Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (28 page)

Possibly because I was playing her, possibly because of sharing a volatile nature and having kindred feelings of insecurity, I felt an immediate affinity for Judy. We hit it off instantly. Thete was lots of laughter, there was a general feeling of camaraderie and goodwill, and she seemed fine. The last prework day she started telling me how nervous she was and I tried to reassure her. Probably if I’d been older, I would’ve hugged her, but I was feeling too deferential at that point.

In those days, before mobile homes, stars had quite luxurious permanent standing dressing rooms, and the next day I went over to her room to see how she was doing and
wish her luck. The sweetness was completely gone, all there was in this person now was abject terror. We kidded around a little bit, I asked her when they were going to get to her scene, and she said she didn’t know, she was waiting for Mr. Robson to come over to see her, and that was the end of that.

Robson was involved on the set and when it was time for Judy’s scene, he sent word down through the chain of command to go get her. And the word came back that she wouldn’t be ready for another forty-five minutes, which on a movie set is a terrible amount of time to be inactive. He was bugged by that, and even though it was none of my business, I went back to see her again. She was ready, but she wouldn’t come out of the room. She said she was waiting for Mr. Robson. I didn’t catch on that she was wanting him to show deference, but she later told me there was more than that involved: she was very nervous and she thought if he came for her and escorted her to the set and introduced her to the crew and all of that, it would make her feel better. Maybe she was being a nuisance, but I could see her point. Well, Robson never came and she never did get out of the room that day.

This went on for a couple of days and each day she acted a little stranger; she started slurring her words, for instance. I never saw her drink, I never saw her take pills, but rumor had it that that’s what was happening. By the third day, apparently, ultimatums had been issued, and she did indeed come on the set and work. Mark Robson kissed her ass in Macy’s window, but everyone could tell she was under the influence of something. I stood behind the set, just cringing, willing each word to come out the way it was supposed to, and it never did. When the dailies were shown, no one was happy and the scene was scheduled to be redone, with a costume change used as the excuse. There was no sense of tragedy on the set, just that this was going to be a long haul.

At lunchtime the next day, I implored her to eat something. No, she wasn’t hungry, but if I were a real pal I’d bring her a couple of Hershey bars. I went to the commissary,
got my tuna sandwich and my chocolate milk and her Hershey bars—the longest I could have been away was fifteen minutes—but when I knocked on the door, I got no answer. Knocked again, no answer. Went to my room and called, still no answer.

I sort of dozed off and suddenly my phone rang and she was crying on the other end. I couldn’t understand a thing she was saying. I kept asking, “What happened? What’s the matter? Where are you?” Guessing she was still in her dressing room, I went over there and an enormous racket was going on inside, a lot of crashing and smashing. I pounded on the door, but she wouldn’t answer. I ran upstairs to call and again no answer. I couldn’t reach anyone else, tried to look in her windows, but no luck. I went back to her room and kept literally kicking at this heavy, old-fashioned door, yelling, “Please let me in! It’s me! Please let me in!” I was frantic and frightened.

Finally she opened the door, looking like the wrath of God. She was not physically hurt, but the cloth on the room’s antique pool table was torn, the light hanging over it was broken, there was glass everywhere. At this point I did embrace her and hold her. I just said, “What happened? What happened?” And finally I was able to understand: “They fired me. I’ve been fired. They fired me.” I tried to calm her down, tell her everything was going to be okay. Someone from the company arrived and told me I could go, that they would take care of this, but I hung around longer than I was welcome, until Sid showed up to take her home. I kissed Judy good-bye, told her that whatever had happened would work out somehow. And that was the last I saw of her until the following year, when she was appearing at the Palace, in tiptop shape and doing a great show, wearing her costume from
Valley of the Dolls
.

When Judy was fired like that, it was really the end of the movie for all of us. It was so ugly, so unkind, that even if people had cared before, nobody gave a damn now. The producers may have felt justified in terms of her being unable to work, but, remember, I didn’t think they were justified in hiring her in the first place. Also, they were a little too ready
with a replacement. They had gotten their P.R. mileage out of the situation, the “Judy comeback” stories had created extraordinary publicity for the film, and now she was expendable.

