October 17, 2018 • 36 mins
Charles Addams was a compelling figure. He visited cemeteries for fun, he raced cars, he collected crossbows. But Addams surprised a lot of people in not being a an elusive proto-goth. He was a dapper, sociable, irreverent delight.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Before we get started with this episode, we
have one last live show to announce for We will
be in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the National World War
Two Museum on Tuesday, November six. Okay, we know that
selection day, but we don't want coming to our show
to keep you from the polls. We are both going
to vote early before we leave for New Orleans, and
(00:20):
Louisiana offers early voting as well, so we encourage you
to do so. You can find out more about this
show and get a link to buy tickets at missed
in History dot com slash tour. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(00:44):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy view Wilson. Tracy, I have to ask you a
question right out of the gate. I'm putting you on
the spot. Okay, the Adams Family or the Monsters? Oh man.
So when I was a kid, I loved the Adams
famly most and I thought the Munsters were a weird knockoff.
That's not accurate, no, but but that's valid to think that. Um.
(01:09):
I will probably shock you by saying when I was
a kid, I liked the Munsters more, really I did.
It was not until I got older that I kind
of switched it over. And I think I realized I
was trying to figure out why that was. And I
think it was an aspirational gould Um where I mean,
I could never be like the long, willowy Mortitia, but
(01:30):
I could probably pull off a lily. Oh sure, like
Avond de Carlo with her little white stripe in her hair.
And she was shorter and she had that fabulous rush
dress and the bat necklace, and so I think that
was what it was. But I liked them both. Now
I love them both. But today we're going to talk
about Charles Adams, who was the creator of the Adams
(01:51):
Family as a cartoon, long before it was ever a
TV series or films, etcetera. And Charles Adams was, by
all accounts a compelling figure. He visited cemeteries for fun,
and he was a car enthusiast, and he raced cars
as an amateur, and he collected and shot crossbows. And
Alfred Hitchcock once just showed up on his doorstep with
(02:13):
no advanced warning, hoping to meet him and saying when
Charles Adams opened the door. I've just come to see
you in your natural Bailey Wick. But Adams very likely
surprised the filmmaker because he surprised a lot of people
who thought they could intuit what the creator of the
kinds of cartoons he made would be like, because he
was not an elusive sort of proto goth at all.
(02:36):
He was in fact, very dapper and sociable, and he
was irreverent but by all accounts, completely delightful to be around. Uh.
And there is so much great stuff to his story
that this is a two parter, so um, we had
to talk about all of his good and bad qualities.
And also I will just say that, after doing all
this research, if I build a time machine, my answer
might have changed again because I just want to go
(02:58):
back and maybe have cock pals with Charles Adams. I
think he would be just a super fun guy to
hang out with. I also feel like this is an interesting, um,
not exactly counterpoint, but that's the word that I can
think of to last Halloween's Edward Gory episode. Yeah, they
in terms of them both having sort of a maccab
(03:22):
fascination in their work and having very distinctive personalities. Yeah,
and it's interesting. Uh. It doesn't come up in either
of these episodes, but naturally people would ask him a
little bit about gory Um and other artists as well, cartoonists,
and and he always felt that um uh And I'm
(03:42):
paraphrasing based on stuff that I read that to him,
he was just to Charles Adams, he just thought he
was funny. He didn't really see himself necessarily as macab
at all, whereas he really thought that Edward Gorey had
this insight into like the darker side of humanity, and
he was like, I strap funny off. Which is kind
of interesting because a lot of his stuff, at least
(04:05):
for the time, it was very dark. Nowadays, it's probably
considered pretty mild by comparison, but it has sort of
a wonderful an unexpected nature of how it looks at
the world and humanity, and that some people often found
a little bit dark or a lot dark. Yeah, So
we'll start at the beginning, as we usually do. Charles
Samuel Adams was born in Westfield, New Jersey, on January
(04:27):
seventh nine. His father, Charles Hughey Adams, had studied to
be an architect, but then ended up working at a
piano company. He worked his way up from a salesman
to an executive, and he really traveled a lot. The
young Charles's mother was Grace M. Spear Adams, and he
went by the name Charlie. By all accounts, he was
(04:47):
a very jolly baby, and the Adams has had this
blue eyed child a little late considering the time. Grace
was in her thirties when he was born, and they
really just treasured him. Yeah, there's a great store. And
in the biography that I read of him that she
initially was very nervous and she bought a baby book
and was doing and she eventually just threw it out
because she was like, I just love this kid, and
(05:09):
we're just going to raise him that way. Um, like
that will be their guiding principle. Uh. He was also
really fascinated as a kid by some of the old
Rundown Victorian homes in their neighborhood. And when he was eight,
Charlie and a number of other boys broke into one
that was under renovation and they drew skeletons on the
walls and they caused all kinds of other mischief. They
messed with the some of the paint and resins that
(05:31):
the construction workers had left behind, and this got them
in a little bit of trouble with the local police.
Adams liked to tell people that he got arrested at
the age of eight for trespassing and vandalism, but there
was actually no arrest. The kids were instead rounded up
and they were taken to the courthouse and Mr Adams,
Charlie's father paid for the damages that the boys had done.
This is like an episode of the Andy Griffiths, totally.
(05:55):
A lot of his life sounds like that. Growing up,
he always stressed what a normal, sort of wholesome, happy
boyhood he had. Yeah, later on, as a young man,
he really did get arrested, though. He was arrested when
he removed the tank top part of his swimsuit at
the beach after having seen a photo of Italian men
who were wearing their swimsuits with just the shorts on. Yes,
(06:17):
for emulating fashion. He got in a little bit of
legal trouble. Charlie did remain fascinated with Victorian homes after
his childhood, even but during his childhood he liked to
wander the streets of their town, where there were a
lot of them, and he would imagine the secrets of
the people who lived there and thought about the sinister
possibilities of the things in their lives they might be hiding.
(06:40):
But his own family, like I said, was pretty happy
and even pretty ordinary. His parents were devoted to one another,
and he sometimes joked that he was strange because he
didn't have an unhappy childhood. He was a much beloved child,
and he also really loved his parents. The only thing
that seemed to darken this picture of perfection and happiness
(07:01):
was that his mother would get lonely when his father
traveled for work. Long past that home break in, Charles
continued to be a prankster. He liked to use the
dumb waiter in the family home to sneak into his
grandmother's room and then jump out and scare her, something
that he admitted doing the same. Eternal grandmother, Emma Louise
(07:22):
tough Spear, would go on to inspire the grand My
character in his famous work as an adult, and it
was through her that Charlie was related to not only
the Toughs family, but also very distantly to John Adams. Yeah,
so that's the other side of the family, not the
Adams from whence his name comes, which is a two
D situation um as in it has two d's in it.
(07:44):
But yeah, so he had a pretty illustrious family set
of connections on his mother's side. He also would say
that in the inspiring the Grandmother later on in Adams family,
that was his grandmother, Like when she first woke up
in the morning and hadn't combed her hair, she was
not always disheveled. But even as a kid, there were
also some clues that Charlie was really in tune with
(08:06):
the maccabre. So, in addition to thinking about those secret
lives of the people in the houses around him, he
adored things like skeletons and coffins and even iron maidens.
At one point he said he really believed that if
he had told his parents he wanted an iron maiden,
they probably would have bought one for him. But some
of his fascination with such things actually came from his
(08:27):
fear of them. He was actually pretty claustrophobic. He wrote
about it as a kid in his diary, and he
was afraid of snakes. But instead of trying to avoid
those things, he confronted them, and he drew his fears
to deal with them. One of the things that comes
up over and over when you read about his house
as an adult is that he had all kinds of
snake art in it, so he clearly really embraced that fear.
(08:50):
He also really loved art. He started drawing as a kid,
and his parents encouraged him in it even when Charlie
was still very young, younger than seven. He was drawing
pictures of World War One as it took place. He
was imagining the scenes that he heard about in news reports.
