Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke (42 page)

And while I still have a great deal of anger in me, much of it left over from what I went through with the Rosses, my ability to control my temper is light-years ahead of what it was. The only people who would probably give a bigger testimonial for Lithium than me are my kids. These are the people who witnessed and suffered the most during those times when their mother was out of control.

One night, a few months after I’d begun with Lithium, it was around midnight and I kept hearing a thumping from the wall my bedroom shares with Sean’s. I opened the door and I saw a person half-in and half-out of Sean’s window, and I let go with the most blood-curdling, unearthly scream I have ever produced. The person dropped to the ground and I ran to the front door and started screaming, “Call the police, call the police!” Then as the intruder fled around the corner, I recognized his shirt and realized it belonged to one of Sean’s friends. Now I wanted to kill Sean because his friend had scared me to death. I started yelling, “Sean, you little shit, get up!” On my way to Sean’s room I ran smack into Mackenzie,
who was sobbing and howling, his whole body just racked with agony. I turned to him and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, I thought it was a burglar.” And he said, “A burglar? Oh, thank God! I thought you forgot to take your Lithium.”

All of which emphasizes one of the key points about Lithium. It’s not a panacea, it doesn’t do away with life’s little (and not so little) problems. When I started my Lithium therapy, it didn’t mean I ended my fruitful psychiatric work with Dr. Arlen, it meant I could begin. I could face life as a garden-variety neurotic, not a green, squirrely monster. Lithium is not a cure for living. It’s a tool.

T
hat man in the White House may not have noticed, but in my life 1985 was a presidential year, and not once but twice. I played America’s first female president in
Hail to the Chief
, and then I became the real-life president of the Screen Actors Guild. Not bad, I couldn’t help thinking, for a scrawny kid from East Thirty-first Street.

Hail to the Chief
was like manna from heaven. Just when my usual money problems were peaking, boom, there’s a series. Not only was it a Witt-Thomas-Harris production again, but the cast was a group of creative actors I enjoyed working with, high-powered, high-performance horses every one. I thought the pilot was the best thing I’d ever read for half-hour television. We came out of the chute very well, and then, just like
It Takes Two
, suddenly the show was off the air for no apparent reason.

Not that we didn’t have our problems. For one thing, the follow-up scripts didn’t have the genius of the pilot. The reason for that depends on whom you listen to, whether we made the network nervous and they clamped down or Susan Harris went off and gave most of her attention to
Golden Girls
. Whatever the cause, we wound up with a very poor bastardization of what had gone before, a show that wasn’t even bizarre anymore, just silly.

The other difficulty was that even though I enjoyed the show, I did not like my part. My character became deadly dull. The woman never took a stand on anything, she never even had a position in family arguments. The writers chickened out, they were afraid to give me any kind of character quirks because I was the president. Since they didn’t know what else to do with me, I became the roll-call person. If you needed to know who the characters in a scene were, just wait a second and the president will tell you. My entire part was a memory contest for what name goes with what face.

Another thing that hurt the show, something I heard constantly from folks on the street, who in general liked the absurdity of the thing, was that they were uncomfortable with my husband, the First Man, if you will, screwing around on his wife all the time. It worked in the pilot because you never saw the other woman, but once she was brought into our living rooms, it set people off. Now I was in a very awkward position, because if I said that to the writers, it would look as if I had an ego problem, that I was afraid my part wasn’t big enough because the bimbo of the week was getting that airtime. And that really wasn’t the case at all. My position was, if you want the American public to respect and like this woman, if you want them to buy the premise that she’s the president, her husband can’t be that disrespectful or none of your big jokes will work. I kept quiet, however, and I think I did myself and the show a disservice.

Despite all of this, I was shocked when the show was canceled after seven episodes. Everyone in the cast was in shock, every single one of us. I haven’t a clue why we were dropped, to this day no one has even tried to explain. I never expected to see ten years out of that show as I had with
It Takes Two
, because the material was too bizarre, but I did expect a full season. Afterward I told myself, “I need to know why this happened so that it won’t happen again,” but really, there’s no formula you can learn from. What am I going to say? That I won’t work for ABC again? Who am I kidding? It’s one of the three shops in town. The next person willing to pay the price gets the body. That’s the reality.

