Charles M. Schulz, An American Master

You watched American Masters: Good Ol’ Charles Schulz, didn’t you? Good! I think it strikes an excellent balance, portraying the artistic man, the family man, and the inner man in equal portions. I don’t completely buy into Citizen Kane being a significant theme, let alone an obsession, for Schulz — I love the movie myself — but overall I found the documentary to be positive, informative, and poignant. I was particularly taken with Donna Wold’s description of a conversation she had with Sparky when he called her in 1970.

I was pleased to see how throughout the program there was always a return to an emphasis on Schulz at his drawing board. The simple act of putting pencil and ink to paper was, after all, what the man loved to do, and it’s the reason he’s worth the attention he is receiving. Congratulations to writer-director David Van Taylor for his excellent production.

Two of the Schulz offspring, Monte and Amy, have had very little good to say about the David Michaelis biography of their father, and Jill has gone on record as agreeing with them. Michaelis appears in Good Ol’ Charles Schulz, and reading his book I can see that he does tend to fancy himself a psychoanalyst, and he’s consistently negative where he could have been more balanced. I feel that David Van Taylor found that balance in Good Ol’ Charles Schulz, so I’m a bit surprised that Monte and Amy aren’t mostly positive about the program.

Over at the Cartoon Brew blog you can read Amy and Monte’s comments about the book. My buddy Dennis has pulled their entries out of the comment thread. If you see a “more” link, click it to read them, otherwise keep scrolling.

Charles Schulz’s son, Monte, who we’ve already pointed out isn’t pleased with the book, posted a comment on our previous Cartoon Brew post further detailing his objections. Here’s his comment in full:

“The point of objection to this biography of my father is how much is simply untruthful, and deliberately so. There are many factual errors throughout the book; there are people who are give authority to speak about our family who have no insight to do so; and there are so many elements of my father’s life that David deliberately left out of the book, that it really is impossible for anyone outside of our family, or Dad’s circle of friends, to come to any genuine conclusions. I can tell you absolutely that he was not a depressed, melancholy person, nor was he unaffectionate and absent as a parent. Honestly, the quote I’ve really wanted to give the press, after reading both the early of the manuscript and the final book, is this: “The book is stupid, and David Michaelis is an idiot.” That said, I had a six year on-going conversation with him about this book, and like David quite a lot. But I was shocked to see the book that emerged, because it veered so drastically away from what he told us he intended to write. Which is why we’ve been so militant in our response. Incidentally, the material David edited out of the book is even more outrageous. The fact is, after reading the book, I decided I’d learned more about David Michaelis than I did about my dad. I found that interesting.”

10/15/07 11:53pm Monte Schulz says:

I forgot to look for responses to my last message on here, but seeing the comments, I believe I need to clarify a few things. First of all, we did not expect, nor did we desire, a fan-bio on Dad. I spoke with David Michaelis on a regular basis for the six years he worked on the book and discussed many issues with him. We knew he’d write about the affair and had no dispute with him at all over that. Nor did we anticipate the book being merely a glowing tribute. After all, we didn’t hire him to write the book; we simply agreed (myself and stepmother) than he seemed to be a good choice. He brought the project to us; we did not seek anyone to write Dad’s biography. Remember, he sold the bio to Harper Collins, not to us. So why the complaints?

How could we have been so surprised by what he wrote? And why does he and Harper Collins maintain that I, in particular, had the chance to correct any errors in the book, yet chose not to? Well, this is not a good venue to explain all this in full, but I’ll summarize as best I can. First of all, there are three levels of problems in the book for me (and not only the family objects to this book, by the way, but also everyone in Dad’s inner circle — close friends, his lawyers, business associates, etc.), and they are as follows: an array of factual errors, both large and small, which highlight David’s intentions in the book; a number of people who were interviewed but whose comments were essentially excluded because they either contradicted or failed to support David’s thesis; and lastly, the greater part of Dad’s story, which David’s deliberately left out of the book because it did not interest him.

