Conversations in the Raw

by Rex Reed

  He brought out his suit (black Edwardian tails, shirt with a detachable stand-up collar and tapestried vest, rented from a theatrical costume company). He couldn’t tie one of the three white ties the costume company had sent along, so I helped him. He had put the collar on backward and we had to take out the stays and collar buttons and start all over. “See what I mean?” he groaned. “I don’t want to be a star.”

  But he was. Thousands of people fought for his autograph, three girls got trampled in the street and it took 25 policemen to keep the uninvited public behind the barricades when his limousine drove up on opening night. Not only did he meet Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, but Prince Charles showed up too, with a nod to his tutor for giving him the night off. It was a royal flush. The stars and movie magnates formed a circle while more than a thousand people sat in their expensive seats and watched the whole thing on closed-circuit television. Without my help, a last-minute crisis had arisen to get Leonard into his rented suit and it had taken three hours to get Olivia into the apricot-colored silk gown designed especially for the occasion by Zeffirelli himself, made in one week by Capucci and flown in from Florence. But they looked like the stars of the evening.

  Prince Charles talked to them so long the Queen had to send Prince Philip to tell him to “Get a move on.” “I think I’m being left behind,” he said, bowing deeply to Juliet, who giggled. Then with the pomp and monstrous circumstance reserved only for crowns and legends, the orchestra played “God Save the Queen” and everyone bowed and curtsied once more and the stars were led backstage to be presented to the entire audience. Leonard was all fingers. “How does that music go again? Are we supposed to come out right after Danny Kaye or what?” “Don’t be silly, I’ll tell you,” said Olivia, shoving him into the spotlight.

  Although some sourpuss movie critics had a few harsh words to say in the next morning’s newspapers (How dare an Italian tell the British how to jazz up Shakespeare?) it was a night when nobody cared about critics. It was Romeo and Juliet’s night. Women cried, men patted them on the back, they shook about a million hands and at 2 a.m., when everybody else started turning into pumpkins, they stood in the middle of a lavish crystal ballroom at Claridge’s holding the magic as long as they could. Dazzling under the chandeliers like uncut diamonds, Romeo pulled off his tie, tore off that damnable collar, and lit into his third soufflé glacé grand marnier, and Juliet kicked off her slippers, stepped all over the train of her Capucci grown, and thrashed away with Prince Charles, heir to the throne of England, in one last sweaty Funky Broadway.

  … and they all lived happily ever after.

  Patty Duke

  Two p.m. on a Sunday afternoon. One of those glass cages overlooking the noise and smoke of midtown Manhattan the people at the Hilton call a hotel room. Jose Feliciano is playing quiet guitar clusters on the phonograph and Patty Duke, ex-child star, is smoking a cigarette and eating scrambled eggs in her bare feet. (Her name used to be Anna Marie Duke from Elmhurst, Queens, but when Patty McCormick, another ex-child star, made a splash in The Bad Seed, some bright, forgotten child-star manager cashed in on the name and changed it to Patty. Now nobody knows what happened to Patty McCormick, but it’s been Patty Duke ever since.) She is 21 years old now, and no longer feels like a Patty, but they won’t let her forget. She asks people to call her Pat, and when they slip she makes little frowns that turn her nose up like a half-nibbled gingersnap. She has been in New York for several months, starring in a movie called Me, Natalie, directed by Fred Coe, who produced her greatest triumph, The Miracle Worker, and the strain shows. Her mother is in the next room packing her things and in a few hours she’ll be on a plane back to Hollywood. She is very blue and her eyes are red from crying.

  She rests her feet on top of a child’s Funny Mooners game and stares at the smoke ring her cigarette makes as it curls in the air. “I’ve had no sleep for four days. I’m black and blue from doing all my own stunts in the picture. I rode my own motorcycle and even jumped into the East River in one funny suicide attempt scene. They made me take a bath when I got out. I guess they were afraid I’d get the clap or something.”

