Charles Addams

At 76 years old, Charles Addams has this physical status:

Charles Samuel Addams (January 7, 1912-September 29, 1988) was an American cartoonist best known for his humour and macabre characters.

Chas Addams was a character in his cartoon Chas Addams.

In several other forms of media, several of the recurring characters, who were later known as the Addams Family, have been the basis for spin-offs.

Early life

Addams was born in Westfield, New Jersey. As childhood friends recalled, Grace M. (née Spear; 1879-1943) and Charles Huey Addams (1873-1932), a piano company executive who had studied to be an architect, was described as "something of a rascal around the neighborhood." Despite the incorrect spellings of their last names, Addams was distantly related to US president John Adams and John Quincy Adams, and he was a first cousin twice removed from noted social reformer Jane Addams.

As an infant, Addams would enjoy the Presbyterian Cemetery in Westfield, where – according to author, and Addams consultant Ron MacCloskey – he'd wonder what it was like to be dead. His ghoulish creations were depicted in the cartoons on Cemetery Ridge in a gruesome way.

The Addams Family mansion in his cartoons is said to be based on a house on Elm Street and another on Dudley Avenue, where police once caught him breaking and entering. The oldest building on the University of Pennsylvania's current campus, where Addams grew up, was College Hall, which was also a source for the mansion. He loved visiting the Presbyterian Cemetery on Mountain Avenue. "His sense of humor was a bit different from everybody else's." According to a biographer, he was also artistically inclined, "drawing with a joyful vengeance."

His father pushed him to draw, and Addams created cartoons for the Westfield High School student literary magazine Weathervane. He attended Colgate University in 1929 and 1930. Another home, and legend, is located at the corner of West Kendrick and Maple Avenues in Hamilton, which may have influenced the Addams Family's house. He attended the University of Pennsylvania in 1930 and 1931, where a fine-arts building on campus was named for him. A sculpture of Addams Family characters stands in front of the building, while the Penn State Library has a mural that he created in 1952 and depicts influential Addams Family members. In 1931 and 1932, he attended the Grand Central School of Art in New York City.

Personal life

He married Barbara Jean Day, who resembled his cartoon character Morticia Addams, in late 1942. The marriage ended eight years later when Addams' decline to have children. She later married John Hersey, a New Yorker writer who wrote the book Hiroshima, with whom she collaborated.

Barbara Barb (Estelle B. Barber), Addams' second wife, married him in 1954. She "combined Morticia-like appearances with diabolical legal scheming," a practicing lawyer who managed the Addams Family television and film franchises and ordered her husband to forego other legal rights for her husband. At one time, she persuaded her husband to buy a US $100,000 insurance policy. Addams hired a lawyer on the sly, who later wrote, "I told him the last time I had heard of such a move was in a picture called Double Indemnity starring Barbara Stanwyck," which caught my interest." Stanwyck's character planned her husband's assassination in the film. In 1956, the couple divorced.

Addams was described as "sociable and debonair." He had been described as a "well-dressed, courtly man with silvery back-combed hair and a gentle demeanor," according to a biographer. He bore no resemblance to a fiend. Addams accompanied women such as Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine, and Jacqueline Kennedy on social occasions, figuratively a "ladykiller."

Marilyn Matthews Miller, Addams' third and final wife, was born in a pet cemetery, and he was buried "Tee" (1926–2002). The Addamses family moved to Sagaponack, New York, where they referred to their estate as "The Swamp."

Addams died on September 29, 1988, at the age of 76, at St. Clare's Hospital and Health Center in New York City, after suffering a heart attack after parking his car. He was taken from his apartment to the hospital, where he died in the emergency room by an ambulance. A wake was held rather than a funeral, rather than a funeral; he wanted to be remembered as a "good cartoonist." He was cremated, and his remains were laid to rest in his estate's pet cemetery, "The Swamp."

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Career

Charles Addams joined True Detective magazine's layout department in 1933, where he had to retouch pictures of corpses that appeared in the magazine's stories to remove the blood from them. "A lot of those corpses were more interesting the way they were," Addams wrote.

Addams' first drawing for The New Yorker, a portrait of a window washer, appeared in the magazine on February 6, 1932, and his cartoons ran from 1937, when he drew the first in the series that came to be called The Addams Family until his death. At that time, he worked as a freelancer.

Addams made animated training films for the US Army during World War II.

After David Levy, a television designer, approached Addams with an invitation to create it with a little help from the comedian, the Addams Family television series began. All Addams had to do was give his characters names and more specifics for the characters to use in portrayals. The series ran on ABC for two seasons, from 1964 to 1966.

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's a scrapbook-like compendium of vintage photographs (and occasional bits 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.

Over the course of his life, Addams produced more than 1,300 cartoons. Many that did not appear in The New Yorker were in Collier's and TV Guide. Addams was given a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1961 for his body of work. His cartoons appeared in journals, calendars, and other merchandizing. Dean Gitter, a guitarist with supernatural origins, released Ghost Ballads, an album of folk songs with supernatural themes, in 2005. Addams released a haunted house. Addams' film The Old Dark House (1963) and Murder by Death (1976) have title sequences illustrated.

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 stories chronicling a family of Illinois vampires named the Elliotts. Both friends and plans to collaborate on a book of the Elliott Family's complete past with Bradbury's writing and illustrations as well, but it never came true. Bradbury's "Elliott Family" stories were finally published in From the Dust Returned in October 2001, with a connecting tale and an account of his involvement with Addams, as well as Addams' 1946 Mademoiselle illustration for the book's front jacket. Although Addams' characters were well-established by the time of their first meeting, Bradbury said, "Addams] came his way and created the Addams Family, and I went my own way and created my family in this book."

"Addams' persona seems to have been compiled for the benefit of feature writers," Janet Maslin wrote in a review of a New York Times article "in addition to that one outré publicity photograph of the comedian wearing a suit of armor at home, but "the shelves behind him carry paintings and antiques as well as a John Updike book."

Alfred Hitchcock, a filmmaker from Addams, owned two pieces of original Addams art. In his 1959 film North by Northwest, Hitchcock refers to Addams. Cary Grant discovers two of his competitors with someone who also believes in him and says, "The three of you together." Now that's a picture that 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. In front of the building, there is a small sculpture of the Addams Family.

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