Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography, by Joshua Kendall, Abrams Press, 339 pages.
Early in my career as a second-grader, my teacher asked the class to take a piece of construction paper and draw the cover of a recently read book. For me, already a member of the journalism club, this was an ideal assignment, although it also brought forth the nascent contrarianism that would prove so useful in my professional career. I remember not wanting to pick a book that might be shared by a classmate. I also remember wanting to choose a book that revealed something about me, namely, my abiding aspiration to become a cartoonist along the lines of my hero, Garry Trudeau.
So, the book, if you can call it that, that I chose to draw was a slim paperback collection of Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strips called Check Your Egos at the Door. The unlikely title—an allusion to a series of strips in which Trudeau dealt with the making of the “We Are the World” charity record—got the attention of my teacher, who, unbeknownst to me at the time, asked my parents about my pick. Where did this come from? she must have wondered. Was I allowed to read Doonesbury? Today, I can squint and understand her surprise: Doonesbury—that she was even familiar with the strip speaks both to its popularity and to the former dominance of its medium, newspapers—distinguished itself by attending to politics and cultural manners and mores. If I had drawn the cover of a book of Peanuts cartoons, I might have been considered too immature for my age, but copying the cover of a Doonesbury book signaled me as being unbearably precocious.
Even now, I cannot fully explain why I was so smitten with Doonesbury, except that I found its artwork cozy (the relatively few pen strokes with which Trudeau rendered his characters’ heavy eyelids and eyebrows remains impressive), its cast companionable (Mike Doonesbury was appealingly ordinary, and his bride, J.J., quite fetching), and its topicality invigoratingly grown-up (the Gulf War and the 1992 presidential election were among the subjects I was just beginning to comprehend). In my mind, I linked Doonesbury with The Today Show—both were newsy things that I consumed at breakfast before school, one in the newspaper on the kitchen table and the other on the small TV set on the countertop. Besides, Trudeau was (and remains) married to former Today Show cohost, Jane Pauley.
John Updike was an inveterate writer of fan mail to his boyhood cartoonist heroes, including James Thurber, and in my own humble way, I picked up this tradition: Sometime in 1994, my father found a way to have samples of my own amateur comic strip—as undisguisedly influenced by Doonesbury as Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County was—passed on to Trudeau in New York City. Though he was under no obligation to do so, Trudeau sent me a typewritten letter in which he praised my work, observed that I seemed to enjoy both the writing and the drawing, and wished me good luck with “all your tooning.” This letter was gazed upon endlessly in that, my 11th year (though I could not have held it in my hands for very long, since I quickly arranged to have it framed).
For me, the 1990s were not the years of the Clinton boom or the “Macarena,” but the time during which I sought to prolong my correspondence with Garry Trudeau. I wrote him several more letters, all of which were answered, but I could never be sure if he actually connected the present letter-writer to the one whom he had so kindly encouraged in his initial missive. This matter was not resolved to my satisfaction even when, in January 1996, I mailed Trudeau an article about me, by then nearly 13, in the local (and I mean, very local) newspaper under the headline “kid cartoonist,” in which the letters I exchanged with Trudeau were proudly referenced. He thanked me for sending the clip, but nothing in his brief note clarified whether or not he recalled who, exactly, I was. And why should he? In all honesty, my cartooning interests had already started to shift to Jules Feiffer, an antecedent of, and inspiration to, Trudeau—to me, perhaps more like the real deal, with his more chaotic art style and less polite politics.
Cartooning itself, along with the leftist agenda of many of its practitioners, would soon recede from my ambitions and fade from my consciousness. And yet we cannot rewrite our pasts: I sit here as undoubtedly the only contributing editor of The American Conservative whose house is adorned with an enormous drawing of Mike and J.J. on their wedding day—an image that first graced the cover of Life magazine but which was later turned into a lithograph (which, incidentally, was inscribed to me by Trudeau). I like to think that it is the ultimate confirmation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assertion that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” that I should cheer on many of the policies of Donald Trump and yet decorate my house with art of Doonesbury, whose creator is appalled by the president.
It was therefore with great interest, and not a little background, that I approached Joshua Kendall’s new book, the excellent but rather clumsily titled Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography. (A biography of whom? The cartoonist? His comic strip? His lead character?) Happily, Kendall has produced an efficient, thorough, and fun-to-read book, one that would have been lapped up by its subject’s biggest fan 30 years ago but which, read today, confirms my estrangement from that subject.
