When home is a soundstage...
How does a "family" really live?

By Leslie Raddatz

Television is nothing if not a family thing.

As family entertainment it has, of course, long since replaced the stereoscope, the gramophone, mah-jongg and parcheesi.

Then there are the family shows, all the way from the primordial Stu Erwin, through Lucy of the Golden Years, to Gentle Ben, which goes them all one better by including a black bear in the familial unit.

But any long-running television show, over and above any of this, actually becomes a family unto itself. In the five years of The Dick Van Dyke Show Dick and his on-the-air wife, Mary Tyler Moore, spent more time together--and there is no hint of hanky-panky intended here--than they did with their respective families; and in 13 years of Gunsmoke Amanda Blake has certainly seen more of James Arness than of two or three husbands who have come and gone during the same period.

Thus it would seem that from any angle CBS's Family Affair would be the ultimate family thing, with its cozy title, its two father images in the persons of Brian Keith and Sebastian Cabot, and its three cute, cute, cute children.

Somehow it doesn't quite work out that way, except on the air, of course, which is what pays off in the show's consistently high ratings. But in the sense of a cast's becoming a unit on the set, each of Family Affair's principals, with the exception of the two small children, Anissa Jones and Johnnie Whitaker, seems to go his own way and keep his own council.

Not that there are any feuds in the group. Keith, the top-billed star, doesn't mind a bit that Cabot, the ham eternal, gets more publicity than he does. In fact, that's the way he likes it. According to the program's publicity man, "Keith hates publicity, Sabby loves it."

The 46-year-old Keith, although his entire background is theatrical, is a reticent, retiring man who makes a point of not being a part of the Hollywood scene. With his wife, the former actress-ballerina Judy Landon, he is one of a handful of showbusiness personalities--Ralph Edwards, Robert Stack, Fred Astaire, Irene Dunne, Ann Blyth and, remember him? Randolph Scott--who are accepted in Los Angeles society, which bears no relationship to the Hollywood society once interred in these pages by Cleveland Amory.

Keith is a devout Catholic, who had religious books in his dressing room. One Christmas, when he was asked to pose for a publicity picture with the children standing in front of a stained-glass window, he said, "To hell with that--I'm not going to exploit religion." Yet he starred in the rather gamy movie Reflections in a Golden Eye, which was condemned by the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, successor to the Legion of Decency. Keith says, "I don't want to play the same guy all the time. I've got three or four scripts at home in which I play somebody's father or uncle, but it's the same old junk. I like to play characters."

Keith's affection for the Family Affair children is generally acknowledged. One person close to the show says, "He's strictly a four-letter guy, but the minute he sees a child he absolutely melts." Another says, "The warmth between Brian and the kids isn't put on;" and the program's director, veteran Charles Barton, agrees: "Brian really loves these kids--it's the love that makes the show so real."

But on the set he seems to remain aloof from them and from other cast members. In fact, like as not he will be found sound asleep somewhere on the soundstage. "He is one of these guys who can fall asleep anywhere," says director Barton. Sometimes it will be in his dressing room but often it will be in a handy chair, in the bed of one of the sets not currently in use or even stretched out on the counter on the set of what was once his bachelor apartment.

As might be expected, Sebastian Cabot also believes in making himself comfortable while at work. Instead of the conventional Hollywood director's chair, he sits between takes in a large black leather armchair. After each scene a prop man takes his coat and umbrella, but he keeps his bowler on. He says, "I have one of those heads that I can't put a hat on without mussing my hair. That's why you will never see me take my hat off on-screen--I always pretend that I have just taken it off when I enter a room." Since his operation last year, Cabot is some 50 pounds lighter--he is down to 245--and he does not eat as heavily as he once did. "He used to inhale the food," says someone who knows him.

His relationship with the children in the cast seems more distant than Brian Keith's. Where they call Keith by his first name, they always address Sabby as "Mr. Cabot." This, according to one observer, may be "because of Cabot's beard and girth" rather than because of any coolness on the part of the gregarious Britisher. In fact, one has the feeling that his attitude toward the children is much like that of French, the character he plays in Family Affair -- a gruff exterior which covers a true affection. Thus, when someone said, "The kids are the catalysts that make the show go," Cabot said, "You know that's not true -- Brian and I are the catalysts that make the kids look good." But he said it with tongue in bearded cheek.

