[© Ken Sax]
“One thing about children’s television, particularly at that time before the proliferation of cable and edgier fare for children, was that any hint of scandal could be ruinous,” Judy Price explains. “Most of the advertising was purchased before the seasons aired and the sponsors were guaranteed a certain season average rating. The fact that Pee-wee’s Playhouse [had completed its run and] was in reruns was irrelevant. If we didn’t make good on our end in regards to ratings, we would have had to reimburse the advertisers and it would have meant a financial loss for the network.”
Although it had been announced that the series wasn’t going to return for a sixth season, Pee-wee’s premature departure from the airwaves led many to wrongly believe that the network had canceled the show in the wake of the controversy.
“I was pissed off at how many times I saw it reported that CBS had canceled the series,” George McGrath remembers. “Paul had already ended the series. It was just sloppy reporting that made it look like Paul lost a lot more career-wise than he actually did. That false impression that the Playhouse would have gone on longer if it hadn’t been for his arrest is still the common perception of what happened. It still pisses me off a little.”
“It is frustrating that the same myth gets published over and over,” Reubens said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “CBS didn’t cancel the show. I’d already been away from the show a year and a half. You go from Pee-wee’s picture to that mug shot . . . I get that it was a good story. A lot of people wrote, ‘He’s ruined his career. Pee-wee’s dead.’ I never said anything like that.”
There has long been speculation about what led CBS to pull the remaining Playhouse episodes. While a great deal of misinformation has been disseminated in the media, Judy Price is glad to set the record straight on what actually occurred in the days after the story broke.
“CBS’s reaction initially was not severe,” she continues. “I saw the story on the eleven o’clock news on Saturday night, and Paul wasn’t recognizable. He had a beard, goatee, and long hair. I knew, because I had been in children’s television long enough, that there was going to be a problem.”
[© John Duke Kisch / CBS]
Price attempted to do damage control before the media had a field day with the story.
“The next morning I called the head of our press department and told her about what happened,” she continues. “She just sort of dismissed it and didn’t think it would be a big deal. Then on Monday, I spoke with Jeff Sagansky, the chief of CBS Entertainment at the time, who wasn’t alarmed because Paul hadn’t been proven guilty of anything.”
The blanket of ambivalence around the network started to lift as time passed.
“Throughout the day, calls started coming in from our affiliates and advertisers,” she remembers. “Of course, the press was all over us. It was obvious the backlash had started. Everyone was trying to get statements. I started preparing to put something else on the air that weekend because I knew eventually I would be ordered to, even though everyone kept saying it wasn’t a problem. But then I got a call from Howard Stringer, president of the network. He didn’t tell me directly what to do, but he indicated we had a problem. The affiliates were threatening to dump the show and the advertisers were ready to jump ship. In order to take the heat off them, we decided to pull the show so we would be the bad guys instead.”
Price remembers making the phone call to Reubens’ team to inform them of the news.
“I did have a conversation with Paul’s people, but there was no debate or discussion,” she explains. “It was going off the air. It wasn’t that we canceled the show, it was just that we didn’t carry it for the last four or five weeks of its run.”
Although she knew the story would garner media attention, Price was frustrated by the legs the story had.
“This news about the show ended up taking great pressure off George H.W. Bush, who was president at the time, because we were having major issues with unemployment, but Pee-wee’s Playhouse was dominating the headlines,” she says. “I was dismayed that this became such a story, but I wasn’t surprised. The public eats up titillating stories. I’m guilty of it, too. Something will catch your eye and you tend to read it. That’s what people do. They like to see scandal and the ugly side of their stars. And it was a feeding-frenzy, believe me. I didn’t take or do interviews at the time because what was I going to say?”
While she doesn’t totally believe news outlets like Rolling Stone that hypothesized that Reubens deliberately went into the theater to sabotage his career, Price does believe “the incident” might have been motivated by an unconscious desire to take a break.
