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But his long disappearance and gradual, Pee-wee-free return has made him more palatable, and Reubens is eager to regain his manic pace. Two weeks ago, he taped an episode of Ally McBeal in which he tries to sue Sting for breaking up his marriage to Cheri Oteri, and last Tuesday he guested on the Tonight Show. He is going to be host of You Don't Know Jack, a game show for ABC. He talks about wanting to remake the Eddie Cantor movie Kid Millions and writing his autobiography. He's also still pushing the variety show-sitcom Meet the Muckles, which he wrote in the late '80s and spent three years trying to make. Reubens' perfectionism, which led to spiraling costs, along with supportive NBC programming chief Warren Littlefield's firing, scrapped the project. Getting caught at a Sarasota porno palace probably didn't help.
But just as important as his own continued comeback--which started with his joining the Murphy Brown cast in 1995--is the one he plans for Pee-wee, a character so popular that Reubens still has unopened mailbags of fan mail, some of it addressed simply PEE-WEE, HOLLYWOOD, making him the only man with a functioning address shorter than Santa Claus'. He had publicly become Pee-wee exclusively, showing up in character even for print interviews, and having Pee-wee, not Reubens, as the name on his star on the Walk of Fame that was jackhammered up after the scandal. "This was my own private joke on conceptual art because I tried to make Pee-wee Herman totally real. It worked really good but totally backfired when I got arrested," he says.
Even though the gig is up, Reubens is eager to do Pee-wee again. He's co-writing the second of two Pee-wee movies he hopes to shop to studios soon; this one starts in the Playhouse before the story moves, Wizard of Oz-style, to somewhere even more messed up. The other one, The Pee-wee Herman Story, is what Reubens is calling "the adult Pee-wee movie" and has the tight-suited one making it as a pop singer, moving to Hollywood, becoming insanely famous and turning into a monster. "Pee-wee Herman winds up getting hooked on pills and booze. I'm not shooting up, but I wouldn't want young kids to see it," he says.
If it were up to him, though, Reubens says, he would rather hide behind that character. "The thing that's always said about me is that I'm really low-key and soft-spoken, so I'm always wondering if I'm talking too loud. It's weirder being myself," he says. So Reubens is still very veiled, nervously cutting himself off every time he is about to reveal something, like saying he has evidence that he wasn't as excited by Nurse Nancy as the Florida police accused him of being. "You're going to make me come off like an idiot," he frets several times. And there is no way he is showing off his house.
Reubens is said to have a house in the Hollywood Hills that makes the cartoony Gary Panter set from Pee-wee's Playhouse look like Martha Stewart's place. It's supposed to be jammed with toys and kitschy knickknacks and surrounded by a cactus garden he planted himself. "It's sad-scary. Even telling you this, you're thinking, 'Funny and colorful.' No. It's scary," he says. He's going to take it apart, get rid of all the junk, de-Pee-wee it, maybe make it a place for an adult. Then again, with all his other projects, he might not get around to it.