Here’s What Happened to ‘Family Affair’ Actor Brian Keith Before, During and After the Classic TV Show

He was born Robert Alba Keith on November 14, 1921, in Bayonne, New Jersey, to Robert Keith and Helena Shipman (respectively an actor and stage actress). In a 1966 profile, The Journal News of White Plains, New York, said of his childhood, “Keith arrived in 1921 while his parents were touring in John Golden’s road company of Three Wise Fools and spent the first seven years of his life going from town to town with them. If ever there was a stage kid, Brian Keith is one.”

Brian added to the Star-Gazette of Elmira, New York, “I spent the first two or three years of my life in hotels and vaguely remembering working in my first silent movie. I didn’t like it. No youngster wanted to be an actor then; you wanted to be a cowboy or fireman or something like that.” That silent movie he’s referring to is 1924’s Pied Piper Malone, which was followed that same year by The Other Kind of Love. His parents ended up getting divorced, his father moving to Hollywood to follow his career as an actor and writer in Hollywood, while his mother continued to perform on stage and radio. He would move to Long Island, where his grandmother would help raise him and taught him to read.

A bizarre bit of Hollywood history was connected to Brian in that from 1927 to 1929, his stepmother was famous Broadway actress Peg Entwistle, who, in 1932, would jump to her death from the “H” of the Hollywood sign.

He graduated from East Rockaway High School in 1939 and at that point joined the United States Marine Corp, where he served from 1942 to 1945 as an air gunner in World War II. After the war, Brian discovered an interest in acting and took a few courses on the GI Bill and ended up with a featured role in the stage version of Mister Roberts. “I did that on Broadway for three years,” he told the Progress-Bulletin. “They brought me to Hollywood for a big romantic thing with Jennifer Jones, but then she quit and went to Italy and that picture was out. So they put me in a piece of junk about the Apaches. I’ve been doing action pictures mostly ever since. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if Jennifer Jones hadn’t quit. I might be a romantic hero now.”

In 1951, Brian appeared on Broadway in Darkness at Noon. His first credited role on the big screen was in Arrowhead (1953), followed in that decade by 19 other films, including The Violent Men (1955), Run of the Arrow (1957), Desert Hell (1958) and The Young Philadelphians (1959). In the ‘50s he also began appearing on television, first in anthology shows and then a series of his own, Crusader, which ran from 1955 to 1956 for a total of 52 episodes.

In Crusader, he plays freelance journalist Matt Anders, who, in the aftermath of his mother’s death in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, travels the world to battle injustice at the height of the Cold War. It sounds like a pretty heavy premise, but, as it turned out, Brian was no fan. As he mused to the Independent Press-Telegram in 1963, “You have to take a bad part once in a while. The bank owns the house and the kids drink milk. Those things have to be paid for. I’ve read all the material in town and I don’t want a series. I did a series years ago, Crusader, working six days a week. All you get is a little bit of security and who wants security? There isn’t any. You can get that in jail. Besides, you can only wear one suit at a time.”

The above notwithstanding, Brian found himself back on series television in The Westerner, which has been described as a more realistic, low-key Western with the actor playing Dave Blassingame, who Wikipedia describes as “a basically decent, ordinary man who was handy with a gun and his fists. A cowboy and drifter, he could sometimes behave amorally in his quest to get enough money together to buy his own ranch, but always did the right thing in the end and remained true to himself.”

The first episode of The Westerner was set in a brothel where he went to rescue a so-called “fallen lady,” a girlfriend from his youth. “Actually,” he told The San Bernardino County Sun in 1961, “if you want to look at it intellectually, all the guy wanted to do was get the girl out of there. The girl didn’t want to go, which is sometimes true and also tragic. NBC got nervous. They had a few calls from cranks and nuts who didn’t understand it. You can get 10 million letters from people who say they love the show, but if you get 10 from some idiots who didn’t, then they get scared.”