  The words sound tough coming from the candy-box bow-ribbon mouth of a girl who still looks young enough to pay half-price at Radio City. But the girl in the pony tail is also a veteran of 15 years in show business, and the survivor of: a personal private life that reads like Elsie Dinsmore, a miscarriage, an unhappy marriage that is now ending after three years, and a career that has been a constant battle between a frightened young woman and a public which has always treated her like a midget with vitamins. One interviewer called her “Little Miss Sewer Mouth” and she cried for three days. She does come on like a pint-sized Jimmy Cagney, but stick around and you can hear the heartbeats. It’s the only way people will listen. When she was a kid, all her interviews were conducted on sheets of mimeographed paper with stock answers. If anyone asked how it felt to be a child star, she would turn to Answer Number 40. Like that. But on this particular day, in this particular hotel room, Patty can take care of herself. “I’ve been knocked down before. I always get up again. All I want now is some peace and dignity in my life. I’m just not going to be hurt any more by what people write about me. Like my divorce. If they want to insinuate it was anything but incompatibility, then let them. I was looking for a father. I’ve been looking for a father all my life and now it’s time I stood on my own two feet.”

  She means it. All her life she was coddled, pampered, told how talented she was. Her father was an elegant but sad man, a cab driver, who sought refuge from reality in a bottle. He left her mother when Patty was six, creating a void in her life that has never been filled. Patty was “discovered” at seven by the John Rosses, a husband-wife manager team with no children of their own, who dressed, fed and exploited her, and although she is not ungrateful for the star they pinned on her door, a certain bitterness creeps through when she talks about her childhood. While all the other kids were playing kick-the-can, Patty was walking up and down Madison Avenue looking for toothpaste commercials. She can still feel the phony smiles she was forced to smile when her tight Mary Jane shoes bit into her feet and the way the starched organdy petticoats chapped her legs and thighs.

  When she was nine, Walter Pidgeon bought her “my first good piece of jewelry—a little gold turtle in a gold clasp at Tiffany’s.” Before she was 12, she had already played opposite Kim Stanley, Helen Hayes and Laurence Olivier. By the time she got the role of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, she had already starred in more than 50 television shows. There was no time for hopscotch. Her days were filled with diction lessons, singing lessons, drama school, making the rounds of casting offices. While the other kids on her block learned arithmetic, Patty learned how to reach the last row in the balcony by crying real tears. Fifteen months before Miracle Worker was produced on Broadway, the Rosses taught her to be Helen Keller. She read books about her, she lay on the ground in Central Park with her eyes closed and felt the grass grow. She went to school with her eyes closed, bumping into walls. They taught her deafness “games” for hours on end. “Patty, would you like a Coke?” If she answered, she lost; if she showed no emotion, she won. She got the part and played it for two years, going to work every night on the subway and riding home in a taxi. She never got a vacation. Sometimes if she was good, she got to pack a steak and have a picnic under the George Washington Bridge. By the time the movie version was made, in an old house in Pleasantville, New Jersey, Pleasantville was the farthest she’d ever been from home.

  Patty’s father came to the matinees, but he stood in the back of the theater and watched. She didn’t know it at the time, but he had been forbidden by law to see her. All she knew was she had a father somewhere and she wanted him with her. One of the fan magazines ran a contest: “Patty Duke Cries Herself to Sleep Every Night! Find Patty Duke’s Father!” They did. In the next issue, they published a photograph of his tombstone. “I could have helped him.
There’s so much I could have done, but I never knew he was there. I blamed myself and grew so insecure I took everything as a personal rejection. I would cry and cry because I thought I had failed these people who took care of me. Can you imagine what that’s like to a child? It’s a miracle I’m not in a nut house!”

  And the world heaped praise on her tiny shoulders. Walter Kerr wrote that she was a “very great actress who only happens, at the moment, to also be a child.” At 16, she won an Academy Award. Where does a child star go from there? Patty went into her own successful TV series, “The Patty Duke Show,” which she hated. She was playing the all-American teenager, but inside her head terrible things were happening. “I wanted to grow up, function for myself. It was time my personal life caught up with my professional one. I was working like an adult, with none of the advantages. I couldn’t go to any of the parties because nobody was supposed to see the little shrimp smoke or drink. I didn’t have any friends, because I had never been to regular school except on the set. Most kids take stands, and fall on their tails. I had missed even that and I was eager to have some kind of life for myself, for me, Patty.” Summoning all the strength in her mini-frame, she fired her managers and, knowing nothing of the world outside their protective wings, declared her Independence Day. “I heard Suzanne Pleshette mention a building in Hollywood where bachelor girls could live without fear of being raped, so I moved in there. I had wanted a garret, but I ended up paying $500 a month with a doorman. My plan kind of backfired.”

