Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (17 page)

Although the directors may have changed frequently, the cast remained steady, and I felt close to all of them, especially Jean Byron, who played my mother and will tell you at the drop of a hat that I’m the only daughter she’s ever had. She was a real grande dame, bawdy, outrageous, swore like a trooper, really my first experience with a woman who was able to maintain her grace and dignity and still be one of the guys.

I’ve since abused the privilege, but it was from Jean that I first learned the many uses of certain four-letter words. Much more important, Jean would talk with me about her intimate relationships, something I certainly didn’t get from my mother or Ethel. I vicariously enjoyed the excitement of romance and also learned about the down side, the weeks and weeks of agony when a relationship is breaking up. She was very generous in allowing a teenage kid in on that, treating me like an adult but also knowing that she was instructing me at the same time. I may have been sixteen or seventeen chronologically, but in terms of emotional experience I’d been frozen at age twelve.

William Schallert, who played the father and who now works with me on the Screen Actors Guild board, was another one of those daddy role models, very warm and cerebral, the wise old owl. I’d confide in him occasionally, but mostly I would just hang around or literally hang on him. There are similarities between Bill and John Astin, whom I later married; if you ask them what time it is, they start with the invention of the sun dial. Now you’re getting a good deal of information, and it’s all very interesting, but in the meantime you’re twenty-five minutes late for wherever you’re going. Both those men can waste an hour of my time, and I’ll be absolutely fascinated, while at the same time I’m thinking, “Son of a bitch—get to the point!”

Bill did something else that drove me absolutely berserk and that was to pretend he was a monkey. He’s basically a dignified person but he had this way of lengthening his arms and making screeching noises. And, of course, the minute he got a rise out of me, which was always, he was gone. He would chase me up and down three flights of stairs, all over the building and onto the roof. I’d run into the ladies’ room and he’d bang on the door, all the time doing this hideous monkey screech. Finally the assistant director and everybody else would say, “Bill, stop it now! We’re trying to get some control here!” Oh, God, I hated it. I’d try to figure out what I was doing to trigger that monkey act, but I never did. In fact, he’s still doing it to me at the Guild and I’m still screaming, Stop it!

When it came to casting my boyfriend, Richard, I was initially very disappointed that Tommy Rettig, the guy from
Lassie
, didn’t get the part. Whew! He looked terrific and I figured I could just instantly have a crush on him and it’d be a built-in romance. Instead, they chose Eddie Applegate, who turned out to be very sweet and wonderful to work with. But although he had a Dorian Grey ability not to look it, he was a good ten years older than me and married. Eddie really looked like the typical dumb blond of that era and he behaved off-camera exactly the way he did on-camera, really goofy and ditso. I’ll bet his agent said to him, “Hey, don’t start acting your age around the set or you’ll get canned.” He got divorced during the last season, and we teased the hell
out of him because he’d discovered partying on the Sunset Strip.

Then there was Paul O’Keefe, who played my brother, Ross, a name I tried to avoid saying. That poor kid, he worked all the time, worse than me. If you didn’t see him on the set, he was off making a commercial somewhere. I remember yelling at him because his ears were dirty, and someone said, “This kid doesn’t have time to take a shower. He’s got another gig!” He was always late, always looked half-asleep or all-asleep, and we were always teasing him to wake up. Or about his complexion. “You look like a bottle a’ milk! Go to makeup! You look like a bottle a’ milk!”

It was a true sibling relationship between me and Paul, because I loved him and I hated him. He could be a pain-in-the-ass little brother; every time I’d try to have a conversation on an adult level, there he’d be. But he was also a midget Einstein, very bright, playing chess with some of the guys on the set to amuse himself. He wore glasses and was very disappointed when he found out that pilots have to have twenty-twenty vision. He’d often show up in a leather flight jacket and one of those old-fashioned helmets with the ear-flaps that come out. He wanted to be a pilot in the worst way.

