(This article was first published in August 1987. Ms. Duke passed away in 2016 at the age of 69.)
By Gregory N. Joseph
WHATEVER SECRETS Patty Duke had about her life — and there were legions, many so deep and dark that for years she did not know or comprehend them herself — they are a matter of public record now.
No, public record doesn’t describe what the pint-sized, dynamo actress, now 40, has told about herself in her newly published autobiography, “Call me Anna” (Bantom Books: 298 pages, $17.95).
The book drapes her life across the Goodyear blimp, trails it behind a Piper Cub over Jack Murphy Stadium, outlines it across the hemisphere in multifarious lights like a spacecraft from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
After marriages, public spectacles, suicide attempts, institutionalization. Pills, booze, eating binges. Names. Sinatra — Jr. and Sr. Lucy and Desi. Desi. Jr. Mother, father, children, husbands, friends, enemies, lovers, producers, directors, agents. Whole networks.
Its glossier moments have been serialized in People and Ladies Home Journal magazines. The Book of the Month Club has made it an alternate selection.
And, for anyone who has missed the book or the excerpts, Duke has hit the newspaper and talk-show stump, discussing whatever some interrogators — some not so nice — want to ask her about.
It’s not likely to stop there. To date, she has had eight or 12 — she can’t remember which — producers contact her or her representatives about transforming the story into a movie.
“Now, that’s truly bizarre,” said Duke, her gray eyes for a moment a stilled pool of pain, anger, strength and humor.
Making a movie about someone cannibalized by show business apparently doesn’t strike some of the movie makers as a mite hypocritical, but the irony lands on Duke with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
Still, although she doesn’t agree with it, she understands it. In her book and in conversation, she acknowledges that while show business could have been a key to her problems, it also has been, in labyrinthine ways, her salvation.
“Like those times as Helen Keller in ‘The Miracle Worker’ on Broadway that I had to go thorough those fight scenes on stage,” she said. “All that hitting out and pulling and tugging every performance for two years was probably a kind of therapy for me, a release. Otherwise, who knows what would have happened to me if I adjust had to hold it all in.”
Of course and this is where it gets complicated — perhaps if she hadn’t been there, in that particular situation, she wouldn’t have felt like hitting anybody.
For “home,” at that point and for some time before and after, was the apartment of her managers, John and Ethel Ross, who had sort of deeded possession of Duke after her lower-middle-class mother decided she needed money to support the family after Duke’s alcholic father wafted out of their lives.
What they did, the Rosses, the hard-drinking Rosses, in a concentration camp-like atmosphere, was take Duke apart and put her back together again. Unfortunately, they left out a few essential pieces — like Duke’s real name, Anna Marie. Not show biz enough. They told her Anna Marie was dead, forever, replaced by Patty.
Thus was born a Grand Canyon-size phobia — Duke’s fear of death.
Even when little Patty, at 16, became the youngest person ever to win an Oscar for her supporting role in the 1962 screen version of “The Miracle Worker,” they were there, controlling her. Through countless plays and TV shows (including the rigged “64,000 Question” game show, in which they shamefully involved Duke), they were there.
What would please then? What could she do? How should she behave? She never knew. She couldn’t even take her own mother to the Academy Awards ceremony at which she was a leading (and, as it turns out, successful) nominee.
It was not until Duke’s mid-1960s television sitcom, “The Patty Duke Show,” and “adulthood” at the age of 18, that she was able to break the hold. But once she broke it — marrying an assistant director on the show named Harry Falk, a man 14 years her senior — she was in a different kind of hammerlock.
She was unable to cope with being a wife, any kind of wife, especially in Hollywood. And even under the best of circumstance, the marriage was threatened by another hidden demon — she says she was definitely, without a doubt, mentally ill.
Years later, at the age of 35 — just five years ago — specialists finally figured out what the problem was. She was diagnosed as being a manic-depressive.
Now this woman who serves as president of the Screen Actors Guild (her industry’s largest trade union), who has her own television comedy series (“Karen’s Song,” on the Fox Broadcasting Network), who has appeared on behalf of causes ranging from AIDS to world hunger and nuclear disarmament, who has won three Emmys to go with her Oscar — is well.
She had things to say to her father, John Duke, that she never got to say before he died, and words of qualified love she fell just achingly short of expressing to her “other” father, John Ross, before he died — two massive holes in her soul she yet struggles to mend. She is coping.
“I just take a little lithium pill in the morning, and another at night, and I’m all right,” she said. Then she put her hand up high, down low and in the middle. “I’m not up here, or way down there, but here, nice and even.”
Which brings us to why Duke said she wrote her book, her tell-all autobiography (really told to ghost writer Kenneth Turan, a former Washington Post and TV Guide staffer).
“I wrote the book not to have a catharsis, because I was under the impression that I already have had many catharses as one could have,” she said.
She said she isn’t sure what impact the book will have on her career, and reactions from friends and business associates have been slow in coming.
The actress said she hasn’t heard anything from longtime pal Frank Sinatra Jr. (“he’s on the road”), nor from his father, with whom Duke claims to have had an unconsummated fling.
She allowed third husband, actor John Astin, to read the manuscript, and he asked to change some things, which she did.
