Monte Schulz' Response To Schulz and Peanuts

From Cartoon Brew's comments:

I forgot to look for responses to my last message on here, but seeing the comments, I believe I need to clarify a few things. First of all, we did not expect, nor did we desire, a fan-bio on Dad. I spoke with David Michaelis on a regular basis for the six years he worked on the book and discussed many issues with him. We knew he’d write about the affair and had no dispute with him at all over that. Nor did we anticipate the book being merely a glowing tribute. After all, we didn’t hire him to write the book; we simply agreed (myself and stepmother) than he seemed to be a good choice. He brought the project to us; we did not seek anyone to write Dad’s biography. Remember, he sold the bio to Harper Collins, not to us. So why the complaints?

How could we have been so surprised by what he wrote? And why does he and Harper Collins maintain that I, in particular, had the chance to correct any errors in the book, yet chose not to? Well, this is not a good venue to explain all this in full, but I’ll summarize as best I can. First of all, there are three levels of problems in the book for me (and not only the family objects to this book, by the way, but also everyone in Dad’s inner circle — close friends, his lawyers, business associates, etc.), and they are as follows: an array of factual errors, both large and small, which highlight David’s intentions in the book; a number of people who were interviewed but whose comments were essentially excluded because they either contradicted or failed to support David’s thesis; and lastly, the greater part of Dad’s story, which David’s deliberately left out of the book because it did not interest him.

Now, we were sent a manuscript at Christmas time last year to read through and comment on. I spoke with David just a couple of days before receiving my copys and reiterated my support of his book, and his right as a writer to voice his opinion (which is another reason why we’d never sue him, even if we had grounds: we believe in his First Amendment rights and his legitimacy as an author). But once I read the manuscript and several of the things in it, well, basically, the top of my head blew off. Factual errors, by example: he argued that my dad was able to work so effectively because my mom ran the place where we lived, doing all the cooking, cleaning, etc. But he left out a wonderful black woman who worked for us almost seven years, Eva Gray, one of the dearest people I ever knew (she just died last year, and we made sure that she and her husband Jim were able to attend Dad’s memorial service), and very integral to our lives back then. David leaves her out of the book entirely, boosting Mom’s roll in our lives and diminishing Dad’s. Then, when he does mention her as fixing snacks for us in 1969 while my mom worked at our ice arena, it’s absurd because she hadn’t been with us for three years by then, having left in 1966 to help with her husband’s business.

He also talks about how my mom had built a pond in 1960 and stocked it with bass so my grandfather could fish when he visited (more proof of everything my mom did, which Dad did not), but, in fact, that pond didn’t even exist until seven years or so later, well after my grandfather was already dead. Just two of many, many factual errors, minor except in their intent, and unnecessary because David could easily have asked me about them during his writing. He didn’t because he’s arrogant. Also, he wrote about how we were inundated by strangers visiting for autographs and Kodak pics of Dad. Not true. I have no memory of strangers driving onto our property (which was not the vast estate David makes it out to be), nor does my sister Jill, nor does my mother. It wasn’t true. Lots of errors like that, careless, silly mistakes. There was no bid of $170,000 in ‘69 for the ice arena, and therefore the costs did not, as David wrote, balloon up 780% to 1.25 million. That latter number was the actual bid. I know this because my stepfather was the contractor and that was his bid. He was astounded that David would write that first number. Lots of mistakes like that.

But what about voices who weren’t heard? Well, for example, he only spoke to my sister Jill once over a lunch and that was that. He did interview Cathy Guisewite, but then called back to ask her, if you can believe it, whether or not my dad “came on to her.” Is he joking? Cathy knew Dad for more than twenty years, and except for one or two lines, David left her out of the book in favor of Lynn Johnston who provided much more provocative information, much of which (particularly in the first draft) is silly and self-serving.

He cherry-picked quotes, put ones together that did not belong together (getting my sister Amy in a section about how Dad was unaffectionate to his children to say that she had to learn to hug from the Mormon church. Actually, she told me that she explained to David how when she was younger, she hated people invading her personal space, but when she joined the Mormons, people were always coming up and hugging her, so she had to learn to do so, as well. But she said that story had nothing to do with Dad at all). Yet David conflated the ideas together.

For my part, 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 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.

