PicoBlog

I always wish the guy at the neighbouring table would try to keep it down when I’m working … but especially at the 2019 Providence Comic Con back when the guy is Patrick Warburton a.k.a. Seinfeld’s David Puddy, a.k.a. The Tick. He wasn’t impressed when I told him that we met in the Detroit Red Wings dressing room in 2002—then again, he wasn’t impressed back then when I told him I worked the Devils’ first Stanley Cup win. Definitely not sponge-worthy.

I’VE written a couple of times about my late Peter Robbins, who was a child actor best known as the original voice of Charlie Brown in the Peanuts Christmas special. I’ve mentioned my trip with him to a Comic Con event in Providence—what would turn out to be the last time we’d meet up. I did stay in touch with him after.

(Have a look at No. 47: PETER ROBBINS / The Dirty Ghostwriter and No. 58: PETER ROBBINS / It's a Reunion, Charlie Brown: The original voice of the beloved Peanuts character talked to me about the suicide (or possible murder) of Christopher Shea, the voice of Linus. The latter has a long audio clip of Peter, still sounding like Charlie Brown, telling the story of the last time he and Chris Shea got together at a Tom Petty concert.)

Published on Jan 18 at 8:00 AM

The week before the Comic Con I emailed the news-tip line at the Providence Journal and pitched him an opportunity to interview Peter. They bit. Yeah, somehow at an event where Chevy Chase, Richard Dreyfuss and the cast of Major League (sans Charley Sheen) among others, Peter landed the star treatment in the local fish-wrap.

Here’s what it looked like. I’ll drop the text in below the my essay here.

Peter was more than grateful and said it was more than his event manager had ever done for promoting him. That manager did seem like a complete sleaze ball. He took a percentage of a bunch of the D-list Comic Con regulars but he reminded me of the freak show manager in The Elephant Man. How he was synced in with the promoters remains a dirty little secret, I guess.

Later I played around with a couple of fiction projects set in the Comic Con universe. I also wrote this essay after and submitted it to the CBC non-fiction contest as a lark. I don’t name Peter in it, but he’s easy identify. I don’t name the other well-known actor and I won’t here. At least publicly. (I’ll just drop it behind the paywall at the end of this entry. Those who know me will almost certainly know that the actor became a friend later on.) I’ll scuttle a lot of guessing and will tell you emphatically: It’s not Jason Priestley, whom I know through his adapting my novels for the TV series Private Eyes.

Anyway, here you go.

AT the front door of the convention centre I stood in line behind a family, weary parents pushing their smiling, chatty 12-yr-old son in a wheelchair. The boy wore a Batman outfit that hung loosely off his withered body. His motor skills had so deteriorated that his parents had to carry his autograph book and a stack of 8-by-10s. Inside the hall he’d join other kids from the children’s hospital who had been given free passes for the weekend.

Ahead of us in the queue were a pack of high-school boys dressed up as the Joker in the disturbing, Joaquin Phoenix iteration. Ahead of them adult couples were decked out as the Walking Dead, as if spectres had to pay admission to haunt the building. Ahead of them, others in Star Trek uniforms, well-worn and tighter than they’d been the last Comic-Con. Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker. Harry Potter. Dr Strange. Dr Who. Dr Octopus. Space Ghost. The Tick. The Incredible Hulk.   

The line-up of pop-culture icons ran into the hundreds but ended with me. I felt naked in an unadorned hoodie and jeans, an outsider as much as the Joker had ever been. I sensed the pity of super-heroes and villains alike. Maybe they sensed my fear that the automatic weapons carried by the Jokers weren’t plastic replicas, that maybe one of them had sneaked the real AK-47 past the metal detector.

At the door, I was waved in. I had a VIP pass. Rather than spend time out on the floor with those in costume and autograph seekers and memorabilia traders, I headed for the celebrity green room. Security guards ushered me behind the red velvet rope. They didn’t notice I wasn’t a match for the headshot on the laminated pass dangling around my neck. If I got through, who else might? My pass led the guards to presume I was somebody. Ninety-seven names, actors and voice artists, comic book artists and professional wrestlers, performers of every stripe, famous and somewhat less so, were listed on the map to the stars outside the hall, so no one on staff could have kept track of them all.

READER, you’re within your rights to ask: “What was an utter unknown doing in the green room with Captain Kirk?” A fair question that I asked myself when I was sitting at a table having lunch with, in no particular billing: Joonas Suotamo, the towering Finnish actor who plays Chewbacca in the Star Wars series; Daniel Ruettiger, the real-life college football player who inspired the movie Rudy; and Randy Jones, who was Cowboy in the Village People. Joonas wasn’t in costume but Rudy was wearing his 45-year-old Notre Dame sweater and Randy, in his boots, leather vest and black cattleman’s hat looked like he had walked right out of the YMCA video.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the Comic Con—I mean, it would have to for me to be standing at the lunch buffet’s steam table with the cast of Saved by the Bell.

