From addiction to a porn-star marriage: What happened to the original Wednesday Addams

Telegraph

19 hours ago

History does not record the day of the week when Charles Addams attended a party in New York thrown by a close friend of the poet and actress Joan Blake. We do know it was early in 1964 and that the New Yorker cartoonist was agonising over an upcoming live-action television adaptation of his popular Addams Family cartoons – about a ghoulish family of misfits who lived in morbid seclusion in a spooky mansion.
The big headache was the family's little girl – pale of face and menacing of pigtail, but, until that point, nameless. What, Addams fretted to Blake over dinner at PJ Clarke's (a Manhattan restaurant popular with the mid-20th century literati), should he call her?
'I said, 'Wednesday – Wednesday's child is full of woe.' And Wednesday became her name,' Blake told The New Yorker in 2018.
Full of woe Wednesday might have been, but the character has quietly become one of the most enduring in Hollywood – as celebrated, in her unsettling, unblinking way, as any superhero or horror movie villain. First brought to life by the troubled child star Lisa Loring in the 1960s TV series, Wednesday remains one of the hottest brands in popular culture: largely thanks to her reinvention as a Gen Z pin-up in Netflix's titular mega-hit, starring Jenna Ortega.
Wednesday's reinvention
Like a school-going, goth-leaning James Bond, each generation of Addams Family fan has got the Wednesday they deserve: Loring's mischievous youngster, Christina Ricci's grungy Nineties icon, Ortega's darkly sardonic yet shy introvert.
But Loring's portrayal remains the most memorable. Born in 1958, she was just five at the time of her audition. 'I got it because of my pout,' she later said. In fact, she was cast – over a 13-year-old rival – because of her resemblance to Carolyn Jones, who portrayed her mother, Morticia Addams.
Loring's Wednesday was the original pioneer of the creepy kid species. She played the character relatively straight as a giddy and enthusiastic child – but everything else was distinctly ghoulish. She had two pets: a black widow spider named Homer and a lizard, Lucifer. Her favourite doll was headless, and given the morbid moniker Marie Antoinette.
She enjoyed her time on the show, once describing her co-stars as 'like a real family: you couldn't have picked a better cast and crew. Carolyn Jones, John Astin – Morticia and Gomez – they were like parents to me'. She also thought it significantly more sophisticated than its rival, The Munsters, saying The Addams Family was the Marx Brothers compared with The Munsters ' Three Stooges. It was an astute observation, given that the show's producer and head writer, Nat Merrin, had worked with the Marxes and was a friend of Groucho.
Away from the screen, however, Loring's life was filled with tragic ups and downs – including addiction, grief and a doomed marriage to a porn star.
She was born Lisa Ann DeCinces in 1958 in the Marshall Islands, halfway between Hawaii and Australia in the Pacific Ocean, where her parents were both serving with the US Navy. Just like Ortega, who would don Wednesday's famous black-collared dress 60 years later, Loring's mother had Mexican roots.
Loring's parents divorced soon after her birth and she was raised by her mother in Hawaii, and later Los Angeles. Show business came knocking early. By age three she was modelling, and claimed her first acting credit in Dr Kildare in 1964. After The Addams Family was cancelled, when she was just six, Loring had to start over. She picked up small parts in The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (a spin-off from The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) and Fantasy Island. Her biggest post-Wednesday role was in the soap opera As the World Turns, in which she was cast as rebellious teenager Cricket Montgomery.
As she reached adulthood, she found it hard to adjust to life post-stardom, with smaller parts in slasher films such as Blood Frenzy marking a big step down from The Addams Family. Struggling to pay the bills, she worked as a make-up artist and interior designer – but substance abuse cast a constant shadow.
She turned to drugs and alcohol, before entering rehab in 1990. The following year she discovered the body of her friend Kelly Van Dyke (the niece of the actor Dick), who had died by suicide. Loring, too, tried to take her own life with an overdose.
Loring was following a tragic family path. Her mother, Judith Ann Callies, had died from alcoholism in the early 1970s, when her daughter was just 14. The following year, the teenager married her childhood sweetheart, Farrell Foumberg. They had a daughter but broke up soon after. In 1981, there was a second marriage, to soap star Doug Stevenson, and another daughter.
Her third marriage was to porn actor Jerry Butler, whom she met while working as a make-up artist on the adult film Traci's Big Trick. Before they were married, Butler had promised to quit the porn industry. But upon discovering that he continued to work in adult films, she divorced him.
'I would not be involved with someone who did that… he was going behind my back and lying to me – that was it,' she said. She went on to remarry, before she died from a stroke in 2023, aged 64.
Family history
Despite her long afterlife, Wednesday began as an afterthought. She did not feature at all in the first Addams Family cartoon – a single-panel New Yorker illustration from 1946 in which her parents, Gomez and Morticia, assisted by man-servant Lurch, stand on the roof of their haunted mansion, preparing to pour boiling oil on trick-or-treaters below.
There was no Wednesday, no severed hand named Thing, no bald Uncle Fester. These would come later. Addams initially didn't even have a name for his macabre clan – and he certainly did not expect that they would become his life's work.
If anything, the cartoonist – born in Westfield, New Jersey, in 1912 – bristled at how his characters had been made more palatable by Hollywood; he was especially aghast over the makeover given to Gomez, who had been piggishly ugly in the cartoons (in part inspired by unsuccessful presidential candidate Thomas Dewey) but smartened up for the screen.
Still, he didn't object to the royalty cheques, which, along with his New Yorker salary, funded a lavish lifestyle including a two-storey apartment in midtown Manhattan, with a Civil War mortician's embalming table in the dining room. He was also fully occupied as a serial lothario, with love interests including Veronica Lake and Jacqueline Kennedy, whom he allegedly dated mere months after her husband's assassination.
Over the decades, Addams's creation has refused to die. Original episodes were re-shown regularly on TV; it was revived on various occasions throughout the 1970s; and the 1991 film, starring Raul Julia, Anjelica Huston and Ricci, won over a whole new generation. It is perhaps Ricci's monstrously deadpan iteration of little Wednesday that Netflix's series owes the most obvious debt – but without Loring, the character may not have ever taken off.
As Ortega herself told late-night host Jimmy Fallon in 2022, while discussing the show's viral dance sequence to the Cramps's Goo Goo Muck: 'I paid homage to Lisa Loring, the first Wednesday Addams. I did a little bit of her shuffle that she does. And of course, they cut out of camera when I did do it. But it's there – I know it is'. It was a fitting tribute to the original Wednesday, a strange little girl for whom adulthood proved nothing but one long horror show.