Here’s What Happened to ‘Family Affair’ Star Anissa Jones: Her Sad Life and Tragic Death

In an effort to encapsulate Anissa, Brian Keith O’Hara, who at one time had a friendly relationship with her mother, Patty, blogs, “It would have driven her crazy that people remember her as the star of Family Affair, because she never saw herself that way. If you wanted to end a conversation or prevent one from starting at all, all you had to do was call her ‘Buffy’ or bring up the show. But if you wanted to talk about poetry, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (Anissa named her dog Lynny after Lenny) or just about anything else — and she was a great listener — then you had a chance of making a new friend. And she was as smart as anyone you ever met.”

Mary Anissa Jones — her middle name meaning “Little Friend” in Arabic — entered the world on March 11, 1958, in Lafayette, Indiana. Her father, John Paul Jones, was, at the time of her birth, an engineering graduate and faculty board member at Purdue University. There he met Anissa’s mother, Mary Paula Jones (maiden name Tweel), who was a zoology student at the time. The year after Anissa’s birth, Paula gave birth to her brother, “Paul” (actually John Paul Jones, Jr.). Shortly thereafter the family moved to Playa Del Rey, California, where her father worked at Hughes Aircraft while also teaching at USC.

The family’s move to California took place while the kids were still toddlers. Paula enrolled Anissa in a dance class when she was four years old. Reported The San Francisco Examiner, “Acting proved to be the big break for the Jones family. The parents divorced shortly after moving to California and Mrs. Jones suddenly had to look for a job. A neighbor who had a child making TV commercials suggested that Mrs. Jones get Anissa started in the same field. Some four commercials later, Anissa was seen and signed by a producer of Family Affair for the part of Buffy.”

Geoffrey Mark, a creative guiding force behind a number of Inside Television’s Greatest and Behind the Fame documentaries, notes that by its very nature, the shooting schedule of Family Affair was a boon financially, but a recipe for disaster for the children. “Brian Keith had the same deal with Don Fedderson that Fred MacMurray had on My Three Sons,” he explains, “which is the show would not be named after them so they wouldn’t have to be the center of every episode. And that they’d only have to work six or 10 weeks a year, depending on the season. So all of their scenes, all of their shots, from the entire season were filmed all at once. All the bedroom shots, all of the kitchen shots, all of the living room shots. And they would all later be edited into the individual episodes.”

“Then,” he adds, “the cast and whatever guest cast were there for that episode would have to come back and one by one they would shoot the episodes in order. So the whole season would have to be written beforehand; they didn’t do them one at a time. Brian got out of work quickly, but then you have children who cannot work full days. So it was very hard work for Johnnie and Anissa. And then, once she turned 18, Kathy took the brunt of it, because she could stay late and they couldn’t.”

Buffy Davis, of course, was the part that made America fall in love with Anissa — and the character’s doll, Mrs. Beasley, which would eventually fly off of toy shelves (unfortunately, Anissa was required to carry the damn thing virtually everywhere). She was also put in front of reporter microphones on a regular basis. For instance, in 1967 The Los Angeles Times spoke to her, commenting, “Every Monday night, little Anissa Jones enters the wonderful world of make believe for half an hour to play Buffy, the tiny tot on CBS’ Family Affair. But away from the series, the studio and her ‘career,’ Anissa could pass for a typical 9-year-old; somewhat precocious, but very natural and unaffected by her show business activities.”

In that interview, Anissa talked about her love of art and the fact that she used to have 54 pets, which caused her mother to raise an eyebrow in response. “I had 50 baby frogs and four other pets … two kittens and their mother and a parakeet,” she explained. “But the poor bird is starving. It never eats. And do you know why? I forget to feed him.” Uh … okaaaay. She also expressed her preference for a pool over the ocean, mostly because you’re unaware of what size wave you’re going to get hit with. “You never know how deep it is,” she said., “but in a pool it’s marked 2-feet, 3-feet, so you know. That’s the trouble with the ocean. It doesn’t say how deep it is.”

And then there was her side business of selling perfume, the idea being that she takes “loads” of flowers, add a little bit of water and then “smash, smash, smash.” The perfume is bottled and she sells the bottles for 10 cents each, going house to house. The source of the flowers? “The neighbors’ yards,” she responded matter of factly. “Sometimes we just pick the flowers and then sell them, but we’re always careful not to sell the flowers to the lady we pick them from.”

