Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (38 page)

I especially hated Sunday mornings. I was tired, I didn’t
want to fly, I didn’t want to pack another frigging Pamper, I didn’t care if the kids went stark naked. John was very good about the daily life chores like doing the laundry, which was fortunate because I really didn’t even attempt to be more generous of spirit. The boys learned almost immediately the best thing to do was just get out of my way. “Just don’t have anything to do with her, try not even to look at her.” It was chaos, pure chaos.

And when we bought a van and drove instead of flying, it was only marginally better. This wasn’t a motor home, this wasn’t a bus done up for a rock star, this was a van, with an ice chest and baloney sandwiches and the kids having to pee in paper cups because John tried hard not to make bathroom stops. For a while we couldn’t get them to pee in the cups, and then they didn’t want to pee in anything but the cups. We’d get to the house and they’d demand their McDonald’s cup to pee into.

Some experiences were worse than others, some were better. We did six weeks of The Marriage Gambol in Milwaukee in the middle of winter. It was cold, it was snowy, it was rainy, it was five California kids who were used to going out anytime they pleased cooped up in a hotel. Can you imagine five male Eloises? They were into throwing things like chairs and lamps at each other and through windows and John kept saying, “We’re having the best time, aren’t we?” I’m surprised we didn’t all turn on him like rabid dogs and kill him, a family of Cujos eating the father.

The best time for me was always Cape Cod. Something about the artsy atmosphere there really appealed to me. The boys loved it too. They had their mini Cape Cod affairs, it was very romantic for them. They had to put up with the horrible noises I make in the night, but everybody survived. Even if I don’t, I think they will always look back on that period as a terrific time in their lives.

I
n 1977 I did a film with Daisy Gerber, a friend of John’s who was studying at the American Film Institute. Daisy was very involved in psychic phenomena and the film was taken from
The Fifty-Minute Hour
, a landmark book on psychiatry. It was about a woman who had an extraordinary eating disorder. She didn’t just binge on pizzas and chocolate, she ate the boxes they came in, she even tried to eat the cans. It was quite intense.

Daisy and I ended up, as you often do on films like that, working eighteen and twenty hours a day. I went into one of my periods of insomnia and stopped eating. I lost ten pounds in a week, I was wired from here to the moon, which was probably at full tilt as well. Because we worked nights at what was then the AFI campus at Greystone, an old mansion in Beverly Hills which has a lot of strange tales attached to it, and because of Daisy’s psychic tendencies, everyone was into an otherworldly mode. At the wrap party we all sat around till past midnight telling ghost stories and talking about spirits and other scary stuff.

John and I got home very late; I was still quite keyed up, but we went to bed. The radio was on, and I began singing along with a song I knew. Then another song came on that I didn’t know, and I started singing along with that one too.
That quite amazed me, and I said to John, “Look what I’m doing! Look what I’m doing!”

“What? Same stuff you’ve been doing for years.”

“No, listen, listen. I’m singing these words and I don’t know the song.” And though John has always claimed I was a millisecond behind, it seemed to me I was right there with it.

Suddenly I said, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God, John. There is life after death.” It wasn’t a sound I heard, it wasn’t anything visual, it was like a revelation. I saw a nothingness, but not a terrible nothingness. And I felt the most euphoric sensation I’ve ever felt.

“I
will
see you again,” I said. “We’ll be together again.” I was deliriously happy. I felt lighter and lighter and lighter—not light-headed, just lighter. “Oh, my God, John. You have to see this.”

And he said “Anna” in such a way that it frightened me; there was fear in his voice and it frightened me. The more unearthly I felt, the more earthly he sounded to me. Then I started talking very fast, saying “Oh-my-God, oh-my-God, oh-my-God, I’m dying.”

“No, you’re not. Stop this.”

“Call me back. I’m going. I’m going. Call me back.”

And he did, he started calling “Anna,” first in a normal tone and finally literally screaming. Still, I kept saying, “You’re getting fainter. I can’t hear you. Call me back. I’m going. Call me back. Call me back.” It really seemed as if I were going someplace. Aside from the anxiety produced by the fear in his voice, it felt great. It wasn’t the kind of out-of-body experience I’ve read about—I wasn’t floating above myself, watching myself. I just felt ethereal.

