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.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch...
