MOVIES - July 6, 1987

Screen Actors Guild President Patty Duke says she was a confused young girl who was manipulated, abused and given drugs by the couple who managed her career. In her new autobiography, “Call Me Anna,” Dukes says she was devastated when her managers, Ethel and John Ross, forced her to change her name. “OK, Anna Maria is dead,” they told her. “You’re Patty now.” “It was as if she really did die,” Duke says in the book, which is excerpted in People magazine. Duke writes that when she was making it big on Broadway at age 13 in “The Miracle Worker,” the Rosses began giving her drugs like Thorazine and phenobarbital. “Ethel would say to me, ‘OK, you have to take your happy pill now because you’ve got to go to sleep so you’ll be bright eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning,’ ” Duke writes.