The Fiddler in the Subway

by Gene Weingarten

  A few weeks after returning from Tucson, I opened the newspaper to Doonesbury and saw this.

  It was Day One of what would be a funny, oddly disturbing week of the strip, in which Ray tries to stay alive while placating his wife and stepson back at the home front. I immediately e-mailed Trudeau. Until I told him, he said, he hadn’t remembered exactly where the idea came from.

  “CLINTON MADE A mistake in letting ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ be the defining issue of his first month in office, to be followed by the health-care disaster. He should have gone directly to welfare reform. It was intellectually dishonest to say the existing system was working. If welfare had been his biggest priority…”

  We are on the plane heading back to New York, and Trudeau is in his geek-drone mode. He is a highly opinionated public policy wonk, and this sort of thing just happens from time to time. When he reads a book, he edits in the margins, correcting errors of grammar, syntax, or cloudy thinking.

  Bingo. Trudeau’s a nerd! It’s no big deal, but I’ll take it. Negative assessments are important when you write profiles, but with this guy they’ve been hard to come by. He’s generous with his time, gracious to everyone, and shrewd with me. I tried to bait him, asking where a dillweed like him gets off having the nerve to date Candice Bergen (he did, way back when) and then marry America’s Sweetheart? I was hoping for an unattractive defense of his virility, but Trudeau wouldn’t bite.

  Finally, in desperation, I decided to get help from America’s greatest living satirist. What would Trudeau ridicule, if the subject were himself?

  Basically, he says, though not in so many words—he’s a bully.

  “Occasionally, people accuse me of courage,” he says. “And that’s wrong. I’m sitting on a perch of safety. Cartoonists have a tar-baby immunity. The more people react to us, and the more angrily they react, the better it is for us. So we’re invulnerable. It just doesn’t seem fair.”

  The first George Bush learned that the hard way. When Doonesbury accused him of having “put his manhood in a blind trust” after becoming vice president and changing his politics to match Reagan’s, Bush repeatedly lashed out at the cartoonist—at least five times between 1984 and 1988. (“Garry Trudeau is coming out of deep left field. The American people are going to be speaking out, and we are going to see whether they side with Doonesbury or the Reagan-Bush message.” “He speaks for a bunch of brie-tasting, Chardonnay-sipping elitists.”) This blowback further elevated Trudeau’s stature and made Bush seem like a petulant, humorless old fud.

  As the plane begins its descent to LaGuardia, Trudeau remembers something interesting, something from his teens, when he had a summer job working at Time magazine.

  “As I was walking out the building one day on my lunch break, two-thirds of a block away this spectacularly beautiful young woman in a very short miniskirt was walking toward me…”

  Not sure where this is going, but I’m taking notes as fast as I can.

  “She was in her early twenties. I was sixteen and looked all of twelve. You could feel it in the air, her coming at you. Her presence was destabilizing the street for a one-block radius. Guys were gawking, cars were slowing. This woman was a menace. She was walking in a confident way, with a swing to her hips. I was geeky and shy, too shy to make eye contact. I wouldn’t even have known what to do with eye contact. My discomfort must have been obvious because, as she passes me, she leans over, her breath is warm, and she softly… growls in my ear.”

  Wow.

  “I thought to myself: I’ve just been handed the most extraordinary gift. She showed such wisdom, with such a generous use of power. She just changed the life of a young boy. I thought, Anything is possible.”

  Trudeau sits back in his seat, smiles. “So I guess you could connect the dots to Jane, actually.”

  Or you could extrapolate it to the entirety of his life, the whole improbable arc of it, the combination of a fundamental humility and humanity empowered by an otherwise inexplicable, blazing self-confidence. You could find, in one moment from a man’s teens, the entire key to who he is and the unlikely, monumental achievement of his professional life.

  I vocalize some of this. Trudeau just looks at me.

  Okay, we’ll just stick with connecting the dots to Jane.

