Living on ‘Peanuts’

The phone rang. It was for his wife. I’ll get back to her, the caller said. The next morning Charles Schulz, a decade older than most people when they retire, a man who long ago amassed more than enough money to do whatever he wants, was in his office by 9, staring at the white strip of paper he must fill each day for more than 300 million readers around the world.

Picking up on this fragment of communication, he scratched out some dialogue in his unreadable handwriting and underneath drew two simple figures in his tremulous pencil. Charlie Brown asks his sister Sally if anyone called while he was out. “So and so called,” she answers, “and said they’d get back to you, or get even with you, or something.” “They?” he asks. She replies, “He or she.”

The moon-faced boy with a few squiggles of hair and the famous bad luck. A black-haired girl with a big mouth and a mean streak. A dog with the imagination of a poet who can never think of a better beginning for his novel than, “It was a dark and stormy night.” A simple joke, a bit of melancholy, a dash of philosophy. Since 1950, Schulz, 73, has turned these deceptively modest ingredients into a cultural phenomenon: “Peanuts.”

The world is awash with his creations. Snoopy floats above Central Park on the side of an advertising blimp. Linus’ security blanket is in the dictionary. Readers of Latin can empathize with the boy with the round face they know as Carollus Niger. Success and acclaim are everywhere. At the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, a retrospective of the strip, on view through August, is breaking records. HarperCollins is about to flood bookstores with a tidal wave of new “Peanuts” titles and gift items (the total print run is 2 million).

The Museum of Television and Radio in New York is featuring an exhibit of “Peanuts” animated specials (which have won five Emmys) until next year, when the show moves to Los Angeles. A piano concerto based on his characters by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich is scheduled to premiere at Carnegie Hall in March. And so what is the first thing that drifted into Schulz’s mind the other day as he sat in the cozy restaurant of the ice rink he built across the street from his office? Rejection.

He can recall in vivid detail the time and manner of various artistic slights: the editor who flipped through his portfolio like it was the Yellow Pages and pronounced it not professional enough; the fruitless train trips from his home in Minneapolis to sell his fledgling strip to syndicates in the big cities of the East; finally landing a deal, only to have the syndicate cancel it at the last moment. In 1950 he signed with United Feature Syndicate, which sold the strip to seven papers--but only under the title of “Peanuts,” not his preferred name of “Li’l Folks.”

“I’ve received my share of insults from editors,” he said. Even his posture betrays a certain wariness; sitting at an oblique angle to the table, his pale blue eyes peeking out from thin slits and avoiding contact in favor of gazing out on the skaters jumping and twirling on the ice. It would, however, be unfair to paint Schulz as bitter or hard worn. Certainly his personality is streaked with sadness, a sense of longing and loss that is familiar to his fans and comes quickly to the surface.

But there is also a genuine warmth, a deep sympathy and even passion that infuse his work and animate his face as he talks about how he never wanted to do anything but draw, about how people respond to the strip and how what he fears most is losing the ability to be self-critical. “That’s the frightening part, to lose your ability to judge whether what you do is any good or not,” he fretted. “I’m sure it’s just something that happens in all areas of creativity.”

The man is the work, observed Paola Muggia Stuff, the director of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum, which Schulz helped found. “He would love to say he was Snoopy, but he’s not often a Snoopy personality,” she said. “He’s got the crabbiness of Lucy; he feels as lonely and as out of place as Charlie Brown. He’s all of those characters.”

Day after day, in one to four panels that fill a slot barely bigger than two credit cards, Schulz creates a world of almost Tolstoyan proportions (perhaps it’s not an accident that the bibliophile harangues friends to read “War and Peace”). While other cartoonists, such as Garry Trudeau (whom Schulz admires), are relentless trend mongers, stuffing their strips with Internet gags and political satire straight out of the news, Schulz focuses more on the eternal than the ephemeral. His world has its pain and its angst, but always gently portrayed, while the current cartoon ethos tends more toward the rude and brash.

