by Nino Ricci
Madeleine Gobeil was a starstruck eighteen-year-old when she met Trudeau at a political meeting in Ottawa in 1957. Trudeau gave her short shrift then, but when she turned up at a book launch of his in the early 1960s she was no longer a tongue-tied adolescent. In a 1963 Maclean’s roundtable, Peter Gzowski described Gobeil as “serious, clever, frank and, above all, emancipated. She is, for example, unafraid to say publicly that she no longer believes in her church.” Trudeau’s relationship with Gobeil was another that would span the years and the continents, ending abruptly only with Trudeau’s marriage. After a stint in Paris in the mid-1960s, where Gobeil made a name for herself with her journalism, including an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre that was published in Playboy, she was hired by Carleton University to teach French literature and was often seen with Trudeau during his first years in government. His marriage to Margaret, however, was a shock. Within months she had left Ottawa and returned to Paris, where she took a job with UNESCO and refused to see Trudeau again until after his divorce.
If there was a common factor in the significant women in Trudeau’s life who preceded Margaret, it was that all of them, in great measure, appeared to be suitable matches for him. If these women were also beautiful—“Interestingly, Trudeau, a relatively small, very thin, though strongly muscled man,” John English notes, “was attracted to beautiful, full-figured, and tall women”—then Trudeau had worked hard enough at his own physique to have earned that perk. The most striking aspect of the young Margaret Sinclair in the context of this lineage was how woefully unqualified—aside from her looks—she was to follow in it. She was a mere nineteen when Trudeau met her in Tahiti, and only twentytwo to his fifty-one when he married her. And apart from an undergraduate degree from Simon Fraser University, where she had studied political science, sociology, and anthropology, she had few of the accomplishments and none of the refinements that Trudeau had previously favoured. After graduation she had spent several months wandering, at her parents’ expense, through Morocco, where excessive drug use and sex had brought her no closer to the enlightenment she had set out in search of. By the time she landed back on her parents’ doorstep in the Vancouver suburbs in the summer of 1969 she was without plans and without hopes.
All that changed when the prime minister asked her out on a date.
What was it in Margaret that was to capture the world’s attention so? Somehow, though in a more undisciplined way, she had the same “Just watch me” quality that Trudeau had, this flower child in her muslin tops and flowing skirts whose next step, like Trudeau’s, you could never predict. At the Liberal Convention in 1968, which Margaret’s family attended because her father was an organizer for John Turner, Trudeau remembered Margaret at once from their brief meeting in Tahiti, picking her out of the mob that surrounded him after his victory and going over to kiss her on both cheeks, as if anointing her. Over the next years we would watch her as we did Trudeau, seeing in her the same fairy-tale quality of having been plucked from nowhere into greatness. We watched her because she seemed so unlikely; because we feared and hoped for some gaffe; because we did not know—and it seemed often enough that she herself did not know—what she would do next. We watched her because the camera loved her. The media made her, as it had made Trudeau: just as with him, there were iconic images of Margaret that would be etched in the Canadian psyche. Margaret in her white wedding garb on the cover of Time, Trudeau doting behind her. Margaret and Pierre swinging Sacha through an airport corridor. Margaret with the Queen. Margaret with Castro. Margaret with Justin, then Sacha, then Micha.
Just as the media had made her, however, so it unmade her. Partying all night with the Rolling Stones in Toronto. Dancing at Studio 54 while her husband went down to defeat at the polls. A famous photo of Margaret caught pantyless seemed the nadir, but there was more to come, as she launched a B movie career that included a bodice-ripper whose script was written by a gynecologist. By then Margaret had begun to seem a grotesque inversion of Trudeau: where he had put walls, she had put windows, injudiciously baring herself to a world that was all too happy to take whatever she offered. The unravelling of her story was as mesmerizing, in its way, as its coming together had been, and maybe as satisfying: just as we had all lived vicariously through her apotheosis, we were now comforted in our conventionality by her downfall.