Ten years ago, at a football game in San Diego, I had met a real-estate agent whose name I recognized when he handed me a business card. He had been a child actor in Hollywood back in the 60s and 70s. I won’t name him here to protect his privacy, which seems like a weird thing to say about someone who these days goes to Comic Cons to sell his autograph to fans and collectors.

Though time zones apart, we maintained a long-distance friendship over the phone. Our friendship was put on hold, however, when he had a psychotic episode and landed in medium-security prison for four years. After he was released to a halfway house and medicated for bipolar disorder, he asked me to help him write his memoir. This appearance at a Comic Con was my friend’s first unsupervised trip, though he was watched closely by the agent who represents him, along with Rudy and a constellation of fading stars. I went because I thought my friend could use the help on his memoir and support with everything else. I figured that he could use a friend.

Thus I was wearing the VIP pass of an actor who had guest-starred on Get Smart and The Munsters.

EVERYONE in the green room seemed to know everything about everyone else except me. My friend told me later that the celebrities suspected that I was his court-ordered plain-clothes minder, a condition of a release to travel while he was still on probation. Truth is, a casting director would have told you I had the perfect look for the role.

The unkind would call those in the green room D List celebrities. Truth is, you couldn’t lump them together.

Some were A Listers emeritus. Richard Dreyfuss won an Oscar as Best Actor for The Goodbye Girl and starred in Jaws, which has made two billion dollars. In the 90s he could command $5-million for 90 minutes of dreck like What about Bob? He’s still working but leading-man days are decades past and at this Comic Con his autograph and photo from Jaws were yours for $60.

Then there were the near-royalty, a level below Dreyfuss. Tom Berenger had been nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actor in Platoon, and Michael O’Keefe had likewise nominated for The Great Santini. They hadn’t been invited to the Comic Con to celebrate their best work, the performances of their career. No, they are attractions because of their roles in broad sports-themed comedies: for Berenger, the manager in Major League; for O’Keefe, the kid carrying the bag in Caddyshack. Fans shelled out $30 to get a minute of their sheepish time and painfully remind them how the first paragraph of their obituaries will read.

Then there was the likes of Caroll Spinney. Few will recognize his name, but everyone in the hall knew he had created and played Big Bird on Sesame Street. Spinney was unfailingly pleasant—whenever fans told him about the influence the show had on them, it seemed like he was hearing it for the first time. Hard to imagine the created Oscar the Grouch having such a light touch. Spinney hadn’t appeared at many Comic Cons—a neurological condition made travel impossible—but came out this time because it was close to his home in Massachusetts. This was, alas, his curtain call. A month after Spinney signed his last $40 autograph, he died at age 85. I doubt he spent a cent of the money he collected that weekend and suspect he would have paid $40 to talk to fans.

MY friend’s signing booth was a couple of tables down from Carroll Spinney’s. I helped my friend hang posters of his famous characters against the curtained backdrop. I collected his money from fans: three grand in cash the Friday night, what he described as “disappointing compared to San Diego and the other big shows.” He wasn’t despairing, however. “Tomorrow will be better,” he said. “Even if it isn’t it’s better than a medium-security prison.” 

That night we went for a late dinner—he had meals comped at the two-and-a-half-star hotel where Comic Con organizers had reserved rooms for their lesser names. He ordered a couple of vodka-sodas, the first alcohol he touched since he landed behind bars five years before and also a parole violation. A better friend than me would have told him that this wasn’t a good idea. I grimaced but let it slide. I’d have jumped in if he had ordered a third. When dessert came he told me weed on him and indiscreetly rolled a joint under the tablecloth.

“It’s is good for my depression and helps me sleep,” he said.

“You know what would be bad for your depression … prison,” I said in a small panic.

I kept my friend talking about his life story for his memoir and that way he couldn’t get too drunk or too high. Visiting memories, even bad memories, seemed better for his depression than weed. He talked about working with Jimmy Stewart and Bob Hope, about his mother pulling up in a limo to take him out of school to the studio, about the phone that didn’t ring after he turned 15, about casual drug use becoming a consuming addiction, about squandering every cent he made in show biz and inherited from his father, a physician to the stars in Hollywood.

