Peter's War
Written by Josh Sanburn
The soldiers lie in piles upon piles. Arms askew. Legs bent. Faces twisted and pointed skyward. Some sit in cargo trucks and amphibious landing boats, others in fighter jets and tanks. They are major generals and lieutenants, colonels and commanders. Some have endured decades of battle. They’ve fought among the pines of the Catskill Mountains and the wooded cow paths of New Hampshire, near coral reefs off the Florida Keys and across the slate quarries of eastern New York, along the urban landscape of Greenwich Village and on the beaches of Provincetown, soldiers like Pryor and Woodward, DePalma and Willis, operating Abrams tanks, UDT Boats, Mirage F-1s, traversing rivers, fortifying bridges, conducting reconnaissance missions, patrolling borders. They’ve seen ice storms, spring flowers, changing leaves, and blistering heat, most notably during the Battle of the Wilderness when 7,000 troops from the Green and Gray armies fought for weeks over 20 acres of splintered, piney forests alongside hundreds of military vehicles and war planes.
But no matter how many soldiers enter the fight, there’s only one rule in this war: no one is allowed to die. Death is forbidden, a fate that can never be claimed, no matter the cost.
The worst-case scenario? A few get lost in the weeds or some of the planes get caught in the elderberry bushes as the chickadees watch, bemused. That’s because these battles are imaginative creations, part of an elaborate strategic game devised by a lone man living in the serene mountains of upstate New York, immersed in a decades-long world of creative make-believe. The soldiers are eternal, or as eternal as modeling clay could ever be. Peter's War has taken to the battlefield in 17 locations in 8 states and three countries. These days, thousands and thousands of these permoplast soldiers lie dormant inside cardboard boxes within a weather-worn wooden shed, at rest and awaiting orders, as its commander next door fights the ravages of time.
Peter Shulman shuffles slowly from his bedroom into the living room of his pale yellow two-story farmhouse. Inside are brown walls and pale red rugs. The house has a character of its own. It feels lived-in, a bit musty. A painting of a topless woman with arms high and outstretched, a pale yellow moon in the background, hangs on a wall. A coffee mug with a silhouette of a mother’s face leaning down toward a child holding a red ball sits on an old wooden table.
The chemotherapy for Peter’s esophageal cancer has stolen much of his energy. He sleeps a lot. His left leg is badly infected. He has a bandage on his chest where a spot of red is seeping through. If you want to talk to him, you have to yell because of his dimmed hearing. When he speaks, it sounds like his throat is part gravel. His son, Peter Shulman, Jr., says that doctors gave his father three months to live. That was almost two years ago. “The chemotherapy is killing him,” Peter Jr. says, while his mom and Peter’s wife Gaye Anne stalks the house with an unlit cigarette hanging from her lips. “But he will not give up until the cancer is gone because he knows he can do it.”
Peter Shulman the elder is 88. And the story of his life, the stories of his many lives, sometimes seem too remarkable to believe. Take for example, the time that he says he ate donuts and drank Champagne with Elton John (then known as Reggie Dwight) in a hotel room and that John was so inspired by seeing Peter with his wife that he wrote his first major hit, “Your Song,” about them. There’s the story about how he raced Corvettes in Mexico and was involved in an accident so severe that the steering wheel slammed into his stomach and pinned him into the seat as both he and the seat went flying out and the car exploded. Then there’s the time he was hired to determine when race riots would occur in Rochester, N.Y., for a shadowy company that attempted to predict human behavior using computer simulations. Or the time he told a newspaper reporter that he spent the day with Pablo Picasso in France. (“You could tell he was a giant of a man,” he said, “although he was not as famous at the time as he would end up being.”) There’s the story his son, Peter Jr., tells about the family driving all the way from upstate New York to the end of the Yucatan Peninsula where they encountered a bunch of Mayans who Peter befriended, including the town’s police chief, who deputized Peter to police the town while he was away and let Peter live in his hacienda.
And then, there’s the time he lived and worked and played alongside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. He says he was right there, on the brink of fame in the 1960s, standing at the edge of something huge. The way he describes it, you can almost picture him in those smoky, crowded galleries of New York, just a breath away from artists who would redefine the world.
He has stories for days about how he turned himself into a pop artist with no training and launched himself into New York City’s art scene, showcasing his “candy coated barbed wire reality” paintings right alongside Warhol’s Soup Cow and Lichtenstein’s Wave. He starts talking about how he went on The Merv Griffin Show and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and found himself alongside others who became household names of American pop culture.
But there’s something about the cumulative effect of listening to Peter’s stories that makes you pause. The stories are almost too amazing, too fortuitous, to be anything but a dream. And even though Peter, Jr., his son, now in his 50s, stands as his loyal comrade, confirming many of his father’s wild tales, you can’t help but wonder: How could anyone have lived so many lives?
And that’s when Peter starts showing you exhibit fliers and grainy photographs of Greenwich Village and Mexico and race cars and you start to think that maybe, just maybe, some of these stories really did happen - including the story that, just as quickly as he arrived alongside Warhol, he quit the art world, told the galleries to shove it, and moved upstate to become a father and a farmer. And why did he turn his back on fame? Partly, for the only thing that seems to have brought him happiness, purpose, and a sense of peace: His War. The war that he’s played his entire life, ever since he was a child.
Peter’s battles started just as the ones overseas quieted. It was the mid-1940s, the beginning of America’s postwar period. Peter was a boy growing up in Far Rockaway, New York, a growing section of Queens off the chilly Atlantic where Jewish immigrants had been settling for decades. Peter’s parents were a wealthy Jewish couple. His father was the chief of radiology at two Brooklyn hospitals – thanks to his own father ushering him into the positions — and both of his parents believed in the power of education above all else. They sent Peter to a prestigious private school miles from home. Each morning, as the sun peeked over the ocean and lit up the seaboard, Peter was driven in one of the family’s many cars to classrooms filled with polished children where he says he was often bullied. Then, when he came home as the sun set, he was told to go to his room and study. He tried, begrudgingly, but he hated it. He not only suffered the isolation of his four walls but Peter describes “very heavy physical abuse” at the hands of his father when he misbehaved.
