Hampton Style - October 10, 2008 - Charles Addams, American Gothic

One would imagine a cartoonist's career to be an isolated affair, a collaboration of the wit and the hand. An artful job, sometimes even masterly, but not that exciting. Charles Addams, however, the prolific New Yorker cartoonist and creator of the Addams Family, managed to sketch out a rather unorthodox path for himself. A lover of fast cars, seductive women and black humor, there was nothing nebbish or antisocial about Mr. Addams.

Despite the title Master of the Macabre, Addams was an urbane man-genteel, witty and endlessly charming-with sophisticated tastes. He dressed in Brooks Brothers suits and Italian shoes, wore his dark hair slicked back, and favored cigars and martinis. When he wasn't hurtling along the Long Island Expressway in a vintage roadster wearing racing goggles, a beauty at his side, he was speeding up Third Avenue with such New Yorker colleagues as Saul Steinberg, Wolcott Gibbs and James Thurber-some riding the running board-as they made the rounds at the 21 Club and Costello's. He dined with Boris Karloff, played chauffeur-companion to the reclusive Greta Garbo, and threw parties attended by friends Dorothy Parker, John O'Hara, Burgess Meredith and Lauren Bacall.

Not the weird shut-in that people imagined, a manly Addams stood a strapping 6ft.1 and weighed 195 pounds. And despite a visage destined for caricature-a comical rubbery face, eyes squinty with devilment, and plotting grin that always hid his teeth-he proved to be quite the ladykiller (but not in the Addams Family sense of the term). The notorious womanizer romanced such esteemed company as actress Joan Fontaine and Jackie Kennedy, and maintained a lengthy but succinct listing of his paramours in tiny black datebooks. (Veronica Lake, 1770 Inn was an entry from 1951.) He frequently entreated his ladies with weekend roadtrips out to the Hamptons-a favorite source of refuge and inspiration for the illustrator-that involved barbecues, cozy firesides, and cruising antique shops. Spending time with Addams, however, wasn't for the faint of heart. On one occasion, when a spooked lover inquired about a noise in the middle of the night, Addams instructed her to go back to sleep: "It's just the little people scraping to get out."

The cartoons of the New Yorker enjoyed their heyday in the 1930s and 40s, and the people who created them formed a rarefied circle. Ingeniously melding high art with popular culture, they were academic, yes, but also the followers of supper clubs, big bands and a swinging time. In Addams, they found their most free-wheeling, man-about-town ambassador. And as the creator of cartoons that were merrily macabre, he was also the member who generated the greatest amount of intrigue.

Such is human nature, that the "normal" will always be fascinated by the ghoulish, tempted to peek inside the coffin, if you will, and Addams's cartoons, just like the works of Poe and Hitchcock, struck a dark and compelling chord. The Addams legend spread, with tales of him sketching his cartoons from an asylum or resembling a sinister Bela Lugosi character who wore a cape. New Yorker contributors claimed the question they were presented with most, the world over, was: "What is Charles Addams really like?" The question came from bank clerks and bellhops, from Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock. (A fan first, then later a friend, the rotund director arrived uninvited one day at Addams's doorstep and announced, "I've just come to see you in your natural bailiwick.")

"Are people ever disappointed when they meet you?" an interviewer once asked an apparently average-looking Addams. "I suppose they are. Aren't you?" he mildly inquired. But despite his civilized tastes, Addams didn't always disappoint. It just so happened that he also had a fondness for funerals and enjoyed visiting cemeteries; he once brought home an old tombstone after an eventful day's perusing: "It wasn't attached to anybody." His Manhattan duplex was filled with such deathly artifacts as antique crossbows and a shiny human thigh bone, a Christmas present from one of his wives. His coffee table was a medieval embalming table, complete with holes in its corners to drain fluids, and a rusty adjustable neck rest. This merry mausoleum was located at 25 West 54th street, directly behind the Museum of Modern Art, and visitors would ride an archaic elevator to reach his door, which was decked with a crossbow, a black number 13, and a vampire knocker. How much these gloomy possessions were amassed to satisfy public expectations rather than his tastes, is still up for conjecture.