The kids--the little ones, that is--probably really are what makes the show go. This was not anticipated. An associate of Edmund Hartman and Don Fedderson, creators of Family Affair, says, "The program was originally conceived as an adult show with kids in it, but it has turned out to have great kid appeal."

Between June and November, when the season's episodes are shot, Anissa Jones and Johnnie Whitaker are together almost constantly during the five days a week the law allows them to work. Three hours each day must be spent in school--a tiny cubbyhole of a room at the far end of the soundstage. When it is time to work, school stops, and assistant director Johnny Gaudioso carries them on his shoulders back to the set. Then it is back to school again. Anissa says, concerning her ability to switch almost instantly from one environment to another, "I have a little stop watch in my mind. When I go out on-stage, click, I turn this off and that on." At 10, Anissa is two years older than Johnnie; she is in the fifth grade, he in the third.

The children's teacher is Mrs. Catherine Deeney, who has been doing this sort of thing off and on since 1936 and whose past pupils have included such Wunderkinder as Shirley Temple and Jane Withers. Of the Family Affair children she says, "They are normal children, but brighter. The problem is to keep them at grade level, so that they won't be ahead of their classes when they go back to their regular schools." She adds, "They live in an adult world, holding their own as adults. I try to encourage them to be children."

Anissa Jones is of Lebanese extraction--her name, pronounced Ah-nees-ah," means "little friend" in Lebanese. She, her divorced mother and her younger brother live on the beach at Playa del Rey, Cal. She is more precocious than Johnnie, but she seems to take herself and her acting less seriously than he does. Johnnie, for instance, burst into tears one day when he could not remember his lines. On his first acting job, he was supposed to cry. A Method actor at 3, he said, "I have to get ready." He turned his face to the wall, then turned back crying. Anissa, on the other hand, can't see anything to get excited about in acting and is at a complete loss to know why people want to see stars. "There's this great guy, Earl," she says, referring to a 60-year-old former circus clown and juggler named Earl Graham, the superintendent of service on the set, whose picture she has in her dressing room and whom she insists she is going to marry.

Johnnie has an autographed picture of Don Adams of Get Smart in his dressing room, and he has an unabashed crush on Anissa. His affection, as noted, is not returned, although the children are completely congenial and have lunch together on the set each day. "But sometimes she gets fed up with him," says director Barton. "She's older, you know."

The two children are the center of attraction at their daily lunches, surrounded by their attentive mothers and other women who work on the show. They keep up a continual line of chatter, one sometimes beginning a story and then stopping at a crucial point to let the other take it up.

Johnnie is one of eight children in a Mormon family that lives in the un-Hollywood suburb of San Fernando. His mother says, "Sometimes it's dark when he gets home, but if it's still light, he can hardly wait until I stop the car because he wants to play so much." But he knows that work comes first.

The final member of the Family Affair family and the one who seems most apart from the group is Kathy Garver. She got the part of the teenage Sissy (sic) because she looks younger than she really is. This means that the producers do not have to worry about having a teacher or welfare worker on the set to look after her or limiting her to five days' work a week. Actually she does attend school during the show's hiatus. She goes to UCLA, where she has another semester before getting her degree in speech. Meanwhile, she lives with her parents in a Hollywood apartment.

When Kathy was interviewed for the part in Family Affair, she thought that her chances were nil. "The rest of the cast are blonde and blue-eyed, and I have brown eyes and my hair was dark. But they wanted somebody over 18 who could play a 15-year-old, so I got the job." Then she adds, "Anyway, I have the same shape face as Brian--parallel trapezoid."

Thus the family of Family Affair ends up really not being much of a family at all but five separate individual individuals. Perhaps Anissa's mother put it best when she said, "She's very possessive about being herself--not just being one of the twins. She's got this thing about being the center of things."

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