RIP Patty Duke
Patty Duke has died at the age of 69. A star actress even as a child, she had in some ways a difficult road, with mental illness (manic-depression) that eventually got under control, which enabled a long marriage and apparently happy family life.
I note that her death was from sepsis, a dreadful affliction I wrote about recently and to which lost a dear friend.
I saw Patty Duke as a child on stage—that is, I was a child and she was a child—in the original production of “The Miracle Worker” with Anne Bancroft. I already wrote about it here:
One of the highlights of my childhood was being taken to the original Broadway production of “The Miracle Worker” and seeing Bancroft and Patty Duke go at it on stage. If you’ve only seen the movie, which is powerful enough, you can’t even begin to imagine the fury and the sense of true danger they portrayed when seen live. How they did it night after night without breaking every bone in their bodies is a mystery.
Duke was thirteen at the time, but her diminutive size allowed her to play the much-younger Helen Keller convincingly. It was a tour de force of acting, and although we are fortunate to have the movie to document her power in the role, that was nothing like seeing the play and those actresses in person, where you feared for their lives and limbs.
I note also that, in a strange coincidence, Anne Bancroft’s real name was “Anna Maria” and Patty Duke’s real name was “Anna Marie.”
RIP.
About 18 months ago, after a relatively routine kidney stone removal operation, I developed sepsis three days later from an infection I picked up in surgery, and spent three days in ICU. Temperature 104+, alternating sweats and violent chills, BP 96/62, dehydrated, so weak I could hardly stand, and a bout of pneumonia and permanent kidney damage came with it too. They said if I’d gotten to the ER a couple hours later…
Total bill for the three days – a little under $24,000, which Kaiser picked up in total.
On the brighter side, in the three decades since I’d last been in the hospital. the food has gotten a whole lot better, and the nurses a lot cuter.
geokstr:
Glad you recovered. Sepsis is very common, as I wrote in that earlier post.
My friend had gone into septic shock by the time she came to the ER. It seems to have happened within a few hours.
Duke’s was “sepsis” from a “ruptured intestine”. I take that to most probably mean a colonic perforation. The obit does not say whether she had surgery.
I personally would view the fever and chills of septicimia as paling in comparison to the pain of a “ruptured intestine” with necessarily attendant peritonitis.
Frog:
I’ve known two people who had this and ignored the pain for a while until they came way too close for comfort to dying. In both cases emergency surgery saved them, but it was really life-threatening.
Frog, forty years ago, I went to the ER with intense abdominal cramping. They wheeled me in for a routine 45 minute appendectomy, and found nothing wrong with my appendix. Eight hours of surgery later, they had removed my perforated ileum, a part of the colon, so I’m very familiar with peritonitis too.
Also on the brighter side, while they were in there, they took out my appendix, so I got a twofer.
Regarding Patty Duke:
Amen!
I loved Patty Duke! I was quite young but remember waiting each week for the “Patty Duke Show!” She was SO cool! (She & Gidget! But Patty Duke played twins: 2X the cool!?)
And, then, there was “Valley of the Dolls.” She played a character who battled drugs and mental illness, with eerie parallels to her own life.
She was the consummate actress and was one of the few actors who was able to successfully transition from child actress to adult artist despite such a turbulent childhood and early adulthood.
And I will always admire her for the courage in facing her problems and committing to get the help she needed, and then to make public her battles at a time when most actors wrote “Kiss and Tell” books to as publicity promptions to amplify their celebrity.
Neo, what a treat to have seen her onstage in “The Miracle Worker!” and to carry that memory with you over the years.
I really only “knew” Patty Duke through television in series and later movies. I imagine she was electrifying in person.
Neo, you may enjoy this tribute to Patty and her actor children. Several of the comments are worth the read also.
http://heavy.com/entertainment/2016/03/patty-duke-children-son-daughter-sean-mackenzie-astin-kevin-pearce-raelene-grandchildren-photos/