Don’t forget her recording career:
Recordings are still available on Amazon...Should have stuck to crepes Suzette. 
Back in the '80s, she was Martha Washington in that awful George Washington miniseries (which, it would seem, has been mercifully forgotten).
You’re most welcome! 
And in turn, thank you for the additional info about Ms. Duke’s further WML appearances…I honestly was going to be quite surprised if what I posted was her only 70’s WML appearance, especially as active as she was for the most part with 70’s game shows.* BTW, that Mark Goodson Wiki entry you linked to is by far the BEST episode guide for 70’s WML…even if it’s not complete, it’s pretty darn close to it (which is impressive in this day and age of GSN not showing as many of the classics/semi-classics as they once did and could again, and having to rely on YouTube).
-
- Particularly Match Game, Hollywood Squares, Password Plus (I recall at least a couple or more weeks where Patty appeared alongside then-hubby, John Astin), and now WML can be added.
Boo - fucking - hoo. I wish I had it so badly.
Cool story, Bro: my Dad was a guest on “What’s My Line” back in the 60’s. No celebrity, but was a salesman in a company that sold leather goods made from tanned salmon skin produced by the Ainu in Hokkaido. Anita Gillette sussed it out in like, 30 seconds, that batch.
Cool story 2: My mom was a contestant on the original “Concentration” game show. She lost
/okay, so maybe not so cool story.
// I evidently come from a long line of losers
///but my Aunt once won the big prize on “Let’s Make A Deal.”
I wouldn’t trade lives with her.
And if extended to the 80’s, throw $25,000 Pyramid and Super Password in there too.
You wish you were given away by your parents at 8 to a couple who exploited you while abusing her sexually and embezzling from you then grew into a young adult with an undiagnosed and unmedicated cyclical psychosis that caused you to be alternately promiscuous, suicidal, physically and emotionally abusive to those you loved, extravagant, and delusional? Hell, I don’t even want the hardships that come with camping, but to each his own.
Bit off topic, but the main thing I remember about that miniseries, other than it being excruciatingly boring,was Barry Bostwick talking about going to channelers to talk to George Washington when he was researching the character. He said that George talked freely about several things, but refused to talk about his relationship with Sally Fairfax. ( I wonder if George had seen Rocky Horror.)
Duke said in her autobiography that she considered a professional nadir when she played a spider-woman hybrid with some sort of breathing apparatus connected to her. I don’t know the name of the movie; does anybody?
Is this the one?
“Curse of the Black Widow”.
Curse of the Black Widow (TV Movie 1977) - IMDb
So do I.
Kind of odd to think of people who were such household names living as middle class as any white collar worker, but I guess it happens.
I usually check IMDb; under “self” it lists things like game show and talk show appearances. It has very little info on the 1968-75 syndicated version of What’s My Line, though. That’s when I searched and found that wiki.
In addition to the shows you listed, IMDb credits Patty with a few appearances on Tattletales. The same channel where I’ve been watching What’s My Line? has been running that, too. For those who don’t remember, three celebrity couples would be contestants; one member of each couple would be secreted off-stage, and host Bert Convy would ask the on-stage celebs a question about some event that happened with their spouse. The spouse then had to tell the same story from a vague hint. I can’t help but wonder why someone saved the tapes of those shows, where they’ve been sitting all this time, and what else is there.
They’ve been leaving in the original commercials in What’s My Line?, by the way, which are utterly fascinating.
I liked it.
Beaten to the punch, but yes, Curse of the Black Widow.
Must be. I’d love to see it just to see how bad it is.
As a huge fan of Rosemary’s Baby I watched her TV sequel, Whatever Happened to Rosemary’s Baby?, when it was on late night once. You could tell immediately without looking it up that Ira Levin had nothing to do with this one; it was absolute dreck. Patty as Rosemary was demonically dispatched pretty quickly and her baby grew to adulthood faster than a soap opera kid. The only major connection to the original was Ruth Gordon as Minnie Kastevet (Ray Milland took over the role of her husband, Sidney Blackmer having wisely died in order to avoid appearing in this one) and not even her scenery chewing was watchable.
Curse of the Black Widow couldn’t have been much worse.
There is also the identical cousin Betsy from Chattanooga to worry about.
She did seem to have awful taste in scripts, or an agent who secretly hated her.
I watched a lot of her horrible Lifetime movies, because if the script was even mediocre, she could turn out a really good performance. Of course, because it was Lifetime, sometimes the films were Serial Apist II, and even Helen Mirren couldn’t have done anything with them.
Fun Fact: It was established in the unaired pilot (set in San Francisco) that Patty and Cathy were identical cousins because their fathers were twin brothers.*
*I wondered about this for fifty years before I finally learned why!
The thread title “dead at 69” did make me think that a hot dog made her lose control.
How is that not known? They used to show both fathers on the phone with each other all the time, both played by William Shallert.
I saw her on some gameshow alongside her son Mackenzie Astin, and it kinda blew my mind that she was the mother of Andy from Facts of Life. If I’d known then that she was also the mother of Mikey from the Goonies, AND that Gomez Addams was their father (or “father” as the case may be) I might never have recovered.
Shame Nick at Night turned to garbage and doesn’t show old B&W stuff like her show any more.