“Most ‘safe’ TV Westerns get by because they lack controversy,” he added, “so they end up with mediocrity and I don’t want to do it that way. To hell with it. Even though a safe series might have a long run on TV, I think it’s kind of a false security. I don’t look forward to the day when all I’ll do is sit around. Who wants that? I want to work until I’m 80. Remember, you can cry all the way to the bank or end up in a mental home. The only reason I took the show was because we agreed to do it a certain way. Roadblocks forced it off the air and another network was thinking of picking it up, and they would have if we changed things around. We turned them down.” The Westerner was created by filmmaker Sam Peckinpah.

In the 1960s he starred in 18 feature films, including Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), a drama which saw him co-starring with Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and Julie Harris; co-starring with Doris Day in romantic comedy With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), and, of course, co-starring with Maureen O’Hara and Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap (1961). The latter sees Hayley playing twins separated in their parents’ divorce and unaware of each other until they come into contact at sleep away camp and come up with a scheme to bring them back together again.

“If it wasn’t for Disney,” Brian admitted to the Independent of Long Beach, California in 1964, “I’d still be wearing a gun on my hip. The Western films I did were all the same character, just the locale was different. I did a thing for Disney called Ten Who Dared, a documentary about the discovery of the Grand Canyon. I played an old flea-beaten mountain man with a beard and chewing tobacco. The following summer he was doing The Parent Trap and he had this part that they’d usually give to somebody like Gig Young. But Disney figured if I could do this old character, I could do that one in The Parent Trap. So he gave me the job.”

Brian, to his credit, continued to work in both film and on television, though he did fall victim to a bit of typecasting. Explains Geoffrey Mark, “Unfortunately, like many men of his generation, it seemed like every film he was in, they found some reason to have him shirtless to show off his muscles. When you’re 20, that’s nice. When you’re 40, not really and if you’re still doing that, the sensitive parts, the parts that might’ve caused him to flex his acting muscles instead of his biceps, didn’t come along. And the parts that he did best in, again, were the parts where he was playing some version of himself, a thoughtful, loving family man. It’s no wonder that the two favorite things he ever did were The Parent Trap and Family Affair.”

Family Affair ran on CBS from 1966 to 1971 and saw Brian cast as bachelor Bill Davis, who decides to raise his brother’s three orphaned children played by Kathy Garver, Johnny Whitaker and Anissa Jones as, respectively, Cissy, Jody and Buffy. They all live together in his luxury New York apartment, aided by Sebastian Cabot as Mr. Giles French. Given his past experience, it’s somewhat surprising that Brian agreed to another series. The answer to that question can be traced to My Three Sons creator Don Fedderson who had a unique approach to attracting big stars to TV, which he used on Family Affair as well.

“I got the same kind of deal from Don that Fred MacMurray has in My Three Sons,” he told the Press and Sun-Bulletin. “I only have to work about 13 weeks on the show and I’m free to do almost any movie that comes along. And thanks to the loot, I’m also free to refuse to do any movie that comes along. The show is Bachelor Father with a dash of My Three Sons and anything else you want to toss in. But what makes one family comedy show better than the other is not the basic format, but the way it’s handled and we’ve got the best on all counts. The show won’t be a world beater by any means, and if I had to put it as the greatest thing ever seen on TV, I’d choke on the words, but it’ll be an entertaining show and very well done.”

In 1968, while talking to the Valley Times of North Hollywood, he provided some detail about the “deal” he references above: “The only way to get away with it is by shooting all 30 shows for the season at the same time. This means that the producer, Don Fedderson, has to have all the episodes for the entire year lined up and separated into scenes instead of individual shows. First we’ll shoot all the scenes in the living room for the whole season, and then other sets. We may be doing bits and pieces from 20 or 25 different shows in a single working day. Even though we skip around from show to show, you can’t get lost. We jump in and out of different situations, but none of them are so deep that you can’t understand them. It’s like doing a 15-hour movie in about 13 weeks. I’m just glad I’m not the cutter and have to put everything together at the end. The biggest problem for me is wardrobe. Sometimes I have to change my clothes 30 or 40 times a day to keep up with the shooting schedule.”

