Hey, everybody. Before we get started with this episode, we have one last live show to announce for We will be in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the National World War Two Museum on Tuesday, November six. Okay, we know that selection day, but we don't want coming to our show to keep you from the polls. We are both going to vote early before we leave for New Orleans, and Louisiana offers early voting as well, so we encourage you to do so. You can find out more about this show and get a link to buy tickets at missed in History dot com slash tour. Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy view Wilson. And this is of course a part two of a two parter about Charles Adams. Uh. In part one of this episode, we talked about the early life of the charming and talented Charles Adams, who went by Charlie with his friends. He started submitting cartoons to The New Yorker when he was still a teenager in art school, and by his early twenties he was a regular contributor with a very devoted following thanks to his odd, irreverent humor. He sometimes said he didn't think of himself as a MacB cartoonist, just a funny cartoonist, and his wit was irresistible to friends and romantic partners as well as people who enjoyed his art. He had been married and divorced twice by the end of nineteen fifty six, and though his last book had not been a huge seller, he was still considered very, very successful. And today we are picking up right after he became a single man once again, and that was a status that he maintained for a very long time. So in the late fifties and early sixties, Charles Adams enjoyed his freedom as a successful man who was not tethered to a family. He dated a whole assortment of high profile women, and that included Greta Garbo and Joan Fontaine. Sometimes he'd go on dates with more than one woman on a given day, and none of them overtook his life in the way that Barbara Barba had. He was also never deceitful about any of this. He was very open with the women that he was dating that he was also dating other women, and he would talk about them to one another freely. He seemed, through all of this openness, to largely avoid issues of jealousy among the various women he was dating. Yeah, a lot of them were in the same social circles, which seems very strange to me. It's kind of like the emotionally healthier version of what we talked about in the Lady Anne Blunt episode with her husband, Wilfred Blunt, who had relationships with a bunch of other women, but it was all very secret and cloaked in weirdness. Charlie was very open. Yeah, you know, everybody understood what the situation was. There was no deception or gross manipulation going on. Yeah, Lady Ann Blunt's husband was also just doing all that without taking her into account in any of it, and regardless of how she felt about it. Yeah, he was hiding it from her, and then when she found out about it was kind of like, so, what are you gonna do about it? Whereas Charlie at was very upfront with everyone and and really by all accounts, very open and willing to talk with any of the women in his life about how they felt about things. His relationship with Joan Fontaine did for a little while threatened this easy, breezy situation. Though the pair became fairly serious and marriage was even discussed, but Charlie ultimately felt that Joan was too high maintenance and often rude to his friends, and so he did not want a permanent relationship. Things could be kind of stormy between the two of them. He once told a friend after she had behaved particularly badly in a restaurant that he had quote popped her in the jaw after the two exited the scene abruptly. But the friend that he told that too, was never very sure if it was a joke, and as far as the Fontaine side of it, she never said anything that would corroborate it. So we don't know if that actually happened or not, but I wanted to mention it in case that anybody had questions. Eventually, that pair called it quits. Charlie felt he could never give the actress enough attention to keep her happy, and nine sixty three, a TV producer named David Levy happened to spot one of Adam's books featuring the spooky family of characters in a bookshop window, and he decided he wanted to option this book for a TV series. All the Creepy Victorian cartoons had been wildly popular in the New York or during the forties and fifties, they weren't really appearing regularly in the magazine by the early sixties. Yeah, the Adams family, although they were not really called that in any official capacity, was a little bit passe at that point. Um. But there had already been many pitches to Adams to try to adapt his work into other formats, but few of them gave Charlie the sense that the people doing the pitching really had the right sense of his humor and style. There was one that he did agree to, which was a ballet adaptation, but it never came to fruition. That seems a great pity, because that is something I personally would just yearn to see me too. I'm very excited about that, even having ever been an idea. I'm picturing just like Uncle Fester dancing, and I really like it. Levy assured Adams that the unique family dynamic of the cartoons would stay in place and be respected as it was transitioned into television, and over time Adams came to trust him on all this. They eventually struck a lucrative deal that offered Adams generous financial compensation and enough power to make decisions about the casting and staffing changes. As the show was developed, Adams started to name this whole family of ghouls. We've been using their names sometimes because that makes it makes sense, but it was really now that Mortisa Gomez, Pugsley, Wednesday, Lurch, and Granny Frump finally gotten the names we know them by today. Yeah, Granny Frump had actually been named in the comics, but she was the only one. And Adams wrote these fantastic descriptions of the characters and drew sketches of each of them to guide the production. They were kind of like made the show Bible. And of more Tisia Uh, he wrote that she is the head of the family and low voiced and with a driving force that kind of keeps everything going. He called her quote a ruined beauty, and Wednesday was described as a solemn child and pretty lost with six toes on one ft. Pugsley was originally going to be named Pubert, but the network thought that sounded like it might be something dirty. I agree with the network. Adams described him as an energetic monster of a boy. Granny Frump had already been named in the cartoons. As Holly said earlier, she was called Grandmama in the series. Quote. She has a light beard and a large mole. Per Charlie's notes, she also wears a shawl on all occasions. Fester was quote incorrigible, and except for the good nature of the family and the ignorance of the police, would ordinarily be under lock and key. Lurch is written up as quote, not a very good butler, but a faithful one. And Thing actually started out a bit differently than he ended up on the series. He or, we don't really have a firm gender identity for Thing. In Adams's notes, it's referred to as the thing, and he wrote, quote, we don't really know who or what he is, but whatever, he is the soul of good nature. At least he grins perpetually and may occasionally whimper. Okay, just in case you don't know what thing is, It's a hand. So all of this grinning and whimpering is very funny. Of Gomez, he wrote, quote, husband of Morticia, if they are married at all, a crafty schemer, but also a jolly man. In his own way. Gomez