  Director Harry Falk had first met her when she was 8 years old. Years later, he showed up in California directing her on her own series at a time when she was going through an emotional crisis. She had learned the truth about her father and was no longer on close terms with her family. She was 18 and still fighting the battle of the eternal teenager. After living with her managers for 10 years, she had moved out on her own and was lonely. He was divorced and experienced. To the horror of her advisors, she married him and retired for a while. “I had decided to sink or swim and I was sinking. I felt emotionally unequipped to take care of a man. I had worked all my life as a kid actor, then suddenly I wasn’t one anymore. I was married and a homemaker. It was what I chose, yet I didn’t know how to be one. I didn’t even know how to cook. I wasn’t holding up my end of the bargain and I needed someone to talk to. So I went to a psychiatrist. That took guts, but I’m glad I went. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. If you break a toe, you go to a doctor, right? So if you have something wrong in your head, you gotta get help or it gets worse. Analysis is a lot better than pills. I learned where my problems were coming from. As a kid, I had days when I did nothing but cry for nine hours straight. If I blew a line, I worried that people wouldn’t like me. It was that fantastic drive to be liked because I was so insecure. Hell, I was just a child, for God’s sake, and what do kids know? They just want to be accepted and liked by everybody. Analysis taught me to laugh. When I was a child I wasn’t impressed by anybody. The only person I ever met who impressed me was John F. Kennedy. Now I have more compassion for people. I don’t have such a high opinion of me anymore, because I have more important things to work out than the drive to succeed.

  “I was very poor when I was little and if I hadn’t become a child star I don’t know what I would have been. I might have turned into a prostitute or something. But that one-track mind that used to demand attention isn’t so important anymore. I don’t need the love of everybody. Judy Garland doesn’t have to worry about me. I’m not going to take over the Palace. I have learned that the public needs a dream, a fantasy idol to bring them out of their problems. You’ve gotta protect yourself, or you’ll become a Frankenstein. That’s why I did Valley of the Dolls, to change the image the public had of me as the little kid in pigtails. I changed my walk. I penciled red on the bottom of my eyelids until it ran into my eyes and they were bloodshot. I had to eat pills all through the movie. They were filled with powdered sugar and I washed them down with booze that was really Coke and watered-down tea. They were so fattening I gained 20 pounds. I went to bars and watched confused, tormented people full of self-pity and wondered how they got to be that way. I really thought it would work.”

  Somehow it didn’t. Valley of the Dolls was an unmitigated disaster so total it almost destroyed her reputation as a quality actress and netted her some nasty publicity as well. When audiences saw little all-American Patty Duke playing a ravaged, alcoholic, drug-addicted Hollywood vampire pushing aside autograph hounds, sleeping with homosexuals, falling into ashcans, waking up with strangers in waterfront dives, washing down overdoses of pills with stale beer, and ending up in an asylum in a straitjacket, they roared. When she talks about it, her eyes fill with tears. “It was garbage. In spite of the publicity, all three of the girls liked each other, but we knew something was wrong. Our communication as friends was not allowed to continue on the set. We got no direction. An actor can’t go out there alone and make a movie. I don’t know any actor who doesn’t need a director. We were flying blind, in a fog. We were never even told from one scene to the next how long it had been since the characters had even seen each other. I was miscast, I admit it. I thought I could play that girl, I really did. Not from my own experience, but from what I knew about life. I played Helen Keller too, but I was never deaf, dumb or blind. But they changed everything in the book. I had to go from 17 to 46, which was physically impossible. They made me look like Tugboat Annie and every time I complained, they said, ‘It’s funny. Just do it.’ Well, it wasn’t supposed to be funny. In fantasy you can do anything. Walt Disney got away with murder. But if you’re going to make a movie about people, you’ve got to touch on reality. When I pulled Susan Hayward’s wig off, that was supposed to be very sad. Jackie Susann never wrote it to be funny. When I saw it, there was the most marvelous roar of hysterical laughter I ever heard in my life and I wanted to die from embarrassment. I had just come out of the hospital after losing my baby, and I was very depressed, so Harry thought it would give me a lift to see the film. Everybody said I was so magnificent in it. Hah! Another trap. I believed them. That was Mistake Number 990,000-B. Next time, in my head, I’m going to say, ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ I needed an air-sick bag to sit through that movie.”

