The Ghoulish Charles Addams

CHARLES ADDAMS was one of the great cartoonists in the history of the New Yorker magazine, a champion and pioneer of macabre humor.

Charles Addams

From the start, he was not like other children. He grew to be an inch over six feet tall, with a large nose, large ears, and eyes often squinting or twinkling. He was born in Westfield, New Jersey in 1912, and raised there — walking to and from school through a neighborhood of dilapidated Victorian homes.

A Victorian in Westfield

His father, a piano salesman, was on the road a lot, so it was his mother and aunt who raised Charles, and introduced him to drawing. He was claustrophobic, afraid of spider and snakes, and he loved to draw and doodle. His mother and his aunt helped him laugh at his fears. Seeing that he was good at drawing, they encouraged him to draw the things he was afraid of. He developed a ghoulish sense of humor.

The old house his family lived in had a dumbwaiter, and Charles loved to climb on the dumbwaiter, hoist himself up to the floor where his nervous grandmother lived, tap lightly on the wall until grandma came — then jump out at her with a yell.

For college, Addams went to Colgate in 1929–1930, then to the University of Pennsylvania in 1930–1931. He also went to the Grand Central School of Art — but he was too restless to graduate from any of those places. He wanted to make a living out of causing a commotion. He wanted to be sketching and doodling, not taking classes.

He started sketching types, and one he loved to draw was a very tall, thin, pale woman in a black dress, with stringy black hair. His favorite male figure to sketch was a bald ghoul who laughed inappropriately.

He began get paid for his cartoons, a freelancer who got his work into the Detective magazine.

“Downhill Skier”

Then he found the New Yorker and eventually published about 1,300 cartoons there. His 1940 New Yorker cartoon “Downhill Skier” shows one skier looking surprised by another skier whose tracks run one on each side of a substantial tree, as if the guy skied through the tree. (Addams was thrilled to learn that a mental asylum used that cartoon to measure the sanity of its patients.)

There was his cartoon of an obscene phone caller in police custody using his “one phone call” to make another obscene call.

There was his cartoon of a turkey farmer shocked to find his turkeys gathered in military formation.

And his cartoon of a Boy Scout troop leader, at the end of his rope, about to take his own life with a sling-shot to the head.

And the cartoon of his bald ghoul laughing uproariously in a movie theater while, all around him, moviegoers weep.

Another of Addams’s New Yorker cartoons showed ghouls standing on the roof of a Victorian gothic residence, preparing to pour boiling oil down on a flock of wholesome Christmas carolers below.

His characters became the source of a TV show (“The Addams Family”) and later a movie. It was the birth of the TV show that forced Charles Addams to name these people he’d been drawing, and flesh them out as characters.

Some of the family

He named his tall, thin, stringy-haired woman “Morticia.” He called the bald ghoul “Uncle Fester” and made him a man always up to no good, a man who probably should be behind bars but you’re glad he’s not so you can see what he’ll do next.

There was also the towering, forgetful butler; the little boy who delighted himself by designing toy guillotines; and the girl who seemed perpetually lost.

Morticia

Most of all, there was Morticia, once beautiful, still ambitious, a driver of men. She ran the house. And Charles Addams gave us other characters: Lurch, and Gomez, and a boy named Pugsley, and Pugley’s sister Wednesday, and Grandma, and Thing, and Cousin Itt.

The Addams Family TV show, the Hollywood movie, and the movie sequel made Charles Addams a lot of money. Indulging his love of old cars, he bought a 1926 35C Bugatti, a red 1933 Aston Martin, and a 1960 Bentley. He called his 1927 Amilcar “the poor man’s Bugatti.”

The 1933 Aston Martin that Charles Addams loved

When he set out on a trip, he always tried to arrange his driving routes so that he could look at every available cemetery.

Fans of the Addams family wanted to meet him, to see the man behind the cartoons. Many seemed disappointed that he was rather courtly and gentle. They’d say: “You don’t LOOK scary.”

To which Charles Addams would archly reply: “I try not to let it show.”

Alfred Hitchcock loved Charles’ cartoons

Alfred Hitchcock, the movie director, shared his love of macabre humor, and once arrived for an unannounced visit. On the doorstep of Charles Addams’ home, Hitchcock beamed and said. “I’ve just come to see you in your natural bailiwick.”

Charles Addams had an apartment in midtown Manhattan and a house in Southampton in which he kept an embalming table. One of his proudest moments in New York City was being bitten by a camel in Central Park.

He loved people-watching, and answered fan letters on stationery from “The Gotham Rest Home for Mental Defectives.” He enjoyed meeting freak show artists, looking out over fetid swamps, pondering grisly sccidents, and pedaling a tricycle while smoking a cigar.

In fall and winter, he wore a nine pound black bearskin coat. Beneath the great coat he sometimes arrived at parties in a robe and red pajamas. It made a pleasant break from a day of sketching.

He married three times, first to a willful woman named Barbara Day, who tried to change Charles Addams or at least have a few things her own way, and it didn’t work. Charles seemed to enjoy being in pain and how can a normal woman be content married to a man like that?

His second marriage was to another Barbara, this time the formidable Barbara Barb of Brooklyn, a feisty lawyer who nearly cleaned him out when they divorced. He was quite private about his love life, but was known to have had some pretty fancy girlfriends, including Jackie Kennedy, Joan Fontaine and Greta Garbo.

Greta Garbo was one of Charles’ girlfriends

His third marriage was to Marilyn Matthews Miller, and this time he got it right. Marilyn was a bride after his own heart. She gleefully wore black at their wedding and consented to have the wedding in a pet cemetery.

Charles acted suave and debonair, with leather boots from Italy, and tailored clothes — or was he gently mocking the suave and debonair? He puttered along in his antique cars and cherished the odd things his fans sent him.

For instance, Charles Addams loved opening his mail to find that total strangers were urging him to draw a cartoon of some fiendishly ghoulish premise of their own devising. He noted that most of the cartoon ideas he got by mail were more perverse than his own. He was delighted that some of the very most perverse ideas came from a Christian minister in Georgia.

Charles often seemed on the verge of a disaster and when he and a guest narrowly escaped the disaster, he’d say: “What a pity.”

In 1988, Charles Addams died at 76, of a heart attack. His ashes were buried, per his instructions, in a pet cemetery. The heart attack came while he was sitting in a parked car. His wife Marilyn said: “He’s always been a car buff, so it was a nice way to go.”