The not-so-great irony underlying everything was that the Playhouse had hummed with sexuality since the day, more than a decade ago, when Pee-wee Herman and his sidekicks gamboled onto a small stage in a theater in Los Angeles. There was polymorphous sexuality afoot, primarily in the form of Pee-wee. And straight and gay sexuality, in the persons of the Playhouse guests.
Prancing and posing with Tito, the buff young lifeguard, Pee-wee still enjoyed looking up women's dresses. "Take it off, take it all off," Pee-wee leered after he hypnotized a female guest. "You'll be more comfortable without those garments." Playing a smart-mouthed nerdy kid, Pee-wee got away with saying things an adult never could. But was Pee-wee straight, or was he gay? Was he a man - he was five feet eleven inches tall - or was he a boy?
Pee-wee's playmates also had libidos. The buxom, long-lashed Miss Yvonne wanted Captain Carl to "really" like her. Her date with Cowboy Curtis introduced countless American kids to an interracial couple. Jambi the Genie was a magic lamp of innuendo. "Now I get to do something I've wanted to do for a long time," Jambi said when he got a brand-new pair of hands.
Like all truly original characters, Pee-wee inhabited a world of his own, with Chairy the talking chair, Globey the French-accented globe, Conky the robot and Pterri the pterodactyl all competing for Pee-wee's attention. Pee-wee issued his own bio: He was the son of Herman and Honey Herman, owners of a curio shop in Hollywood. Miss Marvel Ranell, his fourth-grade teacher, had been a stripper. His career paralleled Sylvester Stallone's. "We can be macho, and we can be sensitive, too," Pee-wee said. "We are both kind of hero guys." If Pee-wee ever did a nude scene, he said, John Holmes would be his stand-in.
Pee-wee's world had verbal as well as visual wit - rare on Saturday mornings - and so enchanted kids of all ages. "Umm...salady!" Pee-wee exclaimed with Lettermanesque mockery while eating salad. "Ummm...chocolatey!" he said, eating chocolate cake. "I'm the luckiest boy in the world," he sang, like a pipsqueak Elvis Costello. "I'm so much luckier than you." Pee-wee was never famous for his patience. He was as petulant as a prodigy. A trippy mix of innocence, wisdom and mischief, Pee-wee, in the end, was a part of all of us - pure, childish id.
After a sellout show at Carnegie Hall in 1984 and a series of triumphant appearances on Late Night With David Letterman, Pee-wee got his first starring role in the movie Pee-wee's Big Adventure. The visionary Tim Burton directed the story of the desperate search for a stolen bicycle. Big Adventure cost $6 million to make and earned Warner Bros. nearly $50 million - it was the surprise hit of the summer of 1985. And in it, we get a few more hints about another side of Pee-wee. "Dottie, there's a lot of things about me you don't know anything about," Pee-wee said, scolding the bike-store clerk who had a crush on him. "Things you wouldn't understand, you couldn't understand, you shouldn't understand. I'm a loner, Dottie, a rebel." Pee-wee was a parodist who told the truth.
A year after Big Adventure, CBS gave Pee-wee its 11:30 Saturday-morning slot. The only live-action show in the time period, Pee-wee's Playhouse was a postmodern half-hour inspired by Fifties kitsch and Fifties kids' shows, toned down only a bit from the original stage version. Cyndi Lauper and Todd Rundgren worked on the music. "Onstage, the show was an ode to kids' shows," says Gary Panter, who was the production designer. "With a real kids' show, we had a responsibility to make it for kids."
As host and MC, Pee-wee danced viewers through a kaleidoscope of Claymation, vintage cartoons and educational features like the secret word. Playhouse won six Emmys in its first season. Now, everybody knew who he was. "That's my name, don't wear it out," Pee-wee whined. (He also resurrected another Fifties tag line, this one for deflecting bullies: "I know you are, but what am I?")
Toning down the show didn't tame it. "That was his point," says Panter. "It's okay to be different. When you set yourself up as something different, it scares a lot of people."
"At the beginning of the century, Freud embraced the idea that kids are sexual beings - not in the same way adults are, but with their own childish versions of sex, like thumb-sucking and sibling rivalry. It was a scandalous notion that never went down very well in America and still doesn't. And Pee-wee was no Mister Rogers. "Pee-wee was not unaffected by culture," says Sandra Bernhard. "He was the perfect example of the perversities and craziness that drives everybody."
CBS didn't mind, as long as the ratings ware good. The critically acclaimed Playhouse made money for its advertisers and made CBS look innovative. Fundamentalist hyenas like the Reverend Donald Wildmon also stayed strangely silent, allowing 6 million kids each week a chance to witness pure visual magic.
"Anything around you could turn into something," a friend of Paul's says. "The vacuum cleaner could turn into a new friend. Everything was as alive as you were, even a doorknob, and it could be a friend, as long as you treated it right."
The Playhouse was also moral. Even as it sent up adult ways and old adult TV shows, it taught kids manners - taught them not to be selfish. (In one episode, Pee-wee gave his wish to fly to Miss Yvonne.) And it engendered tolerance - the Playhouse was the most gloriously integrated show on television.
Chugging into his third season, Pee-wee's ratings stayed high. By then nearly 3 million adults were watching. There was no reason to believe this boy might ever have to grow up - except that the man behind Pee-wee was tired of it all. It was obvious how much energy and concentration doing the character required. So Paul Reubens made a decision to double his efforts, to film those last two seasons' worth of shows and walk away.