Occasionally it was nice to be just warm and loving with Paul, but we didn’t let people see that too often. A couple of times we had shows in which we had to go at each other physically, and whatever it was we were feeling for each other came out. Once we were told to kick, and I’m telling you our shins were bloody when it was over. I’d say, “Stop kicking so hard!” And he’d say, “I’m not!” Then I’d kick him even harder and he’d kick me even harder back and say, “You’re supposed to be the older one!” Poor kid.

At first
The Patty Duke Show
was exciting to do because those guys were fun people to be with, and I was out of the house. And the Rosses were rarely around. But because of what I felt were the inherent limitations of the roles, I got bored very quickly. And the longer it went on, the more I began to hate it. I hated being less intelligent than I was, I hated pretending I was younger than I was, I hated not being consulted about anything, having no choice in how I looked
or what I wore, I hated being trapped. As opposed to
The Miracle Worker
, which felt so true I never stopped learning new lessons from it,
The Patty Duke Show
had no connection to any reality I’d experienced or even heard about. I didn’t want the series to be canceled—I had a sense of loyalty to the other people involved and enough ego investment not to want to be in a flop show that had my name on it—but it felt like a trap.

The show ended up running for 104 episodes, all the way through 1966. It was one of the most popular series of its day, so much so that parents apparently used it as a weapon (as in “You better do your homework or you’re not going to watch
The Patty Duke Show
”) but I never had an idea of the size of its audience. More than that, I honest to God don’t remember any of the episodes, largely because to prevent my head from being turned I was never allowed to watch it. That was a flat-out edict from the Rosses, who’d send me to my room, where I could hear but not see what was going on. Except for watching ten minutes of it in Japanese when I went to Japan on a publicity tour, I never saw any of the shows until just a few years ago.

The story that I did a lot of work to prepare for my dual role is true, but it turned out to be useless research. I wrote lengthy bios for each girl, but they were more silly than anything else. I went to the Scottish Rites Organization’s dances and socials, learned the sword dance and the Highland fling from Ethel, even practiced the bagpipes—that was a trip. It turns out no one ever gets good at the bagpipes, you have to be born a Blackwatch or forget it. All that went into the dumper after the pilot. The same thing with my accent. I learned a true Scottish burr, and then everyone got nervous that the viewers wouldn’t like or understand it so they decided on a general European nothing accent, a kind of “anyplace but America” speech. That always bothered me, I didn’t feel it was professional to be doing an accent like that. I mean, Cathy should be from someplace. That’s one of the reasons I tend to think of my work in that show the same way I do the split screens we used, as part of the trick as opposed to genuine performance.

Actually it was the Patty role, for which I did no
research, that proved to be the more difficult for me. As glib as I was for a person my age, I was really not that outgoing, and certainly not about teenage pursuits. I didn’t know how sixteen-year-olds danced. How would I know? I Never went to a dance. I listened to rock music only when I visited my mother; with the Rosses it was almost never allowed. I wasn’t a teenager of my era, I was too busy talking with forty-year-olds. If I was anything, I was a teenager of John and Ethel’s era. I had no more idea than the middle-aged screenwriters what someone my age should say, so what I was speaking was a Writers Guild idea of teenage talk. It had nothing to do with kids of my generation.

So the Cathy character, which everyone thought was the more difficult because she was so polished and la-di-da, that was the easier one. I liked Cathy better because she was more sedate, seemed older and was less silly. She was kind of boring, but at least she wasn’t called upon to do things that I felt were demeaning and scatterbrained.

The same thing went for the clothes I wore. Frankly, I preferred Cathy’s because they were more conservative in color and style. Others might think they were boring, but that was less offensive than skirts that were too short and too wide, things that were in general stiff and unreal. To me they were trick clothes, an extension of the trick photography and my trick accent. None of it had anything to do with the way a human being of that age really moves or thinks or chooses clothing. Not only did I hate those clothes, but they put my name on some and successfully merchandized them, so a lot of other poor girls were walking around with the same ugly clothes I was. But that’s because they saw them on television, like one of my kids taking a diamond earring of mine because he wanted to look like Mr. T. Kids will imitate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they think what they’re copying is any good.