Judy’s replacement was Susan Hayward, who seemed tough and very distant; I learned only later that she was recovering from her husband’s death. There was an unfortunate incident between us during the shooting of the scene in which I steal her wig in a restaurant ladies’ room and throw it down the toilet. She was very humiliated at having to do the scene in the first place. As written, it was supposed to look as if she had cancer and was losing her hair, but she refused to put on a bald cap. She insisted just bleaching her hair white was going to work.

During the scuffle for the wig I was supposed to push her, but I pushed too hard and she fell. According to Mark Robson, she thought I did it on purpose. Did he plant that seed in her head, or did she actually think that I had? I don’t know. I do know that it was a horror to me that Susan Hayward would think that I tried to hurt her. She refused to work for the rest of the afternoon, and I took the rap for that, as if I had done it on purpose. I apologized to her, I told her it had come to my attention that she thought I had pushed her on purpose, and of course I hadn’t. So that was yet another hideous, uncomfortable episode that took place on that picture. I hated Mark Robson. I truly hated that man.

Toward the end of the filming, the producers wanted me to do a nude scene and I refused. It wasn’t a moral judgment; I’ve taken my clothes off since so that wasn’t really the issue. In this particular scene, however, I saw no point or purpose in it. I was supposed to strip and then walk outside my house to find my husband swimming naked with another naked woman. I was supposedly drunk as well, it was an ugly scene, and with two naked people in it already, I didn’t see that they needed a third. There was a big argument about it, but they couldn’t force me; nowhere in my deal did it say that I had to do a nude scene. We were getting toward the last days of filming and given all that had happened, I was not inclined to go the distance for them anymore.

By the close of shooting, everybody hated everybody. War zones had been set up all over the place. On the last night there is traditionally a wrap party. You do the final shot, the chips and dip are already set up, everybody has a drink, and sometimes people hang around until morning. On this picture I had to go around begging grips and electricians to stay so that there could be any kind of celebration at all.

Only a pitiful little group of us stayed for the party, including Mark Robson. He came over and started telling me that he knew I didn’t like him but he really loved me and after all he’d gotten a hell of a performance out of me. I told him he was right, I didn’t like him—worse than that, I felt considerable animosity toward him, and as far as my performance went, he could have “gotten” a much better one with a different approach. He said, “I just made you mad because I wanted you mad in the scene.” And I told him, “Don’t you realize that if you’re going to hire somebody that you have to provoke, you’re not hiring an actor? You hired an actor. Let me play the scene.” It was a most unpleasant exchange.

The first hint of what
Valley of the Dolls
was really going to do for my career came in an insulting Look magazine article about the filming that portrayed me as a foul-mouthed harridan misbehaving in public. I did indeed swear but not like a sailor on the set, not to the extent that the piece claimed. It was cruel, it was erroneous, and it was bad journalism. I cried when I read it, and I literally did not go out of the house for two weeks, until every one of those issues was off the stands. And afterward, my swearing became worse. I figured, “Okay, I may as well be damned for a lion as for a lamb.”

Not long after
Valley
wrapped, I became pregnant, and there was great jubilation about that. It turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy, however, and I had to be hospitalized for the necessary surgery. I needed both an emotional and a physical recovery afterward, and during that period the call came from the studio that the film was ready, and wouldn’t it be a perfect shot in the arm for me to see it, my performance was so wonderful, all the usual palaver.

Harry convinced me the screening would be a good
idea, and I was not that hard to persuade. I’d been distracted from my work while I was shooting—I was busy having a war with the director and eating doughnuts and playing an ineffective Florence Nightingale to Judy Garland—and I certainly wasn’t aware just how bad the film might be. So with no little effort (it was less than a week after my abdominal surgery) I was gotten dressed and to the car.

