Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (4 page)

John—I never called him that; first it was Mr. Ross, then Uncle John, then in my teens a pre-Dallas J.R.—was shorter than she, very round, with birdlike legs and a round head that was bald in the middle with a fringe around the sides. He wore really thick glasses and his hair had turned white literally overnight from the trauma of surgery he’d had for a congenital eye condition. When I first met them, his hair was like a lion’s mane, very long, startlingly white. Then, on Ethel’s advice, he cut it into what the kids would call a buzz; that was a mistake. He had a slight speech impediment, sort of a sibilance, and a strange little smile. He never smiled full out, he just pursed his lips; I don’t know how he did it, it was really weird. He wore flashy clothes, like what you’d buy in Las Vegas. And he sweated a lot.

As little as I know about Ethel’s background, I know less about John’s, except that he came from a very poor family from the New York area and his full name was John Valentine Rossi. He changed it because most of the people who were successful in his end of show business were Jewish, not Italian, and he used to say the shortened name allowed people to think he was Jewish. He’d worked in public relations, and Ray remembers his saying that he wanted to be an actor, but even though he knew what to do and why he should do it, the minute he got in front of a camera or in front of people, he couldn’t deliver.

Though I wasn’t willing to face this for a number of years, John did understand acting. He had a scattershot approach and there was never any follow-through, but he really did have a fine psychological understanding of character and thought processes. If he had gone about it systematically, he would have been, I think, a Lee Strasberg. When I was coached by him, even as a young kid, he would give me subtext. He also gave me line readings until he got secure enough to know that I could do that myself. He was a huge fan of Stanislavsky, read The Method I don’t know how many times. He knew what it was all about, but Ethel knew only results, whether a performance was good or bad. How you got there was not her job. While he devoured books on every topic, she didn’t read at all; her heavy reading was TV Guide.
So hers was all street smarts, a jockeying-for-position kind of intelligence, and his was the more educated approach.

Early on, their relationship with each other seemed like something out of a storybook. She was always saying “I love you, baby,” and he was always saying “I love you, baby,” and that was several times an hour. If either of them entered or exited a room, it was always “Love ya!” I don’t remember their having any friends, and they never entertained, not even business dinners. In the beginning he seemed to be the leader, but the balance of power shifted drastically within a few years and he deferred to her about everything. It was “Ethel says this” and “Ethel says that.” And they both turned out to be considerable drinkers.

The Rosses may have been genuinely attached to each other, but I think it’s more likely that they were simply stuck with their marriage. This was a time when divorce was a major item and they both were so good at pretending, maybe they themselves believed in the pretense. If there was a real love between them, I couldn’t see it. My adult perception, now that I know, or think I know, what love can be, is that it was only surface stuff. I do know that as years went on and I reached the age when it occurred to me to listen, I never overheard them making love.

At that first meeting, however, the Rosses couldn’t have been more pleasant. They were very opinionated, but seemingly very secure about what they knew and what should be done with me. The feeling they exuded was that they were superior, that they knew, and out of the goodness of their hearts they were going to help you to be superior too.

The Rosses also had a way of talking about me while I was standing right there as if I didn’t exist—“She can’t use that New Yorkese” (I sounded like a miniature Jimmy Cagney), “she can’t do this, she can’t do that.” There was talk about my hair, that it was too short and badly cut, and that I was definitely offbeat, not the pretty little blond girl who seemed to be favored for commercials. But the decision was made before my mother and I left the apartment that they were going to give me a chance, we were all going to try this and see if it worked.

I’ve often wondered what it was the Rosses saw in me at
that first meeting. Maybe they just thought the offbeat look was going to be more in demand. One thing was for sure: there certainly wasn’t any enormous desire in me to become an actress. In fact, I hated it at first. If there was any desire, it was the desire to please, which was very important to them. Besides that, I imagine what they saw was intelligence, a bright shiny little kid who would understand the score and who could easily be controlled. And though they never said any of this to me, they must have seen a strong, basic instinct for acting. I do think that is a gift, something you come here with—I’ve seen it in my own children, who had no schooling whatsoever in acting. When I think back to my childhood playtime, I was very good at those little pretend games. I really felt like a nun when we were playing nun. I had a good imagination, but I didn’t have the freedom to use it in front of other people. That’s what John Ross was able to bring out, the confidence to let my imagination run free.