was also noted as quote the only one who smokes, though Pugsley can be allowed an occasional cigar as a fun bit of trivia. Actor John Aston was given the final choice on the name of the patriarch for this family. He was offered Repelli or Gomez, and obviously he chose Gomez, Thank goodness. Uh. John Aston was originally also not someone that Charlie Adams loved for the part because he looks very different than the way Charlie Adams drew that character, which was very round and a little more squad. But John Aston was a huge fan of Charles Adams, so uh, that ended up working out. But then Barbara Barbe, his second ex wife, got wind of this whole deal, and at that point it became apparent that Charles Adams had really not understood the nature of the divorce settlement that he had agreed to. As you may recall from the first episode, she wanted a number of cartoons and some properties, and he felt like he was escaping a really bad marriage pretty easily. But in fact Barbe had the dramatic rights to the characters that he created. Charlie's attorney, Harriet Pillpel, who might be the subject of a future episode because she was really pretty amazing in her own right, uh, stepped in and tried to help negotiate this deal. During this period, Charlie was also dating Jacqueline Kennedy not long after her husband John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. He was also seeing other men, and he was seeing other women, but Charlie was becoming more and more attached to her. Eventually, the two of them separated, and the exact reason isn't clear. Charlie told friends that he wasn't rich enough for her, but told some of his closer confidence that she said they would never marry because she asked, quote, at the end of the day, what would we talk about cartoons? Charlie was apparently very hurt by this comment and by other moments when she seemed to dismiss him during discussions of diplomacy or politics. Yeah, he was really pretty crazy about her, and she, uh, you know, kind of dismissed him. Hurt. Of course, as the Adams Family TV show progressed, Barbara Barba continued to cause problems. She was displeased at certain clauses in the contract, and she caused a number of assorted other problems that she would just kind of come up with one complaint after another, and Harriet Pillpel tried to dispel these as best she could. Finally, on Friday, September eighteenth, nineteen sixty four, that Adams family made their television debut. Adams had mixed feelings about how the show turned out, though John Aston was a lot more handsome than the cartoon version of Gomez, but he really loved the original cartoons and his charm one Adams over Caroline Jones as Mortitia pleased Adams, who had said that Mortitia was his idealized woman, and Charlie loved the theme music, but he also thought this was sort of watered down and less earnestly grim than his cartoons were. But he was very, very supportive of the show publicly, and he was really quite good natured about the adaptation from his original tone. So even though there were issues that he had, he didn't grouse about it at all publicly. He drew the actor's original sketches of their characters as gifts at Christmas, and he pretty much just stayed out of the way of the production. We'll talk about his life after the Adams Family became a show in just a moment, But first we will pause for a quick sponsor break. So the Adam Stanley took off, Charlie got a little more famous. There are stories about people driving by his house and out on Long Island where he would be outside grilling and they would start singing the theme out the window and he would just kind of give them a thumbs up and keep going. But after the second season, the Adams Family was canceled. It did okay, but it never got fantastic ratings, and even its competitor that we mentioned at the top of the first episode, The Monsters, got better ratings than The Adams Family and Morticia and Gomez and their stories, but it suffered the very same fate at the exact same time. Those two shows actually ran entirely in tandem. They both opened in the the fall uh nineties sixty four season. They both got canceled in sixty six. To make matters worse, the New Yorker had stopped taking any of Charlie's Adams Family cartoons. It was just too confusing. They felt like it being a TV thing didn't then really work right for them to keep publishing the Adams Family as a cartoon in their magazine, but Adams did sneak in references to the Adams Family in other cartoons. But really, his lucrative TV deal had made it impossible for the Ghouls to continue their print life as they had been. Instead, his work turned to Lilliputian like little people and very surreal explorations of identity and expectation. He was transitioning away from topics that had been very frequent in comics for a long time, including cannibals and Native people's that had been by this point recognized as racist. And we're no longer being picked up by publishers. Yeah, a lot of artists were coming to terms with that, Like things that they had been drawing for literally decades were suddenly not acceptable anymore. And some of them were, you know, irritated by it. They're like, well, now I have to kind of change my whole thing. But the times were changing. Uh. In nineteen sixty seven he had a chance to design his very own version of Mother Goose in this book. Contract was lucrative, although once again Barbara Barba got involved. She also insulted Charlie's attorneys as incompetent in the process. The art though that ended up coming out of this that Charles Adams created for the book is spectacular and it is imaginative, and I think it is some of his best. My very favorite, and it is probably the most popular, is his version of Humpty Dumpty because, as you know the Humpty Dumpty story, he falls from the wall and cracks, But in the Charles Adams version, when the egg cracks open, there is a dinosaur that hatches out of it, which takes a whole new meaning. Uh and I absolutely love it. Someone else entered Charles adams life in nine seventy who would become another big part of his identity that he was crafting for interviews from that point forward. He adopted a dog, Mutt, who he named Alice B. Ker She was allegedly named after Alice B. Tokeless. His story went that he had gone to the pound several times to visit the dog, and then he took a friend with him to see her, and while the two men were there, the attendant told him, I'll tell you one thing about that dog. It doesn't like children. Adams immediately answered, I'll take it. He would follow up the story by saying that Alice would never go for the regular but would keep children in their place. Yeah, apparently that story of the visit to the pound with his friend was that his friend was like, this dog is clearly in love with you. Like the dog just ran up and was like happy and wanted to be held by him. And he's like, why she chakes his dog, And he's like, I don't know, until the attendant said it doesn't like kids. He's like, this is my dog. Alice became nearly his constant companion at that point. Her bad behavior was tolerated by friends who spoiled her, and she absolutely adored Charles Adams. He brought Alice everywhere with him, even in his cars when he was racing as part of his hobby, and when he traveled and left her with friends, he would write Alice postcards and apparently call and literally beat that person. That's like, put my dog on the phone. He once told the press, it's just me and Alice against the world, and soon she started show