Despite their obvious darkness, the cartoons of Charles Addams were an idiosyncratic delight. More than just humorous, his ideas were irreverent, Dadaist almost, and the quality of his drawings deemed them artwork. His cartoons had the signature unsentimental New Yorker view, but there was such a sweetness to his murderous characters and freaky misfits, they were elevated from appearing cruel. Children with guillotines, missionary-munching natives, wives either plotting their husband's demise (A lady inquires at a department-store information booth, "Blunt instruments?") or coolly accepting their doom (A woman runs along a beach calling frantically up to the sky, where one sees the ominous shadow of a huge bird carrying a man in his beak: "George, George, drop the keys!" she cries), and the Addams Family pouring a cauldron of boiling oil from their roof-top tower onto innocent Christmas carolers below.

In many ways, Addams was a cathartic force, diffusing one's deepest fears by illustrating them. Sympathies were invariably with the dark-hearted rather than with their docile, domesticated victims-maybe too much a reminder of what mainstream America had become. Relevant and timeless, Addams created the quintessential New York City cartoons: intelligent, antisocial, and poking at the sinister underbelly of suburban life. In an introduction he penned for one of Addams's collections, Boris Karloff saw it as simply as, "He makes the normal appear idiotic, that's all."

Born January 7, 1912 in the town of Westfield, New Jersey, Charles Samuel Addams, or "Chill," as he was known in the neighborhood, was an only child, imaginative, and with a reputation for being a scamp. But apart from a fondness for visiting a nearby Presbyterian cemetery and a penchant for suits of armor and longbows, he enjoyed a regular and rather uneventful childhood. Addams sketched skulls, skeletons and humorous cruelties from a young age, and his earliest ambition was to be a contributing cartoonist for the New Yorker. As an adult he honed his trademark wash technique while on staff at True Detective magazine, where he retouched photographs of bloody crime scenes and corpses so they didn't appear too shocking. His first New Yorker sketch was published in February 1932, when Addams was just 21. It was placed as a "decorative spot," an end-of-column filler, and for that cartoon of a window washer he received a grand total of $7.50. (For context, his train/ferry commuter ticket from the Jersey City shore cost him $10 a month.) But Addams was elated. At the age of 23, a spiral leather notebook was used to neatly record his monthly art earnings: $75, $145, $130, $125, and so on... until 1935, when, with each New Yorker issue carrying at least one or two of his cartoons, "Chas Addams" (as he signed his drawings in smudgy black ink) was considered a full-time contributor. His first New Yorker cover appeared in 1938-he was paid $175 for the illustration-and over the course of 55 years, until his death in 1988, Addams would have more than 1,300 cartoons published in the New Yorker alone. On August 6, 1938, the dark serpentine beauty later to be known as "Morticia"-part witch, part siren-made her illustrious debut. Standing in a clinging, low-cut black dress, her hair pulled tight in a chignon, Morticia and her fiendish manservant listen patiently to a vacuum cleaner salesman-all in the frame of their dilapidated Gothic mansion. After holding court alone for four years, Addams gradually introduced a sideshow family to accompany her-Gomez, an oily and lecherous Peter Lorre-like husband; her beastly son and six-toed daughter, Pugsley and Wednesday; Fester, an unnerving uncle with the air of an escaped lunatic; and a menacing hag of a grandma-and America took the most frightening family next door to their hearts. Addams named his "Family" members only when the idea for a television show was suggested to him. The characters appeared on the air in 1964, then later in a cartoon series, and two successful feature films.

Throughout his life, Addams would always hold a special place in his heart for his original postergirl. He vowed "the ruined beauty" wasn't modeled on any one girl in particular-"just my idea of a pretty girl... with the kind of good looks that I appreciated at that time, and still do, really," he tenderly admitted. True enough, for despite his reputation as a prolific playboy, it was the women who reminded him of Morticia that he would marry.

