Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography

Nearly forty years ago, my grandparents gave me one of the best gifts I ever received: a set of PEANUTS books that spanned the first decade or so of the strip --from 1950 through the early 1960s.

Not only did it give me an opportunity to see the "younger" versions of Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, and the others, the books also made me realize that there was something totally different about PEANUTS --something that I really loved: the characters had a certain "depth" to them that was unique on the comic pages. (Even if at the age of 8, I didn't always understand their vocabulary!)

As it turns out, Charles M. Schulz, the man that would put a smile on my face and literally hundreds of millions of others through the years, was evidently quite a tortured soul. David Michaelis has written a comprehensive biography of the cartoonist that gives the reader an amazing amount of insight into what made Schulz tick.

It came as no surprise to me that there was an awful lot of Schulz in the character of Charlie Brown, but as it turns out, he drew upon his own life for Linus, and Schroeder, and a number of other characters as well. But more surprising to this long-time fan of PEANUTS, was how many of the storylines were taken straight out of his less-than-idyllic life. Extra-marital affairs, unrequited love, lost love, and a general tendency throughout his life to NEVER let go of a negative comment, personal affront or loss. All of these themes would show up --often as the punch line-- in his daily strips. And of course his readers had no idea!

But despite the fact that Schulz would hang onto childhood grudges until his final days and that he could be cold and distant with those closest to him, the flip side was that he was considered by most people he encountered to be quite charming and generous. One notable fact was that, even as his fame had grown to colossal proportions, he pretty much never turned down an interview, regardless of whether or not the reporter was a syndicated writer, or represented a small-town school newspaper.

One story that I found rather interesting, (and telling), dealt with a woman that he was courting about the same time that his marriage was failing. As charming and unassuming as he had always been with her, the woman had finally decided to break off the affair. In a desperate attempt to "keep her" he blurted out something along the lines of: "but I make four thousand dollars a day!!" Needless to say, the was about the most un-charming thing that could have come out of his mouth, and if anything, it made her decision to leave that much easier.

It was a sad and desperate move on his part, and an amazing indicator of how little he sometimes understood "real" life.

And now the caveat about the book... Although Michaelis interviewed his family extensively over the course of about six years (and he is effusive in his thanks to them in the book's acknowledgements), many of these same family members have made no bones about the fact that they HATE the book, and have huge problems with Michaelis over distorted facts, deliberate omissions, and persons who were interviewed who they claim had no insight into Schulz's life. If you would like to read some of THEIR comments about the book, it makes for interesting reading. Go to: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/books/more-on-the-schulz-book and do word searches for "MONTE SCHULZ" (his son), "AMY S JOHNSON," and "JILL SCHULZ" (his daughters).

- Jonathan Sabin

It should come as no surprise that Charles Schulz was a more complex man than he always described himself to be, and author David Michaelis digs deep in his comprehensive, incisive biography to explore the legendary cartoonist's psyche which so successfully informed all the characters in his Peanuts strip. In fact, it's difficult to think of Peanuts as just a comic strip since Schulz accumulated over $1 billion dollars in merchandising revenue by 1989. Even after his death in February 2000, he remains among the top ten highest-earning celebrities who happen to be dead. However, of far more importance to the reader of this book is the legacy he leaves behind in introducing characters who were both naturally contemplative and shrewdly observant, a unique combination that highlighted the universality of their yearning humanism.

Peanuts (a name, by the way, Schulz apparently detested) may have started life as a simple daily newspaper panel in 1950, but his life up to that point was certainly no cartoon. Michaelis details a childhood fraught with personal grief and emotional isolation. His father was the local barber and his mother a housewife, genealogical facts that Schulz would apply to Charlie Brown. Unlike his cartoon counterpart, however, the subject grew highly dependent on his mother who died of cervical cancer when he was twenty, and his emotionally distant father was too preoccupied to fill in the gaping hole she left behind. According to the author, this tragedy left Schulz feeling highly insecure and shaping an idiosyncratic perspective on the world that is best described as half-empty. The key distinction in Schulz's situation, however, is that he deliberately constructed a public image as a boyishly shy and rather dull loser in order to insulate himself from further emotional pain. He was determined to protect himself from others whom he felt could destroy his sense of personal and later professional self.

