Source:Davis, Linda H. Chas Addams

Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life

• By Linda H. Davis
• Published: Sunday, October 29, 2006

New York Times Arts Review

Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life

382 pages. $29.95; £16.11. Random House.

Reviewed by Janet Maslin^[1]

On the evidence of Linda H. Davis's biography, Charles Addams was sociable and debonair. "A well-dressed, courtly man with silvery back-combed hair and a gentle manner, he bore no resemblance to a fiend," Davis writes. So the macabre hallmarks of Addams's famous cartoons cannot be said to tell his story.

Still, Davis tries to make them speak. She relies heavily on the Addams canon to enliven an otherwise surprisingly colorless portrait of the artist. "Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life" uses many drawings as illustrations, so that it redundantly paraphrases as well as depicts Addams's most memorably ghoulish ideas. Its own efforts to address Addams's dark side ("Was it all a cover, just a gag?" "Or was he working out unhealthy impulses in his cartoons?") are considerably less interesting than his.

Davis conducted numerous useful interviews with Addams's friends and associates. But her book also accepts an Addams persona that sounds cooked up for the benefit of feature writers. He is shown at home with a suit of armor and a bat figurine in a posed photograph at the front of the book, but the shelves behind him hold books about painting and antiques, as well as a novel by John Updike. The Addams who made a point of collecting crossbows and using a little girl's tombstone for a coffee table was at least partly a character contrived for the public eye. It is left to Davis, in this first full-length Addams biography, to delve beneath the cobwebby surface of Addams's world to find something real. She gets only as far as illustrating why the Addams gags about spousal murder made autobiographical sense. Addams was a figurative ladykiller, squiring Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine and Jacqueline Kennedy. But this book's main drama revolves around his second wife, the one woman he might reasonably have wanted to murder.

Davis makes the childhood of happy little Charlie Addams (distantly related to John Adams and John Quincy Adams, despite the different spellings of their last names, and to Jane Addams, too) sound bland.

Growing up in Westfield, New Jersey, he was "known as something of a rascal around the neighborhood." He stood out slightly because, in the words of another, "his sense of humor was a little different from everybody else's."

His career at The New Yorker began on Feb. 6, 1932, with a sketch of a window washer that earned him $7.50.

In 1938 he began drawing the witch-goddess in the long black dress, a svelte vision he would later conjure in real life. Addams's first wife, Barbara Jean Day, whom he apparently met late in 1942, looked like the cartoon Morticia Addams in the flesh. Their marriage lasted eight years and broke up after Addams, an inveterate hater of small children, balked at the prospect of adopting one.

Still, it was a happy union compared with Addams's marriage to Barbara Barb (born Estelle B. Barb). The second Barbara, whom he married in 1954, combined Morticia-like looks with diabolical legal scheming. Davis describes the remarkable tug of war that began once Addams' second wife, a practicing lawyer, began persuading him to sign away rights to much of what he owned. She wound up in control of the "Addams Family" television and movie franchises and even bewitched Addams into taking out a $100,000 life insurance policy.

The breathtaking malice of the Addams cartoons may have owed much to this struggle. But Davis offers little insight into exactly how such connections worked. "As a storyteller who loved the fantastical, he offered no analysis of the attraction except to say that a part of him had never really grown up," she writes weakly about "Dear Dead Days," the most bizarre of Addams's books. While this biography cites some of Addams's most ghoulish preoccupations, it never really grasps them and clings more easily to the banal.

References

1. ↑ New York Times Arts Review, October 29, 2006; as accessed by BobC on 2 August 2010