Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke Read online

  A STORY OF SURVIVAL AND SUCCESS, OF REBELLION AND ABUSE, OF COURAGE AND TRIUMPH

  CALL ME ANNA

  Here Patty Duke tells her personal story, her journey from child star to award-winning adult actress, from confused and abused teenager to a highly respected and refreshingly honest show business personality—and she tells it in a voice so familiar to millions of us, yet so starkly and startlingly frank that you will never see Patty Duke the same way again—or forget the little girl whose real name was Anna Marie. Inside Patty reveals:

  Her terrifying appearances on TV’s rigged quiz show, The $64,000 Challenge, that led to her testimony before the congressional subcommittee investigating the show.

  Her courageous break from her ruthless managers when they tried to stop her from seeing the first man she fell in love with.

  Her passionate love affair with 17-year-old Desi Arnaz, Jr. that was thwarted by an angry Lucille Ball.

  Her many liaisons that included a most unusual affair with Frank Sinatra, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, a wedding to a stranger, and her long-term stormy marriage to the much older John Astin.

  The diagnosis of manic depression that began her successful rehabilitation.

  The challenge of bringing up two sons who have followed their mother in acting careers.

  … and much more.

  CALL ME ANNA

  “Related with such appealing honesty, courage, self-deprecating humor and strong desire to make the reader understand how it all could have happened, that she succeeds in winning you over.”

  —The Washington Post

  CALL ME ANNA

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published August 1987

  Bantam paperback edition / June 1988

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1987 by patty Duke.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-47591.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78866-5

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  This book is dedicated to My Husband, my Mother, my Father, my Sister, my Brother, and my Children and theirs.

  And bizarre though it may be, John and Ethel Ross.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Angel of God, my guardian dear

  To Whom his love commits me here;

  Ever this day be at my side

  To light and guard

  To rule and guide.

  This little prayer from my childhood occurred to me as I recalled all those who should be thanked for bringing me this far.

  Some of them have names that are familiar, some have names that are not and some will remain nameless even to me. Among those guardian angels are those without whom this particular promise could never have been kept. For their love, their light and their guidance, I am grateful to:

  Mitchell Dawson for his good counsel as my friend, especially, but also as my good counsel.

  Bobbe Joy Dawson, Mary Lou Pinckert, Sam Faulkner and the munchkin, Sandy Smith, the girlfriends I longed for and treasure so much.

  Ralph and Rosalie Turner, my friends who insure that the fruits of my labor are now stored safely.

  Laureen Lang and Neil Kreppel who’ve assisted me so lovingly in every way over the years.

  Arnold and Lois Peyser, my friends who assured me if I did a TV Guide interview with Kenny Turan, I wouldn’t be disappointed.

  Steve Rubin, who read that article and had the insight, foresight, and faith to reteam Turan and Duke for Bantam.

  Kenneth (you’ll always be Kenny to me) Turan. You met a gun-shy actress for a magazine interview and won her trust, her friendship, and her deep respect forever.

  My children, all of you, for all that you are and all that you give me.

  Dr. Harold Arlen for helping me find me at last.

  And, of course you, Michael Ray Pearce, for finding me Forever and Our one day.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Photo Insert

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  About the Co-Author

  INTRODUCTION

  About two years ago I went to a meeting in the office of Sid Sheinberg, president of MCA and one of the most powerful men in the entertainment industry. I was part of an ad hoc delegation of Screen Actors Guild members, a gracious, dignified lady. Sid looked at me hard and said, “Well, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” And I said, “Yes, it has.” Neither one of us went into any details. I just turned to the folks I was with and said, “Sid and I have had a few meetings in here.” What I didn’t tell them was that the last time I was in Sid’s office, I shouted a string of obscenities and threw his Mickey Mouse clock at him for good measure. When people said about me “She’s trouble,” they weren’t kidding.

  That all happened in 1970, when I was pregnant but no one knew it. I was guest-starring on an episode of Matt Lincoln, M. D., starring Vince Edwards. We were on location on the palisades near San Pedro, and I was hanging off a cliff, supposedly committing suicide.

  There had been a lot of technical problems that morning, the crew was tired and hungry and they wanted to eat, but it was decided that the actors would take lunch first so the crew could continue to set up the suicide shot. It was none of my business—none—but I couldn’t keep my nose out of it. I decided I wasn’t going to lunch until the crew went to lunch. Very unionistic. An argument ensued and I stormed off to get into a car and leave. I said I was going to Beverly Hills to eat, they said I had only a half hour and couldn’t go that far, I said I was taking an hour, maybe even an hour and a half, so they told the Teamster assigned to my car not to drive me anywhere.

