Patty DUKE on InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse

from a childhood so dark and frightening it could have been written by Charles Dickens to becoming a household name from her roles in both the Broadway and film versions of The Miracle Worker she followed that up with her own sitcom and then starred in the cult classic Valley of the dolls today she's just as well known for her bipolar disorder that's made her an outspoken and dedicated activist for those dealing with mental health issues hello i'm ernie manouse coming up on interviews our conversation with Oscar and emmy-winning actress and best-selling author Patty Duke are you still surprised that people remember the Patty Duke show yes to me most of the time it's been 45 ish years ago you know what most surprises me is the age of the people it now goes from twenties ish and of course you know I remind myself that there are reruns but there haven't been reruns of that show for a long time yeah but I love these fresh-faced wonderful kids saying to me I grew up with you a little ahead of you and it was such a short period of time wisely she was only three years but that was back in the day when we did at least 36 episodes a season so that there are and I know this for a fact cuz somebody just sent them to me 104 episodes and as I'm sure people realize nowadays it's you know maybe nine maybe twenty and so they don't have quite as long a shelf life at any rate I'm determined I keep saying this and I haven't done it yet but I am determined to get in touch with Nick at night and or lifetime and find out why we can't resurrect that old show I mean we seniors need our residual now that show came at a time that was difficult in your life as from the whole management and what was going on with your career and we'll get into that a little bit but I wondered do you look back on it has there been enough time that you can look back on it and see good things and happiness about it or does what happened to the experience darken it for you it really doesn't well I can remember certainly almost chapter in verse the dark times but there far outweighs by the love and goodness that I received from the people I worked with which I mean they were not only my family they were my social life they were everything to me and when someone asks me as as you just did about it there's a very natural smile that comes to my face and my heart yeah because again my perception would certainly be different had I not survived all of that I now have the benefit of that the benefit of a diagnosis for my illness the benefit of lithium which works well for me and so I can't I can now kind of look back from the grandma chair yeah and say yeah there's a point you wrote your autobiography the first book you wrote call me Anna and when you were about to publish it what were the nerves like that before very perceptive the nerves prior to the publishing were just completely out of control not out of control in the sense of mania but they were certainly physiological and emotional and I realized eventually that it was old shame mm-hm and fear that was generating this it took a while certainly the publishing of the book and its success helped but what helped most was getting involved in and being a real advocate for mental health in saying I'm I'm the you know here I'm the patient and I'm gonna tell you what it's been like and what it's like now I am satisfying when I do that an aching kind of longing I had what I would be severely depressed and a longing to if I ever get out of this I'm gonna make sure nobody else ever goes through this it's an extraordinary thing to experience yeah but you are going to stand naked before the world in a sense and I think I look at so much that I read about you and always in the beginning they talked about the mental illness they talk about these problems at the point that book was coming out did you realize from that point on that was gonna be a stamp on you or did you just feel I hoped it was really yeah I didn't realize actually until only about five years ago when I had this Epiphany if you will then I really had found my purpose in life I've had a magnificent career known hugged some of the best people who ever lived but I realized that was a means to an end and the end which isn't here yet will be my commitment to bringing people to the help they need take me back to the beginning of all of this when I read your story and I read what you went through and there was your parents and then you ended up going to a management parent in a sense the two of them kind of raised you outside of your family and it was a very dark and difficult time when we look then at the mental illness that you've suffered and I know people talk about it being chemical and it's you know genetic and all of this how do we balance though if you had been raised differently if you had been raised in a sunshine and roses kind of childhood would you have had the same problems later in life do the two go hand-in-hand is my personal belief and certainly I have studied others who believe that somewhere along the line something would have triggered it most often we know that it's or very often it's a loss the death of someone close or the loss of a dog or a career and I firmly believe that the manifestations of the illness would have come forth for me somewhere along the line because I believe that it is genetic I can look back at my mother who was didn't have the