The real story of Maggie and Pierre, however, was not particularly glamorous or remarkable. Much of it we know through Margaret’s own books, Beyond Reason and Consequences, which were considered in bad taste when they came out but were actually a model of discretion with regard to Trudeau himself. No revelations of bedroom quirks or of some monster or petty tyrant who lurked behind the charm, no bitter recriminations or flinging of blame. On the contrary, her comments about Trudeau tended less to soil his public image than to soften it, as they had when she had joined Trudeau on the campaign trail, against the wishes of his advisers, in the election of 1974. Speaking to an audience in Vancouver then, she had called Trudeau “a beautiful guy” who “taught me everything I know about loving.”
There was very little in the books to contradict this image. “Pierre is one of the gentlest of men, a loving father and a very loyal friend,” she wrote of him, taking most of the blame for the failure of the marriage on herself. Trudeau’s own culpability came out mainly as a sort of benign inattentiveness: his holding court entirely in French at a dinner party without realizing that Margaret didn’t speak it; his failure to notice the chilly refusal of the domestic staff at 24 Sussex to relinquish any control of the household to her. In the end her life came apart so spectacularly and so indiscreetly that the public, too, would tend to spare Trudeau any of the blame for the marriage’s failure.
Here was a man, however, who had chosen for his wife someone thirty years his junior and who shared none of his accomplishments or learning or experience. It was not as if he lacked options. Why choose Margaret over someone like his long-time “companion” Madeleine Gobeil, who was still living in Ottawa when he was secretly dating Margaret and who was someone much more suited to him in age and accomplishments than Margaret was? Though the marriage was seen as another example of Trudeau’s bucking of convention, the truth was likely much different. In Consequences, in a tone slightly less genial than that of her first book, Margaret described the three categories women fell into for Trudeau:
There were his female colleagues, and these he saw only as working companions and not as women, though many were also close friends. Then there were possible dates and here, like Edward VIII, he preferred actresses and starlets, glamorous women who were perfect for flirtations and candlelight dinners. Then there was his wife, and she had to be dependent, at home, and available.
Margaret might have added “pregnant,” which she was for almost half of her marriage to Trudeau. Trudeau had always wanted children, and he had always been envious of friends who had married at the proper age and had growing broods while he was still living at home like an adolescent. His earlier relationships had failed not so much because of his aversion to the strictures of domestic life but exactly because he had been attracted to women of accomplishment who had much less traditional views of women’s roles than he had. For all the emphasis throughout his life on human rights, Trudeau, in practical terms, never showed himself to be much of a feminist. In an interview with Gloria Steinem in 1969, he was visibly awkward, stumbling in his response to her charge that there was a dearth of women in his government and attempting to take refuge in a gallantry that made him look decidedly old-fashioned next to Steinem.
Margaret, however, was not Gloria Steinem—or Thérèse Gouin. She had no projects or ambitions outside of her marriage and openly admitted that she “planned to get pregnant as soon as I could.” No one was ever to suggest Trudeau married Margaret for anything other than love, yet there was something coldly practical in the arrangement—in his putting the idea of marriage forward as if he were presenting a government white paper; in his setting of tasks. It was as thou
gh the pattern he had begun in the 1950s of casual relationships with interesting women had been a way of resolving the contradiction his earlier relationships had foundered on, that the independence and accomplishment that stimulated him in a lover he could not have accepted in a wife. Apparently the man who sought challenges in every other sphere of his life did not want to feel challenged in his marriage.
In the end, Margaret proved one of his largest challenges, and one of the few at which he would fail. His inattentiveness was likely much less benign than Margaret generously suggested in her books: it left her to flail. “Pierre’s nature was such that he wasn’t able to help me,” she wrote, by which she meant that his idea of attending to her was to give her a car and her own phone line. However much of “a beautiful guy” he was, he saw his principal role during their marriage as that of prime minister, and not that of giving on-the-job training in how to be a prime minister’s wife.