The year 1942 was a time when life was treating Addams particularly well. His profile as a talented cartoonist was swiftly rising-an esteemed member of the elite New Yorker humorists, he had just celebrated his fourth magazine cover, and his first book, the cartoon collection Drawn and Quartered, had been published by Random House. He also had just met a girl he was crazy about. Barbara Jean Day, also a Westfield native, was petite and gentle, with an alabaster complexion and inky black hair bobbed to her shoulders-obviously much was made of her resemblance to Morticia. "She was very, very lovely; warm, like an invention of his," remarked a friend. Despite her sweetness, she was fiercely intelligent and well-loved; every bit Addams's social equal. At this otherwise fortuitous time, just one word appeared in Addams's earnings journal that month: Drafted.

On Memorial Day, 1943, Private Addams took leave from the army to marry Barbara "Bobby" Day in a church ceremony in Westfield. After a reception at the home of his in-laws, the couple enjoyed a fleeting honeymoon at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Three years after entering the army, Addams was released from military duty, and he returned to his glamorous, free spirited existence-but this time with a wife on his arm. He acquired two vintage automobiles-a rare 1933 Aston Martin roadster and a supercharged 1926 Bucatti, or "Fester"-which he loved to use when squiring his striking bride, particularly down Main Street in Westhampton, a cloistered beachfront community at the time, with their poodle and picnic rug in tow.

After renting a number of houses in the Hamptons, in 1950 Charles and Bobby purchased a Victorian carriage house (all that remained of an estate felled by a hurricane in 1938) on the ocean in Westhampton Beach. They paid $14,000 for two adjoining plots of land straddling Dune Road, which stretched from ocean to bay. The main dwelling consisted primarily of carriage space and stables built around a center courtyard. The couple loved the property, moving in straight away and turning the stables into bedrooms. There were vintage cars to be seen in the driveway, someone making cocktails, or Addams stretched out in the courtyard in his pajamas, reading and soaking up the sun.

Theirs was a happy and glittering union, bolstered by a buzzing social set, European travel and romantic love, but like most lovers of sportscars, Addams was not ready to give up their high-speed, two-seater existence...So when Bobby wanted to have a child, Charles, who found small children repugnant, was less than thrilled. After he finally agreed, Barbara had difficulties becoming pregnant, so the couple decided to adopt. After Addams reneged on the idea at the last minute, Barbara, 31, was devastated and decided to end their 8-year marriage. She moved out-and their married next-door neighbor in Westhampton Beach went with her. Addams notebook recorded the event: B.A. leaves.

In 1952, Addams was commissioned by the Dune Deck Hotel to paint an Addams Family mural on the wall of its popular bar. The ink and wash mural, "The Addams Family on Holiday," pictured the family vacationing on the beach. When the hotel was sold in 1990, the owners donated the mural to the University of Pennsylvania, where it hangs today in their Charles Addams Gallery.

Also at this time, Addams decided to add a work studio to his Hamptons property, and on the vacant bayfront parcel, he relocated a child's two-story playhouse from its original home on Westhampton's dunes. A strange retreat, it consisted of two small rooms, sitting one on top of the other, with porches wrapped around each; over time he added an octagonal stained glass window, a garage and cupola, and a dock. Addams adored working in the top floor studio of his "floating palace." With uninterrupted water views, "it's like being on a houseboat," he said. Amid a garden brimming with poison ivy, which Addams encouraged to climb the walls of the clapboard structure, the artist would quietly work in his wooden tower. He could often be seen tooling about in his small motorboat, "Polyp," or just sitting alone at the end of his dock, dangling his feet in the water.

After the demise of his marriage, Addams dated a string of women who closely resembled Bobby-or his other slinky love, Morticia. Barbara Barb, or "Bad Barbara" as his friends soon came to call her, was one of these dark beauties. But where Morticia may have had sadistic leanings, this raven-haired vamp became the real villain of the Addams story.

