This page is my humble tribute to the little blonde cherub who played Buffy in the hokey but irrestistible situation comedy "Family Affair." Some people may wonder why I'm bothering to make a tribute to an actress who is remembered today mainly as a sad footnote to the drug-addled seventies, but for me she represents something different. She is a painful reminder of the exploitation of children in the entertainment industry.
Anissa, as she was known, was the child of a broken home who landed her first onscreen role in a television commercial at the age of six. Her adorable features soon landed her the role on Family Affair, which began shooting when she was only eight. Her next five years were marked by a constant workaholic schedule; she was in the studio five days a week and spent the weekends doing promotional activities. While television audiences watched a carefree pigtailed girl laugh and play with her adoring family, the real Anissa was living a very grown-up life,working round the clock. She didn't have the familial warmth that Buffy did, either; her only family at the time was little brother, Paul, and her cold and domineering stage mother, Paula Jones. (No, not THAT Paula Jones...:-)
Family Affair was still shooting as Anissa approached adolescence, but since the young, freckle-faced Buffy had been such a success, the show's producers were hesitant about letting the character age. During the five-year run of the show, Anissa's character only aged two years. In 1971, 13-year-old Anissa was still wearing banana curls and dragging Mrs. Beasley around with her everywhere she went. It is also rumored that, to further stunt the character's growth, chest bindings were used on the developing Anissa.
Her abnormal childhood soon led to a troubled adolescence. Although she enjoyed a brief period of happiness in her early teens (during which she lived with her father and experienced a somewhat normal family life), this was shattered with the death of her father in 1974. At this time she moved in with her father's fiancee, but the outraged Paula Jones, insulted that her daughter hadn't come back to her, had her arrested. As a result, the innocent, frail sixteen-year-old who wasn't even five feet tall spent several months locked up in a tough inner-city juvenile hall. Afterwards, Anissa moved back in with her mother, but any hopes of a stable life had been completely erased by then. She soon began taking drugs and the girl who had hobknobbed with the world's rich and famous as a mere child was now seen wandering the streets like a vagrant. She was found dead at a friend's house in the summer of 1976. At first the cause of her death was unknown and headlines like "TV's Buffy found dead-it's a mystery" swept the country. After an autopsy was performed it became sadly apparent that she had died of an overdose consisting of the largest amount of drugs that the San Diego coroner had ever seen in one person. Whether the overdose was an intentional suicide or not... well, the only person who could answer that is no longer with us.
