Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke

by Patty Duke

  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.

  We were in that office less than a minute before a hidden door, one that looks like a curved part of the wall, opened and in he came. He wore a dark suit, a red tie with a PT boat tie clip, and a smile. The moment he walked in, I started crying, and I cried the whole time, sniffing and wiping my eyes and with a real lump in my throat. I was shaking, there was a ringing in my ears, I’m frankly surprised I didn’t pass out.

  He was very relaxed and casual and charming and I felt like a sniveling fool. He gave me a bracelet that had a PT boat medallion on it and he kept making cute little remarks, just charming things to make me feel good. I gave him a kiss on the cheek when it was time to go, and he said something about it that made everybody laugh, but I had no idea what it was; it was as if I went deaf in there, deaf and all aflutter. God, was he spellbinding, the sexiest man ever.

  Aside from that meeting and an off-season trip I took to Japan with the Rosses—where, as much because the Japanese deify Helen Keller as anything else, I was mobbed by thousands of weeping little Japanese girls and boys with cameras—I never really had any sense of the impact of the show. In fact, I’m still amazed at how many people I meet who can sing me the entire “Cousins, They’re Identical Cousins” theme song. My son Mack can tell you exactly what his The Facts of Life ratings are, but I never knew about numbers and audience share. I was just doing my job and my life was very restricted. I was in the apartment, I was in the studio, we ate in the same two or three restaurants every night, and I never went anyplace else; there was no such thing as walking down the street or going to Bloomingdale’s to browse. Plus I had no real friends, no telephone conversations with anyone—I got all my information from the other people on the set, and they probably assumed I knew how the show was doing. I did know the show must be somewhat popular because people recognized me more and more, but getting through the daily stuff was so all-consuming, I never even gave a thought to things like that. Tunnel vision is what it was.

  Looking back now, I do have some theories as to why The Patty Duke Show struck a chord. For one thing, I’d like to think a part of me, either the vulnerability or the zest for life, shone through. Also, those years were the beginning of the mounting number of divorces in this country, and the breakdown of the Father Knows Best type of family. Even with the absolute unreality of identical cousins, the family unit on our show was very strong. The kids could do outrageous things, much more preposterous than the kids watching ever would, but in the end everything was okay, the love was obvious, everybody was still together and strong. There was a security in that family, and that was wish fulfillment of a sort for the kids who sat with their TV trays and watched at home.

  It may seem as if the money I made during all these years should be some sort of consolation for what I went through with the Rosses, but it doesn’t work that way. For one thing, I still don’t know what my income was during all those years with the Rosses. I’ve heard various figures for various jobs, but as for the total of what I actually made over the whole period of our relationship, I have no idea. I was never told and I never asked for an accounting. Because there was no freedom to spend money, no such thing as going shopping with my girlfriends, it wasn’t on my mind at the time.

  An educated guess is that I earned three thousand dollars a week for The Patty Duke Show, which means with over one hundred episodes I made three hundred thousand dollars. Plus the money from The $64,000 Challenge, my other work, the merchandizing, and the one record I had that was a big hit. It probably added up to between half a million and a million dollars, a lot of which was supposed to be put into trust funds, but that turned out to be a sham.

  Not only don’t I know how much money I made while I was a minor, I don’t have more than a clue about what happened to most of it. When I turned eighteen and went to collect on those trust funds, there was eighty-four thousand dollars in savings bonds.
I was dead set against contacting the Rosses for an explanation, a quest I knew would be futile. It wasn’t like them to sock money away somewhere; I never expected to find hundreds of thousands hidden in coffee cans under their potted palm. With their continual dining out in the best places, their frequent exotic vacations, and all the rest, they were very big spenders and I was the cash cow. Without either myself or my parents’ having any kind of say in the matter, my earnings supported a decade’s worth of very expensive living.