In Beyond Reason, Margaret recounted that when she was packing up to leave Pierre in 1977 she found a note she had written only a year and a half after their marriage, when their son Justin was just nine months old. “I am so lonely. I should be happy. I am married to a man who loves me and I have a wonderful baby. But I am terribly unhappy.” Five years and two sons later she was still unhappy, and for largely the same reasons. At twenty-two she had been as unformed as Trudeau himself had been at twenty-two, but while Trudeau had had the luxury of the next twenty-odd years to prepare for the scrutiny of the world, Margaret had had to learn under its glare. For much of her life at 24 Sussex her only respite was the room she had arranged for herself in the attic, painted canary yellow, where she could retreat between run-ins with the domestic staff and the plots by Trudeau insiders to undermine her and the media moments when she wore the wrong dress to a White House dinner or wrote an embarrassing poem for the First Lady of Venezuela.
Margaret reserved particular scorn in Beyond Reason for those Trudeau staffers who seemed determined from the start to keep her from horning in on their sphere of influence. On the campaign trail in 1974, her “old adversary” Ivan Head, Trudeau’s speech writer and foreign policy adviser, “did his best to ease me out,” she wrote, “creating an indefinable but unmistakable aura that I was totally redundant on the trip. He was always smiling, always whispering something in Pierre’s ear, and I felt moments of pure childish jealousy.” By all accounts, Margaret’s perception of what Richard Gwyn called “the manipulative character of life in the court of a Sun King” was dead on. Repeating a pattern that went all the way back to his days at Brébeuf, Trudeau kept a handful of men near him during his time in office whose influence over him was often pivotal. The balance of power had shifted, so that Trudeau was more father now than son, yet the same complex dynamic of a carefully circumscribed intensity often marked these relationships. James Coutts, for instance, who was Trudeau’s principal secretary from 1975 to 1981, came to be seen as an almost Svengali-like figure for his ability to win Trudeau over to his stratagems and to successfully package the Trudeau image. It was Coutts who would engineer the defeat of the Conservative minority in 1979, and Coutts who would woo Trudeau out of retirement and lead him to victory in 1980. Yet, like Marc Lalonde and before him Jean Marchand, Coutts was never to develop a personal relationship with Trudeau; Trudeau saved that for his women. A strange kind of territoriality may have been playing itself out, then, between Margaret and people like Ivan Head, one in which the jealousy ran in both directions, each sensing that one controlled a sphere that was closed to the other.
None of this goes very far, however, toward explaining the public’s fascination with the saga of Maggie and Pierre. Part of the fascination in Canada, of course, was the fascination itself: that the world’s eyes should be upon us, that suddenly this backwater nation made the pages of People magazine and Variety and the British tabloids. Beyond that, their relationship seemed the logical completion of the Trudeau myth, embodying socially what Trudeau had seemed to embody politically. Youth, surely, which was a perpetual theme with him, but also the fairy-tale kingdom, the successful quest, the grail brought back that would restore the land. Like Trudeau’s pirouette behind the Queen or his sandals in the House of Commons, which John Diefenbaker, epitome of the Old Guard, had muttered and fumed over, Maggie was a sign of the passing of the old order, the fusty colonial one of the Family Compact and the Union Jack.
It was uncanny how much the later story of Princess Di came to mirror that of Margaret Trudeau. Plucked from relative obscurity, married at twenty, the darling of the camera who, however, could not quite seem to get things right. Another fairy-tale marriage that went badly wrong—and for similar reasons. In the Canadian way, however, Maggie and Pierre ended rather less tragically and less bitterly. And while for England the tale of Charles and Di was more a matter of endings than beginning, the possible final chapter in the bloody, illustrious history of the British monarchy, for Canada, Maggie and Pierre were a beginning: at some level, and at long last, they were our own, homebred aristocracy. In matters of decorum Maggie was no match for the Queen, but the Queen was fond of her (something that couldn’t quite be said for Diana), producing a hat pin when Maggie’s hat blew off at their first meeting and showing Maggie how to fix her hat in place with it.
