Sex Two Ways
On Pee-wee Herman, Jewish women, shadowy men, Don Draper, Barbra Streisand, and Robert Redford
We’re nearing the end of year one of the stack.
Normally, I’d post tomorrow, but it’s Richard’s birthday, and we’re going to Yaddo for the first time since we met there 17 years ago. He will be 73. When, at 23, he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, he was told he’d be lucky to make it to 60. Sensitive, they are, in the national health.
Maybe the stack is a report from where we are, day to day, on the animal of a life. Richard and I are at the hind quarters, I guess, nearing the tail. Most of the time we’re everywhere on the animal all at once. To me, narrative is about time. The narrator who talks to you in any genre, really, is looking back at a moment that may have taken place five minutes ago or 50 years ago. The narrator is telling you what the creature in the past was feeling back then, when it was going about its paces. The narrator dives into who the creature was in the context the creature lived in, and then the narrator tells you what this look-back is making the narrator feel now, in the moment of talking to you.
That play of time is what (hopefully) hooks the reader. The reader always wants to know: Why are you telling me this? What’s it to you, now? What in life has made you fall in love with it? Oh, I see (it’s hoped the reader comes to feel), and now I, too, remember things I love.
I don’t plan much, you have probably noticed. I feel an impulse, and I stage an experiment. What would happen if I put together this thing I’m thinking about with that other thing that’s drifted into my head? It’s the model of today’s post, pairing a piece I wrote in the Village Voice in 1991, when Pee-wee Herman was arrested in a porno theater, with thoughts I had 20 or so years later about Jewish women and shadowy men—a conversation concerning the TV show Mad Men (2007-2015) and the Streisand/Redford film The Way We Were (1974). In reviving pieces from the past, I’m looking for resonances to now, and both these contemplations of sexuality—the panic of the early ‘90s around children and sexuality in the Pee-wee story, and the erotic fantasies of women that become an exciting alternative to domesticity—both of these subjects feel entirely alive today.
Year two of the stack begins next week. On the animal of its life, the stack is at the nose, I guess, and it’s sniffing around. Please RENEW your subscriptions when stackland prompts you. Please launch a new PAID SUBSCRIPTION at the button below. And please tell your friends. Or one friend, if you are having a good time here. If one piece doesn’t turn you on, come again, because another one, it’s hoped, will. The stack’s only aim is giving you pleasure. More Zoom conversations and gatherings are in the works for paid subscribers. The next one will be in September.
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Free Pee-wee!
Praise for Paul Reubens, who, sadly, died of cancer this week at 70. The piece below is mostly what I wrote in the Village Voice in 1991, after Reubens was arrested. Extra remarks from now are in parentheses. And I’ve added information reported by Celeste Finn in an excellent post she shared on Facebook.
Paul Reubens was visiting his parents in Sarasota Florida when he went out for a wank at one of the local porno theaters that replaced the last picture show. He didn’t even take out his pud, he said.
According to Celeste Finn, “The official police report described the silhouette of the man they later identified as Paul Reubens using his left hand to commit ‘the crime’. Reubens is right handed. If it had gone to trial, an expert witness from Masters and Johnson was prepared to testify that, in their exhaustive research on human sexuality, they had never recorded a subject who used their non dominant hand to masturbate.
“The case didn’t go to trial because Reubens was also shown on the theater’s security footage in the lobby, with a time stamp at the time ‘the crime’ was taking place in the theater, according to the detective’s report. Also, Reubens was advised to avoid the publicity of a trial.”
Back to Stone 1991
Reubens hasn’t been found guilty of any crime, yet CBS canceled reruns of his Saturday morning kid show, Disney yanked a Pee-wee video from its tour attraction in Florida, Toys “R” Us and Kiddie City removed Pee-wee dolls from their shelves, the tabloids and TV news have flogged the story for days, and talk show hosts have been licking snide jokes off their whiskers every night.
Newspapers and broadcasters have enlisted psychologists to advise parents on how to explain Pee-wee’s actions to their children. Last Tuesday, Entertainment Tonight invited Soupy Sales to comment. Sales was introduced as a former kid-show host, although it wasn’t mentioned that Sales had himself been tossed off the air for instructing kids to mail him dollar bills. (Nice joke, actually.) About Pee-wee, Sales predicted (wrongly), “”t’s over, it’s over, it’s over. He signed his own death warrant. Where else is he gonna work? Television will never give him another chance.”
