Column: Ready to travel into the secret life of Garry Trudeau and ‘Doonesbury'?
A man who has spent the last five decades and more as one of the most amusing, irreverent, satirical, pointed, articulate, sensitive, hilarious and provocative voices of a couple of generations has never liked talking to reporters.
That would be Garry Trudeau, whose "Doonesbury" cartoon strip ran in as many as 1,400 newspapers during its Pulitzer Prize-winning run and remains a potent political and cultural force.
One day in 1985, as rain whipped the park across the street, he told me, "Writing cartoons is a very solitary profession, a very monastic existence."
We were sitting in his studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a simple space and not at all the sort of art-scattered room one might have expected. Of course, there was a drafting table in the corner, along with a desk. There was a small bookcase, loaded with the work of other cartoonists. There were four Ralph Steadman prints on the walls, a teddy bear on the couch, and a photo of twins, Rachael and Ross, the first of the four children he would have with his wife, former Chicago TV anchorwoman Jane Pauley.
These memories came rushing back because "Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News Into Art" is due for formal publication on May 26, the first major biography of the man. Written by respected journalist Joshua Kendall, it has 352 pages that have gathered some impressive prepublication praise, such as this from our own Pulitzer Prize-winning Jon Eig of "King: A Life," "No joke: This is a first-rate work, every bit as smart as it is entertaining."
It will fill in the many details of a productive and prolific life, and perhaps satisfy some curious minds, even though Kendall writes that Trudeau's "personal life remains shrouded in mystery. (He) has been called the nation's ‘most famous unknown person' and the ‘JD Salinger of comics.' Intensely private, he doesn't like to talk about his feelings. … He has made a habit of avoiding the press, insisting the work speak for itself. … While the shy Trudeau wasn't willing to let me trail him around, he agreed to be interviewed and responded to countless questions."
The book will chart his life from growing up in very comfortable circumstances in Saranac Lake, New York, being attracted to theater as a youngster, attending Yale University, where he created "Bull Tales," a comic strip parodying the exploits of real Yale quarterback Brian Dowling, which led to "Doonesbury," about which Henry Kissinger would famously remark, “The only thing worse than being in it would be not to be in it.”
It will surely detail his being introduced to Pauley not long after she came from Chicago in 1976 to co-anchor NBC's "Today" show alongside Tom Brokaw. She shortly met Trudeau at a fix-em-up dinner arranged by Brokaw. It may even be noted that when Pauley arrived at our WMAQ-Ch. 5 to anchor the news, the late Garry Deeb, an acerbic TV critic for the Tribune, cited an anonymous source as calling her a person "with IQ of a cantaloupe."
Trudeau and I talked a bit about Deeb, off the record, but otherwise had a full and interesting day. He was very pleasant company, and we grabbed breakfast (blueberry muffins) and later lunch (chicken salads) at a small restaurant around the corner. This interview came about because I had given a favorable review of "Rap Master Ronnie," a play with book and lyrics by Trudeau and music by Elizabeth Swados that opened in the fall of 1985 at a bygone spot called the Club Victoria Cabaret on Broadway near Belmont. It was a show that was a spin-off or sorts from their "Doonesbury: A Musical Comedy" that had had a previous short run the year before on Broadway.
I had called it a "wonderfully stylized and substantial look at Reagan and his times" and "Trudeau goes for no easy laughs. He is a satirist of thoughtful, precise daggers. And while there are riotously funny moments in this show, it is Trudeau’s outrage, which shadows most every number, that lingers. He provokes laughter of a most serious sort."
Trudeau let it be known that he would be willing to be interviewed by me in an attempt to draw bigger audiences and so off I went to New York and there we talked.
The interview ran in the paper and it must have had some effect because the show stayed in Chicago for many more months after moving into the Theater Building on Belmont Avenue.
Trudeau and I never again met and our modest encounter is unlikely to take up any space in the new biography. That was a long time ago, and Trudeau has remained productive, carrying on with the strip, which still runs in reprints most days and as an original on Sundays. He would dive into such other creative ventures, becoming co-creator of the HBO political satire series "Tanner ‘88" and creating (with some collaborative aid by Chicago-born journalist Jonathan Alter) the Amazon Studios "Alpha House" in 2013.
I might have anticipated this. He sort of told me when we talked. I had asked him, "You have millions of readers of your comic strip every day, why do you care so much about the comparative handful that might be watching a play?"
"This isn’t about numbers," he said. "It's about the freedom to express yourself artistically."
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This story was originally published May 12, 2026 at 5:17 AM.