And he also liked to draw a lot of pictures
of KAISERVILLELM. The Second being killed in all kinds of ways.
(09:12):
He was hanged, he was run over by a car,
on and on. Yeah, yeah, he drew everything he heard,
and Grace and Charles really believed that their child had
a true and unique talent, so much so that at
one point Grace brought some of his drawings to Ht
Webster at the New York Herald and said, look at
my child and what he can do. But Webster was like,
(09:33):
this kid has no talent. It's such a common story
among parents being like my kid is amazing, and another
non related person is like, not really though throughout all
of his education, Charlie was a lot more likely to
draw humorous cartoons during class than to take notes, and
even in drawing class, he would hurry through assignments and
(09:55):
then scribble his humorous cartoons for the rest of the
class period. I did this all through school, but it
was with reading. His classmates found him to be fascinating
and fun and he really never lacked for company when
he wanted it. Yeah, he was one of those kids,
it's been described that kind of fit in with everybody.
(10:15):
Like he didn't have one click, he had kind of
people from each click that also hung out with him. Uh.
And at this point though he still thought like art
was probably a good plan, but that he was going
to be like a commercial illustrator. He didn't think all
of this doodling and cartooning would amount to much of anything.
And after graduating from Westfield High School, he enrolled in
Colgate College in Hamilton, New York. And this was actually
(10:37):
a really difficult transition for his mother, who was now
often without her traveling husband and her son who was
away at college. In his sophomore year, Adam's transferred to
University of Pennsylvania. But what he thought was going to
be an art program that would more closely suit his needs,
actually turned out to be more of an architecture program.
(10:58):
He only lasted a year there. He never finished his
undergraduate degree, and when he left college, he started taking
classes at the Grand Central School of Art in New York,
and this school still proudly lists him as an alumnus,
but he only stayed there a year. In nineteen thirty one,
he drew a sketch of a window washer from an
aerial point of view, and then, on a whim, dropped
(11:19):
it off at the New Yorker offices. Like you do.
He left it in an envelope, but he didn't include
a return address on it. And then several months later
he went back to the New Yorker hoping to just
pick up his sketch, and he found out that it
had been published in the space at the end of
a column that's what's called a decorative spot. It was
in the February sixty two issue. He got a check
(11:41):
for seven dollars and fifty cents. And he was twenty
when this happened. Yeah, he apparently went running to show
one of his friends, a young lady, that he had
met in art school that that he had become close
friends with this check and she actually thought he had
forged it. She's like, no, you didn't. Well, the idea
of a person just dropping something off at the New
Yorker office and then having it published smontage, like that's
(12:04):
pretty far fetched. Yeah. Um, But just a few months
after this this joyous milestone, Charlie's father died at the
age of fifty eight, and that sudden death. It wasn't
entirely sudden, but he became ill very quickly and died
not long thereafter. It really catalyzed a change for Charlie.
He kind of realized at that point the school was
(12:24):
never going to give him what he needed, and he
just wanted to go ahead and start earning a living.
And so to that end, he took a job retouching
crime scene photos for True Detective magazine. So in this case,
he would sometimes make them a little less gory and
gruesome before publication, or he would just do layouts where
he had to add captions or um any descriptive text
(12:46):
on the image to further explain it to readers. He
made fifteen dollars a week, and that wasn't super great money,
but it was a really secure job during the depression,
which was a very difficult thing to find. He submitted
to The New Yorker again, This time it was a
sketch of a hockey player who forgot his skates and
he's standing on the ice with his colleagues and his
stocking feet. This was published on January fourth, nineteen thirty three,
(13:10):
and he'd later talked about how unfunny this piece of
art was and wonder why the magazine ever went for it.
He continued to submit cartoons to The New Yorker, and
several more were published that year. Thirty four was leaner,
though the magazine only published one of his cartoons. In
nineteen thirty five, he submitted an image of a printing
press that was running a paper with the headlined sex
(13:32):
Fiend Slays tot. He submitted that to The New Yorker,
and The New Yorker published in on March twenty three.
It was a skewering of the press and the tendency
to run just the most lurid stories possible on the
front page. And from that point Adams, who had already
started signing his art chas Adams, simply because he liked
how it looked. He didn't actually go by chas in
(13:54):
his life, started to get a little more brazen with
the dark subjects of his cartoons. He did routinely get
notes that his drawing needed to be better, and so
he started working with ink wasashes, which added a lot
of depth to his images, and he started selling a
lot more art and making more money. Coming up, we
will talk more about Charlie's early work for The New Yorker,
(14:16):
but first we're going to take a little breaks so
we can hear from one of our sponsors. At the
age of twenty three, Adams was regularly publishing with The
New Yorker as a contributor. That was a job that
ended up really defining his career in the public's relationship
(14:38):
with his work. This wasn't a huge money gig. He
got paid ten dollars for spots, those little smaller ones
that were kind of fillers, and a fee per square
inch for larger images, which wasn't great money. It wasn't
a high volume business, and there was no guarantee that
submitted work was going to be accepted. And he also
submitted to other publications during this time and got published
(14:59):
in some of them, but The New Yorker was his
primary source of income, and as his popularity with readers grew,
the magazine started getting requests to purchase his original drawings,
and then on January one of eight, he had his
first cover with the magazine. Not all of adams drawings
were his own ideas. He collaborated with writers at The
(15:20):
New Yorker for some of his work, and he hired
gag writers on his own as well that included Richard McAllister.
This was a really common practice, and at the time
The New Yorker ran its cartoon division around this idea
of writers and artists working as collaborators. Yeah, sometimes people
are a little shocked. And I know, even later in life,
as like sort of the next generation of artists was
(15:41):
coming up in The New Yorker, many of whom had
been idolizing Charles Adams. They were like, what what do
you What do you mean he didn't write those jokes
and would be like, no, he would get somebody sometimes
to write the joke, and then he would illustrate the joke.
It's like an actor with a script. Uh. So it's
a little startling for some people. Uh. Mortitia Adams first
appeared in print on August six, Although she did not
(16:04):
have that name at the time, she kind of got
called all manner of things like ghoulish woman or you know,
creepy woman. Still her trademark long elegant look is unmistakable,
although her hair is pulled back. In that one, she
is being given a pitch by a vacuum salesman while
a large, imposing butler, a bat and a mysterious figure upstairs.
(16:25):
I'll look on and the scene plays out against what
is obviously a cobwebby haunted house background. And Adams, who
just called the work vacuum Cleaner when he recorded it
in his own personal records, was paid eighty five dollars
for it, and he had absolutely no idea where that
was eventually going to lead. Harold Ross, who was the
co founder and editor in chief of The New Yorker,
(16:47):
saw something in this, though he asked Adams to fill
the Victorian house he had created for the Vacuum Cleaner
cartoon with more characters. Things evolved immediately. The butler went
from this beard man who to the very clean shaven
look that was reminiscent of Frankenstein's Monster as that character
looks in James Whale's films, the surroundings got more dilapidated
(17:11):
and creepier, but new characters didn't appear. But Harold Ross
still liked it though, and it ran in the magazine
in November of nine, more than a year after that
first Ghoulish vacuum cleaner sale, and then on January twelve
of nineteen forty, The New Yorker published one of Adams's
most famous non Adams Family cartoons. It's kind of nicknamed
(17:34):
The Ski Tree or You'll see it referred to as
the Skier, and it features a skier who has just
passed a tree, and the skiers ski tracks can clearly
be seen going around each side of the tree uninterrupted,
and the skier is continuing on. And then a witness
in the form of a cross country skier traveling in
the opposite direction, looks on in bewilderment. Uh, though he
(17:56):
doesn't know quite how this person went around a tree
on its skis from both sides. Uh. It perfectly encapsulates
Charles adams as sense of the absurd and the mind bending,
and Adams became pretty instantly famous for The Skier, which
surprised him greatly. He thought it was just an incredibly
simple cartoon, and he couldn't quite grasp why people wanted
(18:18):
to analyze it so tirelessly. For meaning, it got written
up by professors. People wrote, you know, their thesis on it.
