Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke

by Patty Duke

  My wedding day with Michael Tell—you can gauge my mental state by my eyes. The marriage lasted thirteen days. AP/WIDE WORLD

  Sean Astin, the answer to my prayers. BARRY BREGMAN/GLOBE PHOTOS

  Sharing a hug and happiness with John Astin.

  Mackenzie at three weeks. This time John and I had done it right and gotten married before the baby was born.

  With my guys, Sean (left) and Mackenzie.

  © PETER KREDENSER

  Michael Pearce and I celebrate our first Christmas, in 1985, as he switches uniforms from the Army’s to a tuxedo. CRIS COTONE

  Sean made his acting debut with me in Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom. AP/WIDE WORLD

  A nun at last, in September Gun. CBS

  At my regal best as Martha Washington. CBS

  EIGHTEEN

  My wedding day was November 26, 1965, a month shy of my nineteenth birthday. The site was the Little Brown Church in the San Fernando Valley, sweet and tiny, the ideal movie set. Not everything else, however, was quite so perfect. For one thing, I realized the morning of the event that I’d forgotten to make arrangements for the bride to be driven to the ceremony. So, furious with myself, I got into my electric blue Mustang convertible with the wire wheels and stormed off, taking myself to my own wedding.

  When I pulled up to the church, my Patty Duke Show family was there, and the Rosses were too. I toyed with the idea of not inviting them inside but I decided I didn’t want to feel guilty later on, and such an obvious slap in the face wouldn’t have looked very good in the eyes of anyone who didn’t know the whole story.

  The person who wasn’t there was my mother. Of course I’d asked her, but she’d decided she had to go to my cousin Mary Ann’s baby shower or something and couldn’t quite make it. Every time she complained about my not calling her or not being an attentive enough daughter, I’d remember she had gone to Mary Ann’s baby shower instead of my wedding. Of course, her absence probably had nothing to do with me, she was probably angry at the Rosses. It’s one thing to have your parents pick on you, but when you get gypped because your mother’s mad at someone else, that’s really insulting!

  I was wearing a white mink hat and a white silk suit with white stockings and white shoes, all terribly sophisticated. It was a brief ceremony, and I can’t remember if anybody gave me away—it certainly wasn’t the Rosses! Then we went back to Jean Byron’s house for champagne and little sandwiches before Harry and I left on our honeymoon trip to San Francisco.

  Almost as soon as we got there, Harry ran into an old buddy and the three of us ended up having drinks together on my wedding night. I remember sitting in that rotating bar at the top of the Fairmont Hotel, kicking him under the table while smiling like the nice, understanding wife I was supposed to be and thinking, “Is this all there is?”

  And when we finally did get to bed, we had to call the hotel doctor because I had what I thought was a heart seizure: pains in my chest and arm, inability to breathe, the works. This nice doctor came and kept smiling at the poor little bride. He said it was only an anxiety attack; he told us, “This happens to people sometimes on nights like this.” And I kept looking at Harry like, “Doesn’t he know that we’ve been doing it?”

  One of the first things Harry and I did after we were married was go down to the Los Angeles county clerk’s office and collect the eighty-four thousand dollars in savings bonds that was all that was left from what I’d earned during my childhood. The money had accumulated from the percentage of earnings that minors had to have placed in trust for them under California law. Though I wasn’t twenty-one yet, as a married woman I was allowed to take possession. That turned out to be a painful event in itself; there were a lot of photographers, and we were not happy to have our privacy invaded, plus Harry worried “now people will think this is why I married her.” A most unpleasant experience, all in all.

  Now that Harry and I were officially together, I made a great effort to look the part of someone who could be married to this guy. I still didn’t wear much makeup (I’m not good at that, it just looks like I’m playing dress-up) but I did start to wear tighter, more fashionable clothes. Given what Cathy and Patty wore, that wasn’t too difficult. Not only was it a great relief to dress like someone my own age, but Harry liked me to look that way, and we began to get less flak over the age difference, something which really got old very fast.

