40 Behind-The-Scenes Secrets From The Patty Duke Show That'll Have Fans Feeling Super-Nostalgic

So you know about The Patty Duke Show. But did you know of the connection between it and iconic movie franchise The Lord of the Rings? Duke is the mother of actor Sean Astin who played Samwise Gamgee in the series. That’s not Astin’s only claim to fame: he was also in cult movie The Goonies and web TV sci-fi sensation Stranger Things, among other hits.

Sidney Sheldon, one of the writers for the show, came up with the idea of Duke playing “identical cousins” after noticing that the young actress sometimes seemed to have “two personalities” within her. Of course, this was really bipolar disorder, there just simply wasn’t a name for it back then.

In 2013 Duke remembered to the Los Angeles Times newspaper, “I had delusions I could sing. I was beyond excited until I got into the studio. I felt about an inch-and-a-half tall. I just was frozen. So they had to put a person in the booth with me so they could point to me when it was time to sing.” Sure, it was all part of the marketing for the show, but Duke’s singing wasn’t anywhere near as bad as she thought.

When Sidney Sheldon died in 2007 an old quote of his from 1982 resurfaced. He had once told the media, “I like to write about women who are talented and capable, but most important, retain their femininity. Women have tremendous power – their femininity, because men can’t do without it.” That’s the ethos he brought to The Patty Duke Show.

In April 1999 the cast got together again for a reunion film broadcast on CBS, titled The Patty Duke Show: Still Rockin’ in Brooklyn Heights. Actor Eddie Applegate told the Los Angeles Times that month, “It was quite an emotional experience for everyone,” and Duke herself said, “I thought I didn’t want to do it. Once again, I am wrong. I am telling you, I owe CBS for one of the most wonderful highlights of my life.”

Patty Duke had no fewer than four husbands throughout her life: Harry Falk, Michael Tell, John Astin and Michael Pierce. Her son Sean Astin actually wasn’t sure who his father was – Desi Arnaz Jr. was another possibility – until he was an adult. Eventually a DNA test proved that Tell was his biological father.

Growing up, Duke was completely under the thumb of her managers, who wouldn’t even let her watch the show in which she starred. She told the Los Angeles Times in 2013 that her viewing it was considered to be “part of puffing myself up” and she didn’t actually catch an episode until the 1980s. When she did, she liked it.

Eddie Applegate, who played Patty’s boyfriend, decided that what he really wanted was to be an artist rather than an actor. He quit acting and took up painting for a bit, eventually becoming vice president of the San Fernando Valley Art Club. That being said, he did do some movies in the last years of his career, including 2010’s Easy A.

When she started out on The Patty Duke Show, Duke was a child actor who had no idea what “normal” kids did. She told the CNN website in 2009, “I was a very isolated teenager. When it came time to do some of the school dances [on the show], they had to bring in real teenagers to teach me how. I didn’t know the dances, didn’t know the music.”

Sitcom queen Lucille Ball was initially impressed by Duke’s comedic talents. But that all changed for the worse when Duke began dating Ball’s son Desi Arnaz Jr., who was 17 years old at the time. Ball reportedly detested the media attention the relationship brought on her family. Still, in 2010 Duke told the website HollywoodChicago.com that she and Ball made up before the latter’s death.

Illnesses like bipolar disorder were barely talked about in the formative years of Duke’s life. It wasn’t until the 1980s that she felt comfortable going public with her diagnosis, and even then she was one of the first ever public figures to do so. When Duke passed away in 2016 her frequent co-star Melissa Gilbert released a statement saying, “She got so many people to see mental illness as what it really is, and led the effort to de-stigmatize it.”

Patty Duke said in a 1988 Fresh Air radio interview on NPR, “Most people when they talk to me about [the show], you know, folks on the street, talk about the twins. They forgot the cousin part.” Yep, if you ever misremember the “identical cousins” as being in fact identical twins, you’re far from the only one.

Because she had such a high status as a child star, Duke got to do things other kids of her age didn’t get to. One of these was meeting JFK. She remembered to HollywoodChicago.com in 2010, “I mortified myself, of course, because the minute he walked into the Oval Office, I started crying, and I didn’t stop crying until he left.”

What would place Mad Men instantly in the 1960s era? Showing a character watching The Patty Duke Show, of course. The show’s seen on the TV in the Season Six episode “The Quality of Mercy.” Some have pointed out that having a show about “identical cousins” pop up in the episode tied in to its theme of duality.

Despite her being credited under the name “Patty,” that wasn’t Duke’s real first name. It was actually Anna, but her managers forced her to change it. They got the name Patty from a different child actor who was popular at the time, Patty McCormack. Of course, since she was still a child herself, Duke could do nothing about it.

Duke had the chance to act alongside many of the biggest names of the era on The Patty Duke Show. These included Frankie Avalon, Sammy Davis Jr. and the British pop stars Chad and Jeremy, whom Duke absolutely loved. She told the Los Angeles Times in 2013, “I was obsessed with them. That was a big week for me.”

William Schallert played Martin Lane and he was a big name in acting at the time. But in 1979 he became President of the Screen Actors Guild, an impressive accomplishment, and he remained in the role until 1981. He was also a very prolific actor, with his last role being in the sitcom 2 Broke Girls.

Duke’s managers at the time of The Patty Duke Show were called Ethel and John Ross, and the star has always been open about how they treated her. She told Fresh Air in 1988, “Ethel, the wife of the twosome, often would tell me that I was very plain. Part of that I think was her attempt – though ill-guided – to keep me humble, to maintain control.”

Actress Bette Davis was considered for a guest role on The Patty Duke Show, not least because at that time she herself was playing a double part in 1964’s Dead Image. But apparently she asked for more money and freebies than the producers were willing to give, so she never did appear on the show in the end.

