[Reader-list] Schulz and Peanuts

[Amitabh Kumar]

October 8, 2007



Biography of ‘Peanuts’ Creator Stirs Family

By PATRICIA COHEN



David Michaelis first contacted the family of Charles M. Schulz seven  
years ago about writing a biography of Schulz, the creator of the  
“Peanuts” comic strip. It turned out that Schulz had read Mr.  
Michaelis’s biography of N. C. Wyeth, and that Schulz’s son Monte  
also liked the writer’s work. He ended up helping persuade the rest  
of the Schulz clan to cooperate with Mr. Michaelis, granted full  
access to his father’s papers and put aside his own novel writing to  
help him.

But Monte Schulz said that when he read Mr. Michaelis’s manuscript in  
December, members of the family were shocked by the portrayal of a  
depressed, cold and bitter man who was constantly going after  
different women.

“It’s not true,” Monte said. “It’s preposterous.”

His sister Amy Schulz Johnson felt the same. “The whole thing is  
completely wrong,” she said from her home in Utah. “I think he wanted  
to write a book a certain way, and so he used our family.”

“We were all really excited thinking we were going to get to say  
things about our Dad,” she said, complaining that the children play a  
very small role in the book.

Mr. Michaelis said that he was surprised to hear how upset some  
members of the family were, but that “to their children fathers are  
always heroes, and very few families can see beyond that  
paterfamilias.” After interviewing hundreds of people, going through  
every one of the 17,897 comic strips Schulz drew and doing extensive  
research, Mr. Michaelis said, “this was the man I found.”

“Did I get the story right?” he asked. “Absolutely. No question.”

Mr. Michaelis referred to numerous interviews throughout Charles  
Schulz’s life in which he talked about his own “melancholy” and  
anxieties. “I have this awful feeling of impending doom,” he said on  
“60 Minutes” in 1999. “I wake up to a funeral-like atmosphere.” Many  
portraits of Schulz pick up the same theme. Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s  
1989 biography, “Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz,”  
similarly describes him as depressed and plagued by panic attacks,  
despite a large family and mammoth financial and critical success.  
Nor does it seem that Mr. Michaelis made a secret of his perspective.  
He wrote an appreciation of Schulz in Time magazine in December 2000  
after his death at 77 in which he clearly laid out the thesis he  
expands on in his 655-page book, sometimes word for word.

Mr. Michaelis’s biography, “Schulz and Peanuts,” which HarperCollins  
is releasing next week, is one of the most anticipated books of the  
fall publishing season. Schulz’s cartoon panels are interspersed with  
the text, and Mr. Michaelis uses them as revelations of the artist’s  
emotions.

“He was a complicated artist who had an inner life and embedded that  
inner life on the page,” Mr. Michaelis said in an interview. “His  
anxieties and fears brought him Lucy and the characters in ‘Peanuts.’”

“A normal person couldn’t have done it,” he said.

Biographers often find themselves at odds with the friends and  
families of their subjects. Clearly a loved one is not necessarily  
objective, a family may want to protect a reputation or may be  
unaware of hidden events or aspects of someone’s character. Janet  
Malcolm, in a well-known provocative essay, offered another analysis,  
describing the relationship between a journalist and a subject as  
innately deceptive and the journalist as “kind of a confidence man.”  
Elements of all these explanations have been invoked.

Jean Schulz, Charles’ second wife, said she read about three-quarters  
of Mr. Michaelis’s third draft. She didn’t disagree that her husband,  
whom friends called Sparky, was “melancholy,” but she said that was  
only part of the story: “It’s not a full portrait. Sparky was so much  
more. Most of the time he loved to laugh.

“Part of what puzzles people about Sparky was that he talked about  
the actual physical sensation that he had from being anxious, the  
‘sense of dread’ when he got up in the morning. But he had a Buddhist  
acceptance of life and its ups and downs. He functioned perfectly well.

“David couldn’t put everything in,” she said, but added, “I think  
Sparky’s melancholy and his dysfunctional first marriage are more  
interesting to talk about than 25 years of happiness.” She quoted her  
husband’s frequent response to why Charlie Brown never got to kick  
the football: “Happiness is not funny.”

What particularly disturbed her, she said, were Mr. Michaelis’s  
judgments. “Every artist has to take a point of view,” she said, “but  
if David is going to say that Sparky is a consistently mean man, then  
you need to back it up.”

“The attribution is very vague,” she said, mentioning anonymous  
quotations.

Mr. Michaelis’s source notes for each chapter are organized by  
subject, so it can be difficult to attach a particular quote to a  
particular source.

Jean Schulz said that she had found factual errors, many of them  
trivial, like whether a Redwood tree was dug up, but that “it just  
makes me wonder about other things in the book.” Mr. Michaelis  
“obviously took notes,” she said, but some things were clearly  
“mistranscribed or misinterpreted.”

Monte Schulz cited a number of small inaccuracies, including a  
mention of a housekeeper serving dinner after she no longer worked  
for the family; an incorrect reference to his father hearing him  
lecture at a writer’s workshop; and what Monte said was a  
ridiculously low estimate for building an ice-skating rink, which  
made it seem as if there were a more than a 1,000 percent cost overrun.

He said his mother, Joyce Doty, was very upset at being portrayed as  
an overbearing and shrewish. Reached at her home in Hawaii, she said,  
“I am not talking to anybody about anything.” Meredith Hodges, who  
grew up as one of Schulz’s five children, only discovered as an adult  
that he was not her biological father. She describes him in the book  
as “cold,” “distant” and “afraid to love,” and she wrote in an e-mail  
message, “No comment.”

Mr. Michaelis in his biography describes Schulz as extremely  
generous, devoted to his children, modest and funny, and Joyce as  
energetic, capable and vibrant, but those traits do not get nearly as  
much space. Amy Schulz Johnson, who described Schulz as “the most  
amazing Christ-like father,” complained that Mr. Michaelis played up  
the negative and left out the positive. “We all got deceived,” she said.

Still, Jean Schulz is sympathetic to the notion of a writer’s or  
artist’s creative vision, pointing to her own husband. “David is  
writing this for himself,” she said. “He’s got to be satisfied.”