The One and Only Patty Duke

The famous actress spread hope for those living with bipolar

Editors Note: Patty Duke passed away March 29, 2016 at the age of 69. Her son, Sean Astin invited the public to contribute to a mental health foundation in his mother’s name, the Patty Duke Mental Health Initiative.

Ask Patty Duke a question—any question—and she’ll answer it with candor and charm. She proclaims herself “an open book … a professional confessor” when it comes to telling her story about living with bipolar disorder.

bp caught up with Duke at the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance’s (DBSA) national conference in Houston recently. Relaxing after delivering an inspiring keynote speech, the petite actress says her speaking engagements “are very therapeutic for me. I may moan and groan about the travel, each time is going to be the last time, but the last time never comes.”

In fact, the woman who once heard voices proclaiming religious messages in her head now spreads the word about bipolar with a passion she says is almost spiritual. Her message: “It’s fixable. People need to know that there is forgiveness for the bad things, and the illness does not own you.”

Duke’s own life is her best argument. Before she was finally diagnosed with bipolar at age 35, the actress earned a reputation in Hollywood for her erratic behavior, temper tantrums, spending sprees and heavy drinking. Her first marriage didn’t survive her extreme moods and hospitalizations, her second was an impulsive mistake that lasted only 13 days, and her third became an exhausting battlefield as she put her children through emotional and even physical abuse.

Getting the right medication turned her life around, allowing her to repair matters with her children and build a solid 25-year marriage with her fourth husband. Now 64, she’s an enduring beacon of health, happiness and hope.

Duke’s decades-long stage and screen career has slowed as she nears retirement age, but opportunities still come her way. In early 2010, she finished a 10-month run as Madame Morrible in the San Francisco production of Wicked. This May, she made her directing debut in Spokane, Washington, with a stage production of The Miracle Worker—the play that launched her to acclaim at age 12 when she played Helen Keller on Broadway.

The devoted grandmother also has a gig as a Social Security spokeswoman, explaining in public service announcements how to sign up online for Medicare.

“Oddly enough, I’m thinking that being over 60 is more of a problem than being bipolar in my business,” she says with a laugh.

Meanwhile, she continues to devote herself to her second career as a mental health advocate—although the veteran performer admits to a touch of stage fright before she goes out to share what she calls her journey with bipolar.

“At first, I would [get nauseous], but now I just get butterflies,” she says with a smile and shrug of her slender shoulders.

Whatever her qualms, Duke has been speaking out pretty much since she was diagnosed in 1982. With her unflinching memoir Call Me Anna in 1987, and the TV adaptation that followed a few years later, Duke put a famous face on what was then called manic depression—the first major celebrity to do so.

Oddly enough, I’m thinking that BEING OVER 60 is more of a problem than BEING BIPOLAR in my business.”

Duke became a big star in 1963, when she won an Academy Award for her work in the movie version of The Miracle Worker. She was 16. The same year, her hugely popular TV series The Patty Duke Show began its three-year run.

Over the course of her career, Duke has won two Golden Globe Awards, three Emmies and a host of other honors for her stage, film and television work. She was enshrined on the Hollywood

Walk of Fame in 2004, and more than 1,000 fans flocked to a gala tribute to her in San Francisco in 2009.

Her appearances to talk about bipolar draw a different, and just as enthusiastic, group of fans—the people she embraces (figuratively and literally) as “fellow journeymen.”

Duke’s warmth and charisma radiate in person. At the DBSA conference, audience members line up to meet her and take pictures. She greets them with smiles and open arms, hugging everyone she can reach. She says being invited to speak at such events “is like being invited to a family reunion. I recognize cousins and uncles and aunts and I know that for all of our pain we know something that other people don’t know. It can and does and will get better.”

She wasn’t always this put-together or optimistic. Born Anna Marie Duke on December 14, 1946 in the New York City borough of Queens, she was the third and youngest child of parents who were struggling financially and emotionally. Her father was an alcoholic, she says, and her beloved mother suffered from depression—probably unipolar, possibly bipolar.

“There was certainly something wrong, but it went undiagnosed at the time,” explains Duke.

Anna Marie became Patty Duke at age 7, when a husband-and-wife team took her under their management and began to take over her life. John and Ethel Ross gave her a new name, changed the way she talked, decided what she could and couldn’t do, and eventually moved her into their apartment. The Rosses launched her acting career, but at a cost: Duke chronicled the physical, mental and sexual abuse she went through at their hands in Call Me Anna.

Duke started to have panic attacks and morbid rumination as early as 8 years old. Deep lows arrived with her teens, then manic symptoms such as insomnia and hallucinations began to surface. As Duke tells it, bipolar behavior may have inspired her dual roles as identical cousins on the TV show that made her a household name.

“I remember when (writer) Sidney Sheldon … said it was clear that they would need TWO CHARACTERS for The Patty Duke Show. THAT WAS TELLING.”

“I remember when (writer) Sidney Sheldon invited me over to spend a week at his place. When I left, he said it was clear that they would need two characters for The Patty Duke Show. That was telling,” she says.

The freedom of adulthood brought even wilder swings, including long bouts of deep depression. She recalls ungovernable fits of rage and impulsive jaunts to spend her money “and anyone else’s”—for example, buying three or four cars in a day. She abused alcohol and prescription drugs. She heard voices.

Help was available, she says. She just didn’t take it.

“I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t need their help,” she explains of her twisted thinking at the time. “I was on an intimate basis with God. I told God what to do, and He did.”

