Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (13 page)

I’d heard of Laurence Olivier, I knew this was a great actor, but I was just a kid and I’d never seen him in anything. The only image I had was a newspaper picture of him as Hamlet or somebody, looking very Shakespearean. We always rehearsed our live shows at Central Plaza, an all-purpose hall on Second Avenue right over Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant; it also hosted bar mitzvahs and wedding receptions. I showed up before anyone else on the first day of rehearsals and I was alternately looking at my script and looking at my schoolbooks, when the elevator door opened and this nondescript man got out. We nodded hello to each other and he went and sat at the end of the table.

More people started to arrive, chatting and taking their little coffee cups out of paper bags. There’s an inner room where people started rehearsing—a certain number of people would go in, a certain number would remain outside, and the whole time I was looking around wondering, “Where’s this Sir Laurence Olivier?” Finally I was called to rehearse my scene with him and there’s this little old man who was the first one out of the elevator. And I thought, “Gee, that’s not what I thought he would look like, but if they say this is him, okay.”

We rehearsed that day and a few more, then on Sunday we went to Brooklyn to do the taping. I was waiting on the set when someone called for Sir Laurence and suddenly here was this amazing man, all dressed up in Mexican getup, with two pieces of rubber on his nose, a piece on his lip that made it fuller, little pieces of something on his eyelids to make them fuller, and suddenly I saw Sir Laurence Olivier. Here he was, he just came in pieces!

Even to a kid, Olivier was charming and lovely to work with, so comfortable and secure. In some ways, though, he had the same actor’s foibles that I did: we started the scene talking at a normal level, but every time he lowered his
voice, I went lower still, each of us trying to underplay the other until the director had to come in over the loudspeaker and say, “Excuse us, the scene’s going beautifully, it’s just that none of us can hear what you’re saying.”

I’ve met Olivier only once since, at an event at the Motion Picture Academy while I was married to John Astin. I’m very shy about approaching people, even if I’ve worked with them, but I really wanted John to meet him, so I swallowed my reluctance and went right up. He was extremely gracious but he had a terrible problem with his hands, really painful arthritis, so when John naturally extended his own hand, Olivier said, “I’m so ashamed, I can’t shake your hand. But would you mind if I just touched you.” So John put out his hand and Olivier touched him lightly, because he couldn’t move his fingers. It was quite a moment.

Though professionally I was having enviable success across the board, that only created more problems with the Rosses. The more famous I got, the more neurotic they got. Perfectly nice people can do some pretty bizarre things when they’re mixing pills and booze, which is what the Rosses did. I’ve often tried to figure out why they couldn’t relax and enjoy my success, and the only thing that makes sense to me is that they felt guilty, and when you base your behavior on guilt, that means you’re afraid. The fear of losing me had to come from the fear that they had done something to drive me away, which, of course, they had.

Although John Ross was a heavy drinker and went through periods when he was sauced every night, he was able to quit from time to time. Or he’d parcel the liquor out for himself, sometimes just drinking beer in a small brandy snifter. Ethel, by contrast, drank more and more and more, to an incredible capacity, as the years went by. She was an Olympic-class drinker who preferred vodka martinis with a lemon twist; fifths of vodka would go in two days. From about age eleven, I was their bartender. I was given very strict instructions about how dry the mix should be; sometimes I used an atomizer for spraying the vermouth so it would be truly dry. To this day, I make a great martini.

Ethel was also cross-addicted. She took tons of pills—not a day went by without some barbiturate or other—and
she sometimes spent the entire day in bed recovering. She would get boxes of all kinds of narcotics from a friend of hers in Detroit who was a nurse, things like phenobarbital, Stelazine, and Thorazine. She took Percodan, a heavy-duty, very addictive painkiller, eight or ten times a week for migraine headaches. Ethel was not in the best of shape.

Gradually, during the course of
The Miracle Worker
, when I was thirteen or fourteen, the Rosses involved me in their habits, They’d take me to Atlantic City, they’d be drinking, and they’d give me a little brandy snifter of my own with something innocuous in it at first, then later booze. Or they’d mix Bloody Marys and make a Virgin Mary for me, eventually adding vodka to it. Finally, they started giving me full-out drinks. I felt guilty at first, and then I didn’t care. These adults were giving it to me, after all. And whatever little buzz I got from it felt good.

