Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (31 page)

When Sandy Smith returned to Los Angeles, we reestablished our relationship. I’d gotten into the pattern of spending all day in bed and carousing all night and Sandy tried to extricate me from that. I couldn’t bear to be alone, so we’d run around all day doing silly stuff, getting our hair done and our nails and fooling around in Beverly Hills. She’d drop me off at the Sierra Towers and an hour later I’d call and say, “Come get me. I can’t stay here.” Finally she said, “Look, Lucky’s never in town, you can come and stay with me.” And I did. I was “the lady who came to dinner”—I showed up one day and stayed for weeks.

Sandy and I were like a mini-sorority. We had Ovaltine with marshmallows every night, we’d sit around and philosophize until it was time to go to bed. But once she went to sleep I’d disappear. I was set up on a rollaway in front of Sandy’s fireplace but I had insomnia. Some nights I’d wake her, some nights I’d be too embarrassed. I’d just go out and wend my way back around five or six in the morning.

One night, after Sandy had gone to bed, I decided I had to drive over and see Harry’s new house. I knew it was off Laurel Canyon but I hadn’t been there. It was pouring rain, a very dark night, all very dramatic. I went down a lot of steps, his dog, Finn, was barking his head off, and I pounded and pounded on the door. Harry finally opened it; he was naked but pulling on a robe. He was startled to see me and
he started to close the door, but I stuck my foot in the opening.

“Go away,” he said.

“Please let me come in. It’s raining. Please let me come in.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Please. Please. Just for a minute and then I promise I’ll go.”

“No. Go away, Pat. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“No, I
have
to talk to you now.”

All this time I’d managed to push the door open a little with my foot, enough to get a shoulder and half my body in. Harry didn’t want to slam the door on me, yet he did not want me in that house. The staircase to the second floor was directly opposite the door, and while we were talking, down the stairs came Venus, with her flowing blond hair, wearing a white monogrammed bathrobe I’d given to Harry.

He turned on her viciously and said, “Get the fuck upstairs!” It was the same woman, though I didn’t know it then, that the pool man had seen. She just stood there and looked at me. I think I said, “Oh, my God,” but I’m not sure. I don’t know why I was surprised, but I was. And Harry said, “Now will you go?” I don’t remember if I said yes or just nodded, but obviously I was going.

I drove back to Sandy’s at some insane speed in the rain, screaming, “No! No! No!” all the way—my throat hurt by the time I arrived. I went into her bathroom, and even though she’d tried to hide them, I found a full bottle of tranquilizers, there must have been about forty or fifty in there. I went in the other room and took almost all the pills. I had been careful, however, to take one out and leave it on the counter, because I figured Sandy would be nervous and really need it when she woke up and found me dead!

I don’t remember anything more until I regained consciousness after having my stomach pumped, but Sandy has told me the story many times. She got up in the morning and was suspicious about the way I looked; I seemed to be in a very deep sleep. She roused me with difficulty but I insisted I hadn’t done anything, I was just exhausted and needed some
rest. She walked me from my cot into the bedroom and everything seemed fine.

Sandy left to talk to Joel, a hairdresser who was a mutual friend. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “It sounds like she took an overdose.” Sandy said I was up and walking, but he insisted she go back and look in on me again. And, in fact, what I’d done was hide some of the pills in my bathrobe pocket, and, when I realized I wasn’t dead, taken those while Sandy was gone. So by the time she got back I was absolutely out cold; she couldn’t wake me at all.

In a panic Sandy called everybody she could think of, including Joel, who came over and helped try to rouse me. She tried Harry, who’d had it by this point; he said he didn’t give a damn. She called my manager, who didn’t want a doctor brought in because an ambulance would mean adverse publicity. Finally, knowing I’d been dating Frank Sinatra, she called and reached him immediately. “Aw, Jesus Christ,” he said, and agreed to call somebody who could deal with the situation. And it was his doctor who got me quietly into Cedars, where I was on the critical list for close to a week. I do remember that doctor, a real show biz type, dressed to the teeth, with an attitude that suggested “I don’t have time for this kind of nonsense from you Beverly Hills broads.” It was not an approach I responded to.

