The Boyhood Brian Keith Won’t Talk About…

But His Mother Will

This story will make you weep, make you laugh and make you wonder how Brian became the man he is today

Brian Keith’s mother, Helena Shipman Keith, is a humorous woman, an emotional woman. Once a successful actress in the theater herself, Mrs. Keith knows better than most mothers what her son has been through on the way to success. Because she knows the score, she sentimentalizes nothing. “I didn’t know until recently that Brian realized that I’d given up the theater for him,” she says. “But it’s true. I ran a gift and art shop near Columbia University, in New York, for 25 years. It seemed more reliable than show business, although I’d done very well. Soon after Bob Keith and I were married, we were playing stock in New Orleans when a producer named John Golden, visiting there, dropped by to see our play. Mr. Golden had a play ready to go in New York, and wanted to know if I would come to New York and play the lead. It was like the scene in a corny movie. ‘Mr. Keith and I haven’t been married very long,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t come without my husband.’ He didn’t want Mr. Keith, and I had to haggle—and that’s how we made the big time in New York. The first thing you know, I was pregnant. I worked right up until the end of September, and Brian was born in November, in Bayonne, New Jersey, where his dad was on the road. A few months later I was back on the road. I hadn’t wanted to go when the baby was so young; the producer was very persuasive. He’d have milk delivered for the baby at every hotel and the advance man would make arrangements in each town for a reliable woman to babysit while we were at the theater. True to tradition, Brian slept in the bottom dresser drawer right beside me. He never complained, but I worried and worried. Finally, when we were playing Milwaukee, the baby became really ill, and I was so scared I paid to have another actress brought out from New York for the part. I took my baby and went home. I had worked and worked to get somewhere in the theater. I’d come a long way from Aberdeen, Washington, to Broadway.

“Once I had this child, I didn’t care if I ever worked again. I guess I was hung up on being a mother as Brian is now on being a father. Big Bob, though, gave me a hard time: He never seemed to care about the boy. How could you have any kind of a marriage with a man who felt that way? By the time Brian was three, it was all over. I was afraid of my husband by that time. He was drinking heavily. And I was so worried about Brian. I knew I had to separate them. Our priest at the Actors’ Church said, ‘Helena, you’ve got to move away. You’ve got a lovely child and you have your own health and the child’s health.’ So I took Brian to live with my mother in Tacoma, Washington. I got a job with a summer stock company in Seattle. After two seasons, I was so lonely for my little boy that when we ended the second season in Portland, I just picked up my child, my mother, and my grandmother and brought them back to New York with me.”

Never one word from Brian’s father. Helena wanted the child to grow up in the country, so she got a place on Long Island and commuted to the theater in New York. The country was okay with Brian. He’d had one taste of show business and didn’t like it. At three, he’d been backstage with his mother one day when star Thomas Meighan dropped by. Meighan insisted that Brian be in the picture. There were klieg lights in those days, and Brian was frightened. There were wires all over the floor; they, too, scared the little boy. His mother laughs about it: “The way he held up production!”

An actor? Never

It seemed the last thing in the world Brian ever thought of was acting. He grew up as far away from it as possible. Even when they took an apartment in the city because Helena was working in radio—as soon as spring came, they moved back to Long Island.

“I realize now that it was really unfair to switch him from school to school. In town he’d go to the parochial school down the block, but come May, out we’d go to country, and he’d have to switch schools. He got bounced around. I realized, too, that it must have been pretty lonely for Brian. I was only home in the evenings. Being with his grandma and great-grandma was quite a generation gap for him. I was always trying to find some child to play with Brian. When my mother was hospitalized once, we met a woman who was ill and worried about her large family. We borrowed her little boy, he was three and a half then, and Brian was nine but wonderful with this little child. The boy came out to Long Island every summer until he was fourteen. He called Brian ‘Captain,’ and Brian called him ‘Squirt.’”