His schoolmates lived far away. Even though he shared the grand family house with his grandparents, an aunt, uncle, and cousin, as well as his parents, loneliness pressed in. Within his room, Peter was left to study with nothing else to occupy his time, which was by design. “I was never given a toy by my parents in my entire life,” he would later recall. “There was no such thing as play.”
So, instead, Peter daydreamed. He invented worlds inside his mind which allowed him to escape his bedroom walls, away from the solitude and the forced study. He became a middling student, more interested in his imagination than excelling academically.
But one day, when Peter was about seven years old, he was given something that wasn’t lined paper or sharpened pencils. An aunt handed him some oil-based clay. Reluctantly, his parents allowed the clay to stay – after all, clay wasn’t a toy. And it wasn’t much, just a pound or so. Peter soon realized that all the worlds he’d been imagining in his head could now be made real, in miniature, inside his room. And he realized that the clay never hardened. It was perpetually pliable. When one world ended, another began.
Peter sat in his room turning the soft material in his hands. Slowly, figures began to emerge. He made little people and a boat and got his men to climb aboard. His parents allowed Peter to see a few Western movies and when he returned home, he began reconstructing what he’d seen on the screen: dusty desert towns, heroic cowboys, courageous Native Americans. He found some metal pins that he turned into tiny guns and placed them in the figures’ malleable hands. Peter’s bedroom came alive. And he eventually found the courage to take his cowboys and Indians to the house’s outdoor garden where entire battles in the green shrubbery began. Soldiers charged. Guns fired. Men collided. It was the beginning of a war that would last a lifetime.
Peter also began to sense a fiery anger that lived somewhere deep inside, but noticed the anger would retreat when his fighters battled. Something about the tiny clay men in hand-to-hand combat made it dissipate like smoke from a cannon. But as the anger left, a sense of shame and embarrassment seemed to take its place.
To his parents, this make-believe war was all a waste of time. It was play, not study. So he tried to keep his battles secret and his soldiers hidden.
When he was nine, Peter bought his first – and only – true toy: an M4 Sherman Tank, a hulking metal presence among his fragile clay soldiers. Slowly, his armies began to take shape: two modern factions, meticulously crafted, armed, and ready for war. Then one day, when Peter went out to the garden, he couldn’t find his soldiers or tank anywhere. He looked and looked, but they were gone. He eventually suspected an uncle had found them and thrown them out. But Peter said nothing. The shame of play, always lurking, kept him silent.
Peter retreated into his room. His tank gone, he began making horse soldiers. He didn’t dare to venture out into the garden. It would take him seven years to play outside again and a quarter-century before he told anyone else about his war.
Peter Shulman, by his own admission, is a bit of a con man. Take, for example, the time he fooled his parents into believing he was going to class.
When Peter was in high school, every morning he would say goodbye to his family and head out the door of his house in Lawrence, N.Y., where the family had recently moved, just east of Far Rockaway. Peter left his soldiers behind, hidden in drawers and closets. He had recently begun naming them after realizing he could pretend to play with his real-life friends by hand-sculpting their likenesses. On the way to school the first day, he passed Rock Hall, a 1767 Georgian-style home and manor that was originally a plantation. He noticed a pond on the grounds and started watching the frogs. Some were hopping. Others were buried in the mud. It was peaceful, serene, so serene he just decided to stay there. He walked home for lunch, then returned to the pond in the afternoon until school was presumably over before returning home for the evening, his parents none the wiser. He did it the next day. And then the day after that – until he just never went to school at all. Then one day his report card showed up at home. When his parents opened it to see how their son was faring at school, it was blank. No grades. So as punishment, they shipped him off to an all-boys boarding school. He wasn’t allowed to bring his soldiers, but he smuggled in some clay, resculpted new warriors, and continued to stage his battles – this time on the campus’s salt marshes.
Then there’s the time Peter did the same thing in college. After graduating high school, Peter says a wealthy family friend invited him to a private New York City club to meet the president of Brandeis University, a private research university in Massachusetts. Over lunch, Peter says the president invited him to attend and Peter agreed. Peter’s dad gave him a car. Peter packed his things, including his soldiers, and left New York City for Waltham, Mass. But when he arrived, Peter says no one told him what classes to go to. So, he didn’t. “Never attended a class,” he says. “It was like high school all over again.” But he again managed to recreate war battles, this time along the rock shelves of Brandeis’s campus.
Or, there’s the time he says he pulled one over on the United States Air Force. In April 1955, after leaving Brandeis and a couple of other colleges without earning a degree, Peter recalls meeting an Air Force recruiter who recommended he enlist. So he left his toy soldiers behind to get a taste of what real war might be like. But the Air Force made him a dental technician and, after basic training, shipped him off to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, an increasingly important and growing outpost during the Cold War and one of the closest geographically to the Soviet Union. Peter, though, was more interested in girls and the Harley-Davidson motorcycle he brought with him, which he loved riding in the seasonable summers. But when winter set in with average lows in the teens, Peter grew depressed and wanted out. One day he told his sergeant he was thinking of deserting, and the sergeant sent him to a psychiatrist. “I talked to that doctor and I decided, I’m gonna con him,” he says. Peter told him he was losing his mind due to the unremitting Alaskan winters and that all he dreamt of was green fields every night. The Air Force relented, granting him an honorable discharge and returning him to the continental U.S., away from the Cold War and back to his own.
