Page 92 – LIFE

‘Addams Family’ Hopefuls: Photos From Auditions for a Classic TV Show

January 16, 2020September 16, 2014 by

Some familial surnames are so much a part of the American landscape that it’s difficult to discuss the country’s history, its highs and lows or its complex and often contradictory legacy without mentioning them. The Roosevelt family. The Kennedy family. The Addams family.

Consider the relevance and the cultural reach of the latter. Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Lurch and the rest have been around, in various incarnations, for eight decades. Created in the 1930s by the legendary cartoonist, Charles Addams, the endearingly macabre family and assorted friends, neighbors and things have appeared in magazines (most notably The New Yorker), books, movies, on Broadway and, of course in a short-lived but fondly remembered 1960s TV series. A later, not-terrible animated series ran for a few seasons as a Saturday morning cartoon in the mid-Seventies.

Here, LIFE.com takes a look back at the auditions for the show; some of the actors and actresses who ended up in the cast; and a number of others (largely unidentified in LIFE’s archives) who didn’t get cast.

In an article titled, “TV’s Year of the Monster,” meanwhile, in the Aug. 21, 1964, issue of LIFE, the magazine referenced The Addams Family as well as Bewitched and The Munsters in its preview of the networks’ fall lineups:

They’ve come alive, the whole creepy, crawly Charles Addams family! And what’s more . . . Mr. Addams’ ghoulish people will be but a small part of the monster population explosion at prime evening time.
Cowboys, surgeons and hillbillies have had their day. Now it’s the Year of the Ghouls, and the new fall season, which will burst upon us next month like a spray of lightning over Frankenstein’s castle, will be strictly from beyond the grave. Only let parents have no qualms it will be played solely for guffaws.

Finally, it’s worth noting that while Charles Addams himself was often depicted as a perverse and perhaps even sinister character straight out of one of his own cartoons, that persona was largely for show. As one of his obituaries pointed out when he died in 1988, at the age of 76, “a colleague at The New Yorker once described Addams as ‘an urbane, relaxed, congenial man of great civility. He doesn’t eat babies.'”

“He doesn’t eat babies.” What higher praise for any man?

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

The cast of ABC’s “The Addams Family,” 1964.

Don Cravens The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

An unidentified actor auditioned for the role of Uncle Fester, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin (Gomez) with various actresses who auditioned for the role of Morticia Addams, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin with an actress auditioning for the role of Morticia Addams, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during auditions for “The Addams Family” TV show, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

These girls auditioned for the role of Wednesday Friday Addams—including Lisa Loring, at left, who was eventually cast.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A makeup artist with an actor (possibly Jackie Coogan) who auditioned for the role of Uncle Fester, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A would-be Morticia Addams, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin (right) with an actor who auditioned for the role of Lurch.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actors who tried out for the part of Lurch, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ted Cassidy was cast as Lurch—and his hand was also occasionally seen onscreen as Thing.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin with Ken Weatherwax (left), who was cast as Pugsley.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Boys who tried out for part of Pugsley—including Ken Weatherwax, at right, who was cast in the role.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin with an actor auditioning for the role of Uncle Fester, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin with an actress auditioning for the role of Morticia, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Unidentified actresses who tried out for the role of Morticia Addams, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An actress who tried out for the role of Morticia Addams, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An actress who tried out for the part of Grandmama Addams. (Blossom Rock eventually won the role.)

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Aug. 21, 1964 issue

LIFE Magazine

Gandhi and His Spinning Wheel: The Story Behind an Iconic Photo

November 2, 2020September 10, 2014 by

Few public figures of the 20th century were and remain as instantly recognizable to literally billions of people around the globe as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, born on October 2, 1869, and no single picture has become more closely associated with his life, and his way of life, than Margaret Bourke-White’s 1946 portrait of the civil-disobedience pioneer beside his cherished spinning wheel.

In 1946, during the run-up to the historic 1947 partition and independence from Great Britain for both India and Pakistan Bourke-White spent time in India working on a feature, ultimately titled “India’s Leaders,” that would run in the May 27, 1946, issue of LIFE. (This gallery includes the article, in page spreads, as it appeared in the magazine.) She made hundreds of photographs, including many of Gandhi himself: with his family; at his spinning wheel; at prayer. More than a dozen of her pictures ran in the “Leaders” article in the May ’46 issue. Only two were of Gandhi, and neither of them was the well-known spinning-wheel picture.