  TRUDEAU IS A Yankees fan, so we’re catching a Sunday afternoon game at Yankee Stadium against the White Sox. Some people’s lives just seem to be charmed, and so it’s not surprising that this afternoon turns out to be historic—Yankees great Mariano Rivera comes in with a 6-4 lead and closes out the last two innings for the 400th save of his career.

  At one point, Trudeau’s attentions turn to the ballpark itself—specifically, the facing of the mezzanine deck, a long, narrow strip that, as in many modern stadiums, is used as an electronic crowd-hooching display board. “The dimensions are about one to twenty,” Trudeau says, “but see how much they get out of it, how much they say with just a suggestion? That’s great use of design.”

  Trudeau’s got a master’s degree in graphic design. It was his first career choice until Doonesbury—a success right from his college newspaper days—made everything else moot. Design remains, to this day, the thing Trudeau longs to be doing. In all the time we’d spent together, the only artwork of his that he’d shown me with any particular pride were Doonesbury-themed coasters, cups, T-shirts, and figurines that he had designed for free. They wound up raising $1 million for a Starbucks-sponsored reading charity. It was a subtle piece of work, marrying the Starbucks corporate logos and design with the Doonesbury characters.

  “I had more flow as a designer,” Trudeau explains. “I could just drop down into the zone and stay there for hours. With cartooning, I’m constantly coming up for air, procrastinating, looking for reasons not to be doing it. I spend all day granting myself special dispensation, with ‘creative process’ as my cover story. Carpenters and deli countermen can’t do that, so I think they may feel better about themselves at the end of the day.”

  Midway through the game, Trudeau’s younger son shows up. Tommy, twenty, a student at Brown, has a summer job in the Yankees’ front office. He gets to fraternize with the players and play pickup softball games with coworkers in the outfield, from which he’s hit balls into the upper deck. Not bad, for a summer job.

  Pauley and Trudeau’s two other children, twins Ross and Rickie, are twenty-two. Ross graduated from Brown and is heading off on a teaching career; his sister, a Yalie, wants to be a pop singer, which worries Trudeau more than a little.

  He played me an audio file of Rickie singing Alicia Keys’s “If I Ain’t Got You.” Kid’s definitely got the voice. It’s all personality. Trudeau knows this but also knows the odds against success in that business. “I want her to follow her passion,” he says, “but I just hope she’s sturdy enough.”

  It’s an interesting worry for a guy who could easily have been a doctor in a long-established family practice, but chose cartooning despite certain initial practical obstacles, such as a basic inability to draw. Being a father inspires a completely different risk-aversion calculus.

  As we leave the stadium, the three of us are joined at the subway by Ross, who was sitting elsewhere with friends. The camaraderie between father and sons is effortless and unencumbered. The whole family thing seems almost comic-strippy perfect, like Dagwood and Blondie and Cookie and Alexander. Only this is a real family, not to mention a Doonesbury family, so you know you’re going to have some complexity, somewhere.

  JANE PAULEY IS still beautiful, at fifty-five, and she still projects frank vulnerability, or vulnerable frankness, or whatever is that subtle combination of qualities that made her America’s preeminent morning-show host in the 1980s. We’re meeting for breakfast because there is something Trudeau wouldn’t really talk about, and Pauley will.

  In 2001, Pauley nearly lost her mind. After receiving steroids to control a case of the hives, she began doing oddly intense things. How intense? She bought a house one day, for no good r
eason, on impulse, from an ad on the Web. Misdiagnosed with depression, she was hospitalized under an assumed name, to protect her privacy. Eventually, she was found to have a bipolar disorder—triggered but not caused by the steroids—for which she is still undergoing treatment. Pauley chronicled her struggle in a 2004 memoir, Skywriting.

  Trudeau was largely absent from Skywriting, and he had been guarded with me about the effect of Pauley’s illness on him and the family. He volunteered only two things: “I was told by a doctor that forty percent of marriages just don’t survive it, so from the beginning I knew we were up against something really significant”; and, “The disease subverts your basic survival instinct in the sense that the people who you need to help you survive are the same people you are attacking.”

