Everyone knew Pee-wee Herman. But few knew the man behind the man-child

Los Angeles Times

22-05-2025

The first time we see Paul Reubens in the documentary 'Pee-wee as Himself,' he is not playing Pee-wee Herman, the antic man-child he portrayed in comedy routines, movies, a children's TV show and most of his public life.
It's Reubens as we rarely saw him, out of character, having his hair and makeup fixed while he gently cracks jokes to the camera — claiming he was born in a house on the edge of the Mississippi River while his father worked on a steamboat.
Then his mask slips just a bit further. We hear him jostling gently with the documentary's director, Matt Wolf, over the film which Reubens yearns to control, but which friends and colleagues have told him he can't properly oversee because he is its subject.
'You don't have perspective, really, on yourself,' Reubens says to Wolf. 'I will argue that — and you and I are going to be arguing that for a long, long time. Until this documentary is finished. You mark my words.'
'Pee-wee as Himself,' which HBO is showing in two parts on May 23 and will stream on Max, is Wolf's story of how Reubens channeled his passions for vintage toys, television, alternative art and comedy into the goofy, giggling Pee-wee Herman, who became a foundational figure of the 1980s pop-culture landscape and the focus of a 1991 media scandal.
The documentary also supplies a vivid portrait of the real Reubens, who worked fastidiously to prevent audiences from seeing him as his authentic self. It explores his childhood, sexuality and uncompromising need to be in charge of any project involving him or his characters — right up to his death in 2023 at the age of 70, before the documentary was finished.
What 'Pee-wee as Himself' ultimately reveals is a creator and performer so diligently compartmentalized that he could split himself in two, living widely disparate lives as the public, voluble Pee-wee Herman and the private, retreating Paul Reubens, and still have whole sides of himself that almost no one saw.
'We're all entitled to our inner lives,' Wolf said in an interview. 'Artists, particularly, are many different people inside. Paul was no exception, except the way he went about that was more extreme than perhaps you or I.'
Wolf, whose previous nonfiction films include 'Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell,' about the avant-garde musician, and 'Spaceship Earth,' about the artificial ecosystem Biosphere 2, is 43 years old. Though he considers himself a Pee-wee fan, he grew up with more attachment to a beloved talking Pee-wee Herman doll than to movies like 'Pee-wee's Big Adventure' or the Saturday morning show 'Pee-wee's Playhouse.'
Over a long period of outreach and with help through mutual friends, Wolf got Reubens to begrudgingly agree to a series of interviews — but, the director said, 'with a lot of hesitation, and on the condition that we would have a 30-day trial period to see if we could work together.'
Though Wolf gradually gained Reubens' trust, there was conflict as well — often around the subject's desire to take control of the film.
As Wolf recounted, 'The first conversation, immediately, Paul said, 'I want to direct a documentary about myself, but everybody's telling me I can't. I don't understand why.' And I said, 'Well, I'm here to talk to you about me directing a documentary.'' (Wolf said they eventually agreed that Reubens would have 'meaningful consultation' on the film.)
That compulsive need for authority is a quality that Reubens' friends and family members observed in him, going all the way back to his childhood.
'It was important to him that he control the narrative about him,' said Abby Rubenfeld, his sister. 'He knew what he wanted and he made it happen.'
Growing up, Rubenfeld said that her brother was clearly poised to become an entertainer, whether he was putting on shows for the neighborhood on a basement stage their father built, or cajoling the family to travel from their home in upstate Oneonta, N.Y., to a taping of the 'Howdy Doody' show in Manhattan.
'He was so excited you would think he was the guest on Oprah,' Rubenfeld said.
When Reubens joined the Groundlings comedy troupe in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, his colleagues there also noted his ambitions, even in a field where everyone was striving to stand out.
'His level of commitment was something I hadn't quite seen,' said Tracy Newman, a founding member of the Groundlings who worked with Reubens in this era. 'He was always thinking, looking for an opening, looking for his thing.'
When Reubens first hit upon the childlike, toy-obsessed Pee-wee character at the Groundlings, Newman said, 'He knew he had something he could draw on so easily, because he was a 10-year-old boy at heart.'