According to Sandy I was literally foaming at the mouth because of all the pills I’d taken; she really thought I was going to die. And in terms of how long the pills were in my system, plus the fact that I’d changed my pattern and hadn’t alerted someone first but had done it while everyone was asleep, this was the most serious of all my suicide attempts. Yet, even this time, in my own mind killing myself was never an end, it was only the means toward a goal of being oblivious to the pain I felt. I didn’t want to live the way I was living, and there seemed to be no way out except to stop living, period.

Today I often think of how incredibly lucky I was. There was always, I guess, something inside of me that figured I’d be rescued, but if you play around that way long enough, you are going to have that terrible accident. I would always show remorse afterward, because that’s what was expected;
if you don’t, they put you in the booby hatch. But inside, there was no sense of relief that I was alive. I didn’t think, “Oh, thank God, I’ve got another chance,” but rather, “Oh, shit! Now I gotta do this again.”

There is one thing that is truly and permanently awful about ever having attempted suicide, and that has to do with the people who love you. One of the things I treasure most is their faith in me, their trust in me, but there’s no way I can tell them, “I won’t do that again,” and be totally believed. They have to live with that fear, and I have to live with knowing that. The people you love most in the whole world—you’ve done something that will always cause them pain.

H
arry didn’t come to see me while I was recuperating. It was a calculated choice, and I think the right one. He knew our marriage was finished, and felt it would be misleading and unkind to do anything that would lead me to think otherwise. And after our confrontation on that rainy night, all overtures toward him stopped. There may still have been a longing, a ray of false hope, but really I knew as well as he did that it was over.

When I think back on Harry and me, certainly the lion’s share of the disaster of that marriage was mine. Not that he wasn’t deficient in a lot of ways, but that was always over-shadowed by my illness. What he had to deal with was terrible, terrible—living with someone so troubled, perpetually in and out of crisis. I think Harry’s immaturity and the fact that his head got kind of turned around when he came to Hollywood didn’t help, but he’s no less a good person because of that. He was just at his wit’s end, worn out dealing with me.

I’d built myself the perfect storybook fantasy, and it wasn’t good enough. Why wasn’t it good enough? There’s really no way to explain that. I didn’t just have “emotional problems,” there was something wrong inside, things were out of balance. I had a disease, but no one knew it.

And the fact that I was so young certainly didn’t help, though my age was not so much the culprit as my lack of experience with life. It’s like being in a pod: someone opens it, or in my case you force it open, and there you are, in a completely alien world. There are things expected of you, or you think there are, and you haven’t a clue how to respond. You don’t know the language on the manner or the behavior. I believe if I’d somehow been able, then, to be more the person I am now, I would probably still be married to the man. Or we’d be divorced for different reasons, maybe because one of us outgrew the other. But we never got that far, we never got to figure out if anybody was outgrowing anybody. I still think I have excellent taste in husbands. It’s just that my timing leaves something to be desired.

For several months after I recovered from those pills, I went through a very lethargic period. I was overweight, I wasn’t working—it seemed like I couldn’t get a job. There was no night life to speak of, and no manic activity either. I was just sort of getting through every night and every day.

Then I got a call about
My Sweet Charlie
, which I’d previously missed out on because I’d been in the Westwood when the play was rehearsing for Broadway. Levinson and Link had now turned it into a TV movie and Bob Banner, the producer, wanted me for the female lead. I had to meet with Bob and Lamont Johnson, the director, at the same Stefanino’s restaurant where I’d been picked up by Frank Sinatra. Though nobody said it in so many words, I think they wanted to look me over and make sure I was functional.

I was very nervous about being scrutinized that way, but I was excited when I passed the test and pleased that I was going to do a job and make some money. But there wasn’t the feeling in me that exists now when I’m going to act, the anticipation of the process of creation. I was just sort of moving through time. I didn’t really kick into high gear till we got to our location at Port Bolivar, Texas, just outside Galveston.