  Harry wanted to move from being an A.D. to directing, and I wasn’t about to take no for an answer from Bob Sweeney or from any of the other people who ran the series. It was finally agreed that Harry could direct three shows, which turned out to be the last three of the season.

  We lived at the time in a tiny little house that I sublet from Jean Byron way out in the San Fernando Valley, really the middle of nowhere. Since it was so far away, I’d gotten into the habit of showing up at work late, and my attitude was: “They’re not gonna yell at me, I’ve got a protector now, my husband will hit them!” Finally, about five months after we were married, the day of Harry’s debut arrived, and on that morning we determined that we were definitely not going to be late. After all, this was a man who fancied himself to be in the class of Sidney Lumet, and he’s going to do this half-hour sitcom because his wife’s the girl. I was going in early to do makeup and hair and, so that we could use one car, he was making the trip with me to look at sets and so on.

  We got up early, all excited because today we were going to work together. We had breakfast and he got dressed. You have to understand that it really matters to Harry how he looks. Even as an assistant director he wore just the right color khaki pants, just the right degree of fading in his blue workshirt, just the right everything. All weekend he’d not only been very diligently doing his homework for the show, he’d also taken clothes out and considered various combinations, very carefully deciding what he was going to wear for his debut. I admired what he had on, but it wasn’t good enough, and he must have tried on two or three outfits before we left. We got to the car and I said I’d drive so he could make whatever notations he needed to on the script. It was a beautiful morning, and I was just as happy as a pig in slop. I was a married lady, we were working together, this was “Mr. and Mrs. Hollywood.”

  We came to the stoplight at Ventura Boulevard, and Harry, who’d brought his coffee with him, opened the glove compartment to put the cup on one of the little sections cut out to hold it. I was chatting away, the light changed, I put the pedal to the metal, and Harry was wearing the entire cup of coffee. It may seem funny now, but I certainly couldn’t laugh back then. It was totally an accident, because I truly wanted everything on that day to be perfect, but Harry was so angry that he actually called me a cunt.

  I hardly knew what to say to him, just “Oh, my God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I didn’t know” while he was screaming, “That’s it! That’s it! Turn around! Turn around!” And even though we were more than halfway to work, we had to drive back, I let him out to change and we ended up going back in two cars. Can you imagine? The vain man’s nightmare. I thought that was the divorce, I really did. Can you get a divorce based on the fact that your wife spilled coffee on you on the way to work? Maybe in California.

  Given that kind of a start, our working together was decidedly a mixed bag. Part of the time it was great fun, but it certainly wasn’t as wonderful as we’d anticipated, and there were some real rough spots. My youth and my history were not at all conducive to adult behavior in a competitive situation. I felt, “Wait a minute, I thought we were pals here, who are you to be telling me what to do?” I remember a couple of consciously naughty things I did, like not being able to remember my lines for the last scene of the day when the clock was ticking and they were getting ready to pull the plug. I probably wasn’t ready to be married to anyone, and I certainly wasn’t ready to work with the same person I was married to.

  Although the long drive—not to mention the coffee incident—was no fun, Harry and I had other reasons for wanting to move into
a bigger house closer to the show business action than our San Fernando cottage. For one thing, we were in general spending money in record proportions. If he wanted a Porsche Targa, he got it. If I wanted a little Mercedes, I got it. We were two young people, with no dependents, we now had total access to my salary, and even though that eighty-four thousand I collected wasn’t as much as I should have come into, it came in a big lump of money, which neither one of us was used to.

  Also, Harry was a real maniac about antiques—English, some country French, and American. He practically lived at the Parke-Bernet Gallery when he was in New York, and since I wanted to like what he liked, I made the effort to know the difference between a Queen Anne foot and a ball-and-claw foot. We spent a fortune on truly terrific antiques, but they were just overpowering in this tiny place we lived in.