“I felt bad for Paul, but on the other hand, some people thought it was him deliberately trying to kill the character. I don’t even think the arresting officer would have recognized him had Paul not identified himself as being Pee-wee Herman. I don’t believe that’s why he went out there, but perhaps subconsciously [it was], because he wasn’t set on working all that hard at that time. He had achieved great success and accolades with Pee-wee’s Playhouse and that certainly made him feel good. He accomplished something with it, but at the same time, he was ready to move on.”
[Courtesy PhotoFest]
As CBS pulled the remaining episodes, other efforts were being made to expunge Pee-wee from the national record. Toy stores were yanking merchandise off the shelves, inadvertently making the Pee-wee Herman doll an instant collector’s item. Therapists and social workers were taking to the television airwaves and newspapers to counsel parents on how to break the news of Reubens’ arrest to children. By today’s standards, the story might have captivated the public’s interest for a few days, but in 1991, it was an around-the-clock public crucifixion.
However, as most people jumped on the anti-Pee-wee bandwagon, protests were being held in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco arguing against CBS’s pulling of the show. Many celebrities, including Bill Cosby, Cyndi Lauper, and Joan Rivers, also went on record in support of their colleague.
“He has given so much pleasure to little kids, and what they’re doing to him is sad,” said Annette Funicello at the time. “I like him a lot. If I were able to call him now, I would say, ‘So many people are on your side. We love you. Just hang in there — it will blow over. These things do.’”
During all this, Reubens lay low, humiliated by what had transpired.
“Paul, who is emotionally devastated by the embarrassment of this situation, is currently in seclusion with friends and eagerly anticipating his complete vindication,” his publicist Richard Grant said at the time.
The “complete vindication” Reubens hoped for never came because the actor accepted a plea bargain. Once he had entered a plea of no contest, the actor was ordered to perform 75 hours community service, to write, produce, and cover the production costs of an anti-drug public service announcement, and pay a $50 fine and court costs.
Although Reubens had hoped that avoiding a trial would put an end to the media scrutiny, it turns out he had misjudged the public. Except for a few special appearances, when Reubens left the courtroom on November 7, 1991, he left Pee-wee Herman behind him.
[© John Duke Kisch / CBS]
6: P2K
On the evening of July 10, 1999, Paul Reubens made his first talk show appearance ever as himself. His visit to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno was a resounding success, and the actor received a hero’s welcome when he walked out on stage. Tremors of laughter rippled through the audience whenever glimpses of Pee-wee radiated through Reubens’ words and mannerisms. Although the actor was promoting his upcoming appearance in Mystery Men, three sentences spoken softly at the end of his appearance sent shockwaves across the newswires and Internet.
“I start next week writing a new movie called The Pee-wee Herman Story,” he said. “It’s a movie about fame. Pee-wee Herman becomes famous in this movie
and turns into a monster.”
News that Pee-wee Herman was coming out of retirement was astonishing. Since “the incident,” Reubens had kept a relatively low profile, taking roles in Batman Returns and the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. He earned an Emmy Award nomination in 1995 for his guest appearances on Murphy Brown. Though Reubens continued to stand at the edges of the spotlight, Pee-wee was nowhere to be seen. Barring a 1991 cameo at the MTV Video Music Awards, where he famously alluded to his arrest by asking if the audience had “heard any good jokes lately,” and an appearance a year later at a Grand Old Opry tribute to Minnie Pearl, the “luckiest boy in the world” had become the most reclusive.
However, Reubens’ Leno appearance seemed to signal that his leave of absence was ending. Throughout the following decade, the actor made dozens of public appearances, talking up his upcoming Pee-wee films — a second one based on Pee-wee’s Playhouse was announced in 2004 — along the way, whetting the appetites of his fans worldwide who had expected they’d never see Pee-wee again.
