One final thought on the subject: Cher.
But Paul Reubens continues to dwell in a kind of public netherworld between shame and survivorhood -- as does Pee-wee Herman, the prancing bow-tied man-child Reubens played in two charming if uneven movies and on a brilliant Saturday-morning television series for chidren that originally ran from 1986 to 1991 on CBS. More so than with most celebrity sex scandals, Reubens' arrest in the summer of 1991 for exposing himself (and allegedly masturbating) inside an adult movie theater struck a disdained, discordant note with the pubic. First, and more important, because he was the star of a children's television show, Reubens was portrayed in the media not only as sordid, or sad, or unlucky (depending on your point of view on things) but also as a betrayer of innocents, a virtual pedophile, thanks to some sloppy alchemy of the public mind. Second, he was reportedly caught masturbating, an act that, despite or because of the fact that it is indulged in by sixty percent of the adult male population (if recent sutdies are to be believed), elicits more smirking and condescension than does, say, getting caught with a prostitute in Sunset Boulevard (to cite a mroe rarified sexual practice). Third, there was the confluence of Reubens' alter ego, pale, unvirile, oddly and immaturely sexed -- and the pathology of a chronic self-polluter, if you believe the old Boy Scout handbooks, Catholic-school nuns, 19th century physicians, and the voice in the back of your own head. Even the name Pee-wee Herman is vaguely reminiscient of wankery. The media, and whoever makes up the typical jokes that spread through offices and trading floors (Pee-wee's favorite baseball team? The Montreal Expos), dined out on Reubens for months.
"Trust me, I know what you mean," says Reubens dryly, when I take up some of these issues with him over the course of a long afternoon's conversation. "Jeffrey Dahmer's tory broke the same time as my story, and for a week I was leading the news, followed by Dahmer eating people, boring holes into their heads, and turning them into zombies. It was, " he adds, seemingly at a loss of words to capture the true awfulness of his experience, "just so bizarre." At least the arrest has given him an interesting vantage point from which to view the ongoing parade of celebrity scandal that has entertained us throught the 90s -- what David Kamp in these pages dubbed the Tabloid Decade. "I see people dealing with tragedy in the media, Reubens says. "The first 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, a wekk, two weeks, three weeks -- I know what it's like. I see people making statements to the media and I know what's behins that. I know the meetings that are taking place, the special necessity for it, adn it's just," -- again he seems at a loos for words -- "it's just weird" Were Reubens a different sort of person he could have parlayed these insights into a role as a talking head, a kind of Hollywood Dick Morris filling up airtime of on cable news channels after every movie-star arrest. But Reubens has a sense of public dignity, though it's also true he gained fame by playing a character who sometimes wore a pair of giant underwear on his head.
According to his friends the arrest and subsequent media storm devastated Reubens for years. "He lives with it every day," says the actor William H. Macy, who became close to Reubens on the set of the just-released superhero comedy Mystery Men "It's affected everything he does. It haunts him. How could it not?"
"It was extremely damiagin, says Lucy Dahl, a sceenwriter whom Reubens befriended on the set of Matilda, the 1996 film film based on Roald Dahl's novel for children. "I've invited him to move premieres," DAhl continues, "and he won't go, because he's so wary of the press, which has hurt him so badly." She say Reubens' friends could hardly believe he had agreed to sit for an interview. He himself allows that the whole idea is a "nightmare."
He has never commented on his arrest beyond issuing two brief statements. The first, three days afterward, proclaimed both his innocence of the specific charges and his mortification at the larger circumstance of having been arrested at a second-run porno theater regardless of what he was or was not doing with himself. The second came three months later when he pleaded no contest to a charge of indecent exposure (in exchange for 75 hours of communtiy service, a $50 fine, and $85.75 in court costs) but still maintained his innocence. All the while, Reubens had been showered with invitations to unburden himself on various morning shows and TV newsmagazines; in the way of such pursuits, no avenue was left untaken. "All my friends," he remembers, "got big flower pot arrangements and potted plants from all these shows." Nevertheless, despite such generosity, he managed to avoid the ritual public confession, the tears, the unbearable empathy of Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer, the final absolution between car commercials. "I just couldn't do it," he says. "I was in shock. On some level, I just thought like an ostrich." Meaning he wanted to bury his head in the sand. And who wouldn't? For years he has kept a low public profile.