Now, we were sent a manuscript at Christmas time last year to read through and comment on. I spoke with David just a couple of days before receiving my copys and reiterated my support of his book, and his right as a writer to voice his opinion (which is another reason why we’d never sue him, even if we had grounds: we believe in his First Amendment rights and his legitimacy as an author). But once I read the manuscript and several of the things in it, well, basically, the top of my head blew off. Factual errors, by example: he argued that my dad was able to work so effectively because my mom ran the place where we lived, doing all the cooking, cleaning, etc. But he left out a wonderful black woman who worked for us almost seven years, Eva Gray, one of the dearest people I ever knew (she just died last year, and we made sure that she and her husband Jim were able to attend Dad’s memorial service), and very integral to our lives back then. David leaves her out of the book entirely, boosting Mom’s roll in our lives and diminishing Dad’s. Then, when he does mention her as fixing snacks for us in 1969 while my mom worked at our ice arena, it’s absurd because she hadn’t been with us for three years by then, having left in 1966 to help with her husband’s business.

He also talks about how my mom had built a pond in 1960 and stocked it with bass so my grandfather could fish when he visited (more proof of everything my mom did, which Dad did not), but, in fact, that pond didn’t even exist until seven years or so later, well after my grandfather was already dead. Just two of many, many factual errors, minor except in their intent, and unnecessary because David could easily have asked me about them during his writing. He didn’t because he’s arrogant. Also, he wrote about how we were inundated by strangers visiting for autographs and Kodak pics of Dad. Not true. I have no memory of strangers driving onto our property (which was not the vast estate David makes it out to be), nor does my sister Jill, nor does my mother. It wasn’t true. Lots of errors like that, careless, silly mistakes. There was no bid of $170,000 in ‘69 for the ice arena, and therefore the costs did not, as David wrote, balloon up 780% to 1.25 million. That latter number was the actual bid. I know this because my stepfather was the contractor and that was his bid. He was astounded that David would write that first number. Lots of mistakes like that.

But what about voices who weren’t heard? Well, for example, he only spoke to my sister Jill once over a lunch and that was that. He did interview Cathy Guisewite, but then called back to ask her, if you can believe it, whether or not my dad “came on to her.” Is he joking? Cathy knew Dad for more than twenty years, and except for one or two lines, David left her out of the book in favor of Lynn Johnston who provided much more provocative information, much of which (particularly in the first draft) is silly and self-serving.

He cherry-picked quotes, put ones together that did not belong together (getting my sister Amy in a section about how Dad was unaffectionate to his children to say that she had to learn to hug from the Mormon church. Actually, she told me that she explained to David how when she was younger, she hated people invading her personal space, but when she joined the Mormons, people were always coming up and hugging her, so she had to learn to do so, as well. But she said that story had nothing to do with Dad at all). Yet David conflated the ideas together.

For my part, Dad was a wonderful parent, reading to me, teaching me to throw baseballs, watching movies with me, driving me to school for years, taking me down to SF for doubleheaders, hitting fly balls to me for hours, teaching me how to shoot marbles, sharing his books with me as I grew older and began to write, flying out to Minnesota with me to help buy sheets and pillows for my dorm room, picking me up at the airport each time I flew home, and even in the last six months of his life, staying up late at the ice arena, well past his bedtime, to watch his 49 year old son play hockey games. None of that is in the book. nor are Dad’s passions for golf (which he played all his life, including at the Bing Crosby Pro-Am and the Dinah Shore Invitational for years, baseball (he coached our Bronco League baseball team one summer when I was twelve), tennis where he and my stepmother joined club and met many new friends and played tournaments (he and I won a father-son tournament when I was in my late 20s) and met Billie Jean King, went to Wimbledon twice and became very involved with the Woman’s Sports Foundation, a huge part of his life. And, of course, he loved books, movies, cars, music. What does David mentions of that? Nothing?

Does he name Dad’s, say, five favorite books? Nope. Artists? Nope. He writes a lot about “Citizen Kane” but not about “Beau Geste” or any of Dad’s other favorite films, because the Welles movie influences David’s theme and the others don’t. Why only ten lines or so about the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference, which Dad and I attended for more than twenty five years? That was huge interest of Dad’s. He loved books and writing and talking about both. In David’s first draft, his only mention of the conference was regarding Dad’s “writer’s conference girl-friend, Suzanne Del Rossi,” a completely preposterous page and a half about a woman Dad knew there, someone all of us knew, anyone attended the conference knew, who was married and flirted endlessly, not only with Dad but with many other men there. And nothing ever happened because it was only for fun. Reading that section is what put me over the edge, because I knew then that David had no desire to tell Dad’s life, but rather was more interesting in moralizing and psychoanalyzing Dad because David himself loves analysis. That’s his story, but not ours.