benefit of mania she was unipolar I used to tell her I was sexier because I was bipolar she would say Oh Ana and my dad whom I only knew till I was six years old he died when he was 50 of alcoholism of cirrhosis of the liver I choose to believe that he was self-medicating now we can debate it till the cows come home because this man also served in in World War two in Europe and in Japan the Sea of Japan and there was certainly post-traumatic syndrome going on but anyway again I get to choose so I choose to believe that and I think I can trace it even further back than that now I have an Aunt Frances who lives in Port Washington New York and we talked off and on the phone and she reminds me well you remember aunt so-and-so now she couldn't even leave her house then and so I get these tidbits of the puzzle and and that reaffirms for me my belief that it's it's the genetic genetic disorder so do you know when you first started to be affected by can you pinpoint what would have been the trigger for you because you read the early history of yours and there seems like there's a lot I think I have seemed to always go back to when I was around 19 because that was the most obvious severe depression but through the years I've been able to remember other things and I remember at the age of 12 ish having what we now know as panic attacks but again in my own personal review I can slip those into the bipolar spectrum so in childhood I guess the twelve years old you're doing what miracle workers around the right you are unbelievable but what so panic attacks I think to the untrained eye yeah you're doing a Broadway show you know you're doing it shows the difference was it sure I would have little butterflies when it was time to go on the panic attacks were random completely out of any kind of context at least as I knew it I remember once very clearly it was it was an exquisite spring day in New York and I was going to school and we lived in a duplex I came out the door and there was a church across the street and the sky was so blue behind it and the clouds were just you know those little billowy things and even at 12 years old life I was able to take in that beauty and as oh and there was a cross on the church as I turned around to bend down to get the milk out of the milk box to take up to my mother it hit and what hit was there will come a time when I will never see this again sure of death which became an obsessive fear for many many years drop the bottles ran upstairs my mother came out and I was apologizing for dropping the bottles because my hands were wet never told her yeah that my heart was pounding out of my body that I could feel the pulse all over me and she was not happy about the broken milk bottles so we cleaned them up together and by the time that activity was finished it had passed everybody's different the nerves ever accused though of she's just being dramatic I still have a flair yes I think we eat very sadly are quick to judge something we probably don't understand and drama queen is an easier fix then how do I tell this person that may she needs to see someone who deals in the psyche yeah not the psychic but but that's not and again I don't want to be like one of those reformed folks who goes around judging everybody who isn't enlightened I want to I want to reach that emotional part of them and enlighten them and reassure them that there are answers what made you know it was time to finally go and seek help I didn't I didn't know I certainly knew that at that point thirty some odd years of this thing and and the rage in the in most recent years prior to the diagnosis the rage that I had no idea where it would come from and I would be the nicest mommy and then all of a sudden this venom would come out and a smack and uh a downgrading wasn't meant to be and yet the denial was still very healthy I was married to John Astin at the time we'd been married not quite ten years and my behavior had warned us all out and the marriage was was failing or had failed and I don't know why I mean sometimes I like to think it was a divine intervention but I decided to go see the psychiatrist so maybe that would help me not go into some severe depression about the divorce and that kind of thing as luck would have it I kicked into a manic episode the supplier trust witnessed it we did a few sessions like that and finally the psychiatrist dr. Arlen said Anna don't be frightened I think your manic-depressive suddenly again physiologically this this feeling of elation hello for me and I said thank God it has a name and he said and it has a treatment even better than me better and if that was frightening a little I know now that it was frightening because the disease was now in jeopardy and and a little bit of the stigma of Oh God now I'm going to be a card-carrying crazy nonetheless I was worn out from myself and I trusted him and we went for the lithium therapy and continued talk therapy and within three weeks I didn't noticed that I felt door or have any other side effects I just noticed an absence of the motor running and a sense of freedom yeah now this is not to say that there haven't been time since then well I've gotten frightened or had panic attacks or been Moody Moody maybe a character flaw bipolar is not and and that's what I've had the opportunity to learn and reinforce because of my involvement in the world of mental health when they said with him when it was said okay here's something you can