If you are an American of a certain age (and why do I sometimes feel as if I am the only one?), you grew up with The Patty Duke Show. From 1963 to 1966, Duke played both Patty and her English relative Cathy, purportedly identical cousins. Though I was only a young girl, I argued that this was a genetic impossibility, even if two twins married two twins (you can see what a fun child I was). But the show, whose inane plots were overcome by the star’s charm, was ridiculously popular. (Maybe in those days of Beatlemania, we were all homegrown Pattys, longing to be British Cathys?)
Duke, who passed away today at the age of 69, had a notoriously tortured childhood, far from the idyllic life that the identical cousins shared in their imaginary Brooklyn Heights brownstone. (The theme song was especially memorable, marking the first time that I, and I suspect many others, ever heard of the Ballet Russes.)
That silly yet oddly indelible show was hardly Duke’s only significant role. When she was 16, she starred as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker, for which she received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. But as she grew up, so did her audience—one year after she stopped playing Patty and Cathy, teenagers who dipped no further into the wild world of the ’60s than modified mod dresses and chaste flirtations, Duke embodied the iconic pill-popping, desperately needy Neely O’Hara in Valley of the Dolls. “Sparkle, Neely, sparkle!” she famously cried in that film, recounting the demands of stardom, a subject she knew about in her own hard young life all too well.
Duke, who was off camera by reputation a lovely person, was also a union activist, serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1985 to 1988, and an advocate for mental health. She did indeed sparkle, and she will be missed.
