David Michaelis, "Schulz and Peanuts" author: Mr. Media Interview, Part 2 (Return to Part 1)

BOB ANDELMAN/MR. MEDIA: One of the things that struck me was that he never really matured in some ways. Sometimes, we have these feelings when we’re a kid, we have them when we’re a teenager, that we don’t belong, that we don’t fit in, that no one understands us, but most of us sort of grow out of that, and by oh, I don’t know, 47, my age, you kind of feel like you are starting to get the hang of things, but I get the sense that he never did. He had children, and I am sure he loved his children, and he certainly loved his second wife, but as a member of greater society that maybe he just never did quite get it, he never did feel a part of things.

DAVID MICHAELIS: I think he was continuously aware that he didn’t quite fit in. I remember a quote that I used as an epigraph where he said, “Cartoonists don’t live anywhere.” I think he had a sense of disconnection from the world and from the world around him, and he was in such an odd place after a certain point in his life with the kind of success that “Peanuts” had, with the kind of really quite unique place that “Peanuts” was in the culture. As a cartoonist, he almost had to explain himself after a certain point because he was so much more than a cartoonist, and he kept things real for himself by living what he felt was… Well, he would live on his own terms, and he would live in an ordinary way.

I remember Clark Gesner saying this to me very early on. Clark Gesner was the fellow who did You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, who wrote the lyrics and composed the music and eventually was part of the team that put that musical into the theater in the 1960s. He had visited with Schulz and knew him to some extent, and he said, “You know, this is going to baffle you for the entire time you are working on it, because Sparky presented himself to the world as ordinary. He resisted being treated as extraordinary even though he knew he was.” Even though he knew he had this talent, and even though he knew it could project him and his work into extraordinary stratospheres undreamt of by a boy from Snelling and Selby Avenues in St. Paul, still he kept resisting anything like fame or celebrity, and he lived a life where he had to insist on being ordinary, and it put pressure on him. It put a lot of pressure on him because at the same time he yearned for recognition.

ANDELMAN: I think once one of your characters is a balloon in the Macy’s Day Parade, I think you have pretty well established some measure of success. A lot of the early headlines related to your book have had to do with that there is this darker side of him, that he had perhaps some psychological issues. Are you uncomfortable with that emerging so quickly and maybe that defining the book?

MICHAELIS: I am hoping, as all writers do, that the book itself is read and is read as carefully as the blogs and the stories about the book, because I think that in some ways this whole debate misses the point of why biography, which is to understand Charles Schulz as Schulz understood himself, not as his children understood him or as the world understood him but as he saw his life. That’s certainly the point of view from which I was trying to approach his life, both finding it through “Peanuts”, which is a more abstracted way of understanding how Charles Schulz knew the world, but how he in his own words understood.


If you take simply the issue of his melancholy, which is the word he used to describe the daily sense or weekly sense of angst and dread and strong feeling of doubt and, in some cases, even doom, this was the language he used to describe himself. There was never a diagnosis given by a doctor that was then embraced by Schulz and others about his condition, if you want to call it that, or his situation. But he himself understood himself to be doubtful, insecure, uncertain, fearful, worried. I could keep going, but it would all be too much all of a sudden to hear all of this without saying, as well, yes, “Did he enjoy life?” Well, you know, you couldn’t be literally a victim of clinical depression and be as productive as he was. There’s not a chance. You wouldn’t have found Charles Schulz doing what Charles Schulz did, which was to live with and overcome these things. In a real sense, he was Charlie Brown because the central quality of his life was fortitude. It was getting up every day and trying again.

ANDELMAN: I was going to ask you, were there periods in his life where he could not get up and produce?

MICHAELIS: No, that’s just it. You see, this is why his children quite rightly object to a world that’s saying, “Charles Schulz was an unhappy man, universally categorically across the board.” I think my book is a very sympathetic portrait of a guy overcoming and dealing with his worries. The central story of the book is the achievement of “Peanuts”, the achievement of creating this comic strip that became the world over beloved and embraced, and he became the most popular visual artist of the 20th Century. You couldn’t do that and be a depressed person, but you also couldn’t do that and be a normal person. We’re talking about an artist. We’re talking about a complicated artist, a guy whose complications were the stuff of his art, where he made conscious and deliberate choices not to get help for his struggles but to continue to tap into them and use them as the sources of his art.