Soon, Peter the con man became Peter the drifter. He possessed no True North. Within was a wildly spinning compass that had lost its magnetic force. In 1958, Peter’s mother – the one who held the family together – died. In an early gesture of affection for his son, a gesture that would soon become familiar, Peter’s father recognized his son was depressed and, because he had the means, one afternoon took Peter to a Chevy dealership. His father pointed at a display and asked Peter: ‘Would you like something like that?’ He was pointing at a 1959 Corvette. Peter said yes. It was the only way his father seemed to know how to show his son love.
Shortly after, while watching a race in Lime Rock, Conn., Peter saw drivers racing cars much like his. He thought to himself: ‘I can do that.’ And so, in typical fashion, Peter was all in, full-force, with zero experience. He started racing his Corvette in B Production, where classic high-performance cars like Mustangs and Camaros compete against each other. He raced from the early 1950s to the early 1960s. And there’s evidence of Peter’s accolades – of sorts. According to an issue of Sports Car Club of America, “Pete Schulman” did finish 13th in a September 1960 race in Thompson, Conn. But racing was not to be Peter’s true calling either; in 1962 while racing in Mexico, Peter was flung from his car, broke his neck, and became too afraid to compete. He turned his back on racing.
By 1963, Peter had moved to New York City, where family connections landed him a job as the deputy to the director of research and planning with New York City’s Department of Corrections. Each morning Peter took a taxi to a boat that would ferry him across the East River to report to work on Rikers Island. Peter would take his colleagues to lunch just outside of one of the detention facilities, where they could hear the nearby female detainees screaming and yelling. The incarcerated women provided an amusing soundtrack to their meal. (Despite Peter’s anecdotes of his time at Rikers, the New York City Department of Corrections says they have no record of Peter working there.)
It’s right around here when Peter’s drifting and conning, his fierce intelligence and creativity, the imaginary worlds he created, and his seeming ability to see something and then reproduce it, all joined forces in a spectacular fashion. By the early 1960s, New York City was incubating a number of cultural movements ready to burst into being. One of those was Pop Art, the artform that often took its inspiration directly from pop culture, advertising, and mass production, and it had just started taking hold in New York. Roy Lichtenstein’s Look Mickey, his first use of comic-book imagery, debuted in 1961. Andy Warhol’s collection of Campbell’s soup cans followed the next year
The way Peter tells it, he was with his second wife (his first marriage lasted less than a year) walking around New York one day looking at some of the art on display in the city’s galleries. Peter told her he thought he could do something just as interesting. So, Peter took a break from sculpting his soldiers, walked into an art store, and bought a bunch of canvases. The shop’s owner taught him how to stretch them. Back in his apartment he spray-painted them with enamel. Then he took some white paint and dripped it onto the canvas in puddles. He let the paint dry for a couple days, and when it got sticky, poured some yellow paint on it. He looked down and realized he’d made a fried egg. He liked it. It wasn’t a conscious thing. It’s just what came out. He took a few of his new creations to some New York galleries, and they liked them, too. They evoked the same feelings of popular imagery and absurdity often seen in Pop Art works then. Suddenly, Peter was an artist.
By 1964, he had sold his first painting and things started to take off. He painted fried eggs on a highway. He painted them on toast. He painted them on a dirty floor. He painted them onto a Confederate flag in a work he called Southern Fried Eggs. The following year, Peter was featured in a New York Daily News article alongside other artists like Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg, who all showed their art at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, which became an early incubator for pop artists.
By February 1966, Peter had his own one-man show at the Southampton East Gallery on 72nd Street in New York called America In The Sky, which featured paintings of military aircrafts flying over Kansas prairies and grids of farms, work directly inspired by his war game – even though the inspiration remained a secret. He says the Pentagon bought one of the paintings and that he gave one to Warhol after he stopped by. Later that year he appeared on The Merv Griffin Show along with guests like the actress and singer Charo and comedian Red Foxx. That summer, Peter was part of a show that featured several artists but three headliners: Roy Lichentstein showing Metal Sculpture, Wave, and Brush Stroke; Andy Warhol showing Multiple Flowers, Elizabeth Taylor, and Soup Cow; and Peter Shulman showing Egg in Frying Pan, Confederate Flag, and Daughters of American Revolution. When Peter was arrested for possession of marijuana a month later, Peter described himself as “the world’s greatest painter of fried eggs.” And by the end of 1966, he was selling fried egg paintings for as much as $350, or about $3,400 today, at The National Arts & Antiques Festival in Madison Square Garden. In a 1994 newspaper article, Peter claimed that he once sold one of his fried egg paintings for as much as $30,000.
He worked and showed his artwork in the city before returning home at night to play war in his New York City apartment. He filled an entire walk-in closet with his soldiers and tanks and airplanes, hoping no one would find them. But then, one night, someone did.
It was the early 1960s when Peter says he was at a party near his apartment and started talking to a young Black comedian. They hit it off, and Peter was done partying and wanted to go back to his place to make some coffee. So the two of them left and walked to his apartment. When Peter opened the door, he realized he’d unintentionally left some of his tanks out on a table. The comedian saw them and asked what those were all about, so Peter decided to let it all out. He took him to his stuffed walk-in closet, and the comedian saw it all. The men. The planes. It was the first time since Peter was a child, when his uncle had discovered his soldiers and threw them out, that anyone had stumbled upon his war.
Except, this time, the comedian was intrigued. He wanted to play. It wasn’t the horrific moment Peter might’ve imagined after years of hiding it. Any shame he still had evaporated. The embarrassment dissipated. And he started unboxing. The two of them set up armies on Peter’s living room floor and an all-out war commenced. The comedian, he says, was Richard Pryor. “Tank battles all over my floor,” Peter says. “He wasn’t famous then.”