All of a sudden I said to John, “Hit me on the back, hit me on the back!” and he began alternately calling my name and whacking me. I guess he was taking some pretty good shots, but I kept saying, “Harder! Hit me harder!” Then, suddenly, there was a sensation of no longer being light but grounded. It felt like a thud, and then I completely relaxed, except, of course, for my brain and my mouth. I said over and over, “Did you see that? Can you believe what just went on?”

John was hugging and rocking me and he said I had to eat something. I told him I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t swallow, but he said he’d get me some bread and milk. Then, just as with the song on the radio, I started saying everything John was saying at the same time as he said it. He claims I was slightly behind, but no matter; it was an extremely freaky experience for him and he decided to call my psychiatrist. He turned out to be on vacation, and a second one we called suggested I be hospitalized, which John was against, so finally we settled on going to Dr. Harold Arlen, who was John’s therapist at the time and was to become a major positive force in my life.

John told Arlen that I hadn’t slept and I hadn’t eaten and I was hallucinating. I was still talking simultaneously with him, and I kept saying, “It’s not a hallucination, it’s real.” Arlen said he wanted to see me at his house, and, not totally trusting this, I reverted to my New York roots and said, “I’m taking my brother,” who happened to be staying with us.

As I was getting dressed, I began saying to myself, “Don’t try to make everybody believe this. Go along with whatever they say.” I knew that since we were going to a psychiatrist, rehospitalization was a real threat. I’d better calm down or I could wind up in the slammer again. Arlen was in his bathrobe when we got there, making me a milk shake, and he gave me a Compazine. We sat and talked and every once in a while I would get waves of that sensation all over again, and then I’d start to tremble in fear of being dubbed crazy instead of having had a spiritual experience. I tried to be careful in talking about both what I experienced and what I thought it meant. We must have sat there for two hours, and then the medication took effect and I did indeed gear down. They never convinced me that what I know happened didn’t happen, but they did impress on me that if I had a brain left in my head, I’d agree with them that it was an abnormal experience.

What I went through that night had a number of reper-cussions for my life. For one thing, as long as I didn’t attempt to deny the spirituality of the experience, my terrors and my screaming fits about death simply stopped cold. For another,
it was the impetus for a temporary return to Catholicism, because that was a safe and socially acceptable place to explore the spiritual feelings and ideas I had. And it did create a schism with John that was the beginning of the end of our marriage, because not only would he not accept what had happened, he condemned it. I was upset that I was going to be hampered in finding out more about this new world because my husband thought I was totally crazy. In some areas of my life, I am totally crazy, but this is not one of them.

I was especially flabbergasted because we’d met over our mutual obsession with that very question of death. I felt as if I had this wonderful thing to teach and he didn’t want to learn. To be rejected and scorned in that way didn’t make me stop loving him, it just made me not want to be with him anymore. I felt betrayed. I couldn’t bear to deny the answer that I’d begged for all my life. Whether anyone else believed it or not, it was mine.

Now, my comfort with these ideas is such that I’m not compelled to force others to believe or explore as I do. I am now extremely cautious about where I have these kinds of conversations. They scare people. For many years I myself would hear people talk about things like reincarnation and out-of-body experiences and it just wasn’t for me, it didn’t click. I believe that on that night, because I had fasted and not slept, because I’d been working closely with people who believed in psychic phenomena, I was in such a meditative, receptive state that the energy that allows you to know these things came through. I believe that each of us has a time to receive this message about life after life and that was mine. I also believe we all come here with it and we lose it as we go. We forget. Looking at infants has always fascinated me because I think, “Look at that baby. What does it know that I don’t?” There’s something in those eyes that shows an understanding of eternity that we’ve forgotten.

About a year later, in mid-1978, I had to deal with death in a different form when I found out that Ethel Ross had died. Initially, after John’s death in 1970, I tried to stay in touch with her. It was important for me to maintain
contact with Ethel; after the abrupt loss of my father and John Ross, I didn’t want her to die before we were able to make peace with each other.