ANDELMAN: One of the great devices in the book, I hope you don’t mind the term device, but one of the great devices in the book is that as you are reading, there are “Peanuts” comic strips that are dropped in that, among other things, besides being entertaining, they start putting his life and the things that he felt and the way he did things in context. I wanted to ask you, which came first, the anecdotes or the strip? Did you tailor the strips to match up with the anecdotes or vice versa? How did that all come about, and that must have been very time-consuming in and of itself.

MICHAELIS: The uncovering of the life, the revealing of the life in the slow, steady process or actually sometimes very sudden leaps that one makes at the beginning came first. In other words, as I spoke to people, as I gained some understanding from papers and documents and records of how Schulz had lived his life, how he saw the world, how he interacted with people, how he did and didn’t change at first glance from boyhood to adulthood, it was suddenly the big themes of unrequited love, the big themes of Schroeder’s devotion to art as something that will be making absolutely oblivious to this overpowering girl at the end of the piano asking for his attention, the longing for a little red-haired girl. You begin to see the big themes emerge in broad strokes, but then some little pieces of the puzzle float up, and suddenly there I am looking into a drawer and oh, there’s a picture of a girl, an attractive girl in probably the 1940s to judge from the dress and light and quality of the photograph, and then there’s the next time I’m in Minnesota asking one of his art instruction colleagues, “You know, there was this photograph, did you know…” “Oh, that’s Naomi Cohn. Everyone was in love with her.” “Sparky probably had a crush….” “Oh yeah, Sparky did have a crush on her. I remember…” suddenly emerging a figure of Naomi Cohn, and then suddenly I’m finding Sparky talking about her in several interviews now that hadn’t been out before, and suddenly a portrait is emerging, and because of the United Media database, the comic strip library, I could now go and type in Naomi, and then suddenly up would come, oh suddenly here in 1992, here’s Charles Schulz putting Naomi Cohn into a strip, and oh, yes, in fact, this character Naomi in “Peanuts” is wearing a beret, and that turns out to have been a characteristic of Naomi, the aspiring artist in Minnesota in the 1940s. Sometimes it was as simple as that, and sometimes it added complexity and richness to find something from his life in the strip either chronologically or thematically.



ANDELMAN: I thought about this a lot, but when my dad died a few years ago, I went through his personal affects and uncovered a number of things that disturbed me in a variety of ways. As someone who also writes biography, I have to admit I would never want someone picking through the bones of my life and discovering and magnifying as we do, I mean, that’s what we do for a profession, my mistakes and idiosyncrasies. I don’t want my wife to have to read, “Oh, well, all of his friends remember that he had this unrequited affection for Andrea Passer in high school, and 30 years later, he still thought of her.” Does that kind of stuff ever cross your mind when doing this kind of work? Do you ever have that moment of a little wince, maybe Sparky wouldn’t really like me writing about this, and maybe I shouldn’t? Maybe this I should set aside.

MICHAELIS: Clearly, the choices that led to a book that’s only, and I say, really mean only, 533 pages long, it shows how much I did have to leave out. It shows how severe the selection process is when the first draft of my thorough full-length manuscript was about 1,800 pages long, so to cover a life in a thorough way is by itself a kind of trick, and it is a distortion, and it’s an imperfect instrument for re-creating a life.

But I do believe that there is a way of looking at biography in the context of an artist’s life that makes it valid to do what I did, which is to present the life and the work together. I can tell you, absolutely, that if someone wrote a book about my father and said anything critical, I’d be unhappy, too. I well understand this, but I also believe, and it just jumped into my head, I actually haven’t even thought of this before now, this country embraced a story called The Bridges of Madison County, and in that story, a love affair is related to children who discover a trunk full of the evidence of this love affair in their mother’s life after she’s gone. It enhances the discovery, painful as it is, that she had this relationship during her marriage enhances their sympathy and understanding for what she went through as a person and for who she really was, and the truth hurts. Sometimes along with the hurt that goes with truth is a greater sympathy and a greater feeling of love for someone because you now know more of who they were rather than less.