Peter says he never saw Pryor again after that. But that serendipitous moment – playing war with an up-and-coming Richard Pryor – unleashed an unexpected thought. Maybe he didn’t have to be ashamed about the war anymore. Maybe he could unbox it all. For the first time, Peter saw an opening.
Opening up about his war to someone he’d never see again was one thing. Letting someone close, someone he loved, fully into his world was something else altogether. Playing war with Pryor pierced his long-standing armor. And it led to him being fully open, finally, with Gaye Anne.
Gaye Anne and Peter have been married for almost 60 years. Until recently, Gaye Anne didn’t cook. She didn’t clean. She didn’t do laundry. Peter did. But ever since Peter was diagnosed with cancer in 2023, Gaye Anne has taken over the household chores. She feels indebted to Peter for sticking by her side for so long and through the many lives that she’s lived as well. So now, in her 80s, she’s learning to cook. She washes his clothes. She sweeps.
Gaye Anne is thin with long, silvery-blonde hair. She spends her days walking around the house with Peter recalling their past in a voice loud enough that her husband can hopefully hear. When asked why Peter didn’t make it bigger in the art world, she can be heard across the room yelling: “Because he didn’t market himself!”
Back in the 1960s, Gaye Anne described herself as a revolutionary, an idealist, a dedicated civil rights activist, and always drawn to artists. She initially got a job at the United Nations after she’d graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, but she met a friend of hers on the way into New York City one day who talked her into taking a modeling job. She worked the showrooms for Seventh Avenue clothing stores in New York City like Forecaster of London, Gay Gibson, and Bobbie Brooks, where she modeled raincoats and dresses. Her friends ran in the same circles as some of the city’s musicians and artists, including Andy Warhol. One evening, Warhol and a few others told her she should meet an artist named Peter. So they all went to The Barge in the Hamptons where Peter had had a show with Warhol and Lichtenstein. Peter had also just been on The Merv Griffin Show. Someone pointed Peter out to Gaye Anne, and when she looked at him, she noticed that he had painted his hair silver, which she thought was pretty weird. “He’s handsome, but weird,” she thought to herself.
She later saw him again, this time at his apartment on Jones Street in the West Village. She still thought he was odd but remembers that he made a huge lasagna dinner for all his guests. Gaye Anne hadn’t even finished her plate before she fell in love with him.
But Peter had girlfriends, and Gaye Anne didn’t see him for a while. She realized she had competition. So to get Peter’s attention, she told people she was engaged, hoping word would get back to Peter to make him jealous. It worked. The next time she saw Peter, she says she never left. “He begged me to come back to him,” Gaye Anne says. “Then we were really together.”
Peter smoked a lot of pot. Gaye Anne liked to drink. Peter often longed for the country. Gaye Anne loved the city. Still, they were a match. Peter was even brave enough to take some of his soldiers out of boxes to show Gaye Anne. At the time, he only showed her about 100 figures, so it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. At least, not yet. “I thought it was wonderful,” she says. “He was a sculptor to me.”
Even though Peter was making a living and enjoying his newfound fame as an artist, his mind always seemed to seek out something new. A fresh challenge. He briefly worked for a little-known and shadowy company called the Simulmatics Corporation, which attempted to predict future events through computer simulations of human behavior. Peter sometimes wore military fatigues when he worked. But that, too, was short-lived.
Soon into their relationship, Gaye Anne became pregnant and Peter proposed. On their wedding night in December 1967, Gaye Anne was two months pregnant but having complications, so she was admitted to a Catholic hospital. “The nuns didn’t want him to come in to see me,” Gaye Anne says. “And he said, No! I have to go and be with her. This is our wedding night! And of course the nuns are like…What?” Gaye Anne had miscarried.
Gaye Anne got pregnant again just a couple months after the miscarriage. This time, the couple decided to leave the city. Peter says a U.S. marine was killed by a mugger right outside of his door. Gaye Anne says Peter slept with a gun under his pillow. They felt like the Village was too dangerous a place to raise a child. So, naturally, Peter looked to his father for help. He told him he needed some money and when he got it purchased a 150-acre dairy farm in Salem, N.Y., which, conveniently, gave him ample room for the war that he was still playing in his New York apartment.
And with the move and the new baby on the way, Peter says he decided to leave the art scene in New York behind. Even though his star was rising, he says he started feeling jaded and used by the galleries. “That’s why I was on The Merv Griffin Show and The Johnny Carson Show,” he says. “They put me on those shows because they wanted to sell paintings. It was a phony business and I wanted out of it.” Peter says it wasn’t about the art itself but about what would sell. He’d found another outlet for his creativity, but he soon saw it as pure commercialism. “The reason I became an artist was never to become famous,” he says. So he gave it up and walked out on his gallery contracts. “They were yelling at me, and I decided, Screw them,” he says. “I like painting but I couldn’t stand the galleries. The collectors were all full of shit. Really.”
Two hundred miles north of New York City, light years from the Greenwich Village art scene, on a farm in Salem, N.Y. nestled in the Great Appalachian Valley, Peter started unboxing. He’d finally overcome the embarrassment and shame he’d had about his war as a child. He told his wife. He started letting his friends in on it. His childlike play had poked its head up and out and into the adult world. He didn’t need to fully grow up, he realized. He just needed to be honest about playing war and have the room to do it. “It was on that farm, in that four years that I lived there, that the army really took off,” he says. “I started buying models like crazy and building them, the tanks and airplanes, flying them in the woods and I sculpted thousands of soldiers.” Now, the games really began.
Peter lugged box after box after box to the woods. As the spring flowers bloomed, he unpacked his Green and Gray soldiers and planes and tanks. He spent weeks carefully placing men in formation in the grass. He stationed tanks alongside creeks. He put war planes in nearby branches to mimic flight. Then, when Peter gave the signal, the war commenced.
