Jaleel White Punches Back at ‘Family Matters’ Castmates

One chapter in Jaleel White’s new memoir, Growing Up Urkel, is called “Entitled Little Shit,” which tells you all you need to know about his ugly reputation among Family Matters’ adult cast members. “Am I difficult to work with?” pondered White as an adult. Maybe, he concludes, but the adults on set were just as bad — or worse.

Entitled? That moniker, according to White, belongs to Jo Marie Payton, who played Harriette Winslow. White doesn’t address Payton’s claims that he once challenged her to a physical fight, but he does question her professionalism. “One of my favorite Jo Marie-isms,” he writes, “is how frequently Jo would arrive late for table readings.” Each tardy arrival would come with a wild excuse.

One day she was so late, White says, that the cast began the rehearsal without her. Soon after, “Jo came barreling into the conference room, sunglasses still on, dripping in jewelry, handbag swinging and carrying a rearview mirror in her hand.” 

White found that week’s story particularly amusing. “I’m so sorry, y’all,” she cried. “I left the house, I get halfway down the street and my freaking rearview mirror falls off the damn front window.” Poor Payton — that meant she had to turn around and retrieve another luxury car. 

So when White hears that he was unprofessional? “It’s safe to say I never held up table readings because I had to go back home to get my other Mercedes.”

A lot of Family Matters friction stemmed from the fact that Urkel was originally a guest character. The audience reaction was so huge that he was soon made a regular and, eventually, the focus of the show. That didn’t sit well with adult actors who had reduced lines, or stage moms angry that White was stealing screentime from their children.

The worst was Gwyn Foxx, the mother of Jaimee Foxworth, who played Judy Winslow. Alarmed by the growing focus on Urkel, she lobbied producers to separate White from the other kids in the set’s classroom. When Urkel got the main storyline in the show’s 17th episode (Judy never got one), Foxx confronted White’s mother. Wisely, she told Foxx to take it up with the producers. 

Foxx was “a caricature stage mom both in spirit and dress,” White writes, noting her designer shades, copious furs and “high heels in broad daylight.” When the cast had to sign pictures, she got Jaimee to sign first in writing so big that White had nowhere to add his autograph. Foxx also let Jaimee slide in the classroom, to the point that Family Matters producers brought mother and daughter in for a conference about improving her grades. 

“Do you understand you can’t be on the show if your grades don’t improve?” asked the producers.

“I don’t like school,” she shot back.

The next season, Judy Winslow mysteriously disappeared from the show. 

White didn’t see Foxworth for years until she showed up, uninvited, to his 30th birthday party. He gave her a quick hug but wanted little to do with her that night. “If Jaimee ever wanted to share her story with me or exchange certain apologies, I’d be down to listen sincerely,” he explains. “But not as a reunion on anyone’s podcast for a fast buck or viral moment.”