Looking back at 'The Patty Duke Show' and the '60s

"They laugh alike, they walk alike. At times they even talk alike. You can lose your mind, When cousins are two of a kind."

Even if your memory is hazy on any of the plots from "The Patty Duke Show," chances are you remember the lyrics from the catchy theme song. The identical cousins in question were both portrayed by Duke in her self-titled sitcom that ran from 1963 to 1966. Fresh from her Oscar-winning turn in "The Miracle Worker," Duke played the dual role of prim Brit Cathy Lane and her American cousin, Patty Lane, the high-spirited Brooklyn Heights teen for whom "a hot dog makes her lose control."

Now media historians Caryl Flinn and Dana Polan take a deep dive into the series in "The Patty Duke Show and the American Sixties: Hot Dogs and Crêpes Suzette" (Oxford University Press, $39.95). Newsday recently spoke to the authors via Zoom about the book, which looks at the history of the show and its cultural significance.

Did you grow up watching the show?

Flinn: For me it was a little bit later, in syndication, but it was a part of my childhood for sure.

Polan: I was contemporaneous with the show. I never thought of watching "Gidget," but this was a show I regularly watched along with some others. There was a lot that we had misremembered, mostly in the tone of the show. I don’t think we remembered how much Cathy gets sidelined in the narratives, especially in the third season. And we didn’t remember how interested in the times it was. There are episodes about politics, there are father-daughter issues, the generation gap.

Flinn: And even teen pregnancy.

Polan: There's an episode where her dad thinks Patty and [her boyfriend] Richard are running off to elope. Her dad has been running articles in his paper about teenage runaway girls, so it’s clearly about sex without saying it.

The show also liked to focus on what was happening in other parts of the world at the time.

Flinn: There's a lot of curiosity about other cultures in the show. There’s an episode where Patty wants to be a French cook. She wants to be the girlfriend of her French teacher. She inadvertently adopts a Korean War orphan. So there’s these brushes with other cultures that are there from the start by bringing Cathy, a Brit, into the home. One of the connections we make in the book is that this really lined up with this curiosity about the world and the effort to do good in the world that [President John F.] Kennedy was encouraging. That curiosity about other cultures, you don’t see that in other sitcoms of the time.

Music really played an important part in that show, even to Patty Duke herself becoming a singer.

Flinn: ABC, her producers, really pushed Patty Duke into being a pop star, like they did with Paul Petersen from "The Donna Reed Show," poor Peggy Lipton from "The Mod Squad" and Sally Field ["Gidget"], who could sing as well as the chair I’m sitting in.

Polan: We obviously appreciate Patty Duke, but her recording career was pretty dreadful.

Flinn: She said herself she was no singer and was not proud of it. The musical style, the orchestrations and the breathiness of her delivery were just reminiscent of other singers.

Taking the music theme further, singers like Frankie Avalon and Chad and Jeremy appeared on the show.

Flinn: The whole show is linked to this soft pop that teenagers weren’t listening to. There’s no indication that the Rolling Stones or The Who existed. And Cathy representing England could have brought that in with London and the Mods. Instead Cathy is linked to this proper, stuffy England with good manners and wearing tiaras with her gowns.

The show only last three years. If it had stayed on longer, do you think it would have dealt with some of the heavier issues going on in the country?

Polan: The third season has some good episodes but you could see the show going into silliness and frivolity. Now is that because they’ve already given up or was the quality just declining? If it was that the quality was declining, then the quality would have continued to decline if there was a fourth or fifth season. ... There were more episodes planned but the minute problems occurred — the ratings were falling precipitously — it got canceled.

There were other things. Patty's hitting maturity, she’s breaking away from her handlers, she’s declaring her independence. In 1967, she’s making "Valley of the Dolls," which is really her declaration" that I'm going to be different from "The Patty Duke Show."

Flinn: She was kind of a Miley Cyrus ahead of her time.