Charles Addams’ Real-Life Morticia Might Have Tried to Kill Him

We might not like to acknowledge it, but most people have a type. Maybe you go for tall, dark and handsome, or maybe stocky, hairy and funny, but there’s usually a certain something we’re totally not judging that gets your motor going. Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family comics, had a type that was undeniable by anyone who saw his strips and his three wives: He liked ‘em elegant, fierce and a little murderous. Unsurprisingly, it was that last bit that got him into trouble.

Addams always maintained that no particular person inspired the image and character of Morticia Addams, and any resemblance between the lanky goth queen and any of his own beloveds simply reflected his taste in women. Since he started drawing Morticia first, if anything, it could be said that she inspired his marriages, not the other way around. That was certainly true of his first wife, Barbara Jean Day, the kind of woman who got into NYU in the 1930s and looked so much like Morticia that she was forced to cut her hair to make the comparisons stop. Unfortunately, Day turned out to be too maternal for Addams’ taste, so he moved on to Barbara Estelle Barb. Yep. Barbara Barb. In less feminine words, Stabbity Stab. He was probably kicking himself for having already named Morticia.

By all accounts, it was a fitting name. Barb didn’t just look the part; she was a practicing lawyer described by many as ruthless, and she used her legal acumen to slowly pick off the rights to her husband’s intellectual property. It was when she took out a $100,000 insurance policy on him soon after they married in 1954, however, that gave Addams pause. “I told him the last time I had word of such a move was in a picture called Double Indemnity starring Barbara Stanwyck,” his lawyer told him, in which Stanwyck’s character schemes to murder her husband. 

That might have made Addams paranoid enough to start accusing Barb of putting glass in his food and otherwise trying to poison him… or she might have been doing that. It was definitely one of those things.

Whatever the case, Barb was suspiciously chill when Addams asked her for a divorce in 1956. “I am so lucky,” he told a friend. “She doesn’t want any alimony; she doesn’t want any settlement. She just wants the rights to my cartoons.” 

That would normally be a pretty big deal, but it’s hard to get worked up over copyright when you’re fleeing for your life. Heartwarmingly, the experience didn’t put Addams off goth girlfriends. He married his third wife, Marilyn Miller, in a pet cemetery and lived with her on an estate they called “The Swamp” until he died in 1988. 

The twisted, macabre heart wants what it wants.