He heard about it being taught in like logic classes,
and he was like, it's just a weird cartoon. You
got well. And my embarrassing admission for this episode is
that I didn't really like, I'm familiar with that cartoon.
(18:40):
I'm I've seen it plenty of times before. When I
read the description in this outline, I could immediately call
it to mind. And I did not make the connection ever,
that that was the same guy as the Adams family.
I can understand that. I mean, it's it's an early
stage of when he was doing Inkwashes, so it didn't
have that same level of depths, And it is not
(19:01):
it's weird, and like I said, it's a little mind bendy,
but there's nothing of the sort of creepy stuff that
we more closely tied to him. So the nineteen forties
were really eventful for Adams. In nineteen forty he illustrated
the book But Who Wakes The Bugler by Peter Devrees.
Two years later he published his own anthology, Drawn and
Quartered That Random House, and after that he was constantly publishing.
(19:23):
He had a lot of books. Um That elegant woman
in adams Dark Victorian House, who would later become Morticia,
fell in love, almost in tandem with Charles Adams. The
artist came up with a round, old fashioned looking paramore
for his macab lady as his life was becoming entwined
with that of Barbara Jean Day. Barbara, who went by Bobby,
(19:46):
is often described as looking like Morticia, though Adams at
various times would list all of the many ways that
they were different. In early nineteen forty three, so World
War Two, Adams was drafted into the U. S. Army,
and just a month after he joined, his mother died
at sixty six, which was incredibly rough on him. Three
months later, perhaps to try to reclaim a little bit
(20:08):
of happiness, on May twenty nine, Charlie took leave to
marry Bobby in Westfield. They honeymooned in Manhattan, and then
Charlie returned to the base that he was stationed at,
which was just in a Storia. Barbara set up their
new home in an apartment at thirty six and a
half East seventy Street, and she also started to look
even more like Charlie's cartoon ghoul woman. She grew out
(20:29):
her hair, which was very dark, and she started wearing
a lot of black. Because Charlie's barracks were nearby, the
couple saw a lot of each other and they socialized
with other couples as well. Yeah, this isn't a time
where they were like separated. During his service time, he
stayed on the base, but it was apparent that many
of the soldiers who were stationed there that had wives
(20:50):
or girlfriends often left at night. He certainly was having
dinners with friends and colleagues during this time. But because
of his art background, Charlie was selected to work at
a Signal Core photographic center, making training films and pamphlets
and signs and similar types of things for the military.
And during this time he was also still submitting regularly
to The New Yorker. He occasionally produced war theme art,
(21:14):
usually the request of an editor, but he mainly stayed
true to his own grim humor and subjects. He wanted
his work to be timeless and not tied to the
era in which it was drawn, and the children of
the Little Monstrous Family, who would evolve into Pugsley and Wednesday,
appeared during this time as well. Charlie's army time ended
in after the war was over and he started a
(21:35):
life that was really pretty glamorous. Adams had moved into
a nicer apartment. He started buying cars and unique antiques.
He purchased a farm, spent months on Fire Island, and
party with friends, including old friends and new friends, some
of whom were very high profile in the art or
writing scene. Yeah, it seemed like he and Bobby really
(21:56):
had like that sort of charmed uh artsy power couple
life where they just hung out with everybody cool. They
hosted the coolest parties. He was busy getting into two
racing his expensive cars at this point, and in December
The New Yorker published one of the most famous of
the Adams family cartoons called Boiling Oil. And this features
(22:16):
an angled aerial view of a Victorian mansion with a
group of carolers clustered at the bottom of the image
at the door. They're kind of small in the picture. Lurch,
Gomez and Mortsia again not named this yet, but it's
easier to do that for shorthand are standing on a
ledge near the top of the house, and they have
a vat of boiling oil tipped just before it spills
out onto the merry singers. Huge numbers of requests came
(22:39):
in from fans after this was published, asking if they
could use it on their Christmas cards, and Adams always
granted permission so long as they were just doing it
for personal use and they were not mass producing it
for sale. Charlie really embraced the ghoulish eccentric identity that
his fans seemed to want him to have. He went
on picnics and graveyards and even snatched an old gravestone
(23:01):
which he later used as a table. Please do not
steal gravestones. His home filled up with ghoulish odds and ends,
and he got all manner of odd and creepy gifts.
He would tell reporters and friends about them, and he
was very conscious of how they added to this whole
macab mystique. These things included stuff like a human thigh
(23:24):
bone and a skull that was gilded with gold. Yeah,
all kinds of things. The human thigh bone I have
seen relate in two different ways. One that it was
a gift from a fan, and one that it was
a gift from one of his wives, but I never
saw like conclusive corroboration of either of those, so that
he had one um. By the late nineteen forties, though,
(23:46):
what had started as a small issue in the Adams
marriage loomed progressively larger. Bobby enjoyed their life, but she
really wanted to slow things down a little bit and
start a family. Charlie found it challenging enough to be
in a monogamous marriage and that was something that he
never quite managed to do, and he did not want
to add children to the equation. He was absolutely great
(24:08):
with kids, He enjoyed playing with kids, His friends kids
all loved him, but he thought having one of his
own in his life was going to really limit his
options and basically just prevent him from living the life
he wanted, and he later would say when this topic
would come up, I'm my own child. Eventually, Charlie agreed
that they could have a baby, but they weren't able
to conceive. Bobby wanted to adopt a child, and Charles
(24:32):
agreed on the condition that they get an older child
and not an infant. But then when a child fitting.
Their application finally became available, Charlie got cold feet about
it and he couldn't complete the paperwork, and this ended
their marriage. Bobby left shortly thereafter with another man. Yes,
so they had had eight years where they seemed like
the perfect couple and then it ended rather abruptly. Uh.
(24:53):
And that same summer that the marriage ended, Charlie's best
friend and fellow cartoonist died. That was Sam Kobeing, and
he died suddenly in a car accident, and Adams actually
felt somehow responsible for the death because he had been
the person who got Sam interested in cars, and even
though he was not driving dangerously, I guess he was
driving kind of fast down a straight away when another
(25:14):
car entered and hit his car. And Bobby and Charlie
attended Sam's funeral as a couple. It was their one
last appearance as a married couple. Despite all these personal setbacks,
Charlie's professional life was continuing to flourish. Not only were
there more books, but also merchandise. There was a line
of Chas Adams scarves and housewears that was launched in
(25:35):
the early nineteen fifties. He also worked on an assortment
of projects with his friends. Yeah, some of those came
to fruition and some did not, But he always just
had fun kind of noodling around with other people on
collaborations and projects. And it turned out that adams is
penchant for dark humor really connected with readers. He already
knew that based on the whole Christmas card thing, but
(25:55):
it continued to snowball. He got fan mail from all over,
and at one point he told James Thurber quote, I
have gotten a lot of letters about my work, most
of them from criminals and subhumans who want to sell ideas.
Some of the worst come from a minister in Georgia.
And all kinds of rumors are also started to follow
him around this time, like that he slept in a
(26:15):
coffin and sometimes that he would put eyeballs in his martinis.
Those were untrue, but the legendary tales of his drinking
and womanizing that started around this time were absolutely based
in reality. He was really fun, loving and famous, and
once his divorce became public knowledge, he was like a
magnet for prospective dates. He dated some women regularly, and
there were rumors of some possible engagements, but he was
(26:38):
never exclusive with anyone. Yeah, the list of women that
he was almost maybe engaged to is mighty long. I
mean we're talking dozens. And then he met a woman
named Barbara Barb in nineteen fifty three, and her full
name was actually a stell b Barb, and she was
a tall, dark haired, flashy beauty. She looked to a
(27:01):
lot of his friends like an ultra glamorized version of
Charlie's first wife, Bobby. He very clearly had a type.
