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by Lance Lee (Author)
FAMILY MATTERS is a generations long reckoning with family myth, loss and transformation from the end of the Civil War into the 1970s, showing how family suffering metamorphosized into comedy on an abiding public, cultural scale in the original The Addams Familytelevision series of 1964-1966 created by the author's father, David Levy, from the original Charles Addams New Yorker cartoons. It is also the story of how the author's parents though drawn from widely divergent backgrounds strove to realize the American Dream. Levy's ancestors derived from Jewish Eastern Europe, Lucile Wilds' from Germany and Anglo-Welsh aristocracy. The breakdown of that effort both as a slow ebbing and with an abrupt jolt provides the narrative drive and climax of FAMILY MATTERS.
David Levy rose to prominence in radio in We The People which in WWII reached half of America's households, then after a detour in the wartime Treasury Department running War Bond drives, in television as one of its pioneers, eventually becoming Head of Programming at NBC and lifting that network to the first rank with shows like Dr. Kildare and Bonanza while bringing Hollywood to television with Saturday Night At The Movies. The Addams Family climaxed his career, one of the creation of fantasies publicly rewarded.
Lucille Wilds married him multiple times, publicly in 1942, a perfect match for a husband striving against antisemitism and for acceptance in the then largely WASP world of the great advertising agencies, the source of creative content for radio and early TV. She was "Queen of the Models" in the 1930s and 1940s, "The Models' Miss America of 1939," and the country's "Dream Girl" of 1940" who became the supreme hostess David Levy needed at his side-and as time passed, the Ultimate Mother, Master Builder, and dominant force within her family she learned to shield from his.... That their union lasted nearly thirty years despite their divisions is a testament to the power of love to override glaring opposites, for a time....
FAMILY MATTERS traces the links between private and public, myth and fact, reality and the transformations we all make to understand ourselves and the ideals we raise from our warring strands of inheritance and experience.
