Brian Keith: "God gave me 16 children to love"

By Dean Gautschy

It couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy. One who loved children more. Or had less chance to enjoy them in his own childhood. Brian Keith's early life has been described as "born in a trunk and raised on the rails." His father (Robert Keith) and mother (Helena Shipman) were both well-known performers and he accompanied them on tour. No brothers and sisters to play with backstage. No close pals at the various schools he attended around the country.

But he's more than making up for that lack today! Ever since Brian opened his brawny arms to a winsome trio of young orphans on CBS-TV last fall, folks have realized that her was a perfect father. The kids were adorable. The bearded butler delightful. But it was "Uncle Bill," with his warm sincerity and perceptive twinkle, who made this happy little situation-comedy series live up to all the implications of its title--a real Family Affair with a believable father-image at its center.

If you read "Kids Make My World Go Round" in the January issue of TVRM, you know how much fatherhood means to Brian. And how much Brian means to the four children at home! But how does he look to the three youngsters on his show? And the nine others (at least) whose lives are now closely entwined with his own?

You'll get an unexpected answer from Johnnie Whitaker, who plays 6-year-old Jody on Family Affair. "Brian's just like a big toy to me. I climb on him like a 'jungle gym'--one that picks me up and plays with me!" The freckled face beams, then turns solemn as Johnnie adds with the casual air of one who knows a big man best, by sheer right of seniority:

"We're old friends. He das-covered me."

It was indeed Brian who suggested Johnnie as his TV nephew, after having worked with him in The Russians are Coming... More importantly, the youngster emphasizes, "Brian is my good pal and buddy. He makes up games and plays them with us. Remember on one show, when we were pretending to be a great, big elephant? 'Uncle Bill' was the trunk and I was the middle and 'Buffy' was the tail. Well, Brian made that up. He always thinks up games for us to play."

"Buffy," of course, is Jody's twin sister on the series, as played by tiny, talented Anissa Jones. Even when not making like an elephant, these three fair redheads make a striking picture. They look so astonishingly alike, though not related to each other--any more than they're really kin to Kathy Garver, the pretty brunette who plays 16-year-old sister Cissy. "You know," Johnnie confides suddenly, "Kathy and I have the same birthday and they gave us a party on the set with a great big cake! The cake had a pretty lady on it for Kathy and a little elf on it for me. Brian gave me a show-and-tell game and I got so many toys I had to give some to my sisters and brothers."

There must have been plenty of gifts! Johnnie is one of eight children, the eldest 14, then youngest just a few months old. "Dora Lee's our baby," Johnnie grins proudly. "When she's asleep, she doesn't even snore."

Father to this large brood is John Orson Whitaker Sr., a teacher in industrial crafts at Pacoima Junior High in the San Fernando Valley, and also an instructor in night classes for the Probation Division of the Los Angeles Police Department. The Whitakers are devout Mormons, and Johnnie probably inherited his acting talent from his mother, who never worked professionally but was active in school plays. Johnnie's 11-year-old sister Linda Colleen is the only other family member in show business. She does commercials and models children's fashions for magazine and newspaper ads.

When Johnnie himself was only 3 ½, he did his first TV commercial. In the past, he's appeared as a regular on both General Hospital and Many Happy Returns. As previously mentioned, he first became pals with Brian when the two did The Russians are Coming ...the movie in which Brian was the sheriff and Johnnie was the frightened tot on the church steeple. That was during the summer of 1965.

Actually, Kathy Garver worked with Brian even earlier than that--much earlier. "I was only 8 or 9 then," she recalls. "I was playing a waif with a lot of other children on a segment of The Crusader, and Brian was so nice that we all adored him!

"After I was signed for Family Affair, I asked him if he remembered me. He gave me one of those long, quizzical looks and then laughed, 'You're the little girl in pigtails! Gee, you have grown up.' At times, Brian still can't get over I'm no longer a child."

One day between takes, Brian lifted Johnnie high over his head while roughhousing around. Next it was Anissa's turn, and both children giggled with delight. Then Brian turned to Kathy, all ready to pick her up, too.

"Whoops!" he said, sheepishly. "I forgot you're a big girl now!"

Like Anissa and Johnny (sic), Kathy is always being asked if she is related to Brian. "They seem disappointed when I tell them I'm not his daughter."

Born Kathleen Garver, in Long Beach, California, she is barely five feet tall and--like Anissa--she has always appeared younger than her age. Looking 18 at the most, doll-faced Kathy is actually a few years older than she appears. (Johnnie's the one who, if he doesn't stop growing, will be the size of a basketball "pro" by the time he's in high school!)

