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Caryl Flinn and Dana B. Polan, "The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties: Hot Dogs and Crêpes Suzette" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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- [00:00]
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Carol Flynn
Well, yeah, I'm hot.
- [00:38]
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Dana Poland
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host at New Books Network, and today I'm here with Carol Flynn and Dana Poland to talk about their book the Patty Duke show and the American 60s. Carol and Dina, thanks for being here with me today.
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Carol Flynn
Thank you.
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Dana Poland
Thank you for having us.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Could you start off by kind of talking why you wanted to write this book and why about Patty Duke and the Patty Duke Show?
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Carol Flynn
Well, one of the reasons we're both film and TV scholars and one of the reasons that impelled us was the fact that even people who focus on 60s sitcoms have completely overlooked the show and they focused on shows like the Beverly Hillbillies or Bewitched, and we find that puzzling. And the show, also with a more general audience, hasn't had the kind of longevity that other shows have. Like every, you know, people of a certain age, everyone remembers Gilligan's island or Beverly Hillbillies or things like that. And we found the neglect kind of perplexing once we settled on the project because the premise makes it sound like it's just part of a barrel full of sitcoms that came out in the 60s called the silly sitcoms with really goofy premises like Gilligan's island or Mr. Ed, the talking horse or monster, families with green skin living in the suburbs, things like that. But Patty Duke was interesting. I mean, it had a gimmick to two cousins of different cultural origins played by one actor. And identical cousins is a little bit hard to get your head around. But it was interesting in the fact that you have two leads who kind of mesh and conflict in interesting ways. I mean, the theme song says that they're identical cousins, but one pair of matching bookends different as night and Day. So the contrasts that they present, I think, speak to. We argue, speak to a lot of larger tensions and fantasies of the time. And they show, very importantly for our argument, they show the girls who were its primary audience, not exclusively, that there's a few different ways of kind of being a teenager and coming of age during the 60s. Dana.
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Dana Poland
The things I would. I would just add to what Carol was saying. There was one essay we found on the show, but. And pretty good. But very quickly, even though it's the title is about the Patty Duke show, it becomes about girl culture in the 60s more generally. In other words, it doesn't deal, except for the some pages. It doesn't really deal with the specificity or particularity of that one show. We were also surprised. We didn't want to write a fan book. We didn't want to write a pop. We love Patty Duke or why Patty Duke is great, but there's not even those kinds of books out there. There was. There's not. Even though, you know, there's endless books on I Love Lucy, there's Gilligan's Island. There's not a Patty Duke book popular or scholarly anywhere. I would also, just at a more meta level, talk about the idea of Carol and I writing together. We have known each other for a long time, if I'm not mistaken. We've only. We had only known each other at annual conferences in cinema study, probably not anywhere else. During COVID we started talking by email. And I'm not sure we don't remember exactly how it happened, but we thought, let's do a project together. And we had some other ideas that didn't pan out. And, you know, it's the kind of thing where both of us need to be sparked by the topic. And somehow when Patty Duke came up, we were both like, oh, that would be a great thing to work on. Let's do it.
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Rebecca Buchanan
So let's. Can we start by kind of talking about Patty Duke and who she is? Right. And this show, Patty Duke did a number of things and was pretty prevalent. So, yeah, who's Patty Duke? Why is she so important? And how did she get a show with her name?
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Carol Flynn
Well, one of the reasons it's a big deal for Patty Duke is a big deal, is that this was the first TV show to be named after a child actor. I mean, we had the Lucille Ball show, we had shows like Dennis the Menace, but that was named after a character rather than a star. So when it came out in 63, you get a sense of how big her star was shining. And it was shining because she had just come off of a very successful award winning run on Broadway playing Helen Keller, young Helen Keller in the Miracle Worker and then an Oscar winning performance as Helen Keller in the film version. So these were pretty, not super upscale, but they were definitely art films. They weren't, you know, your regular action films or fantasy films coming out of Hollywood. And so producers at the time, you know, in retrospect, they were coming up with all sorts of corny how we landed on it. But one of them said, well, she has twice the talent of a regular person, so we'll have her do two roles. But they wanted there was a vehicle open for her at ABC and they just for Patty Duke. And it was just a matter of filling in the numbers. So she became very. She was a very big child and teenage star. After the show she went in the kind of notorious Valley of the Dolls, which was sort of a Miley Cyrus sort of move to prove that she was grown up and risque. And after that she did mostly TV films. So she's not widely appreciated as an actor as she could be. She did have a sort of second career that she was very proud of as a mental health advocate. One of the things that we were really impressed by was she was bipolar and came out as having bipolarism before celebrities were doing that. And she was advocating even to Congress to develop more funds for mental health and so forth. So we liked those things. The amount of the diversity of her roles is really pretty stunning. She played in horror films, she played in sitcoms, she played in art films, in low, low feeding films like Valley of the Drag.