In fact, that picture would not appear in LIFE until months later and even then, it ran as a small image atop an article in June 1946 that focused on Gandhi’s fascination with what the magazine called “nature cures” for the sick.

“At the age of 76,” LIFE wrote, “Mohandas Gandhi has embarked on a new career as a doctor. It is characteristic of the Mahatma that, at this moment when his lifelong crusade for a free India seems to have reached its final crisis, he is taking time out from a busy political life to preach a nature cure. Gandhi has no license to practice, of course, but to ask the Mahatma for such a document would be like requiring President Truman to produce his airplane ticket when he boards [the first presidential airplane, nicknamed] the Sacred Cow.”

After Gandhi’s assassination In January 30, 1948, the photograph was given pride of place in LIFE’s multiple-page tribute to Gandhi. Filling a half-page atop the article, “India Loses Her ‘Great Soul,'” the picture serves as a stirring visual eulogy to the man and his ideals.

In typed notes that accompanied Bourke-White’s film when it was sent from India to LIFE’s New York offices in the spring of 1946, the significance of the simple spinning wheel is explained:

[Gandhi] spins every day for 1 hr. beginning usually at 4. All members of his ashram must spin. He and his followers encourage everyone to spin. Even M. B-W was encouraged to lay [aside] her camera to spin. . . . When I remarked that both photography and spinning were handicrafts, they told me seriously, “The greater of the 2 is spinning.” Spinning is raised to the heights almost of a religion with Gandhi and his followers. The spinning wheel is sort of an Ikon to them. Spinning is a cure all, and is spoken of in terms of the highest poetry.

Of the most famous portrait Bourke-White ever made of Gandhi, meanwhile, the memo to LIFE’s editors simply states: “Gh. [a common shorthand for Gandhi in the notes] reading clippings spinning wheel in foreground, which he has just finished using. It would be impossible to exaggerate the reverence in which Gh’s ‘own personal spinning wheel’ is held in the ashram.”

Here, LIFE republishes Bourke-White’s great portrait, as well as other images of Gandhi from the same assignment. We’ve also included the page spreads of the “Indian Leaders” article that ran in May 1946.

Gandhi and His Spinning Wheel: the Story Behind an Iconic Photo

Margaret Bourke-White—The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gandhi and His Spinning Wheel: the Story Behind an Iconic Photo

Margaret Bourke-White—LIFE Magazine

The Rooster vs. the Logo: A Truly Unique LIFE Cover

January 16, 2020September 10, 2014 by

When digging through the archives of a magazine that published as many issues as LIFE did through the years, one occasionally encounters something so surprising that it simply has to be shared. And so behold: the only cover among the thousands published by the venerable weekly, across five decades, that did not feature the red-and-white LIFE logo in the upper left-hand corner.

In a brief note on the issue’s contents page, the editors provided a memorable reason for excluding the logo: “LIFE’s title,” they wrote, “is not boldly superimposed on this week’s cover because that would have spoiled the composition” of photographer Torkel Korling’s portrait of the white leghorn.

The full story of the logo’s exclusion, meanwhile, can be found in a letter from a retired employee named Al Zingaro that ran in the Jan. 5, 1987, issue of an in-house Time Inc. newsletter, F.Y.I.:

To me, the most memorable LIFE cover appeared around 1937 [Mr. Zingaro wrote]. My memory cannot pinpoint the exact date. Permit me to tell this story as it actually happened.

I was a layout artist working on the night side, when at about 11:30 p.m. a nice gentleman of about 40 appeared and introduced himself as Henry Luce. He showed me an extraordinary black-and-white photo of a rooster’s head with a beautifully detailed cockscomb. Mr. Luce, who seemed somewhat shy, asked if I could please make up this photo into a LIFE cover.

About 30 minutes later I showed him the finished cover. He shook his head; something displeased him. “I do not like the LIFE logo covering the bird’s cockscomb.” I tucked the logo back of the cockscomb. Again he shook his head. He did not like the word “LIFE” covered even partly. I said, “Mr. Luce, we are at an impasse.” He was silent for all of 30 seconds then the thunderclap! “Let us omit the logo entirely. This fine photo must not be tampered with,” he said. “We’ll put LIFE in the red banner below in small type.”

