CALL HER ANNA
by David Lefkowitz
Note: This article first appeared in Long Island Woman, Sept. 2009.
The homepage to her official website begins:
“I’ve survived. I’ve beaten my own bad system, and on some days, on most days, that feels like a miracle.” – Anna Patty Duke Pearce
Yup, her first name’s Anna, which is only the first surprising thing about an actress some may know only for playing young Helen Keller in “The Miracle Worker,” or for being pert and perky on “The Patty Duke Show,” or for having her career nearly derailed by “Valley of the Dolls.” No one’s life is easy, but Duke, recipient of the 1960 Theater World Award for “Most Promising Newcomer,” has traveled a bumpier road than most.
We’re not just talking the usual ups (an Emmy for “My Sweet Charlie”) and downs (three divorces) of a career in showbiz; we’re talking physical abuse, sexual abuse, substance abuse, mental illness, drugs, suicide attempts and, later in life, suffering a parent’s worst nightmare. As she wrote in her autobiography, “Call Me Anna,” that vivacious young girl in “The Patty Duke Show” was actually enduring a suffocating and emotionally poisonous childhood.
The product of an unhappy marriage, Anna Marie Duke was shunted off to another couple who pushed her, not unwillingly, into an acting career. By age 11, she was doing tons of live television and commercials, with John and Ethel Ross molding her into their image of what a starlet ought to be. The big break came when John realized Patty (Ethel had changed her name from Anna) would be perfect to play Helen Keller in a new Broadway drama called The Miracle Worker. He trained her for a year, often by blindfolding her so she could feel her way around the room.
Though Duke didn’t win a Tony (Anne Bancroft did), she got to reprise the role in Arthur Penn’s 1962 film and became, at the time, the second-youngest person ever to win an Oscar (after Shirley Temple’s honorary nod in 1934). Unfortunately, stardom only tightened the Ross’s grip on their young charge. “Their bad behavior didn’t start until I was about 13,” Duke told Long Island Woman. “I was a commodity they had to dig their claws into to be sure I didn’t run away somewhere. That fear allowed them to get as twisted as they got.” According to her website bio, Duke suffered “infrequent sexual molestations” from both, as well as being put on a regimen of uppers, downers and booze.
Little wonder that despite success on TV and in the showcase film, “Billie,” the first opportunity grown-up Patty had to move out, she did. Within a few months, she was married to a man nearly 12 years her senior in a union that lasted four years and included a stay in a mental institution owing to her mood swings and suicide attempts (Duke wrote that she “acted” her way out of the hospital by being on her best behavior). Not helping the marriage was Duke’s 1967 career choice – a plum role in a film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s blockbuster novel, “Valley of the Dolls.” What was meant to be a break-out role to prove Duke could play adult parts nearly made her a laughing stock. Though the film would eventually reach cult-trash status, Duke’s career never quite recovered – her three Emmies for “Charlie,” “Captains and the Kings” and a later turn as Anne Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker” notwithstanding. A highly publicized romance with Desi Arnaz, Jr., an affair with a newly separated John Astin, and an unconsummated and annulled marriage to rock promoter Michael Tell followed, with the first note of stability finally struck when Duke was able to marry Astin in 1972. Though even that relationship ended 13 years later, she and the “Addams Family” actor are still close, especially since actor Mackenzie Astin is their biological son (she’s step-mom to Sean).
Still, even during the relatively normal years of the Astin marriage, something was badly amiss, and it wasn’t until 1982 that Duke received the diagnosis that changed her life: she was bipolar. “My boys – my men are wonderfully grounded. But they all went through hell with a wacky, often vicious mother,” Duke admits. “It would come completely out of nowhere. I would go from sweet, nice mom to horrible verbal abuse, all of a sudden. And, yes, it did get to physical abuse. I talk about it now only because I want to acknowledge the victims and let people to know you can get past that.”
Asked if Lithium has been the magic elixir, Duke replies, “I am religious about my medication. When I go around the country and speak about manic depression, I stress that if you’re choosing the medication route, you must take it. Almost within a month of my diagnosis and treatment – it’s not like I had a `Eureka!’ moment; it was more like, `Oh, that motor in my brain isn’t racing anymore.’ Remember that 25 years ago, I had to figure out what normal was. And I’ve been very fortunate in that the side effects are very minor. No kidney issues. If I’m not drinking enough water in a warm climate, I notice a metallic taste, but that’s it. Plus, I’ve retained enough of my neuroses to be interesting, I hope.”
Keeping her life interesting is her fourth and, assumedly, final marriage, this one to former drill sergeant Michael Pearce. “I’ve been married to Michael for 23 years – I think that’s a record for a bipolar person,” Duke notes. “Which isn’t to say we haven’t had tough times. We lost a daughter [Rae, in a car accident] 11 years ago. All my life, I’d wondered how people survive something like that. But you do. With patience and love. Her birth mother, my husband and I became this very strong trio. We allow ourselves to grieve, but we’ll also comment on the funny things she did or the pain-in-the-ass things she did. Certainly, having other children is a real impetus to deal with it in the most wholesome way.”