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Dana Poland
She was in a lot of Hallmark kind of uplift feel good sometimes she would play lawyers or doctors fighting for a cause. She even plays we. It's one we didn't see. But she plays Martha Washington in some made for TV biopic. The other thing I would add, and Carol implied this, her producers, but also her handler. She had a couple who basically had taken over her life and were handling her career. It was clear they wanted to. After the Miracle Worker they were like, we have to exploit this success. But there's only so many ways you can exploit the success of a teen girl. You can't have her go out on the road, so it can't be like a Route 66 kind of thing. It could potentially be a home drama. But I think sitcoms and teenage focused sitcoms are in the air. This is around the time of Gidget, for example. And so that's. They gravitate toward that. One of the side parts of her career which we talk about in the book is that she's also groomed by them to be a pop singer. And this was sort of inevitable for lots of teenagers on TV at the time. Paul Peterson, Ricky Nelson, Sally Field. So Patty Duke does a. A pop career. She cuts four albums, if I remember correctly, two before, two when she's still being handled by the Rosses, and then two on her own. Unfortunately, neither before or after her break are any of the albums any good. She is not a good singer, and she says that herself.
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Rebecca Buchanan
So you've got this. So Patty Duke comes along and the Patty Duke Show. So you've divided this book into sort of two parts. And so the part is really about Patty Duke and the Patty Duke Show. So can you talk about the Pat. The Patty Duke Show? I mean, you gave a little bit about the premise of it, but what is that? Like how when it was produced, how it was produced, sort of some of the things you. Can you highlight some of the things you talk about in that chapter?
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Carol Flynn
Well, we. We unpack a lot. We saw all 107 episodes.
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Dana Poland
100 and three.
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Carol Flynn
One hundred and three. It felt like 207. But we saw all 103 episodes over the course of a summer. And we wanted to talk about how it came into fruition, the kind of seeds that planted the show, which I alluded to a minute ago, who was involved with it. ABC took it up. So we wanted to provide a kind of industry history of it. We wanted to also talk about casting because there were all sorts of rumors of who would. I mean, Patricia Neal was considered to play the mother role. That ultimately went to Jean Byron. So we wanted to get that settled. We also wanted to talk about particular episodes so that we could, in the second part of the book, look at more thematic issues and line it up in terms of its culture. I don't know if this is really answering your question, though, because I don't know what you really want to know. It's a big question. But, Dana, maybe you can jump in.
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Dana Poland
Maybe just before we get into the details of what we found. I think we always knew we wanted to do that kind of analytic, thematic reading of. Of episodes, but we also wanted to talk about the show in its times, in the TV industry. And maybe some of this goes back to what we were saying before about there's very little written on it. So we wanted to know what was the reality of the show, how it came about, things like that. Both of us as media moving image historians have a kind of what I like to call a completist side, which is track down everything. We spoke to the last surviving member of the. Of the cast, Paul o'. Keefe. We went into archives. For example, Sidney Sheldon, who wrote many of the episodes, then later became a novelist. His papers are at University of Southern California and include material of the. For the pilot of the show, where originally Patty is not called Patty, she's called Nancy in the show. And that gets crossed out and they put it in Patti. So we wanted to sort of get it right the first time around. And maybe that also goes back to what I was saying before that there's no other book. And we assume there probably won't be another book after ours. Not because we, like we preempted the field, but because it's. Yeah, 60 years have gone by and no one's written on the Patty Duke show. It's probably not going to happen. So the idea was, at least for the first part to get it right and to get it as complete as possible. There's still lots that we couldn't find. I would like to have learned more about Peter Lawford's involvement or non involvement in the show. He was the producer or head of the production company. The other thing, going back to the two parts, I think unconsciously we knew there were two different parts, but the first draft of the manuscript just had chapter after chapter. And then it was suggested that we think about it in part one, Part two. And the minute we did that, everything became clearer to us as to what the project was, that it had this historical empirical side and a more thematic, analytic side.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. So I guess, and what I'm thinking too is for people who don't know the Patty Duke show itself, right. We've got these two cousins. Like, can you talk a little bit about some of the themes in the show, maybe some of the episodes, like what was going on. Right. These two cousins who are very different. But you also talk about, I think is important that the audience knows their cousins. Right. Even though they're identical cousins, the audience really doesn't often confuse one for the other. Right. Those. Those kinds of things. Right. So what's going on? Yeah, so I guess one of my things is like, who is. What is the Patty Duke show? Right. Like it's in Brooklyn Heights. Where is it taking place? That kind of thing?
