Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (7 page)

Also, my mother was a willing victim a lot of the time. She didn’t want to be poor, she wanted to be taken care of. Her weakness was that it was at almost any price, and that price included me. The Rosses saw to it that there was always some cash for Mrs. Duke, and Mrs. Duke would take her cash and go away, Even now she sometimes says things like, “I was her mother. I deserved some of that.” A lot of stage mothers have that attitude; it’s not unique to mine. But it’s more like a sibling attitude than what I think a mother’s should be.

It took me a long time to realize the resentment I had against my mother. I was angry at her on the most important level there is, at the very bottom of my soul, and I think I had a right to be angry. A parent makes an unspoken agreement with a kid: “You’re here. I got you here. Now I’m going to take care of you.” The expectation isn’t, “Oh, by the way, there are these two people who live on Seventy-fourth Street who are going to make you an actress, but you have to go live with them and they’re going to take care of you—even though you’ve already given your allegiance to me, your mom.”

And my mother still expected my loyalty. When the Rosses weren’t around, she would say, “I’m your mother, and I never see you. I’m your mother, and I told you to do this. I’m your mother …” It wasn’t in me to say then what I feel now, which is, “What are you talking about? I didn’t put me here. You did. I didn’t invite the Rosses into my life. You did.” When my mother was emotionally ill and needed to be hospitalized, she’d always say, “Don’t let them lock me up.” And the anger I felt came from the fact that she had locked
me up. Turning me over to the Rosses was like taking me to Bellevue and throwing away the key.

The Rosses coached other kids besides me and my brother, and occasionally they’d have four or five of us there of a night. That was fun, like the Hollywood Canteen, with all the actor kids hanging out together. But a kind of attrition took place for two reasons. One was that once my success started to happen, the Rosses’ energies grew so focused on me that the other kids just fell away. The other was that these kids, like Joey Trent, the gorgeous boy from the Beanie-Weanie commercial, came from very strong families: there was no way that kid was going to live with anybody but his mother and father, no matter how much the Rosses claimed it was hampering his career. The same thing happened with Susan Melvin, a quite talented little girl whose mother was one of the few people who would say, “What are you doing, John and Ethel? This is weird. My kid is not gonna stay here. She has a home. Tell me where you want her and I’ll bring her there, but I’m not leaving her here.”

The only kid who stayed over at all regularly was a little boy named Billy McNally whom the Rosses discovered shining shoes in front of the Metropole on Broadway near Times Square. His family was also very poor, so the Rosses struck up the same kind of agreement with them that they had with my mother, and Billy came to live with us. He was about two years younger than me, and I adored him because I wasn’t alone anymore, I had a colleague, somebody my own age who also thought the Rosses were a little nuts. When they’d go to bed at night we’d get together and whisper. “What’d they say about this?” “What’d they say about that?” “Can you believe what she did?” Billy stayed with us until he reached that “awkward age” young actors do. His presence was very comforting, one of the rare confirmations I got that I wasn’t crazy. Before his arrival I sometimes felt like a movie heroine pleading with the psychiatrist, “Doctor, someone is chasing me.”

Because the Rosses watched me so closely, one of the most difficult things I’ve had to learn later in life is how to be alone. During my first marriage I would take a bath with the door open, and just being by myself in any room was almost
impossible for me until quite recently. When you’ve been watched and monitored for all your formative years, it’s very hard to get used to not being watched and monitored, very hard to be without the background noise of chatter. If you’re alone, then you must have thoughts of your own. And those were not permitted when I was growing up.

Though I was the principal earner in the Ross household, I was hardly the center of attention: that honor went to Bambi. Bambi was a light fawn-colored chihuahua that was made, I swear, out of toothpicks and papier-mâché. Bambi would stare at you from her big wet weepy brown eyes and ooze from every orifice. I don’t remember a time when this dog wasn’t frail and ailing, but she went everyplace with the Rosses, even, eventually, to the Oscars. If the dog couldn’t go, we didn’t go. Whenever we’d go shopping for anything and happen to notice a purse that Bambi might fit into, Ethel bought it. And when we went traveling, Bambi had her own wardrobe: a dress, a mink stole, a hat.