The long-established basics will only be new to those who did not grow up with Doonesbury (whose numbers will not be few, since the strip has been on a Sunday-only schedule for over a decade). Born into multigenerational wealth in 1948 and brought up in bucolic Saranac Lake, Trudeau was a bookish lad with an artistic bent. “I was the nerdiest kid in the neighborhood,” says Trudeau, whose early ambitions, including becoming a theater impresario, made him a bad fit at tony St. Paul’s School. Later, Trudeau realized the power he could have by sending up the jocks in his orbit, including his classmate at Yale University, George W. Bush, and the school’s star quarterback, Brian Dowling—the figure from whom Doonesbury’s B.D. emerged. This antipathy or resentment was paired with Trudeau’s (truth to tell, not overwhelmingly obvious) artistic ability to create the strip’s earliest, Yale-based iteration, bull tales. Like the contemporaneous counterculture hit movie Easy Rider (1969), whose shoddiness was rendered irrelevant by its timeliness, the crudeness of bull tales was no impediment to Trudeau securing a deal with Universal Press Syndicate to produce Doonesbury. “It nauseates my children that I would find my life’s work six weeks into it,” said Trudeau, whose first contract guaranteed him the weekly equivalent of what would today be $1,800 for the first six months of the strip’s life. He admitted that he “never really learned to draw properly, to see and look at things, to realize before I envisioned,” but little of that mattered since its maker presumably was tuned into the Zeitgeist.
The Zeitgeist, of course, would shift, even in the short span from 1970, when Doonesbury commenced its run, to 1972, when Richard Nixon was reelected decisively. Yet Mike, J.J., B.D., Zonker, and the rest remained immovably fixed at Walden Commune, long past the point when the idea of living in a commune would be funny or even understood by most readers. Speaking in 1972, Trudeau said that Zonker “represents all that is good about the counterculture,” but since his conception of the higher-than-a-kite layabout has never changed, that’s a problem—few today even remember the counterculture the character is supposed to embody. Of course, Trudeau famously relocated his cast from Walden in 1984, and he has always been stirred by the latest news—he rejected a six-week lead time to churn out newsier strips on a one-week deadline—but his sensibility remains that of a ’60s-style lefty with WASPy trimmings. In an interview with Kendall, he still speaks reverently of radical clergyman William Sloane Coffin Jr.
That is not to say that Trudeau was always wrong: Certainly he proved correct in his assessment of George W. Bush and the folly of the war he insisted upon in Iraq. “I had come out of boarding school and I knew a lot of people that I felt were like him,” Trudeau said of Bush. “There was a kind of meanness and a pettiness and humor—very clever, very quick, but at other people’s expense.” So Trudeau got it right about Bush; so did Michael Moore. Such instances of moral clarity are more a matter of a stopped clock being right twice a day. Let us not forget that, long before the calamity of Iraq, one of Trudeau’s most treasured foils was George H.W. Bush—the mannerly, inoffensive father, and pretty darn good president, not the son who made an epic foreign policy miscalculation! Such was the enmity between Trudeau and George H.W. Bush that Trudeau’s mother offered this comment to Newsweek in 1990: “People say, ‘Why does he have it in for Bush?’ I’m sure he extrapolates part of it from boys he didn’t like at St. Paul’s.”
Looking back, I was certainly engaged by the soap opera storylines in Doonesbury—not least Mike and J.J.’s courtship, marriage, and divorce—but Kendall is much more interested in the strip’s political content. This is unfortunate, since, far too often, the strip is ploddingly, boringly liberal. There is a bandwagon quality to Trudeau joining the chorus in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment, cohabitation, and gay marriage, and against tobacco companies (remember Mr. Butts?). This material may have seemed strikingly au courant at the time, but in hindsight, it merely makes him seem like a participant in groupthink. “Garry is the premier chronicler of my f***ed-up generation,” said the former Washington Post publisher Donald Graham, but couldn’t the same be said of the creators of Thirtysomething?
There is good material on Trudeau’s mostly failed screenwriting career (a script about White House correspondents called Zoo Plane was to have been directed by the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid auteur George Roy Hill) and his marriage to Pauley, which produced three children and survived Pauley’s struggle with bipolar disorder. For comic strip geeks, current or recovering, the passage clarifying the participation of inker Don Carlton—wrongly rumored to have contributed more to the look of the strip than he actually did—is helpful, as is the series of strips showing the differences between Trudeau’s lettering style and Carlton’s (the latter used very briefly). The book is so well and amply illustrated with Doonesbury cartoons that it might be enough to send me back to my copy of Check Your Egos at the Door.
And what of us conservative fans of Doonesbury? In fact, we are not unknown: Going back to the earliest years of the strip, Republicans sought approbation from Trudeau. Says historian Rick Perlstein: “The staff in the Nixon White House suffered from a lot of status anxiety. So they were typically flattered by the attention from Ivy Leaguers like Trudeau.” Even then-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) penned a fan letter to the creator of “my favorite comic strip,” despite Gingrich’s name being compared by Joanie to that of “a creature from ‘Dune.’” Later, right-wing movie star Charlton Heston did not mind being named in the strip since “fame today is finally confirmed only by the comic strip.” This is all a bit sad and lame; then-Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY) appreciated his mention in Doonesbury, and though Trudeau directed his assistant to “be nice” in reply to the senator, one senses D’Amato didn’t realize he was at least partly the butt of a joke. Yet this all says more about these figures than it does about Trudeau—a desire, on their part, to be among the cool kids, which Trudeau, as a leading figure of the legacy media establishment, represents.
I do not exclude myself from this analysis. Even in the Trump years, as Trudeau has channeled his remaining energy into repetitive parodies of the president’s hair, I remain fond of my long-ago correspondent, and would never dream of taking down that Mike and J.J. lithograph. It is ever so hard to put away the things of childhood.
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