Thread by @dean_frey

Remembering Charles Addams on his birthday 🎂
📷 Albert Fenn, 1946
"To the people who were surprised that Addams did not seem sinister in the flesh, he said, 'I try not to let it show'."
- Linda H. Davis

Charles Addams gets weird
📷 Albert Fenn
These photos were published in Life magazine, December 1946

Irving Penn
@NewYorker cartoonists, 1947
Helen Hokinson
Saul Steinberg
George Price
Barbara Shermund
Otto Soglow
William Steig
Richard Taylor
Whitney Darrow Jr.
Perry Barlow
Richard Dekker
Barney Tobey
Robert Day
Alajalov
Carl Rose
Leonard Dove
Chon Day
Mischa Richter
Chas Addams

Another series of Life photos of Charles Addams, this time by George Silk, from October 1948. I believe the woman is a model made up to look like Morticia.
Addams was a big car enthusiast. In the late 40s he owned a 1926 35C Bugatti, the same model that killed Isadora Duncan.

Charles Addams by George Silk, 1948
Addams collected cars his whole life.
"He dated Jackie Kennedy, and he claimed he drove her down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue at 110 mph, but in his 1960 black Bentley, not the Bugatti."
- Pete Vack

Charles Addams, "The Skier", @NewYorker, 1940.
Probably his best-known cartoon.

In 1945 Alfred Eisenstaedt took this shot of cross-country skier Conrad Thrane in Canada, reproducing Addams' famous cartoon.

But he spoiled the joke a bit by showing how it was done.

"A cartoon is a remark made by hand & eye instead of breath. It's like a significant glance or an expressive shrug that doesn't vanish in an instant but remains its original spontaneous self indefinitely."
- Ian Frazier
My favourite Charles Addams @NewYorker cartoon, I think.

Charles Addams
Self-portrait, 1954
"Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly."

Charles Addams by George Silk, 1948
He died at 76 in 1988, in his parked car.
Said his widow: "He's always been a car buff, so it was a nice way to go."