The Addams Family is back under the spotlight with the arrival of a musical comedy in Paris. It's not the first time that the characters of Chas Addams have jumped out from their drawings, brought to life so well that you can easily forget that Addams was a major, unconventional contributor to post-war American culture.
Chas Addams (1912-1988) never really had to struggle, because as soon as he reached the age of 21, he had the honour of seeing his very first drawing published on the pages of the venerable institution of The New Yorker, where his work would feature for 60 years. The young man quickly earned a reputation as the master of dark humour, where the absurd would unsettle the life of the average American. One famous drawing is the skier, showing single ski tracks on either side of a tree, as though the skier seen vanishing downhill has passed right through it, with the bewildered onlooker watching him go past as if nothing had happened. A lover of the macabre, the bizarre, even depravity, Addams was an avid collector of unusual objects, such as an anatomy model made of paper maché, from which you could remove the organs, and an embalming tables with holes to drain off fluids and a mechanism to move the neck up and down. Rather paradoxically, Addams was known for being a debonair gentleman, capable of extreme generosity towards any of his fans who had been treated less favourably by life. This is proven by his long correspondence with an admirer who had been left disabled after childhood meningitis.
Addams admired the misanthropic humour of W.C. Fields. But that did not stop him from leading a turbulent high-society life, having liaisons with Joan Fontaine, Greta Garbo or Jackie Kennedy, who once told him that she could not consider marrying him because he was not rich enough. Throughout his life, the artist was bewitched by a female archetype, one that today we would describe as gothic, as modelled by Morticia, the mother in the Addams Family. All the images of Gloria Swanson, the star of the silent movies whom he venerated, and his successive wives.
The famous friends of the illustrator included Alfred Hitchcock, who was so fascinated by his Victorian-style house that it inspired him to use it as the residence of Norman Bates and his mother in Psycho. Slightly age-worn Victorian qualities, an obsession of Addams that is found at the centre of the universe of his fictional family.
Recommended reading
Linda H. Davis: Chas Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life (Random House)
Chas Addams: The Addams Family: An Evilution (Pomegranate)
