Patty Duke has her own miracle to talk about.
Her acting career is thriving. Her latest film will be released this month, and she has a TV movie coming up. She and her fourth husband live in Idaho with two of their eight children, a combined family. She was seriously ill, and now she`s well. She could write a book.
Her name, in fact, appears on the title page of two. In the first, her best-selling 1987 autobiography, ”Call Me Anna,” written with Kenneth Turan, she described the abuse she experienced in childhood and the years she lived with an undiagnosed mental illness. Her recently published second book, ”A Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic-Depressive Illness” (Bantam, $22.50), co-authored with Gloria Hochman, tells how to cope with that illness-using Duke`s experience as an illustrating case.
Duke, who at 12 riveted theater audiences with her precocious performance as the young Helen Keller in ”The Miracle Worker,” grew up to be one of the country`s most respected actresses. She has spent much of her adult life as one of television`s most enduring stars. At one point, she starred on ”The Patty Duke Show.”
On the surface it was a life most women-and actresses-would envy. But, as she revealed in her autobiography, it was a life best described as the script for a tragedy.
Beginning in childhood, her existence was a wildly fluctuating cycle of highs and lows-the highs characterized by irrational, bizarre, sometimes violent and self-destructive behavior, the lows by almost paralyzing depression and a gnawing obsession with death.
This condition, which added to troubles she experienced in earlier marriages, prompted unfounded rumors of drug addiction and nearly ruined her career. This condition had a name she didn`t learn until it finally was diagnosed in 1982, when she was 35: manic-depressive illness.
It`s a genetic, chemical imbalance of the brain that, according to studies, affects between 2 million and 3 million Americans.
Now a contented woman of 45 who remains one of the top stars of television movies, Duke noted in a Washington interview that it also is an ailment that statistics indicate is more common in women than men:
”I believe the reason-at least the reason the medical community is exploring-is not that there are less men experiencing manic-depression, but, as is typical of you guys, you tough it out.
”You chalk it up to something else, or you desperately plow on. Whereas, for some reason, women are `given permission` to seek answers to strange behavior.”
Her autobiography touched a nerve among readers. Duke and her publisher, Bantam Books, were swamped with more than 50,000 telephone calls and letters asking for more information about the ailment-many desperate for help.
Bantam asked Duke to write a sequel dealing with the affliction itself. She agreed and teamed with Hochman, a medical writer, to produce the new book. Duke said she wanted to elaborate on the superficial nature of some media reporting on her illness after her autobiography was published: ”I was wanting to get into, not just what everyone saw on TV, but what happened to her (Duke)-the pain and abuse.”
Duke`s recounting of her life story indicates it would have caused suffering even without the curse of manic-depression.
Born Anna Marie Duke, she lived in early childhood in a walkup tenement on New York`s East Side. Her father was a virtually unemployable alcoholic who left the family when Patty was 6 and eventually died at 50 in a furnished room without Patty`s seeing him again.
Her mother was a loving but desperate and sometimes suicidal woman given to the violent swings of rage, irrationality and despondency.
Her older brother, Raymond, had been ”discovered” as a teen for work in television commercials. When he went into the Army at 18, his managers, John and Ethel Ross, a successful theatrical couple who specialized in training and marketing child actors, turned to Anna Marie.
As Duke noted in both books, the Rosses, now dead, weaned her away from her mother, ultimately persuading her to move into their household and all but shutting her mother out of her life. They persuaded her to change her name to the supposedly more appealing Patty and exercised complete control over her, deciding which clothes she would wear and even her hairstyle. She had no playmates or friends, and no real life but show business.
They had drinking problems, she said, and often were abusive. While living with the Rosses she began experiencing panic attacks.
”The panic happened just about every night when I was going to sleep,”
she recalled in the book. ”Early on I would scream, and I`m telling you it was a bloodcurdling, horrific scream, so it scared everybody who was around. I always lied and said it was a dream, a bad dream. I lucked out because the Rosses never asked me what the dream was about.”
”The Miracle Worker” made her a star, and she won an Oscar in 1962 for her performance in the film version of the play.
Her career became her sanctuary, if a temporary one.
But her affliction became overpowering, as a national TV audience saw when she made an embarrassing and rambling acceptance speech after winning an Emmy Award for her role in ”My Sweet Charlie” in 1970.
Though she somehow managed to maintain her career, her private life was a terrifying disaster at almost every turn. She suffered through not only three divorces (the only celebrity among her husbands was her third, actor John Astin) and difficult pregnancies but also anorexia, promiscuity, insomnia and suicidal compulsions.
Though she had no idea what was wrong with her, she, like many manic-depressives, treated her symptoms with alcohol.
”It was self-treatment,” she said. ”Finally I got so I couldn`t handle the hangovers anymore-two-, three-, four-day hangovers, which I now know were related to the chemical imbalance in the brain.”
She no longer drinks but she continues to smoke.
In 1982, while starring in the TV series ”It Takes Two,” she began experiencing nausea and other flulike symptoms that had no apparent cause. She also found herself becoming paranoid, pacing all night, unable to sleep. She sought the counsel of a psychiatrist who suggested she might be suffering manic-depression.
Just hearing those two words, ”a name for what I was suffering,” was the beginning of her personal miracle, she said. After tests uncovered evidence of the chemical-imbalance disorder, she was put on lithium treatment. Gradually she became what the rest of the world considers normal. She continues to take two lithium tablets every day.
Today, she has a starring role with Meg Ryan and Alec Baldwin in the film version of the hit Broadway drama ”Prelude to a Kiss,” out this month.
Also this month she starts filming a TV movie in Vancouver. In 1986 she married Michael Pearce, then an Army drill sergeant she met while filming a movie at Ft. Benning, Ga. Counting those from previous marriages, their family includes eight children.
”I lead a relatively ordinary life now, which is exactly the way I wanted it,” she said.
”I think that, in a lot of ways, I`ve been lucky enough, at an early enough age, to go back to what I wanted life to be.”