Paul Reubens with Candice Bergen on Murphy Brown [Courtesy CBS / PhotoFest © CBS]
In interviews Reubens described The Pee-wee Herman Story as dark and closer in tone to Valley of the Dolls than the brightness and whimsy of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Big Top Pee-wee. The film’s plot centers on Pee-wee making it big as a country singer and stepping on his friends on the way to the top of the charts. Along the way, Pee-wee acquires habits that clash with the squeaky-clean image he projected on Saturday morning.
“Pee-wee Herman winds up getting hooked on pills and booze,” Reubens explained in 2001. “[Pee-wee’s] not shooting up, but I wouldn’t want young kids to see it.”
Reubens cowrote the film with Valerie Curtin, the screenwriter behind …And Justice for All starring Al Pacino and Toys starring Robin Williams. He cited the film’s plot as being a hybrid of elements from It Could Happen to You, Jailhouse Rock, and A Face in the Crowd.
While Reubens has maintained that the film is only a “fake autobiography,” Dawna Kaufmann, who first brought the playhouse concept to the then-standup comic in 1980, sees similarities between the fiction and reality. In A Face in the Crowd, a convict named Lonesome Rhodes is discovered by a female producer who makes him a star. By the film’s climax, Rhodes, played brilliantly by Andy Griffith in his cinematic debut, becomes a national superstar, affecting popular culture like no celebrity before him. Ultimately, the producer deflates the hot air from his balloon by turning a microphone on during one of Rhodes’ rants about how he thinks his fans are all idiotic sheep, exposing him for the heartless beast he’s become.
According to Kaufmann, Reubens was infatuated with the film during the time the two worked together.
“When we would have writing sessions at his home for The Pee-wee Herman Show, we would take a break by watching the movie,” she says. “Paul would always stop the tape and rewind it just before the producer exposed him for the villain he truly was. He didn’t want to see that part. He just wanted to see Lonesome Rhodes going from nowhere, becoming a big star, and stepping on everyone around him. I should have taken the hint.”
As more details became available about the adult Pee-wee film, Reubens announced he was revisiting his playhouse for a second, more kid-friendly film. Pee-wee’s Playhouse: The Movie was allegedly greenlit by Paramount Pictures, although those statements seem to have been exaggerations at best. The film would have teamed the actor up with a new host of crazy characters, along with some familiar friends.
In adapting the children’s show for the big screen, Reubens’ script took the characters outside of the playhouse walls and into the real world.
“In the TV show, we never left the playhouse,” Reubens explained in 2010. “You never saw Puppetland. I mean, me and Cowboy Curtis went camping one time. There’s a couple episodes where you went, ‘Where are they?” but most of the time we were in the playhouse. The movie has two scenes in the playhouse, at the beginning and the end, and the rest of the movie takes place outside.”
The movie begins on a normal day, with Conky giving the secret word and the King of Cartoons coming over to screen a classic animated short. However, that’s a short-lived moment of comfort before the real adventure begins.
“In the opening of the movie, right in the middle of the cartoon, the film jams, it burns, it’s blacked out,” Reubens elaborated in the same interview. “When the lights come back up, the King is gone. He’s been kidnapped and is being held hostage for ransom by a character named El Chunky Boobabi.”
The film’s structure closely resembles an original draft of a film called Pee-wee’s Big Adventure that was pitched to, and ultimately rejected by, Paramount Studios, which Reubens cowrote with Gary Panter in 1983, two years after the close of The Pee-wee Herman Show. Although the title was later used for the character’s bicycle film, the Reubens-Panter script had many of the characters from the live show embarking on a road trip through Puppetland. Optimistic that he would have an opportunity to bring that film to the screen after the success of Playhouse, Reubens had rewritten the script several times since 1990, incorporating characters like Chairry, Conky, and Magic Screen who weren’t a part of the live show. He renamed the film Pee-wee’s Playhouse: The Movie.
Reubens has admitted that he’d consider casting another actor as Pee-wee Herman. Although he has joked in recent years that Twilight’s Taylor Lautner was in negotiations to fill his tasseled white loafers, Reubens seriously offered Johnny Depp the opportunity to be his successor.