“On weekends I went out with my father on his yacht,” he said. “I played tennis, played golf on the best courses, though I was better at tennis. I had a privileged life. I never played that kid in front of the cameras. The only reason that I went into the business at all were my mother who managed me, and my older sister, who was beautiful at age 20 and in a bunch of shows in guest roles, Mod Squad, whatever. My mom died when I was in high school, so I don’t know if I would have got back in the business. My sister’s career ended fast too—she had drug problems and ended up in bed with Warren Beatty and a bunch of stars and producer … finally couldn’t work at all. Died in a car accident, though I don’t know how much of an accident it was.” 

Hours peeled away. Of course, none of this came up when he was signing at his booth. “Probably would have scared off business,” he said.

I asked him how all his past, everything that goes with it, isn’t too painful to revisit at Comic-Cons.

“This isn’t the past,” he said. “This is my future.”

He swept his arm wide, panning a dining room with fairly full of the famous or formerly so.

“I’m not the only one.”

UNEXPECTED confession: Though I’m painting a despairing picture of my friend and the Comic Con scene, I’m a complete and utterly hopeless show-biz nerd. Please forgive me one semi-starstruck moment.

One name listed in the Comic Con line-up caught my attention: a veteran character actor. These days he’d be best known for work as a supporting character in a series that he doesn’t love, but one that has Comic Con comic-book appeal. He comes up right to the line where he looks familiar but can blend into a crowd. TMZ is hounding the others. People is short-listing the others for the world’s most beautiful. I’ll call him That Guy because, again, I want to protect his privacy. It’s a good fit because That Guy is what most people call him when they see him.

That Guy also happened to be a friend of a friend. His parents grew up down the road from mine.

For years I had gone back and forth with That Guy on social media. We connected the first time when I registered disappointment that his favourite series was dropped after one season. That Guy sent me a note, saying the hurt was so bad that he wanted to get out of the business. No exaggeration, as it turned out. He retreated to the woods in the Pacific Northwest and left his phone in L.A. for six months. In self-imposed exile, he wrote journal entries on Facebook, as long as 3,000 words. To my mind, they were works of genius and I expressed my appreciation in the spaces for comments. His wasn’t a high-traffic page and one day he deleted his account, bidding farewell to regular readers, saying he wanted to write for himself. I respected that.

He had been a scholarship student at a famous university even though he grew up in humble circumstances in fly-over country. He had an electric mind, had read everything, it seemed. 

I saw That Guy grabbing a bottle of water in the green room and chatting with one of the attendants. He was taken aback when I tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey,” he said, a little warily.

I introduced myself and mentioned that I had read his journal posts. I didn’t get a chance to tell him that I missed them.

“Man, we have been going back and forth for years. It’s so good to finally be doing this.”

I wasn’t sure what “this” was, but That Guy proceeded like Stanley chasing down Livingston.

“C’mon over and sit with me, brother, and give me your phone,” That Guy said and then typed in his email and phone number. “We’re going for breakfast tomorrow. You gotta come. It will be great to catch up.”

For an hour we talked as if we were rejoining a conversation from the night before, one that had gone on for years. Books we were reading. Teams we followed. Politics we shared. Religions we were born to. Kids we’re raising. About moving his family to Canada “if the mess in this country doesn’t get cleaned up.”

The lunch break ended and the call went out to the stars to once again assume their places. Patrick Warburton, who was David Puddy on Seinfeld and star of The Tick, led the way, cutting through the crowd on the arena floor.

“Aren’t you going out there?” That Guy asked me.

I shrugged. He must have forgotten that he was one of two people in the building who knew my name.

“If I don’t see you later, text me and I’ll see you at breakfast,” he said.

A minute after That Guy went back on the floor, his agent came up to me and asked me how long I had known her client.

“Sorta years, I guess,” I said. “But in flesh, an hour.”

“It was like you were brothers.”

THE green room emptied and for an hour I typed up notes I had taken the night before. The room was silent, but for the low buzz from the giant hive of fans out on the floor. 

That Guy walked into the green room and grabbed a bottle of water, his eyes tearing. “Dude, these people out there, there’s just so many broken people, it’s killing me,” he says. “I don’t know if I can do this. There was this poor kid …”

That Guy told me about a kid in a wheelchair whose eyes were glazed and struggled to say his name. “I mean, there’ve been others, but this one hit me hard … getting asked to lean over the back of his chair and smile.”

All I could offer was a simple: “Damn.”

THE next day, when I pulled out of the parking lot and put Comic Con in the rear-view mirror, I wondered if That Guy had been so truly shaken. Was his tortured conscience a piece of improv for the actor and an audience of one? If so, he gave a more compelling performance than Richard Dreyfuss in The Goodbye Girl.

I wanted to believe That Guy really was that guy and this was the price paid by those holding the Sharpies and smiling for the fans’ selfies.