So, why didn’t I correct him when I read that first version? Because to change the central erroneous nature of what he’d written would have required a massive re-write and re-thinking of the entire book, something he would never have had time to do, even had he the will and the desire, which he obviously did not. I did not want to clean up the minor errors, only to see the bigger ones remain. Again, I’m only touching on a few issues. If any of you want me to answer anything with greater specificity, I’d be happy to do so. I apologize for rambling like this, but the story is very convoluted. I will tell you that NY Times piece happened because a long interview I did for Time magazine was apparently killed somewhere high above the magazine, up at corporate (I’m not allowed to say more than that), and therefore I was directed to the NY Times reporter who, sadly, hadn’t even read the book when we spoke.

Let me tell you, though, that David never met my father, and basically hid from us what he intended to write. This is very apparent when you read some of the email exchanges we had over the years, and what we spoke about on the phone. I used to ask him not to babble about how Dad was depressed all the time because it wasn’t true, and “don’t write some kind of tabloid novel about Dad’s life.” To which he’d always respond, “I wouldn’t spend six years writing that kind of book.” But he did. Oh, someone asked about any of us carrying on Dad’s legacy. Well, none of us can draw, nor do we have the same sensibility he had toward his characters. The strip was his, but we were the ones who made the decision (by renewal copyright law in the ’70s) have the strip die when he did. We have our own lives and interests, though Dad did tell a friend that he thought my fiction was “raising the level of art in the family.” Thanks for that, Dad! Nor true, of course, but I do my best. Yes, all of this, even responding on here is frustrating, but that biography is so absurdly false in so many ways, I could not just be quiet. I’m mostly disappointed that so many reviewers apparently believe what’s in it. Such is life.

10/16/07 11:29pm Monte Schulz says:

Wow, I didn’t mean to be boring in that long piece on David’s book. I wrote that late at night and could barely see to correct typos, of which there were several. Sorry! Also, I saw that comment about the housekeeper thing as being trivial, and taken alone it certainly is, but, as I said, it was just one of many small factual errors and this is not an easy forum to get into detail. No one wants to read a ten page diatribe.

And, by the way, I haven’t asked anyone not to buy or read David’s book. That’s not my place. I’m just trying to let you know that it is not bulletproof, and is, in fact, erroneous in many ways. And, actually, I liked David a lot. I used to call him “Pudge” because he had a little bit of a gut and didn’t like working out. We got along well. I just don’t like the book that came out of those years we talked. Nor did I want to talk about myself as being left out of the book. That seemed too self-serving and whiny, as though I’d have liked it better if he’d had more of me in it.

Talking tonight with my stepmother, though, I did tell her that it occurs to me now that had he described more fully my relationship with my father, many of his assertions about Dad as a parent would’ve been contradicted. I believe he left me out deliberately for that reason. Incidentally, speaking of silly errors, in the Updike review, you’ll see he talks about how Dad used to play at the Bing Crosby Pro-Am until his agoraphobia finally prevented him from going. Actually, what ended his trips to that golf tournament was the new management from Japan who bought the tournament and decided that new celebs would be better than old ones, so they stopped inviting him!

Another funny story that David did not write about (though I recounted it to him) was when a friend of mine, Buddy Winston, who used to write for Jay Leno at the Tonight Show, pitched the idea of Dad appearing there; he was told that the booking group passed on Dad because they didn’t think he had anything to talk about! Nice, huh? Maybe sometime tomorrow, if you like, I can post up some other problems with the book. Otherwise, I can only thank you for being so supportive of my dad’s work. Regarding whether or not I ought to write a memoir, well, I write fiction and have lots of work ahead, and don’t really know how to tell Dad’s story. I’m a novelist, not a biographer. But thanks for the suggestion. I appreciate it.