  So that’s what I ask Pauley about.

  “Yes,” she says dryly, “there is a free-floating anger that needs a target and will find one.”

  For a year or so, Pauley says, before her symptoms were under control, Trudeau and the family lived with her irrational rages. The twins were hunting for colleges, Trudeau was pressed by deadline after deadline, and Mom was a fulminating piece of work—demanding, histrionic, impossible. “It was just incredible torment for them,” Pauley says. “Garry was keeping the house together. It has to have been the most painful part of his life.”

  Pauley has recovered with the help of lithium, a drug she says she will be on for the rest of her life. Things are mostly fine, she says, except for some side effects, such as a persistent tremor to the hands. She looks murderously at her coffee cup, which the waiter has overfilled, almost to the brim.

  “For example, I can’t risk trying to pick that up.”

  Pauley thinks the story of B.D. has been something special, the best work Trudeau has ever done. And then she says, “I don’t think he’s consciously aware that it has anything to do with me.”

  With… her?

  Pauley smiles. “Garry’s mind is very compartmentalized. The department doing the strip in his brain is not directly connected to the husband part, but…”

  Pauley takes a forkful of scrambled eggs.

  “. . . it defies credulity that on some level it is not present in his work. What is he writing about, really? He’s writing about mental illness, and how it’s possible to find a way out of it, with help. It’s very hopeful.”

  I start to say that Trudeau has never made that connection to me, in fact denies that his private life ever intrudes into the strip. But Pauley is ahead of me.

  “He’ll want to say no, but it’s hard to argue with. Isn’t it?”

  TRUDEAU’S GREATEST WORK is coming at a time when Doonesbury is fading a bit from the national consciousness. He’s still in six hundred newspapers, but that number has been higher; there simply aren’t as many newspapers as there once were, and their readership is dwindling. Young adults who know Doonesbury today are mostly picking it up haphazardly from the Web. The Doonesbury compilation books are not selling the way they used to.

  Trudeau is considering experimenting with sophisticated animation, for Doonesbury online. He’s just finished a screenplay, a comedy about a teenager who is elected mayor of a small town. His newest Doonesbury compilation—The War Within, about B.D. dealing with his mental health issues—has just hit the bookstores, and a second compilation, Heckuva Job, Bushie!, is due out this month.

  Since I last saw him, the investigative cartoonist traveled to New Orleans to see the hurricane desolation firsthand. This past September 11, as politicians on both sides sought political traction in a battle of coordinated outrage and strategic shows of grief, the meatheads took in pro wrestling at Madison Square Garden. (In the main event, Vince McMahon defeated Triple H with the help of a folding chair.)

  And week after week in the newspapers, the quite remarkable story of B.D. continues. Check out this one.

  Let’s see what’s going on here. B.D. appears to be considering cheating on Boopsie. It’s surprising, but maybe not that surprising. From the swiftness and specificity of Celeste’s reaction, it’s clear that she—the secretary at the vets’ clinic—has seen this sort of behavior before. Can it be that many vets who’ve lost a limb might well be tempted to assert their manhood in unwise ways? But see how nimbly Celeste deals with it, in what one might call a generous use of power? She redirects B.D.’s attention to what’s really important, reproaching him for hitting on her, but in a way that leaves his vulnerable dignity intact.

  There are many types of therapy, and it’s not all dispensed by licensed professionals.

  Four panels. Forty-eight words. Funny, too.

  Meanwhile, the same day, in Blondie, Dagwood and Herb go fishing, but Dagwood is so hungry he eats the bait!

  You Go, Girl

  This story is the truth, but every single emotion I pretend to have in it is a lie.

  September 12, 1999

  SOME PEOPLE GET all weepy when their children leave home for college, but not me. Children are supposed to grow up and move away. It’s no big deal.