So, why didn’t I correct him when I read that first version? Because to change the central erroneous nature of what he’d written would have required a massive re-write and re-thinking of the entire book, something he would never have had time to do, even had he the will and the desire, which he obviously did not. I did not want to clean up the minor errors, only to see the bigger ones remain. Again, I’m only touching on a few issues. If any of you want me to answer anything with greater specificity, I’d be happy to do so. I apologize for rambling like this, but the story is very convoluted. I will tell you that NY Times piece happened because a long interview I did for Time magazine was apparently killed somewhere high above the magazine, up at corporate (I’m not allowed to say more than that), and therefore I was directed to the NY Times reporter who, sadly, hadn’t even read the book when we spoke.

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.

*************************************************************************************

That's enlightening! I'm still curious to read it, but I'll make sure to take it all with a mountain of salt.

A New Schulz Biography

NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW: Good Grief!
SCHULZ AND PEANUTS A Biography - David Michaelis.
Illustrated. 655 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $34.95.
Reviewed by CHARLES McGRATH
Published: October 14, 2007

Toward the end of his life Charles Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” wished he were Andrew Wyeth. What Wyeth did was fine art, he grumbled, while he was just a newspaper cartoonist, a draftsman, whose work would surely not last. In fact, “Peanuts” is still read, in anthologies and compilations, by many more people than ever looked at a Wyeth, and Schulz’s was arguably the greater talent. He transformed the newspaper cartoon strip, busy and cluttered by the time he turned up in the late ’40s, by flooding it with white space, and by reducing his childish characters to near abstraction — huge circular heads balanced on tiny bodies — he rendered them far more expressive than their cartoon peers. The strip was able to register grown-up emotions, like anxiety, depression, yearning, disillusionment, that had never been in cartoons before. Instead of the “Slam!” “Bam!” “Pow!” sound effects that were the lingua franca of the comics, it employed a quieter, more eloquent vocabulary: “Aaugh!” and “Sigh.”

“Peanuts” was beloved by everyone: by hipsters and college kids (in the ’60s especially); by presidents (Ronald Reagan once wrote Schulz a fan note, saying he identified with Charlie Brown); by the Apollo 10 astronauts, who named their orbiter and landing vehicle after Charlie and Snoopy; by ministers and pastors, who read moral and theological lessons into the strip; by the suits in Detroit, who paid Charlie and the gang a small fortune to shill for the Ford Falcon. At its peak the strip reached 300 million readers in 75 countries; 2,600 papers and 21 languages every day. The various animated TV specials continue to top the Nielsen charts whenever they’re broadcast, and the musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” after selling out for four years off Broadway, is now a staple of high school and amateur theater productions — the most-produced musical ever.

The success of the strip, together with its spinoffs and an almost unending flood of cheesy “Peanuts” ware — calendars, bedsheets, wastebaskets, lunchboxes, “Warm Puppy” coffee mugs and the like — made Schulz an immensely wealthy man, rich enough to build his own ice rink. In the ’80s he was one of the 10 highest-paid entertainers in America, right up there with Oprah and Michael Jackson. In fact, if by artist we mean someone who paints or draws, it’s no stretch at all to say that Charles Schulz was the most popular and most successful American artist who ever lived. He was also, to judge from David Michaelis’s new biography, one of the loneliest and most unhappy.

We should have guessed, for as Michaelis points out, “Peanuts” was almost transparently autobiographical. There really was an unattainable Little Red-Haired Girl. Her name was Donna Mae Johnson, and she jilted Schulz in July 1950; he nursed the rejection, along with all the other slights he suffered from wished-for girlfriends, for the rest of his life. Charlie Brown, wishy-washy, disillusioned, but also secretly ambitious, was the artist himself, of course; and so were Linus, the oddball; Schroeder, meticulous and gifted; and, above all, Snoopy, with his daydreams, his fantasies, his sense of being undervalued and misunderstood. Violet, with her mean streak; and Lucy, bossy, impatient and sarcastic, were all the controlling, withholding women in Schulz’s life, especially his mother and his first wife, Joyce. Michaelis also goes in for a certain amount of psychologizing, but once you have the key it hardly seems necessary.

Michaelis’s last book was an exceptionally good biography of N. C. Wyeth (Andrew’s father), and his task here is both easier and harder. Wyeth was the practitioner of a dying, minor art form — he was the last of the great painterly illustrators — and if that earlier book had a weakness, it was that Michaelis barely bothered to explain why he deserved a full-length treatment. In the case of his Schulz biography, the importance of the subject almost goes without saying (though the author is at frequent pains to remind us, even so). Schulz was what so many lesser figures are carelessly said to be: a genuine American icon, who in his unassuming way deeply imprinted our culture.

On the other hand, N. C. Wyeth lived a large, big-themed life, with a tragic, Dreiser-ish subplot for good measure. (In his 60s, he became obsessed with one of his daughters-in-law and died in a railroad-crossing collision — probably by accident, but possibly by intention — with her son, his grandson, at his side.) Schulz’s much longer life (1922-2000) was, by comparison, bland and eventless — or at least the part that wasn’t lived inside his head, and except for the strip, he left few clues as to what was going on in there. Though he was one of the first to introduce psychological themes into cartooning, with Lucy and her sidewalk psychiatric-help booth, he was himself stubbornly unanalytical. His nature was as much a puzzle to him as it was to everyone else. “It took me a long time to become a human being,” he told a magazine interviewer in 1987.

People who knew Schulz always called him Sparky, the nickname given him at birth by an uncle, who shortened it from Spark Plug, the name of a woebegone race horse just recently introduced into the popular Barney Google comic strip. It was an almost comically inappropriate handle — there was nothing in the least scintillating about the young Sparky, who was small, shy, geeky — and also a fateful one, linking him to what from a very early age he determined to be his life work: to produce a syndicated daily comic strip.

Not that there were many signs he had a gift for it, or for anything else. Schulz was born and — except for a weird and awful two-year stint the family endured in the California desert — grew up in the working-class neighborhoods of the Twin Cities. His father, who was born in Germany and grew up with German-speaking parents, ran a barber shop (just like Charlie Brown’s dad). His mother, who never got beyond third grade, came from a clannish, depressive, hard-drinking Norwegian farm family and was one of those people who feel inadequate and superior at the same time. According to Michaelis, she could be distant, cool, even mocking and scornful, and he blames her for most of Sparky’s woes, especially his lifelong feeling of being insufficiently loved.

Schulz was raised in what sounds like a grim, even more isolated version of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon — a close-knit place ruled by church and family, where book learning was regarded with suspicion and where, far from being above average, children were discouraged from thinking too highly of themselves. Early in grammar school, Schulz was bumped ahead a grade, which guaranteed that for the rest of his school career he would always be the smallest, skinniest, most awkward kid in the class. Though a decent pickup hockey player, and a good enough golfer to play No. 2 on the school team, by the time he got to high school Schulz was so crippled with shyness he had become virtually invisible. “I wasn’t actually hated,” he said later. “Nobody cared that much.” His one chance for distinction was lost when some cartoons he had drawn for the school yearbook were unaccountably turned down — a rejection he never forgave, just as he never forgave all the girls who failed to notice that he had worshiped them from afar.

After graduation, Schulz’s shyness and insecurity rendered art school out of the question, so instead he took a correspondence course from Art Instruction Inc., the kind of place that used to advertise on the back of matchbooks. (He found the instruction so helpful that he eventually joined the faculty himself and years later went on the board.) In 1942 Schulz was drafted and, heartsick and terrified, left for boot camp only days after his mother had died. But he actually thrived in the Army and came back newly confident. He even began to go out with girls — though his idea of an appropriate dating present was a Bible. (All his life Schulz was the straightest of arrows: he didn’t smoke, swear or drink, on the grounds that neither did Jesus. The wine at Cana, the young Sparky used to claim, was nonalcoholic.)

In 1951, Schulz married Joyce Halverson, a 22-year-old divorcée with a young daughter from an ill-advised and short-lived marriage to a cowboy. He arranged to adopt the daughter, Meredith, and afterward always insisted she was his, even when the teenage Meredith began to poke around and ask nosy questions. To some degree it was probably a marriage of convenience on both sides, but for a while it was happy enough, and the Schulzes went on to have four children of their own. Sparky was an indifferent and often inattentive father and husband, though, because, self-absorbed and secretly harboring immense ambition, he was really married to his work. After a lot of rejections and false starts, he finally landed a weekly strip, called “Li’l Folks,” with the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and it was syndicated in 1950 by United Feature, which insisted that the title be changed to “Peanuts.” Schulz hated the name but went along, adding this to his ever-growing list of grudges.

