For Reubens, all this hoarding is both a blessing and a curse. “I go into a junk store and see some antique thing, and my mind goes: Someone’s going to break that in 10 more minutes.” Instead, he “rescues” it, promising to love it always. There’s just one problem: “You can’t love the amount of stuff I have. I filled up my house three times. I have, like, multiple storage units.”
That undying affection for evocative objects was part of Pee-wee’s unique appeal. His beloved bike wasn’t just vintage cool, it had those multicolored plastic streamers on the handlebars that just scream, with childlike immodesty, “I know this is cool!” Some of the best-loved characters on his TV show were animated inanimate things: Chairry the overstuffed chair, Globey the globe. Pee-wee made animals by sticking pencils into potatoes; he had “Fun With Tape,” making scary faces by wrapping sticky cellophane around his head. Though it had admirers of all ages, Pee-wee’s Playhouse was written “for 5-year-olds,” Reubens says; the show’s best moments were those he could imagine making “a 5-year-old fall off the couch.” That made it all the more awful when police, acting on a tip, pawed through Reubens’ mountain of stuff and declared he had a thing for minors.
“I don’t want anyone for one second to think that I am titillated by images of children,” Reubens said on Dateline NBC. “The public may think I’m weird. They may think I’m crazy. . . . 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.”
But Reubens’ fondness for Pee-wee never went away. “I always loved being that character,” he tells me, his eyes tearing up as he recounts his previous evening’s activity: introducing the annual outdoor screening of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. ‘There were 3,000 people there,’ he says. “I could feel the love.” Pee-wee never seems to have been far from his mind. In the wake of Scandal No. 2, he devoted himself to finishing two Pee-wee movie scripts. The “dark” one he describes as a “sort of Valley of the Dolls Pee-wee story” about what happens when Pee-wee gets famous (hint: He becomes a monster). Reubens has tried to interest studios in that screenplay but had no luck. The second script, based closely on the TV show, is more obviously family-friendly: Pee-wee’s Playhouse, The Movie. That script is “perfect,” he says, admitting he’s been working on it, off and on, since before his 30th birthday—before he first brought Pee-wee to the theater.
That screenplay, in fact, is the main reason Reubens is taking Pee-wee back onstage: He wants—needs—to prove to the Hollywood machers that he can still pack a house. He doesn’t want to do it forever. Just long enough to convince “five people at five studios” that he’s bankable. “I can’t walk into somebody’s office with my background and expect they’re going to see it, you know?” So he’s going to prove it to them. He hopes. “It’s a drag to have tabloid baggage. It’s weird to have your career be a footnote to that, especially when you love what you do.” But he’s over it, he says. “I’m not giving people that power anymore.”
The Casio watch on Reubens’ wrist beeps, alerting him that our time is almost up. “Speaking of obsessive-compulsive,” he says self-deprecatingly, noting that he lives his life by the alarm chimes. Reubens is not humble about Pee-wee’s cultural impact, and he has no reason to be. It’s been said more than once that without him, there would be no SpongeBob Squarepants on TV, no Mini Me in the Austin Powers movies, no Thom Browne pencil suits. Rock bands—Au Revoir Simone and Mr. Bungle—are named after bits in his TV show. Pee-wee made childlike allusion part of the fabric—not the fringe—of America. When I mention that Pirates of the Caribbean (particularly Johnny Depp’s role) owes a debt to Pee-wee, his eyes twinkle. “So does Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” he says.
Perhaps the most groundbreaking part of Pee-wee’s Playhouse was its diverse cast, which included Laurence Fishburne and S. Epatha Merkerson, and a bevvy of other actors of color. But Pee-wee’s wacky world wasn’t just colorblind—social outcasts were welcome, and the show proved effeminate gay camp had mainstream appeal. It was a quirky, polyglot utopian oasis in Reagan-era America.