Kathy's father, Hayes G. Garver, is an architect--not too far removed from the construction engineer Brian portrays in the series. She herself is an "A" student who has temporarily halted her studies at UCLA, where she originally majored in anthropology because "I was interested in how man evolved--it certainly gave me a new perspective on life!" However, she switched to a speech major.

"I wanted some kind of insurance," she explains, "and decided that was closer to my acting field. If I had a lot of money, though, I would travel around the world as a scientist."

With the exception of a New York trip to visit her married sister, Kathy's travels have been confined mostly to California, where the family now lives in Baldwin Hills on the outskirts of Los Angeles. She has two older brothers, Bud, 29, and Lance, 25--both confirmed bachelors.

According to Kathy, she has no steady beaus and probably won't have, as long as her brothers are in town. "They're terrible to the boys I date!" she blushes. "They frighten them off.

The stern father act

"I remember one time I introduced a boy I really liked to Buddy. He gave him a real put-down look and then proceeded to lecture him for thirty minutes. 'You better not do this to my little sister,' he was saying. He mentioned about thirty 'do-nots.' My date was so petrified, he was afraid to come near me the rest of the evening."

Around the set, Brian at times is like Kathy's well-meaning brothers. "He teases me a lot about the boys I date," she smiles. "Part of the time, though, I believe he's serious in wanting to know if I really like a certain boy. Marriage right now is the last thing on my mind. I'll get married when I fall in love and I'm not planning to hurry. I'm young enough to wait.

"If Brian sees me eating candy," she adds, "he gets really mad! I keep telling him I don't have a weight problem, but he insists I will, if I keep snacking on sweets. He's probably right, so we have sort of reached a compromise. Instead of candy bars, I buy a small package of peanut-butter crackers."

By the time Kathy was 3, her large brown eyes had made her the sweetheart of the block in San Bernardino, and her mother enrolled her in ballet, tap dancing and singing classes. At 8, the little girl had an agent and was doing TV commercials. Cecil B. DeMille saw one and was so impressed that he wrote a part for her in The Ten Commandments. Since then, she's performed in many major TV series and a host of other movies, including I'll Cry Tomorrow.

"I've flopped at everything else I ever tried," she reveals. "One summer, I had a job at Santa's Village, an amusement park in the mountains. I had to dress up as an elf and it was a lot of fun. But I got fired the first week because I felt so sorry for some children outside the gate, I let them in free!

"Another time, I worked in a dress shop. I was a lousy salesgirl. Instead of telling a woman how charming she looked in a certain dress, I'd tell her the truth if I didn't think so! I didn't sell many dresses, except the ones I bought--and I was spending more on clothes than I earned."

Tiniest of Brian's threesome on Family Affair, Anissa Jones is actually somewhat older than her TV "twin." Johnnie Whitaker (alias Jody) was born December 13, 1959, so that was his seventh birthday he celebrated on the set with Kathy Garver.

As readers of Anissa's "life story" in the March TVRM will recall, she was born March 11, 1958, in West Lafayette, Indiana. She's also a TV "veteran"--as that earlier story described--but she never tires of talking about Brian!

"You know," she confides in a footnote, "he's the one who gave me my cat Tiger when it was a baby. That was almost a year ago. But now Tiger and 'Frisky' are married and pretty soon I guess we're going to have kittens.

"Oh, I didn't tell you about Frisky, did I?" she giggles. "That's a neighbor's cat."

It's obvious, however, that Anissa finds Brian more fun than a whole basket of kittens. "He picks me up and carries me around! I like him a lot."

"Me, too," is the affirmation from Johnnie. "Did you know that Brian helped us to save Snowball?"

Brian to the rescue

Snowball, it might be noted, was the lamb who guested on the Family Affair episode which marked Sebastian Cabot's return to the series after sick leave. And what almost happened to Snowball threatened to cast a frightening shadow over the youngsters' delighted reunion with their beloved co-star, the bearded butler "French."

"After a few days," Johnnie explains, "Anissa and I kinda thought of Snowball like one of our own pets at home. Then one of the men on the crew told me they were going to make a lamb chop out of Snowball after we got finished using him on the show. We did not like that! Anissa even cried when she found out.

"We went to Brian and told him that we didn't want Snowball to be made into a lamb chop, so Brian went and told everybody about it and pretty soon they said that we could give the lamb to the zoo. So Anissa and I gave Snowball to the Los Angeles Children's Zoo. They even had a special ceremony there when we did it. You can go to the zoo and see him there.

"We do," beams Johnnie Whitaker.

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