going up in his work. Although not his one consistent character, but pretty much any dog he drew going forward was Alice. In nineteen seventy one, he was walking home from a night out and drinking with friends, and two women accosted him on the street. They threw a liquid on him that turned out to be acid. He had to go to the emergency room for treatment, and he kept his coat, which had holes in it, for the rest of his life as a memento of this bizarre brush with death. Yeah, he loved those acid holes in that coach um. But even as Alice was becoming more important to Charlie, he was also realizing that a woman who had been in his life for quite some time meant more to him than ever as well. And that was T, his friend that had formerly been married to his friend Buddy Davey. And T and Charlie had stayed friends through all of the years, because you may recall from the first episode, he had a brief affair with her after his second divorce, and then in nineteen seventy two, their correspondence with each other really shifts and it becomes apparent that they had fallen in love. They were living apart at this point. He was in Paris primarily, she was in Europe doing some work, and Charlie was living in New York and they were not exclusive at all. They knew exactly who each other were, but they wrote these very witty and sexy letters to one another constantly, and they would tease each other about the other people in their lives, and they spoke very openly about just loving and adoring one another. Once she returned from Europe, Charlie and Alice started spending more and more time at Tea's house. In ninety four, Adams had a new will drawn up where his property would all go to Barbara barb but half of his estate was set aside for Tea. Also in the nineteen seventies, with regime changes at The New Yorker, the idea of keeping gag writers on staff to feed cartoonists ideas was eliminated, and for a while Adams just kept paying trusted writers out of his own pocket so that he could keep that same source of ideas going, and sometimes the magazine would instead by sketched out roughs for their more season artists to recreate in their own style. So basically, up and coming artists could sell a rough idea for a cartoon, but then the final cartoon would be done by one of these established names. Because Adams's work had such a distinctive tone, and style, though it was sometimes tricky to find ideas that the magazine could purchase for him to redo that we're going to be the right fit for the now legendary cartoonist. Meanwhile, Barbara Barb finally filed a document that she had gotten Charles to sign almost two decades earlier, and as a consequence, she took all the possession of his property in Long Island. Charles didn't discover this until later. It became apparent in this move that she did not have any intention to return any any of the property to him, as they had discussed during the divorce. Yeah, this was like a weird, out of left field surprise of like, oh, she suddenly filed a lot of piece of paperwork that now put me in a really bad position. But Charles continued to maintain a friendship with Barbara Barb for the rest of his life. It buffuddled Vertu tually everyone else in his circle. It really irritated t but he continued to leave negotiations of all Adams family licensing and rights deals to her, including the nineteen seventies three animated series and later movie deals. As they were starting to come up, Barbe's company continued to issue him check, so he felt like she was doing her job in that regard. Sometimes he even accused his attorneys in New York of not working hard enough to get the best possible deals for him when they were working with entertainment lawyers, and there may have been something to that. His contract with the Adams Family TV series, for example, had no provisions for him to get any residuals, so even though the show played in reruns for years, he got no money for any of it. Barb, on the other hand, was notorious for asking for huge, even ridiculous amounts of money, but she did get much more lucrative deals for him than his other lawyers did. Yeah, she sounds based on the few accounts I read like she was just not oorious in legal circles where they were like, if she walks in the room, just lean back like it's coming um. In ninety six, Charlie was driving his car when suddenly he felt nauseated and he lost consciousness just as he pulled off the road, and he came to in the hospital, diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer from a lifetime of heavy drinking. T took care of everything for him while he was ill. But she was frustrated when the hospital dismissed her in the decision making process as just his girlfriend, and as a consequence, as he was recovering, she really pressed Adams to get marrying. She knew she was not his only paramore and she did not seem to care about that, but she wanted to make sure that she could take care of things if something happened to Charlie again. Charlie quit drinking after this episode except for wine, but no no heavy spirits uh, And he kind of put Tea off on the marriage issue. He still did never want to get married again. And then late nineteen seventies the opportunity came up for the Adams family to be revived on T again, and at this point he was deferring to Barbara Barb on the handling of all the Adams family rights, but he was having trouble getting ahold of her, so he asked his attorney Pill Pill to start discussing things with a studio in California. Yeah. That of course led to problems down the road, where Barbara Barb was irritated that other people had been in those discussions, But this ended up not being a full revival it was a reunion show for Halloween nine, and it did come to fruition, but it did not do well, but it did make Adams about thirty dollars. And he was also starting to make a lot of money through gallery showings, an element of his business that his ex wife had no control over, so he was getting all of the proceeds instead of on those gallery sales. We'll get to the last years of his life after another quick sponsor break. Because of the reputation for dark humor that Adams had developed, sometimes there were instances where Pa Boll interpreted his work in completely unintended ways. One of those happened in nineteen seventy eight, when a Thanksgiving cover that Adams drew for The New Yorker caused a bit of confusion. That image features a turkey farmer standing on the porch of his farmhouse, and the turkeys in the wide barnyard have formed up into military style regiments, presumably with intent to rebel against their holiday fate. But some readers took this as a commentary on Nazi Germany because the barnyard representation was to them a little too reminiscent of concentration camps. There's also a lot of brown which I don't know if there there's like a subconscious brown shirt association going on. I don't know what the deal is, but a lot of people thought that was what it was, and he was like, no, no, it's just turkeys. Also, on May thirty one, nineteen eighty, Charlie and T got married in the pet cemetery at her home. Their dogs, including Alice, were attendants at the ceremony. Tea's College aid son was Charlie's best man, and T were addressed me out of black velvet. Joseph Heller and Cheryl Teagues were among the guests. Although a lot of the guests did not know they were going to a wedding. They thought they were just going to a party to celebrate the recent honor of Charlie's which is an honorary PhD. Yeah, he had finally realized