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A Cartoonist's Life
Random House
November 2006
On Sale: October 24, 2006
400 pages
ISBN: 0679463259
EAN: 9780679463252
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
“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.
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