Pulling the Curtain Back on "Peanuts"

If you're about 35 or older, you grew up with Charles Schulz's comic strip "Peanuts." And if you didn't, well,

According to David Michaelis' new biography, "Schulz and Peanuts," by 1971, Schulz had 100 million readers and the fourth-highest sales figures of any 20th century author.

According to Salon's review of the biography, it's a warts-and-all kind of book. Just reading the review is enough warts for me, thank you. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that creator of the first comic strip whose characters had an inner life of existential angst was a -- how do we say? -- "complex" person:

Somehow, without (it seems) actually trying to, Schulz succeeded at making all of his readers think that his strip was about them.

Actually, it was about him. Michaelis reveals that the upshot of Snoopy's brush with campus protest -- a breathless romance with a "girl-beagle" who had "the softest paws" -- was inspired by Schulz's extramarital affair with a 25-year-old office worker named Tracey Claudius. Snoopy's sentimental swooning over his lady love was no exaggeration, either; Schulz inundated Claudius with doting notes and flowers and gifts commemorating each month of their "anniversary." For the straight-arrow Schulz, the affair was a first foray into adultery after almost 20 years in a marriage that, while difficult, produced four kids and underpinned the most productive period of his life. Claudius, who regarded "Peanuts" as "holy," was terrified when he took her to the Tonga Room in San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel, convinced that the newspaper columnist Herb Caen would spot them and blow their cover. "I would be the one that would ruin his image for the world," she told Michaelis. "God! If I'd found this out when I was reading it, I would have been crushed. Charlie Brown wouldn't be innocent to me any longer."

Some readers may feel much the same after finishing Michaelis' biography. Not, however, about the affair with Claudius, which was heartfelt and, in its own small way, tragic. Schulz was no philanderer, though he was prone to crushes on "distant princesses" (cf, Charlie Brown's little red-headed girl). Rather, it's learning about the depressive, anxious, detached, resentful, self-defeating and self-deceiving personality of the comic strip's creator that's likely to puzzle and sadden some of those who grew up with "Peanuts."