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New Books Network Host/Announcer
Well, it's.
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Carol Flynn
I mean, one of the things that we found really interesting and perhaps not surprising is that, of course, everyone is in on the joke. Audiences are never fooled. We were surprised that episodes did not try to trick the audience into taking one for the other. Occasionally, characters within the storylines did that. So we always know it's Patty Duke. And we are given really strong clues. Well, they're subtle, but they're evident. The hairstyle is slightly different, their clothing is slightly different, so we know who is who. And so the premise, of course, seems really rich in terms of opening up storylines for misunderstandings and mistaken identities and all that. And it makes good on that promise. But it also, I think, what impelled us more to write this book is that it shows the differences between them, offer really rich places to look at, like the differences between English culture and American culture. Patty Duke's Patty was the all American teen whose household Kathy Lane, who's essentially British, comes in to live with for a while. And Kathy Lane is not just. She's sort of a generic old school Brit, you know, very. A little bit stuffy. Her knowledge comes from Latin classes, reading books. Patti's knowledge, her fount of knowledge is popular culture, knowing the latest dance phases, who are the heartthrobs of the time. So even at that level, you get to compare and contrast. And this is anticipating the second part of the book a little bit. But for us, that showed a kind of curiosity that the 60s had about other cultures, especially European cultures that other shows didn't have. So we were surprised, though, that none of the episodes tried to confuse the audience. But in a way, it would have been kind of impossible because the whole. It's the Patty Duke show. It's not the Patty Duke and Kathy. Patty Lane and Kathy Lane show. It was one actor playing both.
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Dana Poland
And I think building on that, you know, going back to what I was saying before about the handlers were looking for something, some vehicle for her, a vehicle for her. A vehicle in which she could show off her acting talents. And it's interesting how many. We saw quite a number of episodes, not merely where the two of them are, where there's no confusion between the two of them, but if one of them is trying to be like the other, it'll start with a scene of the imitator sort of behind the scenes trying out her cousin's accent, sort of getting into the role. So you see them sort of rehearsing how they're going to be the other person. But more generally, and Carol said this, we were surprised at how. How few episodes. There were very few episodes that were based on confusion. Certainly not for the Spectator and often not even for characters within the show. People always seemed to like, one of them will show up at school, and the teacher immediately goes, hi, Kathy. The parents immediately know, even. Even though in the pilot it's all about confusion from beginning to end, they sort of drop that and it becomes simply two cousins who happen to look alike, but characterologically are very different. And then we follow out how different way. It's pretty much different ways of being a young woman in the 1960s. You know, you were asking about episodes. A good episode for us. There's one called how to Be Popular, and it's Kathy is Discover. Kathy's at a party that Patty's thrown and no one wants to dance with Kathy, so she runs off. She's despairing. She writes to an advice columnist for on how to Be Popular. And every bit of advice, when she applies it, she gets it totally wrong. And there's a kind of comic side to it, but there's also a very strongly pathetic side. You see this young woman struggling, trying to be liked, moping around, feeling terrible. Interestingly, it's one of the. It's one of the very few episodes. It's not the only episode that actually goes outside into the streets of New York as if in her torment, we have to see her alone in the big city and not sure of herself. And it's. So there's a lot of pathos. And it's a pathos often connected to what one girl is experiencing that the other girl is not. She's going through some situation. Another episode. Patty doesn't stay out late, but her dad thinks she did stay out late, and she just can't convince him that she was in by curfew. Time and again, lots of pathos, as she realizes her dad, who she thought would have faith in her, doesn't.
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Rebecca Buchanan
You know, one thing I think is interesting, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about is the fish filming of the show. Because it's the 1960s, it's one camera. It's two actors portraying, you know, or it's one actor portraying two characters. So can you talk a little bit about that actual production of the show and how that kind of worked?
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Dana Poland
Yeah, it wasn't the. It wasn't, for example, like I Love Lucy, which famously was three cameras. It was one camera with then the need to do the special Effect of having the girls side by side. And there they simply did some optical work which I can explain if you want. What's interesting is there are moments and we actually reproduce one of a frame in the book where you can actually see the line between the two sisters. They were, they were, you know, they would obscure part of the film, film one girl, obscure that part of the film, unobscure the other half film again. So they are sort of in the same space. Interestingly, Patti herself, Patty Duke, claims to have evolved a system for audio playback where she'd record one side of the conversation. And instead of simply an off screen person reading the lines, she was hearing her own voice in the guise of the other cousin. So she. It was kind of.
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New Books Network Host/Announcer
And she.
