Just Watch Me

by John English

  One day in February 1969, they were in the kitchen preparing smoked oysters on wheat thins as an hors d’oeuvre before a dinner for four. Jennifer prepared the plate and squeezed some lemon juice over the oysters. Trudeau exploded, demanding to know what she was doing, and an “awful, between-clenched-teeth-so-the-guests-don’t-hear argument” began. It was all about freedom to put lemon on one’s own oysters: “The reason I am irritated is that each person has the right to decide whether he or she wants to have lemon juice on the oysters,” Pierre fumed. “You have taken that right away.” The relationship did not last much beyond that evening, and Jennifer soon married someone else. For Pierre, a most intriguing partner soon appeared from the south.23

  Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould, two American cinema giants, separated on February 13, 1969, just before Barbra tied for best actress at the Academy Awards for her performance in Funny Girl.* Although Elliott sat beside her at the gala on April 14 when she heard the good news, the marriage had come to an end. Her major interest, however, had become Pierre Trudeau, whom she had met at the London premiere of Funny Girl the previous fall. Before the gala, and knowing that her relationship with Gould had ended, Streisand and her close friend Cis Corman had been looking through the current Life magazine. As she explained, “We were jokingly checking if there might be a suitable candidate somewhere in the pages who would be right for me.” They spotted a photograph of Trudeau wearing a trenchcoat and sandals and were immediately intrigued—he was so different from Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and other American politicians of the time. Shortly thereafter, she and Trudeau were placed at Princess Margaret’s table at the Funny Girl premiere. “He was,” Streisand later said, “everything my imagination had promised and more.” Forty years later, she recalls Trudeau as a tantalizing blend of “Marlon Brando and Napoleon.” Nevertheless, she refused to dance with him that night because she knew that a prime minister and a star would attract immediate attention. Cis Corman gladly obliged and appeared in the tabloids the next day as a Trudeau “flame.”

  Streisand and Trudeau’s mutual celebrity quickly bonded them, and they both possessed an intensity and electricity that attracted all around them. They went public immediately as Canadian officials fretted about the open affair between the prime minister and a recently separated Jewish American who was a very liberal Democrat. At the very least, President Nixon would certainly not approve. Moreover, rumours of Barbra’s fame, flamboyance, and perfectionism—apparent in everything she wore, did, and sang—made her risky in the eyes of many, who worried about what would happen if the affair broke up publicly and angrily, as celebrity affairs often did. Trudeau’s top advisers met and debated the issue. Finally, Tim Porteous exploded: “We’re debating whether Pierre should date the hottest star in the world. My God, this is political gold!”24

  It’s doubtful whether his advisers could have stopped Trudeau, but he went with their blessing for a weekend in New York with Streisand soon after. On the Friday evening they dined at Casa Brasil on the Upper East Side, at a small, intimate table, and then went to Raffles, the elite discotheque at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. Their relationship was very romantic, and the next day they did not emerge from Streisand’s apartment at all. On the Sunday, however, they reappeared as a glamorous couple at the theatre as the paparazzi swarmed around them. On subsequent meetings, they sometimes ate at a Chinese restaurant, where Trudeau particularly enjoyed the large snails. They talked easily about architecture, politics, and their different worlds. In Pierre, Barbra saw the qualities of her adored father, who was also highly intellectual and thoroughly athletic. In January 1970, after filming The Owl and the Pussycat, Streisand came to Ottawa. The event overheated the capital, which was then in the middle of its worst winter in memory. Bedecked in furs and with Cis Corman as her chaperone, Barbra’s presence was royal in its grandeur, press coverage, and reception. She attended Question Period in the House of Commons, where the Speaker acknowledged her presence as Trudeau beamed up at the gallery. When the time came for her to depart, Trudeau quickly left a meeting, ran to her limousine, and bade a short farewell with hands joined and eyes intensely linked. On the evening of January 28, Barbra and Pierre attended the celebration of Manitoba’s Centennial at the new National Arts Centre. They travelled separately to the hall, but once there, Pierre leapt from his limousine to open the door of hers and, arm in arm, they walked together into the theatre. She was resplendent in white mink, and reporters everywhere borrowed the famous opening line of Funny Girl to describe her: “You’re gorgeous.” There were restaurant sightings, amorous moments, and a fond farewell to make Ottawa, for once, more than a political capital.25