like, hey, it would actually be probably pretty beneficial for Tea to be able to handle my legal affairs because my health isn't really getting any better. Uh. He had had another ulcer situation and and some other problems arise, and also he kind of realized it was going to make her probably happy, so he just finally was like, oh, let's do it, and they did it very quickly. But the couple still lived the exact same lives that they had before the wedding. Charlie lived at Tea's house on Long Island on the weekends and then in his apartment in Manhattan during the week But they both seemed really, really happy in this new marriage. They traveled together, they enjoyed each other's company, and t never expected Charlie to be anything but discreet about his extramarital activities. Even in his later life, his work really continued to delight people. He tried to stay away from topical or trendy topics, but he did mock health, food and modern marriage on occasion. When he was interviewed for a piece in the Washington Post in two the article referred to him as the house haunt of the New Yorker. In the late nineteen eighties, Charlie had another ulcer scare, as well as a carotid artery surgery, and his eyesight also really started to decline. He had to give up even wine recall he had given up heavier spirits before then, uh and he started to socialize less. One of the things was that he just if he couldn't go to a party and have a drink of any kind, he just didn't want to be around a bunch of drunk people. And t noted that after his carotid artery surgery he really came out a much changed man. The normally jolly Charlie had started to have grumpier days. He was still fun, but he was slowing down, and he stopped keeping the notes that he had always copiously written in his date book. His dog, Alice died in Juno seven, and she had been his companion for seventeen years. He didn't talk about it much, but he kept her inscribed food dish after that as a treasured item. It's left his time in Manhattan feeling a little lonely. He wanted Tea to come into the city with him during the week sometimes, but she insisted on staying at the place that they moved to in Sagaponic, New York, which they nicknamed the Swamp. And although he spent less and less time at his office at the New Yorker, when he was there, he was very open and willing when young cartoonists came to talk to him or just get advice. On Thursday September twenty nine, Charlie had a heart attack while sitting behind the wheel of his parked car just outside his New York apartment. He was taken to the emergency room immediately after he was found, but he was pronounced dead. He was seventy six later. In an interview with The New York Times, t who shared his sense of humor, said he's always been a car buff so it was a nice way to go. And he was remembered by friends as a charming man and a great friend and a really good listener. And what was really interesting is that despite his womanizing we've been talking about throughout these two episodes, most of the women in his life described him above all as their great, great friend, one of the few men in their lives who was willing to listen and talk with them in a way that was not a constant effort at seduction. Everyone from Lauren Bicall to Kurt Vonnegut to Burgess Meredith more and Adams, either in person at the services or in letters to his widow. T Charlie's ashes were interred at the Swamp and the Pet Cemetery, which t Adams had transplanted when they moved there. He kept the location of Charlie's ashes secret for fear of fans showing up, and then when she died fourteen years later, her ashes were laid to rest next to his le Laurens, the New Yorker's cartoon editor in the early nineteen eighties, once described how very surprisingly normal Charlie was to a reporter. He said, quote, He's an urbane, relaxed, congenial man of great civility. He doesn't eat babies. A mirror on canvas that Charlie painted in nineteen fifty two forever a Hampton's Hotel has been quietly on display at the Pennsylvania State University Library since two thousand. It was donated by an alumnus who owned the hotel at one time, but it's been sort of tucked away in this out of the way area, not particularly noticed. It depicts the family of Gomez Mortitia, Uncle Fester, Lurch, Grandma Frump, and the children at the beach. Gomez is fishing and seems to have caught something. Fester is that they're ready with a net, and then panicked looking swimmers are getting out of the water. As of a few months ago, the Library was in the midst of renovation plans that was happening in July, and the mural was expected to get a more prominent place once the construction was complete. So there was an update to that article which ran just last month, which was September. It has been decided that that mural is now relocated to the newly renovated and renamed it's called mckinn ends Lounge. It's on the first floor of Paternal Library at Penn States University Park campus. So UM, since we have just passed the thirtieth anniversary of his death, they were putting it there as part of that celebration. So I don't know the policies of that campus and if the public can go visit, but if you can and you're nearby, highly encourage it. It's a really beautiful piece. It's huge. It's fourteen feet long, it's four ft high. It is not a small piece of art at all. Uh and now it is in a location where you can actually view it from an appropriate vantage point for a piece of art that large. So that is Charles Adams, who I clearly adore UM and wish that I could travel back in time to hang out with doesn't that sound like fun? Do you also have a listener mail? I do. Uh. We have gotten a number of postcards from our listener, Alice, traveling around the world. I will read one that she sent us from Vietnam. This was back in August. So I'm, like I said, still catching up with our our postcards. Always I try to keep them aside and read them when I can, and sometimes it takes a little while. She says. This postcard is coming to you from the Saigon Central Post Office, which was constructed in the late nineteenth century and often erroneously credited to Eiffel Poor Alfred Felt, who the actual designer every nook and cranny of Ho Chiman City. Saigon has so much history and rich culture behind it. Yesterday I walked by an unassuming building whose rooftop was featured in Huvanny's iconic Fall of Saigon photo. As I am physically traveling alone, you two are keeping me company as I go on a museum, food and coffee tour slash binge around the city. Thanks to the wonderful work you do. Alice seems like she is having or had I presume the tour is over. The most amazing trip imaginable. I feel like she should plan trips for other people because, like I said, we have assorted postcards and she went fantastic and amazing places. So, Alice, my hat is off to you, and thank you for sharing your travels with us. I'm glad we kind of got to go with you. Uh. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History podcast at how stuff works dot com. We are also across the spectrum of social media as Missed in History and Missed in History dot com is our website where you gonna check out every episode that's ever happened. Uh. There are some notes on the ones that Tracy and I have worked on together, and occasionally we will also post other things like that's where you can find out where all of our lives shows are coming up. Uh. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. For more on this and thousands of other topics, does it how staff works dot com

