She was on my shortlist. It hadn’t occurred to me that Alan Rickman or David Bowie would die so soon, honestly, and they were such big stars that it seemed likely everyone already knew to appreciate them. But when my lament of “Oh, I was going to write about her soon!” was met with Graham’s incredulous “Why?” I knew I should have talked about her sooner.
It’s not just her well over a hundred credits, though I recall legitimately enjoying The Patty Duke Show when it was in reruns on Nick at Nite when I was a kid. Or her Oscar-winning turn as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. To be honest, what I think of when I think of The Miracle Worker is my friend Pureza’s impersonation of Patty Duke as Helen Keller. It isn’t the fact that her son played a Hobbit and a Goonie, either.
I’ve actually read Call Me Anna, you see, and that was after I read A Brilliant Madness. Knowing of her illness made the scenes in Valley of the Dolls where Neely is in the institution more painful, at least for me, because I know what life could have been like for a bipolar woman in that era. The fact that Patty Duke survived at all is a tribute to her strength and courage. She should be admired for it.
Not, I grant you, for some of the acting she did. Not everything she did was very good, and I think she knew that. But she’d been working for so long that I’m not sure she really knew what else to do. She was, she said, difficult to live with. She wrote a couple of books, but I don’t think she could really consider herself much of a writer. She was an actress, and she always had been. After a while, I’m not sure it matters how good or bad the movies are.
Sepsis from a ruptured intestine is not an easy way to go, but I’ll level with you. Any time someone with a major mental illness lives to something even approaching a normal life expectancy, and especially if they die from other causes, I feel a certain amount of pride for them. She lasted. No matter what else you may or may not have to say about the woman whose friends called her Anna Pearce, she lasted.
