Della Holman
Charles Addams was born on January 7, 1912, and died on September 29, 1988. He was an American cartoonist known for his darkly humorous and macabre characters. He signed his cartoons Chas Addams. Some of the recurring characters, who became known as the Addams Family, have been the basis for spin-offs in several other forms of media.
Charles Addams Biography
Life
He was born in Westfield, New Jersey. Son of Grace M. (Spear) (1879–1960) and Charles Huey Addams (1882–1963), a piano-company executive who had studied to be an architect, he was known as “something of a rascal around the neighborhood” as childhood friends recalled. Addams was distantly related to U.S. presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, despite the different spellings of their last names, and was the first cousin twice removed to noted social reformer Jane Addams.
A house on Elm Street and another on Dudley Avenue into which police once caught him breaking and entering are said to be the inspiration for the Addams Family mansion in his cartoons. College Hall, the oldest building on the current campus of the University of Pennsylvania, where Addams studied, was also an inspiration for the mansion. He was fond of visiting the Presbyterian Cemetery on Mountain Avenue. One friend said of him: “His sense of humor was a little different from everybody else’s.” He was also artistically inclined, “drawing with a happy vengeance,” according to a biographer.
His father encouraged him to draw, and Addams did cartoons for the Westfield High School student literary magazine, Weathervane. He attended Colgate University in 1929 and 1930. At the corners of West Kendrick and Maple Avenues in Hamilton, NY, is another home, and myth, that may have inspired the Addams Family house. He also attended the University of Pennsylvania, where a fine-arts building on campus is named for him, in 1930 and 1931. In front of the building is a sculpture of the silhouettes of Addams Family characters, and the library at Penn State contains a mural that he created in 1952 and depicts prominent Addams Family members. He then studied at the Grand Central School of Art in New York City in 1931 and 1932.
In 1933, Charles Addams joined the layout department of True Detective magazine, where he had to retouch photos of corpses that appeared in the magazine’s stories to remove the blood from them. Addams complained: “A lot of those corpses were more interesting the way they were.”
Addams’ first drawing for The New Yorker, a sketch of a window washer, ran on February 6, 1932, and his cartoons ran regularly in the magazine from 1937, when he drew the first in the series that came to be called The Addams Family, until his death. He was a freelancer throughout that time.
During World War II, Addams served at the Signal Corps Photographic Center in New York, where he made animated training films for the U.S. Army. In late 1942, he met his first wife, Barbara Jean Day, who purportedly resembled his cartoon character, Morticia Addams. The marriage ended eight years later, after Addams, who hated small children, refused to adopt one. She later married New Yorker colleague John Hersey, author of the book Hiroshima.
Addams married his second wife, Barbara Barb (Estelle B. Barb), in 1954. A practicing lawyer, she “combined Morticia-like looks with diabolical legal scheming,” by which she wound up controlling The Addams Family television and film franchises and persuaded her husband to give away other legal rights. At one point, she got her husband to take out a US $100,000 insurance policy. Addams consulted a lawyer on the sly, who later humorously wrote: “I told him the last time I had a word of such a move was in a picture called Double Indemnity starring Barbara Stanwyck, which I called to his attention.” In the movie, Stanwyck’s character plotted her husband’s murder. The couple divorced in 1956.
The Addams Family television series began after David Levy, a television producer, approached Addams with an offer to create it with a little help from the humorist. All Addams had to do was give his characters names and more characteristics for the actors to use in portrayals. The series ran on ABC for two seasons, from 1964 to 1966.
He was “sociable and debonair”. A biographer described him as being “a well-dressed, courtly man with silvery back-combed hair and a gentle manner, he bore no resemblance to a friend”. Figuratively a “ladykiller”, Addams accompanied women such as Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine, and Jacqueline Kennedy on social occasions.
Later, Addams married his third and last wife, Marilyn Matthews Miller, best known as “Tee” (1926–2002), in a pet cemetery. In 1985, the Addamses moved to Sagaponack, New York, where they named their estate “The Swamp”.
Charles Addams Cartoons
His’ cartoons regularly appeared in The New Yorker, and he also created a syndicated single-panel comic, Out of This World, which ran 1955-1957. There are many collections of his work, including Drawn and Quartered (1942) and Monster Rally (1950), the latter with a foreword by John O’Hara. Typical of Addams’ work, one cartoon shows two men standing in a room labeled “Patent Attorney”. One is pointing a bizarre gun out the window toward the street and saying: “Death ray, fiddlesticks! Why it doesn’t even slow them up!”.
Dear Dead Days (1959) is not a collection of his cartoons (although it reprints a few from previous collections); it is a scrapbook-like compendium of vintage images (and occasional pieces of text) that appealed to Addams’ sense of the grotesque, including Victorian woodcuts, vintage medicine-show advertisements, and a boyhood photograph of Francesco Lentini, who had three legs.
He drew more than 1,300 cartoons over the course of his life. Those that did not appear in The New Yorker were often in Collier’s and TV Guide. In 1961, he received, from the Mystery Writers of America, a Special Edgar Award for his body of work. His cartoons appeared in books, calendars, and other merchandising. Singer-guitarist Dean Gitter’s 1957 recording Ghost Ballads, an album of folk songs with supernatural themes, was packaged with cover art by his showing a haunted house. The films The Old Dark House (1963) and Murder by Death (1976) feature title sequences illustrated by him.
In 1946, Addams met science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury after having drawn an illustration for Mademoiselle magazine’s publication of Bradbury’s short story “Homecoming”, the first in a series of tales chronicling a family of Illinois vampires named the Elliotts. The pair became friends and planned to collaborate on a book of the Elliott Family’s complete history with Bradbury writing and Addams providing the illustrations, but it never materialized. Bradbury’s stories about the “Elliott Family” were finally anthologized in From the Dust Returned in October 2001, with a connecting narrative and an explanation of his work with Addams, and Addams’ 1946 Mademoiselle illustration used for the book’s cover jacket. Although Addams’ own characters were well-established by the time of their initial encounter, in a 2001 interview, Bradbury stated: “[Addams] went his way and created the Addams Family, and I went my own way and created my family in this book.”
Janet Maslin, in a review of his biography for The New York Times, wrote: “Addams’s persona sounds cooked up for the benefit of feature writers… was at least partly a character contrived for the public eye,” noting that one outré publicity photo showed the humorist wearing a suit of armor at home, “but the shelves behind him hold books about painting and antiques, as well as a novel by John Updike.”
Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock was a friend of Addams and owned two pieces of original Addams art. Hitchcock references Addams in his 1959 film North by Northwest. During the auction scene, Cary Grant discovers two of his adversaries with someone whom he also thinks is against him and says: “The three of you together. Now that’s a picture only Charles Addams could draw.”
The University of Pennsylvania has a Charles Addams Fine Arts Hall on its campus at 36th and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia. There is a small sculpture of the Addams Family in front of the building.
Charles Addams Death
He died on September 29, 1988, at the age of 76, at St. Clare’s Hospital and Health Center in New York City, having suffered a heart attack after parking his automobile. An ambulance took him from his apartment to the hospital, where he died in the emergency room. As he had requested, a wake was held rather than a funeral; he had wished to be remembered as a “good cartoonist”. He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in the pet cemetery of his estate “The Swamp”.