Some of his friends really perceived her rather unkindly. She
was described by some of them as a bimbo. But
in fact, Barbara was smart as a whip and very ambitious,
and she had what seemed to be a very successful
law career. She did have a legitimate law degree, but
(27:23):
she also embellished her own life story in ways that
made it really hard to discern how much she was
a self made success and whether she may have gotten
her money from other means. But regardless of how anyone
else saw Barbara Barba, Charles Adams was completely captivated by her.
But one aspect of their courtship was always consistently relayed
(27:45):
based on accounts of all of Charlie's friends and Charlie.
It was a really tumultuous relationship. Charlie confided in friends
at various points that Barbara was sometimes violent when they fought,
hitting him and brandishing a knife at one point. They
also ended up having a number of false starts on
wedding dates. They would plan to get married, and then
(28:05):
they would get in a big fight and it would
fall apart, and they would just do that cycle over
and over. But they still did get married in South
Carolina at the end of nineteen fifty four. The marriage,
like the courtship, was really a roller coaster. Barbara lied
to Charlie about being pregnant when she wasn't. She told
him that she had no family when it turned out
that she did and they were nearby in Brooklyn. Police
(28:28):
had to intervene in fights between the two of them
on occasion, and throughout all of it. It turned out
that Barbara had maintained a romance with a man in
England who she saw whenever she was traveling to Europe,
which was a frequent part of her work, and the
Any Yorker at this time had first rights to any
of Charlie's cartoons, as outline in a contract that had
been put in place. In the nineteen forties, Barbara Barbe
(28:50):
set up a company of her own that would manage
the sale and distribution of any work that the New
Yorker had not taken. And under this set up, Barbara
was paid to manage the aagement and manage his art,
and she was entitled to fift of the earnings from
these sales. This marriage and all kinds of aspects of
their relationship were completely confusing to everyone in Adam's social circle,
(29:13):
and we'll talk a bit more about that after we
take a quick sponsor break. So, as we said before
we cut to our sponsor break, no one really understood
this marriage, which, as it turns out, was not even
common knowledge for reasons that are a little unclear. Barbara,
(29:37):
who Charlie's friends nicknamed Bad Barbara since they called his
first wife Good Barbara, just kind of a sticky situation
to be in. But she wanted to keep the wedding
a secret for a while, and of course there were
tons of rumors about why she might want that, but
we don't really know. But Charles also seemed a little
afraid of his second wife, and he was willing to
give in to her various demands just to keep the
(29:58):
peace and hopefully keep their various problems from getting out
and damaging his career. But he wasn't counter submissive. From
very early on, he was taking delivery of love letters
that were arriving from Barbara's British lover and then taking
those to his lawyers for safekeeping, without ever telling barb
that he had them. I feel like this is the
(30:19):
inspiration for a whole storyline on parks and recreation. It
absolutely could be the inspiration of so many different genres
of drama, comedy and horror. Well, it's specifically the multiple
wives with the same name um, with one of them
being the particularly bad one. So then in October of
(30:43):
Barbara insisted that Charlie take out a hundred thousand dollar
life insurance policy that named her as its irrevocable beneficiary.
Charlie talked to a lawyer and then he went along
with the policy and Barbara went into couples counseling. He also, though,
hired an investigator to follow o'barbara's activities in England, and
he told friends that he thought that Barbara was trying
(31:04):
to kill him. The marriage finally ended in nineteen fifty six,
with Barbara asking for the rights to fifty of Charlie's
cartoons and ownership of some of his properties. She promised
that she would return the real estate to him in
her will. He happily agreed, thinking this was a relatively
painless way to escape this whole marriage, and after a
quickie divorce, Barbara immediately left for England and moved in
(31:27):
with her lover there. Incidentally, they're quickie divorce, which happened
in Alabama at a time where Alabama was the place
you went to for a quickie divorce could because you
could just stand there and say yes, I'm a resident
of Alabama and no one would question it, and then
they would do the legal proceeding. Allegedly, their divorce took
like forty five minutes, and a lot of people were
doing exactly the same thing. But this became high profile
(31:48):
enough that people were like, wait a minute, we got
to change the loss. This is this is way too easy.
We can't be like the divorce destination and his legal
team that he would consult was always like, don't do this,
don't sign anything she gives you, and he would be like,
you're right, and then he would go back and sign
it um. But finally he thought he was free, and
by the end of ninety six, Charlie had started an
(32:10):
affair with a woman named t Davy, who was his
friend's wife and was also very pregnant at the time,
and this happened when he visited them in Tennessee during
the holidays. T whose name was Marilyn Matthews but she
had gone by Tea since she was a kid, had
known Charlie for about nine years at that point. She
had been introduced through her husband, Buddy Davy, who was
an heir to the Standard Oil fortune, and this affair
(32:33):
was not very serious for either of them. Tea's marriage
was struggling at the time, although they were working on
things with a therapist, and Charlie was still dealing with
his divorce. It was a brief and casual dalliance, but
a deepening friendship grew between the two of them as
Charles stayed there in Tennessee with a very pregnant Tea
while Buddy traveled for work. Meanwhile, Barbara, who had remarried
(32:55):
but not told Charlie about it, once again appeared in
his life. The two started trying to see each other
socially when she was in New York, and it's been
theorized that he was possibly trying to make nice with
her in order to get his properties back, but he
always remained really unfathomably friendly to her. Yeah, his friends
all had theories about why he might have social dates
(33:17):
with her, and that was one of them. That was
kind of the summation was maybe he's trying to get
his stuff back. We don't know she blackmailing you, right,
because she did seem a little snaky um. He also
had a project during this time called Dear Dead Days,
which was published in nineteen fifty nine, and this was
a concept book, and the concept was that it was
(33:38):
the memory album of the Adams family, and it featured
photographs that tied to their world and inspired the cartoons
that he had drawn of them. But there are only
a few pieces of his artwork within it. Some of
the photographs were eerie and unsettling, and it was not
what people expected. It was not what his fans wanted,
and this book did not sell very well, but Adams
(34:00):
thought it was great. He felt like this was a
very fulfilling artistic endeavor. Incidentally, maybe been formed by these
two failed marriages. Charles wanted it never to be actually
stated in captions or images that his gothic bride and
her odd, rotund paramore were married. As his characters that
he was starting to form into a group in these cartoons, Yeah,
(34:24):
they never were a family. Initially in his mind, they
were just like odd ghouls that lived together there. And
it wasn't until the press started calling them actually Adams
family that they started to take on that tone. Despite
the lackluster reception of Dear Dead Days and the end
of this really bad though reef marriage, Charles Adams was
(34:45):
entering a stage of his life that was again sort
of like the epitome of a glamorous, successful party lifestyle.
We are going to talk about all of that, and
of course the Adams Families transitions from the page to
the screen on our next step soon. Uh. I have
listener mail. It's a brief listener mail, but it felt
like it tied into this because it is from one
(35:05):
of our younger listeners and it has a drawing on
it and he writes, can you do an episode on
the Odinbach Castle. My ancestors owned it. I am also
named after it. This is from our listener Odin who
drew a beautiful castle at the bottom. I'll put it
on my list. You never know when those might pop up.
Everything's in sort of a long list, constant rotation situation
(35:26):
where it depends when we find resources and and when
things just work out with our schedule. But I will
put it on the list, Odin, I promise you. Uh.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast at housetuf works dot com.