There’s a whip-cracking tradition in this country of ruining public figures with sex scandals—unless they are rich and white and straight (and can find a way, as has Donald Trump, to turn charges of rape and sexual assault into boosts to his public approval.) Until the rape charge against William Kennedy Smith, Kennedy cockmanship lent glamor to the clan. They were guys being hormonal. When videotapes of Rob Lowe screwing female minors surfaced, he was teased, yet in no time was on an Academy Awards show singing a duet with Snow White that would fairly have dinged his career.
Driving the reaction to Reubens is his connection to children. No one has suggested he touched children. They don’t need to. The image is of him masturbating—a thing everyone knows children do. Everyone knows children are sexual without the help of adults, and also people go to great lengths not to know this.
In the reality of Pee-wee’s world, children were never in that vanilla zone. The name “Pee-wee” is so close to the word “wee-wee.” There he cavorts, a noodle in slicked hair and lipstick, okay as long as he stays limp. The kid-hosts that reassure parents are eunuchs—Mr. Rogers and Captain Kangaroo, also the Muppets, who are made of cloth and who cringe away from females, their one female character is a lecherous, clueless pig.
Reubens doesn’t look like a eunuch in the mug shots released to the press by the Sarasota vice squad, his hair grown biker long, his chin shaded by a goatee. The Pee-wee character who talked to kids wasn’t a eunuch, either. He was a peculiarly sexed guy—libido poking out in campy flounces, risqué asides, and hip wisecracks. He's a committed deviant, welcoming of other oddball types who visit Planet Playhouse.
Pee-wee impersonates the child that adults find precocious and that other kids push away. He’s happiest in fantasy, where objects talk and he controls them. It’s no wonder kids adore his freakishness. All kids grope around in the mysterious meanings of adult language and measure themselves, trembling, against the size of adult body parts.
Pee-wee has always been a wanker figure, getting off on solitary, imaginative pleasure. The charges brought against Reubens have only made this association obvious. The narrator of London Fields, the novel by Martin Amis, points out that masturbation is almost never described in fiction. We’re supposed to be feel lonely when we’re alone, not enjoy our apartness.
Last week in a statement quoted in Newsday, Joan Rivers said that Reubens’s situation was “terribly, terribly sad,” adding that if he was convicted she was “sure” he was “going to go for help.” What kind of help? In seeking out more remote porno theaters? Bill Cosby—(he’s on the right side here, no one is consistent, or maybe he’s foreseeing his own sex trials?)—faulted CBS and Disney/MGM Studios for caving into hysteria and dispensing with due process.
Cyndi Lauper summed up the Pee-wee arrest as “a petty, victimless occurrence.” In homage to Reubens, Dave Herman, host of WNEW’s The Rock & Roll Morning Show, played Pee-wee’s theme song, “Tequila,” and encouraged parents to let their kids play with Pee-wee dolls. Herman, in a phone conversation, said his show had prompted 30 fax messages supporting Reubens and none attacking him. He reported a caller’s evocative detail about Reubens. Before his arrest, he’d declined a CBS offer to do a sixth season of the Playhouse, saying he’d like “to kill off the character.” He was an actor. He wanted to play other roles. Well, babe, it looks like a good time to let it go.
Postscript. Reubens was released from county jail the night he was arrested after posting $219 bond. At the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards Reubens made his first public appearance since the arrest. Taking the stage in costume as Pee-wee, he asked the audience, "Heard any good jokes lately?" and received a standing ovation. Reubens responded with, "Ha, that's so funny I forgot to laugh!"
Goodbye, dear man. You were a terrific actor in every role I saw you in.
Jewish women and shadowy men
Mad Men and The Way We Were
In the first season of Mad Men, Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff) enters the life of Don Draper (Jon Hamm), head ad man at the Sterling Cooper agency. Stylish, educated, and poised, Rachel runs the department store founded by her father, and she wants to boost its status—the way Barney’s rose from discount store to emporium of chic. Rachel controls her life, and mysterious, shadowy Don falls for her, although he storms away from their initial meeting when she challenges his understanding of her store.