Hey, everybody. Before we get started with this episode, we have one last live show to announce for We will be in New Orleans, Louisiana, at the National World War Two Museum on Tuesday, November six. Okay, we know that selection day, but we don't want coming to our show to keep you from the polls. We are both going to vote early before we leave for New Orleans, and Louisiana offers early voting as well, so we encourage you to do so. You can find out more about this show and get a link to buy tickets at missed in History dot com slash tour. Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy view Wilson. And this is of course a part two of a two parter about Charles Adams. Uh. In part one of this episode, we talked about the early life of the charming and talented Charles Adams, who went by Charlie with his friends. He started submitting cartoons to The New Yorker when he was still a teenager in art school, and by his early twenties he was a regular contributor with a very devoted following thanks to his odd, irreverent humor. He sometimes said he didn't think of himself as a MacB cartoonist, just a funny cartoonist, and his wit was irresistible to friends and romantic partners as well as people who enjoyed his art. He had been married and divorced twice by the end of nineteen fifty six, and though his last book had not been a huge seller, he was still considered very, very successful. And today we are picking up right after he became a single man once again, and that was a status that he maintained for a very long time. So in the late fifties and early sixties, Charles Adams enjoyed his freedom as a successful man who was not tethered to a family. He dated a whole assortment of high profile women, and that included Greta Garbo and Joan Fontaine. Sometimes he'd go on dates with more than one woman on a given day, and none of them overtook his life in the way that Barbara Barba had. He was also never deceitful about any of this. He was very open with the women that he was dating that he was also dating other women, and he would talk about them to one another freely. He seemed, through all of this openness, to largely avoid issues of jealousy among the various women he was dating. Yeah, a lot of them were in the same social circles, which seems very strange to me. It's kind of like the emotionally healthier version of what we talked about in the Lady Anne Blunt episode with her husband, Wilfred Blunt, who had relationships with a bunch of other women, but it was all very secret and cloaked in weirdness. Charlie was very open. Yeah, you know, everybody understood what the situation was. There was no deception or gross manipulation going on. Yeah, Lady Ann Blunt's husband was also just doing all that without taking her into account in any of it, and regardless of how she felt about it. Yeah, he was hiding it from her, and then when she found out about it was kind of like, so, what are you gonna do about it? Whereas Charlie at was very upfront with everyone and and really by all accounts, very open and willing to talk with any of the women in his life about how they felt about things. His relationship with Joan Fontaine did for a little while threatened this easy, breezy situation. Though the pair became fairly serious and marriage was even discussed, but Charlie ultimately felt that Joan was too high maintenance and often rude to his friends, and so he did not want a permanent relationship. Things could be kind of stormy between the two of them. He once told a friend after she had behaved particularly badly in a restaurant that he had quote popped her in the jaw after the two exited the scene abruptly. But the friend that he told that too, was never very sure if it was a joke, and as far as the Fontaine side of it, she never said anything that would corroborate it. So we don't know if that actually happened or not, but I wanted to mention it in case that anybody had questions. Eventually, that pair called it quits. Charlie felt he could never give the actress enough attention to keep her happy, and nine sixty three, a TV producer named David Levy happened to spot one of Adam's books featuring the spooky family of characters in a bookshop window, and he decided he wanted to option this book for a TV series. All the Creepy Victorian cartoons had been wildly popular in the New York or during the forties and fifties, they weren't really appearing regularly in the magazine by the early sixties. Yeah, the Adams family, although they were not really called that in any official capacity, was a little bit passe at that point. Um. But there had already been many pitches to Adams to try to adapt his work into other formats, but few of them gave Charlie the sense that the people doing the pitching really had the right sense of his humor and style. There was one that he did agree to, which was a ballet adaptation, but it never came to fruition. That seems a great pity, because that is something I personally would just yearn to see me too. I'm very excited about that, even having ever been an idea. I'm picturing just like Uncle Fester dancing, and I really like it. Levy assured Adams that the unique family dynamic of the cartoons would stay in place and be respected as it was transitioned into television, and over time Adams came to trust him on all this. They eventually struck a lucrative deal that offered Adams generous financial compensation and enough power to make decisions about the casting and staffing changes. As the show was developed, Adams started to name this whole family of ghouls. We've been using their names sometimes because that makes it makes sense, but it was really now that Mortisa Gomez, Pugsley, Wednesday, Lurch, and Granny Frump finally gotten the names we know them by today. Yeah, Granny Frump had actually been named in the comics, but she was the only one. And Adams wrote these fantastic descriptions of the characters and drew sketches of each of them to guide the production. They were kind of like made the show Bible. And of more Tisia Uh, he wrote that she is the head of the family and low voiced and with a driving force that kind of keeps everything going. He called her quote a ruined beauty, and Wednesday was described as a solemn child and pretty lost with six toes on one ft. Pugsley was originally going to be named Pubert, but the network thought that sounded like it might be something dirty. I agree with the network. Adams described him as an energetic monster of a boy. Granny Frump had already been named in the cartoons. As Holly said earlier, she was called Grandmama in the series. Quote. She has a light beard and a large mole. Per Charlie's notes, she also wears a shawl on all occasions. Fester was quote incorrigible, and except for the good nature of the family and the ignorance of the police, would ordinarily be under lock and key. Lurch is written up as quote, not a very good butler, but a faithful one. And Thing actually started out a bit differently than he ended up on the series. He or, we don't really have a firm gender identity for Thing. In Adams's notes, it's referred to as the thing, and he wrote, quote, we don't really know who or what he is, but whatever, he is the soul of good nature. At least he grins perpetually and may occasionally whimper. Okay, just in case you don't know what thing is, It's a hand. So all of this grinning and whimpering is very funny. Of Gomez, he wrote, quote, husband of Morticia, if they are married at all, a crafty schemer, but also a jolly man. In his own way. Gomez was also