  So I shed no tears on the final week of summer vacation when I drove my daughter, Molly, to the University of Pennsylvania, where she and a roommate will live. Their dorm room would fit two Volkswagens and a wheelbarrow. The air inside is suffocating. The decor is Kmart. The carpet is septic. The place reminds you of those hotel rooms in the movies where stubbled gangsters in ribbed undershirts and fedoras hide from the fuzz while a neon sign blinks outside. Molly’s walls are a shade of paint that Sherwin-Williams could market as “Dingy Yellow.” Or “You’ll-Never-Take-Me-Alive Copper.”

  Molly took one look around and was giddily happy.

  So I am happy. That is the way it is supposed to work, and it is working fine, in my case.

  Molly’s roommate is from Chicago. Within minutes of meeting, the two women were bouncing around campus, their lives already jubilantly intertwined. It seems odd to use this term, women. I know it is the accepted designation for eighteen-year-old human females, the legally correct word, a word sanctioned by the restroom doors at some of the nation’s finest institutions of higher education. But until a few days ago, or so it seems, I was wiping strained prunes off this woman’s chin.

  I am disoriented but not dismayed. The whole point of being a parent is to reach this moment. You spend eighteen years encouraging your daughter to be independent, even headstrong, and when she strides away confidently on her own, you should feel good. And I do.

  The University of Pennsylvania is in Philadelphia, and on the day I arrived, the local newspapers reported that a sicko was stalking the streets. He is believed to have raped several women and killed at least one. Molly is unworried; when you choose to live in a big city, she informs me, you must accept certain risks.

  Molly chose this city, and worked hard for it, and got it. My daughter usually does what she needs to get what she wants. When she began to drive, she angled for a deal: We would allow her to come and go as she pleased, within reason, so long as she used good judgment, never lied about her whereabouts, and maintained high grades. She did all those things, and a deal was a deal. So there was many a night when Molly came home after our bedtime, and that was okay with me. I was comfortable and confident as I lay there downstairs on the couch, inches from the door, beneath an old clock ticking loudly in the stillness, awaiting her step on the stair. I am also comfortable and confident about her safety in Philadelphia.

  I have not told Molly to be careful out there, because she already knows it, and besides, no one tells Molly what to do. To use the ladies’ room at her dorm, she must walk down a long hall and up a flight of stairs. There is a bathroom right across from her room, but it is labeled for use by men only. Instantly, Molly announced that she would regard this designation to be optional.

  For the last two years, Molly has volunteered at a firehouse, dressed in a baggy blue uniform, riding the ambulances. She wants to be a doctor, and at the youngest allowable age she became a licensed emergency medical technician. One night sh
e came home from work with blood on her, and a story: A car had hit a bridge abutment at high speed, and people were gravely injured. Molly had been ordered to ride to the hospital with a man whose leg was snapped in two at the thigh; her job was to be a human traction splint, tugging his bones into place as he moaned and whimpered.

  She was not yet seventeen. Her mother and I hugged her and asked if she was okay.

  “Okay?” she said. “This was the greatest day of my life.”

  Molly is small and pretty, and from time to time she took some crap from the guys at the fire station, the usual bawdy banter and good-natured lechery. But when Montgomery County mounted an official investigation into alleged sexual harassment there, she declined to be interviewed. I asked her why. “It’s a firehouse, Dad,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  Her eyes are slightly blue but mostly gray, precisely the color of the door of van Gogh’s bedroom at Arles. A reproduction of that painting hangs on the wall of Molly’s bedroom, which I am pacing right now. The room almost echoes. It is half empty, and tidy for the first time in my memory because her mother spent hours after Molly left fanatically cleaning and recleaning it, explaining all the while how she, too, is untroubled by Molly’s departure. It’s no big deal, we agreed.

  I notice that Molly has not taken her baseball glove. The stitching is frayed, the knots are undone, and part of the heel has been gnawed by our dog. I kept offering to buy her a new one, but she refused, explaining that a glove is supposed to be old and weathered.

  Molly never cared much for sports until a few years ago, when she and I began watching Yankees games together. In the beginning she understood only the rudiments, but it’s gotten so she can tell you the best pitch on which to execute a hit and run with a lefty at the plate and one out.