They had another visitor once when Brian was eight. His father. He’d been in California working in films, had married several times, and now came back East and out to see them at the beach. It was like a scene from another movie. The beautiful little boy, the father suddenly realizing what he’d thrown away. They were strangers.

When they met again, it was years later, backstage on Broadway at a rehearsal of Mr. Roberts. On one side of the stage, the principals were with star Henry Fonda; on the other side, a bunch of unknowns with small parts, among them—Brian Keith. Producer Josh Logan had once seen Brian in a semi-professional acting group. In one scene, Brian’s shirt was yanked off. Logan was impressed with his build and thought of a scene in his forthcoming play. So, there was Brian on stage with Fonda, the star

Help in career

In later years a lot of people thought Brian’s father had helped him get into the theater. Not true. He neither encouraged him nor helped him. It was his mother who urged Brian into the theater. When he came back from the Marines, at loose ends, not knowing what to do with himself, it was she who suggested drama school. Then, she contacted an old friend, Arthur Bouvier, who was directing a stock company in Connecticut. It was he who gave Brian his first break. “Unless this kid falls down and breaks both his legs, he’ll go to the top of this business,” Arthur told Helena. “His sense of comedy, his timing, is great.” And he was right. Brian was to do well, first in theater, then in Hollywood. Now, he’s starring in a most popular television series.

It’s not surprising, too, that as time goes by, Brian tries to keep his private life increasingly private. “Last time he was worrying about his privacy,” his mother said, “I reminded him that when he was a youngster going with a pretty young Irish girl, her mother was always talking about how wonderful it would be if he could be a policeman. That was when he was in his teens, before he’d enlisted in the Marines. ‘If you’d been a policeman, you’d have all the privacy you want. Which is best, Brian?’ He laughed then.”

What is more surprising is that Brian, whose lonely childhood made family life so important to him, should see his marriage of almost fifteen years totally collapse. On May 2, in Los Angeles Superior Court, Judith Keith filed for divorce, charging Brian with extreme cruelty.

Before a Superior Court commissioner, Judith explained her allegation. “Judge, he’s been on location for some time; and on Dec. 3, 1967, he came to me and said that he was moving out and that he no longer wanted to live at home.

“I was quite shocked and I asked him if we could work with a counselor. He agreed, and apparently it did not do any good because at the end of this last October, he said he had no intention of coming back and he wanted a divorce.

“I mentioned that we would have to have lawyers and he said, ‘You mean like you have to have undertakers?’ And I said, ‘I guess so.’”

This course of conduct, she related, caused her to become very nervous and upset and she had to see a physician.

Mrs. Keith’s testimony was supported by her close friend Mrs. Elizabeth V. Christiansen. “I have been present in their home on many instances when his verbal cruelty was evidenced. There were other arguments that were very embarrassing to her when guests were present,” said Mrs. Christiansen. “I saw a great change in her from the first time I knew her 13 years ago.”

Those were the carefree days, Mrs. Keith may have recalled, as she sat in a chair at the counsel table before the court and listened to the testimony.

Then, the brief proceedings were over as the couple’s property settlement agreement was approved by the court and incorporated as part of the interlocutory decree of divorce.

The court granted Brian and Judith joint custody of their four children, though they will live with Judith in line with both parents’ wishes. For, no matter how much they disagreed with one another, the Keiths share an abiding love for their children: Barbara, 10; Betty, eight; Rory, seven; Mimi; seven. In fact, the welfare of the youngsters was a key factor in the property agreement.

And this is perhaps the saddest aspect of all, when you consider how much Brian knows, from personal experience, about the effects of divorce on children. That he will do everything possible to avoid upsetting their lives is only too clear. In the court record it was noted that, “the parties acknowledge and agree that each of them has great love and affection for their children.”

Brian Keith’s own life is a living testament to the fact that “what was” will not destroy “what is to be.” It’s the least a man can do. A good man, a big man, like the son of Mrs. Helena Shipman Keith undoubtedly is.