  I was getting out of control at this point, and, holding my tiny dog, Tara, and wearing a floor-length black and white leather coat over a miniskirt, I must have looked like a court jester. I said, “Fine, the hell with yo
u,” and went out to the street to hail a cab. Of course, one didn’t exist. What came by instead was, of all things, an army garbage truck. I stuck my thumb out and the driver picked me up. The assistant director started screaming, “Don’t you take her anywhere,” I was yelling, “Go guys, go, go, go,” and suddenly my departure turned into a great rollicking, hysterical chase, with a studio limo coming after the garbage truck with me and the dog in it. We pulled into the army base, closed the gates, and wouldn’t let the limo in.

  Then came negotiations through the fence:

  “Are you coming back?”

  “No. It’s my lunch hour. I can do anything I want.”

  “You gotta come back.”

  “I’ll come back when you feed the crew.”

  “The crew already went to lunch.”

  “Then I’ll eat here with the guys.”

  “No, no, you’ve gotta come back.”

  “Then can the guys come and eat with us?”

  Well, it turned out that these guys were Section Eight, genuinely crazy types (who else would pick me up?) who’d been let out on garbage detail as a kind of occupational therapy and had to get permission to go to lunch. Not only did I invite them, but anybody else they cared to invite as well. I went back to the location site, and as I was standing in line, getting my food, over this little ridge came what looked to me like maybe a hundred or a hundred and twenty guys in uniform, looking for lunch. I knew then I was in big trouble. And sure enough I got the call. “Sid Sheinberg wants to see you.”

  I was driven over to his office on the Universal lot, fuming over a summons calculated to chill the boldest heart. Sheinberg wasn’t there, so while I waited around I touched everything on his desk, just like a four-year-old, too self-absorbed to be afraid. I liked his Mickey Mouse clock, one of those little Baby Bens, so I picked it up and put it into my pocket. Sheinberg finally came in and he started reading me the riot act. I said if he didn’t like it, he knew what he could do. He said, “You’re gonna have to not talk to me that way,” and I said, “Who are you, the dean?” Then he said something else that got me very angry and I said, “Go to hell. I don’t have to put up with you. Keep your two grand a week.” And I threw his Mickey Mouse clock at him (he caught it) and left.

  When I got back to the set, I was told I was on suspension. I got into one of those little golf carts, got my stuff out of my dressing room and put it in my car, then I drove the cart as far as I could way out on the back lot, left it there, and threw away the key. Can you imagine? And then I didn’t work for a very long time.

  Up until very recently that story was extremely painful to me. Every once in a while I’d run into a crew member from that time who’d start to tell it and I’d be mortified, I’d die. I’d even have a physical response to the memory, a tightening of my stomach. But now I’m starting to find it funny, almost as funny as the people who tell it.

  The difference is that I know now what I didn’t know then, that I was a manic-depressive, crazy as a bedbug. Since I was diagnosed in 1982 and began taking Lithium, my whole life has dramatically changed. The medication has so stabilized me that incidents like that just aren’t in the realm of possibility anymore. Also, I’ve achieved the kind of respectability that I’ve always wanted. Part of the attraction of being president of the Screen Actors Guild, frankly, was that it conveyed the ultimate stamp of approval. “We accept you,” said the membership, the community I live and work in, “as a person who’s got enough wits about her to do the job.” So now it’s okay for me to say, “Yes, wasn’t I crazy in my youth.”

  What’s still the toughest thing for me to accept is all those articles that were written speculating about my abuse of drugs, which I’ve never used; that that kind of stuff would linger in newspaper morgues and magazine clip files has made me ache. I’d love to destroy every copy of every article that misquotes me, that maligns my mother, that may cause my son, Sean, even if it’s only for five minutes, to have to deal with nonsense instead of getting on with his life. But that’s not possible. I’ll never be that rich—maybe there isn’t anybody who’s that rich.

  What I’ve done instead is follow a very sound philosophical approach that my sons’ father, John Astin, suggested. He would say, “If you keep living the truth of your life, that, not the mistakes or exaggerations, is what will endure. If you live your life in truth, the truth will out.” Sure there are times when I have trouble believing that, but for lack of a better way to proceed, that’s been working for me.

  And, because of a promise I made, I’ve decided to do something else, something more. Sixteen years ago I promised my mother that I would write something to set the record straight, that I’d put something in those archives that’s more accurate, that gives another point of view. I don’t mind being thought of as someone who was crazy, because I had no control over that situation. What I don’t like is for people to think that I chose to do destructive things. I was someone who didn’t have a choice about my actions, yet I fought like a son of a bitch to get to a place where I could have one.

