Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (37 page)

So when John came to Duluth to see me, I wasn’t able to just calmly talk this out with him. A major scene developed, with some of it, unfortunately, taking place at the hotel, where other people could hear. The upshot was that the company told John that he had to get out of town because he was upsetting me, that I wasn’t working up to my capacity. None of this was true, but the scene between John and me was not something you’d want others to witness, and John got a bad reputation for disrupting a production.

I was able to confront these men only months later after I was brought into an office in a Sears store in Los Angeles where I was trying to buy paint. The Sears people took my card away, said, “Come with us,” and informed me how long it had been since Sears had seen any of my money. That was the day John finally decided he had to tell me what he’d known for a long time but had hesitated to bring up. He’d been afraid that I wouldn’t believe him and that that whole Duluth chasm would open up all over again.

The embezzlement scheme used against me was complex enough that it took the district attorney’s office two years to prepare the indictment. Over the three years those guys had been my business managers, I’d accumulated six hundred thousand dollars worth of bills, hadn’t paid my taxes for three years, and was in danger of having my house foreclosed on. Once the grand jury acted against Irwin and Stich, they immediately brought a countersuit against me for two million
dollars for slander. The reason they sued was to be able to take my deposition, during the course of which questions were asked which were designed to spook me.

“Isn’t it true that you slept with Mr. Stich?”

“No.”

“Isn’t it true that you were hospitalized for alcoholism?” “No.”

“Isn’t it true that you were hospitalized for drug addiction?”

“No! You can get the records.”

“We’re not interested in records. We just want to know what you have to say.”

The plan was obviously to get me so upset I’d drop the case rather than have to go through questioning like that in open court. And I did freak out, I went home on the Friday afternoon before the trial and didn’t get up until Monday morning except to beg John to find some way out so I wouldn’t have to do this. There was much hysteria that weekend. Monday came and the attorneys didn’t want me down at the courthouse until it was close to my time to testify, so I waited at home, a nervous wreck, with John. Even though I felt, “If I did it with a porcupine, what does that have to do with the fact that these people stole my money,” I sort of accepted the fact that I was going to be humiliated in court.

Then the phone rang—the sound almost sent me through the roof—and John answered it and said, “Oh, I see. Uh-huh. Okay, okay. Well, you fill me in later.” It turned out my former managers had pleaded nolo contendere at the last minute. It was the only piece of justice I ever got. As for getting my money back, I received three checks through the Department of Correction. One was for fifty dollars, one for seventy-five and one for twenty-five. That was it.

The money crunch, already hideous because of the embezzlement, got worse in 1973 when a Writers Guild strike in Hollywood made it impossible for us to work because we weren’t going to cross any picket lines. So John started asking agents about theatrical work, and that’s how our five years as touring actors, a regular Lunt and Fontanne, began. The official story was that we loved the theater so much we
couldn’t resist dragging the whole platoon on the road, but the fact of the matter was, we started because we were flat broke.

So when Mackie was two weeks old we hit the road with
A Shot in the Dark
. Our first stop was one of the oldest summer stock theaters in the country, Elitch’s Gardens in Denver, which had a wonderful history but happened to be located in an amusement park, where a roller coaster inevitably drowned out our best lines. The play was a piece of utter fluff but it was surprisingly difficult to do, like keeping up an old, cold soufflé. And the real problem was, because of my experience in Miracle Worker-type dramas, audiences thought they were coming to see the more serious Wait Until Dark. So it took a good twenty minutes to get people off the dime and realize that this was only a silly airhead comedy. Until then, there was dead silence out there. It felt like playing to a backdrop.

The burden of keeping the play alive fell largely to John. Both in that play and the others we did, I was a very good straight man, and most of the time I was comfortable with that. There were occasional skirmishes, however. I’d come offstage and shriek at him for killing my one and only laugh, and if he could manage a word in edgewise, he’d point out to me that in fact I’d stepped on my own laugh, which would really annoy me.