For all this self-effacement, Schulz had a keen ambition and a healthy ego. How else could one explain how he sustained such a massive personal fortune from his work? Schulz confessed at one point later in his life, "I suppose I'm the worst kind of egotist...the kind who pretends to be humble." Even he realized that this was not a self-contradictory state but one that fueled him toward sometimes harsh decisions that confused others around him. How this internal dynamic manifested itself is what Michaelis carefully documents in the book, for example, how someone with such a close affinity to children never showed much affection to his own children. His deep-seeded faith reflected the same personal conflict as Schulz viewed himself as an evangelical Christian, one who made a habit of giving ten percent of his hefty income to his church. At the same time, he turned his back on organized religion and embarked on an indiscriminate affair with a magazine photographer well into his marriage to a woman already subjected to the delusional torch he carried for the "Little Red-Haired Girl" from years before. Even his inarguable professional stature was not enough to prevent him from threatening to ruin a competitor late in his career.

Regardless, through his relatively objective narrative, Michaelis is far less interested in providing a gossipy tell-all than describing in penetrating detail the psychological impetus which pushed Schulz to excel at his profession like no one else before or since. The author more than counterbalances the negative revelations of his subject by describing Schulz's generosity toward the next generation of cartoonists, in particular, Cathy Guisewite ("Cathy"). For all that, the most important aspect of Schulz's talent was his unerring sense in economically capturing the zeitgeist of the times in which the characters inhabited from the post-WWII prosperity felt in the 1950's through the existential questions raised in the 1960's and the subsequent evolving need to find a deeper meaning of life. Michaelis is smart enough to focus on that particular gift by way of 240 Peanuts strips carefully chosen to illuminate his points. Like any good biographer, he lets Schulz speak for himself through his work.

Growing up, I had a giant poster of Snoopy surfing, exclaiming "Cowabunga!" But by my college years, the funny, hip cartoon was "Bloom County." I thought the "Peanuts" was old news, an embarrassing reminder of my grade school years. I suspect that such were the views of most people that grew up in the 1970s and 1980s and, of course, their parents. David Michaelis shows in this stunningly good biography of Charles M. Schulz, the creator of the "Peanuts" strip, that I was very, very wrong.

This book is basically a biography of Schulz and Michaelis devotes a lot of time to the early years of his subject, probably more than most readers want to know. The book hits its stride when Michaelis reaches the beginning of Schulz's artistic career and the creation of the strip. Drawing upon an amazing of collection of sources that involved a lot of historical detective work to assemble and working with the cooperation of the cartoonist's family, the author argues that Schulz was an artist and probably the most influential American artists of the twentieth century. What really underscores his argument is the frequent inclusion of "Peanuts" strips, which would not have been possible without the cooperation of the Universal syndicate that distributed the cartoon.

Michaelis shows that "Peanuts" had very mature themes and was not aimed at children. In the late 1950s it was all the rage on college campuses. I have a copy of "Peanuts Revisited," a book my father received as a Christmas present when he was a senior in college. Schulz said if you wanted to know him, all you had to do was to look at his cartoons. The inclusion of some 200 strips throughout this text, gives this book real heft. Schulz drew on many of his own life experiences, including unrequited love (the red-headed girl that Charlie Brown longed for), a house fire that destroyed his California home (in the strip it was Snoopy's doghouse), the rejections he suffered when starting his artistic career (the rejections that Snoopy suffered as the World Famous Literary Ace), and the highs and lows of his two marriages (which became Snoopy's infatuations with female beagles). Schulz directly tackled Vietnam and the civil rights movement. He also dealt with various themes of failure and inadequacy (Lucy and the football, the kite eating tree, and Charlie Brown's career as a pitcher for his baseball team) in a bitter sweet manner. Rereading Schulz as an adult I find many of the cartoons that I never got as a child, laugh out loud funny, because of their light irony.

The "Peanuts" was a commercial juggernaut--there are some 75 animated specials--and was generating billions when the strip ended, surviving its creator by a day, but Michaelis shows that Schulz had enormous artistic influence on cartooning and other forms of artistic expression ranging from popular music to the theater. The author also shows something that I had long suspected: Charlie Brown was as Schulz saw himself and Snoopy was what he often wanted to be.

Buy this book.

Growing up in a relentlessly secular home in the '60s, "Peanuts" was my true north, providing and deconstructing my own ongoing puzzlement about how people felt and thought. I read the comic in the daily papers, hoarded my pennies to buy the collected volumes, and even then, thought that Charles M. "Sparky" Schulz must have shared many of his characters' quirks, dilemmas, joys, and despondencies.