The set-up enticed Brian to sign up, as it had previously done with Fred MacMurray, but it could be difficult for everybody else. Says Geoffrey, “It makes it harder for any kind of an actor to stay in character and remember what the show is about, so it took a lot of cooperation from everyone involved. Amusingly, if you watch both My Three Sons and Family Affair with a magnifying glass, you can see hairstyles change from one moment to another, or the children are wearing prosthetic teeth, because their teeth are falling out, but you can’t have their mouths change from episode to episode or scene to scene. They couldn’t redecorate anything, because it all had to be consistent. And then there were problems with Sebastian Cabot’s health that would change things and Anissa Jones broke her leg twice in one season, which required extensive reshoots. But the show was beloved and Brian always felt it should have gone on longer, but it was cancelled by CBS along with many other aging shows to make way for things like All in the Family.”

During the show’s run, Brian was asked if he felt he would emerge as a true star as a result of the series, to which he responded that he couldn’t care less. “This scene-stealing nonsense never bothered me,” he stated. “I know of a lot of movies I lost because some star’s agent didn’t want his boy appearing with me, because he thought I’d upstage or something like that. Bunk! I just want the series to be good and anybody can have the glory. I’ve got the star billing and if I took anymore money out of the operation I’d be arrested. So let the kids and Sebastian walk away with the honors just so long as we’re a hit.”

As noted previously, finding work was not a problem for him as he consistently appeared in film and on TV throughout his entire career, but he kept trying to give series television a shot. In 1972 he starred in The Brian Keith Show (initially titled The Little People). In it, he plays a pediatrician running a free clinic for kids in Hawaii (where he was living at the time). Starring alongside him was The Donna Reed Show’s Shelley Fabares as his daughter.  There were two reasons he signed on for the show: it was produced by Garry Marshall who had agreed to shoot it in Hawaii. The series ran until 1974 with a total of 47 episodes.

The Zoo Gang was a Canadian series that ran for a single season and was about a group of French Resistance fighters known by animal code names (Brian was “The Fox”) who come together 28 years after their disbanding to seek vengeance for a prior betrayal. Then, in 1975, Brian starred in Archer, based on the character created in print by author Ross Macdonald. Talking to The Post-Star prior to the show’s debut, Brian opined, “It boils down to this character being real, believable. People aren’t interested in reality until it’s exotic or entertaining. I guess if I had to wade through traffic every night to get home after a long day on the job, I’d want something to amuse me, too. Archer’s kind of an underdog. He gets beaten. He’s no superhuman. He drives a broken-down Mustang. He’s not particularly fond of the finer things in life. Music is noise to him, painting is decoration, sculpture is ‘that stuff’ and he doesn’t read books.” Unfortunately, the audience didn’t check out Archer. It was supposed to have a first season of 13 episodes, six were shot and only two aired before it was canceled. Ouch.

Hardcastle and McCormick was his next series, portraying Judge Milton C. Hardcastle, who is retiring from being a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge and is tired of criminals getting off on technicalities. Inspired by the Lone Ranger, he teams up with streetwise car thief “Skid” Mark McCormick (Daniel Hugh Kelly) to set things right. “I don’t think there’s any formula for these things,” he reflected to the Democrat and Chronicle at the time. “You see so many dogs that go on forever and good things that die. If there is a formula, they keep changing it. I like the character. If I like the character, I play it. I can’t think of anything worse than playing a character that’s not interesting. The last series I did I got stuck in something called Archer. Nobody liked it. The Ross Macdonald books are good, but all they did was buy the name. I didn’t know what I was getting into, but the money was so good I couldn’t turn it down.”

