The death of actor Paul Reubens of cancer at the age of seventy was an oddly low-key departure for a man who created one of the twentieth century’s iconic comic characters, and also found himself mired in scandal that threatened to destroy his career, and to a large extent took him away from the A-list fame that he would have expected to attain. Yet throughout his more than four-decade career, Reubens was nothing if not a survivor, even a fighter. The fact that incidents that would have ruined most other men were treated by him as obstacles to be overcome indicated both his resilience and — to some — a refusal to kowtow to the expected demands of the industry that both made and ruined him.
Reubens achieved prominence with his character Pee-wee Herman, who he created in the late Seventies with the improvisation troupe the Groundlings, and firstly developed The Pee-wee Herman Show for HBO in the early Eighties. The character of Pee-wee, who Reubens more or less morphed into in public and possibly in private, was an eccentric man-boy, like a more destructive version of Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean, who remained one of the strangest and most unlikely figures to have achieved prominence and success. But once Reubens appeared in the Tim Burton-directed film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, in which he travels America searching for his missing bicycle and is caught up in surreal exploits along the way, he seemed to have assured himself of a niche in popular culture, even if, in large part thanks to the creation of the Pee-wee character, Reubens himself seemed to have faded from view.
His downfall came in 1991, when he was arrested for indecent exposure at an adult movie theater; while many would argue that, in the pre-internet era, masturbating in public was one of the few resources available to those so inclined, it spelled a death knell for Reubens’s mainstream career, even though he found a variety of people to defend him. One of these, unfortunately, was Bill Cosby, who was quoted as saying, “Whatever [Reubens has] done, this is being blown all out of proportion.”
Reubens made sporadic appearances in theaters in the Nineties, with cameos in the likes of Batman Returns and Matilda, but he did not resurrect Pee-wee until 2010, when he appeared in a successful stage show featuring the character. While he talked occasionally about developing an adult-themed story that would revolve around Pee-wee, it never came to pass, and his swansong in 2016, with the Judd Apatow-produced Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, was acclaimed without ever quite returning Reubens to the mainstream.
Reubens’s death was greeted with the usual sorrow and tributes, with everyone from Burton to Cher expressing their regret and loss at his demise. Yet it’s hard not to wonder whether many of these same influential and powerful people might have done more for Reubens during his wilderness years (Burton excepted). He led what was clearly an eccentric and often troubled personal life — which also included an arrest for possession of child pornography in 2002, although the charges were eventually dropped — but Reubens was a supremely and uniquely talented character comedian. Such are the vagaries of an industry that has always been frightened of those who do not conform.
Yet Reubens’s unique, even strange talent was one that could never quite be handled by Hollywood, and so perhaps the sudden, subdued nature of his end was in keeping with a life lived on his own terms — even if this prevented him from getting the true credit that he deserved.