If what I’ve written about Charles Schulz makes people who love him uncomfortable, I have to believe that if you read it carefully and think it through, that there is enough there to love him the more for who he was despite himself and despite the world that he was trying to grow out of. We all have limitations, and one of the things I kept bumping up against with Schulz was the sense that he had triumphed over limitations, and his limitations were always visible to him, indeed down to the very last strip of ““Peanuts”.” The very last daily strip is Snoopy pondering a snowball while a snowball fight is going on behind him that he can’t participate in because, as the caption says -- and it’s not a thought balloon -- it was a caption, the dog realized that his father hadn’t taught him how to make a snowball. That’s the last statement of ““Peanuts”.” It’s a statement about limitations. It’s about being alone with who you really are and what you were taught and what you were given, and I think it’s very important, if you’re going to try to understand Schulz at all or you want to believe that you know who he was, to know where he came from and how he dealt with the world that he grew up in and how he brought it into his adult life and what he did and didn’t understand of his own life is very important to see.




ANDELMAN: Just a couple more minutes, David. You’ve been very patient about this, and particularly you brought up his last strip, and I wanted to ask you about that. The coincidence that his last strip appeared the day that he died is too much for some skeptics. One comic fan I spoke to in preparing to talk to you insisted that I ask you this: Is there any chance that either his passing was withheld from announcement to coincide with that last strip because the two were so close? And he insisted that I ask you this, is there any chance that Schulz either so to speak pulled the plug himself or had a family member do it so that he and the strip went out together?

MICHAELIS: It is a completely valid question, and I was asked it frequently by the reporters, such as Steve Kroft from “60 Minutes” who had seen Schulz before his death, in the year before his death. Reporters and smart, engaged thinking people who interacted with Schulz understood one of the simplest and basic facts about him, which he himself had put out there for years, which is that he always said, “When I die, the strip dies.” He also always said, “I would feel very empty without this strip.” And in one case, he had joked around saying, “If I didn’t have the strip, I’d be dead.”

He had time and time again showed how fused he believed his life and the strip were. And in the dismay and upset of the months that followed his stroke in November of 1999, in the dismay of realizing he was not going to be carrying on ““Peanuts”,” he was profoundly shaken, and you see it in the interviews he gave at the time. And there’s ample evidence to understand how completely baffled he was about how he was going to go on and what life meant now. So that to find some way to end his life as the strip ends would be logical.

I have to say that in every way I looked at this, without going into a full-scale Congressional investigation into it, I had to believe that no, he did not, or no, he was not, or no, there was no assistance. It would be inconsistent with everything I found to believe that that was true.

However, I do think that as I understand it to myself, I think he somehow witch-doctored himself to that point. One hears about it all the time, the giving up of life, the giving up. Whatever your belief system is, it can engage in this question, whether he gave himself up or whatever. However you see it. But the medical terminology given to me to understand this by his family, by his doctor, is just vague enough still to make one wonder, and there’s no question that the question is valid, but I think I would have to conclude myself from everything that I could find at the time that no, he went by natural causes.

ANDELMAN: Last question: were there any other parts of this Charles Schulz puzzle that you were unable to solve after all these years?

MICHAELIS: Well, I wished from the beginning -- and I still wish -- that the clear evidence of his relationship with his mother had been left on paper more than by the hearsay and very considered evidence left by people who knew her and given in interviews. I wish there were her letters I wish she had written to him. I wish there was on paper some way of seeing how she and Sparky had lived their life, the life of his boyhood, and whether or not there’s any chance to understand his parents remains to be seen. There may yet come some moment where out of a shoebox comes all sorts of letters from his early life. I felt that was a puzzle that I could only guess at or only become closer to understanding through the interview process and through a lot of legwork in historical societies turning out. Just seeing her death certificate and understanding that her death was a death by cervical cancer and not from colon cancer led through numerous channels of research and interviewing to new ideas about why Schulz had had the kind of experience that he had in high school during her illness and so forth.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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Labels: Andrew N.C. Wyeth, beagle, Cathy Guisewite, Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown, David Michaelis, Gary Groth, Jean Schulz, Peanuts, Pulitzer Prize, Snoopy, Sparky, The Comics Journal, Will Eisner

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