Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (20 page)

Later that same year, I almost lost John Ross as well. He and Ethel had a huge fight that lasted an entire weekend. I wasn’t privy to all that much of it because I was in my sleeping mode, but still it was unusual to witness a dispute between them; usually I was sent someplace else if there was going to be a major scene. I woke up for a few hours late on Sunday and he wasn’t there. Ethel tried to make light of it, but she admitted she wasn’t exactly sure where he was. Monday came and went and he still didn’t show up. I finally did the unheard-of, I asked what was going on, but she still wouldn’t tell me.

Then, on Tuesday after work, John Ross’s secretary, John Phillips, picked me up and said we were going to meet Ethel in Newark, New Jersey. He told me that J.R., as I called him then, was in the hospital, but he didn’t go into any detail. The hospital looked like Bellevue, very stark with bars on the windows. I waited in a room by myself for a long time and then Ethel came in. She told me that John had gone to a motel in Newark and attempted suicide and that he
wasn’t expected to live. He had taken phenobarbital, Nembutal, Seconal, Stelazine, Thorazine, and, I believe, Valium, all the pills she was getting from her friend the nurse, any batch of which could kill a person. This was not a cry for help; he took everything in the place—he meant to die. Why the man lived, no one knows.

Later that day, John Phillips told me that before J.R. took the pills, he had written several letters—one to Ethel, one to the police, one to an accountant, and one to me—and he told me their contents. The letter to the accountant talked about how they had played fast and loose with the money earned by Billy McNally, my little friend the Rosses had discovered outside the Metropole in Times Square. The letter to me was basically an apology for not allowing me to grow up, for keeping me from being a normal child, for not being stronger in allying himself with me against Ethel and her restrictions. I never got to see that letter; it and all the others were destroyed by Ethel. She covered it all up; money changed hands to keep the incident off the police blotter and to keep it quiet around the hospital. News of the attempt never came out.

John remained in that hospital for three days and started to rally. I was never allowed to see him, and after that first night I was never allowed to return. Ethel was afraid I’d be spotted. From there John was transferred to Gracie Square Hospital, one of the top places in the city, very expensive. He was there for six weeks and given God knows how many shock treatments.

The last week before John came back I started to get instructions from Ethel about what my behavior was to be once he arrived home. Contrary to any kind of therapy I know of, there was to be no discussion of any suicide attempt. I was never to mention it or the hospitalization—we were all to pretend that none of this had ever taken place. Which we did. And to the best of my knowledge, the man never had any follow-up psychiatric care, not a single session, until a number of years later when they were living in California and he apparently had another breakdown. And irony of ironies, although I never saw him, I’ve heard from several sources that at the time I was hospitalized in Los
Angeles under psychiatric care, he was an outpatient undergoing schock treatment at the same hospital.

Something even more emotionally significant for me, and much more wrenching, than John’s suicide attempt happened right about that time, in the summer of 1963. It involved a woman I felt extremely close to, Ethel’s mother, Gramma Howe. Whenever the Rosses didn’t like my behavior, they’d ship me off to Gramma Howe’s in Detroit. It was supposed to be a punishment, like the honor farm, but what they didn’t know was that Gramma would let me have all the things I wasn’t supposed to. The Rosses never wanted me to eat anything fattening, but Gramma made me stuffed pork chops and apple pie every day. Or she would invite boys over and we’d have a cookout on the tiny hibachi, in her living room no less. She was very domineering and very opinionated, much like Ethel in a lot of ways, but she also knew that most of what was going on in my upbringing was nonsense. Gramma Howe was the only person I knew who wasn’t afraid to ignore the Rosses’ orders, the only person I could count on to love me unconditionally. There was an unspoken pact between us: “Don’t tell.”

Every week for months the Rosses would take me to a weird doctor in New Jersey who looked like Sam Jaffe and offered a procedure that was right out of a demented science fiction movie. The treatment rooms in his office had regular examining tables with the addition of metal coils on the top. You would lie on these coils, a switch would be turned on, they’d start to roll, and the combination of friction and body heat would make you sweat like a pig. The whole thing made me very crazy, because not only were you strapped to the table while this was happening but all the lights were turned out. I learned how to wiggle my hand out of the straps, listen if anybody was coming, and turn the machine off. I know this sounds nuts, but it’s the truth. If I asked questions about the treatments, I was told, “They’re supposed to make you better.” I said, “I’m not sick in the first place,” but nobody was listening.

