George Plimpton heard them while he was still a student at Harvard during the 1940s Wilfrid Sheed was told about them during his school years at Oxford.Īnd the Addams legend caught up with New Yorker staff members and contributors all over the world.

As Addams would begin madly sketching the skier or the maternity ghoul (depending on which version of the story you heard), his New Yorker employer had him carted off in an ambulance to the loony bin.Įveryone from Dick Cavett to medical illustrator Shirley Baty had heard the stories. Or he'd redraw 'The Skier,' his classic 1940 cartoon showing single ski tracks on either side of a tree, as though the skier seen vanishing down the hill has passed right through it. They said that Addams would have periodic mental breakdowns and begin drawing the gruesome maternity room cartoon. 'Don't bother to wrap it I'll eat it here,' he tells the nurse.

The story most often heard concerned a Charles Addams cartoon about a ghoul in a maternity room, come to claim his offspring. People said that Addams had married Morticia, the pale dagger in the spidery black dress from The Addams Family, that familiar band of subversives that included Gomez, Lurch, Pugsley, Wednesday, Uncle Fester, Grandma, Thing, and Cousin Itt. 'A charm to ward off cavity-causing vampires?' she wondered. It was once reported that he had been given a monogrammed straitjacket as a birthday gift - a garment that might have come in handy if the other stories were true, such as the one Patricia McLaughlin told about Addams moving around the living room at a party, 'methodically and imponderably depositing' dollops of tooth powder in various corners.

They said he kept a guillotine at his house and received chopped-off fingers in the mail from fans. They said that Charles Addams slept in a coffin and drank martinis with eyeballs in them.

The addams family new yorker