Her brightness was also on display in a piece that ran in the Star-Gazette of Elmira, New York, as the reporter noticed her mouthing dialogue being spoken by both Johnnie and Brian. Said Anissa, “Oh, I always know everybody’s lines — even my own, except when I miss them. Of course, they all miss their lines, too, once in a while.”

Unfortunately, there were already issues developing, partially from the divorce and partially from the impact of the show. Said Patty at the time, “She is always ready to say, ‘Please call me Anissa’ when people refer to her as Buffy, her name on the show. I do think she likes to be recognized in public — it has some meaning.”

In October 1967, the same paper ran another piece on her in which Anissa explained how she makes herself cry: “I hate it. When it’s a real happy day and then I have to do a scene where I have to cry, I have to think of something sad and then I think of it all day. I can’t make real tears, you know, but I can make a crying sound.”

Also commented on was her growing frustration over the fact that she was playing younger than she really was, a 9-year-old pretending that she’s 6. “She finds playing a mere child of 6 ‘babyish,’” offered The Republic of Columbus, Indiana, “and quickly reveals her true age to anyone willing to listen.”

By 1970, Anissa was doing public appearances every other weekend, drawing thousands of people, but allowed her very little private time. The San Bernardino County Sun wrote, “’Buffy’ is a charming little girl, but one cannot help wondering why she is being subjected to such exploitation. Accompanied by a covey of press agents, she’s been making public appearances all over the country, ‘selling the show’ and the fashions, which actually need little promotion. We first encountered ‘Buffy’ three years ago in San Antonio, where the clothes bearing that name first came to the attention of the fashion press. It seemed to us then, as it does now, that she should be allowed to stay at home and play during her out-of-school and off-the-set hours. Anissa is in the sixth grade at Paseo del Rey Grammar School when not filming Family Affair or making personal appearances. She doesn’t know, she said seriously, if she wants to stay in show business and confident that she hopes to ‘retire when I’m 14,’ which prompted a man in the crowd to say, ‘Over her mother’s dead body.’”

Geoffrey emphasizes that the kids were doing the same work as adults with the same responsibilities. “So,” he says, “not only are they working as actors in a weekly show, but they’re also required to do talk shows and publicity stunts and meet with the sponsors and fly across the country. Their time by contract belonged to the production company and the network. That’s a lot of pressure to put on someone less than 10 years old, less so where one has a good family life where one has parents really working on behalf of the children to make sure their lives are as normal as possible. Where that love and affection are not only given because of the paycheck they’re bringing in. In Anissa’s case, this wasn’t true. Her father and mother divorced, her mother was a pushy stage mother who, after Anissa’s father died, pushed her to be the family breadwinner.”

Family Affair came to an end in 1971, despite healthy ratings. It was a time of change at CBS, resulting in the loss of a lot of audience favorite shows to start making room for the likes of All in the Family, MASH and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Said the Sacramento Bee in 1973, “The show’s cancelation after a six-year run represented a chance for its then 14-year-old leading lady to finally be herself — free from the psychological burden of submerging her personality inside a screen character who never grew older.”

By the time the show ended — and she could finally say goodbye to Mrs. Beasley — Anissa was at a career crossroads. She wanted to make the move to the big screen, but didn’t find many people willing to take a chance on her or the image of her that had been created. One role she auditioned for was Linda Blair’s in 1973’s The Exorcist, but director William Friedkin believed that the audience wouldn’t see character Regan MacNeil possessed, but rather Buffy. In 1975 she was given an invitation to audition for what would become Jodie Foster’s part of Iris “Easy” Steensma in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, but turned the opportunity down — much as she had Brian Keith’s invitation to be a part of his 1972 to 1974 series, The Brian Keith Show. As far as she was concerned, acting and Hollywood had lost its allure. Instead, she decided to enroll at Westchester High School in Los Angeles to try and achieve some sort of normalcy in her life.

But that didn’t really happen. Points out Geoffrey, “Her life kind of spiraled out of control. Her mother and father had fought bitterly over custody of Anissa and her brother, Paul. He won and Anissa went to live with him, but he died very shortly after Anissa arrived, but she didn’t go back to her mother, she moved in with a friend. Why in the world would her mother allow that? Bad parenting. She became a ward of the court. And anyone who knows anything about drugs, would have been watching her behavior and would have known. Anissa was in trouble: petty shoplifting, taking jobs and then quitting them, bad sleeping patterns, bad eating patterns, incredible mood swings.”

