In Morticia's Shadow: The Life & Career of Carolyn Jones

By James Pylant

Before captivating America as Morticia in THE ADDAMS FAMILY, actress Carolyn Jones appeared in 30 movies (including starring roles with Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra) and had a decade-long marriage to producer Aaron Spelling. But the road to Hollywood from her native Amarillo, Texas, was studded with rejection, typecasting, and unwanted comparisons to an actress who hated her: Bette Davis.

Determined to succeed, Carolyn reinvented herself by enduring plastic surgery and dyeing her blonde hair black. Hollywood rewarded its rising star with an Oscar nomination and THE ADDAMS FAMILY, which would become a curse, overshadowing the future of her acting career.

IN MORTICIA'S SHADOW is the true story of Carolyn Jones: a lonely childhood in the Texas Panhandle, blind loyalty to a devoted mother, attempts to erase all trace of a long-absent father, four marriages, her scathing indictment of Hollywood through the pages of a best-selling novel, a courageous battle with cancer, and a triumphant return to television as the evil Myrna Clegg in CAPITOL.

Author James Pylant unveils the real Carolyn Jones, with access to her personal correspondence and journal, as well as interviews with her family, friends and fellow actors. What emerges is an intimate portrait of the iconic actress, a consummate professional who created a mystique not only for Morticia but for herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9780984185788

Book preview

Jones

Prologue

THE GIRL squatted under the sheet-draped dining table, holding the flashlight upward so that it illuminated her snapping blue eyes in the darkness. Her sister and cousins leaned close as if to pounce on every word the girl would utter. When the captive audience could no longer wait, she began to speak.

The man walked down the path in the woods. And then he heard the voice …

What did it say?

Go to the bridge …

What happened next?

He walked to the bridge. Then the voice told him, It floats … it floats …"

What floats?

She stopped as a wry smiled crawled across her lips. The storyteller had her first captivated audience.

More than two decades later, those fierce, steady-gazing blue eyes glowed dramatically when her light blonde hair became jet black and her sculptured nose was finely chiseled. With long, straight dark hair and draped in a floor length, tight-fitting black dress, she mesmerized an audience of millions who knew her as Morticia Addams.

Carolyn Jones never knew that her talent for acting and gothic allure was deeply rooted in the Jones family tree.

1

The Roots of an Actress

HOLLYWOOD REWARDED Carolyn Jones with critical acclaim as an actress, an Academy Award nomination, and her own television series, yet she would admit to suffering with feelings of inferiority. She was sensitive about discussing the past, especially avoiding the subject of her father. Never remember even seeing him, she would say. Julius Jones had not played a role in his daughter’s life since Carolyn was a child, and she refused to acknowledge him. Instead, she invented a father whom she called John Joseph Jones, giving him all of the good traits found in her strongest paternal influence, her step-grandfather.

Hollywood publicists set about to create a colorful family tree for its rising star by making her a descendant of the famous Apache chief Geronimo. The true history of the actress’s family was far more dramatic than anything dreamt by Hollywood. The relentlessly ambitious Carolyn Jones, whether charming an audience through acting, evoking fear with ghostly tales, or strongly voicing an opinion, unwittingly conjured the spirit of a larger-than-life ancestor.

As Yankee Jones stood before his friends and neighbors, he stared into the faces of those who accused him of murder. Perhaps the New Englander’s mind flashed back to his teen years when he won praise for his skill as an actor, a talent that would be inherited by his great-great-granddaughter, the future Addams Family actress. Maybe his thoughts drifted to his darker days in Michigan Territory, where he was a postmaster until pleading guilty to embezzlement from the U.S. Mail. Jones had fled with his oldest son to Texas, then a Mexican province, leaving his wife and other children behind. It was now 1861, and the condemned man called Yankee—Benaiah Jones III—had been found guilty of killing his neighbor, a judge.

Perhaps the verdict against Yankee Jones was borne out of his being too vocal in opposing Texas’s becoming a Confederate state, and he was seen as radical for condemning slavery. Jones’s fascination with Spiritualism—contact with the dead—alarmed his faithful, church-going neighbors who heard stories of Jones and other converts of the new, strange religion participating in séances where tables mysteriously lifted from the floor and hovered in the air. Fear and resentment of Yankee Jones would not, however, end with his hanging. As executioners looped the rope around his neck, a cool and composed Jones made a chilling vow that he would torment them from beyond the grave. You will have no peace, for your conscience will never be free from the knowledge that I will be present with each and every one of you at all times, he said.

The curse that Yankee Jones thrust at his killers was spoken with such force that it left an indelible imprint upon those whom he marked. Legend said that several of these men found escape from the haunting by committing suicide. The others, meanwhile, met tragic and untimely deaths. Folklore says that shortly after Jones’s burial, his grave was discovered opened and empty.