noted as quote the only one who smokes, though Pugsley can be allowed an occasional cigar as a fun bit of trivia. Actor John Aston was given the final choice on the name of the patriarch for this family. He was offered Repelli or Gomez, and obviously he chose Gomez, Thank goodness. Uh. John Aston was originally also not someone that Charlie Adams loved for the part because he looks very different than the way Charlie Adams drew that character, which was very round and a little more squad. But John Aston was a huge fan of Charles Adams, so uh, that ended up working out. But then Barbara Barbe, his second ex wife, got wind of this whole deal, and at that point it became apparent that Charles Adams had really not understood the nature of the divorce settlement that he had agreed to. As you may recall from the first episode, she wanted a number of cartoons and some properties, and he felt like he was escaping a really bad marriage pretty easily. But in fact Barbe had the dramatic rights to the characters that he created. Charlie's attorney, Harriet Pillpel, who might be the subject of a future episode because she was really pretty amazing in her own right, uh, stepped in and tried to help negotiate this deal. During this period, Charlie was also dating Jacqueline Kennedy not long after her husband John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. He was also seeing other men, and he was seeing other women, but Charlie was becoming more and more attached to her. Eventually, the two of them separated, and the exact reason isn't clear. Charlie told friends that he wasn't rich enough for her, but told some of his closer confidence that she said they would never marry because she asked, quote, at the end of the day, what would we talk about cartoons? Charlie was apparently very hurt by this comment and by other moments when she seemed to dismiss him during discussions of diplomacy or politics. Yeah, he was really pretty crazy about her, and she, uh, you know, kind of dismissed him. Hurt. Of course, as the Adams Family TV show progressed, Barbara Barba continued to cause problems. She was displeased at certain clauses in the contract, and she caused a number of assorted other problems that she would just kind of come up with one complaint after another, and Harriet Pillpel tried to dispel these as best she could. Finally, on Friday, September eighteenth, nineteen sixty four, that Adams family made their television debut. Adams had mixed feelings about how the show turned out, though John Aston was a lot more handsome than the cartoon version of Gomez, but he really loved the original cartoons and his charm one Adams over Caroline Jones as Mortitia pleased Adams, who had said that Mortitia was his idealized woman, and Charlie loved the theme music, but he also thought this was sort of watered down and less earnestly grim than his cartoons were. But he was very, very supportive of the show publicly, and he was really quite good natured about the adaptation from his original tone. So even though there were issues that he had, he didn't grouse about it at all publicly. He drew the actor's original sketches of their characters as gifts at Christmas, and he pretty much just stayed out of the way of the production. We'll talk about his life after the Adams Family became a show in just a moment, But first we will pause for a quick sponsor break. So the Adam Stanley took off, Charlie got a little more famous. There are stories about people driving by his house and out on Long Island where he would be outside grilling and they would start singing the theme out the window and he would just kind of give them a thumbs up and keep going. But after the second season, the Adams Family was canceled. It did okay, but it never got fantastic ratings, and even its competitor that we mentioned at the top of the first episode, The Monsters, got better ratings than The Adams Family and Morticia and Gomez and their stories, but it suffered the very same fate at the exact same time. Those two shows actually ran entirely in tandem. They both opened in the the fall uh nineties sixty four season. They both got canceled in sixty six. To make matters worse, the New Yorker had stopped taking any of Charlie's Adams Family cartoons. It was just too confusing. They felt like it being a TV thing didn't then really work right for them to keep publishing the Adams Family as a cartoon in their magazine, but Adams did sneak in references to the Adams Family in other cartoons. But really, his lucrative TV deal had made it impossible for the Ghouls to continue their print life as they had been. Instead, his work turned to Lilliputian like little people and very surreal explorations of identity and expectation. He was transitioning away from topics that had been very frequent in comics for a long time, including cannibals and Native people's that had been by this point recognized as racist. And we're no longer being picked up by publishers. Yeah, a lot of artists were coming to terms with that, Like things that they had been drawing for literally decades were suddenly not acceptable anymore. And some of them were, you know, irritated by it. They're like, well, now I have to kind of change my whole thing. But the times were changing. Uh. In nineteen sixty seven he had a chance to design his very own version of Mother Goose in this book. Contract was lucrative, although once again Barbara Barba got involved. She also insulted Charlie's attorneys as incompetent in the process. The art though that ended up coming out of this that Charles Adams created for the book is spectacular and it is imaginative, and I think it is some of his best. My very favorite, and it is probably the most popular, is his version of Humpty Dumpty because, as you know the Humpty Dumpty story, he falls from the wall and cracks, But in the Charles Adams version, when the egg cracks open, there is a dinosaur that hatches out of it, which takes a whole new meaning. Uh and I absolutely love it. Someone else entered Charles adams life in nine seventy who would become another big part of his identity that he was crafting for interviews from that point forward. He adopted a dog, Mutt, who he named Alice B. Ker She was allegedly named after Alice B. Tokeless. His story went that he had gone to the pound several times to visit the dog, and then he took a friend with him to see her, and while the two men were there, the attendant told him, I'll tell you one thing about that dog. It doesn't like children. Adams immediately answered, I'll take it. He would follow up the story by saying that Alice would never go for the regular but would keep children in their place. Yeah, apparently that story of the visit to the pound with his friend was that his friend was like, this dog is clearly in love with you. Like the dog just ran up and was like happy and wanted to be held by him. And he's like, why she chakes his dog, And he's like, I don't know, until the attendant said it doesn't like kids. He's like, this is my dog. Alice became nearly his constant companion at that point. Her bad behavior was tolerated by friends who spoiled her, and she absolutely adored Charles Adams. He brought Alice everywhere with him, even in his cars when he was racing as part of his hobby, and when he traveled and left her with friends, he would write Alice postcards and apparently call and literally beat that person. That's like, put my dog on the phone. He once told the press, it's just me and Alice against the world, and soon she started show going up in