Most of the time, though, I thought he was an exceptional performer and I stood in awe of his gift. He taught me an awful lot about timing in those kinds of plays, about having the courage to wait, take a line, get the laugh, and then get off. All in all, we worked very well together and while we were performing we almost always had fun. If nothing else, being onstage was one of the few times during the day when we could talk to each other without being interrupted, even if the dialogue wasn’t our own. Nobody said, “Mom! Dad!” There may have been a whole audience of people out there, but we were alone.

We got through the first season making, I think, ten thousand dollars a week plus a piece of the house, and that was all John needed to know. This was going to be our new way of life. Next came
The Marriage Gambol
, which we did
for two seasons until I really got bored with it. The last place we played it was Seattle, and not only was that the one time we were not a hit, we were a big, bad bomb. I wasn’t used to that, I was very spoiled, and I couldn’t handle the failure. Within the space of hours I’d switch from deep depression and lethargy to crying and running around the house, threatening to kill myself, to finally taking the car and driving off in the ever-present rain. And then I said I wasn’t going to do the show. “I don’t have to do the show. There’s nobody to see the show. They hate me. I’m not doing it.” I was really in a bad way.

As a sign of rebellion, I decided to get my ears pierced. John didn’t want me to. We had an argument in the tea shop next door to the place I was going to get it done, and finally we accosted some old lady who was sitting there, minding her own business, having tea and crumpets. I said, “Excuse me. Could we ask you your opinion? This is my husband. I want to get my ears pierced, and he really has severe reservations about it. What do you think?” Now, mind you, I’d checked her ears out before I asked and they were indeed pierced. But she said sweetly to me, “I think you should do as your husband says.” It was the first time I had the urge to punch an old lady!

Instead, I turned to John, who was sitting there smiling, and said, “The hell with you, I’m getting my ears pierced.” The process really hurt, and wouldn’t you know it, I got a dreadful infection and had lobes the size of grapefruit. But John never said a reproachful word, just, “Poor thing. Did you use your alcohol? Aw, poor thing.” And I thought, “Oooh, I’m gonna kill him.”

While all this was going on, John and I got sent the script for
My Fat Friend
, which Lynn Redgrave had done on Broadway and which was currently the hot play on the circuit. I read it and I hated it, I thought it was the most vicious, ugliest play I’d ever read in my life. But since we were in this for the money and everyone was saying we’d be fools not to do it, I figured, what the hell. And it was not until John and I started playing the piece that I recognized that this was a much more profound play than I had ever
realized, that what I’d thought of as viciousness had its roots in genuine understanding.

Although there are other characters, the heart of
My Fat Friend
is the relationship between (what else but) a fat woman who runs a bookstore and her neighbor, a gay man who’s in the closet during the day but a flaming queen at night. A gorgeous young man comes into the bookstore and he and the fat lady fall madly in love. He goes off for a while and the gay man puts her on a regimen so that she loses a lot of weight and becomes a very attractive woman. But when the young man comes back, it turns out he didn’t love her: what he’d loved was her fat. And that’s when you realize that what you’ve been watching is a beautiful love story between the woman and the gay guy. Without actually saying the words, they tell each other about that love, but with the realization that the relationship can never go any further.

As Henry, the gay man, John was magnificent. He felt an obligation to the gay community not to do a heterosexual’s version of a gay guy. He wanted the dignity of the man, and the dignity of his sexual preference, to be organic. He was a smash, but no one knew that in rehearsals, because in the theater John is very slow in developing a character. He really wrestles with it, and carries the book for a long time, making everyone else extremely nervous.

I’d first experienced this in A Shot in the Dark. With that play John was so slow, I thought, “My God, we’re going to have a major disaster. He’s going to get out there and just stare at me.” I began suggesting, “We’ll write things down. You carry papers anyway in the scene, you can just look at them,” but John kept insisting he’d be fine. Opening night came and as I waited offstage he sounded so letter-perfect, I thought he’d taken the book out there with him and cleverly hidden it behind the potted palms.