  While many people will be appalled that my money was ripped off, the curious thing is that doesn’t mean one iota to me. My life was ripped off. I was not allowed to grow and learn at my own pace, the pace of a child. If you don’t get to have opinions, don’t interact with people your own age, you never learn how. Precious years, years, of my life were taken that I can’t have back. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to have the half a million right now, but really that’s meaningless to me. You can’t give me half a million, or even twice that amount, and call us even. No way.

  FIFTEEN

  While the appeal of The Patty Duke Show is not hard to understand, I still don’t have a handle on the success of the six albums I made for United Artists. One single, “Don’t Just Stand There,” was actually a big hit, number three on the charts with a bullet. With a bullet! I wanted to sing so much, but when I hear what I did, it sounds awful. Even the covers still give me a pain in the stomach. I look like a forty-year-old pygmy on one, on another I have white hair with black roots, like an early punker, well ahead of my time. Sometimes I’ll be eating spaghetti or something in a restaurant and someone will come up to me out of nowhere with one of those awful things, saying, “Oh, guess what I found? Would you sign this for me?” There goes my appetite.

  Singing, it should come as no surprise, was also the Rosses’ idea. They noticed that other little girls were singing bubble-gum music and making money at it, so why shouldn’t I? That was the beginning of the years of singing lessons with Mr. Polanski, who ate bananas and cream-cheese-on-raisin-bread sandwiches and drank buttermilk and left a map on the glass. He was very nice but was he ever gross—I’d have to look out the window while I sang. I’d be stuck singing the scales for forty-five minutes, they were so boring and I was so bad at it. He was always saying, “No, no, no. Meee-eee-eee-eee.”

  Mr. Polanski’s other obsession was this smelly thing he was always concocting in a pressure cooker the size of a small valise in a kitchen the size of a broom closet. Whew, it stunk! He was forever going into the kitchen to take care of whatever that strange beast was. I swear to God, it blew up one day while I was singing, all over that tiny closet of a kitchen. I finally got to sing a song, and the thing blew up!

  It wasn’t until The Patty Duke Show in 1964, when the trend had been established for a TV series star to make a record, that I started actually recording. The idea was that the acting and the recording would reinforce each other, each area would help you become popular in the other. Whether you could actually sing or not didn’t matter; the technology was getting so good that if you could get out three notes in a row, the record people could splice a performance together. And, note by note, that’s exactly what they did with me.

  You have to understand that even though I’d hated my lessons, I really loved to sing and I didn’t know that I couldn’t. I mean, it sounded okay to me. Nobody taught me any better, not even the guy with the raisin bread. So I was very excited about all this. I’d learn the songs, though they had to be very careful when they taught them to me, because if they didn’t immediately catch that I was singing the wrong note, that was the way it stayed. Forever. Then they had all these musicians come into a studio, and an arranger would come in, too, tap the stand with his little baton, and everybody would look up and start to play, and that was my song! It was so thrilling, I could hardly stand it.

  The excitement lasted until someone said, “Now you have to go over there and put on earphones, count eight bars, and sing along.” I can’t read music, never could, probably never will. I don’t know from bars, that’s where my father was! Nobody told me when to come in, when to get out, when to be quiet, when to speak, and I became absolutely petrified about the entire experience. I knew I didn’t know what I was doing, but I didn’t have the confidence to reveal that until the situation reached crisis proportions. Then I’d start sobbing and saying, “I don’t know, tap me on the shoulder when I’m supposed to sing and I’ll sing.” And that’s what literally had to be done. They must have suffered so, those poor record producers. They all kept saying, “But you really can do this. You really can sing.” And something that had been joyful to me became an absolute nightmare. Each one of those “sides,” as they say, was a painful extraction from my psyche as well as from my body.

  My so-called formal education was as problematical as my singing lessons, and it’s also been the source of real frustration and shame. If I was in a group of people later in life and it was apparent that they’d been to college, I became intimidated and less a participant in the conversation. How could I possibly talk to these people? Gradually, though, I realized that either I ought to go to college or else become better informed on my own. I became a voracious reader of all kinds of things, and I also became a better listener. The real breakthrough was getting past the fear of asking a question because of the worry that I’d sound stupid. I found clever ways to phrase things, so it didn’t look like I was ill educated or illiterate, but I asked questions and got answers.

