“I’m very happy to meet you, Mr. Sheldon.”
“I’m happy to meet you, Miss Duke.”
We talked during lunch and her shyness seemed to disappear, but her vulnerability remained. She held my hand during lunch, and it became obvious to me that she was hungry for love.
Patty had had a terrible background. It was like something out of a Charles Dickens novel. Her mother was psychotic. Her father was a drunk who abandoned the family. At age seven, Patty had moved in with her manager, John Ross, and his wife, Ethel, who were living in an upstairs cold-water flat. Patty had never had a family.
Before The Patty Duke Show, John Ross was a struggling, small-time manager. His clientele had consisted of minor character actors. Among them was a young actor named Ray Duke.
One day, Duke came to Ross and asked him if he would represent his young sister, Anna, who had done no acting up to that time. Ross met the seven-year-old girl and agreed to handle her.
A few months later, when Anna’s home life became unbearable, the Rosses agreed to let her move in with them, and promptly changed her name to Patty. The order had come from Ethel Ross, who declared, “Anna Marie is dead. You are Patty now.”
John Ross read that a play called The Miracle Worker was going to be produced on Broadway, and he decided that Patty Duke would be right for the part of Helen Keller, a blind, deaf, and mute girl. He coached Patty for months. When she finally competed against a hundred other girls and won the part, their lives changed completely. The day after the play opened, John Ross’s unknown young client had become an overnight star.
Ross began receiving offers for Patty for thousands of dollars a week. Instead of knocking on producers’ doors and begging them to hire his clients, Ross was being wooed by producers, directors, and studio executives. He could not believe his good luck.
When lunch was over, I realized how taken I was by Patty. I found her irresistible.
“How would you like to come to my house tonight and have dinner with Jorja and me,” I asked her.
She beamed. “I’d love to.”
Jorja was just as enchanted with Patty as I was. She was bright and vivacious and kept us laughing throughout the evening.
As Jorja and I were talking, we suddenly realized that Patty had left the table. I got up to see where she was. She was in the kitchen, doing the dishes. That clinched it for me.
“I’m going to write a show for you, Patty.”
I got a big hug and a whispered “Thank you.”
I decided that if I was going to have my name on a television show, I wanted to be able to control the quality of it. I held my first meeting with the producers.
“We’re delighted that you’re going to do the show, Sidney.”
“Thank you.”
“In addition to being the creator, you’ll be the story editor, and supervise the other writers.”
“I don’t want any other writers.”
They stared at me. “What?”
“If I am going to do this show, I want to write it.”
“Sidney, that’s impossible. We have an order for thirty-nine shows, one show every week.”
“I intend to write them all.”
They looked at each other, horrified. It was only later that I learned why. No one in the history of television had ever written every script for a weekly half-hour comedy show.
“Is this negotiable?”
“No,” I said.
“You have a deal.”
Not until months later did I learn that the day I signed the contract, they had hired four other writers to write scripts, so that when I came to them and said, “I don’t have a show for next week,” they could hand me the scripts and say, “Here you are.”
Because Patty was underage and California child labor laws were so strict, we decided to shoot the show in New York, where juveniles could work as many hours as their producer wanted them to.
Jorja, Mary, and I moved back to New York.
Creating a television show for Patty Duke was a challenge, because she was so extraordinarily talented that I did not want to waste her abilities. I hit on the solution of having her play two parts—twin sisters: one a bouncy, outgoing, New York girl; and the other her demure sister from Scotland, who had been separated from her at birth.
Bill Asher was signed on to produce and direct, and he suggested that we make them cousins instead of sisters, to explain them having grown up at a distance from each other. That worked just as well for me.
The Patty Duke Show was produced at an old television studio on Twenty-sixth Street, twelve blocks from the theater where I had worked as an usher and a barker. It was not the best of neighborhoods. One day, a secretary was hired to begin work at nine o’clock. At ten o’clock, a large rat ran over her shoe. At twelve o’clock, she was accosted as she went to lunch, and at one o’clock, she quit.
I had already written half a dozen teleplays in advance. Now it was time to start casting. We got lucky.
The studio signed William Schallert to play Patty’s father, Jean Byron to play her mother, Paul O’Keefe for the part of Patty’s brother, and Eddie Applegate to play Patty’s suitor.
The first day of production, Patty started a ritual that went on until the end of the show. Every morning, before shooting began, the entire cast and crew lined up and sang “Good morning to you. Good morning to you. We’re all in our places with bright shiny faces.”
It was an interesting sight to see the hard-bitten crew, some unshaven, most in T-shirts, line up to earnestly sing this children’s song. Outwardly, Patty was one of the happiest stars in television. It was not until three years later that I learned the truth.