Lurch, The Teenage Idol? Ted Cassidy Was the Breakout Hunk of ‘The Addams Family’

Nobody’s ever claimed teenage girls have normal taste. From the first time some cave fuckboi with pouty lips smashed a rock, they’ve been into bizarre displays of masculinity. They also gravitate toward the supernatural for reasons that probably have to do with astrology and incredibly valid fears about real boys. Thus, we get entire generations of teenage girls obsessed with the sparkly geezers of Twilight, the current wave of monsterotica, and apparently, Ted Cassidy as Lurch in the mid-‘60s sitcom adaptation of The Addams Family.

The lust for Lurch first came to the attention of those on The Addams Family set when Cassidy began receiving a bizarre amount of fan mail from teenage girls. Now, when we say “bizarre,” that’s not to disparage Cassidy’s appearance; in fact, behind-the-scenes photos of Cassidy suggest he was actually pretty dreamy without all that makeup on. With flawlessly styled wavy hair and cheekbones that could give you seven years of bad luck, he was a perfectly nice-looking young man who happened to be hilariously tall.

But his underage fans didn’t know that. All they saw was a freakish servant, which may have been appealing on its own on a number of levels we’re not really qualified to dig into. Maybe it was his dual role as Thing that did it — everyone can appreciate a well-formed disembodied hand, at least if the sex toys modeled in Thing’s image that we found on a reluctant Google search and quickly navigated away from are anything to go by.

Whatever the case, Lurchomania became so overwhelming — he was even featured in teen magazines alongside the Beatles and Tom Jones — that the writers of The Addams Family were inspired to pen the episode “Lurch, the Teenage Idol,” in which Lurch stumbles into a record deal, briefly becomes a prima donna, and learns the value of humility and privacy after losing his voice.

It seemed like a joke, but Cassidy really was getting mobbed by adoring fans, and it became a reality when Ted Cassidy was actually given a record deal and subsequently released “The Lurch.” The song and accompanying dance debuted on the variety show Shivaree! five months after the episode aired.

Unfortunately, the single flopped. It appears that, as horny as they were for the Addams’ imposing butler, the nation’s schoolgirls had a limited record store budget and they preferred to spend it on Jagger. Still, though Cassidy’s music career and sex symbol status in general were short-lived, it just goes to show that you can wrangle teenage girls into just about anything if you strike just the right balance between weird and hot.