On January thirteenth (Friday the 13th, to be
exact) of 2006, I had an absolute and primal wish fulfilled. I was on the phone
for 45 minutes with Patty Duke. Granted, in my dreams of such a moment, we chatted
together and laughed and bonded. In reality, I said not a word. I was on a
conference call with Patty, her nephew Mike, another gentleman and 99 other
members of the Patty Duke Online Center
for Mental Wellness.
. The other members
and I were in “Lecture Mode”, meaning that we were muted while Patty and the
two gentlemen spoke. It didn’t matter. I probably would have been too
tongue-tied to be coherent anyway. You see, out of every person in the world
past or present, Patty Duke has been my inspiration and role model and muse. We
really should be good friends. We have so very much in common. Here is just a
partial list of the many connections we have:
I was born on December twelfth; her
birthday is December fourteenth. We were born on different years but we’re
both bipolar. (Interestingly, I share my birthday with Connie Francis and
Frank Sinatra who were both diagnosed as bipolar. We also have Bob Barker
and Dionne Warwick as 12/12 babies, but I’ve heard no reports about their
suffering from the disease. Lucky them! But what does that say about Sagittarians?)
When I was around four years old or so,
I discovered The Patty Duke Show on television. I was mesmerized
and instantly hooked. I didn’t understand my intense attraction to the
show at the time yet I knew that it had to do with the concept of the twin
cousins, Patty and Cathy Lane – who were both portrayed by Miss Duke.
Throughout my life but especially in my childhood, I was obsessed with
twins. I knew my father was one. What I didn’t learn until the age of 23
was that I was also a twin…at least in the beginning. My twin miscarried
during my third month of gestation and that trauma in the womb is likely
why I was born intersexed.
I was
aware enough as a child of my condition that, while all adults insisted on
calling me “Charles”, my friends weren’t so constrained. By the second
grade, I had chosen the name of Katherine and had all my friends address
me as Kathy when no adults were present. As you may have guessed, Kathy
derived from Cathy Lane. I merely felt that the “C” spelling was weaker
than that with a “K”. I still feel that way. Just don’t call me Kathy. I
outgrew it by the age of ten and can’t bear to be called so as an adult.
They
say that manic depression is probably genetic and I feel that’s probably
true. It has certainly run in my family, just as twins have. However, out of
all the dozens of cousins I have within my generation, no other has
exhibited the disease. While I believe I always had the seed, it didn’t
necessarily need to be fertilized. But it was. I was twelve years old when
a doctor, attempting to make me into a “normal boy”, put me on a year-long
overdose of testosterone. In recent years I’ve heard of a condition known
as Testosterone Dementia and I am certainly living proof that it
exists. Literally one day prior to beginning these weekly
multi-injections, I was happy as a lark and convinced life was somehow all going to straighten itself out in the end.
My first suicide attempt happened just about two weeks to the day after
the treatments began. What I needed was a miracle worker. I didn't get one.
And things actually went downhill from there!
In my
book, I wrote that Patty had become a kind of Virgin Mary to me. An icon. I
can’t explain it but I sensed down to the pit of my soul that we were much
alike and that she was exactly the kind of person I was determined to be.
Even that doesn’t really express the feeling. I remember when, in my thirteenth summer, I came home from a trip with my church’s youth group.I had only been foiled from killing
myself on that trip by someone I knew inadvertently interrupting the
procedure. When I got home, I went to my room. I discovered that a new TV-movie
starring Patty Duke was just about to come on. I watched it, curled into a
fetal position and crying. I was hugging a large pillow to my chest and
pretending it was Patty’s shoulder on which I was crying. Even today, that
memory affects me so much that my hands begin to tremble slightly. They
are now.
By the
time I was thirteen, I was thoroughly dedicated to the act of
self-destruction. I eventually ended up in a mental hospital – which did
absolutely nothing to help me but contributed a great deal to my
depression and my bleak outlook on my life in general. After I’d been
there a few months, the television premiere of the film Valley of the
Dolls was broadcast. That movie shook me to the marrow of my bones and
became a primary passion for me well into my adult years. Of course, one
of the stars was Patty Duke. There was much laughter during the mental
hospital scenes with her, although all in all that experience was no
laughing matter. Just a few years ago, someone close to me hacked into
this hospital’s database and pulled up some information about me that left
me stupefied. For one thing, it was apparently quite obvious to the
medical staff that I was a hermaphrodite. I didn’t even know the word,
much less it’s meaning, and no one chose to enlighten me. (I didn’t found
out about my intersexed condition until I was twenty three.) Some of the other
patients might have been informed about this information by the staff, though, which might
partially explain the gang rape I had to endure. Finally, records existed of a plan that had been
drawn up to prove me criminally insane -- just in case I tried to bring a lawsuit
against the facility for my rape. How…nice. My fixations with both Valley
and Patty helped me endure the situation but to call it “unpleasant” is
putting it mildly.
