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 Ruben-
feld 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 at-
torney and the legal director of the Lamb-
da Legal Defense and Education Fund, a
national gay and lesbian civil-rights
organization active in fighting discrimina-
tion 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 audi-
tioned 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 real-
ly 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 North-
western 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 con-
quistador, and I spoke in Spanish, and I
Shrinking Pee-wee
In an effort to plumb his psyche and
understand his appeal, Rolling Stone
asked a number of mental-health profes-
sionals to study the Strange Case of Pee-
wee H. Here are their informed opinions.
Ava Siegler, Ph.D., Director of the Child,
Adolescent, and Family Clinic of the
Postgraduate Center for Mental Health
in New York:
Paul Reubens is a clown, in a long
tradition of clowns who act like babies.
At the opening of his show, a woman's
boop-oop-dee-doo baby voice sings, "No
more napping. Anything can happen:'
That's the theme of the show. Pee-wee
allies himself on the child's side, against
the grown-up world. Boundaries — be-
tween make-believe and reality, past and
present, child and adult — are sub-
verted, released or obliterated.
Clownlike makeup highlights his mouth,
which is eroticized; the younger the
child, the more important the mouth is
as a symbol of gratification. The
makeup also makes him androgynous,
so though he's supposed to be a boy
baby, he has qualities of a maternal
figure.
I'd be surprised if many ten-to-eleven-
year-olds watch the show, because their
sexual identity is becoming con-
solidated. They probably find this guy
stupid — and threatening because of his
androgynous quality. He would appeal
to young adults or late adolescents, who
would see him as an absurd hero, a hip
figure drawing upon popular culture,
which tries to destroy establishment
culture. As for little kids, what seems in-
credible and most powerful to them is
the adult acting like an impulse-ridden
baby. I would imagine as many adults
hate him as like him, because he touches
on strong sexual and aggressive im-
pulses in all of us.
Thayer Greene, a Jungian adult analyst:
There's this motif of somebody who is
presumably an adult behaving totally
like a child. I work with people who are
in that condition, but they do not get
paid television salaries to behave that
way. I think it's one thing to have a rela-
tionship to the inner child as an adult;
it's another thing to be identified with
the child. Compared with the Muppets
and Sesame Street, the show is like graf-
fiti on subways compared with Picasso
and Rembrandt.
Mark Novick, MD., head of the Com-
mittee on Childhood and Adolescence
Pee-Wee Herman: The show, like the star,
defies categories.
for the New York County District
Branch of the American Psychiatric
Association:
I think he's innocuous and very, very
strange. 'Ib his credit, he doesn't seem
overly frightening to children, unlike
programs that show violence. Every-
thing_in his show is silly, including the
adults, who appear as devalued, outra-
geous individuals arguing with one
another. It's how a child might view
adults. Pee-wee's suit is too small, a way
of saying he's becoming an adult but
doesn't want to be. He still wants to
wear his suit from when he was a few
sizes smaller.
Susanne Short, a Jungian adult and
child analyst:
Pee-wee is an in-between being. He oc-
cupies a borderline space between nor-
mal and weird, that world of the un-
conscious where images come and go in
dreams. It's a chaotic place. I can see
why some people, watching him, would
feel almost psychotic, because of the
chaos. He has a half smile, half leer,
which gives him a disarming innocence
and yet sinisterness. He's a trickster
figure, and in the symbolic tradition, the
trickster is also the magical, shape-
shifting spirit of creativity. In
mythology, that's both evil and good —
the harmful and beneficial possiblities
in chaos. The reason we like him is that
he represents the creative inner aspect
of ourselves. The reason we dislike him
is the same.