Julius Davis J. D. Jones, Yankee’s grandson, was born in Hillsboro, Texas, in 1862. As a young man, he was hired as a cowhand for a ranch outside of the West Texas town of Sweetwater. Gaining much knowledge of cattle farming during the next six years, J. D. started his own ranch. In 1889 he married Fannie Florence Brandon. J. D. Jones enjoyed a successful career as a cattleman. He registered Herefords and won blue ribbons every year, said a great-granddaughter. The Joneses, the parents of a dozen children, settled in Mulberry Canyon near Abilene.

Julius Alfred Jones, J. D. and Fannie’s youngest son, was born on February 10, 1897. The dark-haired, brown-eyed boy with a turned-up nose was nicknamed Doodle by his father.

J. D. and Fannie instilled a strong work ethic in their offspring. Children, they believed, should never have idle hands. The father was stern with his daughters, prompting one to flee the family home by finding a husband. Two other daughters followed her path, both using matrimony as an escape. Young Julius’s own problems with his father led him to run away at age fourteen. While he eventually returned home, Julius’s problems with Mr. Jones were never completely resolved. You could tell he still resented his father, said a niece.

Julius, as a twenty-year-old, named his father as his employer when registering for the draft in 1917. Three years later, at the enumeration of the 1920 federal census, he still worked on his father’s stock farm. Yet, farming and raising stock did not impassion the young man. Julius was a restless soul, one who was always in search of a better job. Doodle was as honest as he could be, recalled his niece who never knew him to ask for a dime. He was a good person, and I liked him. He never got in trouble. She said her even-tempered uncle did gamble some, but when he did gamble it was for keeps.

By his mid-to-late twenties, Julius traveled east and found himself in Mineral Wells, a tourist town of some seven thousand souls. West of Fort Worth, Mineral Wells gained a reputation as the South’s greatest health resort. It was here that he met and fell in love with Chloe Jeanette Southern, a young woman who would become his wife and the mother of Carolyn Jones. Despite the age difference—Julius was nine years Chloe’s senior—they found a common bond. Both were private people, and each had tried escaping a troubled past by running away as teenagers.

Mother was illegitimate, Carolyn explained. It totally affected her life. Chloe’s birth came only five years out of the Victorian Age, when society viewed an out-of-wedlock birth as scandalous. The sense of shame was tremendous; illegitimate children were seen as tainted by parental sin.

Benjamin Ray, Carolyn Jones’s maternal great-grandfather, was born in Alabama in 1848. He moved from his parents’ home after turning twenty, the same year he came to North Central Texas and settled in Johnson County, south of Fort Worth. In 1870 Benjamin Ray married Mattie Prestridge. Descendants insisted that Benjamin’s bride was a Comanche, although that Great Plains tribe never lived in Mattie’s native Alabama.

Benjamin and Mattie Ray became the parents of ten children over a period of twenty-three years. The father, a Democrat, raised his brood to attend the Missionary Baptist Church.

Emily Caroline Ray, called Callie, was Benjamin and Mattie’s ninth child. Born in 1886, she was small when her farming father moved the family far away into the rolling prairies of the remote Texas Panhandle. The Rays settled near the Donley County town of Jericho where Mattie died when daughter Callie was a nine-year-old.

The family faced a scandal when Benjamin Ray was accused of murder, but the story underwent at least two revisions of family filtering to diminish its impact. The story repeated to Carolyn said her great-grandfather killed a German sympathizer during World War I. Ray is said to have been incensed to see the man’s raising of a German flag. If you don’t take it down, I’m going to shoot you, he threatened. The man refused, and Ray fatally shot him.

The second version, an entirely different scenario, tells of Callie’s older sister, Sally, and their father walking down a Jericho street when a shot rang out from the second-floor window of a hotel. Benjamin Ray responded by firing a fatal shot at the sniper whose body fell to the street. While her father went in search of the sheriff, Sally had to stay behind to keep roaming hogs from devouring the body.

In truth, the story centered around Ray’s dispute with a man named Jake Still. One family member said that Still, who had been seeing one of Benjamin’s daughters, was told to stay away, while another relative said problems arose when wheat stolen from Ray’s wagon was discovered at the Still farm.

According to Benjamin Ray, he only wanted to right a wrong: dispel Still’s gossip that claimed Ray was involved with a married woman. A confrontation between the two adversaries in the winter of 1898 ended with Still’s being shot to death. Ray was indicted for murder and pleaded not guilty. A change of venue was granted, and when the trial was heard, the jury found him not guilty.

In his later years, Benjamin Ray made his home with daughter Sally. Because doctors diagnosed him with a psychosis, he was admitted to the state hospital in Wichita Falls. Benjamin died there three months later of hypostatic pneumonia in 1933.