After Sean was born, I made the trip to Mecca to show her the baby, and there were phone calls after that. Ethel came to visit a few times after John and I moved into our house, and once she happened to say something derogatory about my mother. And John, very graciously but very strongly, admonished her and said there would be no more of that; in our house my mother was to be respected. Subsequently, my mother decided to move out to Los Angeles, and I told Ethel that she was still more than welcome to visit, and that as long as basic ground rules of decency could be observed, it would be great to continue the relationship. And I never heard from her again.

When my brother moved out to California as well, he wanted to find Ethel for the same reason I did, to resolve old hostilities as much as possible. We tried to locate her, but I probably wasn’t as diligent about it as I could have been. Then one time John and I were driving around Palm Springs and I started talking about J.R. and Ethel, as I always do when I’m in that neck of the woods. We happened to pass by the contemporary furniture store they’d bought when they moved to the desert and I pointed it out to John, who said, “Maybe she’s in there.”

“No, no, she’s been gone for a long time.”

“She could still be around.”

“No, no.”

“Well, do you want to go in and look?”

“No, no, no, it’s too late.”

Within two weeks we read in the trade papers that Ethel Ross had died. So close and yet so far. Part of me was deeply, deeply shaken that she was gone. The idea that she didn’t exist anymore was very frightening to me, and the idea that she might exist somewhere else was even more frightening. Occasionally while I’m reminiscing about the Rosses I still say to myself, “Boy, I’m really going to get whacked for this one.”

But in another sense I felt no remorse at Ethel’s death, no “I’m worthless, I should kill myself, I’ll never be forgiven
now” kind of thing. A memorial service was arranged at Ethel’s home and my brother, his wife, Lucille, and I drove there together. We laughed all the way down, I mean all the way, reminiscing and telling Bambi-the-dog stories until my sister-in-law screamed that she was going to wet her pants. For all of the turmoil that everybody had endured, I thought having the kids come back laughing turned out to be a nice way to honor Ethel Ross.

When I look back on the Rosses, what I recognize now is that one couldn’t have accomplished anything without the other. John had the brains, the show biz cunning and savvy, but Ethel was the engine, the motivating force. It was all theory until she forced him to put it into action. And she was a remarkable force, literally indomitable. Ethel had a kind of power over people that was almost unfair: a mere look of disapproval got right to your core and wiped you out, and the slightest nod of approval, which was all the kudos one ever got from her, could spur you on for days. I’m still not sure where this strength came from, but to everyone involved with her, Ethel’s opinion was paramount.

One of the most lasting positive legacies I have from my time with the Rosses, aside from the great gift of acting, is an obsession with the truth. Because so much of my early life was filled with lies, clever distortions, and half-truths twisted to fit other people’s self-serving needs, I’ve sworn, “Goddamn you, now I will tell the truth.” I can take anything that anyone says to me, I may be hurt or ticked off, but I don’t completely reject the person. Unless they lie to me and I catch them. That’s absolutely intolerable.

Both John and Ethel Ross have been dead for some time now, and it’s been more than two decades since they’ve had control over my life and career, yet I’m still not sure I can consider them with any kind of objectivity. A difficult fact that I’ve finally accepted is that there will never be a true resolution of my feelings, I’ll never finish with them till I’m dead. To me, there are people, and then there are the Rosses.

Yet my feelings have become manageable and giving them their due, not compromising their integrity, is very important to me. I feel terribly responsible to people who are
dead. Try as I might to be fair, I’m afraid they’re going to turn out to be the villains of this piece, and I wish that weren’t so. It’s obvious to me that had they not crossed my path, the likelihood of my becoming an actress was slim, and the joy of that far outweighs any of the pain. I know they started out with the best intentions toward me, but fame and success distorted their perspective.

More than that, there is a goodness about them that they left behind in me, that they would have left behind in no one else. They made me into a real believer. I believe in hope, I believe you can change things. I saw what they did to me in a positive way and what they tried to do in a very negative one. Out of the agony that living with them became, a strength developed. I know that change can happen, and that you can recover.