LITTLE ROCK — Auggh! A top-rate public television biography of Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz might sound like fun. But there's no sadder hour-and-a-half on television than American Masters' look at "Good Ol' Charles Schulz" at 8 p.m. Monday on AETN.
The show depicts Schulz as a good man, yes, but "missing something" he never found. He seems to have looked for it over and over in the 40 times he watched the movie, Citizen Kane. All he had to show for the obsession was a comic-strip joke in which his character of Lucy tells how the movie ends.
If he looked to Orson Welles for answers on how to let go of his life's doubts and rejections, Schulz must have gone away like Charlie Brown always did, disappointed.
Schulz never got over the slights of childhood. His mother's death left him with a hollow heart. He never forgot the "little red-haired girl" who, in real life, threw him over.
Old hurts flowed into the collapse of his first marriage, and then out the tip of his pen. He drew with ink, but it was just as much the artist's sense of failurethat outlined good ol' Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang of kids with grown-up complexities.
He apologized for having only a high school education. But he was smart, too, and aware of the strip as a kind of diary in which he dealt with feelings he never confessed out loud. He resisted marriage counseling, the show reports, for fear it would spoil the cartoons.
Instead, he translated his losses into Charlie Brown's baseball defeats and kites that wouldn't fly. And he found in his marriage troubles - his wife considered him a wimp - Charlie Brown's relationship with the overbearing Lucy.
Schulz retreated to his drawing studio the way his character, Schroeder, took to the piano. A friend of the cartoonist says he "lived in Snoopy's doghouse."
There, he produced the strip that appeared in 2,500 newspapers internationally - that earned him $35 million a year - and that left him wondering if people seemed to like him only because he was rich and famous.
"I can't believe they think I'm that good," he says, teary-eyed, in an interview shortly before hisdeath in 2000. "I just did the best I could."
He describes the "dirty trick" he played on Charlie Brown: In 50 years and almost 18,000 comic strips that Schulz drew entirely by himself, he never let "that poor kid" kick the football.
Schulz biographer David Michaelis (Schulz and Peanuts, newly published) speculates that the cartoonist really meant himself. Schulz never let that poor man kick the football, either.
HAPPINESS IS ...
The picture isn't all so dismal. Schulz invented the phrase, "Happiness is a warm puppy," after all, and he meant it.
Others who comment on Schulz include his fellow cartoonist Jules Feiffer. He envies the brilliance Schulz displayed in his creation of Linus, the intellectual thumb-sucker with a security blanket.
Feiffer brushes off Schulz's early work - cute, wholly innocuous cartoons that Schulz sold here and there, promising nothing special to come. And then, all of a sudden: Work of genius.
"Good Ol' Charles Schulz" traces the cartoonist's childhood in Minneapolis, a barber's sonnicknamed "Sparky" after the comic-strip character Barney Google's horse, Sparkplug.
He grew up determined to draw a comic strip. Lacking the confidence to attend art school, though, he enrolled in a correspondence course. The Web site for the school, also in Minneapolis, still lists him among its graduates, along with a quote: "It was a lucky day for me when I enrolled with Art Instruction Schools."
Among the show's happiest moments are the home movies that glimpse the young Schulz, who had become one of the school's instructors. He looks uncharacteristically comfortable among the other artists at work, teaching how to draw.
These are happy views for me, especially. I signed up with Art Instruction, too, in high school. Some of these men on the screen probably were the teachers I never met, but knew from the letters and sketches they sent.
Peanuts had allowed Schulz and his family to move to California by the time I was struggling over two-point perspective. He built an estate there, but he still called back to Minneapolis every now and then to keep in touch, the school secretary, Arlene, told me.
He still contributed drawing lessons, and he was Art Instruction's example of how to succeed. Art wasn't supposed to be flighty. The school taught would-be cartoonists to be dependable, hard workers like Minnesotans in general, and like Schulz.
I can testify that much to the show's report that Shultz almost never put on airs, that he worked at being ordinary.
As for cartooning - one of Schulz's co-workers at the school remembers how he kept getting better. He made constant improvement seem as common as breakfast. He made it look easy.
So easy, Schulz let on like anybody could do as well. The truth was, only one man in the world - in all creation - no wimps allowed - could draw Peanuts.
And as "Good Ol' Charles Schulz" makes indelibly clear, it wasn't so easy being him.
In the end, Schulz takes his place in a line of troubled clowns that extends from Mark Twain to Bert Lahr to Lenny Bruce (and maybe Owen Wilson). He's the one it would be nice to think brought the football. And nobody in the crowd cares who's rich and famous; they just like the guy.
Style, Pages 64 on 10/28/2007