After reading this absorbing biography by David Michaelis, I now know that as a child I'd chosen the right person to provide a daily guide to childhood and the mysteries of adulthood. Michaelis provides a comprehesive back story, having spoken to amd corresponded with hundreds of Schulz's relatives, friends, neighbors, buddies from his childhood in Minnesota and during his stint as a "foot soldier" in World War II. After syndication made Sparky world-famous, writers, artists, and performers sought to meet Schulz, but his innate shyness made it difficult to reach out to other people. Michaelis hesitates to play snap psychologist with his subject, but does conclude that a lifelong unhappiness--despite his cataclysmic success--and intermittent agoraphobia encouraged Schulz to stay where he felt most comfortable: at his drawing board in his home studio.

Some of Schulz's intimates have expressed disappointment at the finished product, but any public exposure of mostly-private persons is difficult, no doubt about it. This author's sensitive eye waded through bales of information (some never-before published, such as several days spent visiting and talking with novelist Laurie Colwin), and fifty years of daily cartoon strips to create a balanced, fair portrait of a man, his romances, marriages, work, and the situations that molded Sparky (his lifelong nickname) as well as his characters, known and loved throughout the world. Dozens of strips and drawings are reproduced here to illustrate their relation to the cartoonist's private struggles as they were drawn. And when Schulz died of colon cancer just as his final strip was published, the synergy between timid Sparky and the media empire he created concluded. Hollywood certainly couldn't top this painfully true saga.

We all want to know what makes the other person tick - and some people, like David Michaelis - are fortunate enough to get paid for it. Michaelis isn't a licensed psychotherapist, but he is the biographer of Charles Schulz, the man who brought the world the cartoon strip "Peanuts".

At 566 pages, "Schulz and Peanuts" follows a trend toward longer and longer biographies. Neal Gabler's recent Disney biography came in at over 900 pages. Michaelis has crammed his book with detail about Schulz's life. So much detail that the reader may fairly question why some of it is there: does knowing that Schulz's favored lunch at one time was a ham sandwich and a glass of milk prepared by his secretary really make a difference in our understanding?

Michaelis also prefers detail that portrays Schulz as a chronically unhappy man no matter how successful Peanuts and the Peanuts merchandising effort became, no matter how much wealth he accrued. This portrayal angered some members of the Schulz family, who had opened their memories and archives to Michaelis. It also angered many people who knew or claim to know Schulz.

All of these people claim that Schulz was a much happier and content man than Michaelis describes.

I don't doubt that there is anotherful masterful biography of Schulz still to be written, a biography that more accurately reflects the happier, more content side of Charles Schulz. But I have no argument with the Michaelis book either and, in fact, think it may accurately reflect the inner turmoil and discontent of its subject.

Acheiving great success, fame, popularity and wealth is no bar to feeling lifelong anger at childhood events. Being discontented, insecure, anxious and unhappy is no bar to living a productive life. And Schulz, even for the endless litany of complaints he had about this and that, was satisfied that he was able to do what he wanted: draw cartoons and earn a living. That was all he wanted to do from childhood on.

Schulz, as is well known, drew Peanuts himself, 17,897 cartoon strips over 18,032 days (49 years and a bit). And that doesn't count all the other art for books, clothing and the endless items constituting his merchandising empire which still tallies up $1.2 million in sales.

Yes, Schulz appears to have been chronically depressed, phobic and forever regretful. Yes, he didn't kiss his children good night all the time and his first marriage was an endless conflict, ending in divorce. True, he did engage in continuous flirtations with women and even had an affair of sorts. Michaelis records all of this in detail, occasionally boring detail at that.

But Schulz had something few people had, the ability to establish alter egos like Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy, Linus and others. Schulz lived his life as well through them and in the process allowed hundreds of millions of people to identify with the same torments, turmoil and demons Charles Schulz felt. (Michaelis brilliantly inserts dozens of Peanuts strips into the text to illustrate his points.)

Michaelis establishes that Charles Schulz was Everyman. His doubts, fears, phobias, anxieties struck a chord with Peanuts readers because he and they were one and the same - and Michaelis is perceptive enough to realize this.

While I don't and can't disagree with family and friends of Schulz that Michaelis' biography doesn't describe the full Schulz, I do belive that Michaelis has done a superb job of showing us who this man who gained millions of readers through his ability to connect with them was.

A superb biography which is too long and too detailed, but still a masterful work and well worth reading.

Jerry