his work. Although not his one consistent character, but pretty much any dog he drew going forward was Alice. In nineteen seventy one, he was walking home from a night out and drinking with friends, and two women accosted him on the street. They threw a liquid on him that turned out to be acid. He had to go to the emergency room for treatment, and he kept his coat, which had holes in it, for the rest of his life as a memento of this bizarre brush with death. Yeah, he loved those acid holes in that coach um. But even as Alice was becoming more important to Charlie, he was also realizing that a woman who had been in his life for quite some time meant more to him than ever as well. And that was T, his friend that had formerly been married to his friend Buddy Davey. And T and Charlie had stayed friends through all of the years, because you may recall from the first episode, he had a brief affair with her after his second divorce, and then in nineteen seventy two, their correspondence with each other really shifts and it becomes apparent that they had fallen in love. They were living apart at this point. He was in Paris primarily, she was in Europe doing some work, and Charlie was living in New York and they were not exclusive at all. They knew exactly who each other were, but they wrote these very witty and sexy letters to one another constantly, and they would tease each other about the other people in their lives, and they spoke very openly about just loving and adoring one another. Once she returned from Europe, Charlie and Alice started spending more and more time at Tea's house. In ninety four, Adams had a new will drawn up where his property would all go to Barbara barb but half of his estate was set aside for Tea. Also in the nineteen seventies, with regime changes at The New Yorker, the idea of keeping gag writers on staff to feed cartoonists ideas was eliminated, and for a while Adams just kept paying trusted writers out of his own pocket so that he could keep that same source of ideas going, and sometimes the magazine would instead by sketched out roughs for their more season artists to recreate in their own style. So basically, up and coming artists could sell a rough idea for a cartoon, but then the final cartoon would be done by one of these established names. Because Adams's work had such a distinctive tone, and style, though it was sometimes tricky to find ideas that the magazine could purchase for him to redo that we're going to be the right fit for the now legendary cartoonist. Meanwhile, Barbara Barb finally filed a document that she had gotten Charles to sign almost two decades earlier, and as a consequence, she took all the possession of his property in Long Island. Charles didn't discover this until later. It became apparent in this move that she did not have any intention to return any any of the property to him, as they had discussed during the divorce. Yeah, this was like a weird, out of left field surprise of like, oh, she suddenly filed a lot of piece of paperwork that now put me in a really bad position. But Charles continued to maintain a friendship with Barbara Barb for the rest of his life. It buffuddled Vertu tually everyone else in his circle. It really irritated t but he continued to leave negotiations of all Adams family licensing and rights deals to her, including the nineteen seventies three animated series and later movie deals. As they were starting to come up, Barbe's company continued to issue him check, so he felt like she was doing her job in that regard. Sometimes he even accused his attorneys in New York of not working hard enough to get the best possible deals for him when they were working with entertainment lawyers, and there may have been something to that. His contract with the Adams Family TV series, for example, had no provisions for him to get any residuals, so even though the show played in reruns for years, he got no money for any of it. Barb, on the other hand, was notorious for asking for huge, even ridiculous amounts of money, but she did get much more lucrative deals for him than his other lawyers did. Yeah, she sounds based on the few accounts I read like she was just not oorious in legal circles where they were like, if she walks in the room, just lean back like it's coming um. In ninety six, Charlie was driving his car when suddenly he felt nauseated and he lost consciousness just as he pulled off the road, and he came to in the hospital, diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer from a lifetime of heavy drinking. T took care of everything for him while he was ill. But she was frustrated when the hospital dismissed her in the decision making process as just his girlfriend, and as a consequence, as he was recovering, she really pressed Adams to get marrying. She knew she was not his only paramore and she did not seem to care about that, but she wanted to make sure that she could take care of things if something happened to Charlie again. Charlie quit drinking after this episode except for wine, but no no heavy spirits uh, And he kind of put Tea off on the marriage issue. He still did never want to get married again. And then late nineteen seventies the opportunity came up for the Adams family to be revived on T again, and at this point he was deferring to Barbara Barb on the handling of all the Adams family rights, but he was having trouble getting ahold of her, so he asked his attorney Pill Pill to start discussing things with a studio in California. Yeah. That of course led to problems down the road, where Barbara Barb was irritated that other people had been in those discussions, But this ended up not being a full revival it was a reunion show for Halloween nine, and it did come to fruition, but it did not do well, but it did make Adams about thirty dollars. And he was also starting to make a lot of money through gallery showings, an element of his business that his ex wife had no control over, so he was getting all of the proceeds instead of on those gallery sales. We'll get to the last years of his life after another quick sponsor break. Because of the reputation for dark humor that Adams had developed, sometimes there were instances where Pa Boll interpreted his work in completely unintended ways. One of those happened in nineteen seventy eight, when a Thanksgiving cover that Adams drew for The New Yorker caused a bit of confusion. That image features a turkey farmer standing on the porch of his farmhouse, and the turkeys in the wide barnyard have formed up into military style regiments, presumably with intent to rebel against their holiday fate. But some readers took this as a commentary on Nazi Germany because the barnyard representation was to them a little too reminiscent of concentration camps. There's also a lot of brown which I don't know if there there's like a subconscious brown shirt association going on. I don't know what the deal is, but a lot of people thought that was what it was, and he was like, no, no, it's just turkeys. Also, on May thirty one, nineteen eighty, Charlie and T got married in the pet cemetery at her home. Their dogs, including Alice, were attendants at the ceremony. Tea's College aid son was Charlie's best man, and T were addressed me out of black velvet. Joseph Heller and Cheryl Teagues were among the guests. Although a lot of the guests did not know they were going to a wedding. They thought they were just going to a party to celebrate the recent honor of Charlie's which is an honorary PhD. Yeah, he had finally realized like, hey, it