I
t happened one day while Ethel was trying hard to curl my hair, which was very coarse and straight and difficult to work with. I had overheard telephone conversations with other people, strangers to me, about having to change the kid’s name, about how Anna Marie was too long and not “perky” enough. My opinion had not been solicited and I knew it would not be accepted. Besides, I couldn’t believe they’d really do that. But without any preamble Ethel said, in between curls, “Okay, we’ve finally decided, we’re gonna change your name. Anna Marie is dead. You’re Patty now.” Just like that. Little did they know that over twenty years would be spent on a psychiatrist’s couch because of that phrase alone.

No bolt of lightning struck then, at least not that I was aware of. Actually, my first reaction was waiting to see what they were going to do with my last name, and when they didn’t go on I guessed that Duke was staying. I think the Rosses chose Patty because Patty McCormack, who’d been so successful on Broadway in The Bad Seed, was leaving New York for Hollywood. It’d worked for her, so why not for me? I didn’t make a fuss that I can remember, but I took an instant dislike to the name, probably because it wasn’t mine. I was sitting on a bus with the other extras on one of my first
jobs and listening as they kept calling this “Patty” person. Naturally, I didn’t respond. Finally, I remembered, “Oh my God, that’s me.” Someone I barely knew had taken away my name. What I didn’t know was that that was the tip of the iceberg, the beginning of the little by little murder of Anna Marie Duke and the rebuilding of the Frankenstein’s monster that became Patty Duke.

One of the first things the Rosses tried to do was break me of my New York speech patterns. They did it by giving me an English accent, the theory being to take the pendulum all the way to the other side and then bring it back. Almost every day after school at Sacred Heart my mother would take me to their apartment and I’d work with John. For hours and hours and hours I’d sit in front of a big old reel-to-reel tape recorder and practice reading from The Innocents, the play version of the Henry James novella. I’d listen to John’s prerecorded version, and then I’d do it. Afterward he’d come in and review my progress. We’d work without the recorder, reading the script together, and he’d correct me—every word. God, I hated those sessions—they were very frustrating and went on for months. John was a perfectionist in that area; later on, when I learned accents for specific roles, there was no such thing as doing a sort of general Southern accent. If the play was set in Tennessee, we did a Tennessee accent. Though it must’ve gotten tedious for John as well, at least he was dealing with a child who would never think of saying, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” The kid was obviously trying, so how mad could he get?

What also started immediately was working on my appearance, which meant picking me apart, a constant tearing-down. While I can remember genuine kindness from John—I think he was very taken with me—Ethel was a different story. There was a lot of anger in her, a very hard, opinionated edge, and she got really vicious when she’d been drinking. John was completely intimidated by her at those moments. He’d get a sad look on his face, as if to say, “Don’t pay any attention, it’s just the booze talking.” Ethel always said she liked Ray the best, which of course made me work all the harder so that I would be the favorite. Dream on.

The Rosses’ idea was to create another Grace Kelly.
Little white gloves, little white socks … the perfect little princess was the role for me, the image I had to live up to. Only Ethel forgot to notice that we’d run out of princes and little countries to rule. She was always saying, “Is that the way Grace Kelly would behave?”

“No.…”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“I’m sorry.…”

The Rosses began by telling me how plain I was. I didn’t look like the cute little girls who usually worked in show business. There was a whole list of things I’d never do right, from the way I walked and the way I talked to the way I brushed my teeth or combed my hair. Ethel was especially hard on my hair. It just had to grow, she would say, as if telling it would make it perform. After trying curls and informing me that I could never wear a ponytail because my nose was too big, Ethel decided braids were what I needed. But there was a long way to go. It took two years of her brushing and brushing and literally pulling for my hair to get long enough for French braids. I loved my long hair once I had it, but the Rosses wouldn’t let me wear it down because it was too “glamorous,” I would get too affected. When I got too old for braids, they simply cut off my hair. I no longer had that luxurious feeling of masses of hair, and I was inconsolable.