Essentially
My Sweet Charlie
is a two-character drama. A teenage girl, I guess she would be considered poor white trash, takes refuge in an unoccupied house after being kicked
out by her father, a hard-shell Baptist, because she’s pregnant. One night a black man in a three-piece suit breaks into the same house. He’s an elegant individual from the North who came down to be in a peace march and, in self-defense, killed a white man. He’s pretty bloodied, on the run from the police, and he needs this haven as much as she does.

So we have these two adversaries, the sophisticated black man and the bigoted white trash girl. In fact, my first line of dialogue was, “It’s a nigger,” which was very hard for me to say, it made me feel very self-conscious. Predictably, things develop between these two, from each not being able to stand the other to the point where, without ever touching each other, without even sitting next to each other, it’s obvious that they’ve fallen in love. She even teaches him to talk like a “nigra” so he can pass for a local and go shopping at the store.

He finally decides he has to go back up North, and there’s a very moving scene in which they say good-bye to each other. She goes into labor the morning he leaves, and he stops by the store to try to get a doctor for her. This time the locals get suspicious and the man ends up fleeing and being shot in the back. The last image you see is of the girl being helped into a police car. There’s a discussion about what she’s going to do with the baby, and you know she’s going to keep it and call it Charlie. It was a lovely story, as much a love story as a racial statement about the times. And in some ways the real-life relationship between me and Al Freeman, Jr., who played Charlie, paralleled what was happening in the piece.

When I arrived in Port Bolivar I was not terribly attractive. I was overweight and looked, a lot of people said, very much like Janis Joplin. Also, I had a fever blister the size of New Jersey on my lip. Lamont, Al, the writers, and I went out to dinner the first night and Al, though pleasant enough, had a very arrogant kind of attitude that put us all off. We were so paranoid that he was going to think we were bigots that we overcompensated, even pandered to Al, which made him even more arrogant. Yet I felt my liberal heart was in the right place: even though there’d been some racial trouble
in the area, I’d insisted that I wouldn’t stay at a hotel unless he could stay at the same one if he so chose.

After dinner we adjourned to the producer’s suite to do a preliminary read-through of the script. There’s no way you’re going to hear award-winning performances the first time around, but everyone ends up expecting them anyway. As I said, I wasn’t the most appealing-looking person in the world, plus my clothes looked awful because I’d flown in them all day. And aesthetics turned out to be very important to Al; he himself was dressed to the nines and looked marvelous.

I don’t think we’d gotten ten pages into the script when Al stopped and went into his “black power” rhetoric. He felt his character was too much of an Uncle Tom, a sellout to the white world. Levinson and Link were defending their script and I was trying to interject some comments, so I could be part of the club, and Al kept snapping at me—“You don’t quite understand what it is I’m discussing here” or “I’m not talking to you.” I was not nearly as articulate in those days as I hope I am now, and I was easily intimidated, so my first reaction was to sniffle, and the effort I made in holding back the tears was obvious.

Whenever Al raised an objection, the powers that be kept calmly saying, “We’ll deal with that later.” But halfway through the script a screaming fight erupted, provoked by Al, and, once again, I tried to interject my opinion. And Al turned around and told me to shut up. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about and—this was the coup de grâce—why didn’t I go away and grow another fever blister.

At that point I told Al, at a vocal level that could not be misunderstood, that he could go fuck himself. I threw the script across the room, swept up the ugly little dog I’d brought with me from L.A.—which Al had also insulted—and stormed out of the room. Frankly, I was justified, but it would have been nice if I could have done it in a more gracious way.

I stood waiting by the elevator, my heart pounding in my ears. I was sure the boom was going to be lowered on this bad little girl. I could hear my agent saying, “You did
what
?” Maybe it was a holdover from my years with the Rosses, but I
never felt that I was going to receive support if I made trouble, even if my actions were completely justified. And yet I knew that in this case I was right. This was not part of the creative process, the man was simply a rude son of a bitch.