Generally, The Green Army — the good guys — attack first. They’re often the aggressors. Peter chooses arbitrary spots to see if a Green fighter jet is pointed directly at a Gray target. If so, the Gray plane is eliminated and the Green plane takes its place and vice versa. A similar system is used for soldiers on the ground. For tanks, Peter uses a laser pointer to determine hits.
The playful twist in Peter’s war — that nobody dies — is an idealistic notion Peter took from the 1945 war movie A Walk in the Sun about captured soldiers in an Italian farmhouse during World War II, a movie made when Peter was forming his very first soldiers on Long Island. In the movie, the platoon repeats a mantra: Nobody Dies. Nobody Dies. Nobody Dies. Peter liked that, especially as the war in Vietnam was intensifying. And so, in his war, if there’s a direct hit, the soldier is removed from the battlefield and promoted. He lives on to fight another day. “It’s a peaceful war,” Peter says. “It’s the kind of war that I have where I’m at peace with myself.”
The very first Battle for Salem raged for months over airfields and towns until the fall when leaves colored and the weather turned. Peter, as he always did, wrote an after-action report where he listed promotions and medals awarded to his brave soldiers before everything ended up back in boxes so the hunters wouldn’t stumble upon his men.
Gaye Anne didn’t really understand the extent of Peter’s war until they moved to Salem. She’d seen the 100 or so soldiers in his New York apartment, but now, with acres of land, she saw everything. “They call it coming out with being gay, right? Well with him, it was coming out about his army,” she says. “I thought it was insane.”
But she also saw a lightness in her husband when he went out to play. And she suspects that it’s forever tied to the solitude he felt as a child being sent to his room, the child who was “never given a toy,” and the abuse he endured from his father. “It became an escape. His play. He’s able to play. How many grown men are able to play?” she says. “He found a way.”
Off the battlefield, Gaye Anne – who was pregnant with Peter, Jr. – says the Salem farm often became like a commune on the weekends. They hadn’t fully left their Greenwich Village lifestyle behind. Sometimes there’d be a dozen people who would stay out in the barn, partying and taking LSD. “Here I am pregnant and having my next baby, so I’m being really careful, right?” she says. “I decided nobody could come in the house.”
While they were in Salem, Peter and Gaye Anne saw another celebrity cross their path. Peter says he isn’t sure of the exact day, but he says they found themselves in a Holiday Inn hotel room with Elton John, still known at the time as Reggie Dwight, who had just played a show in nearby Saratoga. This happened, Peter says, because one of his cousins was the singer Margo Guryan, who was married to David Rosner, a music publisher who played a significant role in Elton John's early career and rise to stardom. That night, Peter says he, Elton, and Gaye Anne ate pizza and jelly donuts and drank Champagne together. “We were bragging about our son, Peter, how he was born,” Peter says. “So then he wrote a song. I forgot the name of it. Gaye Anne would know. ‘This Song’s For You,’ or something like that.” Peter means “Your Song,” Elton’s first top 10 international hit and often considered one of the greatest songs of the 20th century. Elton John, and his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin, have publicly stated a different inspiration for the song.
Like many of Peter’s stories, this one seems almost too good to be true. But then again, plenty of his tales have sounded that way—only to turn out to be real. Elton John did, in fact, play a concert in Saratoga in the early 1970s before officially changing his name from Reggie to Elton. So, maybe?
Peter, Jr., says that Elton John sent the family a copy of the album with a note hinting that the song was about them. While Peter Jr. says the note has been lost somewhere among the countless news clippings, artworks, photos, and keepsakes of a lifetime, the Shulman family isn't too concerned with proving the story. For them, it’s not about recognition or validation – it’s about the music, the memories, and the meaning it has brought into their lives.
Peter Shulman, Jr. has a recurring dream. He’s standing in the country. Sometimes a city. Then the earth below his feet becomes parabolic, as if it’s shrinking, like a ball deflating. He begins perceiving its curvature as it shrinks, becoming so small it seems like he’s going to roll off the earth completely. Then, there’s a perceptible pattern. A bluish hue followed by white light. Then, he wakes up. He’s since learned that his mom, Gaye Anne, had sat him on the kitchen floor as a baby, believing he was developed enough to sit up by himself. But as she walked away, he rolled backwards and hit his head. He soon learned that the pattern and color of the floor where he fell were similar to those in his dream. He believes it’s his first memory.
By the early 1970s, his dad felt like it was time for a new life for his family, again. And without any real planning, they packed up, this time landing in Wolfeboro, N.H.
“I remember the first time we came to the end of a long driveway and looked up at this big white beautiful colonial house,” Peter, Jr., says. “And my father told me, ‘This is going to be our home now.’ And feeling this sense of his presence and not having any feeling of insecurity or trepidation or wariness of moving to a new place. That's kind of a snapshot of how it felt to have my father near me.”
Peter Jr. says there was never any analysis of why some place rather than another might actually be a good place to live. “My dad would say, OK, we’re done with this place. What’s next? And go look for it physically,” Peter Jr. says. “It was just, Everybody get in a car and wherever we run out of gas, that’s where we live.”
Life for Peter Jr. was an endless adventure. There was always something new to see, some unexpected place they were heading to next. And despite the fact that change was constant, he was confident in his father’s ability to navigate whatever came. “If I had him around, I wasn’t afraid of shit,” Peter Jr. says. It was the kind of security and love — even veneration — that his dad never seemed to have with his own father.
But the confident dad wasn’t always what it seemed. Peter Jr. says he also remembers his dad having massive anxiety attacks. “He would just suddenly start getting all shaky and scared and start crying to my mom, and my mom would hold him, and he would just weep for hours the whole night,” he says, adding that his dad would hug him and his mom while saying: “I’m so scared.” Peter Jr. says he thinks the anxiety stemmed from the weight of caring for his family while hiding away any hints of emotional weakness. But the next day, he says his dad would be regenerated, ready to take on the world again. Peter, Jr., thinks his dad probably had clinical anxiety. “He would just ignore it, ignore it, ignore it until it clobbered him.” Today, Peter says he doesn’t remember these attacks. But Gaye Anne confirms they did in fact happen.
When the family arrived in Wolfeboro, Peter had no idea what to do for a job. The way Peter tells it, one of the residents he met early on suggested he run for office. So Peter thought what the hell and went down to City Hall and signed up to run for police commissioner. And he won. Peter says he didn’t campaign, but he didn’t have to. Luck was on Peter’s side: He was running against an incumbent who had had an affair and the city wanted him out.
Peter later became part of the city’s board of adjustment and planning board as well as curator of The Libby Museum of Natural History. Slowly, Peter was transitioning from almost a childlike figure who went from job to job to now being a full-fledged public servant, helping zone and plan a city that was growing but attempting to maintain its historic character.
The family spent about a decade in Wolfeboro on 70 acres of pine forest. By this time, Peter had sculpted 25,000 soldiers, hundreds of aircraft and 1,000 vehicles. He’d been playing so long that he discovered some of the people who had soldiers named after them had died in real life. The Green Army now had so many divisions that he was able to create multiple corps and army groups. The only true casualties, meanwhile, were the soldiers who’d get eaten by chipmunks and squirrels or the aircraft damaged by curious porcupines. Or when Peter purposefully left men behind to mark that he’d been there.
But even though Peter was open with his family about the war, it was still a personal endeavor. “If I made overtures to play war with him,” Peter Jr. says, “he would not be receptive to that.” His dad was still very private when he was actually playing. It was his meditation, Peter, Jr. says, and he didn’t push his dad to include him.
While the family was in Wolfeboro, Peter and Gaye Anne briefly got divorced. They had a tumultuous relationship at the time. Peter still smoked weed and Gaye Anne drank. Both caused problems in their marriage. And they fought a lot. But they reconciled on the condition that Peter quit marijuana. “He stopped and he was great,” she says. “I mean, he was the perfect husband. But I didn’t stop drinking.” It would later haunt both of them.
The light in Provincetown, Mass., is almost Mediterranean. Stretching back to the late 19th century, the light has attracted artists like Charles Hawthorne, Edward Hopper, and William de Koonig. People consider it one of the best places in the world to study color, helping inspire abstract expressionism. And in the 1980s, that light – and the idea of getting back into the art scene in a public way – attracted Peter Shulman.
“When he came to town, he blew into town,” says Billy Evaul, a local artist and lecturer in Provincetown. “It was a real sensation.”
Evaul has been an artist all his life. He’s studied all the traditional styles – abstract expressionism, figurative expressionism, minimalism. By the 1980s, he was an established artist in Provincetown, and when Peter Shulman – who’d had some of his work exhibited in Provincetown two decades earlier – showed up, he’d never heard of him.
“A lot of people were pretty snobby about it because he was untrained,” Evaul says. “He was nontraditional and he was also very cavalier about it. So I think it was an easy mark for other artists to put down.”
Most of the artists there were like Evaul: in the trenches for years studying different schools, training and striving, dedicated to their craft, some barely scraping by. They didn’t take time off to visit the Yucatan or learn zoning. “He rejected them, and they rejected him,” Evaul says.
No matter. Inside the little house he had rented, Peter began painting with an eye on publicly showing his artwork again. He bought a bunch of canvases and laid them out on his work table. As his acrylic paint began flicking at the large, blank white squares, what appeared was somewhat different than his 1960s work. This time, two decades later, he was painting stark, sharp, black-and-white works of Bob Dylan and Elvis, silhouettes of a mother with a child holding a yellow butterfly or a gray wind-up mouse, paintings of his cat Lyndon, colorful carousel horses, nude dancers, and two of his favorites: a striking black and white work called Black Man and the painting he still has in his living room, Moon Dancer. Many of the ideas had been in his head for years. But his style was seemingly no style. It drifted, just like he did. He took his new works and started showing them at art galleries around town. Local newspapers began writing about this pop artist who once wowed the New York art scene with headlines like “Peter Shulman faces a comeback” and “Pop Art Refugee Shulman at Home in Provincetown.” For a 1986 show at the Deberry Gallery, he even got Warhol to contribute a promotional quote: “Peter was a force among us during the ‘60s. I’m glad he’s back.”
Evaul had dismissed Peter at first, but he came around. Today, he says he thinks Peter was as talented as Warhol or Lichtenstein or any of the artists he was associated with in the 1960s. But he says Peter didn’t like schmoozing. He didn’t work the system with curators and museums and big-time gallerists. And he says that Peter not only had too many varied interests, but he wasn’t consistent enough to truly make a name for himself.
“You have to stake out your style, and then you just have to start making hundreds of works that are in that same style. And if you vary too much, you can get squashed. The market doesn't like you to do that,” he says. “Peter didn’t have enough critical mass that you need to be in the upper, upper brackets of the New York art scene.”
Peter had officially returned to the art world two decades removed from his Pop Art period. He was selling paintings. He was hosting gallery exhibits. He was back. But all of that was about to change again, because Peter got word that his father was dying back in Lawrence, N.Y. So he and his family returned to Long Island. There in his childhood home, his father was suffering from Alzheimer’s. So Peter helped care for his dad, made arrangements for what would happen to the house once he was gone, and to take his mind off of it all, played army in the cellar, almost as if he was once again nestled in the solitude of his childhood room, sculpting 15,000 more soldiers and adding hundreds of pieces of military equipment. And while he was there, he went through his father’s papers and discovered something about himself. He was adopted.
Peter had always sensed something was off. He could remember a time when he needed his birth certificate to get his driver’s license and his dad handed him a form with barely any information on it. His father, Peter says, was a Jew and deeply religious, but he never pushed Peter to be Jewish in any real way. He grew up in a Jewish house, but he was never bar mitzvah’d. Now, in his 50s, it all started making sense. Peter eventually learned that his birth mother, an English Catholic who lived in the Bronx, had a child out of wedlock. Him. His adoptive mother wasn’t able to have children, so they adopted Peter. Peter has since made contact with one of his half-sisters. He says he has no ill will against his biological mother who gave him up. “My mother, the Jewish mother, will always be my mother,” he says. “She was wonderful. Wonderful woman to me. So, she’ll always be my mother. I have nothing against this other woman. But I’ll never think of her as my mother.” Still, Peter says learning that he was adopted didn’t change him. “I had suspected it my entire life,” he says. It was as if he knew it was coming.
Evaul remembers that when Peter’s adoptive father died, Peter was left a large chunk of money, and when the family eventually sold the house in Lawrence and returned to Provincetown, Evaul remembers Peter describing it as “dirty money” and that Peter bought brand-new cars for himself, his wife, and Peter Jr., who became prone to crashing the family’s vehicles. Peter would take people out to dinner and buy a dozen bottles of Dom Perignon, sometimes spending $1,000 in one night. “He was getting famous for that for a while,” Evaul says.
In 1992, Peter used what inheritance money he had left to buy a farm in upstate New York. The family moved again, one last time. Gaye Anne says it was to get her out of Provincetown where drinking was too easy. “I didn’t want to leave. I was having so much fun partying,” she says. “But he knew that the only way to get me to stop drinking was to get out of there.”
She stopped drinking the following summer. And Peter once more began retreating from the art scene. Evaul has kept in touch with him over the years. And he says he might be the only person who actually has one of Peter’s military vehicles from his war: a fighter jet. “He put my name on it,” Evaul says. “I had the most kills of any of his planes. So he retired it and gave it to me.” It hangs in Evaul’s kitchen.
As Peter restarted and then stalled his art career, Peter, Jr.’s life began to echo his father’s.
As a teenager, Peter, Jr., became interested in Provincetown’s long history of Portuguese fishermen who would sail out to Georges Bank, an elevated area of the sea floor off of Cape Cod, to pull up Atlantic cod and halibut, and the wives who would stand in cupolas on the tops of their houses in what were called “widow’s watches” looking out across the Atlantic toward the Grand Banks, hoping, praying that the boat they watched their husband sail out on in the morning would return with him in the evening.
This intrigued Peter, Jr. So he started going out on century-old boats with the town’s grizzled fishermen to test his own abilities on the waters. The days were long, sometimes 12 hours. Often, there wasn’t much to catch and not much to do. So he’d watch the currents, trying to read whether anything was lurking underneath. Other times the water would be still, and he’d just have to wait. Because there was so much downtime, he read. The boats, thankfully, were full of books. He read Nietzsche, novelist Harold Robbins, random science textbooks. The boat became his floating university.
Eventually, he attended college on land, but much like his father, he started drifting. He hopped around to a few colleges in New York state. He applied to Niagara College without any intention of attending. He says he filled out the free application because what the hell and then called up the university and asked when school started and they told him: Tomorrow. So Peter, Jr., hopped on a bus, showed up in the middle of the night, and located a random dormitory. He wasn’t on the list to live there but one of the employees gave him a room anyway. He says they eventually forgot about him and he ended up having free room and board for two years.
Peter, Jr., graduated from Niagara and became enamored with the former Czechoslovakia and its writers, especially Milan Kundera. Something about the tragedy and comedy in Kundera’s works spoke to him. He recognized the lightness of his own being in them. “I was reading these books and I was home,” he says. “I was realizing: ‘This is my soul.’” So he saved up a little money and moved to Prague with no real plan — not unlike his father. Inside his pocket, he carried a painted photograph of the medieval arches of the Charles Bridge that spanned the Vltava River. It became his guide. When he found it, he noticed a broken-down building nearby. For about a week and a half, alongside backpackers and drug addicts, he squatted in the building at night while writing poetry and drinking wine on the riverbank during the day. But eventually he realized he needed to get his act together. He ended up getting a job teaching English as a second language, eventually finding work as a translator for government officials. He met a woman who he eventually married and the two of them traveled back and forth between the U.S. and Prague for years. That was life until Peter, Jr.’s mom got throat cancer. So he left Prague behind and moved back to the U.S. full-time.
Ever since, Peter, Jr., now in his late 50s, has taken care of both of his aging parents along with being a husband and father to two children. And he’s on somewhat of a mission to bring his dad what he believes is long overdue recognition for a remarkable life and artistic career that fell into obscurity. Peter, Sr. says his work appeared in 110 solo shows and 450 group exhibits. He says he sold more than 2,000 paintings in his career. Yet the Guggenheim Museum has no record of him. Neither does the Whitney Museum of American Art or the Brooklyn Museum or the Leo Castelli Gallery. The Museum of Modern Art has a single record of Peter’s career deep inside its library: a press release and flier from his 1966 America In The Sky exhibit which described him as at the “forefront of the pop movement.”
Look up Peter Shulman online, and the most you’ll find is his personal website built in the early ‘90s and a mention in Atlas Obscura calling his war “the largest and longest running miniature campaign in history.”
Because his dad was never into marketing, Peter Jr. says he’s trying to take on a bit of that himself these days. His dad doesn’t seem to care about fame or even money at this point but Peter, Jr. is in some ways trying to rectify both. “He didn’t care if anybody knew who he was,” Peter Jr. says. “He enjoyed art. It was just intrinsic. He enjoyed art for art’s sake.”