Now, however, a Paul Reubens boomlet in under way. There is Mystery Men, in which he is part of an ensemble that includes Ben Stiller, Janeane garofalo, Greg Kinnear, Geoffrey Rush, and Macy. (Reubens' character is The Spleen, whose superpowers entail farting.) Pee-wee's Playhouse is also back in circulation, on home video and in reruns on the Fox Family Channel.
By talking, Reubens hopes finally to lay the scandal to rest, though he is skeptical as to say whether this is really possible. "People still come up to me," he says, " and go, 'How are you?' You know, very heavy, like," -- here he puts on a comic, ultra-solicitous voice, -- "Are you all right?" [The scandal] seems so old now. I mean, it feels funny just talking about it because it's so not a part of my life anymore. But it certainly was for a while, I have to say. And certainly there were many people who were trying to make me feel good at the time. They were saying, 'This is all going to blow over. The public has a short memory.'" Sometimes yes, but sometimes not. "The public has a really good memory," Reubens tells me. "The public has a mind like a steel trap."
In person, with his hair cropped short, though not slicked back in an Atro-Boy 'do, Reubens is easily identifiable as the actor who played Pee-wee Herman (this wasn't the case with his famous 1991 mug shot, in which he is wearing a goatee and has his hair grown out long and skanky). Talking to him, you can occasionally glimpse a vestigial Pee-wee mannerism -- a puckish smile, or the onset of an eye-roll. His speaking voice, unlike Pee-wee's nasal plaint, is pleasantly middle-range: soft, relaxed, even intimate, with just a hint of an insinuating Jack Nicholson-like purr. On this particular summer afternoon, he is dressed in aplaid short-sleeved t-shirt and crisp stonewashed blue jeans. If he didn't have the face of a children's television icon, he could pass for a high school typing teacher.
"I'm lower-key than most people think I am," he offers, almost as an apology. Not long before our interview, he attended the wedding of his friend David arquette to Courteney Cox, where he apparently dissapointed the family of the bride with his manifest lack of zaniness. He is, in fact, surprisingly earnest. For instance, he frets about the violence and coarseness of popular culture and takes his own role in it very seriously: "How the television and film industries feel they are not responsible -- I don;t get." I think that if you are in the position that you are a role model, you are a role model. Tough luck. I realize that there is a kind of dichotomy because I didn't carry this as far as I could have or should have, because I would up getting arrested and involved in a so-called sex scandal. [But] when I see some of these sports heroes or whoever going, 'Well, it's not my fault I'm a role model,' yeah, I understand the thinking, but it still doesn't change the fact that kids are looking up to you." He sighs. "I could do another four or five hours on the subject and just nod off."
"My experience is that Paul has no idea how many people love him," says Lynee Stewart, who played Miss Yvonne -- "the most beautiful woman in puppetland" -- on Pee-wee's Playhouse and in the series' earlier incarnation as a Los angeles stage show. Talking to numerous friends and colleagues of his, I quickly gather that Reubens is indeed the subject of great affection. Adjectives like "brilliant," "generous," "sensitive," "playful," and "pure" are routinely used to describe him. "He's sweet," says Fran Lebowitz, a friend of Reubens' for 10 years, "and 'sweet' is a word I never have occasion to use not in connection with desssert. And never in connection with a performer. [But where] most performers are solipsistic, Paul is not... And hence he's not intolerable. He's like the son you always wanted."