Margaret’s comments about Trudeau’s actresses and starlets were to hold truer for his post-Margaret era than they did for his pre-Margaret one. The old pattern of longdistance relationships was there, but it was much more conscious now. In some ways Trudeau truly became the playboy he had only feigned to be when he was younger, though the image never detracted from that of being a consummate father to his boys. As for his philandering, there would be many women who would attest to it, shocked to find a counterpart leaving by the back door as they came in through the front, but few who would abandon him for it. Women stayed in his life for years, well after relationships had ended; there might be bitternesses, but never ill wishes.
About Margaret’s evening with the Rolling Stones Trudeau had said to interviewers, with what seemed real feeling, “I don’t expect Margaret to stop going to rock concerts and to visit friends in New York because some people will be misled into thinking she’s not behaving right. So, it’s okay with me.” In his last years, after the death of their youngest son, it was Margaret he most took solace from, and Margaret who sat at his bedside day and night as he died.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Notwithstanding
In some ways, the 1970s turned out much like the 1950s for Trudeau. A big bang at the beginning—the Asbestos Strike, the October Crisis—but then nothing much to show for all his hard work by the end. His fledgling attempts at putting in play his notion of “participatory democracy,” the committees and white papers and weekend retreats, got bogged down in procedural issues and endless debate. His Just Society initiatives—in unemployment insurance, in regional development, in equalization programs—not only had dubious results but fed a national debt that rose from a mere $18 billion in 1968 to $100 billion by 1979, so that in eleven years Trudeau’s Liberals accumulated four times as much debt as the preceding administrations had done since Confederation. The constitution, despite the conferences and tentative accords, was no closer to patriation than it had been in the fifty years of attempts by various governments, and Trudeau’s cherished Charter of Rights and Freedoms remained a pipe dream. Meanwhile the one big initiative that Trudeau had pushed through, official bilingualism, had not even been his own, and had done nothing to stem the tide either of western alienation or of Quebec separatism. With the election of René Lévesque’s Parti Québécois in 1976, separatism was actually at its height, with a referendum in the offing that despite all Trudeau’s efforts at national reconciliation threatened shortly to split the country in two.
The one thing Trudeau could say was that despite the October Crisis and the Energy Crisis and stagflation and the spiralling debt, he had survived, even if just barely. He had won the shakiest of minorities in 1972 and then a majo
rity in 1974 that he owed mainly to the boost Margaret had given his image on the campaign trail and to his spirited mockery of a Conservative proposal for wage and price controls—“Zap, you’re frozen!”—over which he would have to eat crow not long after his re-election. But in May 1979, while Margaret seemingly danced on his grave at Studio 54, the magus who could not lose an election saw the Conservatives win a minority under leader Joe Clark, a man who had been known until then as Joe Who. When Trudeau announced his retirement shortly afterwards, he confirmed for many people what they had always suspected, in a charge that echoed the one levelled against him in the 1950s: that he was a dilettante, that he had entered politics as a diversion, losing interest in the game as soon as he no longer controlled it.
There has been much speculation about what Trudeau’s legacy might have been had not Clark bungled a confidence vote six months into his term or had not Trudeau—after many exhortations, still playing the reluctant bride—agreed to return to lead the Liberals in the election that followed. Perhaps it would merely have been the legacy of most prime ministers, that of having been part of initiatives they didn’t start and didn’t finish, of having been eccentrics, in one way or another, of having done some things well and others poorly. Yet somehow, with Trudeau, the whole would have been greater than the sum of his parts. For the many people who followed Canadian politics merely as a kind of background static, who might normally have sooner tuned in to an American leadership debate than to a Canadian one, Trudeau had turned their heads, had made them think more of themselves, well before he had slain the dragon of referendum or brought home the constitutional grail.
