Paul Reubens Was a Smoker, but He Didn't Want Kids to Know that He Smoked

Thanks to a new documentary on his life, we're learning more about Paul Reubens, the man who played Pee-Wee Herman for decades on TV and the big screen. Among the revelations in the documentary are the ways that Paul shielded his personal life from public view intentionally so that he could maintain his status as a role model for children.

One way he did that was by hiding his own habit of smoking cigarettes from the public. Here's what we know about how much he smoked and why he felt it was so important to hide that fact.

According to reports from the time of his death, Paul was a heavy smoker but insisted that he never be photographed smoking because he knew that he was also a role model for children.

He also turned down endorsements of junk food for the same reason, per The Daily Beast, believing that it was very important for him to be seen as an ideal for children to live up to, even as he knew that his own flaws would make that difficult.

In the new documentary Pee-Wee Herman as Himself, Paul said that he didn't want the project to be a "legacy movie."

“I really want to set the record straight on a couple things, and that’s pretty much it,” he said, even though he sat for 40 hours of interviews for the project. The film's director, Matt Wolf, had no idea that Paul was battling cancer at the time, or that he would ultimately die in 2023 at the age of 70.

Among the things that he hid from the public was the fact that he was gay, a fact that he believed would have hurt his career.

“He didn't want his work to be seen through a gay lens or to be perceived as a gay icon,” Matt told USA Today. “That just wasn't how he defined himself.”

Even in the documentary, he struggled to address the subject head on.

Just like the fact that he smoked, Paul hid the fact that he was gay from public view for almost his entire life. He was arrested in 1991 for indecent exposure, and a decade later, he was charged with being in possession of child pornography. The documentary goes to great lengths to suggest these charges were inappropriate and to help clear Paul's name.

“The reason I wanted to make a documentary was to let people see who I really am and how painful and difficult it was to be labeled something that I wasn’t,” he said in an audio message recorded a day before his death. “I wanted people to understand that occasionally, where there is smoke, there isn’t fire."

“I wanted somehow for people to understand that my whole career, everything I did and wrote, was based in love and my desire to entertain and bring glee and creativity to young people."