I should note that when you call up friends of a profile subject you tend to hear nice things, just as you would hope to be the case with your own friends. Nut rarely do you hear nice things with unaninimaity and genuineness; even people who have beefs with Reubens seem to have great respect for him. Crew memebrs who worked on Pee-wee's Playhouse talk aout the unusual ways that Reubens would extend himself, asking after sick parents, making everyone wear nametags so that he could learn the crew members' names, entertaining dying children from the Make-a-Wish foundation who visited the set on a regular basis. He is said to be someone who delights in sharing his many enthusiasms -- 3-D photography, landscaping, Korean barbeque, a old fishing camp in the Adirondacks, an antique mall in Bakersfield to which he likes to drag friends on field trips. An unusually prolific and enthusiastic sender of Christmas cards, he is known for his lavish gift-giving and obsessive shopping. He lives in the Hollywood Hills in a toy-and-kitch-clogged home -- "You can barely navigate it," says Lebowitz, "and it's a big house" surrounded by a cactus garden most of which he himself planted, apparently at no small peril to his own flesh. There, he is said to commune with the many deer, raccoons, skunks, and coyotes that wander onto his property, a Saint francis of the canyons.
In these descriptions of his private life, one senses currents of both the gentleness and nostalgia that underlie his work. One hears about the contradictions too: that he can be both painfully vulnerable and "sledgehammer hard"; that he is a workaholic who can also drive collaborators to distraction with creative ways of procrastinating, like intiating impromptu games of office hide-and-seek. He decines my offer to discuss his romantic life, except to say taht he is single and "looking." He allows that he would like to have children someday, but worries that, at 46, he is getting too old.
He was born Paul Reubenfeld in Peekskill, New York, in 1952, the eldest of three children -- two boys and a girl. His father, Milton Reubenfeld, owned a Lincoln-Mercury dealership, later a lighting store; and his mom, Judy, was an elementary-school teacher. Although his parents weren't wild about his becoming a performer, Reubens credits them with being formative influences: "My parents are hilarious. They're like a team. They work off each other. I never realized that they were that funny for a long time, and then in the last ten years, I look at them and go, No wonder I turned out to be a comedian. They need, like, a rim shot."
Other early influences include the television shows he says he watched most zealously" Captain Kangaroo, Howdy doody, The Mickey Mouse Club, and I Love Lucy (for some reason of long-forgotten Eisenhower-era developmental theory, his passion for the last show was a cause of great concern at his grammar school). In what you might call his version of the myth-charged day when a teenage Bill CLinton met President Kennedy, Reubens once appeared on Howdy Doody as part of the show's studio audience, the Peanut Gallery. Alas, there are no photographs of the future kiddie-show host shaking hands with host Buffalo bob or grinning next to Howdy, and in any case the event proved less than inspirartional. "I remember sitting there and thinking, Well, where the hell is Howdy doody? You couldn't see anything. It was all cameras and lights and junk in the way. Nobody looked like they looked on TV. And it was all really very frightening." Howdy Doody was the cause of further trauma in the Reubenfeld household when it went off the air in 1960. "I remember sitting on the floor of our living room watching the last epeisode just in tears, crying, sitting there as a really little kid and thinking, What kind of a world is this?" You'd like to imagine Reubens vowing then and there to right this wrong when he grew up -- somehow, someday, -- but that didn't happen.
In any event, his world proved to be more exotic one year later when the Reubensfelds more to Sarasota, Florida -- winter headquarters for the Ringling Bros. Circus. Paul was then nine. His new neighbors included the Great Wallendas, the famous family of high-wire artists, and another family that shot one another out of cannons. He remembers his first Halloween in Sarasota, when he and his sister knocked on the Doll Family's door. "They were midgets," he explains. "and we didn't even know what that was -- I didn't even know how to process that. I mean, I was looking at someone smaller than me but who was obviously old. They said, 'Come on in,' and we went inside their house. It was like being on acid when you were a kid. Everything was tiny, the cabinets were down to here. The whole house was small." Again, you'd like to imagine Reubens deciding then and there to build a wacky, cockeyed Playhouse when he grew up, but that didn;t happen, either.
