Chas Addams: A Cartoonist's Life - Hardcover

Davis, Linda H.

3.89

195 ratings by Goodreads

9780679463252: Chas Addams: A Cartoonist's Life

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679463259 ISBN 13: 9780679463252

Publisher: Random House, 2006

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“They’re creepy and they’re kooky,” is how the catchy theme song of The Addams Family described everyone’s favorite nonconformists–Morticia, Gomez, Lurch, Uncle Fester, Grandmama, Wednesday, and Pugsley. But for all the novelty of the sitcom based on Charles Addams’s groundbreaking New Yorker cartoons, Hollywood’s Addams family paled beside the cartoonist’s. “Not half as evil as my original characters,” sighed Addams.

Though the haunted-household cartoons developed a following among New Yorker readers long before the 1960s sitcom, and the Addams and their seedy Victorian mansion soon became recognizable types, the artist with the well-known signature “Chas Addams” remained an enigma. Called “the Bela Lugosi of the cartoonists,” Addams was the cartoonist everyone–even Hitchcock–wanted to meet. He was bedeviled by rumors. People claimed that he slept in a coffin, collected severed fingers sent by fans, and suffered bouts of madness that sent him to the insane asylum.

The true Addams was even more fabulous than the wildest stories and cartoons. Here was a sunny, funny urbane man, “a normal American boy,” as he called himself, with a dog who hated children and a taste for crossbows. While producing a unique body of work featuring lovingly drawn homicidal spouses, demonic children, genteel monsters, and an everyday world crosshatched with magic, Addams raced classic sports cars, juggled beautiful women (Joan Fontaine, Jackie Kennedy, and Greta Garbo, to name a few), and charmed everyone. But though his pursuits suggest lighthearted romantic comedy, Addams’s life had its sinister side. Far darker than anything Addams created with a brush was his relationship with a dangerous woman who forever changed his life.

In this first biography of the great cartoonist, written with exclusive access to Addams’s intimates and his private papers, we finally meet the man behind the famed cartoons and circling rumors. Here is his surprising childhood in New Jersey, the cartoon that offended the Nazis, the friend whose early death Addams long mourned. Here are his wives, the stories behind his most famous–and some of his most private–cartoons, and the Addams whom even his closest friends didn’t know.

With wit, humor, poignancy, and insight–enhanced by rare family photographs, classic and previously unpublished cartoons, and private drawings–Linda H. Davis paints an engaging and endearing portrait of a marvelous American original.

One of America’s most gifted biographers, Linda Davis has given us an engrossing, unforgettable portrait of the legendary New Yorker cartoonist. In Davis’s empathetic narrative and in accompanying cartoons, photographs, and drawings, the great artist lives again in all his eccentric brilliance,
ghoulish sense of humor, fecund love life, and warm and gentle humanity. Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, Chas Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life deserves to win every literary prize there is for best biography.--Stephen B. Oates, Paul Murray Kendall Professor of Biography and Professor History Emeritus, The University of Massachusetts at Amherst

“If you don’t appreciate martinis with eyeballs in them, this is not the book for you. For the rest of us here is an irresistible riot of a read, an exhilarating expertly mixed cocktail of words and images. Charles Addams’s life was crowded with women–famous women, smart women, witty women, garden-variety drop-dead beautiful women–but in Linda Davis he has truly met his match.” --Stacy Schiff, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Vera

“Seldom have we found as satisfying a fit of subject and author as this. Linda Davis has distilled years of research, travel and interviews into a rollicking and fascinating review of Addams’s astonishing life as artist, playboy and–from time to time–husband. We can all be grateful that Addams and Davis finally found one another.”--Harrison Kinney,
author of James Thurber: His Life and Times

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About the Author:

Linda H. Davis is the author of Onward and Upward: A Biography of Katharine S. White and Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane. She lives with her husband and two children in Harvard, Massachusetts.