*  *  *  

Despite my abortive appearance for Robert Kennedy and some sporadic antiwar rallies during the Vietnam era, I really date my serious political involvement from my involvement with John. There was much political discussion in our house on a daily basis, and not just around the dinner table. The discussions that went on between John and his brother Sandy and Sandy’s wife, Lena, and eventually me were truly exciting and inspirational. They made me want to go out and mix it up in the world.

John’s an extremely well-educated man, a stimulated and stimulating thinker, but I’m a doer, so I stole from his thinking and went and did. I don’t love danger, I don’t want to commit professional suicide, but I’ve had to face the fact that I no longer like playing it safe either. If a situation arises in which I can be involved, and it’s something that I feel is vital to me or my kids or just other people, I’ll take a shot at it, even if somebody says, “Hey, you may not work on such-and-such network anymore.” I really want to know that I’ve participated.

Something very critical to my letting go of apathy happened in 1980, during my return to Catholicism. Three celebrities, LeVar Burton, Dick Van Patten, and I were asked by Catholic Relief Services to go to Mauritania, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Kenya to make public service announcements and help raise money to fight famine in Africa. I’d been asked to go the year before, and frankly, I just hadn’t felt equipped to do it. The second time I was asked, I felt a combination of being too embarrassed to say no again and wanting to be able to deal with it. I desperately wanted to stretch and grow and find other purposes for my existence. I was looking for the larger picture, and for answers to the questions, and they were not to be found, as I used to think, in the bathroom puking up overdoses. So even though I was very fearful, I went.

Before I got to the relief camps, I tried to steel myself to imagine the worst, most horrifying thing I was going to see, so that the reality would be less of a shock. I thought the sight of all these thousands of starving people would be the first assault, or the noise they make, the wailing and agony that sounds otherworldly. But the first assault was the smell.
It wasn’t the smell of excrement, it was the smell of decay, of death. The total impact of the camps was so overwhelming, so grotesque, I couldn’t even begin to absorb it.

Very shortly after the visit to the first camp, in Mauritania, a headache began that stayed with me for two weeks, a headache that no amount of aspirin or anything else could get rid of. Sitting under the stars one night in Kenya, stars so close you feel you don’t even have to straighten your arm to touch them, I had to face the fact that what this headache was caused by was repressed rage.

First there was my own impotence. I mean, what goddamn good was my public service announcement going to do in the face of all this, no matter how much money it raised? Then there was the anger at man’s inhumanity to man, at the way none of the systems we’ve set up really work. I’d even confronted Father Kaiser, the Catholic priest who was with us, in the middle of a shantytown where death was happening all around. “What do you say to these people?” I demanded. “What’s the answer? You’re supposed to know.”

But this one night under the stars in Kenya, there were a bunch of us sitting around the camp, and we began to hear really boisterous singing off in the distance. Someone got curious so we jumped into the Land-Rover and headed off. We found maybe two hundred people, members of the Kakama tribe, people whose children were dying during the day, singing and doing this ritual jumping dance with such jubilation, such joy.

We pulled up and they were thrilled to have visitors. They loved Father Kaiser because he was big and gawky and silly-looking in the hat he always wore. They wanted him to jump with them, and since the man can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, his attempts had them just roaring with laughter. Then they wanted the “little mama” (guess who) to do it, and I was just bent over double, I was laughing so hard. Then I stood up, and my headache was gone.

What I realized then was that for all my bleeding-heart concern, I couldn’t begin to make a difference in the lives of these people, and past doing what I could to feed them, maybe I didn’t even want to. They were sick and dying and yet something inside them came alive and celebrated the
stars and the moon and the fact that they can jump three feet off the ground. I’d never experienced anything like that night.