  Trudeau and Streisand continued to date, and he invited her to Harrington Lake, where he impressed her by diving expertly into the chill of the lake. Trudeau approached the question of a lasting relationship, mentioned his desire for children, and basked in Streisand’s extraordinary presence. But suddenly she found it “scary”: her marriage had just ended; her career was gloriously successful; and however enchanting she found Trudeau, Canada was a foreign country. There were obviously many questions and problems. What about his Catholic religion and her Jewish beliefs? Must she learn French? What would happen to her film career if she was Trudeau’s wife? She would never ask him to resign, strong liberal that she was. Her questions amounted to a refusal, and the affair came to an end later in the spring. They remained in contact and on friendly terms: Streisand sent a cable when the Quebec Liberals won the provincial election in April 1970—“Congratulations for Quebec and Love for the Liberals”—and she sent birthday greetings in October later that year. “Amidst all of this chaos,” she wrote, “I hope you have a happy birthday. My thoughts continue to be with you. Love, Barbra.” The affection endured, and in Streisand’s words, so did the exquisite memories of the way they were that winter of 1969–70: lovers who shared “mutual admiration and respect—and chemistry.” They would meet again in November, and later in the eighties.26

  Trudeau continued to date others, notably the engaging and intellectual Madeleine Gobeil, whom he had known for many years and who now taught French at Carleton University. She was often his close companion when he attended events at the National Arts Centre, and they sometimes spent evenings together, with dinner and conversation, at her home in Ottawa. He also continued to see Carroll Guérin, who was both amused and troubled by Trudeau’s romantic escapades. Her remarkable ability to cut through his defensive layers meant that he was frequently drawn to her in crises, and while neither censorious nor possessive, she suspected that his addiction to serial dating could create such a crisis. And she was right.

  Margaret Sinclair learned of the candlelit dinner with Barbra Streisand at 24 Sussex Drive in the morning papers on January 29, 1970. Furious, she slammed down the phone when Pierre asked her out after Barbra had left. “Go back to your American actresses,” she screamed into the receiver. She had good reason to feel betrayed. They had begun dating in August 1969, when Trudeau asked her out during a visit to Vancouver after she’d returned from a torrid love affair with the young Frenchman Yves Lewis. She had chosen Yves over Pierre in Tahiti and then enjoyed a “hippie’s” life in Morocco, where she sampled promiscuity and drugs. When Trudeau called her at home, Margaret hesitantly accepted his invitation and then, with the help of her mother and sisters, she turned the “flower child into a Barbie doll” in frenzied preparations for the date.*

  Accompanied by two plainclothes officers, Margaret and Pierre dined at the Grouse’s Nest, a touristy restaurant with compensating spectacular views of Vancouver. Their initial nervousness dissipated as Margaret enthralled Pierre with tales of Yves’s time at Berkeley, where he had stashed hand grenades and weapons while preparing for revolution, and of her own life on the edge in Marrakesh. The ever-curious Trudeau was intrigued, and he encouraged Margaret to talk: “It is in his nature to be charming and complimentary to women,” she recalled, “and, away from that sort of old-fashioned galla
ntry for so long, I had quite forgotten how beguiling” it could be. And he questioned her continually. They danced closely together, and in that emotional moment, Margaret forgot that Pierre was two years older than her mother. They talked effortlessly and with some excitement about religion and a spiritual experience, perhaps induced by drugs, that she had had in Morocco. The night ended with a suggestion that she leave Vancouver, where she was unhappy, and move east. She considered his idea of going to Ottawa, but essentially took pleasure in an evening where she was “not battling with a young man’s ego.” She didn’t think about what prospects there might be for two such very different people: “one cerebral, clearheaded, rational, devout and almost fifty; the other confused, scatty, certain of only one thing and that was to avoid all possible formality and social responsibility, and barely twenty.” With an uncertain future, that fall she did decide to move to Ottawa.27

  Their romance bloomed after she took a job as a sociologist with the new Department of Manpower and Immigration. At Pierre’s request, their meetings were secret. Margaret loathed her job but adored Pierre more and more. She found him youthful, willing to listen, and understanding of a young person’s dreams. Her views gained support when those champions of youth, the Beatle John Lennon and his companion, Yoko Ono, called on Trudeau at his parliamentary office on December 23, 1969. Clad entirely in black and grounded in Canada because Lennon had broken American drug laws, the two celebrities spent fifty minutes with Trudeau—forty minutes more than booked. They emerged and told a gaggle of reporters that they were enthralled. When asked whether Trudeau was “beautiful,” Lennon responded, “I think he is.” Yoko Ono had had doubts when she came, she confessed, but no longer: he was “more beautiful than we expected.” He was, Lennon declared, a man who could bring “peace” to the world. With Trudeau’s popularity on the wane and many Canadian newspapers complaining that he was unimaginative in policy, these unexpected endorsements possessed real political weight.28

