Goth Girls-Part Three

I have been going through the vaults of my brain trying to think of early Goth Girls. I'm sure that the basic Goth Girl goes back a long way, but what about the specific look of the late twentieth century? Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees seems to have inspired scads of dark-haired girls and young women who, over the years and decades, have taken to wearing black clothing, black accessories, and black eye makeup. But was there anyone before her? I think of the character Jacqueline Gibson from the movie The Seventh Victim (1943), played by Jean Brooks, as an early Goth Girl. I wonder if her look could have been inspired by another fictional character who made her first appearance just five years before.

Charles Addams (1912-1988) drew more than a thousand gag cartoons during his decades-long career. His first for The New Yorker is from February 4, 1933. His first illustrating a family and household that would eventually bear his name came along on August 6, 1938. It depicts the character who would become Morticia Addams. At her side is, I think, an early version of Lurch. Addams went on to create 58 cartoons featuring his Gothic characters in their Gothic house. With her black hair, pale skin, black dress, and dour expression, the matriarch of Addams' cartoon family seems to have been a model for the Goth Girl, or a model for models.

On May 1, 1954, The Vampira Show premiered on KABC-TV in Los Angeles. The title character, played by Maila Nurmi (1922-2008), was the first television horror hostess (before any horror host). Maila Nurmi is supposed to have based the look of her character on Charles Addams' as yet unnamed cartoon matriarch. I wrote recently about the Googie style of architecture, named after Googie's Coffee Shop in Los Angeles. That's where the woman who played Vampira met James Dean (1931-1955). They became friends. Like Charles Addams, James Dean was a car enthusiast. The former suffered a heart attack in his car and died in a hospital on September 29, 1988. The latter was killed in a car crash on September 30, 1954. This week is one of anniversaries of deaths of prominent people, but I guess every week is like that. Alex Raymond, also a cartoonist and also a car enthusiast, also died in a car crash in September. His end came on September 6, 1956.

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, was another television horror hostess. She was played by Cassandra Peterson, who was born on September 17, 1951. Yet another Happy Birthday! Elvira had her own local horror movie show in Los Angeles from 1981 to 1986. Her look was based on that of her predecessor, Vampira. And so Elvira was based on Vampira who was based on the character who would one day be named Morticia. Vampirella is a completely different character, even if she has dark hair and sometimes wears bangs.

Almost thirty years after her first appearance in a magazine gag cartoon, Morticia Addams got her own TV show called The Addams Family. It made its debut on September 18, 1964. Morticia was played to perfection by Carolyn Jones (1930-1983). The actress was a natural blonde but played one brunette or dark-haired woman after another in movies and TV shows. She wore her natural hair color in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). What a great movie and good, appealing, and attractive actress!

I have been writing about a Gothic revival that I think took place in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1960, Paramount pictures released Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and with a screenplay by Joseph Stefano based on Robert Bloch's novel of 1959. (Bloch also had a September death date.) In that movie, a young woman, played by blonde Janet Leigh, gets in her car and attempts to drive away from the past. However, once she stops driving, she reencounters the past in the form of a psycho killer who lives, incongruously for that late date, in an Addams Family-style Gothic house. As in The Seventh Victim from seventeen years before, there is a shower scene in Psycho. Also as in that earlier film, the sister of the missing woman goes looking for her. Four years after Psycho was released, the Gothic house--a comic Gothic house--reappeared in The Addams Family television show. Unlike the heroine of the Gothic Romance, Morticia has no desire to run from her house. She is actually très heureuse there.

There is one more possible Goth Girl in today's entry. Like Jean Crane as Jacqueline Gibson, she had dark hair and wore bangs straight across her forehead. Her name was Barbara Jean Day. She was born in 1919 in Chicago and graduated from Butler University in Indianapolis in or about 1939. On May 29, 1943, she married Charles Addams in Westfield, New Jersey, a little less than two months before The Seventh Victim was released. I don't know when she started wearing bangs. She lacked them in her college yearbook picture. I wonder if she was influenced by a viewing of The Seventh Victim. I also wonder whether she was influenced in her general appearance by the Morticia Addams character. Or maybe Charles Addams went looking for women who reminded him of her. (Male artists sometimes fall in love with their creations.) Barbara Jean Day died on August 16, 2007. That was ten days after the sixty-second anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and sixty-nine years and ten days after the first Addams Family cartoon. Barbara Jean Day's second husband, John Hersey (1914-1993), wrote about the first atomic bombing in his book Hiroshima, first published in its entirety in the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker. I wonder if Charles Addams had a cartoon in that issue, too.

An image of Charles Addams' original art for a cartoon published in The New Yorker in November 1939. This is one of my favorite of the Addams Family cartoons.

Charles Addams and Barbara Jean Day in a photograph that is pretty obviously staged. Despite what people have written about her, she could not have been the original for the character who would be named Morticia Addams. Addams drew Morticia before he ever met Barbara Jean. In 1938, when his first Addams family cartoon was published, she was a non-Goth-looking student at Butler University in Indianapolis. They did not meet until 1941 and were not married until 1943. And I'm pretty sure that's not an original drawing on his lap. It may be simply a tear sheet from The New Yorker. By the look of his haircut and the checked shirt, I would guess this is a postwar photograph, possibly from the late 1940s or early 1950s. Notice the Audubon print on the wall: those are his depictions of the common American gull.

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley