The Pee-Wee Perplex: Welcome to Paul Reubens’ ‘Playhouse’
I think to be an individual is a difficult thing, and it’s become more and more difficult.
—Pee-wee Herman
He saves every bit of energy for the time when the camera comes on, and he becomes Pee-wee that second.
—Gary Panter
The first time my mother saw Paul on late-night TV, she called me the next night, promptly at five o’clock, when the rates change. That was the kind of lady she was. And she said, “I don’t care what you say, Judy. I am going to buy that boy a suit that fits him. I don’t want to see him on television again in a suit that doesn’t fit him.”
—Judy Rubenfeld
The eldest of three children, Paul Rubenfeld was born in 1952, in Peekskill, New York, and grew up in Sarasota, Florida, where his parents ran a lamp store.
Today Mr. and Mrs. Rubenfeld are retired. Paul’s sister, Abby, 33, is an attorney and the legal director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a national gay and lesbian civil-rights organization active in fighting discrimination against AIDS victims. His brother, Luke, 28, trains Doberman pinschers, preparing them for what Milton Rubenfeld terms “a black belt in karate for dogs.”
When Paul was in sixth grade, he auditioned for an amateur production of A Thousand Clowns. “His father didn’t want him to try out,” Judy Rubenfeld says. “He said, ‘If he gets the part, he’s going to really have the bug,’ ’cause that was a big part for a kid. I said, ‘I think we should let him try out, ’cause he won’t get the part. There’re far better kids, and it will nip it in the bud.’ Of course, he got the part.”
And the kid got other parts: at the Asolo State Theater in Florida and at Northwestern University’s summer program for gifted high-school students, where, in what Paul calls “a humbling experience,” he discovered that there were other talented young people in the world. He may have been humbled, but he won the award as the summer’s best actor for his performance as David in the play David and Lisa. “Then I wasn’t humbled anymore, but for a while I was humbled.”
During his freshman year at Boston University, he auditioned for the Disney-endowed California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, which offers training in the performing and visual arts. “I only wanted to go to a school that you had to audition for to get in,” he says. “I got turned down by a lot of schools, so I didn’t think I would get in.”
Humbled or not, he got in. “There are a lot of wonderful actors out there, and wonderful actors don’t always have wonderful auditions. I’m not somebody who does really well on auditions. Most of the roles I’ve ever gotten have been from people who’ve seen me doing something full length, rather than an audition piece. When I was going to Boston University, I used to hitchhike to New York every weekend and audition for a different school. I was turned down twice by Carnegie-Mellon. I auditioned the second time because I wanted to be accepted and turn them down, but then they turned me down again. I was turned down at Juilliard and several other places. But Cal Arts was really where I wanted to go.”
While he was studying at Cal Arts, he won several roles — in the same show, The Death and Life of Jesse James, at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum. “I played all the parts that weren’t the lead parts. I played a Chinaman. I played a Spanish conquistador, and I spoke in Spanish, and I had my heart ripped out in an Aztec ceremony — by this guy who used to cut me with a knife for real every night. I used to have big arguments with him after the show.”
Somewhere along the way, Paul Rubenfeld became Paul Reubens. Living in California, he juggled the aspiring performer’s usual assortment of “between engagements” jobs — as a busboy, a Fuller Brush man, a submarine-sandwich maker, a setup person in the kitchen of a pizza shop. Engagements he was between included appearing in small parts in two Cheech and Chong movies and not appearing as the voice of Freaky Frankenstone on the TV cartoon The Flintstones. (Paul’s vocal diversity continues. In last summer’s movie The Flight of the Navigator, the voice of Max is credited to Paul Mall. And in the new George Lucas Star Tours ride at Disneyland, the main robot, Rex, would be speechless without him.)
With a former classmate from BU, Charlotte McGinnis, he developed an act called the Hilarious Betty and Eddie. “It was an out-of-trunk kind of vaudeville duo,” McGinnis says. “We did a puppet show and a stand-up sound-effects routine.” After winning twice as best act on TV’s Gong Show, the Barris Island boot camp for entertainers, they tried to win as worst act, because the award money was the same. They weren’t bad enough.
Paul also appeared on the show as a Flathead Indian lounge singer, with a sidekick playing the tom-tom in the background. He won twice for that, too. “I feel like I own Chuck Barris an enormous debt because I made a living from The Gong Show for a couple of years.”
Residuals from those appearances keep rolling in. “I get $7.50 checks once in a while. And the first five or six times they rerun ’em, you still get more prizes. I got a shrimpburger cooker and a bowling-ball set, and I got this really cool textured-paint stuff that I used on the walls of the Groundling Theatre that’s still there.”
As a member of the Groundlings, an L.A. improvisational theater group, Paul created a frenetic little guy names Pee-wee. “I used to have a little harmonica, a little teeny one about one inch long, and it said Pee-Wee on it, and the name stuck.”
In 1980 Paul starred in The Pee-wee Herman Show at the Groundling Theatre. A rough predecessor of Pee-wee’s Playhouse — but more boisterous and with sexual innuendo — it became a cult hit, playing to adults after midnight and to children at weekly matinees. Eventually it was shot at the Roxy Theater for an HBO special. Behold Pee-wee wearing mirrors on his shoes to reflect a girl’s underwear and hypnotizing a young woman in order to get her to take off her dress. Once she’s in her slip and awaiting his next suggestion, he doesn’t know what to do.
