Don't invite Paul Reubens over just to be nice. Because he will come. While he was shooting the movie Blow in Acapulco, a pack of drunken college students from Jersey swarmed the man who was once Pee-wee Herman and, in a spasm of exuberance, invited him to their hotel party. "It's like if I were loaded out of my mind on spring break and saw Captain Kangaroo," explains Reubens. That night he went to the kids' suite and stayed at the party for hours. Reubens has also taken up fans on offers to stop by when he's in their town. "I went to someone's house for dinner, and it turned out everybody already ate, and they just watched me eat. I've gone over to complete strangers' houses, and it's like tons of people come out in pickup trucks and say, 'I'm Donny's wife's boss's friend, and he told me you'd be here." Still, Reubens is not going to just sit at home. "I've sort of decided not to be so protective anymore," he says.
The '90s were the protected decade for Reubens. After pleading no contest to a 1991 charge of indecent exposure at a porn theater he dropped into while visiting his parents in Florida, Reubens went into hiding for a month at the New Jersey compound of billionaire Doris Duke, whom he got to know through her Hawaiian neighbor Jim Nabors, whom he met through Charo, who had appeared on his kids' show, Pee-wee's Playhouse. Being Pee-wee Herman is even weirder than you think.
As Paul Reubens, though, the guy is within driving distance of normal. He's not the greasy, bearded freak from the infamous mug shot or the manic wad of frustration that is Pee-wee but a mellow, slyly funny 48-year-old whose oddest obvious quirk is that he's trying--and succeeding--at coming off like a 30-year-old. He has shaggy, jet-black hair with bangs, wears a horseshoe-embroidered black Guyabara and jeans and has a freakishly creaseless complexion. And he has proved his ability to pull off non-Pee-wee characters over the past few years, culminating in a convincing gay '70s Los Angeles hair stylist cum drug dealer in Blow, the cocaine movie starring Johnny Depp that opens this week. "I have a four-year-old daughter, and I was introducing her to Pee-wee's Playhouse, and halfway through I was like, 'I wonder what that guy is doing?' " says director Ted Demme. "I called him, and I said, 'Man, if you could create a character that was a quarter as memorable as Pee-wee, it would be amazing to have you in the film.' "
That is just the kind of part Reubens was trying to land when he first moved to Los Angeles in the '70s. "At that time comedy was king, and no one was buying me as a dramatic actor," he says. So he joined the Groundlings, a Los Angeles improv group of which Phil Hartman and Cassandra (Elvira) Peterson were also members, and invented Pee-wee in 1978. He did the character until 1990, the year before his arrest, when--fortunately, as it turns out--he decided to take two years off from performing and--unfortunately--grew that scary goatee. He wound up getting himself a lot more than two years.
His decade of shame happened because unlike Hugh Grant, Robert Downey Jr. and Bill Clinton, who bounced back like flubber, Reubens chose not to go out on the contrite circuit--talk-show appearances and celebrity-magazine confession stories. And it was partly because parents use their TVs as baby sitters, and no mom wants her baby sitter breathing heavily in a sparsely filled theater.