You can also find us pretty much everywhere on social
media as missed in History and Missed in History dot
com is also where you'll find our website where you
can get any episode of the show that has ever existed,
(35:48):
as well as occasional other goodies, and you should do
that at missed in History dot com. You can also
subscribe to this show on Apple, Podcast, Google Play, Spotify,
where wherever it is you get your podcasts m M.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how Stuff Works dot com. M
Hey, everybody. Before we get started with this episode, we
have one last live show to announce for We will
be in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the National World War
Two Museum on Tuesday, November six. Okay, we know that
selection day, but we don't want coming to our show
to keep you from the polls. We are both going
to vote early before we leave for New Orleans, and
(00:20):
Louisiana offers early voting as well, so we encourage you
to do so. You can find out more about this
show and get a link to buy tickets at missed
in History dot com slash tour. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(00:44):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy view Wilson. Tracy, I have to ask you a
question right out of the gate. I'm putting you on
the spot. Okay, the Adams Family or the Monsters? Oh man.
So when I was a kid, I loved the Adams
famly most and I thought the Munsters were a weird knockoff.
That's not accurate, no, but but that's valid to think that. Um.
(01:09):
I will probably shock you by saying when I was
a kid, I liked the Munsters more, really I did.
It was not until I got older that I kind
of switched it over. And I think I realized I
was trying to figure out why that was. And I
think it was an aspirational gould Um where I mean,
I could never be like the long, willowy Mortitia, but
(01:30):
I could probably pull off a lily. Oh sure, like
Avond de Carlo with her little white stripe in her hair.
And she was shorter and she had that fabulous rush
dress and the bat necklace, and so I think that
was what it was. But I liked them both. Now
I love them both. But today we're going to talk
about Charles Adams, who was the creator of the Adams
(01:51):
Family as a cartoon, long before it was ever a
TV series or films, etcetera. And Charles Adams was, by
all accounts a compelling figure. He visited cemeteries for fun,
and he was a car enthusiast, and he raced cars
as an amateur, and he collected and shot crossbows. And
Alfred Hitchcock once just showed up on his doorstep with
(02:13):
no advanced warning, hoping to meet him and saying when
Charles Adams opened the door. I've just come to see
you in your natural Bailey Wick. But Adams very likely
surprised the filmmaker because he surprised a lot of people
who thought they could intuit what the creator of the
kinds of cartoons he made would be like, because he
was not an elusive sort of proto goth at all.
(02:36):
He was in fact, very dapper and sociable, and he
was irreverent but by all accounts, completely delightful to be around. Uh.
And there is so much great stuff to his story
that this is a two parter, so um, we had
to talk about all of his good and bad qualities.
And also I will just say that, after doing all
this research, if I build a time machine, my answer
might have changed again because I just want to go
(02:58):
back and maybe have cock pals with Charles Adams. I
think he would be just a super fun guy to
hang out with. I also feel like this is an interesting, um,
not exactly counterpoint, but that's the word that I can
think of to last Halloween's Edward Gory episode. Yeah, they
in terms of them both having sort of a maccab
(03:22):
fascination in their work and having very distinctive personalities. Yeah,
and it's interesting. Uh. It doesn't come up in either
of these episodes, but naturally people would ask him a
little bit about gory Um and other artists as well, cartoonists,
and and he always felt that um uh And I'm
(03:42):
paraphrasing based on stuff that I read that to him,
he was just to Charles Adams, he just thought he
was funny. He didn't really see himself necessarily as macab
at all, whereas he really thought that Edward Gorey had
this insight into like the darker side of humanity, and
he was like, I strap funny off. Which is kind
of interesting because a lot of his stuff, at least
(04:05):
for the time, it was very dark. Nowadays, it's probably
considered pretty mild by comparison, but it has sort of
a wonderful an unexpected nature of how it looks at
the world and humanity, and that some people often found
a little bit dark or a lot dark. Yeah, So
we'll start at the beginning, as we usually do. Charles
Samuel Adams was born in Westfield, New Jersey, on January
(04:27):
seventh nine. His father, Charles Hughey Adams, had studied to
be an architect, but then ended up working at a
piano company. He worked his way up from a salesman
to an executive, and he really traveled a lot. The
young Charles's mother was Grace M. Spear Adams, and he
went by the name Charlie. By all accounts, he was
(04:47):
a very jolly baby, and the Adams has had this
blue eyed child a little late considering the time. Grace
was in her thirties when he was born, and they
really just treasured him. Yeah, there's a great store. And
in the biography that I read of him that she
initially was very nervous and she bought a baby book
and was doing and she eventually just threw it out
because she was like, I just love this kid, and
(05:09):
we're just going to raise him that way. Um, like
that will be their guiding principle. Uh. He was also
really fascinated as a kid by some of the old
Rundown Victorian homes in their neighborhood. And when he was eight,
Charlie and a number of other boys broke into one
that was under renovation and they drew skeletons on the
walls and they caused all kinds of other mischief. They
messed with the some of the paint and resins that
(05:31):
the construction workers had left behind, and this got them
in a little bit of trouble with the local police.
Adams liked to tell people that he got arrested at
the age of eight for trespassing and vandalism, but there
was actually no arrest. The kids were instead rounded up
and they were taken to the courthouse and Mr Adams,
Charlie's father paid for the damages that the boys had done.
This is like an episode of the Andy Griffiths, totally.
(05:55):
A lot of his life sounds like that. Growing up,
he always stressed what a normal, sort of wholesome, happy
boyhood he had. Yeah, later on, as a young man,
he really did get arrested, though. He was arrested when
he removed the tank top part of his swimsuit at
the beach after having seen a photo of Italian men
who were wearing their swimsuits with just the shorts on. Yes,
(06:17):
for emulating fashion. He got in a little bit of
legal trouble. Charlie did remain fascinated with Victorian homes after
his childhood, even but during his childhood he liked to
wander the streets of their town, where there were a
lot of them, and he would imagine the secrets of
the people who lived there and thought about the sinister
possibilities of the things in their lives they might be hiding.
(06:40):
But his own family, like I said, was pretty happy
and even pretty ordinary. His parents were devoted to one another,
and he sometimes joked that he was strange because he
didn't have an unhappy childhood. He was a much beloved child,
and he also really loved his parents. The only thing
that seemed to darken this picture of perfection and happiness
(07:01):
was that his mother would get lonely when his father
traveled for work. Long past that home break in, Charles
continued to be a prankster. He liked to use the
dumb waiter in the family home to sneak into his
grandmother's room and then jump out and scare her, something
that he admitted doing the same. Eternal grandmother, Emma Louise
(07:22):
tough Spear, would go on to inspire the grand My
character in his famous work as an adult, and it
was through her that Charlie was related to not only
the Toughs family, but also very distantly to John Adams. Yeah,
so that's the other side of the family, not the
Adams from whence his name comes, which is a two
D situation um as in it has two d's in it.
(07:44):
But yeah, so he had a pretty illustrious family set
of connections on his mother's side. He also would say
that in the inspiring the Grandmother later on in Adams family,
that was his grandmother, Like when she first woke up
in the morning and hadn't combed her hair, she was
not always disheveled. But even as a kid, there were
also some clues that Charlie was really in tune with
(08:06):
the maccabre. So, in addition to thinking about those secret
lives of the people in the houses around him, he
adored things like skeletons and coffins and even iron maidens.
At one point he said he really believed that if
he had told his parents he wanted an iron maiden,
they probably would have bought one for him. But some
of his fascination with such things actually came from his
(08:27):
fear of them. He was actually pretty claustrophobic. He wrote
about it as a kid in his diary, and he
was afraid of snakes. But instead of trying to avoid
those things, he confronted them, and he drew his fears
to deal with them. One of the things that comes
up over and over when you read about his house
as an adult is that he had all kinds of
snake art in it, so he clearly really embraced that fear.
(08:50):
He also really loved art. He started drawing as a kid,
and his parents encouraged him in it even when Charlie
was still very young, younger than seven. He was drawing
pictures of World War One as it took place. He
was imagining the scenes that he heard about in news reports.
