Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (40 page)

And she turned around and over the back of the seat we began to chat. The first thing I said was, “If you touch your goddamn hair again, I’m going to break your hand!” She laughed, and I gave her some other notes, both general and specific. Most important, I gave her Arthur Penn’s direction for me for the wah-wah sound. I’d never told anyone that—it was Arthur’s and my secret, complicated for me by my crush on him. It was very hard for me to do, like giving her a love letter. And, of course, she was embarrassed by it just as I’d been when Arthur gave it to me. But when we began rehearsing in Florida, there were immediate results. She took those couple of little tips, put them to work for herself, and continued to improve until we opened.

Opening night for me was what opening nights are always for me, tripled. John flew out, nominally for the performance, but what he really came for was to hold my head while I barfed. I spent two or three hours that day in my dressing room bathroom, with my costume protected by a huge barber’s cape. There was no threat of my forgetting lines here, they’d been engraved in my head for twenty years, but still there was real terror.

And wouldn’t you know it, there was trouble even before I got onstage. During the opening scene, with baby Helen still in her crib and the doctor talking to Mrs. Keller, he accidentally knocked his bag off the table and everything the actor had insisted on putting inside, bottles and stethoscopes and little mallets fell from the second floor of the set bouncing and rolling all over the stage. So while the baby was going blind and deaf, the audience was roaring with laughter. I turned to Charlie Siebert and I said, “That’s it! That’s it! I’m not going out there! That’s it.”

When I did first walk out on that stage, I felt tiny, and my voice was shaky. I copied a few things from Annie as a tribute to her, very private and backstage, like sitting on my suitcase the way she’d sat on hers. A lot of that first performance was a blur, I was driven purely by adrenaline, but there were moments of sheer ecstasy just knowing that I was
doing it. We got a standing ovation when it ended, lots of curtain calls and all that kind of fun.

One of the curious and scary things about that brief stage run was that I occasionally felt my manner with Melissa getting a little too Ethelish. One night during curtain calls, for instance, she was absentmindedly picking her nose. She realized where she was, the audience began laughing, and she sort of looked down at her finger and then took my hand. It wasn’t my place to say anything, but I was livid. She was not Half-Pint on that stage, she was Melissa Gilbert playing Helen Keller, and that kind of behavior was not adorable. I felt so close to her, I wanted her to be so good and so perfect that when the curtain came down I turned and said, “If you ever, wherever you are in your whole life, behave that way again onstage, I will find you and I will whack you. You are never to be anything but dignified during a curtain call, and don’t you ever forget it.” Boy, did that make an impression. Whew. She certainly didn’t fool around in curtain calls anymore; she may not even have picked her nose anywhere since.

One of the bittersweet aspects of getting involved with the remake was being reunited with Fred Coe. I had not seen him since 1968, when my behavior on the
Me, Natalie
set had not been up to the standards I would have liked, and certainly not up to his standards, so our parting had not been pleasant. It was good seeing him again under saner circumstances, but he was in very poor health, in fact he could barely walk. He was hospitalized for open heart surgery during the filming and he died on the table. His death really hit me hard. I remember going to work the next day and wailing out loud in my car. He was my last connection to the past, and I missed him so.

When I think about both film versions of
The Miracle Worker
, it’s inescapable that the second wasn’t as powerful as the first. Not that some things about the remake weren’t improvements. The play’s original ending was restored, you have the boom-boom-boom momentum of the miracle, Helen giving the keys to teacher, sitting on her lap, kissing her cheek, and teacher signing, “I love Helen forever and ever.” For me, that will always be the ending. And even though I
still admire the courage of not going to closeups in 1961, I think in the newer version the more personal, quieter moments were well captured because they were done in that television closeup style.

One reason we had to go to closeups in the remake, however, was that the director was unable to build emotional momentum any other way; the choreography of the production was in general lacking in intensity. And doing the picture in color bothered me. Even though
The Miracle Worker
really is a black-and-white movie, you can shoot something in muted colors and come pretty close to that feeling. But the house they used was a yellow gingerbread and it looked wrong, like something from Oklahoma! Everything was a little too vibrant for my taste.