go on that's going to cut off the ends you know the extreme high and the extreme low you'll still have emotion but the extremes are going to be gone was there a part of you that feared losing who you were even though those were bad but those were who you had been for so many years or was it just so bad at that sometimes I I have a very limited scope but it doesn't it doesn't occur to me to make that far ahead I think probably I knew that if something didn't happen one of my suicide attempts was going to succeed and kind of asked backwards but it gave me a sense of security to go ahead the creativity aspect the you know if you give up that magnificent euphoria we're you gonna get your jollies sorry it hadn't occurred to me I just wanted it off put it off stop in examining it since I believe that I'm more creative than I ever was partially because I can complete a thought now and then but I'm able to now pick and choose creatively what I'd like to do rather than having that raw thing fly out there and hope that somebody like our director is gonna capture something and put it in order I'm a much more creative mother my husband isn't here today but I would hope that he would agree more creative wife and again by that I mean I have the ability now to channel my sensitivities to be aware of what that person needs yeah it isn't always what I need I need I need I need I need it's been remarkable for my relationship with my kids who suffered how hard was it for them to come to a point of forgiveness assuming that they have I think it's a fair assumption that they have there's a part of me that says you know there may be a few dangling participles it took them a while because it takes a while to trust somebody who has behaved that way you know my kids were always poised for the other shoe to drop and post diagnosis and treatment they would still poke in those areas to see if the other shoe was gonna drop again I had the the understanding given to me by the psychiatrist to be able to allow them to do that which is not to say that that we're in a couple of times that I didn't fall right in the trap on the other side of all of this I think we often all of us come in contact with a friend a loved one a person who's going through a depression and maybe it's not fully clinically diagnosed depression but are in a bad place and all too often our initial react get over it feel better come on what can we get your boot straps yeah what can we do to actually help somebody in a situation like that is there anything we can say was there anything that could have been said to you that would have been a bit of comfort other than a get over it No so what do we because that those things were said John Astin is a very kind man he said just about anything that anyone could think of and it might it might be a little band-aid but for a very short time I think what we can say to people now is first of all our sincerity must be real one would hope that we would be good listeners and find a very casual almost way to suggest professional help of some kind which is usually met with anger or get out of here you're no help but to have these stick-to-itiveness identity again creatively find ways to assure these people that the judgment is not a part of this and that getting better is real it really really really happens yeah I know that you go around and you talk to a lot of groups recently here in Houston speaking to a group what is it you want to come out of what you say to them what do you want them to take away first of all when I when the first book came out and I did interviews I would say very earnestly I can help one person it was a biggest lie I ever told what I want them to take away is some of what we've been talking about the reassurance that there's a little lady standing up there who has indeed had a life good bad indifferent for almost 25 years and that it really is possible for them I try actually to keep myself out of debates about this because I find them it's simply a waste of everybody's time but that doesn't mean I can't be engaged and I think that I could go the distance in a debate about whether or not there is very real help for people who experience depression for schizophrenic I mean what has happened in the last 25 years in the in the scientific and medical world is phenomenal I mean somebody was telling me the other day about work they were doing with autism this is how I look I thought autism was that's it yeah not anymore it's a good time to be alive that it really is it truly is but it's also a time when we must continue to eradicate but to work to eradicate the stigma and it is time where we have to say goodbye you are and I promise next time it will be all Patty Duke show Valley of the dolls all that stuff sean has to show me oh yeah little Lord of the Rings it's a younger group I have myself introduced a shot as his mother well I'm gonna say right now thank you so much Patti dude bless your heart thank you to order a transcript call eight six six six five to 3378 or send 695 to the address on your screen please include the name of the guest

Channel: HoustonPBS

Views: 64,631

Rating: 4.770925 out of 5

Keywords: patty, duke, on, innerviews, with, ernie, manouse, interviews, sitcom, valley, of, the, dolls, america, actress, stage, film, television, neely, o'hara, houston, pbs, channel, interview

Id: BccK58UqREY

Length: 27min 28sec (1648 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 30 2011