  ONE

  Though I’ve been a professional actress since I was seven or eight, acting was never a dream of mine. What I really wanted to be was a nun: nuns were the only people I came in contact with who weren’t drinking and screaming! I played nun a lot with my friend Margie Stravelli—she’d play anything. We’d fold scarves a certain way, make a bib with paper from school, put on a bathrobe, and flick our rosary beads as we walked up and down. And then we’d just be mean: that’s how you played nun. Assign a lot of homework, whack the table with a ruler, fight about who was in charge. “You were the Mother Superior last week. Let me be Mother Superior.” We played nun for hours.

  Yet when I think back to my earliest memory, it was of performing. It was Sundays after church and I’d always be wearing a very good dress, looking very neat and spiffy. My father, John Patrick, would be charged with taking me to a park on Second Avenue between Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth streets on New York’s East Side, but we never quite made it. We’d end up instead at “Grandpa’s bar,” where his father, a man with pure white hair, very blue and bloodshot eyes and that kind of handsome Irish face with all the veins sticking out from drinking too much, was a bartender. Grandpa was what they called a periodical drinker, and when he drank, my mother says, he was violent.

  As early as I can remember I’d be stood on the bar and, even if it was July, I would recite “The Night Before Christmas.” Sometimes everyone would give me pennies, but mostly it was pretzels—I could be bought for pretzels and Coca-Cola. Dad, of course, would be throwing back a few boiler-makers. He’d always swear me to secrecy, but he’d get in trouble anyway when we got home, because whether I told or not—and I would, every time—it was obvious where we’d been. But I loved being hoisted up on that bar, I just loved it. And that was probably where my passion for acting began.

  Until I was about twelve years old, when the place got so infested with bedbugs that it drove us cuckoo, my family lived at 316 East 31 Street. The five of us (my father; my mother, Frances; my sister, Carol, who was eight years older than me; and my brother, Raymond, who was five years older) all lived in four rooms: a kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms, all without doors. It was at the top of a four-story walkup: we lived in the back apartment and the Callahans and their dog, Scroungy, lived in the front. Scroungy was a black spaniel, so vicious it lived its entire life with a muzzle on: the Callahans would take it off only to feed the dog when nobody was around. Scroungy was mean.

  Though we had four rooms, none of them was as big as my den today—you could do submarine work after living in them. The rent was only thirty-six dollars a month, but there was a panic about not being able to make the payment every time it was due. My sister and I slept in the same bed for a while, but she didn’t like it because I moved around too much and I didn’t like it because she talked a lot and out loud in her sleep. We had a sink, stove, refrigerator, and the washing machine my mother got her
hand stuck in. Even after the machine was turned off, she kept screaming. I was just a little kid, I didn’t know what to do. I finally figured out I should pull the plug, but I had to get Mrs. Callahan to extricate my mother’s hand. Thank God for Mrs. Callahan. My mother might still be there.

  We also had pressed tin ceilings, the kind that are becoming really popular again, only these weren’t nice and white; they had big rust stains where water had leaked through the tar-paper roof because my mother always walked on it in her high heels—she used it for a spy tower. She’d go up there and embarrass us to death. Maybe Ray was playing stickball in the street, where he wasn’t supposed to be, or I had my finger up my nose—whatever it was, she’d start screaming at the top of her lungs. Once she screamed down for Ray to come upstairs, and one of his buddies, a guy named Walter, couldn’t take it anymore and yelled, “Jump, Mrs. Duke, jump!” Of course, the moment my poor brother walked in the door, she gave him a slug because of what the other kid had yelled. Well, she figured, he’d been standing there, hadn’t he?

  The neighborhood we lived in, Kips Bay, was almost all Irish and Italian. We were street-smart city kids, but the kinds of things the older ones did, like the boys shooting off firecrackers or maybe stealing hubcaps, the girls chewing gum and putting on black eyeliner because it made them look hard and tough, seem very innocent now. We never really wanted for anything, and I never remember being hungry. So tabloid stories that say “a piece of bread seemed like birthday cake to her” still make me furious. Sure we were poor, but we weren’t desperate, we weren’t like homeless people who may have nothing at all to eat. If I was hungry, it was because my mother made pea soup, which I wouldn’t eat on a dare.

  My mother had a strong sense of responsibility to her family. She used the phrase “these children we brought into the world” again and again. She prided herself on the fact that she raised perfectly clean children. People of her generation in that neighborhood had very little to be proud of, but they were proud of the way they kept a home. It was the old “you could eat off the floor” routine, though what my mother forgets is the reason you could eat off the floor is that my sister was washing it! The household might be threadbare, but it was sparkling clean, and her children were dressed better than lots of rich people’s kids; my clothes were much better, much cleaner, much neater than my boys’ are today. When you’ve got the money, you relax and say, “Fine, wear the holes in your jeans, look like a bum.” But when you don’t have it, you want to look as if you do.