Chapter One

Arrested at the Age of Eight

They said that charles addams slept in a coffin and drank martinis with eyeballs in them. They said he kept a guillotine at his house and received chopped-off fingers in the mail from fans. It was once reported that he had been given a monogrammed straitjacket as a birthday gift—a garment that might have come in handy if the other stories were true, such as the one Patricia McLaughlin told about Addams moving around the living room at a party, “methodically and imponderably depositing” dollops of tooth powder in various corners. “A charm to ward off cavity-causing vampires?” she wondered. People said that Addams had married Morticia, the pale dagger in the spidery black dress from The Addams Family, that familiar band of subversives that included Gomez, Lurch, Pugsley, Wednesday, Uncle Fester, Grandma, Thing, and Cousin Itt.

The story most often heard concerned a Charles Addams cartoon about a ghoul in a maternity room, come to claim his offspring. “Don’t bother to wrap it; I’ll eat it here,” he tells the nurse. They said that Addams would have periodic mental breakdowns and begin drawing the gruesome maternity room cartoon. Or he’d redraw “The Skier,” his classic 1940 cartoon showing single ski tracks on either side of a tree, as though the skier seen vanishing down the hill has passed right through it. As Addams would begin madly sketching the skier or the maternity ghoul (depending on which version of the story you heard), his New Yorker employer had him carted off in an ambulance to the loony bin.

Everyone from Dick Cavett to medical illustrator Shirley Baty had heard the stories. George Plimpton heard them while he was still a student at Harvard during the 1940s; Wilfrid Sheed was told about them during his school years at Oxford.

And the Addams legend caught up with New Yorker staff members and contributors all over the world. What, people wanted to know, was Charles Addams really like? Even in places where people had never heard of The New Yorker, said Calvin Trillin, “eventually they’d get around to asking about Addams.” James Geraghty, Addams’s former art editor at The New Yorker, had been asked the question wherever he went. “In Avignon I was asked . . . the French for ‘What is Charles Addams really like?’ ” He had been asked the same question in Italian in Gergamo, and in Greek on the island of Rhodes. And he truly believed that if he had ever visited Timbuktu, he’d have been asked the question in Timbuktuese: “What is Charles Addams really like?”

“Are people ever disappointed when they meet you?” a reporter once asked Addams.

“I suppose they are. Aren’t you?” he deadpanned.

Everyone from Cary Grant to the clerk at the Registry of Motor Vehicles had wanted to meet Addams. He had long ago opened his front door to find “a fat little man standing there.”

“I’ve just come to see you in your natural bailiwick,” drawled Alfred Hitchcock.

Many years before 1981, when the latest intrepid reporter went in search of answers, the name Chas Addams, as the artist abbreviated it in thick black ink in a lower corner of his cartoons (“Just a matter of design,” he explained; “it looks better than writing out ‘Charles’ ”), had become synonymous with black humor. He could make even a chair “scary, grim,” said New Yorker artist Mischa Richter.

Though much of Addams’s work was funny without being dark, and marked by great sweetness, it was the sinister stuff that had made him famous and earned him such sobriquets as “the Van Gogh of the Ghouls,” “the Bela Lugosi of the cartoonists,” “the graveyard guru,” and a purveyor of “American Gothic.” His work was compared to that of Shakespeare and Poe.

The Addams name was intertwined with a certain kind of offbeat character and place. One saw a particular type of woman—model-thin, with pale skin and long black hair, wearing a black dress—and thought: “Morticia.” Round, bald men brought Uncle Fester to mind. The Addams name also conjured an atmosphere, and a house—a peeling Victorian confection that had come to represent something menacing.

“Well, it looked a bit like a Charles Addams cartoon,” Lady Bird Johnson said in 1964, after seeing the property in Johnson City, Texas, that would become the presidential ranch. “And I think that if I’d been told that I was going to buy it and start trying to make it into a home I would have turned and run,” she added. It was no coincidence that the notorious Hitchcock movie Psycho, released in 1960, had featured an Addamsesque Victorian as the home of the psychopath Norman Bates: Hitchcock had become an Addams friend and owned two of his original cartoons.