The theme song to The Patty Duke Show seems pretty dated now admittedly, but it still sticks in the head. And the band who performed it, The Skip-Jacks, did another TV theme tune which likewise went down in television history. They’re the people who created the famous opening song for The Flintstones.

There were a lot of strangely identical cousins on The Patty Duke Show! For one episode Duke played, in addition to Patty and Cathy, their other relative Betsy in the episode “The Perfect Hostess.” It was explained away by their fathers, all of whom were played by actor William Schallert, being identical siblings.

The reason Patty Duke got her own self-titled TV show was because one year earlier she’d won an Oscar. In 1963 she picked up a Best Supporting Actress gong for playing Helen Keller in the movie The Miracle Worker. She had been 16 years old at the time, the youngest person ever to win at that point.

Hip hop band The Beastie Boys just loved to reference classic shows in their songs, and one of these was The Patty Duke Show. A line from “Shake Your Rump” goes “The Patty Duke Show, the Wrench, and then I bust the Tango,” while a lyric from “Finger Lickin’ Good” has Mike D. claim, “I can do the Freak, the Patty Duke, and the Spank.”

Eddie Applegate’s character on the show was Richard Harrison, the high-school boyfriend of Patty Duke’s character Patty Lane – except in real life he had long since outgrown high school. He was 27 years old when the show started, while Duke herself was a genuine teenager at 16.

William Asher and Sidney Sheldon, the men who created The Patty Duke Show, went on to create some other world-famous television shows. They were also the brains behind Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. Of course, those shows have supernatural elements while The Patty Duke Show has none… unless you count the weirdly identical twins.

Duke had a favorite cousin on the show, and it wasn’t the one which bore her name. She told CNN in 2009 that she preferred Cathy “because I thought she was dignified and gentle and rational.” As for the other role, “When it was time to be Patty, I would have to deal with my embarrassment of her stupidity.”

In 2009 the actors reprised their roles one more time, not for a reunion show but for a series of ads. In these, Patty taught Cathy how to sign up for Social Security online. The PSAs were meant to promote this new thing for the older generation – though Duke herself actually said she didn’t plan to do it for a while.

Duke’s time as a child actor was enough to turn her off from the idea of her kids following in her footsteps. She tried to dissuade her son Sean from acting, but of course it didn’t work in the end. He told People magazine in 1985, “She had a bad time of it when she was a kid. But when she saw that it was going to be okay for us, she changed her mind and helped us get into the business.”

Rita Walter was the woman who made the “Cathy and Patty on the same screen” trick possible. She was the body double, the person you see on screen when you don’t see the character’s face. Later on, though, she did get to show her own face. From 1970 to 1981 she was on the show As the World Turns.

On the set of The Patty Duke Show the actors bonded just like a real family. Duke remembered to CNN in 2009 that William Schallert “was also a solid, solid figure to me and still is. To this day, the relationship has grown, and he is always there for me.” Paul O’Keefe considered Schallert to be like a father to him, especially since his own father had died.

In a 2014 interview with the Emmy TV Legends website, Duke mused about her show’s portrayal of parenting, “[The Patty Duke Show] had something that I don’t think shows have had until now maybe Modern Family. That family had a father and a mother who were the heads of the households. These kids may have played these pranks and all that but there were consequences.”

The pilot for The Patty Duke Show wasn’t much like the program that eventually came to fruition. Patty Duke was in it playing both cousins of course, but Paul O’Keefe’s and William Schallert’s roles were taken instead by Charles Herbert and Mark Miller, respectively. The show was also set in San Francisco instead of New York, and it lacked the iconic theme song.

Duke devoted a lot of her later life to mental illness awareness and funding. She spoke at events and told her audience there was hope to be found after a bipolar diagnosis. She would also highlight the importance of proper medical treatment, and tell painful real-life stories of how her untreated disorder affected her children.

In a 2013 interview with the Television Academy website, Duke considered the prospect of doing a second The Patty Duke Show reunion. She said, “Those characters live inside me today. If we did another reunion show, the few of us that are left, I could do it. I’d like to make Patty a little wiser!” But sadly it never happened.

Comedian and podcaster Marc Maron is much too young to have played a teen on The Patty Duke Show, considering he was still a baby the year the show aired. But that didn’t stop people from assuming he appeared in the episode “Patty Pits Wits, Two Brits Hits” – when actually it was another person named Marc Maron.

No doubt about it, 2016 was a really bad year for celebrity deaths. We lost, among others, David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Prince… and not one but three members of The Patty Duke Show cast. Duke died in March of that year, then William Schallert passed away in May and Eddie Applegate in October.

There was a reason the show was filmed in New York. Unlike California, New York had no strict laws restricting the use of child actors. Coogan’s Law, named after the famously mistreated child actor Jackie Coogan, wasn’t applied equally across the board, so the 16-year-old Duke had to work long hours at Manhattan’s Chelsea Studios.

When talking to CNN in 2009, Duke spoke about how her show related to her mental health. She said she believed it gave her “the tools that helped me survive through my youth until I got my diagnosis.” And because she was so close to her fellow cast members, it was a place where she went “for safety.”

In the 1950s there was a massive scandal involving TV game shows, and the young Patty Duke found herself part of it. At 12 years old she had been on one of those quizzes and was secretly coached in order to win the big prize. In 1959 she had to appear before a subcommittee, and she confessed to what had happened. The newspapers were furious that fraudsters had got a child involved in their crimes.

Despite the show getting good ratings, it was suddenly canceled in 1966. How come? Part of the reason was the producers’ refusal to start filming in color, even though it was needed to keep up with the times. But it was also because as soon as Duke turned 18 the studio would have demanded that she worked longer hours and relocated to California. She refused to do this, so ABC axed the show. Its loss!