Pee-wee Herman was born in 1978 at the Groundlings, the Los Angeles improv group that has over the years produced alumni such as Phil Hartman, Lisa Kudrow, Jon Lovitz, Julia Sweeney, Laraine Newman, and nearly half the current cast of Saturday Night Live (Cheri Oteri, Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan, Chris Parnell, and Ana Gasteyer). Reubens joined in 1977 after having moved to Southern California to attend college at the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied acting. People who knew him then often say they regret that the success of the Pee-wee character has kept the public from seeing Reubens' versatility as a comic actor. (One of the fondly remembered characters he created at the Groundlings was the Native American lounge singer, Cheif Jay Longtoe, the political correctness of whom -- he drank and danced on point in big white sneakers -- Reubens still frets about.) Pee-wee was first intended to be "a really bad comic, somebody you would look at and go, 'This guy's never going to make it.'" The name Pee-wee came from the brand of harmonica Reaubens owned. Herman was the surname of a "crazy, high-powered" kid he knew growing up in Florida (I like that it didn't sound like a made-up name, that it was kind of cruddy"). The voice was the one he had developed years earlier as the "resident juvenile" at a Sarasota reportory theater company. As to how it all came together, "I just sort of flipped a switch and the character came out," Reubens says. He admits, "You'd think in twenty years I'd have a better story."
Certainly he wasn't the first adult to be rewarded for having a puerile sense of humor or to gain fame playing a freakinsh, overgrown child. As seen on a 1981 HBO special, the character was originally far more manic and grating than he would be insubsequent films and television series, although even in this cruder incarnation Pee-wee has more depth -- this is relative -- and far more ironic self-awareness than such precursors as Harry Langdon, Lou Cotello, Pinky Lee, Soupy Sales, and Jerry Lewis, performers who never had much appeal to the hip adult audiences of their eras. Pee-wee was something more akin to Lily Tomlin's Edith Ann, but ruder and less precious. From the beginning, observers were struck by how Reubens had managed to capture the conflicted nature of childhood, its twin poles of anarchy and shame, which gave the character an appealing reality even amid the antic grotesquerie; with his shoe mirros and naughty jokes, the Pee-we character also acknowledged that young children are sexually inquisitive -- not a particularly novel observation, but one that is rare on Saturday mornings, where it eventually landed.
Pee-wee Herman certainly had a nice dark mean streak that I never tried to hide," says Reubens. "I mean, I always thought that was funny. But he was basically good-hearted, and there is a sweetness, I think, to what I do." Reubens noticed that Groundlings audienced responded to Pee-wee more readily than than they did to his angrier or more depressive characters. "There was a higher likeability facto to Pee-wee Herman... And I made a decision to -- I became Pee-wee for a while. Because I couldn't figure out how to make it in Hollywood. I didn't feel that I had anything to separate me from anyone else in town. This sounds really weird, but I was actually thinking of that musical number in Gypsy, "You Gotta have a Gimmick." There's these three strippers singing that song, and I was thinking that and going, A gimmick? Yes. That's good."
He was helped in all this, perversely, by being rejected for Saturday Night Live in 1980, losing out to Gilbert Gottfried for the "nutty, dorky guy" slot in the first season after the original cast retired. Angry and haunted by the fear that he had missed his one shot at the big time, Reubens borrowed money from his parents to finance a stage show at the Roxy Theater on Sunset Strip. While S.N.L. went on to enjoy the most disastrously unfunny season in a long history, The Pee-wee Herman Show, a parody of the kiddie shows Reubens had loved as a child, became a hit, playing for five months and launching Reubens as a headliner and "I know you are, but what am I?" as a catchphrase. The 1985 film Pee-wee's Big Adventure, directed by a then novice Tim Burton, was a sleeper hit that summer, grossing $45 million on a budget of about 7.5 million, which in turn inspired CBS to offer Reubens an actual Saturday-morning children's show.