Pee-wee stayed mute about the reasons why. As for Paul, years ago he had disappeared behind the makeup and the too-small suit, granting interviews only in character. The truth was, nobody had heard from Paul Reubens in years.
at Chasen's restaurant in Los Angeles in 1986
Moving from Oneonta, New York, in 1961, the Rubenfelds and their three children - Paul, Abby and Luke - moved into a comfortable one-story house overlooking Roberts Bay, in Sarasota, Florida. Paul's mother, Judy, taught school. Milton Rubenfeld's lamp store was successful enough to provide Paul's sister, Abby, with a Rambler when she was old enough to drive and to send the whole family to Mexico for two weeks one summer. The Rubenfeld children were bright and popular. Paul spent countless hours glued to the TV, watching I Love Lucy and Howdy Doody. He once met Emmett Kelley, the dean of American clowns (Sarasota was for years the winter home of the Ringling Brothers circus). It was a meeting that must have thrilled Paul, who was himself a budding performer. In the family basement, he used a crate from Milton Rubenfeld's store to build a stage and entertain the neighborhood kids. A brown-eyed girl named Joan Verizzo became a family friend.
During the Seventies, the Rubenfeld kids hit their stride. Abby attended Princeton, where she was elected freshman-class president, before going on to law school and a career as an activist lawyer in New York and Nashville. Paul appeared in community theater and was voted Sarasota High's Most Talented Senior in 1970. Never crazy about their son's career choice, Milton and Judy kept hoping Paul wouldn't get big parts. He kept getting them.
In March of 1971, when he was eighteen, Paul had his first run-in with the Sarasota Sheriff's Department. He was busted for pot possession and held for a brief time on a $1000 bond. That may sound like an outrageous amount of money, but it wasn't unusual in the drug-hysterical Seventies. Wearing greasy hair and glasses, Paul looked as sullen as any kid booked on a weed misdemeanor. He got two years' probation.
After a rough year at Boston University and rejection letters from Julliard and Carnegie-Mellon, Paul enrolled at Cal Arts, in Valencia, California, and found his groove. He changed his name to Reubens, appeared in cameos in a couple of Cheech and Chong movies and developed a character called Jay Longtoe, a lounge-singing Indian, for his frequent appearances on The Gong Show. Paul was a man of a thousand characters then. Developing his skills at the Groundlings Theater, the improvisational troupe in Hollywood where Phil Hartman and Laraine Newman of Saturday Night Live got their start, he came up with Pee-wee Herman. A contorted, overgrown kid with Dippity Done hair, white shoes and a red bow tie, Pee-wee began life in a five-minute skit poking fun at Captain Kangaroo. Rather unexpectedly, Pee-wee was a local hit, playing to packed midnight shows at Groundlings. The Pee-wee Herman Show moved on to the Roxy on Sunset Strip, where it sold out for five months and was filmed for a Home Box Office special. Pee-wee had broken into the medium he would soon change: television.
Even on the cusp of stardom, Paul made frequent trips home to visit his parents. By then, Milton and Judy had moved into a fine home at the end of a private road on exclusive Siesta Key. It had a classy glassed-in deck overlooking the gulf, palm trees, a bird feeder and plenty of space for cars. Sarasota was a place for Paul to kick back and see his old friends, like Joan Verizzo, who had gone to work as an intern in the State Attorney's office.
Known for its balmy weather, dramatic lightning storms, a good ballet company and state theater, Sarasota enjoys the kind of serenity that money can buy. Donald Regan, the White House chief of staff under Ronald Reagan, lives there. Audrey Hepburn has a place on Longboat Key. It is a town of guarded residential developments striped with speed bumps, where old-timers wave to each other from their motor launches and carefully pilot their Mercedes to shop at Target discount stores.
It comes as little surprise that Sarasota is not a city that plays by Playhouse rules. The Gulf Coast of Florida likes to keep its sex behind closed doors. In the last several years, cops have busted topless sunbathers and men and women wearing skimpy thong bathing suits. A Sarasota record-store clerk became the first person in the state to be charged with the sale of sexually explicit material to a minor - a felony - for selling a 2 Live Crew tape to an eleven-year-old girl.
Sarasotans are often confounded by Sheriff Monge's department. It makes half as many drug arrests as the city police, who cover a smaller area. It lets deputies get naked busting hotel call girls. Monge wants a twenty-percent budget increase. Murders are up. Sexual assaults are up. Violent crime is up eleven percent overall. So why is Monge sending detectives - four at a time, in this case - to a porn theater?
"A lot of those people in vice are born-again types," says Elliot Metcalfe, the Sarasota County public defender. "A part of them is kind of nasty; they've got their own agenda. I've never heard one complaint about that theater. Law enforcement has gotten the message that they can engage in any type of behavior as long as they capture the criminal. People are frustrated and angry."
Home visiting his parents in 1983, a few years before Pee-wee mania hit, Paul drove off in his Ford Tempo toward the Adult Entertainment Center in Coral Cove Mall and his second encounter with local law enforcement. The Adult Entertainment Center is called the South Trail Bookstore today, a rat-hole peep-show joint selling vintage porn magazines and attracting men of all ages looking for action.
Undercover cops followed Paul to the back of the mall that night, where they said he tried to open the door of a Pontiac that wasn't his. At 3:15 a.m. he was arrested for loitering and prowling. Over a T-shirt, he wore a plaid shirt that was untucked. he had a mustache, a goatee and sideburns and a stray lock of hair curled over his forehead, which gave Paul the look of a mall-rat Mephistopheles.
A month later the charge was dropped. Paul's old friend Joan Verizzo, on her way to becoming a sheriff's deputy, worked on the case for the State Attorney's office.
"Dear Sheriff Joan," Pee-wee Herman wrote on a photograph for her. "Be my friend forever."