She was still a decade away from an accurate diagnosis when her first son, Sean, was born in 1971. The following year, she married actor John Astin. They had another boy, Mackenzie, in 1973.

Duke says she wanted with her whole heart to have a baby, but in the end it was her cherished children who experienced “every bit of my bipolar adventures.”

“The first couple of years it was ecstasy,” she says, but when Mackenzie was born, “all the joy that I expected, that I experienced with the first one went away.… Sweet little Patty Duke became an abusive mother.”

Her voice trembles when she talks about what she put her sons through.

“They never quite knew who was going to be on the other side of the door. It could be the nice mom or this raving, ranting, raging, out-of-control creature.”

When her longtime therapist finally recognized there was a manic contrast to her depression, Duke was indescribably relieved to put a name to her condition. There was a reason for her ping-ponging emotions and out-of-control behavior, and a way to manage them through medication.

She was also able to explain to her boys, then 11 and 9, that a chemical imbalance was behind her awful treatment of them.

Duke says it took years, but she has forgiven herself for the childhood her sons endured because of her untreated bipolar— and that they, most graciously, have done the same.

“These children united with each other and that’s how they got through living with the mother they were dealt,” she says. “It took a while for these little boys to trust me again. They do now. They have tremendous respect for my recovery and amazing generosity in their forgiveness of me, as long as I take my medicine.”

Duke does not mince words when she talks about the importance of staying on medication. She says she often wonders when she hears young people rail against having to take meds.

“I want so much for them to recognize their chemical imbalance and to treat it as they would any other affliction in their lives,” she says.

As for the creative energy and elevated mood she may have left behind in achieving recovery, she feels no regret. Quite the opposite, in fact: “I feel that since my diagnosis and treatment … my work just became easier for me.”

Nor does she miss the manic highs—and the destruction that followed in their wake.

“I’m capable of being really happy without going to that level,” says Duke, who names spending time with her sons and five granddaughters as her greatest joy.

“I was on an INTIMATE BASIS WITH GOD. I told God what to do, and HE DID.”

She adds, “In my case, the mania always had this foreboding feeling. And of course, in order to get rid of the foreboding feeling, I’d do something even more outrageous!”

Duke says her husband, Mike Pearce, has been lucky to never see her in a manic episode. But, she says with an impish smile, “I like to keep him thinking, ‘You never know.’”

Duke and Pearce, a former Army drill sergeant whom she met while preparing for a role, married in 1986 and have been inseparable ever since, she says. (They have an adopted son, Kevin, born in 1988.) Pearce is also Duke’s manager, so they travel as a couple when they’re not home in Idaho with their menagerie of dogs.

“My life is very full,” Duke says. “I am happy being with my husband, and it doesn’t matter what we are doing.… He not only spoils me rotten, he keeps me humble, and that’s his main job.”

Apart from medication, Duke says she mainly manages her bipolar by staying attuned to her moods. If she feels unusually down for a few days, she seeks out her doctor. Given their hereditary odds of developing mental illness, her sons also keep a close watch for any danger signs and are well educated on the importance of seeking help.

“They have not displayed any symptoms, but they are also acutely aware of the manifestations,” she says. “We don’t all go around with a microscope looking at each other every day, but … if we need a genetic model, I’ve certainly got one.”

Duke is encouraged by earlier diagnosis of bipolar these days and better education on how to manage it. She has also seen enormous strides in public awareness, as well as in the treatment options available.

“I’m capable of being REALLY HAPPY without going to that [manic] level.”

“I don’t know how many medications are out there, but at the hands of a skilled psychiatrist or psychologist you can reach that point where you find the right combination,” she says. “And, if you have to do the hunt-and peck, isn’t it great that you have something to do a hunt-and-peck [with]?”

Duke has certainly done her part in changing perceptions and spreading information. Her 1992 book A Brilliant Madness, co-authored with medical writer Gloria Hochman, pairs her personal account of having bipolar with scientific information about the illness and ways to treat it.

The enthusiasm of the fans at DBSA flocking to meet Duke, and the many “thank you’s” for sharing her story, shows how much her efforts are appreciated. She seems a bit in awe of the effect she’s had and the response she gets:

“The love that comes to me … is kind of overwhelming sometimes. I know when I started out, I meant to do something good, but you would think that I rearranged the entire world sometimes!”

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Why Patty Never Skips Her Medication

PATTY DUKE says she has never skipped her medication and tells a humorous anecdote to illustrate why. The incident happened shortly after she was diagnosed and starting her recovery, she explains to a rapt audience at
the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA)?national conference.

She was separated from her then-husband and living with her two sons in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel Air. After putting the kids to bed one night, she heard a thud on the wall separating her bedroom from that of her elder son’s, who was 11.

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘What is that kid doing up?’ ” Duke relates. “And I marched down the hall, opened the door to his room and Sean is splayed across his bed, snoring to beat the band.”

As Duke started to walk out of the room, she was horrified to catch a glimpse of “little fingers” dropping down from Sean’s window.

“I’m [screaming] and I’m running around the house,” she says with lively gestures. “I run back toward my room to call 911 and I meet in the hall Mackenzie, who is crying and sobbing, ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, what happened?’

“I said, ‘I think we have a burglar.’ He said, ‘Oh thank God! I thought you forgot to take your lithium!’”

The room explodes in laughter, but Duke’s point becomes clear.

“That’s how much it means to our loved ones that we take our medication and then go about and have a life.”

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Printed as “The One & Only Patty Duke”, Summer 2011