Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

Charles Addams

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 Hershey, 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 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.

Addams 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 fiend". 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".

Death

Addams 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".

Cartoons

Addams' cartoons regularly appeared in 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.

Addams 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, Addams 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 Addams showing a haunted house. The films The Old Dark House (1963) and Murder by Death (1976) feature title sequences illustrated by Addams.

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 an Addams 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.

Bibliography

By Addams

Books of Addams's drawings or illustrated by him: Addams also illustrated two books by other authors. First was "But Who Wakes the Bugler?" (Houghton & Mifflin, 1940) by Peter DeVries. The other was "Afternoon in the Attic" (Dodd & Mead, 1950) by John Kobler.

Drawn and Quartered (1942), first anthology of drawings (Random House)Addams and Evil (1947), second anthology of drawings, (Simon and Schuster)(illustrations) Afternoon in the Attic (1950), John Kobler's anthology of short storiesMonster Rally (1950) third anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)Homebodies (book) (1954) fourth anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)Nightcrawlers (1957), fifth anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)Dear Dead Days: A Family Album (1959), compilations book of photos (G.P. Putnam & Sons)Black Maria (1960), sixth anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)Drawn and Quartered (1962) re-released (Simon & Schuster)The Groaning Board (1964), seventh anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)The Chas Addams Mother Goose (1967) Windmill Books; reissued with additional material 2002My Crowd (1970), eighth anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)Favorite Haunts (1976), ninth anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)Creature Comforts (1981), tenth anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)The World of Charles Addams, by Charles Addams (1991), posthumously compiled from works with the copyright owned by his third wife, Marilyn Matthews "Tee" Addams (Knopf)Chas Addams Half-Baked Cookbook: Culinary Cartoons for the Humorously Famished, by Charles Addams (2005), anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)Happily Ever After: A Collection of Cartoons to Chill the Heart of Your Loved One, by Charles Addams (2006), anthology of drawings (Simon & Schuster)The Addams Family: The Evilution, (2010), about the evolution of The Addams Family characters (arranged by H. Kevin Miserocchi)

About Addams

Davis, Linda H., Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life (2006), Random House, 382 pages

Tribute

On 7 January 2012, on Addams' 100th birthday, he was honored with a Google Doodle.