“Could you imagine Johnny as Pee-wee?” asks Prudence Fenton, Playhouse animation and effects producer. “That’d be hilarious.”
Pee-wee Comes Out of Retirement
Although he had been mentioning that Pee-wee Herman was due to make a comeback, Reubens shocked his fans when he announced in early August 2009 that he would be returning to the stage for a revival of The Pee-wee Herman Show. The show was scheduled to run from November 19 to 29 in a limited engagement at the Music Box at The Fonda in Hollywood.
At the Twitter Conference in 2009 where Pee-wee had his first public appearance since announcing his comeback [© Brian Solis]
“I’ve put part of him away for a long time, but part of him has always been here with me,” Reubens told the Los Angeles Times. “I think it will be like riding a bike — which isn’t a bad analogy for Pee-wee, by the way.”
Although Pee-wee Herman had gone into seclusion, Reubens had kept up the hope that the character would have an opportunity to reappear.
“I spent an awful long time twelve years ago thinking to myself, you know, this can’t be my final thing,” Reubens said in a 2004 Dateline interview. “I’m a big believer in the happy ending. I want a Pee-wee movie to have a happy ending, Pee-wee gets his bicycle back. I don’t know what the ending is to my story, but I think it’s going to be a happy one.”
For a while it appeared doubtful that Reubens’ career would have the happy ending he sought. After returning to the spotlight in the late 1990s, the actor attracted attention for a featured role as a gay, drug-dealing hairdresser in the 2001 film Blow. Although the role was a departure from the more comedic roles audiences were used to, his performance won the respect of critics. Esquire summed the film up best: “There are many reasons to see Blow . . . but perhaps the best reason is to see Paul Reubens, who hasn’t had a role worthy of his talents since the glorious, pre-scandal days of Pee-wee Herman.”
Reubens seemed poised for a full-scale comeback until a 2002 arrest that was nearly fatal to his career. Acting on an anonymous tip, the Los Angeles police department searched Reubens’ home for child pornography. The actor pled guilty to a single misdemeanor count for possession of obscene material. Many of his fans believe the arrest was spurious and, unlike the passive way he responded publicly to “the incident,” Reubens hit the airwaves to clear his name with his supporters.
“One thing I wa
nt to make very, very clear,” he said in an interview after his arrest. “I don’t want anyone for one second to think that I am titillated by images of children. It’s not me. You can say lots of things about me, and you might. The public may think I’m weird. They may think I’m crazy or anything that anyone wants to think about me. That’s all fine, as long as one of the things you’re not thinking about me is that I’m a pedophile, because that’s not true.”
The public’s response seemed to suggest that Reubens would have the chance to accomplish everything else he wanted to with the character. He hoped to see another Pee-wee Herman film in theaters and introduce the character to a new generation. If things went well with the live show at The Music Box, he thought, maybe someone in Hollywood would give him another shot.
While attempting to drum up interest in his films, the actor had floated another trial balloon to test how the public would react to a Pee-wee return. In 2007, Reubens put on his classic costume for the first time in 15 years to appear at the Spike TV Guys’ Choice Awards. Although Reubens was out of practice with the character, the packed audience at the event applauded wildly when he stepped out on stage and the appearance was considered a success by those in the media.
The idea to bring Pee-wee back to the stage was not Reubens’, but Broadway producer Jared Geller’s. Geller was a longtime fan who thought a live show could spark a resurgence in the character’s career. Initially the actor refused, but just as the barrage of phone calls had worked in the summer of 1986 to get Reubens rolling on his CBS Saturday morning show, Reubens ultimately changed his mind.
“I went back and forth between wanting to do it and not wanting to do it,” Reubens said in a 2009 interview with the L.A. Times. “I had a producer that was calling me every two months for two years and every two months, I would change my mind. Finally, one day I woke up and decided, ‘This is it, I’m coming back.’”
Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse Page 13