He elaborates, “When she turned 18 in March of ’76, she received the forced savings from her salary on Family Affair and then another amount of money that had been held for her in trust. She received a little less than $200,000, which she blew almost immediately. In four or five months.”

Sadly, it all came to an end for Anissa on August 28, 1976, at age 18, following a night of partying with a number of others, including her then-boyfriend, in the beach town of Oceanside, California. She suffered an overdose that took her life. The coroner would later report that she had cocaine, PCP, Quaalude and Seconal in her system. Six days later, her doctor, Don Carlos Moshos, was arrested and charged with manslaughter for illegally prescribing Seconal to her. While awaiting trial, he died, resulting in the case being closed. Following a private service, Anissa was cremated and her ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean.

Muses Geoffrey, “She had been dealing with so much: bad parents, crazy shooting schedule and production people who froze the children the way they did so that there was no character growth for them. There was just so much pressure. You know, there was a whole episode of Hollywood Palace [in 1967] built around Anissa and Jimmy Durante. She’s 11 at the time playing 6. Any child will tell you being treated like a little baby when you’re hitting puberty is embarrassing and confusing and frustrating. So she was unhappy at home, embarrassed, confused and frustrated at work, feeling undervalued, feeling overworked, and put in competition with Johnnie for screen time and attention, which was the doing of the adults. So it seems like she had no port in the storm and the storm finally overtook her literally at the beach.”

On August 13, 1976, syndicated columnist Marilyn Beck wrote a moving column about Anissa, noting that she had first spoken to the actress when she was 8, and told at the time that Anissa wanted to eventually be a mommy with six kids and work as a veterinarian taking care of puppies and kitten. “She was a little girl whom other little girls envied, but who, in truth, experienced tremendous pressures during those years that should be reserved for the simple joys of childhood,” wrote Marilyn. “Bright and personable, her role as Buffy was to cause her increasing psychological straining … She was nearly 14 when Family Affair ended and, at an age where she was growing interested in boys, was still being instructed to play with dolls — on camera and on personal appearance tours. At a time when her mind and body were developing, she was still being given the wardrobe and dialogue fitting a video character who had remained eight years old. During the last season or so, chest bindings were reportedly used to disguise the fact that Buffy was growing up.”

It was Marilyn’s view that Anissa had a lot of catching up to do and she’d heard here or there about the challenges she was facing being a normal teenager. “Now,” she stated, “those pressures are permanently, tragically over. ‘I want to see God,’ she told me, ‘because everyone always talks about him, but no one has seen what he looks like. I bet he’s got blue eyes and is bald-headed and is a big, big man who looks just like Yul Brynner.’ How tragic that that should be the one dream Anissa got a chance of realizing at age 18.”

Geoffrey sees the blame pretty clearly: “Young actors are not protected. Many of them walk away with almost no education or any idea of how to make a bed or fry an egg, do a spreadsheet on a computer or type or anything having to do with real life. This goes from Shirley Temple and Judy Garland and Jackie Coogan all the way through to today’s young people. Unless they have good parents and wonderful producers, they aren’t taught how to be adults, because the people in charge want to keep them controlled. Well, when you control a young person and then all of a sudden they’re not wanted anymore, they’ve got nothing to fall back on.”

“Anissa,” Geoffrey adds,” was not taught how to be anything more than Buffy. She wasn’t taught the exigencies of adult life. Life is wonderful, but life is difficult. Life is hard. Life is making decisions and making changes when it’s necessary. Life is advocating for oneself. Life is also realizing that one is not the center of attention. Many child actors walk away from their shows not knowing any of these and we’ve seen the carnage of it. The ones who end up truly well, like Ron Howard, are because his family knew exactly what to do and made sure when he was away from that set, he was a child that had chores in the house and responsibilities at home. They were on set with him to make sure he was being treated well.

“If you haven’t got anything to ground you, that’s a very heady experience. So Anissa is a tremendously unfortunate casserole of all these different ingredients that were baked until it bubbled over. And by the time it bubbled over, it was too late.”

Back in 1967, while speaking to the Star-Gazette, Anissa let the reporter in on a secret: she really didn’t think she would be an actress all her life. “I want to be an artist,” she said. “A painting artist. I want to do billboard painting.” When told that that takes a long time, she replied, “Yeah, I know, but I got a couple of years left.”