One cold, rainy day in September, Ethel’s mother, my friend and ally Gramma Howe, who was seventy-one, drove out to visit from Detroit and she went to this place with us.
She and I were put in the same room, me on the table and Gramma in something that looked like an electric chair. She was strapped in as if she were going to be executed, and when the so-called doctor went out, she looked at me and said, “What … is … going … on here? Are they [meaning John and Ethel] completely out of their minds?” I laughed and said, “Oh, Gramma, I have to do this all the time.” And she said, “Get me out of this thing.”

I unhooked her, but the machine had been on long enough to make her very sweaty. It was still cold and rainy when we left in the Rosses’ Lark convertible and, as usual, the Bloody Marys were popped open. By the time we got back to the apartment, Ethel was blind drunk and Gramma Howe was already having chills. Within an hour both John and Ethel were passed out and Gramma was vomiting and running a high fever. She was lying on the couch in the living room, getting sicker and sicker. I couldn’t wake up Ethel, so I went to John and said, “You have to call the doctor. Something’s very wrong with Gramma.” He roused Ethel and she said, “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with her, she always does this to me,” and passed out again.

Gramma’s temperature was 105, she was sweaty and clammy. But even though I was almost seventeen, I didn’t feel I had the authority to call the doctor on my own. Then Gramma started to get delirious. I tried to wake up Ethel again—I said, “She’s calling for her mother, she’s talking nonsense”—and Ethel said, “Oh, she always does that. It’s just to get my attention. Don’t listen to her.” At which point I took a deep breath and called the doctor myself. He came over and said Gramma had the flu. He advised giving her little sips of Coca-Cola and keeping a cold cloth on her head, which I did.

Then, at eleven-thirty, Ethel came out of the bedroom and said, “
What are you doing
?”

And I said, “I’m sitting here with Gramma.”

“You’re supposed to be in bed! You have to work tomorrow.”

“But Gramma’s really sick, and I’m sitting here with her.”

“YOU’RE NOT SITTING HERE WITH GRAMMA! YOU’RE GOING TO BED RIGHT NOW!”

“Are you going to take care of her, then? Are you going to sit here?”

“I’LL DECIDE WHAT I’M GOING TO DO! YOU’RE GOING TO BED, NOW!”

So I kissed Gramma and went to bed. But what Ethel didn’t know was that right before she came out, Gramma had spoken. Her head had cleared and she’d told me, “You’ve got to get away from these people.” I said, “Gramma, that’s not possible. Where would I go?” She said, “I don’t care where you go, you’ve got to get away from these people. They are crazy.” It was like the last words of wisdom from a guru before the spirit leaves the body. She was the one authority figure who told me that I wasn’t hallucinating, I wasn’t nuts. I knew then that my desire to get away from the Rosses was an intelligent one. Up to that point, no matter how much I disliked the Rosses, my loyalty had always been to them. All that was going to change.

I slept especially soundly that night, but at three A.M. Gramma Howe had a heart attack and died there at the apartment. The doctor was called again, a fire department emergency crew tromped through the apartment, and I slept through all of it. In the morning, I sensed someone in my room and woke up. It was John, leaning down to pick up my alarm clock, which was on the floor next to my bed. Ethel stood in the doorway.

“What are you doing?” I said. “I have to get up!”

“No, you can sleep in. You don’t have to go to work today.”

I looked at Ethel, and she said softly, “I’m sorry.”

“You killed her,” I said very quietly. “She’s dead because you killed her. You get out of my way, you get out of my room.”

I went in to see where Gramma was but the body had been moved, and now I began screaming, “Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?” And they kept saying, “Calm down.” Finally I just screamed, “FUCK YOU!” First time ever.

They told me then she was at the morgue at Bellevue,
where my father had been taken, the hospital where I was born. And I said, “Then get the fuck out of my way.” Once I used the word, it started to come very naturally. And I got dressed and went to work. Never again did the Rosses have the kind of hold on me they used to. It took me another six or eight months to accomplish getting away from them, but with Gramma Howe’s voice ringing in my ears, it suddenly became inevitable.