On July 4, 1905, the citizens of Donley County gathered on the streets of Clarendon, its county seat, to celebrate Independence Day, as they had done for twenty-seven years. This highlight of the social season in the secluded Texas Panhandle was an opportunity for young men to meet and court the daughters of Donley’s farmers and ranchers. Who Callie Ray may have been dating then is unknown, but that month the nineteen-year-old conceived a child.

On Saturday afternoon, April 28, 1906, Callie gave birth to a daughter at the family home eight miles southeast of Jericho. The young woman named her child Chloe Jeanette Ray. She was known by her first name, pronounced Clo. Callie never revealed the identity of the baby’s father. Whispers in the Ray family claimed that he was a businessman. Chloe herself would later say that her father was a young man whose own father, a judge, became furious when learning of his son’s siring a child out-of-wedlock. The jurist forbade his son to marry Callie, saying that the young man’s education was far more important.

Callie decided to keep her baby, though society then frowned at unwed mothers raising children. Chloe remained with her mother, at least until the time of the marriage of Callie’s favorite brother, John Ray. Donie, John’s bride, found Chloe’s presence an embarrassment and pressured her husband to convince his sister that her little girl should be given up for adoption. Callie, a conscientious woman, wanted her child to have a mother and a father. Chloe’s social acceptance hinged upon having what her own father denied her: the all-important family name. Callie knew of a couple who were willing to legally adopt her daughter and arrangements were soon made.

The day that Levi and Mattie Southern took Chloe proved both confusing and frightening for the little girl. Levi Southern, who was already past sixty, had fathered children by two wives. Mattie Southern, his third wife, was in her early thirties and childless. The couple took the four-year-old girl to Kiowa County, Oklahoma, where they farmed. Also making their home with the family were Levi’s forty-year-old son and Mattie’s seventy-eight-year-old mother. The little girl was won over by her adoptive father, a man she loved dearly. But her relationship with her new mother proved horrific. Mattie Southern subjected Chloe to verbal and physical abuse, sometimes threatening her with knives or stripping off the girl’s clothing and whipping her. Chloe later wondered if the couple adopted her so that they could have an extra pair of hands; she had to work hard constantly.

Despite becoming the Southerns’ daughter, Chloe was not cut off from her biological mother. The unusual arrangement with the Southerns allowed for Chloe’s visiting with Callie. But the adoption forever deprived Callie of being called mother, a term her daughter reserved for Mattie Southern. Chloe would thereafter address the mother she had known for the first four years of her life as Callie.

Starting her life over, Callie took a job as a sales clerk at a coffee shop in Amarillo. That town, founded less than a year after Callie Ray’s birth, quickly became a major cattle-marketing center. Railways, which made Amarillo an important shipping point for products such as cotton, brought new residents. Around the time of Callie’s move to Amarillo, the town’s population stood at 9,957—an increase of 8,515 in a decade. The town sported a new opera house and electric street cars, but it was increasingly emerging as an industrial town, with milling and feed-manufacturing.

Callie met a twenty-five-year-old man named C. W. Baker, called Charlie, who worked for a wholesale company, while the two lived at the same boardinghouse. Callie became Baker’s bride in 1910, and the couple moved into their own home in Amarillo. Born Charles Waterman Baker in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1885, the young Midwesterner probably did not deliberately seek Amarillo as his residence, but rather came there on the heels of a transfer by Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing, a company then based in his native Wisconsin.

Culturally out of place in the Texas Panhandle, Callie’s husband, although staunchly traditional and conservative, still found himself at odds with the prejudices of the Lone Star State. Baker, who did not appreciate the South’s notions when it came to race, felt perfectly at ease at the black socials he attended.

Meanwhile, Chloe Ray—renamed Chloe Southern—settled into a new home with her adoptive family. Callie came for a visit and introduced the little girl to Charlie Baker, a meeting that made a deep impression upon Chloe. She recalled seeing her new stepfather for the first time when he took mother and daughter to a movie theatre. Sitting in Callie’s lap, Chloe stared into his face as she tried to understand his role in her complicated family. Charlie accepted his new stepdaughter, but he viewed her with a stern paternal eye. The Bakers couldn’t have children of their own; pregnancies during their marriage ended in miscarriages.