The Rosses were also unhappy with the way my mother dressed me, which I can understand, but the clothes Ethel bought were always intended to make me look younger than I was. She was always putting me in little baby dresses instead of an eight-year-old’s clothes. Their reason was, “You’re so little, people don’t believe you’re eight so we’ll make you look six.” Now that I have kids, I realize how important it is for a child to feel secure with her age, how destructive it can be to dress children younger than they are.

Three jobs, none of them speaking roles, came up almost at once for me, and I’m not sure which one came first. Ray thinks my first was working with him on The Deep Well, a documentary on a home for wayward children in Pleasantville, New York. Or it could have been as an extra in I’ll Cry Tomorrow. In that film Susan Hayward got out of a car and
walked into a building and I was part of the background, buying one of those fat, salted pretzels. I wasn’t a movie fan, so I didn’t know who she was, but still I looked at her not so much with envy but rather just a kind of longing. This must be a special person, because she wasn’t out there all day waiting with the rest of us, then, boom—there she was and things started to happen.

The early job I remember best, though, was a commercial with Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney. It was a Christmastime commercial, with what seemed like ten thousand little kids on a train circling a lot of toys while Winchell talked with his dummy. The job came up very suddenly—I remember a lot of panicky hustle and bustle the night before. My mother took me and my white communion dress over to the Rosses and Ethel dyed it, which was devastating to both my mother and me. A communion dress becomes a relic, you don’t go and dye it pink. Ethel also starched my crinolines with sugar water; I had no skin left on my legs by the time the day was over. And something that you’d imagine was apocryphal but that really did happen was having to put cardboard in the bottoms of my shoes to hide the holes. Ethel cut three or four pieces out of shirt cardboards, put them inside my Mary Janes, and then painted the bottoms of the shoes with shoe polish. My instructions for the day were, “Don’t talk, and keep your feet on the floor.”

As soon as it became necessary for me to deal with the outside world, the Rosses started teaching me what to say, turning me into a perfect Stepford child. Every single word, from the moment I left them before a job till the moment I came back, was programmed. Any so-called personal conversation, programmed. All of which still has its effect on me. I still have to fight the impulse that tells me, “You’re not supposed to do anything to rock the boat. Just swallow whatever anyone says or does and get on with it.” The Rosses were very clever, and they wanted this to be the most unusual creature ever. Most of all they loved the Cinderella idea, the Pygmalion and Galatea image. The problem with Galatea is she can’t have any thoughts of her own; it only messes things up.

When I had to give an interview, I would be prepared in
a way that was diabolical but very effective. John Ross would stay up late the night before, writing down every conceivable question, plus my answer. There could be a couple of hundred of them, covering every possible approach an interviewer might take, every possible topic, every potential twist. He’d quiz me to see what my answers would be—I, of course, never gave the right one—and then the appropriate responses would be worked out in words I could actually say. Their tactic was never, “Here are the lies we’re going to tell today,” but rather, “Ethel and I have been talking and we think the best answer for how you got started is to say that your desire was so great, you were so thrilled that somebody finally picked you off the streets.” Then I memorized those, and I memorized variations, in case the same question was asked in a different way. Even pauses were orchestrated: how long to think before answering a question, how long to think during my answer. If it was an amusing answer, I was told to deliver it thus-and-such a way. Nothing was left to chance.

When the interviewer came around, I performed like the perfectly trained young teenager who might have come from a finishing school for midgets. I would show him in, take his coat and hang it up, serve coffee and cookies or whatever. My manner was one step short of a curtsy, and I think if Ethel could have squeezed that in, she would have. While the interview was going on, John stayed in the background and never interrupted; that was so that no one could say he was interfering or that I was being manipulated. Having prepped me, he didn’t have to intrude. If I had a memory lapse and said the wrong thing, he wouldn’t contradict me, he’d just say, “Well, perhaps another way to look at it is …” and that would push the right button and I’d get the information out the way he had planned. Once I got the basic interview down, it would be updated, critiqued regularly, and there would be periodic refresher courses. People were not used to reading interviews with children that age. They were very taken with the idea of a kid who seemed to be at ease with the language—the Rosses’ footwork totally dazzled everyone.