Bambi rarely walked anyplace, she was carried in her daytime bed: a wicker basket covered by, depending on the temperature, two or three little infant receiving blankets. Bambi had practically no teeth and her tongue hung permanently outside her mouth. I mean, she never even brought it in to get it wet. So when the time came to feed her, which was quite some ritual in itself, the first thing you had to do was get a glass of water and dip Bambi’s tongue in it so she could eat at all!

Now, it was a great honor to be among the chosen few who could feed Bambi, who, of course, ate only a special diet. With God as my judge, feeding her was an hour-and-a-half event. First you opened the can at both ends and squished all the food onto wax paper, because Bambi could eat only a can a week and the rest had to be carefully saved. Then you sliced off just the right amount and put it into a special little frying pan that was only for Bambi’s food; nothing else could be cooked in this pan. You’d add a tiny bit of water and mush up the food, but not too much, because Bambi didn’t like it if it had been mushed up too much. Then you would heat it, but very carefully, because
she couldn’t feel anything on her tongue, which was like plaster of Paris, and you might bum her.

When the heating was finished, you poured this gray gruel onto a paper plate. Then you took Bambi out of her bed and put her not on the kitchen floor—too slippery!—but into the foyer, which doubled as my bedroom. You held the plate out and you said in a high voice, presumably at a pitch that dogs could hear, “Does Bambi want her dinner?” At which point, this poor decrepit thing jumped up, danced around in a circle, and begged.

Now, you kept saying this until someone threatened to murder you because of the screeching. Then you put down the plate and everybody had to stand there and watch her eat. When about a third of the stuff was gone, which was about all Bambi could handle, there was a serious discussion about whether or not she’d eaten less than usual and questions like, “Is she getting enough nutrition?” were asked.

Now came the pièce de résistance, asking Bambi, in that same high-pitched screechy voice, if she wanted to “make a river.” You cannot believe the instructions I used to get about this. One of my mother’s jobs was very neatly cutting up the newspapers used to line Bambi’s cat litter box, which was also kept in the foyer where I slept. We all had to stand there and watch Bambi make a river, and after she’d finally acquiesced, everybody had to tell her how good she was to have done it. And then, because no river was allowed to stay more than ten seconds, you would lift up and dispose of four pieces of the paper—no more, no less—so that Bambi’s box was always clean.

Finally, years later, Bambi became ill, even in the Rosses’ eyes, and they took her to a special vet in New Jersey: no one else could be used. They came back without her, heartbroken that Bambi had to stay overnight. That was one of the few times I reverted to my Catholicism, praying fervently that the dog would die. And she did. That really encouraged me and I started praying about the Rosses! If it worked on animals, maybe it would work on people too. Even though I was always giving interviews about how much Bambi meant to me, I really hated that dog. God, she was hideous. And the Rosses were much nicer to Bambi than they were to me:
no demands were made on that animal, she didn’t have to perform any function. I’ll probably have to pay some karmic price for this, but I can’t help it. I loathed that dog.

Life with the Rosses provided few opportunities for escape, and sometimes they came in unlikely situations. In 1959 I made a curious little science fiction film called The 4-D Man, which starred Robert Lansing as a scientist who learns the secret of transposing matter and is able to walk through walls and things like that. Unfortunately, he needed human energy to revitalize his powers, and I played one of his victims: a little girl pushing a doll carriage. He takes one look at me and the next thing, my little legs are sticking out from some bushes, next to a broken carriage.

The producer of the film, Jack Harris, owned a studio out in rural Pennsylvania where he’d made The Blob and other movies. I was a city kid and this was my first extended time in the country. I hung around with one of the producer’s sons, riding bicycles, finding secret places, inhaling the smells of the Pennsylvania countryside. It was a wonderful experience for me because of the location and the tiny sense of freedom, but I always felt as if I were doing something terrible, that I would be caught and get into trouble for having fun.