“WOW.”

Granted, this was still fairly early in LIFE’s existence: in April 1937, Luce’s magazine had been around for less than two years. Nevertheless, there’s something to be admired about a publisher who would forgo, even temporarily, his magazine’s distinctive logo simply because he felt it would impinge on the integrity of a photograph . . . of a rooster.

LIFE magazine, April 26, 1937.

LIFE With Postwar Teens: Photos of Fads From Around the U.S. in 1948

January 14, 2022September 2, 2014 by

In late 1948, LIFE revisited a topic that the magazine had covered a number of times in previous years, and would delve into again and again over the next several decades: namely, teenagers. More specifically, the mystifying habits, lingo and fashion choices of teens around the U.S., from Detroit to Des Moines to Los Angeles to Washington, D.C.

As LIFE wrote in that 1948 article, titled simply (hyphen and all), “Teen-Agers”:

Every year as school begins boys and girls from 12 to 20 start scurrying around like squirrels after nuts, looking for games to play, new clothes to wear and new songs to sing. Every year by Christmas they somehow manage to figure out a different twist for almost every ordinary thing, like hats and handshakes, dates and dances. [Now] LIFE takes a look around the country to answer the annual question about teen-agers: what are they up to now?

In Atlanta on Thursday the boys have nothing to do with the girls and the girls have nothing to do with the boys. In Des Moines Tuesday is a special day. On Tuesday the boys wear GI shoes to school. In Detroit the boys go in for crazy haircuts, and in Seattle some football players wear hair curlers at night. This year’s fashionable word for a jerk, square or schmo is “geek” in Detroit, “mole” in Philadelphia, “pine” in Atlanta, “tweet” in Chicago, “snook” in Des Moines, “tube” in Los Angeles and “scurb” or “T.W.O” (Teensy Weensy Operator) in Washington, D.C.

Sometimes . . . the teen-agers have to be content with exaggerating the fads that were left to them by their elders. . . . Last year they liked to dance languorously to slow music; this year, with the exception of some pace-setters in California who are reviving the Charleston and the black bottom, they move even more slowly, dragging themselves at a walk around the dance floor.

And so it goes. One would think, reading the article in LIFE its tone one part scornful, three parts amused that the editors of the famous weekly had never been teens themselves. Then again, as the modern notion of the teen years as a quantifiable life stage didn’t exist in full until the early 1940s, perhaps LIFE’s editors were never teens, after all. What lucky moles, snooks and tubes they were.

Finally: Note that “Popular Guy” Earl Reum, who is featured in many of the pictures in this gallery, evidently went on to become what a tribute website calls “the ‘Master Wizard’ of student leadership training.” Dr. Reum died in 2010. Read tributes written by many people whose lives he touched.

1948 Teenagers

Lisa Larsen The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

1948 Teenagers

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

1948 Teenagers

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

1948 Teenagers

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

1948 Teenagers

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

1948 Teenagers

Lisa Larsen The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

1948 Teenagers

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

1948 Teenagers

Herbert Gehr The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

December 20, 1948 cover of LIFE magazine.

How to Take a Group Portrait of 14 NFL Quarterbacks on Their Day Off

January 13, 2023August 26, 2014 by

In 1961, LIFE magazine managed to get every starting NFL quarterback, including six future Hall of Famers, in a studio for a group portrait. The photographer, Ralph Morse one of the most versatile photojournalists of the 20th century was never one to have his subjects just stand there and smile, so he asked Johnny Unitas, Bart Starr, Fran Tarkenton and the rest to, in effect, act like quarterbacks. The result is somehow ridiculous, charming and kind of cool, all at the same time.

The group portrait came about because Morse knew there was no way that he could follow 14 professional quarterbacks around the country individually the way LIFE’s sports editors wanted him to.