The same kind of pattern developed with drugs. Early on, whenever there was even a hint of my being sick, if I sneezed or complained of a sore throat, they took me to a doctor who gave me shots. The Rosses claimed they were Vitamin B
₁₂
shots and maybe they were, but still it’s unusual to take a kid practically every week for injections to keep her healthy. They were also very quick to shoot me up with penicillin, which turned out to be unfortunate for me. At first it did its job, then I built up a tolerance, and finally an allergy, so I can’t take it at all anymore.

Eventually the Rosses started giving me Thorazine and Stelazine, both antipsychotic medications, as well as phenobarbital and Percodan. Ethel would say to me, “Okay, you have to take your happy pill now, because you’ve got to go to sleep so you’ll be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning.” It wasn’t a nightly event, it came in spurts over a period of about six years. Though I was never given enough to become addicted, it certainly wasn’t a healthy practice. I think the Rosses simply thought I was keyed up, or, given that I had trouble sleeping, wanted to insure that I had a good night’s rest. No one was educated then about how dangerous that stuff could be, so they probably weren’t acting from malice, just a combination of ignorance, greed, and bad judgment. It’s odd that even now I feel nervous about revealing
this aspect of their behavior. I feel like I’m betraying them.

I didn’t find out specifically what kinds of pills they’d been giving me until years later, in 1965, when I was hospitalized in Los Angeles and given Stelazine and Thorazine in a little white cup. I thought those pills looked familiar, and then it hit me. I wondered if that stuff had somehow damaged me, if the depression I often felt came from those pills. And years later, when I learned I was manic-depressive, I wondered if the Thorazine and Stelazine had triggered those episodes in the first place. Although you’re born with the potential for manic-depressive behavior, many people go a whole lifetime without it’s being set off.

Though I tried not to show it, I was depressed and insecure a lot of the time during
The Miracle Worker
’s run. But the facade, like the show, had to go on. In fact the Rosses used to tell what they thought was an adorable story about how everyone in
The Miracle Worker
cast was seeing psychiatrists and how I had come home once and asked, “How old do you have to be to be in analysis?” Their answer was, “You’ll never need a shrink. People who are in analysis just don’t feel loved. And you always have all the love you need.”

Perhaps coincidentally, but probably not, this was the time in my life when my weight first became a problem. Annie at one point complained that I was getting too heavy for her to lift, and the Rosses, of course, decided I was too fat. They pretended not to notice that a year had gone by, and I might simply be growing, which was actually what had happened. It wasn’t a thrill at thirteen to be told to cut out ice cream and candy and eat grapefruit and cottage cheese, especially when I wasn’t overweight. Ethel invented what she called the lettuce sandwich, which was baloney on lettuce with mustard. Whenever I could, I’d go to the nearest candy stand on the subway platform and fill up on Hershey bars. I was starving!

That was the beginning of life-long dieting and self-consciousness about weight. My weight has fluctuated as much as forty pounds from time to time, which on my frame makes a major difference. I really peaked in 1979. I went to
the market one day, probably for more garbage to eat, and a woman standing behind me at the checkout counter very sweetly asked, “And when is your baby due?” I came home and I really had to face the truth. I couldn’t pretend any longer by wearing bigger clothes, not looking in the mirror, not getting on the scale. By coincidence my next project was a TV movie about a woman who was fat and got skinny. I lost those forty pounds and I’ve never been that overweight again.

Contributing to my state of mind was the continuing unhappy situation with my parents. My mother was backstage with me all the time, staring at the walls in utter misery. She’d read the papers and doze; she rarely watched the show—I think it made her nervous. I was always anxious when people came backstage, in case she might make a scene. She always had an angry face and I was always trying to do something to make that face, or the mean face, or the sad face, go away. Always checking with her, “Is this okay, Mom? Is that okay?” and almost never getting an answer.

