A Dark and Stormy Life

By 1958, 400 papers were running "Peanuts," but Schulz remained intensely, even brutally, competitive. Around this time a fellow art-school instructor told Schulz he was giving up his cartoon ambitions, to which Schulz replied, "Good. That will make one less cartoonist I have to compete with." Even in the 1990s, when the "Peanuts" juggernaut (sweatshirts, MetLife ads, books, figurines …) was bringing in more than $1 billion and making Schulz $26 million to $40 million a year, graciousness didn't always come easy. When the cartoonist who drew "For Better or Worse" told him she was going to kill off a character Schulz liked, Schulz petulantly told her that if she did he would have Snoopy get hit by a car the same day her strip was to run, "and everybody will worry about Snoopy, and nobody's going to read your stupid story, and I'll get more publicity than you will!" That's the kind of anecdote that has deeply upset Schulz's family. They do not deny that it occurred, but feel Michaelis did not properly balance such stories with examples of Schulz's generosity. Cathy Guisewite, for instance, who draws the strip "Cathy" and knew Schulz for 20 years before his death, recalls him as "generous and gracious and kind, and so encouraging of new cartoonists," she told NEWSWEEK.

Another sore point is the affair Schulz had, beginning in 1970. He was 47; Tracey Claudius, whom he met when she photographed him for a magazine article, was 25. After Joyce discovered the months-long affair, Schulz agreed to break it off, prompting fatalistic notes about love in the strip: a bereft-looking Snoopy, atop his doghouse, asks, "What do you do when the girl-beagle you love more than anything is taken from you, and you know you'll never see her again as long as you live?" To which Snoopy, nose in food dish, provides his own answer: "Back to eating." In fact, Schulz did not give up his "girl-beagle" and go back to eating. He kept seeing Tracey and, a few months later, proposed (while still married to Joyce), saying that as his wife "you could have anything you want. I make $4,000 a day." But Tracey was put off by how he "didn't give a damn about people … he had no larger feeling for humanity," she told Michaelis.

It's always risky taking an ex-lover's word, and a number of Schulz's friends don't recognize him at all in that portrait. Guisewite recalls him as not only generous to young cartoonists, but also as honestly self-effacing. At meetings of fellow cartoonists, she recalls, Schulz always wore his name badge despite being the most famous face there: "He was never really ready to be 'Charles Schulz'; he was just a guy making sure people could say hello to him by name."

Michaelis is at his best articulating the appeal of "Peanuts" through the decades. In the 1950s it struck a chord with people feeling guilty over their vague discontent amid historic postwar prosperity (Linus watching a leaf fall: "Nobody's happy where they are"). In the 1960s it expressed the struggle of young people reaching for inchoate freedoms and pondering the meaning of existence (Snoopy, wondering why he was put on Earth: "I haven't got the slightest idea"). More than anything, "Peanuts" upended the belief that childhood is a time of innocence and happiness, for a child's pain is more acute than an adult's. "Charlie Brown reminded people … of what it was to be vulnerable, to be small and alone in the universe, to be human," writes Michaelis, "—both little and big at the same time."

Michaelis makes wonderful use of the strips, reproducing scores to emphasize points of connection between Schulz's life and work or between the strip and the times. (The syndicate that holds the rights to "Peanuts" sold him the permissions for five cents per strip—Lucy's fee for psychiatric advice.) Schulz's cartoon children never age, for they already suffer from adult disillusionment and angst. Charlie Brown exults at the prospect of finally flying a kite that won't be eaten by a tree, until he pauses and tells the foliage, "Here, take it. It's been a long winter, and I'm very tender-hearted." As novelist Umberto Eco wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1985, "The poetry of these children arises from the fact that we find in them all the problems, all the sufferings, of the adult."

That suffering, actual and mythical, remained until the end the well to which Schulz returned again and again. Even as he lay dying of cancer in 1999, his reminiscences were all "about being picked on as a boy," and how he still wanted revenge on the kids who had bullied him so long ago. "You could see the bitterness in him," a friend recalled. "Nothing in all of his 77 years had been resolved." He seemed "angry at God, angry with friends, angry with fate." Schulz had announced in late 1999 that the strip would end, and drew only another two months' worth. As it happened, he died on Feb. 13, 2000, the day before the final Sunday "Peanuts" strip. As soon as "Peanuts" ended, so did his life.

© 2007