  Since I was working, Harry did most of the house hunting. One thing about marital finances that was true then and is still true now is that if I trust this person with the care and feeding of my soul, then I can have no question about whose money is whose. If I need a premarital agreement, then I don’t need to get married. And finally Harry found a spectacular place. It cost a lot more than anything else we’d seen, but there was no doubt that this was the house we wanted.

  It was a colonial mansion off Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills, jutting out on its own precipice at the top of the mountain with a twelve-car parking lot, a four-car garage and a 360-degree view of Los Angeles. Its nine rooms were big, bright, and airy, with bay windows and fireplaces everywhere. Everyone who sees the house loves it; Sharon Tate later rented it for a while when she first got pregnant, and she and Roman Polanski wanted to buy it. For Harry and me, two young people supposedly starting out in life, there was great, great excitement about living there.

  I was still doing the series when it came time to furnish the house, and that was the beginning of my relationship with a friend of Harry’s, a woman who’s now a successful novelist, Joanna Barnes. She and Harry had become pals on a Peter Falk series called Trials of O’Brien. She was a bright and funny lady and Harry admired her Back Bay kind of background, very stylish and classy. If you’re going to go to all the best galleries on Madison Avenue, you might as well go with someone who’s dressed to kill.

  Because somehow Joanna did everything right. Her hair was the right color, her makeup was perfect, so were her fingernails, her rings were the best, her watch was the most attractive, her Pucci dresses fit just right because she was about eleven ounces too skinny, she said “fuck” and “shit” all at the same time and it sounded wonderful—she just could do no wrong. Plus she knew where you should buy everything, the best method of making Hollandaise sauce, etc., etc., etc.

  I had real trouble with that relationship, which I realize now was probably not that unusual. I was trying to be the sophisticated good sport, and understand that these two were just pals—I always wondered if they’d had an affair, but I really don’t think so—but considering how insecure I was to begin with, their closeness was just deadly for me. And Harry could be very insensitive about my feelings. If he did notice how I felt, he didn’t seem to care. Instead, Harry asked Joanna to help him furnish our house because, of course, she got a decorator’s discount. I kept wanting to scream, “Asshole! Pay retail! Have a happier wife!”

  So Joanna became our unofficial decorator. She’d call from the pay phone at the Beverly Hills Hotel and announce, “I’m on my way up! Put on the coffee!” Click. It didn’t occur to her that we might be in the middle of making love or cleaning the toilet bowl or having the discussion of life, she was coming. One day the three of us were sitting drinking coffee in this cozy lanai setting, his antiques all around us, and Harry was staring into his coffee cup, which said on the inside, “Forget Me Not.” And he says, “Forget me not, forget me not, forget me not—who the hell gave me this?” Of course it was me, and of course I didn’t have a good sense of humor about it. I started bawling, and then I wouldn’t tell them why. The poor woman, never in a million years would she want to hurt me, but whenever she was around, something would invariably happen that was guaranteed to drive me totally nuts.

  If one thing summed up my previous bondage to the Rosses, it was the name they’d stuck me with. On one level I now disliked it because it was a little girl’s name, and it was very important to me that all diminutive and cute things vanish from my life. But more than that, because the name came from the Rosses, because it was given to me as an edict over which I’d had no control, it symbolized them. That name meant those faces, it meant that helpless, nonperson time in my life, so much so that for many years all the awards I won for acting were very well hidden and packed away because I couldn’t stand the name on them.

  Once Harry and I were married, the opportunity to reclaim as much of myself as I could by changing my name was too good to pass up. I began fiddling around with various combinations and finally decided that “Pat Falk” was an acceptable name in a way “Pat Duke” was not. Then a real campaign began. People were told, “She wants to be called ‘Pat,’ ” and they were reminded if they forgot. The interesting thing is that, early in our relationship, Harry fleetingly called me Anna Marie. He even used that name when he wrote me letters. It just didn’t last, however. Anna Marie really wasn’t fully reborn inside me yet, she hadn’t the strength to be totally out. That was a resurrection that would have to wait.