Once
out of the loony bin, I took a giant step and wrote Miss Duke a fan
letter. I got a lovely reply from her and a signed photo of her and her
then-husband, John Astin. To tell you how much I have adored this photo
throughout the years, I used it as a prop for the set of my living room in
the 1995 Los Angeles play, Scream, Teen, Scream. Peter Spears was
the director. He had appeared with Patty a few years earlier in the
television film Cries from the Heart. While that film was in
production, an article I’d written on The Best and the Worst of Patty
Duke Films had been published in Los Angeles. Peter, who didn’t yet
know me, gave a copy of the article to Patty. Needless to say, I later
thanked him profusely.
In my
late teens and early twenties, once Katherine had fully emerged and
“Charles” was deceased once and for all, I encountered an amusing thing.
As I began to pursue my performing career in earnest, I for the first time
in my life had person after person commenting to me that I resembled a
“chubby Patty Duke”. My God, can you imagine my reaction? I ate it up!
Even with the addition of the word “chubby”.
For the
rest of my teens and into my twenties, the Patty Passion remained
unabated. There were a few years when friends helped me celebrate my
birthday two days late, on “St. Patty’s Day”. Every film or television
appearance she made I viewed with ardor. Ironically, in my earlier
twenties I attempted yet another suicide attempt in the bathroom while
Patty’s television film Best Kept Secrets was being broadcast on
the TV in the living room. I figured, if I had to go the last voice I
heard might as well be hers. However, that was one of the times I
chickened out. The razor blade was poised against my wrist but I just
couldn’t force myself to make the final move. (I videotaped the movie, just in case I was alive to see it. I was and I watched it. However, the memory of what was going on while it was telecast kept me from saving the tape.)
I
moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 1992. I knew…I just KNEW…that
somehow, some way my path and hers would cross. It was some time before I discovered
that at about the same time I arrived, she departed California for a new
life in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. I'm sure you can imagine my frustration when I found this fact out! Yet another coincidence is that one of my dearest friends is a native of Coeur d'Alene and I spent a little bit of time there a few years before the Pearce family became residents. So you might say -- if you were willing to stretch your credibility about a mile long -- they we took each other's places! LOL!
Patty
Duke was diagnosed with manic depression in her thirties. So was I. In
fact, one of the most horrific yet most amusing life stories I have is all
about how I spent the Christmas holiday of 1995 in the Los Angeles County
Hospital’s Psychiatric Emergency Unit. It followed my final decision to
end my life. It was also, perhaps, the most serious. A few years before, I’d
read Patty’s second book A Brilliant Madness and the light had
finally dawned for me what the real problem was for me and why almost
twenty years of therapy had been unsuccessful. However, it took that
wretched/comic Christmas to finally get the medical diagnosis I needed. I
just KNEW that, like Patty, Lithium would be a wonder prescription for me.
As it turned out, it was. I have now had ten years of relief from my
symptoms via Lithium and Prozac. The last ten years have been the only
years I can really remember that felt real and seemed (a word I’d almost
never used on myself up to that point) normal.
My acting career, oddly enough, lost any impetus it had once my manic depression was under control. However, since I love to write almost as much as I love to perform, the opportunity to write copy for one of the major studios presented itself and I accepted happily. I did this for a while and enjoyed every minute of it. My job was to write all the copy on individual video/DVD box projects. (I was freelance, so I never got my hands on any really big releases.) But was it an accident -- or a funny twist of fate -- that my first assignment was for a film called Dream For An Insomniac, starring Jennifer Anniston, Ione Skye and...MacKenzie Astin, son of Patty Duke?
When
my book was published in 2001, I partially dedicated the book to Patty
Duke. And why shouldn’t I? After all, she was my unknowing companion
through the mystery of my twin, through my sexual status, through a mental
hospital and finally through my odyssey to wellness. All in all, I’d say
we have a hell of a lot in common. What do you think?
I'm not afraid to state
for the record, here and now, for the whole world to know: "Patty Duke, I have loved you
all my life and loved you more fully and completely than I've loved most people I've known.
I will always love you and I know that, without you, I wouldn't be alive right now
to type these very words." There. I feel much better.