Pee-wee's Playhouse debuted in the fall of 1986 and was an instant sensation, drawing a substantial audience of adults, who found it worth getting up on Saturday mornings to see what Reubens had persuaded CBS to air on a program ostensibly for kids. On one episode, Pee-wee returned from a shopping trip and began coyly to unpack his groceries for the camera: "Milk... milk... lemonade... " (in homage to the beloved playground verse that also explains, as did Pee-wee, where "fudge is made."). On another episode he was clearly more interested in dancing with Tito, the hunky Latin lifeguard, that he was with busty Miss Yvonne. Despite such goofy if genuine envelope-puching, Reubens says he never had much trouble with CBS's standards-and-practices department, although on his first episode, for reasons he never understood, the network tried to keep him from sticking pencils in a potato.
The real genius of Pee-wee's Playhouse lay in the larger world that Pee-wee inhabited. There was a vibrant, kitchy production by artist and underground cartoonist Gary Panter, the stream-of-consciousness-like pacing, the inventive animation, and a small village-worth's of inanimate objects, which included a talking chair (Chairry), a talking globe (Globey), and a talking chandelier (Chandelier) -- everything talked on Pee-wee's Playhouse, including, by the second season, the floor (Floory). Pee-wee had human friends as well, like Miss Yvonne, Captain Karl (played by the late Phil Hartman, who also co-wrote the script fot Pee-wee's Big Adventure), Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne), and Jambi the Genie (John Paragon, who, along with Hartman, was one of Reubens' closest friends and callaborators at the Groundlings. At its best, Pee-wee's Playhouse sent up classic children's television -- not just Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo but the hundreds of other local programs on which middle-ages men talked to sock puppets and unspooled, old scratchy cartoons, -- with a delightful, skewed logic all its own. It was a show that was both gently subversive and full of positive messages (share, be nice, brush your teeth), a show that evidenced amusements at the conventions of its genre but also respect for them. It was to children's television what Late Night with David Letterman was to talk shows, but without the curdled irony and naked self-loathing -- which, technically, I suppose, would make it the Late Night with Conan O'Brien of children's television. It won a total of 22 Emmys, including two for Reubens himself.
Pee-wee's Playhouse, the idea being that profits would come later with syndication sales, a common formula on television. On top of that, Reubens says he paid himself scale as a performer. He did do pretty well for himself through merchandising deals, though he limited his returns by insistinf Pee-wee products be well-made. He also refused to endorse candy bars and other kinds of junk food, though a Ralston Purina Pee-wee Chow cereal nearly made it to supermarket shelves. "The commercial," Reubens recalls, "was going to be a 50s mom shaking the cereal into a bowl and then putting it on the floor -- the kids were gonna come up and eat it on all fours like dogs. It tasted just like Trix, which was my favorite cereal when I was a kid, and had more of everything good in it than any other cereal on the market at the time. No sugar, sweetened with fruit juice, had all kinds of extra vitamins. It was really good for you, and everything was going fine -- until the last minute they did a blind taste test and kids hated it." In another blow, Reubens was never able to interest manufacturers in bringing out a line of Miss Yvonne wigs for little girls.
Though never much of a premiere-goer or one to vacation in Aspen or the Hamptons, Reubens did enjoy the celebrity perk of meeting other famous and successful people. He got to know the late heiress Doris Duks and her adopted adult daughter, Chandi Heffner, whom he had met in Hawaii through Jim Nabors (whom he had met through Charo). Though some in Duke's circle looked down their noses at Reubens -- "He was singing for his supper," says one -- she enjoyed his company. There was a semi-notorious dinner party in 1989 at Shangri-la, Duke's faux-Persian Diamond Head estate, during which Reubens and Heffner exchanged vows in an impromptu mock wedding ceremony. Nabors seranded the couple, and says, "I still have the temporary marriage liscence signed by Imelda Marcos (whom Duke had recently bailed out of prison). I wonder: what do you talk about at a dinner party with Doris Duke, Jim Nabors, and Imelda Marcos? "Oh, they were talking about everything. They were talking about the FBI, they were talking about you know, gold and prices. It just ran the gamut."
