Lisa Loring was born on February 16th, 1958, and is starting the latter half century of her life with far more control and brighter hopes than she enjoyed during much of her first fifty years. While many people are quite familiar with her most famous role, that of the gothic little girl named Wednesday Thursday Addams from ‘The Addams Family’, it’s likely that but a percentage of those fans know of the life of the child actress, and how her life had more dark corners than the household containing Uncle Fester and Lurch.
Lisa was born on the island of Kwajalein when her father was in the Navy, and her parents divorced when she was approximately two years old. Her Mother moved with her to Los Angeles, and due to Lisa being a beautiful child, she was gaining success as a child model before recognized as the natural choice for the role of Wednesday Addams in 1964. The role along with the enduring success of the comedy series led young Lisa into a decent life then, but when it ended, somehow her life was filled with a lot of tragedy. Inasmuch as the Addams Family operated along a distant fringe of society and family values, so it was with Lisa Loring, her life, and her life within the Entertainment Industry.
Lisa was but fifteen when she married a childhood friend named Farrell Foumberg, and was a divorced, single mother by the age of sixteen. She had no adult figures in her life to turn to, since her mother died about that time from complications due to a life of severe alcoholism. But living in an environment near showbiz, she got a job on a sitcom entitled ‘The Pruitts of Southampton’. While that role may be rather forgettable, Lisa obtained a respectable role on the soap, ‘As the World Turns’, playing Cricket Montgomery for about two years. However, due to the various complications in Lisa’s life, her soap opera career ended quickly. Perhaps due to the rigors of being in front of the camera, Lisa gave up on the struggles of the craft and took a position behind the camera, eventually working in makeup. But being true to the fringe-like nature of her life, she was divorced yet again from Doug Stevenson, who worked in soaps, too, and her makeup career somehow brought her into the dark world of pornography.
It was in porn where Lisa was exposed to a world of drugs and alcohol, common to that genre of entertainment back in the 1980’s. She wasn’t performing, but ended up meeting and marrying Jerry Butler (really Paul Siederman, who made his stage name Jerry Butler after the famous musician of the same name), a man renowned for his performances in pornography throughout the 1980’s; a career choice made some time after a would-be hockey career was cut short by injuries. The couple had spoken on various daytime talk shows at the time about the darker sides of the porn industry.
Their marriage came to an end about the time her husband’s adult film career ended (if your husband makes a living by having sex with other women for income isn’t on the fringe…), and Lisa was seriously struggling with drugs, alcohol, and life in general. Here she is again, living within the outer fringe of an industry she knew since a child, but struggling so much to find the way to happiness. She had even made a suicide attempt with an intentional overdose. But Lisa recalled that her mother died at the age of 34 because of substance abuse, and seeing she was trailing along the same dark path as her mother, Lisa decided not to follow a dark trail of death and instead entered rehab and turned her life around.
Lisa has spent the past several years living a healthier, happier life. She still enjoys touring conventions where she meets fans of The Addams Family, embracing that time of her life. Other than that, she has been working in public relations for a hotel chain, and even had a position with an interior design company. Reports show that she is still with her latest husband, Tim Drury. Her relationship with Tim shows she is still along the fringe of show business, what with Tim being the son of James Drury, from the TV show, ‘The Virginian’. It seems these fringes they traverse are lighter and brighter.
Lisa Loring is a shining example of how someone can overcome a life full of difficulty, stigma, and debauchery, even when the odds are stacked so high. She demonstrated that even though she struggled with what life threw at her (despite so-called successful points with her roles as Wednesday and Cricket) and even succumbed to the tragedy at times, she found a way beyond the dark, dreary world of her performing career and a way to be wiser and stronger. She found happiness in what she had rather than begrudging what she didn’t, accepted life out there on the fringe, and that has brought her to achieving the start of her second century in life, which is something her mother could not do.
