Charles Addams, creator of Los Locos Addams, was a cartoonist and prominent figure in New York society which makes his life even more interesting.
Despite the different spelling of his last name, He was related to two American Presidents: John Adams and John Quincy Adams.
From a young age he was attracted to Sinister. In 1932 he worked for a magazine called True Detectives, where his function was to retouch photos of corpses so that they did not look so bloody.
Throughout his career as a cartoonist he made drawings of different types for a wide variety of publications, advertisements and even an album cover, Ghost balladsby singer Dean Gitter.
One of the most important media in which he participated was The New Yorker magazine. For this publication, around 1938, he began to draw characters that would later inspire Los Locos Addams.
He himself was just as eccentric as they were. To show a button, it turns out that he adorned his apartment with objects such as old pistols, swords, rubber bats, a human bone and a table originally used to embalm corpses.
He visited snake farms, had picnics in cemeteries, and used to laugh at funerals. There were also dozens of rumors that made it seem even weirder. One of them was that he slept in a coffin.
Although he liked the sinister, the truth is that Charles Addams operated in an environment of glamor. He liked Aston Martin and Bugatti cars, cigars, drink and beautiful women.
He was popular with the latter, as he had a great bearing and a refined look. He had romantic relationships with actresses Greta Garbo and Joan Fontaine, as well as Jacqueline Kennedy.
He also had famous friends like the writer Ray Bradbury and the film director Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock is said to have been inspired by Addams 'illustrations when deciding what Norman Bates' house would look like in his film Psycho (1960).
Something that is curious about his work is how love impacted him in his creative universe. It turns out that in 1942, the cartoonist met his first wife, Barbara Jean Day, who physically resembled Morticia. They divorced because he refused to adopt a child.
His second wife, Barbara Barb, also known as Estelle B. Barb, was a canny attorney who also looked like Morticia. They were married until 1956 and, in the long run, she got the rights to Los Locos Addams for film and television.
The original television series was born thanks to producer David Levy. To create it, he asked Addams to give more specific names and characteristics to the characters he had been drawing for The New Yorker; at first, these were not related to each other.
At Levy's request, the illustrator imagined Homer, Morticia, Merlina, Pericles, Uncle Lucas, Grandmother, Uncle Thing, Fingers and Largo.
They became central figures in a series about a wealthy family that reveled in the macabre, unaware that others found it strange and scary.
Addams himself would not have been out of tune with these characters. He married his third and last wife, Marilyn Matthews Miller, in a pet cemetery. She wore a dress black.
The cartoonist died at the age of 76, on September 29, 1988, due to a heart attack, but his work is still valid.