10/17/07 8:45pm Amy Schulz Johnson says:

To begin with, I completely agree with every word written by my brother Monte. It is important to me for fans to know that David’s book is more fiction than fact. When David came to my home to spend time with me, learning about who my father was, he distinctly gave me the impression that he wanted to learn and write the truth. David committed the ultimate “sin of omission” by leaving out what would have been many, many chapters of what a wonderful father and friend my dad had been. From the time each one of us was little, to his dying day, my dad devoted large amounts of time to us. There is no way he could have been a more involved and loving father. As for being a friend, it would be extremely difficult to record all the good that he did and the time that he spent with each person that he had the chance to meet and spend time with. There are too many people, not enough time, and it would take volumes of books, not just one. Having said that, I believe David had the sacred obligation to compile this information as best he could and lend credence to it. Leaving out the generous man that was my father, David ends up publishing a book about someone else, not Charles Schulz.

10/18/07 12:01am Jill Schulz says:

As the youngest daughter of Charles Schulz I have not spoken out yet on this book however I would like it to be known that I am in total support of Monte and Amy, and the rest of our family in feeling deceived and angry over what is an extremely incorrect impression of our father and our life growing up with him. He was a very present Dad, and very involved in each and every one of our lives and interest up until the end. The portrayal in David’s book of Sparky as cold, distant and unloving is simply 100% incorrect. I know many of my quotes, well, the few in the book from the one an only hour David ever spoke with me in seven years, were all taken out of context. Also, whomever said that David did not have a sense of humor hit on something which would explain why David never qualifies any quotes from our father has having been said in joking or sarcasm which was a definite style with our Dad. A few years before he fell ill one day my father asked me out of the blue “if I would miss him when he was gone” He wasn’t a big hugging type of Dad (which is all I said to David and he twisted it into him being cold and unloving), but was always there for us emotionally to talk and share time with. Never was he mean. We each a our own special relationship with him and he respected how different we each grew up to be and supported our interested no matter what. Now, regarding all of the factual errors, Monte has mentioned many, and those are just some of them. One big one that seems to appear in all of David’s press articles is that Sparky said “Unhappiness is funny”
That is NOT what he said. He said…..and he said it many.many times, when asked why Charlie Brown never gets to kick the football……”Losing is funny, because only a few people ever
experience winning, but we all experience losing”

10/18/07 12:47am Monte Schulz says:

I’m glad to see Amy post on here because she had one of the best lines about David’s book. While Michaelis (and many reviewers) seems to favor my brother Craig’s line, “We thought we were getting vanilla, but instead we got Rocky Road,” Amy said last year (after reading the first draft), “I thought I had a happy childhood until I read David’s book.”

If I can find some free time tomorrow or the next day, I’ll go through the book a little more closely to point out some errors and problems that will more fully explain why we object to the biography. Tonight, I just want to explain that it’s very difficult for us to see the press and book reviewers making comments about Dad and our family life that are just simply untrue. I mean, how does anyone expect us to react when Laura Miller over at Salon.com writes, “. . . his children complained incessantly of his detachment and obsession with work.” There is no truth in that statement whatsoever. Moreover, she can’t possibly know whether it’s truthful or not, because she doesn’t know any of us, was never at our house during those years, has no inside information at all about us or our relationship with Dad. Worse yet, all of the above applies to David, too. It’s stunning to read reviewer after reviewer parrot back information like that from the biography without the least bit of skepticism, particularly once we came forward to speak out against the book. Then we hear about how actually we’re just idolizing Dad, putting him on a fatherly pedestal, not facing the reality of his cold and distant demeanor. In other words, David Michaelis apparently knows more about us and our family lives than we do! Is that so? Yesterday I spoke for about an hour with a family friend who was quoted in several places about how Dad was not “the world’s best parent.” After he told me that it was true, Dad wasn’t that good a parent and he saw it first hand at our house, well, I then regaled him for five minutes with a brief history of my relationship with my father, meaning everything this friend had no knowledge of, all the places my dad took me, all the things he did for me, everything he taught me. When I finished, this guy was surprised and sheepish and apologized, and told me that he just didn’t know all that, had no appreciation for a side of my father he’d never seen. And, of course, I had to point to him that it was because Charles M. Schulz was my father, not his. So how could he have known? Therefore, how could David Michaelis possibly know? And how could the reviewers of David’s book know what’s true and what isn’t? They can’t and he can’t. So, here’s the sad truth: actually, David Michaelis absolutely, and without equivocation, knows that what he wrote about our family, and how we felt about Dad, and how he felt about us, is false. He knows it because he did interview us, and each of us told him about our lives with Dad, and no one in the family spent more time, devoted more hours, exchanged more emails and phone calls with David than I did. He doesn’t address me in the press because he knows that my life with Dad, just mine alone without needing to drag in my younger sisters, flatly contradicts a huge part of his portrait of Charles M. Schulz. That’s why he left me out of the book, in any meaningful way. And that’s one of the many reasons this book is deliberately dishonest and incomplete. And he knows it. What’s sad is how deaf I was to him all those years. Nearly everytime we spoke, at one point or another in our conversation, he would suggest that I write a memoir of my life with Dad. And I just laughed it off because, after all, wasn’t that, in part, what he was doing? Well, as it turned out, his suggestion was almost like a code to tell me that I’d better write down that father/son relationship because I was not going to to see it in his book.