From the Providence Journal

PROVIDENCE — In the Rhode Island Convention Center ballroom on Saturday morning, across the crowded corridor from where the cast of the 1990s sitcom “Family Matters” was greeting fans during Rhode Island Comic Con, a short, older man wearing a Charlie Brown shirt stood at a booth when a young boy approached with his mother.

“How old are you?” asked Peter Robbins, the 63-year-old who first voiced the title character in 1965’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

“Nine,” he said.

“That is exactly how old I was when I first voiced Charlie Brown,” Robbins responded. “Now you need to go out and get a job.”

“That’s what I need to get now, too,” he added, before signing a picture and handing it to the family.

Robbins’ life has had its twists and turns. But through it all, one constant has kept his spirits up, even in the worst of moments.

“I am alive today, in part, because of Charlie Brown,” he said, ensconced in a fluffy blue armchair during an interview in his room at the Graduate Providence. “You would not be doing a news story about me if I were not the voice of Charlie Brown.”

Robbins was born Louis Nanasi in Los Angeles in 1956 to parents who were refugees from Hungary in the aftermath of World War II.

Nanasi became Peter Robbins when he began auditioning for roles in Hollywood, shortly before he was picked to be the first voice of Charlie Brown in the Peanuts Christmas special.

“The opening [of the special] is very profound,” Robbins said, “when Charlie Brown looks at Linus and says, ‘There has to be something wrong with me, Linus.’”

“How could there be something wrong with a 9-year-old boy?”

In his adult years, long after he stopped voice acting — his last round with Peanuts happened just before his voice changed around age 14 — Robbins would find himself in trouble.

He began seeking out escorts and got wrapped up in prescription drug abuse and alcoholism. He eventually started dating one woman steadily, and that relationship led to a series of legal troubles and jail stints beginning in 2012.

“I made a bunch of stupid, criminal threats in 2012,” said Robbins, who lives with bipolar I disorder.

The threats involved his girlfriend at the time, Shawna Kern, and a plastic surgeon who had performed Kern’s breast-implant surgery.

Robbins was also charged with threatening a sheriff’s deputy on Jan. 13, 2013.

The court permitted him to serve time in a treatment center in lieu of a one-year jail term, but by 2015, he had violated his probation by drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana and failing to complete court-mandated domestic-violence classes.

The drug and alcohol use got him kicked out of the mobile home where he lived. While in custody after violating his probation, he was ordered to undergo a mental health exam after an outburst in a San Diego courthouse.

In December 2015, Robbins was sentenced to four years and eight months as part of a plea agreement regarding charges related to threats he made against the mobile home park’s owners.

That, he says, is when his true ordeal began.

Robbins said that racial politics in the California penal system caused several problems for him.

“If you do not play ball with [the prison gangs], bad things happen,” he said. “Once, the white gang blanket-partied me for going to a Catholic Mass with the Mexican group.”

Blanket party is slang for when someone’s face is covered with a blanket while a group is beating them.

Another time, he demanded a man in the prison yard put his shirt on to cover a large swastika tattoo on his chest.

“I told him to cover it up,” he said. “My grandfather died because of the Nazis.”

Toward the end of his sentence, his issues with bipolar disorder as well as paranoid schizophrenia got him transferred from the California Institution for Men in Chino to Atascadero State Hospital.

“My five years in prison were a true trip through hell,” Robbins said. “At the end, I was successfully paroled into the hospital, where for the first time in my life I received treatment.

“I spent four months in [Atascadero] tweaking the right medication, and since I have been on that medication, my life has turned around.

Robbins said he moved into a sober-living home in the San Diego area after his release and needs special permission from his parole officer to make trips, such as to Providence, where he signs autographs to earn a living.

“This is my comeback convention,” he said. “This is my testament that parole works. Going to anger management works. Taking the proper medication works.”He noted that there were several parallels between himself and his fictional counterpart.

“The credit goes to the man who is actually in the arena, and fails time and time again, like Charlie Brown, to kick a football,” he said. “But it will never be with those timid souls who neither know the thrill of victory or agony of defeat.

“That is why Charlie Brown is such a wonderful character,” he added. “He does see a psychiatrist, so he knows he has got some problems and he is trying to get help. They always say that Charlie Brown is a lovable loser but, at the end of the day, he gathers everybody around the tree.”

Robbins ended the interview by noting Linus’ comments upon seeing the bare, sickly tree in the Christmas special.

“Linus said that all it needs is a little love,” Robbins said. “Maybe that’s what we all need.

“Even though we are quirky. Even though we are depressed. That is what Charlie Brown represents, but at the end of the day ... love.”

Thanks for reading. And the ID of “That Guy” is below the paywall.

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