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Dana Poland
One of the things that you could
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Carol Flynn
get the timing down perfectly with that the reaction to my.
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Dana Poland
One of the things. She wrote three memoirs and in at least one of the memoirs she's constantly talking about this or that person as a method actor. She wasn't herself a method actor, but she was clearly concerned with some kind of similar to method acting, a sort of notion of inner authenticity. So even though she's faking the idea of being two cousins, she clearly wanted authentically for one cousin to be talking to the other. So instead of having, like I say, a prop person read the lines from off screen, it was important to her to be talking with herself, to be talking to another side of herself. They also had two different dressing rooms for her.
- [21:57]
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- [22:28]
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- [22:32]
Carol Flynn
Well yeah.
- [22:35]
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Oh yeah. Intense. Wanna see if you can handle the heat? Then try me with pickles or spicy mayo and jalapenos. Oh, and it's all just $4.99. That's a deal. Almost as hot as I am. Almost sweets? No spicy. See for yourself. $4.99 and only at 7:11. Followed through 8, 2546 participating stores only while supplies last visit store for full terms.
- [22:57]
Carol Flynn
Yeah, I was going to say jumping off that. It Wasn't just an impulse towards deep psychological realism. It was what she was ordered to do. She had one dressing room for Patty, one for Kathy, and she had to go back and forth and it drove her crazy and wasted a lot of time, but it was. They took the gimmick even to the production setup.
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Dana Poland
There are stories, we can get confirmation of this, but there are stories that it went even beyond production setting that, for example, her high school teachers were told, today she's going to be Kathy. Call us at the end of the day if she broke roll or today she's going to be Patty. So she was forced to be one or the other at different parts of her life.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Fascinating. So we've got this show, right? You've kind of situated it in the 60s. You talked a little bit about that. But one of the things in that sort of second part, you really kind of look at the idea. One of the ideas is sort of the twin, like twinning. And you look at doubling as well. Can you talk a little bit about twinning and how you kind of look at that historically and how you kind of situate like that? And then we can talk about how like the show situates in that idea or that concept.
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Carol Flynn
Well, the twinning. And we spend a fair amount of time talking about western ideas of twinning before the. Before the show. And the twinning and the idea of doubling has a really strong tradition in horror where you have the doppelganger, you have Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where you've got a self seeming person representing the complete opposite of the original one or an original being split in two. And this didn't completely go away in the 60s and 50s and 60s, I think of Tom Trieran's book and film the other you have horror films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Where there's a good sister and a bad sister, not quite twins. But what we found interesting is that in 60s culture, a little more generally, but certainly with the Patty Duke show, that horror tradition of twinning turned comedic and all of a sudden you could have twins in a comedy. And it being the source of gags, not horror and angst. And so you have movies like the Parent Trap where Hayley Mills plays two sisters of divorced parents and they discover they have. One is raised by the father, the other by the mother, and they meet in camp and discover that they're siblings and try to bring their parents back together again. So that shift in moving from horror to comedy we thought was big. And it was going on a little bit before, like in the 50s with movies with Jerry Lewis and even Elvis Presley played twins in a movie that was really terrible, but he did it. And so it was starting to shift. And you think also of all the multiple roles like the mouse that roared. And so you have, I think, a playfulness with the technology itself, that the technology could reproduce images and it would be funny and you'd have an awe from the technology itself being able to replicate one that isn't horrific. I think now the fantasies are more fears about, like the proliferation that AI can produce doubles without you having any idea what the original one was or which one is, quote, real. Whereas at the time, I think there was enough fascination with the technology and just the shift away from horror that we found really interesting. And as Dana was saying before, it gave us the opportunity to open up our sense of what though having two identical but different girls might mean for girls watching the show, it showed that there were more than one way. There was more than one way of living your life. And well, this gets into all sorts of episode gamuts, but that's some of the things we looked at with twinning.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah.
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Dana Poland
And one of the epiphanies we had early in the project was around because we had been talking about it as a 60s show. And one epiphany was about John Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy. I mean, his Nick, he's nicknamed Jack. So it's Jack and Jackie and they become in a way, doubles and in a manner that sort of parallels the Patty Duke show. One is more European in background and not literally European, but Jack. Jackie Kennedy has this kind of European side. She speaks multiple languages. She does the junior year abroad. John Kennedy is supposed to be all American and playing football on the White House lawn. If you know the best selling LP the First Family, that very much pinpoints that difference and how he's a man of the. He's an earthy guy and she's sophisticate and that sort of maps for us onto Hattie and Kathy, you know, And I think that connects up to something that maybe Carol will talk, could talk about, which is the show. We were struck by it, by the extent to which it's supposed to be in provincial Brooklyn Heights. But it's all about opening up to other worlds. And it has a kind of cosmopolitan air to it, or the guise of cosmopolitanism. Do you want to talk about that, Patty? I was going to call you Patti. Do you want to talk about that, Carol?
