(8 of 9)
"At first," recalls Director Penn of the Seesaw rehearsal, "she could hardly find the stage. She couldn't stand. She couldn't turn. She'd play with her back to the audience. She was too broad and too vulgar. Even the lawyers and agents connected with the show said, 'She's no good; dump her.' " But Penn had already recognized something Anne's critics had not: she took direction admirably. "I even had to tell her where the jokes were, but once was enough." On the road Gibson would "write a funny line for Fonda and a question for Annie, and she'd get the laugh and leave Hank standing there with the line in his hand."
Silent Humor. Anne had known that she would be tapped for the part of Annie Sullivan ever since Gibson started working on the new play while Seesaw was still on the road. In the meantime, Anne became engaged, this time to Mario Ferrari-Ferreira, distantly related to the Italian auto family. But by the time Seesaw began its tryout in Washington, Annie was again fed up with the idea of marriage. "The play had become vitally important to me," she says matter-of-factly. "There was no time or energy for anything else." There was also another complication: her Catholicism. Says she: "The church is still a big part of me."
To prepare for Miracle Worker, Anne worked at the Institute for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in Manhattan; she attended a workshop sponsored by Northwestern University and the American Foundation for the Blind; she practiced the manual alphabet at a camp for deaf-blind adults in Spring Valley, N.Y. And she suffered through her experience as a blind girl on a roller coaster. Finally she met the child who would become her partner in one of the finest performances of a theatrical generation—Patty Duke.
The little girl and the grown woman seemed to recognize each other at once. Like Anne's, Patty Duke's childhood belonged to the streets of New York. Her father (a taxi driver) and her mother (a checker at Schrafft's) were separated; before Patty got her first TV roles, the family teetered on the edge of poverty. In Miracle Worker, it was Anne to whom Patty looked for approval; it was Anne who became her particular pal. Soon, says Arthur Penn, "Patty and Anne were carrying on conversations in the manual alphabet behind our backs, cracking jokes and having themselves a time."
Out the Window. Patty's preparation was almost as painstaking as Anne's. Her agent and his wife taught her what it means to be blind by making her navigate with eyes shut around obstacles set up in their apartment; they made her practice deafness by teaching her to ignore telephone bells, suddenly clashed pot covers, unexpectedly fired questions. Conditioned reflexes to sight and sound came under control. The cast still remembers with amazement the night at Manhattan's Playhouse theater when a cable snapped with a loud crack high over the stage. Anne and the spaniel that plays the Keller family dog jumped a foot. Patty Duke, as the deaf Helen Keller, did not even start.