Where To Watch
Ted Cassidy's ''grand romance'' was with his college sweetheart
The Lurch actor's real family included Jesse, two kids and a pup named Pepi.
One of the last episodes of The Addams Family to ever air was the second-to-last episode "Lurch’s Grand Romance," which found the lumbering butler swooning over a new love.
It’s a funny episode featuring Lurch, as well as one of Grandmama’s love potions, but behind the scenes of The Addams Family, Lurch actor Ted Cassidy didn’t need any potion to find love.
He already had his own family to support, after falling in love and marrying his college sweetheart in his 20s.
Cassidy met his wife Margaret Helen Jesse, who went by Jesse, when they were both going to college in Dallas, Texas.
He was a basketball player who had transitioned into radio broadcasting, and she was a pretty young student with a flair for creative arts studying psychology.
After they got married, they bought a huge house in Dallas and started a family, welcoming first their son Sean, then their daughter Cameron.
Things were going well for Cassidy in Texas, and he was so happy to be able to provide for his family, rising up in the radio ranks to titles like sports director and host-producer on popular music shows.
But then, Cassidy got the itch to act, and Jesse decided to support his ambition. He would go to California for auditions, and she would often accompany him.
At first, it felt like a lost cause, making those trips and returning to Texas having gotten no parts, but then Cassidy got cast on The Addams Family, and things seemed to be turning around.
Jumping at the opportunity, Cassidy moved his family out of that big Dallas house and into a cramped two-bedroom apartment outside Hollywood.
His plan was to wait out the first year of The Addams Family and see how it goes before buying a house.
Supporting him, Jesse made the cramped apartment feel like home, drawing caricatures of her husband in crayon with the kids and hanging them all over the walls.
Sometimes when he came home from a long day of shooting, she’d be there with guitar in hand, ready to sing songs and relax into their family’s hootenanny kind of home vibe.
It was very exciting for the Cassidy family then, when The Addams Family became a success.
Cassidy and Jesse decided it was time to settle in for real in California, going house hunting at last.
They hoped to find a house as big as the one they left in Dallas, with a huge yard that could serve as a playground for their kids and the dog.
While Cassidy returned to the studio to film episodes, his wife Jesse would continue her classes at UCLA, still on a path to become a psychologist.
Then soon after "Lurch’s Big Romance" aired, The Addams Family ended.
Cassidy must’ve looked around his house at that moment and known that he had really made it, no longer worried about having to move his family any time his career called on him to find a new role or meet a new challenge.
Cassidy continued acting after The Addams Family, particularly finding success as a cartoon voice actor.
Then in 1975, Cassidy and his wife Jesse divorced, and four years later, Cassidy died at the age of 46.
The family man’s memory was honored by his kids, who obeyed his final wishes and scattered his ashes in the backyard of their family home.
28 Comments
GILLIS BOTH said You Rang?
Your post is one of the best I have ever read on the MeTV boards. Thanks for sharing.
As for
“His plan was to wait out the first year of The Addams Family and see how it goes before buying a house.”
If you start in the past tense, then you have to stay in the past tense, so it’s see how things WENT, not goes.
The second-to-last episode WOULD be one of the last, now, wouldn’t it?
He was more than Lurch.