  NINETEEN

  The final episode of The Patty Duke Show was filmed in 1966; ABC did not pick us up for another year. The reason wasn’t lack of popularity, the network simply wanted all its shows for the next season to be in color, and United Artists, claiming it would cost too much, refused. I think it was a negotiating ploy on United Artists’ part; they thought they could stonewall and get another year out of the series in black and white, but they lost.

  Part of me was really happy when the series folded. I was having obvious problems staying involved with Patty and Cathy, and until the show ended, I hadn’t quite recognized how important acting was to my well-being. I wasn’t even smart enough to know that I would have to have a substitute for it in my life. I really felt “I’m married, I’m going to stay home, have babies and wear little white aprons, and, of course, I’ll be happy.” I didn’t realize having a husband is not something you do like doing a job, like acting or being a lawyer.

  And no matter how much I hated the show and wished with all my might that it would fold so that I could get on with being “Sadie, Sadie, married lady,” that didn’t matter psychologically. When it fell apart, I got buried by the rubble. Because if you’ve belonged someplace all your life, unhappy though it may be, that place is home. The feeling of abandonment when it’s gone is just as real as your mother giving you up to live with other people.

  So at the same time as I was feeling thrilled that the series wasn’t picked up and I was free, I felt as if I no longer had an identity. I was no longer associated with the Rosses, so there wasn’t anyone telling me what to do. But I hadn’t learned how to make dinner, how to make a decision, how to do anything. You can’t plan ahead if you’ve never learned to plan in the first place. And at the back of my mind I was hearing, “You’ll never work again. You’ll never work without us. You’ll be nothing without us.” Kissing off the show meant not only kissing off the Rosses, it meant kissing off a lifetime that I’d never gotten to understand.

  The upshot of all this was that I went into a major depression after the series folded. Somehow it seemed easier to be crazy. People don’t judge you as harshly, you don’t hear many mean, vicious things being said about patients in psychiatric hospitals. It’s “Oh, that poor thing, she doesn’t know.” That’s easier than having to be responsible for your actions. Saying “I’m nuts, I can’t do this, I can’t cope” was a new defense mechanism for me. It meant you didn’t have to function, and I didn’t.

  Take going to the market. A good four, five, six hours a day might be taken up with this planned trip. Harry and I would sit down, ha
ve coffee, and discuss the shopping list literally for hours. It wasn’t really a discussion; he’d give me pep talks and I’d cry. “You can do this,” he’d say. “Look, thousands of people do it every day. All you have to do is just walk in. So what if you get the wrong things? Don’t worry about it.” There were days when he reached his limit, when he’d just say, “The hell with it, don’t go to the market,” but most of the time he really was a good soul, constantly trying to bring me back to some kind of reality and assuage the fear of whatever these demons were that were raging inside me.

  Finally, we’d get the list in order, enough items to make it an acceptable, businesslike list; I wasn’t so far gone at this point that two or three items would have seemed like the real thing. Then I’d go upstairs to get dressed. And Harry would come up, sometimes a few minutes later, sometimes hours later, thinking I’d left. And I’d be standing in the closet, or sitting on the floor, the same way I was when I first went up. I wasn’t really catatonic; I was aware of what I was doing, and aware that my behavior was an aberration. I just didn’t want to go.

  With Harry’s constant encouragement I eked by. And there were times when I’d come out of this state, when I’d get up of a morning, make a list, and go to the market, just like anyone else. But even as I was performing these acts, I was experiencing constant physical and emotional anxiety. Whenever I was out in public I was always thinking, “Do they know? Can they see?” Plus there was the fact that people were looking at me because I was recognizable, and they were wondering if I might be Patty Duke. If you’re paranoid to begin with, and then people do start staring at you, it’s much tougher to know what’s real and what’s not.