Patty Duke to speak at benefit for YWCA women's programs

When writer Sidney Sheldon created "The Patty Duke Show," he wanted to spend time with the actress to research the show's concept.

"He observed me and we interacted, and I went back to New York and he set about writing, and instinctively he came up with this dual character," Duke remembers.

"Later, I said, 'Boy, oh boy, mister, you knew the problem. There are so many personalities inside that teenager.' He felt he couldn't put it all into one person. He had to make two."

"The Patty Duke Show," which aired on television from 1963-66, featured Duke playing two very different characters, cousins Patty and Cathy.

What nobody knew at the time was that Duke was swinging back and forth between highs and lows, with an undiagnosed mental illness: bipolar disorder.

Duke, 61, has had many roles in her life, including spokeswoman for mental-health issues.

She'll speak at a benefit lunch on behalf of the YWCA of Seattle-King County-Snohomish County on April 15 at the Comcast Arena at Everett Events Center.

For more than 100 years, the YWCA has provided shelter, housing, counseling and other services for women and families.

A portion of women served by the YWCA have mental-health issues, according to Liz Mills, YWCA director of Opportunity Place. Angeline's Center for Homeless Women, for example, serves an average of 250 homeless or low-income women each day in Seattle. About 75 percent have mental-health issues.

"What they do is extraordinary," Duke said. Speaking from her home in Idaho, she cited the YWCA programming as "unique in its scope."

She is impressed with "its success in bringing people together and out of themselves and giving people a place. We want to belong, mentally ill or not. Most of us want to belong. The Y casts a big net and welcomes everybody in and keeps their promises."

For more than 20 years, Duke says, she and husband Mike Pearce have "crisscrossed the country and Canada, and there's an energy that gets going that is healing for all of us in the room. I never leave a place where I have spoken without having learned something, and without being reassured I'm on the right track."

She has seen progress in talking about mental illness, but "fear is what fuels stigma," she says. "In terms of being able to talk about it, when you get to personal stories, there's a fear of losing employment, of being an outcast in the family, and in terms of being bipolar, we usually arrange to be an outcast."

Duke's treatment for bipolar disorder came when she was an adult, years after her troubles began. Now a grandmother, she has penned two books, "Call Me Anna" and "Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic Depressive Illness."

One reviewer compared Duke's childhood to a novel by Charles Dickens, with a depressive mother, alcoholic father and severe abuse at the hands of her managers, whom she lived with as her career developed.

Duke won the Academy Award for best-supporting actress playing the role of blind and deaf activist Helen Keller in "The Miracle Worker," in which she co-starred with the late Anne Bancroft, who played Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan.

When Duke sees "The Miracle Worker" on TV, she's grateful that "it endures. And I am so blessed that it was done with caring and quality that Helen and Annie deserved."

Duke met Keller once.

"I was 13, and she was about to be 80," Duke said. "Her companion welcomed me into the house and asked me to stand at the foot of the stairs. By some signal only Helen knew, she walked out. There was a thread thumbtacked on the wall. She put her pinkie on that thread and glided down the stairs."

"It took about half an hour to get over my shock and awe and see her as the human being that she was," Duke adds. "The rest of the three or four hours we spent wandering in the garden, talking about nothing and everything. She just glowed.

"She made you feel comfortable, one of the words I used about the YWCA," Duke said. "She made me feel I belonged. By the time I left, it was no more this icon, Helen Keller. It was my friend, Helen Keller."

Diane Wright: 425-745-7815 or dwright@seattletimes.com