After arriving in New York City in 1976, she began performing in live sex shows and in 1979 appeared in the pornographic film Candy Goes to Hollywood.

Her schoolmates and teachers recalled Williams as a "shy and pretty girl, an average student who played in the junior high band, paid attention to her hair and clothes, and who spoke so softly ... you had to lean toward her to hear her.

[3] In 1976, Williams arrived in New York City, where she saw an ad in the Show Business magazine that lay open on the floor of the Port Authority Bus Terminal station.

It was a casting call for radical artist and Yale University graduate Rod Swenson's experimental "Captain Kink's Theatre".

[3] The Plasmatics toured the world, although a concert in London was cancelled by the promoters due to safety reasons, causing the press to dub the band "anarchists".

During the shooting of an appearance on SCTV in 1981, studio heads decided they would not air Williams's performance unless she changed out of a costume that revealed her nipples.

In January 1981, police in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, arrested Williams for simulating masturbation on stage and charged her with battery to an officer and obscene conduct.

Later that year in Cleveland, Ohio, Williams was acquitted of an obscenity charge for simulating sex on stage wearing only shaving cream; she subsequently covered her nipples with electrical tape to avoid arrest.

[8][9] In November, an Illinois judge sentenced her to one year's supervision and fined her $35 for attacking a freelance photographer who tried to take her picture as she jogged along the Chicago lakefront.

[14] In 1991, Williams moved to Storrs, Connecticut, where she lived with her long-time companion and former manager, Rod Swenson, and worked as an animal rehabilitator and at a food cooperative in nearby Willimantic.

"[16] Her teachers and other sources described Wendy Williams as a shy and soft-spoken child who was an average student, and who learned to play the clarinet very well in the junior high band—-although she herself at numerous times stated that she felt like an outcast and was misunderstood by her strict parents, whom she referred to as "cocktail zombies".

[18] While making the transition into early adulthood, after running away from her family at the age of 16 and leaving the U.S. to explore the world for several years, for a time Williams became interested in Far Eastern spirituality, religions, and gurus as well as experimenting with mind-altering substances like LSD and mescaline.

[17][20][21] She continued to try different jobs and lifestyles in order to discover somewhere where she felt she belonged, until eventually finding the show-business magazine ad for Rod Swenson's Sex Fantasy Theater in 1976—he would go on to form and manage their band, the Plasmatics; the two remained lifelong romantic partners until her suicide in 1998.

[1] After leaving the music scene, Swenson and Williams moved to Storrs, Connecticut, in 1991 to live in the geodesic dome house that they built for each other.

[17][20][18] Although some have retroactively referred to her as straight edge, and her lifestyle supports this as she never used drugs and stopped drinking/smoking at a certain point in her life, there is no known evidence to suggest that Williams identified as such.

[25][26] On her brief appearance in the adult film Candy Goes to Hollywood, Williams was quoted as saying: "It was just like working in a donut shop, except you didn't wear a paper hat".

He found a package she left for him that contained some noodles he liked, a packet of seeds for growing garden greens, some Oriental massage balm, and sealed letters from her.

She had apparently been feeding wild squirrels moments before her suicide, as well as putting a bag over her head before shooting herself to spare her partner the horrible sight.

[27] This is what she reportedly wrote[28] in a suicide note regarding her decision: I don't believe that people should take their own lives without deep and thoughtful reflection over a considerable period of time.

For me, much of the world makes no sense, but my feelings about what I am doing ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a place where there is no self, only calm.Joey Ramone and many others issued statements at the time of her death.

[30] Several of Williams' former Plasmatics co-members (Chosei Funahara, Richie Stotts, Wes Beech, Stu Deutsch, Jean Beauvoir and TC Tolliver) played a six-song set with four of them handling the vocals.