It was a small screening—the writer, the producer, probably Mark Robson, and a few other people. Remember, this was one of the first times in my career that I had been allowed to see my work, so I was especially excited. The film started out nicely enough, but then it got to the meat of things, and the pain from my surgery got worse and worse and I thought I would die. I was awful, everything was awful, it was just the pits. I started thinking to myself, “What am I going to do? Should I get sick and leave?” I chickened out and waited until the end of the movie, praying, I suppose, that it would get better somewhere along the line. It didn’t. The lights came on and no one said a word—talk about humiliating. I stood up—cautiously—and Harry said, “Gee, the music’s beautiful.” And that was it.

One of the reasons Twentieth Century Fox had shown me the film was that they wanted me to fly to Miami and join a press junket on a cruise ship going from there to the Bahamas. Well, of course, after I saw it I wasn’t going to cross the street to be part of that junket. But then all kinds of pressure was applied from the studio, my P.R. people, my agents, all of them saying, “Hey, it’s a cruise! You’ve never been on a cruise before! It’ll be fun!” Finally, I agreed to go. We’re such suckers, we actors, we really are.

It was fun to see Sharon and Barbara Parkins and the rest of the cast again, but those of us who’d already seen the film couldn’t look one another in the eye because we knew how awful it was. The cruise started, it was enjoyable and romantic, the food was wonderful, and I was indeed forgetting about my recent personal tragedy when it came time to view the movie. They packed us and all these press folks into this tiny theater, turned on the projector, and, wouldn’t you know it, it ran too fast. Not enough to bother the visuals, but enough to make all the voices sound several tones higher:
Paul Burke came out like Minnie Mouse, I had a voice only dogs could hear, it was ridiculous.

And remember, it’s not as if we were still at the dock or had dinghies at our disposal. They’d long since pulled up the gangplank, and we were stuck in the middle of the ocean, watching this turkey. This was truly purgatory. People laughed at all the serious parts. Jackie Susann got up at one point and left the screening: once people started laughing when the demented guy in the mental hospital scene was drooling and I was singing to him, it was enough to drive any best-selling author to her “dolls.” I’ve read since in her husband Irving Mansfield’s book that she had cancer then and was going through her own horror. At any rate, she went to her room, took a bunch of sleeping pills, and I never saw her again until it was time to get off the boat.

The rest of us, however, just got silly. We kept running around the companionways, trying to stay away from the press—we certainly didn’t want to be interviewed about this—and have our own good time. Sooner or later, though, we all got trapped and had to talk, and lie, about the socially redeeming value of this movie.

Although it amazes me, there are a number of people who got something out of that picture. Whenever someone comes up to me and says, “I saw you in
Valley of the Dolls
,” my instinctive reaction is to say, “I’m sorry you wasted your money.” But I found I have to be really careful, because there are those who actually made a connection. There is in fact a cult following for this film. There are “
Valley of the Dolls
” parties and people dress up as Neely on Halloween. Extraordinary!

Personally, I try my damnedest never to see that movie. Almost everything I’ve done, even if my work could have been better, I can look at and not feel ill at ease. But there are a few things—still photos from
The Patty Duke Show
, those album covers, and
Valley of the Dolls
—that I can’t to this day look at comfortably. I can’t even look back and say, “Wasn’t that a gawky kid?” or “Yeah, she had a silly hairstyle but she was all right.” You would think after a certain amount of time you could get past the embarrassment, but
it’s still very hard for me. It’s not a question of dealing with my history, I do that every day. It’s that I feel I look silly and my work is bad. I take a great deal of pride in my work, and I can’t have much about that nonsense.

T
he summer of 1968 started on an up note. Once again, Harry and I were supposed to live together in New York. He would be hanging around with his old buddies, and he was working on a script (though it was going nowhere fast) and I was going to star in a film called
Me, Natalie.

The project was produced and directed by Fred Coe, the
Miracle Worker
producer with the great lap, and I took it because I loved the part of Natalie. I really clicked into this lady. She’s described as an ugly Jewish girl from Brooklyn, and certainly, when people looked at me, that wasn’t their first thought. But her lost, waiflike quality, with an edge of humor and sarcasm, was something I could very easily relate to, as was the film’s premise of recognizing the pain that’s making you feel ugly when you’re not. Which is probably why I was able to do the work despite the crises that developed.