would actually be probably pretty beneficial for Tea to be able to handle my legal affairs because my health isn't really getting any better. Uh. He had had another ulcer situation and and some other problems arise, and also he kind of realized it was going to make her probably happy, so he just finally was like, oh, let's do it, and they did it very quickly. But the couple still lived the exact same lives that they had before the wedding. Charlie lived at Tea's house on Long Island on the weekends and then in his apartment in Manhattan during the week But they both seemed really, really happy in this new marriage. They traveled together, they enjoyed each other's company, and t never expected Charlie to be anything but discreet about his extramarital activities. Even in his later life, his work really continued to delight people. He tried to stay away from topical or trendy topics, but he did mock health, food and modern marriage on occasion. When he was interviewed for a piece in the Washington Post in two the article referred to him as the house haunt of the New Yorker. In the late nineteen eighties, Charlie had another ulcer scare, as well as a carotid artery surgery, and his eyesight also really started to decline. He had to give up even wine recall he had given up heavier spirits before then, uh and he started to socialize less. One of the things was that he just if he couldn't go to a party and have a drink of any kind, he just didn't want to be around a bunch of drunk people. And t noted that after his carotid artery surgery he really came out a much changed man. The normally jolly Charlie had started to have grumpier days. He was still fun, but he was slowing down, and he stopped keeping the notes that he had always copiously written in his date book. His dog, Alice died in Juno seven, and she had been his companion for seventeen years. He didn't talk about it much, but he kept her inscribed food dish after that as a treasured item. It's left his time in Manhattan feeling a little lonely. He wanted Tea to come into the city with him during the week sometimes, but she insisted on staying at the place that they moved to in Sagaponic, New York, which they nicknamed the Swamp. And although he spent less and less time at his office at the New Yorker, when he was there, he was very open and willing when young cartoonists came to talk to him or just get advice. On Thursday September twenty nine, Charlie had a heart attack while sitting behind the wheel of his parked car just outside his New York apartment. He was taken to the emergency room immediately after he was found, but he was pronounced dead. He was seventy six later. In an interview with The New York Times, t who shared his sense of humor, said he's always been a car buff so it was a nice way to go. And he was remembered by friends as a charming man and a great friend and a really good listener. And what was really interesting is that despite his womanizing we've been talking about throughout these two episodes, most of the women in his life described him above all as their great, great friend, one of the few men in their lives who was willing to listen and talk with them in a way that was not a constant effort at seduction. Everyone from Lauren Bicall to Kurt Vonnegut to Burgess Meredith more and Adams, either in person at the services or in letters to his widow. T Charlie's ashes were interred at the Swamp and the Pet Cemetery, which t Adams had transplanted when they moved there. He kept the location of Charlie's ashes secret for fear of fans showing up, and then when she died fourteen years later, her ashes were laid to rest next to his le Laurens, the New Yorker's cartoon editor in the early nineteen eighties, once described how very surprisingly normal Charlie was to a reporter. He said, quote, He's an urbane, relaxed, congenial man of great civility. He doesn't eat babies. A mirror on canvas that Charlie painted in nineteen fifty two forever a Hampton's Hotel has been quietly on display at the Pennsylvania State University Library since two thousand. It was donated by an alumnus who owned the hotel at one time, but it's been sort of tucked away in this out of the way area, not particularly noticed. It depicts the family of Gomez Mortitia, Uncle Fester, Lurch, Grandma Frump, and the children at the beach. Gomez is fishing and seems to have caught something. Fester is that they're ready with a net, and then panicked looking swimmers are getting out of the water. As of a few months ago, the Library was in the midst of renovation plans that was happening in July, and the mural was expected to get a more prominent place once the construction was complete. So there was an update to that article which ran just last month, which was September. It has been decided that that mural is now relocated to the newly renovated and renamed it's called mckinn ends Lounge. It's on the first floor of Paternal Library at Penn States University Park campus. So UM, since we have just passed the thirtieth anniversary of his death, they were putting it there as part of that celebration. So I don't know the policies of that campus and if the public can go visit, but if you can and you're nearby, highly encourage it. It's a really beautiful piece. It's huge. It's fourteen feet long, it's four ft high. It is not a small piece of art at all. Uh and now it is in a location where you can actually view it from an appropriate vantage point for a piece of art that large. So that is Charles Adams, who I clearly adore UM and wish that I could travel back in time to hang out with doesn't that sound like fun? Do you also have a listener mail? I do. Uh. We have gotten a number of postcards from our listener, Alice, traveling around the world. I will read one that she sent us from Vietnam. This was back in August. So I'm, like I said, still catching up with our our postcards. Always I try to keep them aside and read them when I can, and sometimes it takes a little while. She says. This postcard is coming to you from the Saigon Central Post Office, which was constructed in the late nineteenth century and often erroneously credited to Eiffel Poor Alfred Felt, who the actual designer every nook and cranny of Ho Chiman City. Saigon has so much history and rich culture behind it. Yesterday I walked by an unassuming building whose rooftop was featured in Huvanny's iconic Fall of Saigon photo. As I am physically traveling alone, you two are keeping me company as I go on a museum, food and coffee tour slash binge around the city. Thanks to the wonderful work you do. Alice seems like she is having or had I presume the tour is over. The most amazing trip imaginable. I feel like she should plan trips for other people because, like I said, we have assorted postcards and she went fantastic and amazing places. So, Alice, my hat is off to you, and thank you for sharing your travels with us. I'm glad we kind of got to go with you. Uh. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History podcast at how stuff works dot com. We are also across the spectrum of social media as Missed in History and Missed in History dot com is our website where you gonna check out every episode that's ever happened. Uh. There are some notes on the ones that Tracy and I have worked on together, and occasionally we will also post other things like that's where you can find out where all of our lives shows are coming up. Uh. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. For more on this and thousands of other topics, does it how staff works dot com