A Dark and Stormy Life

Fans of Charlie Brown and the rest of the "Peanuts" gang will not be surprised that Charles Schulz, "Peanuts"' creator, considered himself as bland and boring as his comic-strip alter ego, Charlie Brown. They won't be surprised that Schulz once told Johnny Carson that in high school he failed "everything" and was chronically lonely, nor that he had bitter memories of his childhood in St. Paul, Minn., of bigger kids who "push you down and knock you over and won't let you swing on the swings that you want to swing on." The experiences left such scars, writes David Michaelis in his 655-page "Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography," that Schulz "spoke of these bullies in the present tense."

Fans will be surprised, however, at something else Michaelis found during the seven years he worked on the biography, beginning just after Schulz—whom everyone called Sparky—died in 2000. Not one of the childhood friends Michaelis interviewed "could recall any instance where Sparky himself was picked on," he writes. Although talent going unrecognized was central to the legend Schulz created about himself, in fact his teachers and others regarded Sparky as exceptional. No matter. Schulz's "stubbornly held resentment had no ending," writes Michaelis. "He spent a startling amount of time over nearly sixty years polishing a cameo of boyish helplessness and frustration."

The portrait of the artist as flawed human being has become a clich?, and Michaelis admirably steers clear of it. What he gives us instead is both a dynamic character study and a penetrating literary analysis. For the first, he dispels the myth of "Saint Charles," recounting—with great sympathy, considering—how a father who created the best-known cartoon children in the world almost never kissed his own goodnight, how an evangelical Christian (he even did sidewalk preaching) cheated on his first wife and how the most successful cartoonist in history threatened to sabotage a competitor's strip. This is not the Schulz of "happiness is a warm puppy." Some of this dark side also emerges in "Good Ol' Charles Schulz," a documentary scheduled for later this month as part of PBS's "American Masters" series.

Not surprisingly, the clay-feet portrait has left Schulz's family somewhere between furious and stricken, even though they were Michaelis's sources for stories of Schulz's lack of fatherly involvement, the extramarital love letters and much else. Monte Schulz, the younger son, tells NEWSWEEK the book has a number of errors, though they appear to be on minor points such as where Schulz picked up the neighborhood kids for the school carpool and when a housekeeper worked for the family. More important, he says, he was shocked at the description of his father as an uninvolved parent. "Why would all of us [children] gather at his hospital bed for three months if we hadn't felt enormous affection from him?" he asks. The portrayal is deeply incomplete, he says, leaving out Schulz's love of books and music, his work with women's sports and his devotion to the senior men's hockey team he played on. "Had we known this was the book David was going to write, we wouldn't have talked to him," says Monte. As Craig Schulz, the eldest son, told Michaelis after reading the manuscript, "Well, I guess we were expecting vanilla, but we got rocky road."

Thankfully, Michaelis has packed much more than tabloid fodder into this overlong book. (We could do without the detailed backstory and genealogy of just about everyone Schulz crossed paths with, down to the woman who dreamed up the "Peanuts" licensing empire, even if that is now standard operating procedure for biography.) By plumbing Schulz's psyche, Michaelis has come up with a compelling explanation for the wellspring of his genius, the inspiration for the sweetly melancholic depiction of the human condition that marked "Peanuts."