And he also liked to draw a lot of pictures
of KAISERVILLELM. The Second being killed in all kinds of ways.
(09:12):
He was hanged, he was run over by a car,
on and on. Yeah, yeah, he drew everything he heard,
and Grace and Charles really believed that their child had
a true and unique talent, so much so that at
one point Grace brought some of his drawings to Ht
Webster at the New York Herald and said, look at
my child and what he can do. But Webster was like,
(09:33):
this kid has no talent. It's such a common story
among parents being like my kid is amazing, and another
non related person is like, not really though throughout all
of his education, Charlie was a lot more likely to
draw humorous cartoons during class than to take notes, and
even in drawing class, he would hurry through assignments and
(09:55):
then scribble his humorous cartoons for the rest of the
class period. I did this all through school, but it
was with reading. His classmates found him to be fascinating
and fun and he really never lacked for company when
he wanted it. Yeah, he was one of those kids,
it's been described that kind of fit in with everybody.
(10:15):
Like he didn't have one click, he had kind of
people from each click that also hung out with him. Uh.
And at this point though he still thought like art
was probably a good plan, but that he was going
to be like a commercial illustrator. He didn't think all
of this doodling and cartooning would amount to much of anything.
And after graduating from Westfield High School, he enrolled in
Colgate College in Hamilton, New York. And this was actually
(10:37):
a really difficult transition for his mother, who was now
often without her traveling husband and her son who was
away at college. In his sophomore year, Adam's transferred to
University of Pennsylvania. But what he thought was going to
be an art program that would more closely suit his needs,
actually turned out to be more of an architecture program.
(10:58):
He only lasted a year there. He never finished his
undergraduate degree, and when he left college, he started taking
classes at the Grand Central School of Art in New York,
and this school still proudly lists him as an alumnus,
but he only stayed there a year. In nineteen thirty one,
he drew a sketch of a window washer from an
aerial point of view, and then, on a whim, dropped
(11:19):
it off at the New Yorker offices. Like you do.
He left it in an envelope, but he didn't include
a return address on it. And then several months later
he went back to the New Yorker hoping to just
pick up his sketch, and he found out that it
had been published in the space at the end of
a column that's what's called a decorative spot. It was
in the February sixty two issue. He got a check
(11:41):
for seven dollars and fifty cents. And he was twenty
when this happened. Yeah, he apparently went running to show
one of his friends, a young lady, that he had
met in art school that that he had become close
friends with this check and she actually thought he had
forged it. She's like, no, you didn't. Well, the idea
of a person just dropping something off at the New
Yorker office and then having it published smontage, like that's
(12:04):
pretty far fetched. Yeah. Um, But just a few months
after this this joyous milestone, Charlie's father died at the
age of fifty eight, and that sudden death. It wasn't
entirely sudden, but he became ill very quickly and died
not long thereafter. It really catalyzed a change for Charlie.
He kind of realized at that point the school was
(12:24):
never going to give him what he needed, and he
just wanted to go ahead and start earning a living.
And so to that end, he took a job retouching
crime scene photos for True Detective magazine. So in this case,
he would sometimes make them a little less gory and
gruesome before publication, or he would just do layouts where
he had to add captions or um any descriptive text
(12:46):
on the image to further explain it to readers. He
made fifteen dollars a week, and that wasn't super great money,
but it was a really secure job during the depression,
which was a very difficult thing to find. He submitted
to The New Yorker again, This time it was a
sketch of a hockey player who forgot his skates and
he's standing on the ice with his colleagues and his
stocking feet. This was published on January fourth, nineteen thirty three,
(13:10):
and he'd later talked about how unfunny this piece of
art was and wonder why the magazine ever went for it.
He continued to submit cartoons to The New Yorker, and
several more were published that year. Thirty four was leaner,
though the magazine only published one of his cartoons. In
nineteen thirty five, he submitted an image of a printing
press that was running a paper with the headlined sex
(13:32):
Fiend Slays tot. He submitted that to The New Yorker,
and The New Yorker published in on March twenty three.
It was a skewering of the press and the tendency
to run just the most lurid stories possible on the
front page. And from that point Adams, who had already
started signing his art chas Adams, simply because he liked
how it looked. He didn't actually go by chas in
(13:54):
his life, started to get a little more brazen with
the dark subjects of his cartoons. He did routinely get
notes that his drawing needed to be better, and so
he started working with ink wasashes, which added a lot
of depth to his images, and he started selling a
lot more art and making more money. Coming up, we
will talk more about Charlie's early work for The New Yorker,
(14:16):
but first we're going to take a little breaks so
we can hear from one of our sponsors. At the
age of twenty three, Adams was regularly publishing with The
New Yorker as a contributor. That was a job that
ended up really defining his career in the public's relationship
(14:38):
with his work. This wasn't a huge money gig. He
got paid ten dollars for spots, those little smaller ones
that were kind of fillers, and a fee per square
inch for larger images, which wasn't great money. It wasn't
a high volume business, and there was no guarantee that
submitted work was going to be accepted. And he also
submitted to other publications during this time and got published
(14:59):
in some of them, but The New Yorker was his
primary source of income, and as his popularity with readers grew,
the magazine started getting requests to purchase his original drawings,
and then on January one of eight, he had his
first cover with the magazine. Not all of adams drawings
were his own ideas. He collaborated with writers at The
(15:20):
New Yorker for some of his work, and he hired
gag writers on his own as well that included Richard McAllister.
This was a really common practice, and at the time
The New Yorker ran its cartoon division around this idea
of writers and artists working as collaborators. Yeah, sometimes people
are a little shocked. And I know, even later in life,
as like sort of the next generation of artists was
(15:41):
coming up in The New Yorker, many of whom had
been idolizing Charles Adams. They were like, what what do
you What do you mean he didn't write those jokes
and would be like, no, he would get somebody sometimes
to write the joke, and then he would illustrate the joke.
It's like an actor with a script. Uh. So it's
a little startling for some people. Uh. Mortitia Adams first
appeared in print on August six, Although she did not
(16:04):
have that name at the time, she kind of got
called all manner of things like ghoulish woman or you know,
creepy woman. Still her trademark long elegant look is unmistakable,
although her hair is pulled back. In that one, she
is being given a pitch by a vacuum salesman while
a large, imposing butler, a bat and a mysterious figure upstairs.
(16:25):
I'll look on and the scene plays out against what
is obviously a cobwebby haunted house background. And Adams, who
just called the work vacuum Cleaner when he recorded it
in his own personal records, was paid eighty five dollars
for it, and he had absolutely no idea where that
was eventually going to lead. Harold Ross, who was the
co founder and editor in chief of The New Yorker,
(16:47):
saw something in this, though he asked Adams to fill
the Victorian house he had created for the Vacuum Cleaner
cartoon with more characters. Things evolved immediately. The butler went
from this beard man who to the very clean shaven
look that was reminiscent of Frankenstein's Monster as that character
looks in James Whale's films, the surroundings got more dilapidated
(17:11):
and creepier, but new characters didn't appear. But Harold Ross
still liked it though, and it ran in the magazine
in November of nine, more than a year after that
first Ghoulish vacuum cleaner sale, and then on January twelve
of nineteen forty, The New Yorker published one of Adams's
most famous non Adams Family cartoons. It's kind of nicknamed
(17:34):
The Ski Tree or You'll see it referred to as
the Skier, and it features a skier who has just
passed a tree, and the skiers ski tracks can clearly
be seen going around each side of the tree uninterrupted,
and the skier is continuing on. And then a witness
in the form of a cross country skier traveling in
the opposite direction, looks on in bewilderment. Uh, though he
(17:56):
doesn't know quite how this person went around a tree
on its skis from both sides. Uh. It perfectly encapsulates
Charles adams as sense of the absurd and the mind bending,
and Adams became pretty instantly famous for The Skier, which
surprised him greatly. He thought it was just an incredibly
simple cartoon, and he couldn't quite grasp why people wanted
(18:18):
to analyze it so tirelessly. For meaning, it got written
up by professors. People wrote, you know, their thesis on it.