A practicing lawyer whose real name was Estelle, Barb had the curvaceous body of a showgirl, peekaboo hair falling over one eye, and a curiously upturned nose (there were rumors she had it "done" to appear more like Morticia's pert nose). It appeared the glitzy seductress decided Addams would be hers at first meeting-she turned up at his apartment naked under a mink coat soon after-and he succumbed to her lethal charms. In 1954, despite their routine of violent spats, an enchanted Charles made Barbara Barb the second Mrs. Addams. It appeared that Addams's friends weren't as smitten. The distinguished New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford labeled her a "big, brassy number," and when he and his stepfather, New Yorker publisher Raoul Fleischmann, encountered a made-up, snugly attired Barb in Quogue, the elder gentleman remarked, "What's the real name of that Whore of Babylon?" Among their fights were instances of her biting Addams, attacking him with a knife, and putting out cigarettes on his arm while he was driving. Friends wondered how he could have followed his marriage to "the sweetest girl in the world" with this one. For all of his swagger, Addams was a gentle man, and those around him say he was genuinely frightened of Barb. After she had destroyed every reminder she could find of his first wife, "Good Barbara," a woman Charles had really loved, he managed to salvage a few items, including a torn photo of Bobby in a black bathing suit, and sent them to his ex-wife on a whim.

Over the course of a marriage that lasted less than two years, just how Barb managed to walk away with 75 percent of the Addams Family rights signed over to her is a fact that bewildered all. The details remain "very sketchy." With devilish scheming and persuasion, she wound up in control of The Addams Family TV and movie franchises, as well as convincing Addams to take out a $100,000 life-insurance policy. Addams's lawyer, whose counsel he dared to enlist only unbeknownst to her, alerted him to the 1944 movie Double Indemnity, where a wife plots to murder her husband for a life-insurance payout. Addams was convinced Barb was trying to poison his food, so when she finally agreed to a divorce he remarked, "I am so lucky. She doesn't want alimony; she just wants the rights to my cartoons." She ended up owning all of his property, too.

It seems that Addams was never a firm believer in "Once bitten..." In 1980, 24 years after they began their affair the first time around, Charles married Marilyn Matthews Miller, "Tee," in her family's pet cemetery. When Addams first fell for Tee it was 1956; she was married to an old friend and heavily pregnant. The real love of his life, Tee was the wife who survived him, and their marriage proved to be his most agreeable and natural union. In 1985 the couple moved to a new residence in Sagaponack, an estate they called "the Swamp." On September 29, 1988, Addams suffered a fatal heart attack while parking his automobile in front of their Manhattan apartment building. ''He's always been a car buff, so it was a nice way to go,'' Tee said at the time. She passed away on Thanksgiving four years later.

Illustrating the enduring appeal of Addams's ghoulish offspring, 2009 will see the debut of The Addams Family musical, with a Broadway run in both Chicago and Manhattan. The "Family" continues to revive our interest with their delicate balancing of sinister with the sweet-and so, too, their creator, who himself exhibited that same blend throughout his life. Wickedly funny and gentle-natured, Charles Addams was considered to be one of the most desirable names on a Manhattan guest list. He enjoyed the company of his friends, probably even more so his women, and he played husband to two ladies who adored him. But the man who brought black humor to the mainstream had true darkness come into his life-a woman who embodied his desires and fears. She took most of what he had and in the process she tried to destroy him.

But with signature aplomb, every bit the man who loved to ride around cocktail parties on a kid's tricycle smoking a cigar, Addams dusted himself off while friends scratched their heads, beseeching an explanation. While it will never make sense how he allowed himself to be felled by his second wife, Addams himself had more of a reasoning of the situation than the bystanders. Once, when a reporter questioned him about why he remained so committed to the cold Morticia, the artist softly replied, "An unsavory creature, I know, but I have always been in love with her."