The Once and Future Pee-wee

By RUTH LA FERLA
The New York Times
May 20, 2007

IN the 1985 movie “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” the title character turns to a friend and murmurs darkly, “There are a lot of things about me, things you wouldn’t understand, things you couldn’t understand, things you shouldn’t understand.”

At the time those words seemed perversely at odds with the twee entertainer conceived by Paul Reubens, an actor so fused with Pee-wee Herman that he is enshrined in the popular imagination as an emblem of innocence — the sunny jester in white loafers and a red bow tie.

In retrospect, though, Pee-wee’s cautionary words had a prescient ring. More than 15 years have passed since Mr. Reuben’s arrest in 1991 on charges of indecent exposure, an episode that put an abrupt end to “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” the manically subversive Saturday-morning children’s television series introduced in 1986 on CBS.

Pee-wee’s signature staccato laugh, dancing eyebrows and drainpipe pants were packed away in mothballs, while Paul Reubens the actor continued to work, drawing raves for performances like that of a wily dope-dealing hairdresser in the 2001 movie “Blow.”

Mr. Reubens the man has, meanwhile, remained enigmatic, rarely giving interviews and preferring to retreat — as the gossips have it — behind the prickly cactus garden surrounding his house in the Hollywood Hills. As he pointed out with an affecting gravity, “For survival it’s much easier to not stick out.”

But to a public that remembers him with intense affection, Pee-wee is indelible. He has even become an unlikely fashion role model for a new generation of Hermanphiles who parade around town in slickly updated interpretations of their idol’s gray geek suits.

Mr. Reubens remains the hero of legions of post-adolescents and their parents, who recall him as an anarchic imp, a shrewd merchant of anticonformity. He routinely dispenses his signature at autograph shows.

“What I’ve noticed that people respond to in my career,” Mr. Reubens said, “is that I was very lucky. I had very little selling out.

“I meet people all day long who say to me, ‘I’m an artist because of you,’ really cool-looking young people. I just want to burst into tears.”

But in the past few months he has submerged his inner prankster in character roles that promise to recharge his erratic career.

In an interview at his publicist’s office in West Hollywood earlier this month, Mr. Reubens, 54, was by turns candid, wary and unnervingly seductive. At a glance, he appears to have traded in his antic persona for a worldlier, more subdued model — his girth expanded, his hair gray-flecked, his adenoidal whine modulated to a grainy croon.

STILL, a hint of his former daftness erupts in roles like that of Gerhardt, the beribboned monarch with a child-size prosthetic hand on “30 Rock” on NBC — a comic turn that has become must viewing on YouTube.

Yet he is rueful in the FX drama “Dirt,” playing opposite Courteney Cox as an alcoholic newsroom veteran who has seen palmier days, and caustic in “The Tripper,” a bleakly comic slasher film that was released in April.

“I was Pee-wee Herman for so many years that it wasn’t really a question that I didn’t want to do other things,” he said. “I didn’t have time for other things.”

Trained as a performer in the sulky James Dean mold, Mr. Reubens stopped chasing leading-man roles to play the jester in the late 1970s, only to discover that the character fit him like one of his natty suits. He has not appeared as Pee-wee in years, preferring the anonymity of a button-down shirt and fresh-laundered jeans.

Navigating the shoals of modern celebrity culture “definitely requires some thought and some strategy,” he said. “You are constantly trying to figure out, how does one not become a slave to being somebody that someone else would recognize?”

He added, “The public already knows about me more than I ever wanted it to know.”

He was alluding to the salacious publicity that dogged him for years after his arrest in an adult movie theater in South Florida. His police photo, reproduced in the tabloids, was of a man with a goatee, long ropy hair and a nakedly sullen expression. Disgraced, he became the target of off-color jokes and was subjected to relentless scrutiny.

Inevitably, it wrecked his career as an entertainer and role model who delighted in urging little children to use their imaginations and brush their teeth. “Playhouse” had been in reruns; even those were yanked off the air.

The incident haunted him. Years later, Lucy Dahl, a screenwriter and a friend of Mr. Reubens, told reporters that the media storm had been “extremely damaging.”

At the time he kept a low profile, Ms. Dahl said the other day. “But he has moved on,” she said. “We have all moved on. It was a long time ago.”

