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

people reading all this and saying, “For heaven’s sake, why didn’t she say something, say she wanted to make a phone call, say she wanted to be with her mother? She was on a set every day with forty people—why didn’t she tell somebody?” It’s just not that simple. For one thing, there were practical reasons. I was a kid. They were adults. It was my word against theirs. But it’s also more complicated than that. It’s almost impossible to understand, unless you’ve walked in those shoes for a while, that once you’ve been successfullyindoctrinated, it simply no longer enters your mind to act in another way. You know what your sentence is, and you live it out.
    The overwhelming irony of the Rosses’ plans and schemes is that they genuinely thought they were doing the right thing with all their disparaging comments, helping me become a solid citizen by keeping things in perspective for me. They weren’t out-and-out monsters, thinking, “Okay, let’s get the little bitch and humiliate her,” even though that was often the result. In their heads there was a lot of self-righteousness. When they built this cocoon around me, they probably thought they were saving me from a lot of the difficulties of growing up, but that was really the opposite of what was necessary. I was never allowed to grow and learn at my own pace, the pace of a child. They often talked of the injustice of their not having children because they knew what children needed. But everything they gave me in the way of love was very superficial. I used to think, They never loved me. It was all a lie. It was all a scam. But I think now that they really did love me, they just didn’t know how.

FIVE
    O pinions, as far as the Rosses were concerned, were a luxury I wasn’t allowed. I remember once voicing one, who remembers about what, and being sat down in the kitchen and told there was no such thing as an opinion for me. Period. I was to do what I was told. Period. I’m a parent myself, and I can imagine saying to my own children, “You’re a kid, you’re being very opinionated and you’re not seeing the whole picture.” But this was, “No opinions about what you wear, how you look, what you say, how often you change your underwear. That’s it. None.” We’re talking about the most basic things here, even down to the kind of toothpaste I used. “You don’t like the taste? We’ll tell you what taste you like.” And especially no opinions about acting.
    When the roles I was going to try out for were discussed, I never had any input. It would simply be announced that “you have an audition for this” or “you’re going to do that three weeks from Thursday.” Even considerations like “Gee, I have tests coming up in school” weren’t allowed. I would take my shiny patent leather Mary Janes and a pair of clean socks with me in my school bag, and I would call in and find out what auditions I had that afternoon. If the part was really good, I’d meet John Ross at the audition and we’d work onthe script in the stairwell or someplace. But if the audition was just for a commercial, I’d go by myself or with my mother. Then there would be the last-minute reminders. “Are your socks clean?” Ethel was fixated on socks. “Remember, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed! Sparkle! Sparkle-sparkle-sparkle!” It sounds like a bad “movie of the week,” but I took it seriously, I became like some mechanical doll run amuck with my eyes rocketing in my head. Sparkle-sparkle-sparkle.
    Many of the first jobs I got when I began to work in the mid-1950s were on commercials. And because this was the heyday of live TV, a lot of the spots were live as well. They made me really nervous, but I’m sure they were even scarier for the people who hired children to do them: “Okay, hold your breath, let’s see what the kid’s gonna do this time!” The worst was for Esquire shoe polish. The announcer talked about how using the polish was so simple, a child