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Chas Addams: A Cartoonist's Life, by Linda H. Davis
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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With wit, humor, poignancy, and insight–enhanced by rare family photographs, classic and previously unpublished cartoons, and private drawings–Linda H. Davis paints an engaging and endearing portrait of a marvelous American original.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
- Sales Rank: #1057722 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Random House
- Published on: 2006-10-24
- Released on: 2006-10-24
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.57" h x 1.31" w x 6.47" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 382 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
In this buoyantly written first biography of Charles Addams, Davis dispels the myths surrounding the cartoonist and challenges facile assumptions that Addams was the archetype of his own creepy creations. Though fascinated by "the aberrations of life," he loved Aston Martins and Bugattis, cigars, drinking and beautiful women (he often dated famous ones, including Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine and Jackie Kennedy). Addams—whose living room centerpiece was a draining device for corpses called a "drying out table"—gleefully perpetuated the myths surrounding him. He liked to imagine "that if he hadn't been a cartoonist, he might have been a criminal." However, a more sustained exploration of Cecil Beaton's comment that Addams's work "introduced a gothic element into daily life" would have added a deeper dimension to this portrait. Overall, it's more affectionate than critical, and never fully explains why Addams's work became so beloved or significant. Yet the book, which includes previously unpublished artwork, photographs and personal drawings, is sure to interest Addams fans and New Yorker history buffs. (Nov.)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Charles Addams eventually became famous for his morbid, mordantly witty New Yorker cartoons and the ghoulish, gothic family that appeared in them, and later a 1960s TV series and several movies. But as a struggling cartoonist in the 1930s, he was hardly the most original, or even the funniest, out there. As Davis shows in this well-researched valentine to Addams, some of his early cartoons were so run-of-the-mill that it's hard to believe he would soon develop a personal, highly eccentric, taboo-breaking style. Davis charts Addams' transformation from adequate apprentice to inspired master, tying the darkening of Addams' wit to events in his life: an army hitch, falling in and out of love, the failures of several marriages. At times it seems that Davis' strong love for Addams and his work forces her to soft-pedal the most problematic parts of his biography--Addams' darkest, often sadistic projections, as though from out of the national id, where did they come from? Still, all true fans will enjoy the multitude of facts Davis packs in. Jack Helbig
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
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.
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
ADDAMS: That's two "D" s for Devishly Delicious !
By Steve Cox
What a fantastic biography of this mysterious man, this legendary cartoonist! It's about time someone explored fully the life of Charles Addams, father of "The Addams Family" and master of the macabre and bizarre cartoons from The New Yorker magazine. The tales from his odd childhood and woes of his wives (well, two of them) make for a terrific story here and Linda Davis has given Addams the proper send-up with this highly detailed and smartly written biography. (There are a few small pebbles in the shoe: for instance, The Addams Family television sitcom in the 60s was filmed, not "taped"...) But all in all, superb research and insight into this talented being with an eerie twist to him. The book makes you wish you'd met the man. There are ample illustrations inside, examples of Addams artwork, snapshots, diary entries, family photos, etc. Bravo!
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Clinical (Bordering on Sterile) Bio of A Colorful Rogue
By Donald P. Reed
Chas Addams [1912-1988], A Cartoonist's Life, Linda Davis; Random House (2006)
"She is one of that all-too-common breed that idolizes The New Yorker & is constantly reminding you of cartoons that appeared in it years ago, which she then proceeds to describe in detail (guffawing) & then "Oh, dear, if I could only remember the caption!" She also remembers everything I ever wrote, & quotes passages from it written by Max Shulman & Geoffrey Hellmann..."
--- S.J. Perelman, "The Selected Letters of..." (p. 117 .)
Not a waste of time, & informative; but Tom Kunkel, author of the great Harold Ross biography, is not even remotely in jeopardy of being eclipsed.
The artist infused with an abundance of charm needed a writer equally blessed with a warm sense of humor & wit - not an author with a compulsive need to describe each & every detail in his cartoons (particularly if the cartoon itself is on the opposite page).
She did do an excellent job of it in some respects. Her exposure of the frauds of his maniacal & manipulative 2nd wife, & the inane brain of the vain Joan Fountaine (one of his paramours), was first-rate.
But as with the anemic Fred Allen bio (by Robert Taylor), Davis never really got a feel for her subject until at the very end, in the chapters that describe a trip out to Connecticut taken by Addams (by now, in his mid-70s) & Frank Modell, only a few days before Addams passed away.
It also might have been the subject matter, Addams himself - something along the lines of, when astonished acquaintances of Cary Grant would discover what a remarkably un-debonair man he could be, in real life.
Addams knew his way around a tux, but he never exhibited any desire to do anything other than to race sports cars & draw brilliant illustrations later to be united with punch lines (many of which were not his own).
At the tail end of a (probably platonic) fling with (the post-JFK, pre-Onassis) Jackie Kennedy, she thoughtlessly wounded him with a cruel remark.
" 'Well, I couldn't get married to you,' she told him. 'What would we talk about at the end of the day - cartoons?' "
(She probably said the same thing to the pool boy.)
But I'll give it this. It was a pleasant change to read a book about The New Yorker that hadn't been written in anger by ex-staffers with their "How It All Went Wrong" axes to grind.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Dadd & Charlie
By Jeffrey Aldridge
My dad and Charlie were in business during their undergraduate days at UPenn. Dad would go out and take orders and Charlie would draw custom Christmas "and other special occasion" cards. I thought this was pretty neat. Nearing his deathbed, my dad finally confessed the he'd go out and take very specific instructions, gather photos, descriptions, etc. and bring other sordid details back to Charlie, who would then draw "pornographic" cards based on those orders. That revelation got me looking at Wednesday in a whole new light! It was enjoyable to read that Charlie was like that all his life.
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