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Carol Flynn
Kathy? I'm happy to, yeah. I mean, part of the doubling wasn't just A twinning of character. But as we started getting into the meat of the matter, it was comparing Patti. There were so many episodes where she would enter contests or feel compelled to prove herself the all American teenage. She tried to be an all American teen writer. She wanted to be an all American teen pop singer. She took quizzes. Is she a normal all American teen? And this is contrasted very much with Kathy, who is again, this old world Brit, very old world, nothing contemporary or Rolling Stones about her.
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Dana Poland
She was so not Swinging London.
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Carol Flynn
Not Swinging London, Pop London, anything like that. And so we looked at the whole premise of bringing Kathy into the Lane household in Brooklyn Heights, we felt was part of its time. Because if you remember, Kennedy was really, first of all very youthful and asked American youth to get involved. And he also, through he devised the Peace Corps and things like that, urged a cosmopolitanism where Americans would not only be curious about other cultures, but actively engaged with them. This is really different from the 50s Cold War America, where we were isolationist and fearful of what other countries might do to us, was painting in very broad strokes, of course, But Kennedy in the Camelot era, and Kennedy's marriage itself showed that kind of embrace of a Europeanness. Right. And even though in the Patty Duke show, it was clearly done for laughs. But there's one episode where she tries to be a French chef, another where she tries to be a French writer. Actually, there's a lot of Frenchness in there. She tries to start businesses, but that's sort of a separate issue there. But there's this. There are really some racist episodes too, where there's a recognition. Patti inadvertently adopts a Korean War orphan. And it's the orphan shows up at the door. Interestingly, it's not played by a Korean actor, but the powers that be discovered there's been a mistake, and so the kid has to be removed from the home so that the episode returns to its premise at the end, which sitcoms always have to do. But even there, you've got a curiosity about other cultures and Patti's misguided attempt to do good. There's another episode where she starts a pen pal correspondence with the Soviet official that gets her into trouble with the CIA. But this engagement with other cultures and the fantasies about being able to do so. I mean, in the 60s, this is when air travel became affordable for. For middle class Americans for the first time. This was a time when there were a lot of movies, travel movies, travel comedies like if It's Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium and Der Brigitte, things like that. So we felt that it was, you know, it definitely did it under the guise of comedy. You know, we were not trying to dispute that and sometimes the premises were really silly. But we do feel the show was very much part of its time in that impulse that is with us a little bit, but not so much anymore. I mean we still have it with American curiosity about the British royals and the kind of almost twinning of William and Henry. Henry, not Henry. Harry. Thank you.
- [33:37]
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- [34:08]
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- [34:37]
Dana Poland
I mean, just let me maybe build on that idea of as you said, opening up to other cultures. I mean, one of the things that struck about struck us about the Patty Duke show was that even if things are returned back to family and domesticity in Brooklyn Heights, there's at least this gesture towards recognizing other worlds existing out there. And that seemed to us somewhat different than some of some other sitcoms of the time. One of our friends, Lynn Spiegel, has an excellent essay on the fantasy sitcoms of the 60s and how they recognize otherness through My Favorite Martian or Talking Horse or My Mother the Car. But here you have a show set people putatively in the real world in Brooklyn. But that's about France, that's about Russia, that's about the Korean War. And part of our argument is even if that openness gets closed off by the end of the episode, the very fact that it's raised at all for us was kind of revelatory. We had not remembered, I don't think either of us had seen the Patty Duke show In decades, we had not remembered episodes. And we were struck in going back through all those 103 episodes about how many were about the world or about things going on in the world. And Patti and Kathy either trying to bring worlds into the home or going out into the world. It could be. Doesn't have to be the globe. It could be going out into the world of politics, going out into the world of social engagement, bringing in not only others from other places, but others within America. So there's an episode in which a beatnik comes and lives with them. There's episodes. There's a. One of our favorite episodes was about Patti trying to bring Sammy Davis Jr. Into the school to perform at the school dance. And there's a kind of interesting engagement around race in that episode. There are episodes about teen sexuality, pregnancy. So we were struck by how, how much, how worldly the show was, even in a comic mode.