As for my own performance, if people were going to dislike it on its own merits, I was prepared to live with that. My fear was that instead, people might accuse me of having done an imitation of Anne Bancroft. I hadn’t watched the original for many years, but the night we wrapped I called John and said, “I’m finished and I’m coming home. I’m having a large drink and I’m going to watch
The Miracle Worker
.” And I did. And a fascinating thing happened. For the first time I realized that that ghost of a voice I’d kept hearing, the one whose rhythms and patterns I was so afraid of imitating, wasn’t Annie’s after all. It was my own voice of all those years of reciting the play as I lay in my bed at night. There was no similarity at all between that ghost in my head and Annie Bancroft. “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” I said. “I fought myself.”

And though I’m in general ambivalent about awards, I have to confess that the Emmy I won for
The Miracle Worker
is my favorite acting honor. My enthusiasm wasn’t even dampened by not being able to accept in person; there was a Screen Actors Guild strike and I had to watch the ceremony on a snowy little TV on a cross-country train—John and I were touring again. I don’t know whether it was the competition with that authority figure of my youth or wanting to be recognized for having the tenacity to hang around long enough to play the Annie Sullivan role or both, but I wanted that
award and I was thrilled to have it. It was the perfect end of a perfect fantasy.

My last involvement with
The Miracle Worker
, unfortunately, was a sour one. I’d always been fascinated with the later years of Helen and Annie Sullivan, and my enthusiasm fired up Ray Katz, one of the producers of the TV version, who in turn convinced William Gibson to write a new piece called Monday After the Miracle. I was shown an early draft, which we all knew wasn’t there yet, and I was told they’d get back to me when the kinks were worked out.

The next I heard about the project, however, was an article in
The New York Times
announcing that it was going to be done as an Actors Studio showcase directed by Arthur Penn and starring Ellen Burstyn. I was shattered. And suddenly, Ray Katz was unavailable for my phone calls or my agent’s. When we finally got in touch with him, he said he had done what he could, but he could not convince Arthur Penn and William Gibson to use me. He didn’t go into details about what their objection was, and he didn’t apologize. I was devastated.

About ten weeks later I got an urgent call from Ray Katz saying that things had not gone well in the showcase and there was renewed interest in me. Even though I knew better, I got caught up once more in the excitement of possibly doing the show. But the same thing happened a second time: I got turned down without any reason being given. Even forgetting about our past relationship, to have a director of Arthur’s stature reject me out of hand was a hurt that was insurmountable for a while.

As an actress, you can reject me for a lot of things, and though I won’t like it, I’ll get by. But
The Miracle Worker
is something else. It’s intertwined with a very complex emotional history, and being rejected for that play touched a raw nerve ending. When people speak of my career, even those in the business, rarely do they remember that I started in live television and had played many roles before
The Miracle Worker
. I’m an actress because of Helen Keller; that role was the very foundation of the one area in my life that remained steadfast while all the rest, more often than not, went to hell in a handbasket. Being rejected for
Monday After the Miracle
was like being stripped of my epaulets. It was as if someone had said, “You’re not Helen Keller anymore, and you’re not Annie Sullivan either!” If I’d had more perspective at the time, more of a sense of humor, I’d have been in a lot better shape.

F
rom almost the moment he began to talk, my son Sean was constantly saying, “Can I be in the movies? Can I be in the movies? Please. I can act. Please! Please! Please!” I mean the kid has been running for mayor since he was eighteen months old. John and I didn’t ignore him but we really played down that acting bent. Initially, my approach was, “No kid of mine will ever do this.” Given what I’d been through, it was the most honest attitude I could have.

It was John who helped me realize how unreasonable I was being, who pointed out that my situation had been unique, that the chances, thank God, of our sons having similar problems were slim to none. These kids weren’t being given over to the Rosses or anyone like the Rosses, they were staying with their parents, no matter what. John also used a clever lobbying tactic. He’d say, “Hey, this is an honorable profession. What are we so ashamed about? If we were doctors, we’d want them to be doctors. If we were in the dry-cleaning business, we’d want them to take over that.” All those arguments helped to allay my big fear, that it was bad enough to screw up your kids under any circumstances, but to put them into show business, with all the special risks that entails—that was a heavy-duty responsibility.