We took a cab after the theater. Usually my mother would drop me off at the Rosses’ but sometimes we’d go home to Queens. We’d have fun for a few minutes during the ride. I’d stop for ice cream and she’d stop for pig’s knuckles, really gross, and we’d have a little bit of a lighthearted time. But once we’d get home, she’d retreat to that miserable place in her mind, wherever it was, and I’d fiddle around, trying to get geared down to go to bed.

The incident I remember most clearly from that period was the one time the Rosses gave my mother permission to take me away for a long weekend. We went to a lake in New Jersey, with little cabins around it. I wasn’t a very strong swimmer to begin with, and one day, for some reason, I got into trouble out on the lake. My mother, who can’t swim at all, remembers this thought going through her head as she watched me start to go under: “Oh, my God, what am I going to tell the Rosses?”

With my father, the situation was more complicated, though I didn’t know it at the time. The last time I’d seen him was when I was about eight. He was in a hospital and had all these scary-looking tubes in him. I remember I brought
him rice pudding, which may not have been too practical—the guy had tubes everywhere, how’s he going to eat rice pudding?—but I knew my daddy liked rice pudding without raisins, which, of course, I love to this day, so I had to bring him some.

After the Rosses took control of my life, they told me in so many words that my father just didn’t exist. “We don’t know where he is” was the exact quote, which turned out to be a lie, because my father would surface periodically, sometimes to get fifty dollars or so from the Rosses, sometimes just to talk. He wasn’t, after all, forbidden by law to see me, even though that might have been his perception. I think it was a combination of his own embarrassment, his own feelings of inadequacy, and the Rosses’ callous manipulation of those feelings that kept him away: “If you love her, Mr. Duke, if you’re a responsible person, you’ll stay away from her. If you want things to remain as comfortable as they are now, you’ll just let sleeping dogs lie.” That’s the way I’m able to sort out in my head what the Rosses did. Certainly they were capable of such behavior. In 1961 my sister wanted to bring her future husband to meet my father, and the Rosses, who’d been told this by my mother, made a big to-do and in their paranoia refused to allow it; they were afraid my father might be encouraged to rock the boat. Momma begged Carol, “Please, please, you’ll make trouble,” so Carol didn’t push. The Rosses had the whole family that firmly under their thumbs.

In 1968 a woman came up to me at the Improv in New York and asked how my father was. I told her he’d been dead for five years, asked how she knew him, and she told me a story that really wiped me out. Apparently she ran a luncheonette where my father washed dishes. He’d go on periodic benders, wouldn’t show up for a while, but because everyone in the place was crazy about him, they’d go out and find him, help him pull himself together or send him to his sister’s house in New Jersey until he straightened out enough to come back to work.

Suddenly, my father didn’t take a drop, went on the wagon, and stayed on for several months. Everyone kidded him about what he was doing with his money now that he
wasn’t spending it on booze, but he never answered them. Finally he told this woman, “I got a kid in this play on Broadway. Three or four times a week, I go there and stand in the back.” He told her that if this was as close as he could get to his kid, then that’s what he was going to do. He never came backstage. He never made himself known. I never knew he was there. Just like my mother, he was insecure, he didn’t know what to do, so, with the purest of motives, he broke his own heart.

As
The Miracle Worker
entered its second year on Broadway, I began to have some concentration problems. Not in the tantrums—something was always new and vital there, plus the physical danger meant we had to maintain a keen awareness. But for no reason at all, during other scenes it would be tough not to laugh. Sometimes I simply did it—Helen’s behavior was a little erratic anyway—but I’d make sure I was turned upstage just in case.

The worst scene for setting me off was the last one before the miracle. Everyone is sitting around the table and Captain Keller is cutting the ham. We used a wax ham and wax ham slices and every once in a while they would fall on the plate a certain way that looked like the funniest thing I ever saw. It might have been mildly amusing, but not grounds for the absolute hysteria that would follow. My shoulders would start to shake, Annie would poke me, then she’d start to laugh and her shoulders would shake. Everyone else would be trying to do the scene while these two crazy girls were falling apart.