By 1920 the Bakers left Texas and moved to Minneapolis when Charlie took a job as an assistant manager. The Southerns, meanwhile, returned to Texas and moved to Gray County, east of Amarillo. By the time Chloe was a teenager, the Southerns relocated to the north central region of the state where they ran a boardinghouse in Mineral Wells. One of their boarders was a married man who talked the teenager—desperate to escape her adoptive mother’s abuse—into eloping with him. Mattie Southern hired a detective who tracked down the underage girl and brought her back home. Chloe returned to Mineral Wells High School where she graduated in 1926. The school yearbook noted that, Chloe’s talent lies in playing a piano. Whenever she plays, one begins to feel all cares and worries steal swiftly away. She found escape at the cinema, where her vivid imagination could roam in the world of silent movies. Her musical talent led to her landing a job as a pianist at the theatre. Perhaps it was there or at the Southerns’ boardinghouse that Chloe Jeanette Southern first met Julius Jones.

Sometime within three years of Chloe’s high school graduation, love blossomed between the two. Julius, however, was deeply troubled by a bad experience in Mineral Wells. In a postcard Chloe wrote to his sister, Ruth Jones Isenhower, she told of physical injuries he suffered. Jones is getting along fine. Dad said he was feeling better but they can’t move him before next Saturday because they took the stitches out. After his recovery, Julius left and went some 260 miles west to Midland. His leaving town did not diminish his feelings for Chloe, and the two kept in touch through letters.

In the spring of 1929 Chloe traveled to Topeka, Kansas, with the Bakers, and from there she wrote a letter to Julius. Before the letter’s arrival, she sent a telegram to him and asked that he meet her in Dallas. When the message was delivered on Monday, March 18, an overjoyed Julius immediately penned a letter and apologized for the grief he caused her—presumably by his leaving Mineral Wells—and adding that time has dragged by so slowly; it seems ages since I saw you last. Chloe wanted him to meet her in Dallas on the following Monday. I hope we can be so happy in our new life that we can forget our past worries and sorrow, he offered. On the next Monday, May 25, 1929, Chloe and Julius met in Dallas, and they were married that same day.

The newlyweds began their married life together in Midland, where Julius worked as a barber. He had also introduced her to his family, and Chloe was welcomed by the Joneses who took an instant liking to the twenty-three-year-old.

Ruth Jones Isenhower, who assumed the problems of all of her siblings, was pleased when Julius married Chloe, if only because her restless brother at last appeared happy. However, Julius never seemed to have money. And then there were episodes of depression, when Ruth observed that he would just walk around or sit around like he was blue. Ruth was aware that something had happened in Mineral Wells; he didn’t seem like the same person.

2

Amarillo

THREE MONTHS after marrying Julius Jones, Chloe became pregnant. While she looked forward to the birth of their first child, Julius saw fatherhood as an unwelcome responsibility, perhaps viewing it as one he could not financially afford. Chloe saw that her husband seemed nervous around children. She noticed that if a child walked through the threshold of the barbershop where he worked, Julius would make a hasty exit.

Demons from the past taunted him and placed limitations on his happiness. I have tried to brace up and forget things that have happened in my past, but everyday it has gotten worse until I can stand it no longer, he told his mother-in-law. Julius alluded to a mysterious event in Mineral Wells six years earlier that affected him deeply.

His shortcomings, he said, did nothing but make Chloe miserable and left her disappointed. Leading his wife to believe that he would go to Big Spring to pursue a new job, he left her behind in Midland. Julius went as far as Sweetwater, where he wrote a letter to Callie and confessed that he was not coming back. He asked the Bakers to travel to Midland and break the news to Chloe. It is all my fault, he told Callie. I am so worthless, he cried. I couldn’t even pay rent and buy groceries.

Julius Jones refused to discuss his problems. I will take them with me and hide them along with myself in some river or some other place that I can find where I will never be found so that any search will be hopeless, he wrote.

Stunned by her husband’s abandonment, Chloe wrote to her sister-in-law, Ruth Isenhower, with questions. Why did Julius leave? Her puzzled sister-in-law could offer no answers. I can’t imagine what is wrong with him, Ruth wrote. He had never been in any trouble, nor had he ever been one to chase after women. Ruth dreaded telling her mother that Julius had left Chloe. It will nearly kill Mama, she said.

Her husband’s abandonment left the pregnant and unemployed Chloe with no choice but to return to Amarillo with her mother and stepfather. At 3:57 p.m., on Monday, April 28, 1930—the day Chloe turned twenty-four, she gave birth to a daughter at Northwest Texas Hospital, naming her Carolyn Sue Jones. The newborn’s name was inspired by her mother’s admiration for movie star Carole Lombard. The infant’s birth certificate was filed in June, but for some reason a duplicate was filed two months later with the spelling Carellyn.

In Carolyn Sue Jones’s baby book, her mother meticulously recorded all of the facts—not only identifying the doctor but recording the names of all seven attending nurses. John Ray, the uncle who had persuaded Callie to surrender her only child for adoption, was the first person in the family to give money to his four-month-old grandniece. The doting mother noted that Carolyn Sue—the smartest, cutest baby with bright eyes and a beautifully shaped