greene’s novel
The Power and the Glory
along with Julie Harris, George C. Scott, Keenan Wynn, and, most exciting of all, Laurence
Olivier. It was just a brief scene (Olivier’s on the run and I bring him food) that they wrote in because Susskind, who liked to work with me, wanted the two of us in a scene together. I rehearsed during the week, performed on Broadway at night, and taped
The Power and the Glory
on a Sunday, my only day off.