Sometimes the Addams delinquents assumed nonhuman form. There was the famous hairball, named Cousin Itt in the television series. There was the grinning, snaggletoothed, grinchy figure who had appeared in The New Yorker in 1974 tearing down a wintry mountain slope on a snowmobile, the razorlike hair on his body flying straight back: the Abominable Snowman as winter sportsman. But often Addams’s creepiest people were the normal-looking, nondescript types, the people one passes on the street without truly seeing them: the little clerk, the drab housewife, the “purposeful charlady,” as Addams called her, who in a memorable 1942 cartoon raises the leg of her bound and gagged employer and continues her mechanical sweeping.

people swore that they had actually seen the maternity room cartoon, but Addams had never drawn it. He had, however, submitted a cartoon rough (an artist’s draft) with a similar idea: “I’m worried about Albert,” says a wife of her husband in a maternity room. “He eats his young.” “It was of course rejected,” Addams told his friend Steven M. L. Aronson, a book editor and writer.

Still, people believed what they wanted to believe. A 1978 New Yorker Thanksgiving cover by Addams showing a stunned turkey

farmer contemplating the flock that has gathered into military formations in the yard provoked some wild reactions by readers who inter-

preted the straightforward drawing as a reference to “Nazi concentration camps.”

And yet Addams himself had invited the misperception—if only in jest. Hadn’t he once answered his fan mail on a letterhead inscribed “The Gotham Rest Home for Mental Defectives”? Hadn’t he worn flaming red pajamas over his clothes to one Manhattan party, and a Knights Templar robe to another? Dressed as Abe Lincoln for an awards ceremony, which wasn’t a costume party? Taken to pedaling a tricycle (while smoking a cigar) around another party?

He had long delighted in telling reporters about some of the gifts he had received: a gilded skull, a human thighbone, a frozen beef heart in a box for Valentine’s Day. “I woke up the other night and felt like screaming,” he once told a reporter. “I thought, ‘Why not? No one will ever hear me.’ So I let out a long, thin scream, and felt much better.”

He visited snake farms. He was known to picnic in graveyards, and he sometimes took souvenirs. Friends of the cartoonist noted that it was always at Charlie’s instigation that they found themselves dropping in at the “booby hatch,” or the winter home of the Ringling Bros. circus freaks in Sarasota, Florida. “Charlie, what about you? What did you do over the weekend?” cartoonist Mort Gerberg asked Addams over lunch one day when the mundane conversation had turned to the subject of gypsy moths. “Well, it was really such a nice day on Sunday, I decided to take a friend for a drive—to Creedmore,” said Addams, referring to the state psychiatric facility in Queens. Gerberg wasn’t sure whether he was kidding.

Addams’s friend Ralph Fields, a lawyer who had a home on Long Island, as Addams did, recalled the time the cartoonist offered him a ride back to the city. Addams arrived at the appointed hour in his 1926 35C Bugatti (the same model Isadora Duncan was riding in when the fringes of her neck shawl caught in the spokes of a rear wheel) and from there followed a route back to New York that took them by cemeteries “about seventy-five percent of the time,” said Fields. “It was a beautiful day for looking at cemeteries.”

But Addams’s interest in “the aberrations of life,” as his friend from Quogue, Walker McKinney, put it, also led to random acts of kindness. Addams took a keen interest in McKinney’s brother, who had been brain damaged as a boy, giving him autographed copies of his cartoon collections and spiriting him away for rides in his classic cars, which included a red 1933 Aston Martin, a gleaming 1960 Bentley, and a 1927 Amilcar—“the poor man’s Bugatti,” Addams called it. He maintained a long correspondence with a fan who had been disabled in childhood by meningitis.

Addams’s friends treasured his endless curiosity, and his irreverent, sometimes haunting one-liners: “Okay, let’s get out the carving set!” he cried the day a bird hit the big glass window at a friend’s barn and was killed. “Well, we’ll stab them,” he said when the soft-shell crabs another friend had ordered for an Addams birthday dinner turned up alive. (He and his hostess, Axie Whitney, gassed them in the oven instead.) “What a pity,” he would sigh at the happy ending of a near-disaster. Was it any wonder that Addams loved W. C. Fields—a perpetrator, as George Carlin would point out, rather than a victim.

Everyone had a...

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