“Those editors were crazy,” Morse (now 96 years old) recently told LIFE.com. “One week I might fly to Dallas or St. Louis or Detroit to photograph one of the players, and maybe he’d be great. Or maybe he’d be awful. Either way, the assignment would take weeks months! and there was no guarantee we’d end up with what we wanted. The only way I could make a decent picture is if I made it in one place, at one time, with all of the players. I called the NFL commissioner, Pete Rozelle, and told him what I wanted to do. He said I was crazy. He told me they’d have to do it on their day off, and they’d never agree.

“So I said, ‘Look. You’re the commissioner, aren’t you? They’ll do what you tell them, won’t they?’ I suggested we do it in Chicago, somewhere in the center of the country. All they had to do was bring clean uniforms, and show up. We set a date, and I flew out to Chicago a week early to rent a studio. I had a local high school football team come to the studio every day for that week, and we practiced all sorts of scenarios until we had one that worked the guys in front tossing the ball underhand, the guys in back throwing overhand. We also set up a sheet of plexiglass with a hole cut in it for the camera lens to poke through, so I wouldn’t get creamed by 14 footballs coming at me.

“All the quarterbacks arrived on the scheduled day, and we had the whole thing figured out ahead of time. These guys were famous. They were busy. They didn’t want to mess around. They wanted to get into their uniforms, take the picture, get out of their uniforms and go. And that’s what happened.”

One thing worth noting here is that the great Y.A. Tittle (front row, far right), who was playing for the New York Giants at that point in his career, was 35 years old when the photo was made. Old for an NFL quarterback, sure but he looks like he’s 65.

One hell of a player, though; he’s one of just 11 Giants to have his number retired. He’s also one of six future Hall of Famers in Morse’s photo; the others are Layne, Starr, Unitas, Tarkenton and Jurgenson.

Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

Quarterbacks of the NFL in 1961: (back, L-R) Milt Plum, Bobby Layne, Sam Etcheverry, Bill Wade, Bart Starr, Johnny Unitas, Norm Snead, Zeke Bratkowski; (front, L-R) Jim Ninowski, Fran Tarkenton, Don Meredith, John Brodie, Sonny Jurgensen, Y.A. Tittle.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe: The LIFE Cover Stories, 1952-1962

January 16, 2020August 25, 2014 by

While the legend of Marilyn Monroe will always be closely associated with LIFE—her first cover shoot for the magazine, in April 1952, made by the great Philippe Halsman, remains one of the most famous and collectible covers in the history of the magazine—it might surprise some people to learn how seldom she actually appeared in the magazine itself.

There’s little question that LIFE recognized Marilyn’s singular, profound appeal from early on in her career, but she only graced LIFE’s cover six times while she was alive. (She appeared on several more covers after her death in August 1962, including later editions after the magazine ceased publishing as a weekly.) Six times is fewer than Dwight Eisenhower, for example, while Liz Taylor holds the record with fourteen appearances on the cover of the premier photographic magazine of the age.

[Buy the LIFE book, Remembering Marilyn]

And yet . . . when one considers that Marilyn’s run of six covers occurred during a span of a mere 10 years, and that had she lived she might well have challenged Taylor’s supremacy, her close connection to the magazine and, by extension, her centrality to the American conversation around fame, celebrity, sex and media in the 20th century is cast in a much clearer, brighter light.

On top of all that, when one recalls that several of her covers are regarded as classics—her debut and a later Halsman, from 1959, of her jumping, glancing back over shoulder; the Ed Clark shot from 1953 featuring Marilyn and Jane Russell in form-fitting red sequined dresses; a Lawrence Schiller shot of a smiling Marilyn by a pool in June 1962, just two months before her death—the notion that Marilyn helped define what LIFE looked and felt like in the 1950s takes on far greater force.

(Speaking of the 1950s, please note what might be the most incongruous clash of word-and-image ever to appear on the cover of LIFE or on the cover of any magazine, for that matter. In the very first image in the gallery, and quite easily overlooked by anyone whose eyes are, understandably, drawn solely to the gorgeous woman gazing out from the April 17, 1952, issue of LIFE, one can read these rather dramatic, if head-scratching, words: THERE IS A CASE FOR INTERPLANETARY SAUCERS.)

In the end, the LIFE covers on which Marilyn appeared—we’re featuring seven here in this gallery, as well as spreads from the articles that accompanied them—are really just reminders of what a true movie star looked like six long decades ago.