The rise and fall of kiddie star Pee-wee Herman, a.k.a Paul Reubens In the last week of July, while George Bush, James Baker and Yitzhak Shamir were making historic headlines, the misadventures of a nice Jewish boy from Florida were garnering near-equal space from much of the U.S. media, and drawing even greater attention than the politicians from the American public.
Pee-wee Herman, a.k.a. Paul Reubens, the 38-year-old star of two feature movies and an Emmy-award-winning Saturday morning children's series, was arrested in his home town of Sarasota and charged with indecent exposure in a pornographic movie theater. The comedian has almost never been photographed without his white-faced, red-lipped make-up, but within hours of his arrest Reubens's mug shot complete with decidedly un-Pee-wee-esque long hair and goatee was being flashed nationally on the evening newscasts. Reubens, who grew up in Sarasota and was in town visiting his family, denied the charge, which carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail and a $ 500 fine.
But the real cost to Reubens, whatever the outcome of the case, may be his show-business career. When news of his alleged misconduct broke, Disney-MGM studios in Florida pulled a videotape featuring Pee-wee used on the tour of its theme park. The CBS network also promptly canceled a series of repeat episodes of "Pee-wee's Playhouse," the hugely popular Saturday morning television series Reubens had discontinued last year after five seasons. Reportedly devastated by the publicity, Reubens retreated from view, while on television and radio talk shows across the country his public evenly split among supporters and detractors debated his alleged transgression and mulled over his eventual fate.
On his television show, Pee-wee was fond of telling viewers that he was born to Honey and Herman Herman. As Paul Reubens, however, he was the oldest of three children born to Judy and Milton Reubenfeld, in the Hudson River Valley town of Peekskill, New York, and was raised in Florida, where his parents owned a lamp store. Judy Reubenfeld has reportedly not found it easy to be the mother of a performer whose fame is based entirely on a fictional alter-ego. "When you're a Mrs. Reubens, or Mrs. Reubenfeld, or Mrs. Herman," she once said in an interview, "it gets very confusing. I'm not sure where Paul ends and Pee-wee begins."
The character of Pee-wee was debuted by Reubens in a Los Angeles comedy club in 1979, in a short skit that parodied such children's television icons as "Captain Kangaroo" and "Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood." Popular response to Pee-wee aptly described in a recent biography as a "mincing, prancing, nasally whining man-child" with "rouged cheeks, cherry-red lips, skinny bow-ties and shrunken, fifties-style suits" resulted in Reubens's becoming a frequent, if somewhat irksome, guest on such talk-shows as "Late Night With David Letterman."
When his show "Pee-wee's Playhouse" debuted in 1986, it was hailed as an oasis of impish imagination and harmless anarchy in a Saturday morning wasteland of callow action-adventure shows. Broadcast from a studio designed as cubist-kitsch recreation room, the show featured such goofy series regulars as a long-suffering floor called "Floory," a Parisian-accented world globe called "Globey" and Pee-wee's pet Pterodactyl. Pee-wee's refrigerator was populated by animated left-overs; there was a family of clay-mation dinosaurs beyond the mouse-holes of his walls, and the playhouse was overrun with bizarre visitors like a very fat ballerina and a slick black cowboy.
"Pee-wee's Playhouse" quickly earned accolades for its mixed-media feast of live action and special effects; a third of its viewers were, in fact, adults who had cottoned on to what one reviewer called Reubens's "daffy educated eye." Time's art critic Robert Hughes even proclaimed the show superior on a visual level to most contemporary fine art. In addition to the series, Reubens wrote and starred in two feature films the critically acclaimed "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" (1985) and the less successful "Big Top Pee-wee" three years later. (The movies were never screened in Israel, where distributors were baffled by their weird humor.)
In the early 80s Reubens had decided to merge himself professionally with his perennially adolescent and androgynous creation. Whether appearing on TV or being interviewed, he almost never dropped his Pee-wee guise. The real personality behind the make-up has been something of a mystery, which accounts in large part for the tremendous publicty the incident has generated. Another factor is Pee-wee's position as a children's television and movie idol; "Traditionally (such) celebrities want the image of being squeaky clean so they're acceptable to parents and advertisers, and an appropriate role model for kids," said Margaret Loesch, president of the Fox Children's Network, to the Los Angeles Times.
However, the affair has already sparked a pro-Pee-wee backlash, with major entertainment figures like Bill Cosby rallying to his defense. But Pee-wee's predicament has not galvanized the 20,000 strong Jewish community of his home-town. "People here," says Barry Millman, public relations director of the Sarasota Jewish Federation, "don't see any connection between what Reubens did and what religion he practices. They see it for what it is: not a felony, but a victimless crime. And frankly, we've got bigger problems to worry about." (left) Pee-wee in his playhouse (top) Paul Reubens sans make-up