Our first scene together started out fine, but then came that great, dreaded pause. It was in a situation where I couldn’t help him out by paraphrasing his line, so we just stared at each other. I looked at the two other guys in the scene, I looked back at John, and thought, “Poor son of a bitch. Oh, he must be dying.” And then it hit me—the next line was mine. And not only did John paraphrase my line,
and his, and get us back on track, but he looked at me so caringly that I thought, “That bastard. Never again will I worry. He can carry the goddamn book until they pull up the curtain on opening night and I’m not going to worry about him.”

With
My Fat Friend
, John was truly working at a snail’s pace. I don’t think he knew word one for about six days. It was making the director very anxious, so I told him the story about A Shot in the Dark, but I don’t think I accomplished anything except scaring the man about my abilities. And John was brilliant on opening night, and not just because it’s astounding to witness this man who didn’t know his ass from page eight two days before suddenly not only saying the whole play, but performing it. And he kept improving during the run; there was one time when he was so convincing in a scene that even I wondered, “Where is he getting this from?” I was so busy admiring him, I lost my concentration in the scene. This was not the man I knew. This was the guy from the play. That performance revealed a whole new horizon for John’s skills and gift.

The last thing John and I toured with together was
Rattle of a Simple Man
. I had a lot of trouble with it. The play, about a country bumpkin who goes to see a hooker and falls in love, was dated by the time we did it, and I never felt really comfortable in the role, partially because I had to take my clothes off down to a bra and little bikini panties.

We were doing fine, however, until we opened in Chicago and I got creamed by a critic, which sent me into another tailspin. It wasn’t a review of my performance, it was a negative review of my life and an attack on the respectability I was working so hard to develop and maintain. The piece ridiculed the concept of John and me as a couple, the idea that I was pretending to be a great married lady of the theater when everyone knew what I’d really been up to for the past few years.

That article had a very intense negative effect on me that lasted for months. Months. I thought, “Jeez, I’ve been so good and it doesn’t mean anything. They still write that crap about me. Okay, now let me be bad.” That idea came more in feelings than clearly defined thoughts, but the upshot
was that I became more and more obstreperous. There were no pills available in Chicago, so I didn’t try that. But there were screaming, raging, one-sided fights I picked with John.

The result was that I flatly refused to do any more of this kind of nonstop touring. John tried to talk me into continuing. He kept saying what great fun we’d always had, how it was the best time ever. John truly did love touring. Sometimes all of us flew from playhouse to playhouse, and sometimes we drove with the whole family, including my mother and a housekeeper, and John really got into the whole Dad’s-behind-the-wheel-and-we’re-off-to-sights-unseen mystique.

But because touring was a whole lot of work and I was tired, I hated it. We rented people’s houses and I didn’t want the kids to break things or mess anything up, so there was constant tension about situations that John was totally unconcerned with. For him, overshadowing everything was the fact that we were in “the theater,” while for me it was always summer stock. I wasn’t in the theater, I was in the laundromat. And I was in the bowels of hell emotionally. I even had my analytic sessions long distance over the telephone.

Generally we would play eight performances and travel on Sunday. If we were smart, we’d pack Friday night, but we weren’t always smart. And packing was an enormous chore. The amount of luggage was unreal, because kids come with a lot of garbage and show folks come with a lot of garbage too. I certainly wasn’t going anyplace without my coffeepot and my curlers and my this and my that. We even schlepped our own costumes—it really was born-in-a-trunk time.

Each kid had his own footlocker in which he was allowed to put anything from games to stereos. If it fit, fine, if it didn’t fit, it didn’t go. It was a nice theory but it worked only on paper because it didn’t take into account the inevitable shopping bags. My mother had gone through her entire life having a love affair with shopping bags, so we had lots of them. Invariably the kids would put their wet bathing suits into the paper shopping bags that tore rather than the plastic ones that didn’t. And always when we left someplace, something was left behind.