- [36:37]
Carol Flynn
And compare with a show like Gidget, which was another part of girl culture along with Barbie, that really started going into mass production in the 60s. Gidget, the one world she was concerned with was the beach. And even in Bewitched, which a lot of scholars have talked about as a sort of proto feminist show almost, that just stays within the world of, you know, witchcraft. Whereas Patty Duke, there's one episode where she tries to be a union organizer. I mean, it's all. It's goofy for sure, but she tries to unionize the kids in the household against the tyranny of the. Of the adults. And it's just. You're not going to see that on Gidget. And we were surprised to see it on Patty Duke. But it's again, these efforts to approach difference. And there's also just the sheer variety of gambits and things that Patti wants to try on that we thought was really important in other ways, too. And there's several episodes where she wants to become an entrepreneur. She tries to become a door to door saleswoman of this really weird weight loss contraption that jiggles on her waist. She tries a babysitting service, she tries a dressmaking business. So, like, all these aren't necessarily tied with foreignness, but they are tied with, as Dana put it, getting outside the house and not just being confined by the walls of a domestic sitcom. And even though they return to those walls and the bland normalcy, by the end, you've got these possibilities that we argue are really important to send as a message, if you will, to young girls growing up in this, let's face it, proto feminist era, where you know, you've got women thinking about their wives, about marriage being the inevitable conclusion of their lives, which Patty Duke show absolutely did not buy into. So we think all these escapades and journeys were pretty significant and unusual for their time.
- [39:14]
Dana Poland
I should. I'll jump in and just a digression. In talking about doubling, one of the things that Carol and I discovered is that we sort of became doubles at times during this project. We would not talk for a couple days and then suddenly both of us would send each other an email at like literally the same moment, often with the same insight. And I mentioned that because I was just about to jump in and say, you know, you were just talking about all the things Patti wants to be. It's very rare in the show, very, very rare in the show that one of the things she wants to be is a housewife. There is one episode where they think about what it would be like to be married and then they have nightmare visions. And it becomes this kind of literally goes into fantasy, that nightmarish fantasy, nightmare, fantasy, nightmare fantasy of how awful marriage would be. And that's the show we were really struck by how marriage phobic the show is. Marriage is not the end all, be all. Even though the one side of the 60s is pushing women towards that. We were very struck. One book we, we quote was a book that was very popular for dissident male youth in the 60s, and that's Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd. Growing Up Absurd. He talks about kids today. They're being forced into all these norms and they have to break free. They have to revolt. Now, of course, I'm not talking about women because all they're going to want to do is get, which I'm not even going to consider them. And that's exactly not the way Patty is. It's certainly there's less interaction of Kathy with potential boyfriends, but when she is interacting with boyfriends, there's also this kind of marriage phobia, one of the very strong. And it's also about the cosmopolitan. One of the very strong episodes is where the prince of some fictional Middle Eastern country or southeast Southeast Asian country falls in love with her and says he's going to bring her back to his country. And she, Kathy gets very invested in the idea this would be great because if I marry him, I could use all his riches to build up the infrastructure of this impoverished country. Then she discovers that he's intending her to be one of several wives. And she immediately says, that's not our way. That's. And Even though she's been British through the first seasons, she says that's not the American way. That's not our way. As if she's now adopted American mores.
- [41:35]
Carol Flynn
And even. Even the parents, when they think that Patty and her steady boyfriend are getting too serious, they start freaking out. There are a few episodes where there's an episode where they mistake. Someone mistakenly overhears them going to get a license, and it's a fishing license, and they think it's a marriage license, and the parents flip out the father especially. So there is this. There's no race towards the altar in this show. And we found that very interesting as well. I mean, we're not trying to argue that it's a, quote, feminist text. We're really not concerned with the politics of the show so much as just how it feeds into and as part. An active part of larger cultural tropes of the time.
- [42:32]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, I thought, and you mentioned this a little like with Gidget and that kind of thing. But I also thought it was interesting how the show kind of. I don't know if it's. I don't know if ties together is the right word, but you talk about, like, a lot of sitcoms around just boys and men, right? Like My Three Sons, different things like that. And then. Then the sort of Gidget and that kind of thing. And the Patty Duke show holds this sort of different place in television history and especially history at that time. And I don't know if you want to talk a little bit more about that or how it's positioned around these other sitcoms that were coming out before it or during that time.
- [43:17]
Carol Flynn
If you're talking about. There's two ways we can look at this. There's looking at it in terms of other sitcoms more generally and looking at it as a piece of girl culture, which I think is what you're asking. Girl culture was interesting insofar it was in the 50s. Speaking broadly, it's like pop culture became aware of the. The male teenager's purse strings that he could rock and roll and things like that were pitched more to young men and boys. Whereas in the 60s, if all of a sudden mass culture realized that there was money from young girls or young girls asking their parents. And so this is when you have Barbie really taking off. You have the Gidget franchise.