Mr. Reubens has recovered sufficiently, in fact, to step back and assess events in a historical context. Paraphrasing David Kamp writing in Vanity Fair, Mr. Reubens observed that the ongoing spectacle of public scandal that riveted the public from the early 1990s, ushered in the tabloid age, bracketed at one end “by my arrest, and at the other by Monica Lewinsky.”

To this day, he is skittish, deflecting questions with a stream of diversionary chatter. Mischievously, he showed off his Casio watch, set to buzz at the end of two hours to signal that time was up. He confided having dreamt about this interview, or more precisely about the tape recorder he imagined would be used. Why, he wondered, was it not attached to some sort of winding umbilical cord with a microphone at one end, and at the other, the reporter, seated at a respectful distance at the far side of the room.

With cockeyed dream logic, the answer occurred to him: “The reason reporters don’t have a long cord is they want to look at you up close. I bet the reason is you can stare at my forehead as much as you like.”

Mr. Reuben’s forehead is faintly lined, his manner seasoned, as may be fitting for a performer whose career trajectory appears to have reached midpoint at a time when many of his peers have peaked.

He appeared in a cape and purple beret as a Guardian Angel-like volunteer on the popular Comedy Central series, “Reno 911,” and had a cameo earlier this year as Sir Terrence, an overdressed plutocrat, in the movie “Reno 911!: Miami.” More recently, in “The Tripper,” Mr. Reubens, as a rock concert promoter, gets to pop his cork, spewing expletives with a patently cathartic force.

He is shopping “Area 57,” a pilot for a situation comedy in which he plays a passive-aggressive alien secreted away in the Nevada desert by government agents. And he has been cast alongside Demi Moore and Emma Thompson in a movie directed by Todd Solondz, known for dark suburban fables like “Happiness” and “Welcome to the Dollhouse.”

Mr. Reuben’s past indiscretions seem to pale alongside those of a Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan. What does he make of a celebrity culture in which stars flaunt their kinky exploits like soiled sheets to appease the public or to perk up a failing career (as occurred on a recent episode of “Dirt”)?

“That’s television,” Mr. Reubens said sharply. “I heard people at the time of my arrest say, ‘He did that to get out from under that Pee-wee character.’ Anyone who thinks like that is not remotely on top of what people go through. That’s like saying Lana Clarkson shot herself in the face.” (Which is what Phil Spector, the record producer, on trial for her murder, says she did in 2003.)

Though the past still rankles, Mr. Reubens is not quite ready to retire Pee-wee Herman. He hopes to secure financing for a third Pee-wee movie (a second, “Big Top Pee-wee,” was released in 1988), a cautionary tale in which Pee-wee descends on Hollywood and becomes a rock star rotten with fame.

“It’s kind of like crunch time now,” he said of the project. “I feel like I can’t put this off too much longer.” Wait too long, he fretted, and all the digital retouching in the world would not mask the effects of age.

A child of the 50s, Paul Rubenfeld grew up in Peekskill, N.Y., and later moved to Sarasota, Fla., where he tethered himself to his home screen watching “Captain Kangaroo” and “Howdy Doody.” Later he sent up these shows with brash affection on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

He conceived Pee-wee Herman while working with the Groundlings, an improvisational troupe in Los Angeles, and took the character to CBS. From the outset Pee-wee could be endearingly fussy, a throwback, unconscious perhaps, to Tintin, the fastidiously turned-out boy reporter immortalized in the 1920s in the famous Belgian comic strip.

EARLIER in his career, Mr. Reubens was tickled to discover that the Pee-wee look had been appropriated by the French, who conceived a line of Pee-wee Herman shoes and fashion paraphernalia. Today Thom Browne, a designer of skinny suits with high-water trousers, is obviously indebted to the playhouse.

Adam Shapiro, a New York fashion publicist, pays homage to the prim Pee-wee aesthetic in a red bow tie, short drainpipe pants and white Converse shoes. “There is something a little bit off about that silhouette that is appealing,” Mr. Shapiro said. “You definitely notice it on other people, too — the bow ties, for sure, the skinny trousers, the sneakers.”

Mr. Reubens, alternating bursts of frankness with reticence, declined to discuss his private life. “I’m not a hermit,” he said, “but I’m not out on the party circuit every night. I’m getting too old for that.”

He bemoaned the passing of the Hollywood studio system, which for the most part kept its players employed and their raunchier proclivities tightly under wraps. He copes, he confided, by “trying to maintain my naïveté while becoming jaded.”

“I’m not in Kansas anymore, ” Mr. Reubens added wistfully. “ I would love to be in Kansas.”