It’s 1960, and he’s insulted taking directions from a Jew, and a female one at that. He doesn’t think she should leave the ghetto. There are Jewish stores and Jewish ad agencies, he tells her. One of the younger execs refers to her as Molly Goldberg, because it’s the only reference he can grab to dismiss her, and the absurdity of the comparison of this sleek striver to a stout, middle-aged mama figure shows there isn’t yet a category for Rachel in the Mad Ave world.
Don’s talent is to recognize the next new thing as it takes shape, so he can market it or destroy it. Ordinarily, he would send Rachel packing, but she’s hired his firm, so’s forced to take her in, and in measuring her intelligence and self-possession he sees what is missing in himself. She believes she can remake the world, rather than adapt to it, as he has tried to do, and he feels an impulse to clip her power by making her sexually vulnerable. He’s aroused, too, because she makes him feel unsteady, and his slipping convictions make him more interesting to himself and sexier to himself.
She’s attracted to this man who is smooth and beautiful, and who is in some sort of enigmatic pain. He invites her for a drink, and she meets him. She notices he has a loose cuff link, and chooses an expensive pair for him from the jewelry case in her store. He leans over to kiss her, and she folds into him without loosing her footing. He says he’s married, meeting her eyes. He’s saying he will fuck her but not risk losing the account by deceiving her. When she says she isn’t interested in a second-helping existence, she surprises him again. He counts perhaps too much on his erotic allure. She sees his confusion and says, “What did you expect, for me to run beside your life?” She says she will continue with his firm but he must remove himself from the account. The purpose of his seduction has backfired, and he feels done to even though she has acted above board.
Don wishes he were Rachel. It’s an extraordinarily brilliant reversal of the usual trope of a woman falling in love with the man she wants to become. Don wishes he had Rachel’s freedom to pursue his own ideas and desires. And then he understands he doesn’t know what his desires are. He’s learned to calculate what other people want and package it for them, but what is he moved by? What does he care about? This question continued to drive the evocative series throughout its run.
At home with his family, Don squirms away from the question of his desires. At the same time, he’s on the spot to help his wife bring off a Hallmark party for their little girl. They live in a suburban enclave gated off from Jews and other “elements” considered pushy and invasive. Don’s family life, it’s quickly sketched, feels to him more like a trapping of success than a set of connections.
While assembling a playhouse for his daughter, he drinks several beers and tops them off with liquor. At the party, he chats with a divorcee the other wives consider a predator merely because she’s unmarried. Don is just talking to her, but his wife Betty (January Jones) interrupts their conversation and sends him off to fetch their daughter’s birthday cake. He doesn’t return. He parks his car and sits beside the railroad station, wondering what moving object he can jump onto.
The more stylized the acting and directing on the show, the more real, oddly, this world seems, or perhaps hyper-real, in that feeling here isn’t expressed in language but rather in what isn’t said. Part of the series’ plan is to establish and then subvert stock types: the mysterious, emotionally lost ad executive who can chameleon himself this way and that; the abandoned, unhappy housewife caught in a Douglas Sirk melodrama; the office queen who rules the other females but shies away from competing with men; the country mouse enduring the station’s of “sex and the single girl,” caught between the secretarial pool and the junior execs. In training to become a man, the first time Peggy Olsen (Elisabeth Moss) has power, she badgers an actress she’s hired for a commercial so much the woman runs from the studio crying.
Throughout the show, we see the characters from the point of view of a dazzled child—you could understand the entire story as told by Don’s daughter Sally (Kiernan Shipka)— spying through a keyhole into her parents’ private angst and joy. We stay by this keyhole with her. The figures remain as inaccessible in the telling as they were to her—to us—in childhood. The figures are preserved as impenetrable in order to prolong our romance with them. It’s seldom a show allows the audience to enjoy not knowing in such a sustained way. Eros is what resists understanding.