- [44:11]
Dana Poland
You've got Patty Duke, King Beat magazines, Tiger Beat. Yeah, right.
- [44:16]
Carol Flynn
Tiger Beat and all these sorts of things. Calling all girls 17 had started in the 40s, so the wheel started turning after World War II. But it really started going into high gear in the 60s. But even if you take something like calling all girls or these magazines, they would ask quizzes. They were all about dating. They were all about how attractive you were. And Patty Duke just was not there. I mean, when there were quizzes that they took, like when Kathy had to take a quiz to see if she's a wallflower or not, and she learns that she is, they're sent up because they are ridiculous. And Patty Duke was. Never had this assumption of dating being. I mean, there were some. A lot of episodes about dating, but it didn't have the prominence in the show that it did say in Gidget, where she's only. What's his name? Moondogy. Moondogy. Her boyfriend worried about things with him. Patty Duke's got a steady boyfriend, but he's so inert, basically to feckless guy. He's taken for granted. There's no real sparks there. So we thought it was interesting that this show, despite being a very active part of pop culture at the time, directed at girls, wasn't skewing towards this pro marriage or even pro dating message. That's a little different, though, than Patty Duke's pop singing career, such as it was. Because those songs were mostly covers of. Yeah. Of love ballads and insipid pop songs of the time.
- [46:11]
Dana Poland
Yeah. One episode that sort of fits what Carol was just saying. And I'm gonna. I think it's called the Boy Next Door. Maybe not. Or Invisible Boy. The Invisible Boy. There's a neighbor that Patty has decided she has a crush on. And the conceit of the episode is that we never see him in his entirety. He's. He comes behind a wall, he's fixing a car, so you only see his legs. And the idea is, even though he's an object of desire, supposedly he's also just interchangeable parts. He could be any boy. He. He doesn't have any solidity to him. And what's.
- [46:45]
Rebecca Buchanan
What.
- [46:46]
Dana Poland
What's interesting with Richard, Patty's nominal boyfriend, that he's also. Doesn't have much solidity. He's just kind of dweeby. And he's like. As Carol was saying, he's taken for granted. He's not really a figure of attraction. Of attraction. He's in the tradition. A few years later, there's that girl where Marlo Thomas, her. Her boyfriend is Donald. And everybody who watched that show, the question is, what is. What does Anne Marie see in Donald? And the same question comes up. What does Patty see in Richard? Were not. It's never made clear. So it almost undercuts teen love, puppy love, all those kinds of things that girls are singing about in girl groups at the beginning of the 60s, you know, the. The big moment of the girl groups is 61 to 63, right when the Patty Duke show starts. And she does covers of those. But she's already in some different mode where teen romance is not the end all, be all. Yeah, she can go out and be entrepreneurial, as Carol was saying, in a way that Gidget never does. There is one episode where Gidget sort of becomes political. She meets a beatnik played by the future film director Henry Janglin, who just died recently, and he says, what are you doing for the world? And she decides to protest her local movie theater because it has differential pricing for daytime and evening. And that's as far as her politics goes. Whereas Patty and Kathy campaign for a local congressional race. They talk about civics, they go out and do things in the world. You know, Another thing we talk about is, traditionally, especially in the 60s, when you had things like Tiger Beat and all the heartthrob boys, is this idea that girls are nothing but mindless, screaming, you know, monkeys. The girls are going crazy over the monkeys or whatever. Patty is rarely like that. She's rarely a kind of mindless consumer. The mindless consumer in the show is Richard, who's mindlessly, endlessly consuming food. He's voraciously shoving things down his throat. He never has an entrepreneurial idea in his head, whereas Patti endlessly does.
- [48:57]
Rebecca Buchanan
I do have to ask you, because you bookend with the theme song, so could you talk a little bit about the Patty Duke theme song and why it's important as well, and sort of. And sort of how it kind of helped you sort of frame this show.
- [49:16]
Carol Flynn
Well, I want to ask you, was this a song you were familiar with?
- [49:19]
Rebecca Buchanan
No, I had to go listen to it. And you know what? Because it's so funny, because I was thinking about this, because I watched lots of other sitcoms on Nick at night that were during the same time period, but not really the Patty Duke show, right?
- [49:37]
Carol Flynn
It's a period of amazing theme songs, right? Like Gilliken's Island, Beverly Hillbillies, A Horse Is a Horse.
- [49:44]
Dana Poland
Of course.
- [49:45]
Rebecca Buchanan
Of course, Mr. Aaron the horse Is the Famous.
