Read Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke for Free Online

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.
    The Rosses were also adept at making up stories about me, like my getting a soap commercial because I was the only kid who showed up with a dirty face. They even had me lieat my first audition. To reinforce the impression my new clothes made, they told me to say I was six when I was eight, a lie that wasn’t caught until I testified before Congress in 1959. If I could unearth an eight-by-ten photo of me from that period, with credits on the back, fifty percent or more would be lies. Like Somebody. Up There Likes Me. I wasn’t in that movie, my brother was. A credit for The Arthur Murray Party, saying I appeared on it six times, stayed on my picture past The Miracle Worker. I was never on that show; I wouldn’t know Arthur Murray if I fell on him. And, of course, I had little anecdotes to go with each credit, in case somebody asked me a question.
    The Rosses tried to convince me I wasn’t being made to lie. They’d say, “Everybody does this,” or “It’s just so they’ll have something to talk about with you.” But I was always afraid I was going to get caught. With that strong Catholic upbringing, here I was telling bald-faced lies. I realize now that I never would have gotten caught because I was so good at it—I was acting. But at the time I was terrified. Every time I would hand my picture across the table to the person casting the part, I worried that I would forget which story went with which show. There were so many lies. They lied about my weight, they lied about my height, and, of course, they lied about my name.
    And though I didn’t feel it at first, that name change did indeed turn out to be a lightning bolt that reached deep into my mind and touched a major concern of mine, which was a fear of death so powerful it precipitated daily anxiety attacks from the early 1950s to 1983. I was obsessed, truly obsessed with my mortality. And guilty, as well, about not worrying about my parents’ deaths or my sister’s or brother’s or my children’s or anyone else’s. Just my own.
    Because when the Rosses said, “Anna Marie’s dead, you’re Patty now,” it was as if she really did die. When people take away your name, they are taking away your identity. That may seem like a lot of fuss over a bunch of letters strung together, but your name is an important symbol. What had happened to that Anna Marie person, I wanted to know. Could she be dead? Where’d she go? It was all part of the feeling that nothing about me was good enough for thesepeople, not the way I talked, not the way I looked, and not the most important thing, my name. I felt as if they’d killed part of me, and in truth they had.
    My fear wasn’t ever-present. Life would be