History does not record the day of the week when Charles Addams attended a party in New York thrown by a close friend of the poet and actress Joan Blake. We do know it was early in 1964 and that the New Yorker cartoonist was agonising over an upcoming live-action television adaptation of his popular Addams Family cartoons – about a ghoulish family of misfits who lived in morbid seclusion in a spooky mansion.