Aside from the clothing and the accents, I separated the characters by examining my own mannerisms and then figuring out which ones I would be able to give up in order to animate the other character. One takes longer strides and when she sits down, she doesn’t necessarily cross her legs. The other wouldn’t dream of sitting down without crossing
her legs at the ankles. One has very erect posture, the other slumps. One is very vivacious, the other looks more cerebral. One is going to talk louder and be left-handed, the other the reverse.

It was an interesting acting exercise in some respects, but it was also baloney; the technique could be boiled down to playing it faster and funnier for one and slower and quieter for the other. It was also annoying not to be able to perform either character fully because of the restraint of keeping them separate, having to eliminate certain things I might have done for one character because it belonged to the other one. No human being is either that perky or not perky. Although Sidney Sheldon had developed the roles as a device to use all parts of me, I felt as if I didn’t get to use any. It was like asking a ballet dancer to dance only from the waist down.

Much of the strain of the dual role, however, was strictly physical. For one thing, as a public relations gimmick, I had to use two separate dressing rooms, one for Patty and one for Cathy. It was really a pain, because I was always leaving in one room something that I needed in the other. I kept begging the people in charge to knock down the cardboard wall between them so I could have one room and be comfortable, but the answer was always no.

Also, because of the use of a split screen, I did a lot of responding to myself, which was hard, and we had to film each scene at least twice and often a number of times. Sometimes I ended up changing twelve or fifteen times a day. That actually turned into one of the more entertaining parts of the shooting; when you’re in the army, you make a game out of anything to survive. I would drive the poor hairdresser crazy, saying, “Quick, quick, put in the pins,” trying to get the changing time down to under a minute and a half. I didn’t care what I looked like—I never got to see the show anyway. There was a mirror in my dressing room, which was surprising, because usually they were forbidden to me by the Rosses as self-indulgent. The only one I had access to at their apartment was on the medicine chest in the bathroom, but I was allowed in there for only ten minutes at a time. As a result, I rarely used the one on the set and to this day I don’t
use a mirror much because it’s not a habit I ever developed. There were no mirrors, so I didn’t look.

One of the most positive things to come out of the show was my increased involvement with the Muscular Dystrophy Association. I became National Youth Chairman the first year of the series, the idea being to pay attention to this incredible force of teenagers who were doing something right and to help mobilize more of them. Though I think my participation was initially a public relations idea on the part of the Rosses, a way to keep my name before the public when I was between roles, it rapidly became very important to me and today, twenty-three years later, I’m still involved.

My job may have sounded honorary, but it was really a lot of work. I’d finish with the show on a Friday night and I’d fly to Detroit or Chicago or New Orleans or wherever. I’d be interviewed all morning, do a luncheon speech, more interviews in the afternoon, then usually make an appearance at a sock hop or something like that at night. You’re continually on the ball, you’ve got to give the right answer, you can’t offend anyone, you’re never allowed to be tired. Appearances like that are the hardest part of this business. Acting’s easy by comparison.

For someone my age, who had not been trained to deal with seriously ill people, that contact was initially traumatic. It takes an enormous toll to see these exquisite-looking, bright children who are withered and tortured in their little bodies. You might be bright and cheery in front of them, but inside it hurts and you’re enraged. You’re saying to yourself, “What the hell is life about? Where’s this just God I keep hearing about?” It’s tough stuff to wrestle with, especially when all the Rosses would give me were trite answers to serious questions. Maybe there are no answers, but at least respect the fact that I have the questions.

Through a combination of the Muscular Dystrophy national office and the fact that Peter Lawford was one of the producers of my show, I was invited to accompany the Whit-takers, a family with two children with dystrophy, to meet President Kennedy in the White House. Talk about auras. With him, you really knew you’d met up with a special essence, so much so that I don’t remember a thing about
visiting Washington or how I got to the White House, I just remember the moment in the Oval Office.