As the creator of the comic strip Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz was loved by millions. What we didn’t know is that he could never see it that way. David Michaelis presents a revealing look at the world’s most successful cartoonist in the remarkable biography SCHULZ AND PEANUTS.
The master of the “minimal gag,” Schulz didn’t believe he was the sad-sack personality of his strip’s star Charlie Brown. Certainly when it came to wealth, fame and power, he kicked the football from Lucy’s hands each and every time. But a lifelong depression kept him down, which probably was to the strip’s benefit. After all, if Schulz had a sunny outlook, would Peanuts ever have caught on?
No doubt about it, Michaelis’ book is a downer, a real heartbreaker, but that’s what makes it so compelling. From the start, Schulz’s life seems destined for misery, born in poverty. When the young man is shipped off to World War II just one day after burying his cancer-ravaged mother, it’s clear that the double-blow will shape his thinking for the rest of his days.
Cartooning was all Schulz ever wanted to do, and despite repeated rejections, he finally lucked out. As we all know, Peanuts became a daily staple, a multimedia sensation, a franchising cash cow and an American institution. But that’s not the interesting part. The man behind it all is, portrayed – via his own terse diaries and open interviews with friends and immediate family – as anxious, nervous and wracked with insecurity when removed from his bubble of creating the strip.
Startling revelations are made beyond his inane thinking that he was disliked and unloved: the sheer unhappiness of his first marriage, his marital infidelity toward the end of that loveless union, his inability to tell his five kids that he loved them or even to give them a hug. Certainly there’s fallout from that; tales of drug abuse and a hushed-up abortion rise to the surface.
Don’t mistake this work for a Kitty Kelley hack job or character assassination. While Michaelis presents a side of Schulz we never saw – or imagined – it actually humanizes the man, who passed away within a day of his final strip’s appearance in spring 2000. Michaelis’ genius is in letting his subject tell his own story, in a way; the first page offers a telling quote from Schulz: “If somebody reads my strip every day, they’ll know me for sure – they’ll know exactly who I am.”
And this is proven true, every few pages. Following a point made about Schulz’s life, a strip from among a legacy of nearly 18,000 follows to validate it. Even the affair Schulz had with a much younger woman is told to the world via a series of strips with a smitten Snoopy as a stand-in. Every problem that weighed on his soul, every fight he had with his wife managed to play out on the page, sometimes word for word. Using around 240 strips, this simple gimmick lends Michaelis’ account credibility to burn. –Rod Lott
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You might enjoy this audio interview with “Schulz and Peanuts” biographer David Michaelis (with transcription).