His nickname was Chill. Take a good look at his portrait. He always threw in something unexpected.
Charles ("Chas') Addams 1912-1988 had one dream, one ambition and went for it: to be a cartoonist at The New York Times - and that's what he did until his death at 76 (heart attack). He started as a freelancer and then became a full-time staff member in the New York office. For life.
His legacy to us is his creation of The Addams Family. He would draw panels for the New York magazine and drew more than 1300 cartoons for the publication in his lifetime. His childhood was relatively normal if somewhat nomadic for a while, but growing up in a sound suburb of New Jersey he was a normal kid and played with friends. Yet he had an eager and emerging fascination for the macabre; a very black view on typical American life; a fantastic and satirical inversion of expected convention. His sense of humour was far from normal. But what is "normal"?
He liked visiting cemeteries, he loved to daydream, collect medieval crossbows and later in life used a little girl's tombstone for a coffee table. He married 3 times. He married wife #3 (Marilyn Miller) in a pet cemetery wearing sunglasses. They moved their marital home to a house near NYC they called "The Swamp".
In the USA, cocaine was sold over the counter until 1914. Heroin was marketed as a cough suppressant by reputable pharmaceutical companies such as Bayer from 1898-1910. The ad for Ayer's Morphine was also for children's teething problems and to cure 'all diseases of the throat and lung'.
Charles 'Chas' CHILL Addams was honoured in his lifetime and awarded an "Edgar" (I didn't know what that was either). It's the popular term for The Edgar Allen Poe Awards, named after spooky goth laudenam addict and genius American author, Edgar Allen Poe. It is awarded annually by the Mystery Writers America. He was even quoted in Hitchcock's suspense thriller North by Northwest with Cary Grant saying "Now that's a picture only Charles Addams could draw." The following clip has nothing to do with this story but it's one my favourite movie scenes and it's from North by Northwest.
But back to Chill. He always wanted to be remembered as "a cartoonist" and so he has with his 1937 original panel drawings of the eccentric and wealthy The Addams Family.
They weren't a family at the time, just a collection of anti-suburban misfits until 1964 when his caricatures were made into a TV series called The Addams Family. And that's when he decided to name the 6 year old grim-looking daughter... Wednesday. Ironically, Chill hated small children so I can only assume his creation of Wednesday Friday Addams was the antithesis to the Barbie loving, petulant, curly haired blonde, pretty pink dressed demanding little screamer of the baby boom era. Just a thought.
My favourite Wednesday was the first TV version played by Lisa Loring. I always dreamed to have a best friend like her at school. Someone who was interesting and different, cultured and brilliant - in judo, playing the flute, speaking French, painting trees with human heads, writing poems to her favourite pet spider, Homer, and her favourite doll was Marie Antoinette who was guillotined by her brother Pugsley.
Christina Ricci played a constantly cranky and believable Wednesday in The Addams Family movie (1991) and it's sequel Addams Family Values (1993).
Kris Vine from TIME OUT CHICAGO interviewed the cast in October 09. Here is an excerpt from the interview.
Q: "This is not based on the TV show or the movies, it’s based on the [Charles Addams] cartoons. Given that, Krysta, how do you go about building your character knowing that people have expectations about who Wednesday Addams is, and yet this Wednesday Addams is very different than what people know?
KR: Right. Well you know, to be fair, the cartoons were different from the movies were different from the TV show, so there has been an evolution in Wednesday. She hasn’t been the same in every incarnation. This is just one more evolution of her life. She’s been slowly growing throughout history: starting at five, then nine, 13, [now] 18…I’m hoping people are ready for this next phase. There are some expectations about what she looks like, the things that she does, and I can say that we honor her very well. Everyone has been brilliant in their ideas of how we give people what they think they want, and also give them something that they don’t know that they want. I think they will be pleasantly surprised."
Go Krysta.
I just wonder, what part will Thing play in the musical?
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