Of the Hardcastle character he added, “He’s not really as eccentric as people make him out to be. His ideas about the legal system aren’t eccentric. What burns him out is that people take advantage of it. But it’s free country and people can do that. You don’t see much crimes in Spain, but every fourth person is a cop. In England when you go into court, the point is to see that that justice is done. Here it’s who’s going to win and looking for loopholes. Resenting that is not eccentric, everybody feels that way. An ax murderer gets off because they didn’t have search warrant. There’s the kind of thing people get mad about. Hardcastle is strict to the letter of the law. That could be eccentric. In one show, I insisted that a cop give me a ticket. It’s a well-conceived character. He’s human. And it’s fun. If it’s not fun you just as well quit, because the work is too hard.” The show ran for three seasons and 67 episodes between 1983 and 1986.

In 1987 he played Professor Roland G. Duncan in Pursuit of Happiness, a sitcom set in a small Philadelphia college which lasted 10 episodes. Heartland, which aired in 1989 (also for 10 episodes), casts Brian as old-fashioned farmer B.L. McCutcheon, who loses his farm and is forced to move in with his daughter and her family. The actor was actually annoyed when people referred to his character in this sitcom as a bigot and a sort of update of Archie Bunker. “Hell, no,” he proclaimed to the New York Daily News. “He reacts to things like we all do. He’s not a bigot. You can’t be ignorant for five years on TV in a series. He says things like, ‘If the Japanese lost the war, how come they own Chicago?’ That’s not being bigoted. A bigot is a guy who hates a certain group of people. My character hates everybody. I liked the material. It’s funny stuff.”

Brian continued working on television until 1996, his appearances in that year including episodes of Cybill, Pacific Blue, Touched by an Angel and Walker, Texas Ranger. The following year he appeared in the films The Second Civil War, Walking Thunder and Rough Riders.

On the personal side of things, Brian faced highs and lows (some extreme) in life.  From 1948 to 1954, he was married to Frances Helm. When they divorced, that same year he married actress/dancer Judy Landon, the pursuit of whom he described as follows in a 1964 edition of the New York Daily News: “I’d never have met Judy if I had been thinking good, clean thoughts. I was making a jungle picture at Paramount with Rhonda Fleming — hope you didn’t have the misfortune to see it — and I was bored with the replica of a South American jungle set we were working on, so I went outside for a breath of fresh air. Two girls passed by wearing practically nothing but long black stockings and plumes in their hair. I thought, ‘This looks pretty good, I’ll follow them.’ They went to another set where Red Garters was being made. I was close behind. Inside, casing the joint, my eyes were suddenly glued on this beautiful girl in a ballerina costume. This is for me, I said to myself. Can’t let her get away. I introduced myself and three weeks later we were married.”

Brian and Judy were together until 1969. Together they had two children (Michael and Mimi) and adopted three others (Barbara, Betty and Rory). However, what is seldom mentioned in Brian’s bios and even in much of the media of the day is the fact that their son, Michael James Keith, died of pneumonia at the age of eight after having been ill for about a week.

In 1970, he married Victoria Young, with whom he had two children, Bobby and Daisy. Like her father, Daisy became an actress. Things seemed to be going okay in his life, until 1997 when virtually everything went to hell. It started with a significant financial setback. On top of that, he had been suffering from emphysema and was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Then, Daisy shocked everybody by committing suicide, which was the final blow for Brian. On June 24 of that year, at the age of 75, he used a shotgun to commit suicide himself, shocking everyone. Almost.

“Brian was friends with his Family Affair co-stars Kathy Garber and John Whitaker until he died,” says Geoffrey, adding that he always carried Anissa Jones’ 1976 overdose with him.  “He actually called them to say goodbye and let them know what he was about to do. He didn’t want them to read it in the paper or hear about it on television and get scarred by it that way. This was not a mad man having a bad moment. This was not a man who was mentally ill. This was somebody who felt that his time on the planet was over; that he could not deal with the physical pain of the cancer or the emotional pain of his daughter’s suicide. It was actually very kind and thoughtful of him.

“The man is dying,” he continues, “and he’s just lost his daughter 10 weeks earlier. But he loves Kathy and John enough to be concerned with how they might react and was a good enough friend to say, ‘Look, this is about to happen. I want to protect you. I want to love you. I want you to know why and that I’m okay with this.’ That’s an extraordinary person who does that.”