Anyhow, it’s just lame to have phony information out there and have so little opportunity to contradict it, set the record straight, have our say. Which is why I really do appreciate this site, and all of you for reading what I’ve written, and responding so thoughtfully.

As I said at the top, I’ll try to suck it up and go through some of the book with you, being a little more expansive with some of the silly things in the book. I would like to let David know this much, however: My friend, out here in the California, we call them “towns” not “villages.”

10/20/07 8:33pm Monte Schulz says:

Jumping in here again, let me answer quickly that we have no interest at all in legal action against David. Why would we? That has never been a topic of conversation with us. In our opinion, he has every right to say what he wants in his book, but just the same we want to be able to say what is flatly untrue. This is why the strange experience I had with Time magazine last month killing an interview I’d done was so unfortunate. But this forum has been amazing to me, and for that I thank all of you. Again, sometime this week I’ll try to go through the book for you to more fully explain some of the egregious errors and conscious deceptions. That’s my only purpose on this site with you — to simply let you know what’s not true in David’s biography.

10/21/07 4:23pm Monte Schulz says:

Addressing (again) why we didn’t work with David to correct some of his errors, well, actually, both my sister Meredith and my stepmother did, in fact, try to work him. And neither were all that pleased with the result. That is to say, his effort was feeble when adding material (the SB Writers Conference, for example), and nothing really changed regarding his view of our family life, or how Dad saw himself. Seeing what he edited out of Meredith’s story vindicated my choice not to work with him: I noticed only one thing he cut out, which was, believe it or not, David’s suggestion that on our cruise to Hawaii aboard the Lurline in ‘66 (?) that my dad had his eye on Meredith’s fourteen year-old girlfriend. Why even write that? Her friend was appalled when I sent the passage to her by email. It left the book, all right, but he’d still written it. Why? The point is that David had such a firm point of view, and so many erroneous judgments, that his re-write would have required a postponing of the book’s pub date (something we suggested and was rejected out of hand by Harper Collins), that I couldn’t see any good purpose in correcting a dozen or so small but glaring and lazy factual errors (any of which could have been corrected by his calling or emailing me during the writing of the book when I was more than happy to help). My old editor at Viking was, in fact, the one who advised me to let it go out with the factual mistakes intact after I regaled him with all the big ones. His quote was that otherwise I’d be “polishing a turd.” Ten months later now, and hearing David tell the NY Times that he got it right, “positively,” only confirms that I made the right decision. But again, let me repeat, that was my choice to make, not the family’s. We decided right from the beginning that each of us would have the right to go our own way, say what we chose to press (if anything), and deal with David as individuals. That was only fair, I think.

10/22/07 12:11am Amy Schulz Johnson says:

Let me begin by saying that I am overwhelmed by the kind words of love for my dad and support of us, his children. I wish I could personally thank each one of you. It means the world to me, Monte, Craig and Jill. I will use the answer to a question that was asked of me, in one of the posts, to tell a special story of my father. Concerning my membership in the LDS church (Mormons) it was asked of me whether my dad and I had many discussions about religion. Ironically, we did not ever discuss religion. This is why: my dad spent a great deal of his life studying the Bible. I have images of him sitting in his big, yellow chair, reading the scriptures and marking them extensively. He taught Sunday school for 12 years out in Sebastopol, not to mention his involvement with the Church of God in Minnesota. When I told him that I was joining the Mormon church, I knew that it was a church he did not believe in at all. Because of the wonderful relationship we had with each other, it was instinctive of us to know that discussing religion would not do either one of us any good. I had WAY too much for respect for dad’s religious knowledge and he had WAY too much love for me, his daughter, to ever say anything. We never wanted to hurt one another. I now am a parent to 9 children, ranging in age from 9 to 24 years old. One of the most important parenting skills I have learned directly from my dad is that of unconditional love. As I look back in time, I constantly marvel at the love and support I got from dad when it came to all of my involvement in the Mormon church. There are many, many people, who when they join a religion contrary to their parents’ beliefs, are then disowned by the family. To begin with, my dad came to my baptism (I was 22 years old.) When I decided to serve a full time mission for the church, he was again there for me. When I got my mission call (a letter) from the church, my dad was one of the first people I wanted to tell. I walked into his studio, unannounced, and as was his fashion, he immediately put down his pen and got up from his desk when I announced, “Dad, I’m going to England!” His quick wit and sense of humor responded “Even Jesus didn’t get to go to England!” With that statement came outstretched arms and a big hug, making me feel as though he were proud of me. He then spoke at my mission farewell (not typical of non-members.) The only time in my life I ever saw my dad cry outloud was the morning I was leaving for my mission. He just stood on the sidewalk with tears streaming down his face. He couldn’t move. He was so overcome with sadness. I was about to leave him for the first time in my life, for over a year, and at the same time, my sister Jill was about to head off to Argentina to skate in ice shows. His “babies” were finally leaving him. And to make matters even MORE difficult for him, the following week or so after I left, he had quadruple bypass surgery. Let it be known that he HAND wrote me beautiful long, loving and funny letters EVERY week on my mission! I cherish those letters more than anything I own. When I returned from my mission, he continued to show his love unconditionally. I was married in the Oakland Temple and of course he had to miss the ceremony itself. But he sat in the temple waiting area and he then stood outside afterwards, in the cold and fog, to have his picture taken with me and my husband. Again, this was a show of his love and support for me. To reciprocate as best I could, I created a ring ceremony and a situation where I could have my dad “walk me down the aisle” to a song that was special to both of us. My point? Our relationship was so solid, so unconditional, that nothing was going to come between us…not even a religion that could have divided us. Now, I have 4 grown children, and 5 left in school, and I have a daily goal to show them the same unconditional love that my dad showed to me. It is hard sometimes, when your kids don’t do what you hoped they would. But, when I struggle with feeling bad, it only takes me a second to remember the example that was shown to me. This is MY story, but each one of my siblings could tell you the same thing concerning THEIR relationship with dad. Because David’s book has left out the experiences that show you who our dad REALLY was, we feel it necessary to share them with you ourselves. Thank you for listening.

10/22/07 9:06am John B. Johnson says:

In Defense of Truth

I very much appreciate many of the words in this forum. I personally knew Charles “Sparky” Schulz for about 18 years; I am his son-in-law (married to Amy). I strongly agree with what Monte, Amy, and Jill said, along with the many others who wrote the truth.

I’m not sure who the person is that David was writing about, but here are some truths about Sparky that I experienced firsthand, most of which came from his taking time away from his busy schedule for me and my family.

Sparky took me golfing many times (when he could have been working), he hit fly balls to me in the baseball field, we went out to dinner, we went to movies, we quoted lines from The Great Gatsby to each other, I watched him play in many golf tournaments, he often showed interest in my work and life by asking thorough questions, he knew of my genuine interest in genealogy and thus he shared with me many stories of his youth and growing up in Minnesota and stories about his time in Sebastopol with his young family, I saw him interact in a respectful and positive way with his friends (Dean J., Larry J., Father L., Chuck B., etc. etc. etc.), I saw him play ball with my children, I watched him draw funny pictures at his kitchen table with my children, we spent many Christmases staying at his house, we went on trips with him to Minnesota and other places, he came to our house many times, I saw the love and dedication he had for my wife, Amy and all her siblings, and the list goes on and on and on!

And he did all this, along with all his other relationships in his life, while dealing with the daily pressure of drawing his comic strip. This is not “idolizing”; this is real life! In Sparky’s defense, this was the truth. I loved him as a father-in-law and I appreciated all the love and support he gave to me and my family during the 18 years I knew him