That trip to Africa lasted a little more than two weeks; my next serious political involvement took eighteen months. That’s the amount of time I took off in 1981 and ’82 to work for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Given my chronic lack of financial stability, that was quite a decision. But I believed that if we changed the packaging and the P.R. for the movement, something the right wing is so adept at doing, and made it less threatening to the mainstream, we could turn the tide.

I said to my activist gay women friends, who were essential to carrying the movement for a long time, “I know we’re Johnny-come-latelys, but just as a political maneuver, step into the background and let us more mainstream-looking folks go into the Midwest and talk about our husbands and our children. As long as the means are honorable, isn’t the result all that counts?” Unfortunately, I didn’t have the power and the confidence to go out and recruit more women like me, and I never got a lot of support for my position. I understand that, but given how things turned—or didn’t turn—out, I think it’s regrettable.

Though over the years I’ve gotten myself involved in so much public service work I’ve grown fearful of becoming “caused out,” two areas still get as much attention as I can possibly muster. One is fund-raising for AIDS research and awareness; any group that comes to me about that gets my help. The other cause is nuclear disarmament, and what involved me there was a promise I made to my son Mackie.

Mackie was having something called “night terrors.” He would start out of his sleep, absolutely terrified, and no amount of consoling helped. We’d just have to wait until the screaming was spent. Unlike my own early fears, he at first didn’t seem to be terrorized by anything specific.

But eventually it became apparent to me from conversations while we were watching the news that Mackie was not just concerned by the potential of nuclear holocaust the way most of us are, he really was quite preoccupied with it. He’s always been very articulate, but instead of talking about his
fear, he’d ask a lot of questions. Did I think anyone in power was crazy enough to push the button? What if someone flipped out and did it? What if this, what if that? From my experience with the Rosses I knew telling him not to worry wasn’t going to help, but I didn’t know what to say. Frankly, I was just as scared as he was.

One week
Newsweek
came out with a cover story about
The Day After
, the TV movie about post-holocaust society. Mackie saw the magazine lying on the breakfast table and started asking me these questions again, until I felt, “If he asks me one more like that, I’m going to scream.” And then he said, “How come you’re not involved in any of the nuclear freeze groups? You do the E.R.A. and famine relief, you do this and you do that, but what good is it going to do if we all melt?”

“Mackie, please. I can’t get involved in one more cause. There are people out there doing it.”

“Yeah, but there aren’t enough people doing it.”

“Mackie, you know I have little enough time at home. Don’t send me out there. I can’t do this.”

And he kept challenging me and challenging me. Then tears welled up in his eyes, he started to cry, and he told me how tired he was of being afraid. Finally, he just said straight out, “What are you going to do about it?”

“I don’t know what to do about it,” I said, “but I’ll find out.”

I said I couldn’t promise him that there wasn’t going to be a nuclear holocaust, or that we’re not all going to drop dead from who knows what, but that if there was anything I could do in my limited way, I would. And I did, and Mackie has fewer night terrors now. I have nothing really to offer the nuclear freeze movement except one more voice, one more person with the ability to show up and give a speech, and Mackie’s smart enough to know that. But that someone who loves him is making an effort is a consolation to him. It’s that simple.

Although I’ve now been a Screen Actors Guild member for twenty-five years, I had absolutely nothing to do with the union until the second half of the
It Takes Two
season.
That’s when one of the show’s regulars, Richard MacKenzie, and a friend of his, Paul Kreppel, who years later became my campaign manager, asked me to become involved with an organization that was formed to support the merger of SAG with AFTRA, one of the two other actors’ unions. That’s how my appetite got whetted to understand not only the purpose of unions but also what goes on in them.

Several things attracted me to working for SAG. For one thing, although doing a series and running a family might seem like enough for anyone, it wasn’t for a person with my high energy level. And after I’d gotten involved, what hooked me was a combination of enjoying the sense of personal affirmation and seeing that I had an effect. “My God,” I said to myself, “I can make a difference.” I began staying abreast of and taking a serious interest in union matters, and I stopped throwing away mail from SAG that didn’t say “residual” on it.