I
t happened in the early days of
The Patty Duke Show
. I glanced in the mirror one morning and said to Nancy Littlefield (then a second assistant director but now New York City’s Film Commissioner), “Who’s that guy with the blue eyes?” She said, “That’s Harry Falk. He’s here to see about the first assistant director’s job.” And I said, “I’m going to marry him.” Never mind that he was fourteen years older than me and already taken. I was determined. It may have taken me a while, but I did it.

Harry was spectacularly good-looking, six foot one with big blue eyes, the kind of guy who turned heads. He was great in terms of what we called “attitude”—just the way he stood was very sexy. And he knew it; he had that aura of quiet confidence that comes with being aware of the power of one’s own masculinity. Yet I think he partly resented that; he felt, “Okay, I know I’m good at this, but I want to be good at other things.” Harry was very quiet and painfully shy, which made him seem mysterious. And he had this giant dog, an Irish wolfhound named Finn, that weighed about 185 pounds and stood over six feet tall on his hind legs.

Even though I probably now subscribe to the “search-for-the-father” explanation for why I got involved with Harry, part of the reason was simply that no boys were hanging
around the show. Men were hanging around. That was the field in which my sexual appetite was whetted. It was a real animal magnetism attraction for me with Harry, and, of course, having had no experience at all with the opposite sex, Steve Curry’s kiss notwithstanding, I had no idea how to go about this conquest. I’m sure I acted like a lovesick puppy for the whole season.

No matter where Harry went on the set, I always knew where he was, always. I could be acting in a three-minute scene, and I knew exactly where he was standing, whether it was in the light or in the dark. When we weren’t shooting, I always managed to be in the vicinity of where he was, sort of following him around, trying to think of subjects to engage him in conversation. Stanley Praeger was directing the show then, so we had his jokes and one-liners going for us; laughing and enjoying them was something we could have in common.

More than that I dared not do. I thought I had been so quiet and clever that no one had guessed what was on my mind. We had the summer off, and when I showed up for the first day of the second season, I found out Harry wasn’t coming back. He had left us to work on a more intellectual series called
East Side, West Side
. It also meant more money and was a one-hour show, but I, of course, thought he’d made the switch because he hated me. I was inconsolable, and within an hour I realized that everyone had known all along that I had this crush on Harry. People kept coming up to me and saying, “Don’t worry, honey, maybe the show he’s on won’t work out and he’ll be back.” And I kept saying very primly, “Who? Who? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

It was during the hiatus from Harry that I became involved with Frank Sinatra, Jr. He was so grand and gracious, so smitten and so romantic. The attention was lovely, but while on most levels my thoughts about Harry were “Well, that’ll never work out, I don’t even know where the man is,” I really hadn’t given up on him. That’s where the passion was. And I did manage to find Harry’s phone number and call him. I didn’t know what the hell to say when he answered the phone, I simply blurted out, “Hi, I just wanted
to tell you that we were all sorry you didn’t come back.” He sounded very guilty.

Then it came time for my seventeenth birthday party at the studio and he was the surprise: I just turned around and there he was. My heart skipped several beats, and I did all those teenage things when I saw him. And his face got very red, as it always does when he’s embarrassed. I tried to be friendly but ever so cool, yet I must have asked him eighteen different ways how he liked his new show and when was he coming back to ours. I had never looked at ratings before, but suddenly they were of great interest to me. And then his show was canceled, and somehow—it certainly had nothing to do with me—Harry was brought back as our first A.D. and my life was made.

This time I determined to be more aggressive. I became much more conscious of how I looked. I disliked Patty’s and Cathy’s clothes even more now, because they weren’t sophisticated enough and I certainly didn’t want to look like a kid in front of Harry. I started wearing black a lot, black turtlenecks and black pants, a very Greenwich Village bohemian look that I remembered Annie Bancroft wearing several years before. I would strike up conversations with Harry in a much more blatantly flirtatious way. I didn’t have to deal with hiding my feelings anymore, because everyone had guessed, so I had nothing to lose. Then I started making hints about going out to the movies, and finally, in the most casual way, he invited me to go to dinner. I thought I would die.