For those keeping score, Sean is still doing “scads” of movies (“so many, he sometimes doesn’t even mention it to me”), and Mackenzie started as a teen idol on “The Facts of Life,” tried to ditch acting for baseball (“but the high-school coach never played him”), got temporarily caught up in the L.A. lifestyle, turned his life around and returned to movie work, and now often performs in plays at Johns Hopkins University where his dad runs the theater program. Pearce’s daughter, CharLene [yes, the “L” is capitalized] is a scientist and working mother. “When she got pregnant the second time,” Duke recalls, “she came to the house weeping. I said, `excuse me, you’re a scientist; don’t you know how it happens?” Completing the family unit is 20-year-old Kevin, whom the Pearces adopted when he was two days old. “People who don’t know he’s adopted wonder how this tiny woman birthed this 6’7”, 280 pound man,” Duke laughs.
For all the kids and grandkids, the actress is beginning to feel the inevitable “empty nest” tug, not to mention the awareness that at 62, she’s not an ingénue anymore. “I was really pissed when I realized I was entering a whole new phase of life,” Duke says. “I was very negative about it for awhile. I wouldn’t look in a mirror because I saw my mother who passed when she was 80 – and I looked like her when she passed! It’s taken me a concerted effort over the last two years to find the good in it. What’s great is that while I’ve been in San Francisco playing Madame Morrible in Wicked, Michael and I are getting to rediscover each other. Plus I have to go onstage with all these twenty-something people and keep up. I give myself congratulations every time I come off the stage.”
Asked if doing a lavish musical eight times a week requires strongly monitored physical exercise or diet, Duke notes, “I have no set regimen, but I find I’m becoming more fit, just from my job and living in this city. It’s inspired me to get off the couch and walk the hills of San Francisco. As far as diet, a couple of years ago, I decided I was a vegetarian. Unfortunately, I was a completely uneducated vegetarian, which meant I stopped eating, because this country is really not set up for that lifestyle. I did that for 11 months and lost a whole bunch of weight, but I eventually went back to adding meat to my diet because the weight loss was becoming unhealthy. The transition each way is not easy.”
Few things have been easy for Duke, from her childhood traumas to more recent health issues (in 2002, she was kicked in the head by a horse and suffered a near-fatal concussion and skull fracture; in 2004 she underwent successful single bypass surgery). But, at least in our chat, she’s unfailingly optimistic. “The horrible stuff makes the good stuff even better,” she offers. “For all the negative early crap, I’ve had unbelievably wonderful experiences with my fellow actors, and I wouldn’t trade that for all the bad stuff. I taught drama at the University of Idaho last year – holy Mary, that’s a hard job! But I loved it. All those fresh angelic faces developing both personally and in their work.”
“Fame at an early age,” continues Duke, “needs real guidance and support. And a balance outside that world. You need to wash the dishes and empty the garbage. It’s so seductive to become a hothouse flower who can be disgustingly demanding, but that’s when everything turns against you. I never thought I’d let my sons go into show business at an early age, but John Astin said at the time, `It’s not like what happened to you. We’ll still be their parents.’ The good skills we had were helpful, while the not-so-good skills showed themselves as well.”
Which brings the conversation full circle back to Duke’s childhood and its aftermath. “I’d come to a place where I’d forgiven [Mr. Ross], so I wrote him a letter saying, `let bygones be bygones,’ but I made the mistake of showing it to a lawyer friend who said, `Don’t you dare send this.’ I didn’t trust my instincts and didn’t send the letter. Within ten days, he was dead. So I made sure that I at least had some resolution with his wife. It may not have been a glowing, musically underscored resolution, but I was able to come to a place where I truly forgave her. I’m sure it didn’t matter a hill of beans to her, but it was healing for me. I hate to paint a constantly rosy picture, but we forget that there sometimes is a rosy picture.”
SIDEBAR:
Early in her career, Duke worked with both legends and legends-to-be. Here are her thoughts on:
RICHARD BURTON
“I followed him around like a puppy dog. Repressed though I was, I obviously had some sort of sexual instinct. I was ten when we did `Wuthering Heights,’ and my whole psyche goes back to the romance of those two words. We worked together again when I was about 13. To me, he was timeless.”
SIR LAURENCE OLIVIER
“We were doing `The Power and the Glory,’ and he was kind of underplaying. Since I was also taught that camera technique, we both kept underplaying each other. Then, over the P.A., a voice said, `Excuse me for interrupting, but we can’t hear either one of you!’ So we got caught. But Olivier was so generous. Twenty years later, we were invited to an Oscar picture-taking for past winners. He came up to me and said, `Oh, I’m so delighted to see you after all these years.’ It really made an impression on me.”
AL PACINO
“I was doing `Me, Natalie’ where I played an ungainly Jewish girl from Brooklyn. It was Pacino’s first movie, and he had a tiny role where he comes up and asks me to dance. So we’re dancing, and he says, `You put out or what?’ That was it. But – and everybody has a story like this – I knew I’d just met a major, major force in the acting world, just from those two lines. Years later, I saw him in American Buffalo and went backstage. We talked and laughed and I realized that, like Olivier, there’s some connection between the greatness of the gift of these two men and their humanity, their graciousness.”
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