Hamm, who plays Don as a gliding muscle, isn’t conventionally macho, or else nothing would penetrate him. No one knows his full story, although gradually it’s revealed. In the first season finale, we learn he was born Dick Whitman and had enlisted in the military during the Korean War. When his commanding officer was killed in an accident and his face was destroyed, Dick, in a quick stroke, exchanged dog tags with the corpse without considering the consequences. What about the people in the real Don Draper’s life? Wouldn’t they search for him when he didn’t return home? The coffin with Draper’s remains is sent back to the Whitmans, although neither parent is Dick’s biologically.
Dick grows up to rely on his wit and cunning. When Pete, a junior exec, learns the truth of his identity and tries to blackmail him, Don at first feels threatened and proposes to Rachel they run away together. She’s insulted, of course, partly because he keeps casting her in the role of the girl. She can see the future, and it looks like a car wreck.
Don, sent away again, gets drunk, returns to his office to asleep, and the next morning changes into one of the white shirts he keeps stacked in a desk drawer. Then he tells the truth to Burt Cooper, the firm’s owner, played by a jolly-looking Bobby Morse. Cooper is a disciple of Ayn Rand, prophet of the sort of killer individualism Don strives to embody. Cooper laughs at the revelation in front of Pete. “Who cares? Who cares who he is? No one will care.” He tells Don he’s free to fire Pete, although he may wish to spare the snake that, once saved, can become fiercely loyal. We know Don won’t fire Pete because he’s no longer afraid of him and he’s not a vindictive person. He doesn’t care about money, really, and he doesn’t believe in the advertising business. He doesn’t believe in anything except his ability to continue, and he loves his children, although he’s not interested in them. He’s focused on sensation. He’s always looking to numb pain.
Don’s pain is the show’s mesmerizing revelation. It makes him poignant, and it’s what Rachel and the other women in his surround respond to. Charged by his fantasy of flight, he says to Rachel, “You know me. You know everything about me,” searching her lean face for recognition. She shakes her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
******
In The Way We Were, Katie Morosky (Barbra Streisand) longs for Hubbell Gardiner (Robert Redford.) Her hair is frizzy. His hair is smooth and gold. It’s 1944, and she spots her college crush at El Morocco, beautiful in his white naval officer’s uniform, dead asleep on a bar stool. The film is lushly photographed and scored. It’s schmaltzy and also unusual in that the lovers can’t mesh.
In Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw in a similar way sets her sights on Big, who resists her. In one episode she replays the last scene of The Way We Were, where Streisand’s Katie spots Redford’s Hubbell in front of the Plaza Hotel. They have been divorced for many years, and he has just married a pretty, young double for his Waspy college girlfriend. Katie smooths his hair and says, “Your girl is lovely.” Carrie does the same thing to Big after he marries a Park Avenue socialite, and he looks at her confused.
The Way We Were delights in love that doesn’t end because it can't be gratified, and by centering on female desire it broke ground in 1973. The movie burrows into Katie. Iconic Hubbell is the Garbo we can’t know and who can’t articulate himself. Katie and Carrie try to discover what’s inside aloof, shadowy men, but it’s impossible because the men are unknown to themselves. The women stay beside their respective blanks, because in that way they find space for the renewal of their fantasies. And a kind of hope. Hope as the eros of repeated disappointment.
Watching The Way We Were, we want the blue-eyed American to adore the passionate Jewish girl in the same way we want America to tuck the huddled masses into its warm overcoat. We want the brains and tenderness of the funny-looking girl to outstrip her large nose, and we want her to stop working to prove herself all the time. We want him to want her. That's all he has to do. But he wants less from life and from himself.
Her attraction to him makes him feel alive, and he enjoys her delight in him more than he delights in her. Her belief in his talent makes him think he can be a writer, but writers need something they burn to say, and Hubbell doesn’t want to speak. Redford is a fascinating incarnation of the enticing no. In scene after scene, as he paces around silently, looking sideways at anything but the situation he’s in, his bottled emotions peek out of his eyes like hostages in a bank robbery before they are corralled out of sight.
What a pleasure it is to read your work. You're such an original, elegant and eloquent thinker!
Very interesting take on Mad Men and The Way We Were (and the reference to the scene in Sex and the City). They were fascinating and frustrating in equal measure, and I think you've put your finger right on the sore spot.