The (Charles') Addams Family

The story behind the real father of our favourite creepy family.

To my English speaking readers: since my native language is Spanish, I apologise in advanced for any mistakes that you can find in the English version of this post. Thanks for your support! 😊

We are all familiar with this melody.

And, most certainly, we’ve all watched this dance once or twice.

However, what do we know about the real head of The Addams Family? This is the story of Charles Addams.

Charles Addams was born in New Jersey, in 1912, and soon it was clear that he was not like the other children. He loved drawing (and he was very talented at it), and he enjoyed walking around the cemeteries in Westfield (the small town where he grew up).

He was also a lucky child. His parents were well aware of his talent and didn’t try to make a lawyer or a doctor out of him. Instead, they encouraged him to do the thing he loved the most, drawing, and sent him to study arts in the University of Pennsylvania. Years later, he’d use the building were he studied (the oldest in campus), the College Hall, along with the family house in Elm Street, as an inspiration for the mansion of certain creepy family in his cartoons.

In 1932 he took the plunge and sent, for the first time, a cartoon to The New Yorker. Surprisingly, not only it was published, but the editors of the magazine encouraged him to keep sending his material. That’s how he became a regular contributor to the magazine. At the same time, he worked in advertising (making drawings for press ads) and also as a photography retoucher for True Detective, a true crime magazine (you can see the fascination for true crime is neither recent nor strictly limited to podcasts) for which he had to remove the blood in the pictures so they were easier on the readers’ eyes.

Over the years, his contributions for The New Yorker became more and more frequent, and before the end of the 1930s it had become his main job. Most of his cartoons were jokes unrelated to each other but, between them, he started drawing more and more scenes starred by a very uncommon family.

The family was initially composed by a creepy couple, their two (quite wild) children, a very weird uncle, a grandmother and a sinister butler, although it was rare that all of them shared the page. The readers of the magazine became more and more interested by the crazy family with which he made fun out of the American middle class.

The growing popularity of these cartoons made ABC interested in the characters, and offered Addams a deal to adapt them as a TV series. They had two conditions tough: the family needed a name, and so did the characters, as long as individual characteristics so that the writers could develop the plots.

The Addams Family was born: Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, uncle Fester, Grandmama and Lurch. The series went on from 1964 to 1966, and became an almost instant cult classic all over the world.

Despite the success of the series, Charles Addams kept doing what he loved most, drawing: from cartoons for The New Yorker to an illustrated edition of a Ray Bradbury short story (they became close friends).

In his personal life, he was quite far from his characters, and the people around him described him as an easygoing and pacific man, yet a bit eccentric, of course. After two failed marriages, in 1980 he married Marilyn Mathews Miller, his one true love. The wedding took place in a pet cemetery (a bride’s property) and they moved out of town to a estate they named “The Swamp”. In true Addams Family style.

In 1988, right out of The Swamp, Charles Addams had a heart attack. He died in hospital a few hours later. He was 76.

He was three years short of witnessing the true Addams Family fever that took place in the 90s, with the film adaptation that Barry Sonnenfeld directed in 1991, with the actors that would become the almost official faces for the characters in the collective imagination: Angelica Houston as Morticia Addams, Raúl Juliá as Gomez, Christopher Lloyd as uncle Fester and the iconic Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams. The movie had a sequel, Family Addams Values, in 1993, which was equally successful.

Since then, we’ve seen animated adaptations and restorations of the original series and, in 2022, Tim Burton took over (no one would be more suitable to take over Addams’ legacy) with Netflix’s original spin-off Wednesday, with Jenna Ortega in the lead role. The series is an original story that follows the adventures of the family’s daughter in a school for children with “special abilities”. The series re-awakened the “Addams fever” (as if it ever went away) and it’s currently in production of its second season.

Charles Addams, the boy who walked around cemeteries, created one of the most beloved families of the popular culture. And he did it his way. With a goth aesthetic and a very dark sense of humour, he made generations of spectators fall in love with this family of creepy manners (even when they never though it was possible). And, as I said, he made it through that dark sense of humour because every time we laugh with one of his cartoons or its adaptations, we are not laughing at those who walk around cemeteries, we are laughing at those who don’t. And that really is pure (dark) magic.