But four years after the premiere of Pee-wee's Playhouse, Reubens was burned out, exhausted by writing, producing, starring in, and, essentially, co-directing the series while doing the same jobs on a second film, Big Top Pee-wee. After shooting a fifth season of Pee-wee's Playhouse back-to-back with its fourth, Reubens exercised a clause in his contract and closed up shop in the fall of 1990. In his words "an empty shell," he took a year off to travel and recharge his creative batteries.
He says he never found playing Pee-wee a particular burdern, but others say he was suffocated by the character, unsure of what kind of career he could have as just Paul Reubens. He had hidden himself behind the character, seeing himself more of a conceptual artist than a comedian and hoping to endow Pee-wee with a celebrity and reality all his own. It was Pee-wee, for instance, who got a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Reubens rarely gave interviews to the press, and when he did, it was almost always in character; he also tried to avoid being photographed out of character. As James Walcott wrote in these pages in 1987: "Paul Reubens must be one of the few remaining performance artists who still believe in secrets, distance, mystique... He's a contained dynamo; he isn't out to spill his innards." Indeed, for Reubens, one of the most painful aspects of his arrest -- other than those we'd all agree on -- was the fact that it thrust him into the public eye on terms not his own.
Some months into his sabbatical, while visiting his parents in Sarasota, he was on the way to meet some friends for dinner on the night of July 26, 1991, when he stopped off at the run-down, sparsely attended South Trail XXX adult-movie theater to take in a triple-feature of Catalina Five-O: Tiger Shark, Nurse Nancy, and Turn up the Heat. He thinks he "must have been at the theater before," but says he wasn't a "serial pornography person." On the night in question, "I didn't give it any thought or place any importance on it. I didn't feel like, This is the wrong thing to do. I didn't feel like, Someone is going to photograph me coming out of here and the kids are--" He drops the thought.
He had always taken the responsibility of being a children's performer seriously, even in terms of his private life (a heavy smoker, he had gone to great lengths never to be photographed with a cigarette in his mouth). But at the time of his arrest, the show "was so over in my mind." Later in our interview he returns adamantly to the same point. "In my mind, I wasn't sitting in the theater in my bow tie and suit." Says Gary Panter, his friend and colleague, "At some point you get tired. This is just me talking, but if you work so hard to accomplish so much, you might think, I deserve a break. You might think, I can be anonymous and go where everybody goes -- or at least where a lot of people go."
Four members of the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office were deployed that night at the theater in plain clothes. Reubens was arrested in the lobby as he was leaving the men's room. After he was processed at the Sheriff's Office, a high-school friend, who, as it happened, was working as a deputy sheriff helped him make the bail of $219. The arresting officers hadn't realized who he was (though Reubens reportedly identified himself as Pee-wee's creaotr and offered to put on a benefit for children in exchange for the charges being dropped). A beat reporter for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune recognized his name on the police blotter, however, and two days later the story broke nationwide, Reubens' mug shot splashed against the nation's papers. The photo pains him to this day. "I was really angry," he says, "that I didn't smile in that picture. I mean, I still can't really look at that picture because it's so real to me. It's so reflective of the moment it was taken, where I was just going, Oh my God! What is going to happen next?" With the long hair, the beard, the desolate expression, the image was so un-Pee-wee like, such a perfect visual counterpart to Reubens' arrest, that it drove the story the way good visuals always do, whether a snapshot of Donna Rice on Gary Hart's lap or photos of Balkan atrocities.
That night, realizing what would soon be coming his way, Reubens fled. "I didn't know it would be as huge as it was," he says, "but I knew it would be a big deal." He remembers calling his parents from the local airport. "I was getting ready to leave and my mother was going, 'This is all going to blow over. Just come, you know, come on out to the house.' And I can remember just saying, 'I don't think you have any idea what's about to happen.'"
He flew to Nashville, where his sister, an attorney, lived. From there he
called Doris Duke and asked her permission to hide out on her estate in New
Jersey. "The first day I woke up there, the staff had done what they
do for any guest, which is put out all the daily publ