But the nation’s attention last week was on the Pee-wee Herman found in the hothouse known as the XXX South Trail Cinema. In one sense the arrest of a 38-year-old actor named Paul Reubens on charges of indecent exposure during a hard-core film fest is a trivial episode in a summer of international banking scandals and superpower summits. Yet has there been such unity of water-cooler conversation since the gulf war? What people seemed to be searching for, in their edgy conversations and dozens of gross-but-funny jokes, was a way to think about a case that appeared to have a shortage of victims and an excess of police.
Can an electronic babysitter violate our children’s trust? The country divided into two camps. “I always knew there was something weird about him,” said the kind of no-nonsense folks who have the uncanny ability to look at a man with cherry-red lips and a talking chair named Chairry and see something out of the ordinary. At the same time, the Pee-wee Herman Defender’s Club sprang up in San Francisco. Its members sat in an office on Fillmore Street taking supportive phone calls-and wearing shirts that said HANDS OFF OUR PEE-WEE.
Reubens himself communicated with the world only by means of a sad mug shot. Pee-wee, when confronted with any sort of accusation, would say, “I know you are but what am I?” His creator seemed unable to express anything but shame and resignation. And understandably so: the mere accusation, which Reubens denies, has changed his life irrevocably. “Just make sure they spell your name right,” Hollywood cynics used to say. But the only thing the cops misspelled was “masterbate,” and CBS decided not to broadcast the final five reruns of his Emmy award-winning Saturday-morning show. Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., stopped showing a videotape in which Pee-wee helps explain how movies are made. Reubens’s own lawyer, who has since allegedly removed himself from the case, announced that “his career is over.”
Could this be happening in a country that danced to the Divinyls hit record of “I Touch Myself " just a couple of months ago? Friends have said that Reubens, who was described by his publicist as “emotionally devastated by the embarrassment of the situation,” planned to retire Pee-wee anyway. After five seasons on TV and two feature films, the creepily manic character, which Reubens stayed in for interviews and other public occasions, had become, they said, a crushing burden. “[Paul’s life] was a time bomb waiting to happen,” says actor-friend Bob Drew. “Sooner or later, he was going to do something human.”
The act Reubens is accused of performing during the heterosexually oriented triple feature of “Tiger Shark,” “Turn Up the Heat” and “Nancy Nurse” is defined, in a 1984 report of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, as “a natural and nonharmful behavior for individuals of all ages and both sexes.” The problem is going public. Exposure of the genitals is a violation of Florida Statute 800.03. The police report says that at 8:25 p.m. on July 26, and again five minutes later, the suspect was observed “with his exposed penis in his left hand.” Two of the three detectives seated in the theater eventually arrested Reubens in the lobby, where, had he not been staying at his parents’ house in Sarasota, he could have rented the same movies he’d been watching on the big screen.
The official police report makes Reubens sound shellshocked and desperate: “I’m Pee-wee Herman,” he allegedly told the law officers. “Maybe I could do a charity benefit for the Sheriff’s Office or something to take care of this.” When the detectives pressed on with the arrest, he pleaded ignorance. “I knew people fooled around with each other [in the theater],” he said. “But I thought it was OK to be by myself.” So, apparently, do a lot of other people. “With all the crime going on here,” said 73-year-old Sarasota resident Kenneth Meadows, “what the hell are three undercover detectives doing in a porno theater?” The police response is that they don’t make the laws, just enforce them. The undercover detectives were said to be working on a drug case, and when their leads did not pan out, they decided to check the theater for sex offenders. But one man’s “filler time” is another’s Kafkaesque nightmare. The jokes that swept the country seemed less like entertainment than true comic relief-a nervous reaction to the possibility of such humiliation. (One of the mildest: What’s Pee-wee’s favorite baseball team? The Expos.)
People also may be laughing because Pee-wee’s big adventure is a 20th-century myth become reality. Americans so love the idea of a secretly vile kiddie icon that they fabricate scandals where none exists. Pinky Lee, Buffalo Bob and Mister Rogers have all endured baseless rumors about their predilections, and Soupy Sales is still denying he told smutty jokes on TV in the ‘5Os and ’60s-and offering $10,000 to anyone who can prove he’s lying. Not that Soupy has shown much sympathy for Pee-wee. “There’s something about children that we protect,” he says. “We don’t want them around perverts. He can masturbate his brains out, but you don’t do that in a porno theater when you’re a role model.”
That sounds logical, but how many parents pointed their children in the direction of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” and said, “Be like him”? In fact, his show was ’la gallery of weirdos,” says John Hannah, a Los Angeles writer who knew Reubens. “A kind of surrealist bathhouse.” The man who played Pee-wee now appears to have a taste for pornography: apart from the current charges, for which he will receive a hearing on Aug. 9, Reubens was picked up in 1983 for allegedly “loitering and prowling” in front of a Sarasota adult bookstore, though no charges were ever pressed. That disqualifies him from a Supreme Court nomination. But Pee-wee Herman was a lot stranger, and we loved him to death.