At the peak of Pee-wee's fame in the 1980s, Reubens was appearing publicly as his character and stopped granting interviews as himself, which seemed like the ideal way to safeguard his privacy and still enjoy the civilian pleasures of anonymity.
'Brad Pitt probably has to stay sequestered in a tower in a castle somewhere — it becomes no fun at all,' said Cassandra Peterson, the actor better known as the macabre movie hostess Elvira. 'I feel like I got to have a normal life, and Paul got to have a normal life too, and pick and choose when he wanted to be fawned over.' When they socialized together without their Pee-wee and Elvira costumes, Peterson said they were each like 'a drag queen who was out of drag.'
But behind the scenes, Reubens was wrestling with his decision to hide his identity as a gay man after having been more openly out during his pre-fame years.
Amid the scrutiny that came with his success, 'he thought he was in the closet,' said Rubenfeld, now a lawyer who focuses on LGBT rights. 'I think most people thought he was gay anyway, but he chose not to make that public. Nobody should have that kind of pain about who they are and have it affect them that much.'
Even during the making of 'Pee-wee as Himself,' this proved difficult for Reubens to acknowledge. At one point, Wolf recalled, 'He came into my little room and was like, 'I don't know how to do this.' And I said, 'You just say, 'I'm gay.''
Once filmmaking resumed, Wolf recalled, 'I said, 'Paul, are you gay?' He made a bunch of jokes, and then he started to just speak from an authentic place.'
The carefully constructed boundary between Paul Reubens and Pee-wee Herman was all but annihilated when Reubens was arrested for indecent exposure in 1991 at an adult movie theater in Sarasota, Fla., where his parents lived. At the time, 'Playhouse' was in reruns.
The media circus that followed now seems wildly excessive. As Wolf explained, 'I always said to him, 'You didn't do anything wrong. In historical retrospect, this was an injustice that was a symptom of the media's emerging appetite for takedowns, and you were a casualty of that.''
But Reubens felt like a pariah and the documentary shows him struggling in near-solitude for months after the incident.
He and Wolf never got to have a detailed discussion about this aftermath or how Reubens went on to put his life and career back together. The actor and the filmmaker had had a falling out during the making of 'Pee-wee as Himself,' again over editorial control, then reconciled. Reubens said he would give a final interview and, Wolf said, 'he trusted me and that he wasn't sure he'd be able to be as involved as he hoped.' Coming out of that conversation, Wolf felt he had the confidence he needed to continue the project.
A week later, Reubens died of cancer, having kept his diagnosis a secret from nearly everyone except his closest confidants.
Rubenfeld, who was among the few who knew Reubens was sick, said there were still times before he died that her brother would try to conceal the severity of his illness.
'Paul is an actor, and when I talked to him, you couldn't really tell if he was in a bad mood, unless he wanted you to. And you couldn't tell if he didn't feel well, unless he wanted you to,' she said.
Wolf said he learned of Reubens' death on 'the day that everybody found out that Paul died,' through the news media coverage and the many sad, celebratory tributes that followed. For all the involvement that Reubens had wanted on the documentary, Wolf was left to finish it without him, using the interviews he had already conducted with Reubens and a haunting narration that Reubens had recorded for him in the final days of his life.
Wolf knows that, without his intending it, 'Pee-wee as Himself' will be viewed as a grand summation of someone who never quite knew what to make of himself.
'As much as Paul had done work on himself through the various kinds of traumas and controversies he faced in the media, I don't think he necessarily could see himself in all of his complexity,' Wolf said. 'I think a lot of what I was asking Paul to do was to integrate different parts of himself, and that was very uncomfortable.'
Wolf added, 'Paul started to recognize that I had a take on his story, and that he was OK with that take.'
While his perspective on Reubens may endure or fade, what will stand over time, Wolf said, is Reubens' legacy as an artist and innovator who brought his offbeat sensibility to the widest possible audience, and who paid a price for doing so.
'I think there's consequences for being an experimental performance artist in a mainstream context,' Wolf said. 'Being avant-garde and being popular — those things don't always go together.'