Then, in 1981, when Sean was ten years old, I was offered an
Afterschool Special
about child abuse called “Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom.” I wasn’t particularly interested, but out of courtesy I agreed to read the script, and when I saw that there was a lovely part for a boy Sean’s age, I thought, “What the hell—it would be kind of fun to do it with him.” I discussed the idea with John, who hemmed and hawed as he does, and finally he said, “Okay. Take a shot at it.”

I didn’t feel it was terribly honorable to blackmail the production company by saying I would do the show if they’d use Sean, so I told them I would do it if they’d just audition him, no matter what the outcome. They were delirious at the chance, for the P.R. value if nothing else. And when Sean got the part, he was jumping out of his skin, he was so happy.

Sean was absolutely adorable to look at, and given the irrational behavior he’d witnessed, courtesy of me, he had no problem understanding the feelings of the kid he was playing. The only thing he had a problem with was a scene in which I had to scream at him. Screaming was something private that happened at home, you didn’t do it in front of people. He was so embarrassed, he would laugh on camera, which was not exactly what the director had in mind. We were having a real problem, so at one point, just before a take, I looked at him not like the character but with a genuine mean-mother look. Sean was brilliant in the scene, but the poor kid was petrified. I instantly regretted what I’d done, and I told Sean so as soon as the scene was over. I said it was something I would not repeat—from now on he was on his own. He could stink up a scene for all I cared, I was not going to put either of us through that again.

Sean loved everything about the whole movie-making process. He loved the equipment, he loved the people, he loved the attention, he even loved the doughnuts. He just took to it like a duck to water, which frankly didn’t surprise us at all. Because Sean’s true gift, which becomes so apparent on a set, is that he is completely guileless. His confidence is not an ain’t-I-the-cat’s-pajamas kind of thing; it comes out of a wisdom, far beyond his or even my years, that this kid just
has. And, of course, that makes everyone just want to hug and touch and love him, which can lead to difficulties.

The problem is not with other actors, who, in my experience, are awfully good at parenting a kid on the set. But the people who need something from the child—the director, the assistant director, the wardrobe and makeup people, the crew—will find themselves, even if they’re against it in theory, pandering to that kid to get what they need out of him. That makes it very difficult for the parent to monitor and control the child. And if the kid is getting all kinds of approval for what may be aberrant behavior, it’s very confusing for him as well: “Mom and Dad keep saying it’s wrong, but everybody else seems to like me. Maybe Mom and Dad are wrong.”

I’ve very often found myself, for instance, going to people on a set and saying, “Excuse me. I know you enjoy Sean (or Mack) and that you want to do something nice for him, but I’d really appreciate it if you wouldn’t give him any more candy. Why don’t you play a game of cards with him instead.” I had a problem with one guy who was just crazy about Sean and wanted to be the bad guy with him behind Mommy’s back. He was feeding him crap all day long and, because Sean is a high-energy kid anyway, if you shoot him some sugar, forget it, you’re scraping him off the walls. I told Sean that if he didn’t cooperate, I would go so far as to have memos typed and put up around the set. He said he’d be good, but by then he was out of control—we were finding Hershey bar wrappers and Winchell’s doughnut boxes under his bed—so up went the notice. It was very humiliating for him, but once you make a threat like that, you have to follow through.

As opposed to Sean, Mackie was very shy, and at first I didn’t believe he’d be able to act. I thought if you told Mack to do something he didn’t want to, he would either cry or go stand in the corner until he turned blue, and he certainly would never repeat something more than once for anyone. But the competition between the two boys is intense, and once Sean was on his way, there was no holding Mack back. And he has amazed me with the way he takes direction. His instincts are great, but unlike Sean and me, who are largely
instinctive, he’s a very intellectual actor, terrific at sizing up a situation, figuring out how to allow the director to believe Mack’s taking his direction, and then doing it the right way. Sean doesn’t have the time or the patience to go through that.