  Me, Natalie, she says with pride, is the best movie she has ever made. “It’s about me, really. A girl my age, an ugly duckling, who leaves Brooklyn and moves to the Village and falls in love. It taught me I have only scratched the surface of what I can do if I try. Valley was rotten, this is just the opposite. I don’t care if nobody likes it, I know it’s the best work I’ve ever done. I didn’t have Harry or anyone to lean on. This was solo. After Valley I went into such a depression that the marriage just wasn’t working at all, so I came to New York and moved into an apartment on East 67th Street next to the Cuban Embassy. I didn’t even need an alarm clock to wake me up. A bomb went off every morning at four o’clock. I finally moved to this hotel to get some sleep, but I haven’t had any. You know what I’ve been doing? I went to see my mother again and we’ve been staying up all night talking, trying to erase all the misunderstandings. I understand about my father now and why they kept him from seeing me. I’ve found my family again.”

  She brings out snapshots of her brother Ray and her sister Carol and a dozen smiling, healthy babies, including one of herself, naked as a jaybird on a fur rug. “This is me—little Anna Marie, before anyone ever heard of Patty Duke. And this is my mother’s wedding dress, which I’m taking back to California. It fits me perfectly. And this is Old Friend, my doll I’ve had all my life.” Old Friend’s fingers had been chewed off by some long-ago child and Patty squeezed it so hard it would have yelled if it had not already lost its voice in some faraway backstage dressing room. “It’s wrong to carry grudges against people for what your life has been. I refuse to say ‘Mea culpa!’ and blame things on Mama or Daddy or the Rosses. Annie Sullivan said, ‘No pity! I won’t have it!’ I heard Anne Bancroft say it every night for two years
straight in The Miracle Worker and I’ve never forgotten it. I may in my actions ask for pity, but I don’t want it. At 21 pushing 22, I’m the same size I always was. My name is still Anna Marie Duke, I’m still trying to find the same answers to the same questions as everyone else in the world. If I was Anna Marie Duke the telephone operator, not written about in The New York Times or photographed with Helen Keller in Life, nobody could care less except the people directly involved. I don’t regret being Patty Duke the actress. I’m only ashamed that so many people have been forced to share my problems with me. But the marvelous thing is they also got to share an experience with a 16-year-old girl winning an Academy Award. They got to share the highs, too.”

  She picks up the script from Me, Natalie and begins to read. “In the last scene, she leaves the boy she loves to go out and find her own life. She says, ‘Maybe I’ll be miserable, maybe tomorrow I’ll be happy. But it’ll be my miserable, my happy. Because I’m me, Natalie.’ Fact-wise, I only know two things—you’re born and you die. What happens in between is up to you. Nobody’s there with you when you’re born and nobody crawls into that box with you when they bury you. You can’t fail unless you try. I’ve blown it many times, but my track record is pretty good. From now on, it’s going to be me, Patty, and I’m going to live that in-between part to the fullest of my capabilities. Some people may call that a threat, but I call it a promise.”

  Her mother had finished packing and it was time to catch the plane back to—what? Her husband had moved away and her nine-room colonial house on the same street as “Pickfair” would be empty. But there was a life to work out, and Patty Duke was sure as hell going to find a way. The limousine was waiting, so she hugged her mother, who was crying in her mink stole, and still looking small and vulnerable for such a tough little girl, said goodbye. She was still holding her doll when the door closed.