  Once the Rosses got hold of me, my little Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary school didn’t suit their needs. The compromise they reached with my mother was to send me to the Notre Dame Convent School on Seventy-ninth Street and Columbus Avenue; it was still a Catholic school (obviously!) but I would supposedly be allowed ample time off for work. That turned out to be not true enough for the Rosses, who quickly yanked me out. I was glad to leave Notre Dame; lots of rich kids went there and I felt very out of place. And we’re talking heavy-duty Catholic—the nuns spoke French. And, as opposed to the group at Sacred Heart, the nuns there were mean. At least they looked mean, even if they weren’t, because of the scary-looking “bat wing” habits they wore.

  So I spent my last two elementary school years at Willard Mace, which I liked a lot even though I didn’t always fit in. It was a professional children’s school and although I was working, I felt very isolated from the other show biz kids. I didn’t know all the agents in town or what auditions were happening or what had been written in Backstage, and these kids did. They were like midget adults and I quickly became a quasi-midget to fit in. One of the ways I did, both there and in high school, was to become the class clown, which was partly a reaction to my shortness. I made a lot of jokes about being small so I could say it before somebody else did. I still occasionally make the jokes today, but it’s now just leftover patter, I don’t feel the same kind of defensiveness I did then.

  My high school was the Quintano School for Young Professionals, and the truth is that it was a high school out of a musical comedy. It was located in a narrow brownstone building on West Fifty-sixth Street, around the corner from Carnegie Hall—two big rooms with folding chairs and rickety folding tables that wiggled all the time. It still functioned as a part-time ballet school, with wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling mirrors. How many teenagers, especially performers, do you think were concentrating on their work in that environment? The joke around school was that I was the only one who carried books. One of my teachers was always borrowing my geometry book and spitting all over the pages while he talked. And he didn’t talk about math, he talked about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

  I wasn’t that much different from other kids my age. I was becoming more and more interested in boys and romance, but I had nowhere to go with those feelings. I was attending school with girls who looked twenty-five and I had to fight the Rosses to get out of pinafores and into skirts and sweaters. Finally getting to wear knee socks was a big achievement; stockings took even
longer. I never got to wear makeup until after I was married. The dress I wore to my prom showed my underpants, and not in the best way either—kind of like a Chatty Cathy doll. I was still “one of the guys” and the other girls were all the sex objects we now claim we don’t want to be. I loved school and I hated school, but for different reasons than most kids. I disliked being with my classmates, where I didn’t feel I belonged, and I wanted to see the teachers. It was a really confusing time.

  Making things worse was that the Rosses refused to let me have any social life with any of the kids in that school. I had a telephone, a new Princess model, so that if anyone came to take pictures or interview me, my bedroom would look like a typical teenager’s, but for a long time the phone wasn’t even connected. Then, finally, they connected it but I wasn’t allowed to give out the number. I was not allowed to have a recess—I had to take another class. I was not allowed a lunch hour—I had to take another class and eat when I got home. I wasn’t allowed to hang out the way kids hang around with each other, and if I did it for even five minutes after school, I’d be very guilt-ridden and have to come up with an excuse why I was late in calling the Rosses, which I was supposed to do the instant I got out. Of course, I would sneak a few minutes here and a few minutes there, but I never really developed a full-out relationship with anybody in the school.

  I did, however, manage to get my first real kiss. I was nearly fourteen when I developed a crush on a guy named Steve Curry—very curly hair, great eyes, a sweet, nice guy. He was in Stop the World, I Want to Get Off on Broadway, and when we rode the bus down to our respective theaters, I managed to reveal my crush and, man of the world that he was, he kissed me. I’d seen a lot of movies, but I didn’t know people opened their mouths when they kissed till I met Steve Curry. He was in a Broadway show with a bunch of chorus girls and he knew. After that, Steve found one of the models in school to go out with and oh, was I mortified. I thought that kiss meant we were going to get married.