November 07, 2007

SIGH. The hatchet job on Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, both the book by David Michaelis and the PBS American Masters special based on the book

To write a successful biography or documentary about an artist, you must genuinely appreciate the work they did. How can you capture the essence of someone in any meaningful way if you don't understand them? Two new attempts to present the life of Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, fail miserably for this reason. The reader/viewer is left feeling empty and wondering, who was that all about?

If you have read Peanuts through the years, you know Charles Schulz, because he poured his heart and soul into being a cartoonist, his life's ambition and life's work. And you know the new book by David Michaelis and the PBS American Masters documentary based on the book missed the mark badly.

The premise for the book is Michaelis' pedestrian thesis of Charles Schulz as Charles Foster Kaine in Citizen Kaine - he lost his mother as a boy, he longed for romance but never got really close to a woman, he immersed himself into his work to avoid life. The only problem is, none of it applies to Schulz. He was in the army when his mother died, hardly a child unnaturally torn away from his home at a young and tender age. Like so many people in his generation, he married young and for all the wrong reasons - "nice" couples who wanted to have sex got married back then, or shortly thereafter. And with the unavailability of birth control, and the assumption that having kids was a given, couples legally mated for all the wrong reasons soon became a family, bound together out of societal pressure. The husband threw himself into his work. The wife tried to find whatever limited outlets were available to her. Then one day it occurred to much of the western world in a collective aha moment, why do we have to stay in miserable unions? And they looked around. Rinse and repeat, and you have a picture of how millions of marriages ended in the 1970's.

The documentary creators decided to phone it in, parroting the book and its sad little premise nearly word for word. The book's author, Michealis, basically narrated the thing, briefly trading off with a stepdaughter doing a fairly good impersonation of Lucy Van Pelt and a younger cartoonist acquaintance, Lynn Johnston. Interspersed were film clips, many of which were from stock advertising footage from the 1950's or completely irrelevant to Schulz (nowhere is this more evident than in the clips showing various artists singing Charlie Brown (He's a Clown) - a song that had nothing whatsoever to do with Peanuts).

So we were left to catch glimpses of the Charles Schulz we had come to know, when the wretched things stopped obsessing about his sex life for a moment or two. Watching Schulz drive his kids and their neighbors to school, we see a decent man who cared about family and community, in a quiet, unassuming mid-western way. Learning how he wrote A Charlie Brown Christmas in just a few days, and fought to keep the scene with Linus reading scripture in the show, despite fierce opposition all around, we see his depth of thought and spirit. Hearing the catch in his voice as he spoke his last words to the fans before he died, we know how much it all meant to him, and that he knew, finally, how much it meant to all of us.

Reading Peanuts from the early days to the very last comic strip, what we see is not Citizen Kaine. From the 1950's to the 1990's, what we see is a fascinating glimpse of American life, through the eyes of a profoundly funny but perceptive artist (who, like many artists before him and after, had characteristic bouts of melancholy, but also of joy). But much of the cultural significance of Peanuts was simply not considered worthy of mention in the book or documentary. Not a word about Woodstock, named after the legendary music festival! Nor Vince Guaraldi - just a bar of his famous "Linus and Lucy" evokes memories of Peanuts. Nor the groundbreaking feature film based on the comic strip, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, Snoopy's "feeling groovy" free spirit, Linus' gentle and grounded philosophy, Peppermint Patty's liberated celebration of girlhood, Spike's determined individualism - all these wonderfully developed characters took a backseat to the robbing of their creator's dignity.

(Another example of a dignity-robbing "biography" is Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg. Read Katharine Hepburn's autobiography Me: Stories of My Life instead.)

At Cartoon Brew, his son Monte Schulz talks about the inaccuracies in the book, as well as the inordinate amount of time spent speculating about his father's sex life, which Monte echoes elsewhere about the documentary (his sisters, who agree "100%" - his sister Amy said, “I thought I had a happy childhood until I read David’s book" - are also featured in the discussion thread):

...Dad was a wonderful parent, reading to me, teaching me to throw baseballs, watching movies with me, driving me to school for years, taking me down to SF for doubleheaders, hitting fly balls to me for hours, teaching me how to shoot marbles, sharing his books with me as I grew older and began to write, flying out to Minnesota with me to help buy sheets and pillows for my dorm room, picking me up at the airport each time I flew home, and even in the last six months of his life, staying up late at the ice arena, well past his bedtime, to watch his 49 year old son play hockey games. None of that is in the book. nor are Dad’s passions for golf (which he played all his life, including at the Bing Crosby Pro-Am and the Dinah Shore Invitational for years, baseball (he coached our Bronco League baseball team one summer when I was twelve), tennis where he and my stepmother joined club and met many new friends and played tournaments (he and I won a father-son tournament when I was in my late 20s) and met Billie Jean King, went to Wimbledon twice and became very involved with the Woman’s Sports Foundation, a huge part of his life. And, of course, he loved books, movies, cars, music. What does David [the author] mentions of that? Nothing?

Does he name Dad’s, say, five favorite books? Nope. Artists? Nope. He writes a lot about “Citizen Kane” but not about “Beau Geste” or any of Dad’s other favorite films, because the Welles movie influences David’s theme and the others don’t. Why only ten lines or so about the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference, which Dad and I attended for more than twenty five years? That was huge interest of Dad’s. He loved books and writing and talking about both. In David’s first draft, his only mention of the conference was regarding Dad’s “writer’s conference girl-friend, Suzanne Del Rossi,” a completely preposterous page and a half about a woman Dad knew there, someone all of us knew, anyone attended the conference knew, who was married and flirted endlessly, not only with Dad but with many other men there. And nothing ever happened because it was only for fun. Reading that section is what put me over the edge, because I knew then that David had no desire to tell Dad’s life, but rather was more interesting in moralizing and psychoanalyzing Dad because David himself loves analysis. That’s his story, but not ours...

Let me tell you, though, that David never met my father, and basically hid from us what he intended to write. This is very apparent when you read some of the email exchanges we had over the years, and what we spoke about on the phone. I used to ask him not to babble about how Dad was depressed all the time because it wasn’t true, and “don’t write some kind of tabloid novel about Dad’s life.” To which he’d always respond, “I wouldn’t spend six years writing that kind of book.” But he did. Oh, someone asked about any of us carrying on Dad’s legacy. Well, none of us can draw, nor do we have the same sensibility he had toward his characters. The strip was his, but we were the ones who made the decision (by renewal copyright law in the ’70s) have the strip die when he did. We have our own lives and interests, though Dad did tell a friend that he thought my fiction was “raising the level of art in the family.” Thanks for that, Dad! Nor true, of course, but I do my best. Yes, all of this, even responding on here is frustrating, but that biography is so absurdly false in so many ways, I could not just be quiet. I’m mostly disappointed that so many reviewers apparently believe what’s in it. Such is life.



"Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself." ~ Doris Lessing

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