It Was Easy to Get Pee-wee Herman

Photo: Marco Grob

The first time I saw Pee-wee Herman, in his 1981 HBO comedy special, I was in sixth grade, close enough to the character’s maturity level to immediately feel the truth of the portrayal. I didn’t understand everything Paul Reubens was doing as a performer — I had seen that kind of sketch comedy only in little bursts on Saturday Night Live, never stretched out to an hour — but it spoke to me, as it did to nearly everyone who saw it, even those who initially found it grating and weird. Pee-wee was Everykid. He was chatty, bratty, imaginative, annoying, charming, and profoundly narcissistic in the manner of an elementary-school-age person who hasn’t yet figured out that other people don’t merely exist but are as important as he is. If he came up against a reality that was too harsh to deny, he would deny it anyway. His comeback to being insulted, “I know you are, but what am I?,� would have been laughed off any real-world playground. But Pee-wee delivered it as if blessed by the ghost of Oscar Wilde.

Beneath it all, he was vulnerable. He let us know when he was scared, sometimes outrageously (he had the best full-body-recoil fright reaction since Lou Costello) but other times in small, modulated real ways. That first Pee-wee special was right up there with Robin Williams’s first guest appearance as Mork from Ork on Happy Days, which was so fully realized and technically dazzling that it instantly landed him the spinoff sitcom Mork & Mindy, launched him toward movies, and made even casual viewers who didn’t watch TV through a talent scout’s eyes realize, That person is brilliant, and we haven’t heard the last of him. Sure enough, Reubens’s HBO special caused such a stir that it led to two feature films (Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which launched the career of its newbie director, Tim Burton, and Big Top Pee-wee, partly inspired by Reubens’s childhood fascination with the traveling circuses that used to pass through his town) and a hip CBS children’s show that ran from 1986 to 1990.

Reubens, who died this week of cancer at 70, created the character in 1977 during his stint with the Los Angeles comedy troupe the Groundlings, naming him after a Pee Wee brand harmonica he had owned as a child. He created the special after being rejected as a cast member for the 1980–81 season of Saturday Night Live. What’s most extraordinary about Pee-wee in retrospect is that he was just one of many characters shaped and inhabited by this actor with such a richness that any of them could have been the star of their own film or TV show. The best actors give you a “tip of the iceberg� feeling, and Reubens was one of the best. You could see it in his performance as Mystery Men’s Spleen, an amateur superhero whose power is flatulence; as a member of an all-star vampire tribunal in What We Do in the Shadows, his last major role; and as the drug dealer Derek Foreal in Blow, who blurts stray lines from show tunes and, upon being introduced to the main character, extends his ringed hand as if expecting it to be kissed. The audience just got whomever Reubens was playing the instant the character appeared onscreen, and even as he kept revealing new layers and shadings, there was always the implicit promise that he had more to give.

But Pee-wee defined his career and then, in a strange, unforeseeable way, helped shatter it. It’s possible that Reubens’s 1991 arrest for indecent exposure in an adult movie theater, as well as charges in 2001 of possessing child pornography (which were later dropped), might have derailed or destroyed him even if he hadn’t become an international star playing a child character that families welcomed into their homes. But there’s no doubt the nature of Reubens’s celebrity magnified the impact. He pleaded no contest to the 1991 charge, and in 2001, he turned himself in after being accused of “possessing materials depicting children under the age of 18 engaged in sexual conduct.� In an eventual appeal, his lawyer said police had raided Reubens’s home and seized “a historical collection of artwork, kitsch memorabilia, and adult erotica� that included 30,000 items total and that the offending material consisted of “24 vintage magazines and a single vintage film� that were not defined in Los Angeles as obscene until 1989, when the statute Reubens was charged with violating became law. If neither event had occurred, Reubens might have gone on to become one of the great character actors of the past 40 years, rather than someone who seemed to possess that level of talent but rarely got to prove it.

In the context of other celebrity scandals, some of which bounce off the accused individuals, it’s hard not to grimace at how punishments are doled out unequally and disproportionately. Hardly any of it makes sense. Reubens didn’t get a career death penalty, but it was a life sentence with occasional fleeting periods of parole. Headlines in the vein of “Pee-wee’s Perverted Playhouse� were common; the satirical weekly Spy even put Reubens on the cover alongside Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whose confirmation hearings were defined by allegations of sexual harassment. Reubens went eight years without acting on-camera after his 1991 arrest until his appearances in Blow and Mystery Men, and he spent the years after his 2001 scandal mainly doing voice-over work (with occasional on-camera roles, such as his two-episode stint on Pushing Daisies). (Pee-Wee came back in a Broadway production in 2010 and a Netflix movie in 2016, but the character never quite regained lost mainstream ground.)

During the same time span, Winona Ryder’s career went cold after a 2001 charge of shoplifting thousands in merchandise from a Beverly Hills department store, and she didn’t have a real comeback until becoming a regular on Stranger Things. Jeffrey Jones, of Amadeus and Deadwood, was swept up in the same 2001 citywide police action as Reubens and similarly charged with possession of child pornography (he ended up pleading no contest to solicitation of a minor). Jones subsequently entered rehab with the encouragement of Deadwood creator David Milch, who helped pay for his legal defense. Over the next 18 years, Jones had just five acting credits, one being the Deadwood reunion film. Contemporaneously, Mel Gibson, Tom Sizemore, Michael Jackson, Roman Polanski, and other artists dogged by allegations (and sometimes multiple charges) of physical or sexual offenses continued to work at the highest levels of the business. Expensive lawyers, clever publicists, and loud fan bases no doubt made a difference, but there’s something inexplicable at the core of it all.

In the end, it’s easy to want the sheer indefatigable sweetness of Pee-wee to eclipse the ugly parts of Reubens’s story, especially as his friends and peers in Hollywood come out in droves to memorialize a figure well known for celebrating others in personalized birthday messages, among other forms. But of course, the eclipse wasn’t total because you’ve read about the ugliness here and probably elsewhere. “I know you are, but what am I?� gets you only so far. The world Reubens built was beloved for making us think otherwise.