Charles Addams and his CAR Toons

In addition, the covers of two of his books, “Black Maria” and “Monster Rally” had auto-related themes. In 2007, the Bridgehampton Historical Society launched an exhibit “Charles Addams and His Cars”, which focused on his car collection and his cartoons dealing with cars. Still available through the Bridgehampton Historical Society is a book, “Charles Addams Cars & Car-toons” for $10.

There were other cartoons directed specifically to the sports car enthusiast. One of the most famous is the Bugatti hearse, sketched for the SCCA magazine “Sports Car” in the 1949. Sandy Leith describes the work. “The Bugatti hearse is a finished, professional cartoon with a driver and passenger in coat and tie driving through or to a cemetery. The passenger’s mouth is open, suggesting, perhaps, that Addams had a caption in mind.” At the time, the SCCA was still in deep discussion about what exactly constituted a sports car. Bugattis were the untouchable speed goddesses perched high on the pedestal of sports car mythology. Says Leith, “My recollection is that either Ted Robertson or Russ Sceli suggested that any Bugatti, even a Bugatti hearse, if it showed up at an SCCA event, would be considered a sports car!” Hence the cartoon by Addams of the Bugatti hearse, which, in effect made fun of the SCCA’s own hypocrisy.

Vintage Sports Car Club Secretary Tony Carroll kindly provided us with copies of three Addams drawings, and we reproduce them here with the permission of the Tee and Charles Addams Foundation.

A cartoon drawn for the May/June 1950 “Sports Car” illustrated the cultural and generation gap a sports car might evoke at a set of lights. Foreign sports cars…and at the time all sports cars were foreign…were rare, exotic, alien automobiles in a landscape of huge Detroit sedans, neither well-liked nor understood. Next to highly louvered streetable sports racing car is a caricature of a Buick convertible filled with college age kids staring, laughing and wondering about the alien that has alighted next to them. Most noticeably, the two girls are laughing, the three guys amazed, puzzled and unsure. The sports car driver looks straight ahead, and bears the laughter and comments.

Some SCCA members were eager to to build a special which would qualify as a sports car. This Addams illustrated with glee. The first method was to use someone else’s motor in another’s chassis. We might think BuMerc here, but the practice was common enough. Addams had a crane holding what appears to be an Alfa 8C engine being guided into a small two seat sports car. The mechanic obviously lacks an engineering degree.

Specials were known to eat money. And once committed, one couldn’t lose face with sports car buddies, resulting in a rather sad situation illustrated by Addams in the March/April 1950 edition of “Sport Car.” The wife is threadbare and starving, while the budding Colin Chapman robs the kid’s piggybank while kicking the poor kid away.

Addams never got rid of the car bug. One of his most famous cartoons is a scene of a hilly graveyard. Addams lets the epitaphs on the make the statement: Cunningham, Mercer, Packard, Hudson, Nash, Cord, Franklin…all long dead car manufacturers. The hillside would be much more crowded had Addams a chance to update it today.

Another cartoon, never before published, is a scene from trackside in the 1970s–a particularly dangerous era in racing. While a team of mechanics scrambles to ready a race car for the event, the driver sits on a couch while a psychiatrist takes notes.

Right to the last, he drew and he drew cars. When in 1986, he reluctantly sold both the Aston Martin and his beloved Bugatti, he drew and painted a picture of a hearse pulling the T35C on a flatbed. Once can’t help but think he knew his time was near.

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