- [49:48]
Carol Flynn
You know, and all these, you know, these theme songs, through their lyrics, spell out the premises of these silly shows. And what we found wasn't too surprising. But despite this kind of cultural amnesia about the Patty Duke show or
- [50:09]
Rebecca Buchanan
its
- [50:09]
Carol Flynn
lack of a long tail, let's just say the people who did know it knew the theme song. And they started with. When we would say we're doing a book on the show, people would inevitably start singing pieces of the theme song. So for audiences of a certain age, not necessarily like boomers who might have seen it growing up, but people who might have seen it at Nick at night or in later syndication, it was this. The theme song was very evocative of the show. And it was in the credit sequence and through the theme song that you get Kathy and Patti opposed. I mean, the subtitle of our book is called Hot Dogs and Crepe Suzette because there's a ridiculous line in the lyrics. Kathy adores the minuet ballets and Crepe Suzette, Ballet Russes and Crepe Suzette where Patti likes to rock and roll, a hot dog makes her lose control, which is the weirdest line in the universe. But people remember that. And so you've got even these gastronomical divisions separating these two out before even the show begins through the theme song. So it is very memorable. It's very catchy.
- [51:37]
Dana Poland
Yeah. And it's curious. I mean, we obviously were writing about the Patty Duke show, not about these other shows, but I would guess if we had said we're writing about Gilligan's Island, a person wouldn't immediately burst into a. A three hour tour. They would talk about the premise of the show, Gilligan the Skipper.
- [51:55]
Rebecca Buchanan
Who's your favorite?
- [51:56]
Carol Flynn
Who their favorite character was. Ginger. Ginger or Marianne.
- [52:01]
Dana Poland
But anybody who grew up with the Patty Duke show, the first thing they would do is start singing lyrics. We mentioned this in the book. One of our friends who teaches at Vassar, we were surprised because she didn't remember the theme song at all. And she remembered episodes, whereas none of it. We didn't remember episodes. And she was the oddity in that respect. Yeah. How, how can she not remember the theme song? It was, it was the one exception to the case. But as Carol said, for us it was important not only as a catchy theme song in a period of catchy theme songs, because it's one that lays out the thematic oppositions that drive the show. You know, Gilligan's Island. That song basically says they're stranded, Branded. Says he's branded and has to hear his name. But here's one that talks about cultural oppositions, political oppositions, biographical oppositions between the two, the two cousins.
- [52:57]
Rebecca Buchanan
So one last question, because we've been talking a while and it's kind of a self promotion so the book is out now so people can get the book. Is there anything else either of you are working on? Anything with the book or. Yeah. Like last words you want to say about this book or any other sort of projects you're working on?
- [53:15]
Carol Flynn
Well, this is. I'll just start. Dana will probably have more to say about this than I do. It's curious that we've largely been, especially me, film critics and scholars. Dana has written a few books on television shows, but this was our first long book, concerted book on tv. And it was just such a joy to dive into it. And one of the chapters that we do have in the book looks at Patty Duke in relation to other sitcoms of the era. And it was just so wonderful reviewing all the literature on sitcoms of that time. So there was a lot of pleasure in and doing this book. But Dana will have more to say on this as well.
- [54:08]
Dana Poland
Well, Carol and I talked about this a couple weeks ago. I think one thing that this book represents in both of our careers is we both started with studies that were much more general, like Carol writing on New German cinema, Carol writing on music overall in the Hollywood system. And bit by bit, we paralleled each other in writing more about more individual phenomena and the ramifications of individual phenomena. So Carol writing on the Sound of Music, Ethel Merman. It's an entire career, but it's still one figure. And I think my last books have been single. Single object focused. Whether I did a book on the Great Escape. I've done these little BFI books. I have one coming out on Goodfellas. So this idea of taking one single thing and studying all its ramifications and discovering that that actually opens you up to larger history. You can't talk about the Patty Duke show on the one hand, without talking about the 60s. You can't talk about it also, though, without talking about how it's like. And unlike other sitcoms, I would just say that again, as completists, there were moments where there wasn't that pleasure that Carol was talking about.
- [55:21]
Rebecca Buchanan
I.
- [55:22]
Dana Poland
You know, we did. We did a lot of division of labor. And one of the things I did, I don't think this was like an assignment, but I took on watching a lot of Miley Cyrus's show because there was one episode where she has a twin. And I must say, there were moments where that was a real slog.
- [55:39]
Carol Flynn
Yeah. I was very generous in giving you those. Giving you that work, wasn't I?
- [55:45]
Dana Poland
Yes.
- [55:46]
Rebecca Buchanan
Oh, that is great again. Well, thank you so much, Carol Lynn. And Dana Poland, thanks for talking to me on the New Books Network about the Patty Duke show and the American 60s.
- [55:59]
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