Even in Provincetown, if a gallery owner wanted to put on a show in a way his dad didn’t like, he’d just pull out of it. His dad got more pleasure creating something for a family member or a friend who would admire it than for the public at large. “He got much more satisfaction from that than he ever did when they were sold at galleries to people he didn’t know,” Peter Jr. says.
Gaye Anne has her own theories – and regrets – about why her husband didn’t make it bigger. Today, Gaye Anne admits that her drinking harmed their relationship, and she worries it got in the way of his career. She says she stopped drinking 30 years ago after seeing how much it was hurting their relationship. “It was because of him that I was able to stop,” she says. “He saved me.”
But Peter, of course, has his own theories. “I ducked fame to some extent,” Peter says today. “I just was in no hurry to satisfy anybody’s desires. I just wasn’t in a hurry to produce the number of paintings they wanted.”
He says not only were Gaye Anne and Peter, Jr., both supportive of his career, he thinks he didn’t work as hard as he could’ve at times. “They both kept urging me to do more paintings,” he says. Now, when he looks back, some of his fondest memories aren’t the galleries with Warhol or his time on The Merv Griffin Show or the brief comeback in Provincetown. It’s the simple mornings when he and his wife and son would awake and walk out into the quiet fields and hills of Salem, the same fields and hills where he could play his war and not have to answer to anyone.
“Gaye and I have been together 60 years now. My son is in his 50s,” he says. “We’ve been together a long time.” He and his family found a sweet rhythm that worked. They became copacetic. “So why mess it up?” Peter says.
Peter Shulman is still at work. In his studio on the second floor of his home, a painting with stark black horse silhouettes against a deep blue sky with a pale moon in the background sits on his work table, unfinished. It looks strikingly like his Provincetown work, but with a distinctive gloom. He still paints with acrylic on canvas, the same way he’s painted for decades. As of March 2025, the chemotherapy had largely been successful, although doctors have recently found spots in another part of his esophagus and near his lung that might be cancerous. Peter has lost 50 pounds in the process, but he still has ideas he’s trying to finish. Mostly, he’s returned to painting carousel horses. Brightly colored, spinning, jumping carousel horses.
Gaye Anne has taken on the role of immediate caretaker as Peter tries to get better. “Because he’s sick, nothing else matters really,” she says. Peter, Jr., meanwhile, tries to help both of them. He lives about 45 minutes away, visiting most days and routinely taking time off of work to get his dad to doctor’s visits and be an extra set of hands around the house. He’s pondered the possibility that his youngest daughter, one day, might take over the war from her grandfather. She’s shown some interest.
Since the cancer, the war has remained dormant. Peter is too weak. He can’t bend over. So the soldiers lie there, some standing at attention, waiting for their next command, unused and unplayed with inside his shed, the seasons changing around them, battles to be fought another day. Waiting, but not yet forgotten.
In the Catskill Mountains on Moon Shadow Farm, Peter Shulman found a place where he didn’t have to grow up, a different kind of solitude than what he’d experienced as a boy, a huge tract of land where he could both be a child and grow old. He didn’t give up his childhood passion. He didn’t conform to what society told him was the proper thing to do. He often lived on impulse, even if that meant conning others or putting the whole family in the car with no destination and leaving everything behind or making fried egg paintings with no training. In a world where American individualism runs deep, Peter's version of it stands out as uniquely his own.
AFTER ACTION REPORT: Moon Shadow Farm, West Fulton, N.Y. 20 AUGUST 1999. 8 AM - 14 PM, Military Time. (Abbreviated.)
GROUND ACTION
The Green Ninth Armored Division attacked on the eastern perimeter of the Gray area supported by the 15th Infantry Division. The Gray forces were driven back but did not break. Green losses in this engagement: 146 officers and men, 17 M60A1 tanks, 12 M113 APCs.
AIR ACTION: Col. Brown shot down IIIs, Maj. Berry (F116) shot down 1 SU7 and was shot down by a MIG 29, Capt. Aaron was shot down by a Mirage 2000.
LOSSES
Ground Equipment:
Green Army including from air attack: 78 vehicles
Gray Army including from air attack: 83 vehicles
Officers and Enlisted Losses:
Green Army including pilots: 445
Gray Army including pilots: 422
Aircraft:
Green Army: 7
Gray Army: 14
Neither side, the Green nor the Gray army, has ever won. If you spend the time to read through the 2,500 after-action reports and 40-plus war summaries, the conclusion would be that the war has been a 60-year stalemate. But winning was never the point, anyway. The war is a political statement and the war is an escape. But maybe, the war has always been about reaching back ceaselessly through the decades, past Provincetown and Wolfeboro, past Salem and Greenwich Village, past the blue Yucatan and a white Alaska and into a solitary Long Island bedroom. Maybe it was always about holding close the 7-year-old boy who figured out a way through his own anger — a sudden burst of wonder in his discovery that he didn’t need friends or acquaintances or the world outside to be at peace. All he really needed was the playful inner world that he, himself, was creating.
“All the shame and secretiveness is over,” Peter once wrote years ago on his website. “Putting this on paper is the final opening up of my wars. I think I'm ready now. I have no idea where many of my companions in the game are now, but I wish them all well. It's been great playing the war with them over the years. So, on goes my war in which ‘nobody dies.’ I suppose it will not end until I do.”
Josh Sanburn is a producer for the public radio show and podcast Reveal. He previously worked as a national correspondent for TIME Magazine, where he covered policing, criminal justice, and societal and demographic trends across the United States. After TIME, he worked as a producer for Gimlet Media, where he helped develop and produce special series for The Journal, The Wall Street Journal’s daily podcast. He’s also produced documentary series for ABC News and National Geographic and has written features for Vanity Fair.