He heard about it being taught in like logic classes,
and he was like, it's just a weird cartoon. You
got well. And my embarrassing admission for this episode is
that I didn't really like, I'm familiar with that cartoon.
(18:40):
I'm I've seen it plenty of times before. When I
read the description in this outline, I could immediately call
it to mind. And I did not make the connection ever,
that that was the same guy as the Adams family.
I can understand that. I mean, it's it's an early
stage of when he was doing Inkwashes, so it didn't
have that same level of depths, And it is not
(19:01):
it's weird, and like I said, it's a little mind bendy,
but there's nothing of the sort of creepy stuff that
we more closely tied to him. So the nineteen forties
were really eventful for Adams. In nineteen forty he illustrated
the book But Who Wakes The Bugler by Peter Devrees.
Two years later he published his own anthology, Drawn and
Quartered That Random House, and after that he was constantly publishing.
(19:23):
He had a lot of books. Um That elegant woman
in adams Dark Victorian House, who would later become Morticia,
fell in love, almost in tandem with Charles Adams. The
artist came up with a round, old fashioned looking paramore
for his macab lady as his life was becoming entwined
with that of Barbara Jean Day. Barbara, who went by Bobby,
(19:46):
is often described as looking like Morticia, though Adams at
various times would list all of the many ways that
they were different. In early nineteen forty three, so World
War Two, Adams was drafted into the U. S. Army,
and just a month after he joined, his mother died
at sixty six, which was incredibly rough on him. Three
months later, perhaps to try to reclaim a little bit
(20:08):
of happiness, on May twenty nine, Charlie took leave to
marry Bobby in Westfield. They honeymooned in Manhattan, and then
Charlie returned to the base that he was stationed at,
which was just in a Storia. Barbara set up their
new home in an apartment at thirty six and a
half East seventy Street, and she also started to look
even more like Charlie's cartoon ghoul woman. She grew out
(20:29):
her hair, which was very dark, and she started wearing
a lot of black. Because Charlie's barracks were nearby, the
couple saw a lot of each other and they socialized
with other couples as well. Yeah, this isn't a time
where they were like separated. During his service time, he
stayed on the base, but it was apparent that many
of the soldiers who were stationed there that had wives
(20:50):
or girlfriends often left at night. He certainly was having
dinners with friends and colleagues during this time. But because
of his art background, Charlie was selected to work at
a Signal Core photographic center, making training films and pamphlets
and signs and similar types of things for the military.
And during this time he was also still submitting regularly
to The New Yorker. He occasionally produced war theme art,
(21:14):
usually the request of an editor, but he mainly stayed
true to his own grim humor and subjects. He wanted
his work to be timeless and not tied to the
era in which it was drawn, and the children of
the Little Monstrous Family, who would evolve into Pugsley and Wednesday,
appeared during this time as well. Charlie's army time ended
in after the war was over and he started a
(21:35):
life that was really pretty glamorous. Adams had moved into
a nicer apartment. He started buying cars and unique antiques.
He purchased a farm, spent months on Fire Island, and
party with friends, including old friends and new friends, some
of whom were very high profile in the art or
writing scene. Yeah, it seemed like he and Bobby really
(21:56):
had like that sort of charmed uh artsy power couple
life where they just hung out with everybody cool. They
hosted the coolest parties. He was busy getting into two
racing his expensive cars at this point, and in December
The New Yorker published one of the most famous of
the Adams family cartoons called Boiling Oil. And this features
(22:16):
an angled aerial view of a Victorian mansion with a
group of carolers clustered at the bottom of the image
at the door. They're kind of small in the picture. Lurch,
Gomez and Mortsia again not named this yet, but it's
easier to do that for shorthand are standing on a
ledge near the top of the house, and they have
a vat of boiling oil tipped just before it spills
out onto the merry singers. Huge numbers of requests came
(22:39):
in from fans after this was published, asking if they
could use it on their Christmas cards, and Adams always
granted permission so long as they were just doing it
for personal use and they were not mass producing it
for sale. Charlie really embraced the ghoulish eccentric identity that
his fans seemed to want him to have. He went
on picnics and graveyards and even snatched an old gravestone
(23:01):
which he later used as a table. Please do not
steal gravestones. His home filled up with ghoulish odds and ends,
and he got all manner of odd and creepy gifts.
He would tell reporters and friends about them, and he
was very conscious of how they added to this whole
macab mystique. These things included stuff like a human thigh
(23:24):
bone and a skull that was gilded with gold. Yeah,
all kinds of things. The human thigh bone I have
seen relate in two different ways. One that it was
a gift from a fan, and one that it was
a gift from one of his wives, but I never
saw like conclusive corroboration of either of those, so that
he had one um. By the late nineteen forties, though,
(23:46):
what had started as a small issue in the Adams
marriage loomed progressively larger. Bobby enjoyed their life, but she
really wanted to slow things down a little bit and
start a family. Charlie found it challenging enough to be
in a monogamous marriage and that was something that he
never quite managed to do, and he did not want
to add children to the equation. He was absolutely great
(24:08):
with kids, He enjoyed playing with kids, His friends kids
all loved him, but he thought having one of his
own in his life was going to really limit his
options and basically just prevent him from living the life
he wanted, and he later would say when this topic
would come up, I'm my own child. Eventually, Charlie agreed
that they could have a baby, but they weren't able
to conceive. Bobby wanted to adopt a child, and Charles
(24:32):
agreed on the condition that they get an older child
and not an infant. But then when a child fitting.
Their application finally became available, Charlie got cold feet about
it and he couldn't complete the paperwork, and this ended
their marriage. Bobby left shortly thereafter with another man. Yes,
so they had had eight years where they seemed like
the perfect couple and then it ended rather abruptly. Uh.
(24:53):
And that same summer that the marriage ended, Charlie's best
friend and fellow cartoonist died. That was Sam Kobeing, and
he died suddenly in a car accident, and Adams actually
felt somehow responsible for the death because he had been
the person who got Sam interested in cars, and even
though he was not driving dangerously, I guess he was
driving kind of fast down a straight away when another
(25:14):
car entered and hit his car. And Bobby and Charlie
attended Sam's funeral as a couple. It was their one
last appearance as a married couple. Despite all these personal setbacks,
Charlie's professional life was continuing to flourish. Not only were
there more books, but also merchandise. There was a line
of Chas Adams scarves and housewears that was launched in
(25:35):
the early nineteen fifties. He also worked on an assortment
of projects with his friends. Yeah, some of those came
to fruition and some did not, But he always just
had fun kind of noodling around with other people on
collaborations and projects. And it turned out that adams is
penchant for dark humor really connected with readers. He already
knew that based on the whole Christmas card thing, but
(25:55):
it continued to snowball. He got fan mail from all over,
and at one point he told James Thurber quote, I
have gotten a lot of letters about my work, most
of them from criminals and subhumans who want to sell ideas.
Some of the worst come from a minister in Georgia.
And all kinds of rumors are also started to follow
him around this time, like that he slept in a
(26:15):
coffin and sometimes that he would put eyeballs in his martinis.
Those were untrue, but the legendary tales of his drinking
and womanizing that started around this time were absolutely based
in reality. He was really fun, loving and famous, and
once his divorce became public knowledge, he was like a
magnet for prospective dates. He dated some women regularly, and
there were rumors of some possible engagements, but he was
(26:38):
never exclusive with anyone. Yeah, the list of women that
he was almost maybe engaged to is mighty long. I
mean we're talking dozens. And then he met a woman
named Barbara Barb in nineteen fifty three, and her full
name was actually a stell b Barb, and she was
a tall, dark haired, flashy beauty. She looked to a
(27:01):
lot of his friends like an ultra glamorized version of
Charlie's first wife, Bobby. He very clearly had a type.