Schulz had initially dreamed of an action strip but began drawing children because that’s what seemed to sell. The earliest strips hit what now seems the authentic Schulzian emotional tone — “Yes, sir! Good ol’ Charlie Brown. ... How I hate him!” — but it took a while for the drawing to evolve, for the heads to enlarge, the limbs to shrink.

“Peanuts” grew slowly at first; caught on hugely in the ’60s, when almost by accident it seemed to speak to everyone who was experiencing the generation gap; and then almost drowned in a licensing binge and flood of tchotchkes. Schulz said yes to everything, no matter how kitschy — toys, cards, books, sweatshirts — until even his fans began to complain he was selling out.

What saved “Peanuts,” Michaelis suggests, was the elevation of Snoopy into a main character in the late ’60s, and the way his boundless, almost surreal fantasy life frequently took over the strip, which at the same time was being pared down to a visual minimum: a scarf, a helmet, a doghouse indicated by just a few horizontal lines. Another thing that didn’t hurt was the gradual souring of the Schulz marriage. The family was living in Southern California by now, on a sort of private Disneyland with its own stables and miniature golf course and the ice rink (where Schulz like to hold court in the Warm Puppy snack bar) nearby. Despite his success, Schulz was prickly, lonely, depressed and increasingly subject to panic attacks; Joyce felt overburdened and underappreciated. Their feuds, their long bouts of coldness, inspired some of the most Thurber-like stretches of “Peanuts” — the strips where Charlie and Lucy seem to be locked in the eternal struggle of male and female, with the latter always wielding the upper hand.

As Schulz grew into middle age, he filled out, stopped wearing his hair in a buzz cut and discovered that he was actually attractive to women. He had one full-fledged affair, and in 1973, a year or so after divorcing Joyce, he married Elizabeth Jean Forsyth, 16 years his junior, whom he had met — where else? — at the ice rink. This second marriage was happier, in large part because Jeannie, as she was known, saw it her job to make it so. Schulz was often moody and withdrawn nevertheless, and was also compulsively flirty. The evidence suggests that his was essentially an arrested sensibility, locked in adolescent longing and self-absorption. But for a certain kind of artist this is not such a bad thing. Kipling and P. G. Wodehouse suffered, or benefited, from much the same condition: like Schulz, they were truly happy only when transported by their work. Schulz said once that if it weren’t for cartooning he’d be dead, and indeed he died within days of resigning from the strip because of ill health.

In another way, though, Schulz’s is a classic American story: the lonely, misunderstood genius who clings to his dream, finds riches and fame, and discovers that they don’t make him happy after all. He was like Gatsby or Citizen Kane. That he chose the comic strip as his medium links him, on the one hand, to such gifted, pioneering and equally misunderstood figures as Winsor McCay, creator of Little Nemo, and Krazy Kat’s George Herriman; and on the other, to current practitioners like R. Crumb, Chris Ware and the graphic novelist who goes by the name Seth, who is currently editing “The Complete Peanuts” for Fantagraphics (and who illustrated this review). These younger artists have a far warier relationship to popular success than Schulz did, but they share his themes of loneliness, of loss, of being unable to connect. Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan is in many ways Charlie Brown grown, while still an adolescent, to a premature old age. And Crumb offers a window onto what Schulz might have been like if only he had let the anger out.

Michaelis, who had the cooperation of the Schulz family, tells this story brightly and engagingly, if not always succinctly and without repetition. There is rather less than one might expect about the rich tradition of newspaper comics that spawned Schulz, and more than some readers might prefer about, for example, the patterns of metastasis in cervical cancer (the disease that killed Schulz’s mother). Throughout the book Michaelis maintains affection for his subject without losing sight of how exasperating and narcissistic he could be. And the smartest thing he has done is to pepper his pages with actual strips from “Peanuts,” dozens of them, usually without comment or footnote or even date: an appropriate strip just turns up in the middle of a paragraph that happens to be talking about something similar. Sometimes it’s an illustration, sometimes a wry comment. The effect is to continually remind us of why Schulz matters in the first place, and of the potential not just for humor but for feeling and eloquence in the odd and oddly persistent art form where he made his home.

Charles McGrath, formerly the editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The Times.
Illustration by Seth.