It was a dark and stormy night.
With heavy traffic and a light rain, everyone was later than they wanted to be. The place was Unity Temple. The night was Tuesday of last week. The event was a lecture on bipolar depression. The speaker was one of those oddities-a performer who will forever be remembered for having played a larger-than-life legend. The legend, of course, was Helen Keller. And the actress-speaker was Patty Duke.
Her purpose was to continue her longtime role as spokeswoman for those suffering what she had suffered for nearly a lifetime-bipolar or manic-depression. Yes, she was promoting her second book, A Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic-Depressive Illness. And yes, she was seeking to wipe out lingering stigma concerning this and other mental illnesses by talking about it firsthand.
The hour-long talk was delivered to an overflow audience. To avoid turnaways, extra seating and a loudspeaker were provided at the lower level. Wisely, Duke stayed on the autobiographical track rather than delve into unknown realms of past and current psychiatric approaches. Some of this was dealt with in a follow-up, half-hour Q&A session.
She focused largely on her troubled family life, the tumultuous early years, her demon-haunted 20s, 30s and 40s and her multiple marriages. Even with the trappings of Hollywood as a backdrop, she was disarmingly honest, sharing personal details of early promiscuity, addictions and disjointed years as a foster child.
She described her father as a “hopeless alcoholic,” whom she never saw after her sixth year; and her mother as a lifelong depressive who tried but couldn’t seem to guide her. Duke borrowed from an older brother who apparently had found some stability partaking in school and community theater in Queens, N.Y. With Patty, the talent and “magic” were always there, and after one season on the TV soaps, she found herself on the New York stage for a two-year, first-run Broadway production of The Miracle Worker. And who doesn’t know she played young Helen Keller to Ann Bancroft’s Annie Sullivan, the hired charge of the lost Helen?
Within a year, the play became a movie. Within two years, Patty Duke took the 1963 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. At 16, she was the youngest (then) ever to win in that category. But it was all too much, moving too fast. Not long after, she found someone to marry, became pregnant and fell into a full-blown, five-month depression. The marriage dissolved and she had to search in earnest for work. Her fall wasn’t that precipitous, yet her psychological road was pocked with shell holes.
She told the Unity audience of her “best” manic screed, where everything got let out. “And because my doctor witnessed it,” she said, “a diagnosis was finally made: manic (or bipolar) depression. I was overjoyed! At last, it had a name!”
Today, we know that Patty Duke and others have not only survived but prevailed. She’s stable, sane and sensitive. She helps sufferers and the public at large to deal more intelligently with metal illness and stigma. She sells her books while making public appearances like the one that rainy Tuesday.
Aside from regaining and maintaining her mental health, she said, the most valued by-product of her struggles was her prized friendship with the late Ann Bancroft.
Go back in your memory or get the video of The Miracle Worker and witness the electrifying scene in the Keller family’s backyard. Caretaker Annie Sullivan (Bancroft) is at the end of her string with poor, lost Helen when she guides the child’s hand across the bark of a tree. “Tree!” she shouts. “It has a name!”
Pulling her to the ground and clutching a tuft of grass, she screams, “Grass! Grass!
It has a name!”
Then the pump handle. First a trickle, then a gush-and young Helen enters the world! “Water! Water!” cried Annie Sullivan. “Yes! Yes! Water! Water! Water! … Oh, my Dear!”
At the end of last Tuesday’s talk, the long queue of book buyers prevented asking how accidental was the wording of Duke’s own reaction to her doctor’s diagnosis: “It had a name!”