Some of his friends really perceived her rather unkindly. She
was described by some of them as a bimbo. But
in fact, Barbara was smart as a whip and very ambitious,
and she had what seemed to be a very successful
law career. She did have a legitimate law degree, but
(27:23):
she also embellished her own life story in ways that
made it really hard to discern how much she was
a self made success and whether she may have gotten
her money from other means. But regardless of how anyone
else saw Barbara Barba, Charles Adams was completely captivated by her.
But one aspect of their courtship was always consistently relayed
(27:45):
based on accounts of all of Charlie's friends and Charlie.
It was a really tumultuous relationship. Charlie confided in friends
at various points that Barbara was sometimes violent when they fought,
hitting him and brandishing a knife at one point. They
also ended up having a number of false starts on
wedding dates. They would plan to get married, and then
(28:05):
they would get in a big fight and it would
fall apart, and they would just do that cycle over
and over. But they still did get married in South
Carolina at the end of nineteen fifty four. The marriage,
like the courtship, was really a roller coaster. Barbara lied
to Charlie about being pregnant when she wasn't. She told
him that she had no family when it turned out
that she did and they were nearby in Brooklyn. Police
(28:28):
had to intervene in fights between the two of them
on occasion, and throughout all of it. It turned out
that Barbara had maintained a romance with a man in
England who she saw whenever she was traveling to Europe,
which was a frequent part of her work, and the
Any Yorker at this time had first rights to any
of Charlie's cartoons, as outline in a contract that had
been put in place. In the nineteen forties, Barbara Barbe
(28:50):
set up a company of her own that would manage
the sale and distribution of any work that the New
Yorker had not taken. And under this set up, Barbara
was paid to manage the aagement and manage his art,
and she was entitled to fift of the earnings from
these sales. This marriage and all kinds of aspects of
their relationship were completely confusing to everyone in Adam's social circle,
(29:13):
and we'll talk a bit more about that after we
take a quick sponsor break. So, as we said before
we cut to our sponsor break, no one really understood
this marriage, which, as it turns out, was not even
common knowledge for reasons that are a little unclear. Barbara,
(29:37):
who Charlie's friends nicknamed Bad Barbara since they called his
first wife Good Barbara, just kind of a sticky situation
to be in. But she wanted to keep the wedding
a secret for a while, and of course there were
tons of rumors about why she might want that, but
we don't really know. But Charles also seemed a little
afraid of his second wife, and he was willing to
give in to her various demands just to keep the
(29:58):
peace and hopefully keep their various problems from getting out
and damaging his career. But he wasn't counter submissive. From
very early on, he was taking delivery of love letters
that were arriving from Barbara's British lover and then taking
those to his lawyers for safekeeping, without ever telling barb
that he had them. I feel like this is the
(30:19):
inspiration for a whole storyline on parks and recreation. It
absolutely could be the inspiration of so many different genres
of drama, comedy and horror. Well, it's specifically the multiple
wives with the same name um, with one of them
being the particularly bad one. So then in October of
(30:43):
Barbara insisted that Charlie take out a hundred thousand dollar
life insurance policy that named her as its irrevocable beneficiary.
Charlie talked to a lawyer and then he went along
with the policy and Barbara went into couples counseling. He also, though,
hired an investigator to follow o'barbara's activities in England, and
he told friends that he thought that Barbara was trying
(31:04):
to kill him. The marriage finally ended in nineteen fifty six,
with Barbara asking for the rights to fifty of Charlie's
cartoons and ownership of some of his properties. She promised
that she would return the real estate to him in
her will. He happily agreed, thinking this was a relatively
painless way to escape this whole marriage, and after a
quickie divorce, Barbara immediately left for England and moved in
(31:27):
with her lover there. Incidentally, they're quickie divorce, which happened
in Alabama at a time where Alabama was the place
you went to for a quickie divorce could because you
could just stand there and say yes, I'm a resident
of Alabama and no one would question it, and then
they would do the legal proceeding. Allegedly, their divorce took
like forty five minutes, and a lot of people were
doing exactly the same thing. But this became high profile
(31:48):
enough that people were like, wait a minute, we got
to change the loss. This is this is way too easy.
We can't be like the divorce destination and his legal
team that he would consult was always like, don't do this,
don't sign anything she gives you, and he would be like,
you're right, and then he would go back and sign
it um. But finally he thought he was free, and
by the end of ninety six, Charlie had started an
(32:10):
affair with a woman named t Davy, who was his
friend's wife and was also very pregnant at the time,
and this happened when he visited them in Tennessee during
the holidays. T whose name was Marilyn Matthews but she
had gone by Tea since she was a kid, had
known Charlie for about nine years at that point. She
had been introduced through her husband, Buddy Davy, who was
an heir to the Standard Oil fortune, and this affair
(32:33):
was not very serious for either of them. Tea's marriage
was struggling at the time, although they were working on
things with a therapist, and Charlie was still dealing with
his divorce. It was a brief and casual dalliance, but
a deepening friendship grew between the two of them as
Charles stayed there in Tennessee with a very pregnant Tea
while Buddy traveled for work. Meanwhile, Barbara, who had remarried
(32:55):
but not told Charlie about it, once again appeared in
his life. The two started trying to see each other
socially when she was in New York, and it's been
theorized that he was possibly trying to make nice with
her in order to get his properties back, but he
always remained really unfathomably friendly to her. Yeah, his friends
all had theories about why he might have social dates
(33:17):
with her, and that was one of them. That was
kind of the summation was maybe he's trying to get
his stuff back. We don't know she blackmailing you, right,
because she did seem a little snaky um. He also
had a project during this time called Dear Dead Days,
which was published in nineteen fifty nine, and this was
a concept book, and the concept was that it was
(33:38):
the memory album of the Adams family, and it featured
photographs that tied to their world and inspired the cartoons
that he had drawn of them. But there are only
a few pieces of his artwork within it. Some of
the photographs were eerie and unsettling, and it was not
what people expected. It was not what his fans wanted,
and this book did not sell very well, but Adams
(34:00):
thought it was great. He felt like this was a
very fulfilling artistic endeavor. Incidentally, maybe been formed by these
two failed marriages. Charles wanted it never to be actually
stated in captions or images that his gothic bride and
her odd, rotund paramore were married. As his characters that
he was starting to form into a group in these cartoons, Yeah,
(34:24):
they never were a family. Initially in his mind, they
were just like odd ghouls that lived together there. And
it wasn't until the press started calling them actually Adams
family that they started to take on that tone. Despite
the lackluster reception of Dear Dead Days and the end
of this really bad though reef marriage, Charles Adams was
(34:45):
entering a stage of his life that was again sort
of like the epitome of a glamorous, successful party lifestyle.
We are going to talk about all of that, and
of course the Adams Families transitions from the page to
the screen on our next step soon. Uh. I have
listener mail. It's a brief listener mail, but it felt
like it tied into this because it is from one
(35:05):
of our younger listeners and it has a drawing on
it and he writes, can you do an episode on
the Odinbach Castle. My ancestors owned it. I am also
named after it. This is from our listener Odin who
drew a beautiful castle at the bottom. I'll put it
on my list. You never know when those might pop up.
Everything's in sort of a long list, constant rotation situation
(35:26):
where it depends when we find resources and and when
things just work out with our schedule. But I will
put it on the list, Odin, I promise you. Uh.
If you would like to write to us, you can
do so at History Podcast at housetuf works dot com.
You can also find us pretty much everywhere on social
media as missed in History and Missed in History dot
com is also where you'll find our website where you
can get any episode of the show that has ever existed,
(35:48):
as well as occasional other goodies, and you should do
that at missed in History dot com. You can also
subscribe to this show on Apple, Podcast, Google Play, Spotify,
where wherever it is you get your podcasts m M.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
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