Friday Spill: An Addams Christmas Carol (Postscript To Addams In Love)

 

We’re thrilled here at the Spill to be able to bring you this holiday treat from Charles Addams’s biographer, Linda Davis.

Back in October Ms. Davis showed us hitherto unpublished letters and drawings from Mr. Addams. Today, for the first time anywhere, we see two more unpublished Addams, and, at the close, a curtain call for the reclining fellow with flower (we saw him in that earlier post as a cast member in Addams’s Thurber mural)    

My thanks To Ms. Davis, and the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation for permission to show the work. 

 

An Addams Christmas Carol (Postscript to “Addams in Love”)

by Linda H. Davis

If Charles Addams knew he was losing his girl that Christmas of 1935, he betrayed no hint of it in his letter. “Jewell dear,” he wrote from his home in Westfield, New Jersey, on December 10th, “Christmas is starting to get in the air again around here—so I thought I’d better do something about it….” And he filled the left margin of his handwritten letter with a series of red-clad holiday bell ringers.

                    © 1935 Charles Addams  With permission Tee and Charles Addams Foundation

                                               

Did the enchanting Jewell Valentine Bunnell, a student at the University of Wisconsin, recognize Charlie in the drawings? Two of the Santas – the first one on the left, and the shivering Santa in the middle of the queue –both with obviously false beards, resembled him, albeit in highly unflattering form. 

Tall, elegant, with back-combed brown hair and a bulbous nose, Addams was an attractive, if not conventionally handsome, man people later mistook for Walter Matthau. On the brink of 23, he could have taught a master class in love. 

1. Be yourself. You don’t have to look like Cary Grant to appeal to women. Ultimately, he would reimagine himself as Uncle Fester. 

2. Don’t posture. Though serious and disciplined about his art, and already a valued contributor to The New Yorker, he admitted to quitting early that day to see the Marx Brothers in “A Night at the Opera—I’m still weak from helpless laughter,” he wrote. 

Once, picturing Jewell in her ski suit, he had confessed his own failed attempt at skiing. He had “soon tired of it,” he wrote, and turned to whacking the icicles off the roof of his mother’s house with a stick. And he drew her a picture.

                       © 1935 Charles Addams With permission Tee and Charles Addams Foundation

3. Take an interest in the woman as a whole person, not simply as a love object.  As a lover, Addams was remarkable in his ability to make friends of his lovers, even after the romance, or marriage, was over.  He took an interest in their work, their children, in them.

That Christmas, he was eager for the girl he loved to come home. Would she be disappointed if she couldn’t ski? “There is no snow in Westfield,” he wrote,“so please don’t expect any. But if it’s going to make you feel bad I can arrange to drop bits of cotton lint past your bedroom window and make a noise like Jack Frost.”

© 1935 Charles Addams  With permission Tee and Charles Addams Foundation

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Linda H. Davis is the author of three biographies: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life, Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane; Onward and Upward: A Biography of Katharine S. White; and one e-book, Autism on the Farm: A Story of Triumph, Possibility, and a Place Called Bittersweet. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, The New Yorker, and in other publications. The mother of two, Ms. Davis lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Chuck Yanikoski. 

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For more on Charles Addams visit the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation website. 

Ms. Davis’s Charles Addams: A Life is just out in a new edition. 

Here’s Mr. Addams’s A-Z entry: 

Charles Addams (Born in Westfield, New Jersey, January 7, 1912. Died September 29, 1988, New York City. New Yorker work: 1932 – 1988 * the New Yorker has published his work posthumously. One of the giants of The New Yorker’s stable of artists. Key cartoon collections: While all of Addams’ collections are worthwhile, here are three that are particular favorites; Homebodies (Simon & Schuster, 1954), The Groaning Board (Simon & Schuster, 1964), Creature Comforts (Simon & Schuster, 1981). In 1991 Knopf published The World of Chas Addams, a retrospective collection. A biography, Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life, by Linda Davis, was published in 2006 by Random House.