The only other times I ever got away were occasional weekends when the Rosses would ship me home if they decided they wanted to be alone. My mother had moved to Queens by this time, but my visits weren’t like Lassie Come Home or the return of the prodigal daughter. It wasn’t that those visits were unhappy, they just weren’t much of anything, probably because it was obvious that they were only a stopover, that my mother had no autonomy and nothing was going to change. When I wanted to go out, she’d say, “What would the Rosses say?” Invariably the Rosses would have said, “Don’t leave the house.” Sometimes my mother would get brave and tell me, “The Rosses said you couldn’t go out, but go ahead anyway.” I’d go out and play with the neighborhood kids, maybe go to somebody’s basement and dance, but I was always looking over my shoulder, because I knew if they called and I wasn’t home, there’d be hell to pay.

And invariably there would be one call over the weekend
and if I wasn’t around—how often can you use the she’s-in-the-bathroom routine?—my mother would be ordered to get me home immediately. I always let her know exactly where I’d be in case that call came, because Ethel would rant and rave at her. “How dare you let her go out! We told you she couldn’t go out!” We were like two little kids being punished because my keeper for the weekend hadn’t followed orders.

Ordering my mother around was standard procedure for the Rosses. They would call and say, not, “Could you come in on Thursday?” but “Can you be here in forty-five minutes?” And that was not really a question. It meant, “You will be here.” And my mother, of course, never had the courage or whatever it would have taken to say, “No, I can’t. I have some things I’m doing.” She would stop whatever she was about, throw herself together, and go into the city. Sometimes they gave her all my fan mail to take care of. She’d take the letters home and sit up till three A.M., addressing envelopes and putting pictures in them, and then drag a suitcase full of them back to Manhattan on the subway the next morning.

After I moved in with the Rosses I mostly saw my mother when she showed up about once a week to do their laundry. She would do the hand laundry and Ethel insisted on most things, especially personal items like pajamas, underwear, and socks, being hand-washed. Not only was my mother never paid, this being kind of a “favor among colleagues,” she was given very specific instructions about how to do things and a critique when she was finished. It was always done in a very patronizing tone, with Ethel saying things like, “Oh, Mrs. Duke, would you mind very much? Oh, thank you so much, Mrs. Duke. Now, Mrs. Duke, you must use the Woolite here and you mustn’t use more than a capful.” No wonder my mother went deaf. Who wants to listen to that?

To this day my mother still gets furious over a phrase in the old stock publicity about me that says how filthy my white shoes and socks were before John and Ethel Ross began to manage me; ask her about the phrase “we took her and her dirty white shoes,” and you still get the whole chapter and
verse. When I was a kid, I wondered, “Why is she making such a big deal about the shoes and socks? What does it matter?” But now I realize it mattered a whole lot. It was an attack on her motherhood, and it underlined her guilt about having relinquished that position with me. That tossed-off phrase did it; that was the stake through her heart.

The image comes to me often now of this woman who came from a shabby apartment in Elmhurst, or, later on, a basement place in Astoria to a seemingly flashy Manhattan apartment to launder the personal underwear of people with whom her child was living. It’s cold on West End Avenue, with the wind coming off the Hudson River, and I think of those awful lonely moments she must have had, cold in her heart as well as on the outside, walking those long blocks to the subway in her thin coat. And returning home to a place where there was no one. Who’s going to do her laundry? Who’s going to care if she’s had any dinner? What awful demons she must have been living with. It made me ache. It still makes me ache.

W
hen I first started acting, my main motivation was fear, a feeling that if I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, something horrible was going to happen. But once I became a hot little number on live TV, once the work changed from “Daddy, I want ice cream,” to more meaningful parts and I began to feel myself understanding the concepts and getting better, the acting mechanism in me really clicked. I’ve never liked to think of myself as very ambitious, but it’s been there, underneath, and this was when the drive really kicked in. I was no longer doing the work just because the Rosses wanted me to; now I wanted it as well. I liked the feeling of walking into a studio and not only knowing that I belonged but also having other people know it.

That sense of belonging—the attention and affirmation—was really the key element for me. Most performers are very loving, very willing to show affection, and I made attachments quickly. I would love everybody, and there would always be a couple of favorites who loved me back. They were like the family I’d never really had, so it was wrenching when each show came to an end. I was grief-stricken to the point of feeling inconsolable; every one of the good-byes was a real loss to me.