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

going along fine and then something, like passing those endless cemeteries out in Queens, would trigger it. Or maybe I’d be reading, and there would be a natural progression from that to contemplating life and the larger questions. All of a sudden the absolute realization of my own mortality would hit and I just felt impelled to scream. Sometimes it was what I’d call a bloody-murder scream, sometimes words like “No! No! No! No!” The screams served the purpose of relieving the fear a little bit, and then I’d force myself, before I got sucked back in again, to immediately think about something else.
    Occasionally, once I began working, the fear would hit when I’d be in a cab, say, going over the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan. I was a kid, but I’d get so crazed, I’d tell the driver to stop and I’d get out and run. I remember running over that bridge, running and running and running and running until I was so physically tired that I couldn’t think anymore, I couldn’t be scared.
    Inevitably, though, it happened at night, on the way to sleep. I’d scream every night of my life. I’d be lying there in bed, thinking about what I had to do the next day, and this feeling would come over me. From that moment I wasn’t actually thinking anymore, thoughts didn’t come, I was overtaken by abject terror. After the scream I’d pretend that I’d been asleep and had had a bad dream. To cover the sound I developed a really annoying habit of making a horrible clearing-my-throat noise that bordered on hyperventilation.
    The men in my life have been very comforting and helpful about this, even when I’d bolt out of bed and run right across the night table. John Astin many times had to hold me down on the floor and tell me that whatever it was, it was all right. My children know about it, of course, and feel free to explore answers that suit them. The only people who weren’t sympathetic were the Rosses. Finally, one night Ethel had had enough of that strange, strangled sound and she said, “What’s the matter with you? Stop that.” And I said, “I have something in my throat.” She told me, “No,you don’t. You do that all the time.” And I finally said, “I’m afraid of dying.” And she said, “That’s just too bad. You don’t have to worry about that for a lot of years.” Great, I thought, should I wait until the day I’m dying to start? All I could think, was “I’m in agony, somebody help me.”
    When I went through a cursory basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1985, to prepare me for a TV movie I did called A Time to Triumph, I was reminded of my own early training. The idea was the same: taking away individuality, breaking the will in order to have control, erasing the slate so it could be filled in by the authorities. Everyone wears the same clothes, the hair is shaved so everybody looks the same, the goal being the loss of ego and becoming one with your unit. And that was very much like what the Rosses did to me. I was stripped of my parents, I was stripped of my name, I was eventually stripped of my religion, and they had a blank slate to do with as they wished.
    When I was with the Rosses, I quickly went into a kind of limbo, similar to the mind-set of people who are in jail or even mental hospitals. You simply cannot think about the bad things because there is nothing you can do about them, you have to live in the reality that you’re in. You don’t make a conscious decision not to think, you just stop thinking. What you do is lock it all out, put a solid vault door between your feelings and what you’re expected to say and do. That led, especially as I got older, to a constant internal tug-of-war, a resentment against myself as part of me began to feel I could in fact do something about it. I could have said, “I don’t want to do this anymore” or “I’m going to tell people what you’re doing,” but my fear was always greater than my intelligence.
    I can imagine