Paula Reubens, aka PeeWee Herman, had a very public downfall in 1991 after an arrest for indecent exposure while in an adult film theater. He was also arrested on what were pretty bogus child pornography charges in 2001, for an extensive collection of mid-century kitsch art along with possession of the Rob Lowe sex tape. He plead guilty to a lesser charge on that issue but the case was so trumped up that the charges were ultimately dropped. He’s finally making a comeback after two decades have passed, and recently returned in a stage show as his famous cheeky alter ego. Reubens is now working on another family-friendly PeeWee movie, his third, to be produced by Judd Apatow. His stage show, featuring several original members of his TV show including Cowboy Curtis, Miss Yvonne and Genie, will come to Broadway this fall.

I’ve been seeing excerpts from Reubens’ Playboy interview quoted in the celebrity press, but instead of just covering the segments that were being covered I read the full piece and am so glad I did. If you grew up watching PeeWee’s Playhouse like me you may be interested to hear his side of the story. I found myself really rooting for the guy after hearing what he’s been through and how deeply it affected him.

On his arrest in 1991 in an adult movie theater
PLAYBOY: You maintained you were innocent of the charge that you were masturbating in public in an adult theater.

REUBENS: Had we gone to trial, we had ready an expert from the Masters and Johnson Institute who was going to testify that in 30 years of research on masturbation the institute had never found one person who masturbated with his or her nondominant hand. I’m right-handed, and the police report said I was jerking off with my left hand. That would have been the end of the case right there, proof it couldn’t have been me.

PLAYBOY: Then why did you plead no contest?

REUBENS: Did I want to have all that revealed in court and then have to listen to Jay and Arsenio and others for another two weeks? So I pleaded no contest, and all I got was community service, but that resolution happened the same day Magic Johnson announced he was HIV positive. My case wasn’t in the news, so nobody even knew it was resolved. An article in Vanity Fair later described the 1990s as “the tabloid decade.” It suggested the decade was bookended by my arrest in 1991 and the Monica Lewinsky scandal at the decade’s end. I was just the warm-up act.

PLAYBOY: How bad did it get for you?

REUBENS: I wouldn’t leave the house. Except I did go do the MTV Video Music Awards a handful of weeks after the arrest—at which Pee-wee came out and said, “Heard any good jokes lately?”—because I had a publicist then who simply made me do it. Which may have set a good example for damage control. I don’t think it was coincidental that later Michael Jackson picked the MTV awards to give his new wife, Lisa Marie Presley, that big long kiss. But putting the Pee-wee suit and makeup back on to go do it was a nightmare. Paparazzi staked out my house for months. To get out, I hid on the floor of somebody’s car, under a blanket.

Toward the end of those first three months I made an appointment with a therapist and made him come to my house. Sometime during the session he said, “You know you’re in shock, right?” I didn’t know. When he said it, I thought, Oh my God! Okay, I get it. Then the whole three months I had just gone through made sense. I was in shock. There was a feeling like, You’re going to wake up from this and it’s going to turn out to be a bad dream. It didn’t. But as a result I now know everything there is to know about scandal and shock—how you move through the first 12 hours, the first 24 hours, the first six weeks, the first six months, the first six years and so on. I know how to navigate all this hideous, shitty, horrible stuff you go through. Which saved my life when scandal number two happened

On his child pornography charge
PLAYBOY: Which arrived in November 2001 when you were arrested again, this time charged with possessing child pornography. In many ways this was far worse than the first one. What exactly happened?

REUBENS: The police had been given a false tip in an alleged sting operation and came to my house. They thought the wrong thing, and they were there for the wrong reason, and when that became clear, they should have left. Or they should have taken all my computers like they did but spent three minutes looking through them and realized they were wrong. Hypothetically, even in a less than perfect world, you assume if the police barge into your house and it’s the wrong house and they have guns drawn and you hit the ground because you’re supposed to be, say, a crack dealer—and it’s obvious you’re not—that they ought to say, “Oh, okay. Sorry.” But they don’t, and they certainly didn’t after raiding my home in search of things that just didn’t exist. The state eventually realized I had nothing offensive, but the city attorney decided to put me through three years of hell anyway.

PLAYBOY: The case centered on your collection of what was described as kitsch art—only some of it vaguely sexual in theme—plus a copy of the Rob Lowe sex tape, which not only had its own kitsch value but had made the rounds all over the entertainment community.

REUBENS: It came down to whether the art was obscene or not obscene—you know, is it art or obscenity?

PLAYBOY: Well?

REUBENS: If you saw what was taken out of my house, you’d burst out laughing. An example of one of the things they confiscated was a crudely done painting I got at a thrift store. It’s of a football stadium. In the foreground the football players are out on the field in mid-play, but they don’t have pants on. When I found it I thought, Oh my God, that is the greatest painting I’ve ever seen in my life! It’s hilarious. Not one person ever—even a little old lady, even a conservative right-winger, even the pope—would ever look at that painting and call it obscene. I spent a year trying to get my collection back. They destroyed things you wouldn’t believe they’d destroy. I had an extensive collection of etched-on-glass 3-D 1940s cheesecake photography of beautiful women. They made it sound as if I had a huge homoerotic collection, which I didn’t.

PLAYBOY: The most horrific part of the outrage was that you were a children’s-show icon who’d already had his reputation compromised in a way this magazine would see as unwarranted persecution.

REUBENS: Yes, and I spent my blood, sweat and tears on the show, and I did it for kids. So to come out and suggest or even whisper anything regarding me and kids is devastating.

[From Playboy]

Reubens goes on to say that he doesn’t have a thick skin, that he doesn’t want to pretend he does, and that everything that happened to him did hurt his feelings. He also admitted that there’s no escaping these scandals, that “the public has a memory like a steel trap,” and added that after all he went through “it’s as though you’ve got some kind of stink on you” that can’t wash off. He’s 58 and joked that “I sure wish I had thought to lie about my age before the Internet started, but there’s no turning back now.”

We love PeeWee and hope that his new Broadway show, and upcoming film, are a success. It was a shock to find out that the goofy guy we watched on TV wasn’t the same person we knew, but he also wasn’t the deviant the media made him out to be. Now that he’s been through all that, we’re ready to welcome him back.

Paul Reubens is shown at the opening of his show in LA on 1/20/10. Credit Juan Rico/Fame Pictures