His characters may be ageless, but their desires also prove perpetually elusive. Charlie Brown pines for the Little Red Haired Girl he can never approach. Lucy loves Schroeder, who cares only for Beethoven. Sally dotes on Linus; he prefers his blanket. “Everybody is yearning for something they can’t have. There’s all this unrequited love,” Muggia Stuff said. “It’s probably one of the most human strips out there.”

The irony is that Schulz is doing just what he always wanted to do: drawing cartoons and making people laugh. He was born in 1922, nicknamed “Sparky” (“Hey, Sparky,” people say as they pass his table) by an uncle after a cartoon strip character and grew up in St. Paul, where his father was a barber. One of his first memories is of a kindergarten teacher looking over his dabblings on a sheet of butcher block paper and telling him that someday he would be an artist.

“She may have overshot it,” he said. “That was my first and only encouragement.” In high school a teacher asked him to sketch some cartoons for the yearbook; on the last day of school he tore through the volume only to find that his work had not made it. “I never did find out why,” he said dryly more than half a century later. Visiting his dying grandfather in the hospital, he chanced upon a how-to book for cartoonists. “I bet I read that thing a thousand times,” he said.

He took drawing lessons from a correspondence school and later taught there, picking up extra money by doing the lettering for comic books at night. To this day he still does his own lettering, turning his jittery pencil scrawl into a firm ink line. Some 16,000 strips after starting he has no plans to stop.

Five days a week he drives down from the hills near here where he lives with his second wife, Jeanie, to the low-slung redwood office building set back in a residential neighborhood near downtown. From 9 to 4, with a lunch break across the street at his ice rink, where he plays hockey in a seniors league every Tuesday night, Schulz is in his large studio. Guinness put him in its book when “Peanuts” was sold to its 2,000th newspaper 12 years ago; 600 more now buy it. “There is no such thing as inspiration,” he said. “You just do it.”

Schulz, who has five children, doesn’t remember ever taking more than 10 days off at a time. He did suffer a month of forced inactivity recovering from heart surgery in the early ‘80s but worked extra hard before he went into the hospital to churn out an extra large backlog of cartoons. At the moment he’s got two weeks of daily strips done and almost three months of Sunday panels. “I’m the ideal employee,” he said, “very dedicated, faithful, reliable.”

Pines wave outside the curtained windows of the studio; inside books and mementos are everywhere. Schulz draws at a small table, the kind of thing you’d find gathering dust in the corner of an art store, marked down. Unlike many big-time cartoonists, who employ enough assistants to make Rubens jealous, Schulz still does it all himself. “I still delight in trying to make a good pen line,” he said.

His hand shakes more as the years go on, giving his recent drawings a saw-toothed edge. But when the originals, each panel about the size of a large postcard, are reduced for newspapers, the cartoons don’t look too much different than they did 45 years ago. That’s not to say there aren’t stylistic differences: more single panel gags, some without words.

“I find that remarkable,” Muggia Stuff said. “He’s accomplished more than most cartoonists ever dream of and yet he’s still testing the water. Visually he’s gotten a lot looser. Some people say he’s becoming Zen.”

Snoopy, however, is no monk. He has more outfits than Barbie, all of which you can buy at the “Peanuts” gift shop next to the ice rink. You can also buy everything from a $2.50 “Peanuts” hockey puck to a $295 faux leather golf bag. Since 1957 when “Peanuts” characters started hawking Ford Falcons in commercials (a year before Snoopy even stood upright), Schulz has presided over a far-flung international empire, overseeing his marketing company Creative Associates. He has even been inducted into the Licensing Industry Merchandisers’ Assn. Hall of Fame.

Still, Schulz oozes obvious hurt when he says cartoonists are not given their due. “Cartoonists are kind of ignored,” he said. “It’s not considered a worthwhile profession. It’s considered a waste of time.”

This from a man who has been awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture and has had his work exhibited in the Louvre. “It was an honor considering my cartoons were rejected from my high school annual,” he said. “Life is full of rejections.”