  During the election campaign, Trudeau had frequently spoken about the need to re-evaluate Canadian foreign policy. He took office at the moment when public support for America’s war in Vietnam had collapsed, and Canadian critics expected he would end the ambiguities that had marked Paul Martin’s policy toward that war. Had he not attacked Lester Pearson in 1963 when the “defrocked prince of peace” committed a future Liberal government to accept nuclear weapons as part of its commitment to NATO and NORAD? Trudeau mused openly about those commitments while he campaigned and reiterated his belief that Canada’s foreign and defence policies needed “review.” Volume One of this biography revealed how Trudeau’s views differed from Pearson’s during the golden age of Canadian diplomacy in the late 1940s and in the 1950s. He had opposed the Korean War and speculated about Canadian neutrality in the Cold War. Pearson, Trudeau claimed, believed that the role of Canada was to interpret “London to Washington & vice versa, as if they needed a despicable mouthpiece.” As in so much else, Trudeau changed his mind once he came to power, and most Canadians accepted that the new prime minister now belonged in the mainstream.29

  But the mainstream became highly turbulent in the late 1960s, and Trudeau kept some of his earlier sentiments. First, he retained the view that the Department of External Affairs was an “Anglo-Saxon” preserve, an opinion sustained by the research of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. Second, he still felt uneasy about the weight of the “U.S.–U.K. axis” in Canadian foreign and defence policies. His opposition to nuclear weapons was fundamental, and membership in NATO meant that Canada was a member of an alliance committed to their use. His closest political allies, Marchand and Pelletier, were inclined toward neutralism, and as a journalist, Pelletier had expressed strong opposition to U.S. Asian policies in the early 1960s. In Trudeau’s view, NATO had dominated Canadian international policy, and that domination was wrong.

  Third, Trudeau had long since concluded that Soviet Communism was authoritarian, hidebound, and dangerous, but he detested the virulent anti-Communism often expressed by the American right. His frequent visits to Sweden piqued his interest in neutrality, yet he recognized that Canada’s relationship with the United States made neutrality unrealistic. Fourth, in Two Innocents in Red China, Trudeau had ridiculed China’s exclusion from international organizations and its non-recognition by many Western democracies, including Canada. It would be a mark of the “independent foreign policy” many Canadian intellectuals and journalists were demanding if the Canadian government broke with the Americans and others and recognized China.*

  Finally, Trudeau’s travels in Asia, Africa, and Latin America had left their mark on him. In his first major speech on foreign policy, in May 1968, he had spoken eloquently about the “Third World.” Eventually, he declared, “the overwhelming threat to Canada will not come from foreign interests or foreign ideologies or even—with good fortune—foreign nuclear weapons.” It would come from the “two-thirds of the people of the world who are steadily falling farther and farther behind in their search for a decent standard of living.” Canada, he thought, should now turn to that neglected majority.30

  Ivan Head, who had now begun to serve as Trudeau’s principal foreign policy adviser, wrote that May foreign policy speech. Although formal appointment did not occur until 1970, Head’s close presence to Trudeau immediately and correctly confirmed fears in the Department of External Affairs that its historic preeminence was threatened. Trudeau liked Head, who was also small of stature but physically robust, eager to debate, and quick to dissent. During the campaign he had written speeches and notes on foreign policy subjects for Trudeau that were often scathing. In the case of development assistance, for example, he bluntly claimed that earlier governments had “never set forth a clear-cut statement of policy on Canadian economic assistance programmes.” As a result, Canadians were completely “confused.”31

  To complicate matters, Trudeau did not like Under-secretary of State Marcel Cadieux, the principal civil servant responsible for Canadian foreign policy, although their acquaintance was long, their backgrounds were similar, and they had worked together effectively in dealing with French interference in Canadian politics during the late Pearson years. The fiery Cadieux, however, had offended Trudeau when he told him in the late forties that he was completely unsuited for External Affairs and should not apply. A staunch Catholic with conservative beliefs, he had also angered Trudeau by his objection to one of Trudeau’s homosexual friends and by his stern anti-Communism, which girded his fervent support of the Vietnam War and the NATO alliance. Despite their differences, Cadieux initially welcomed Trudeau’s victory simply because he despaired of Paul Martin’s indecisiveness and his ambiguity toward de Gaulle’s policies in Canada. Gordon Robertson, whom he did admire, told him that Trudeau was “much to be preferred” to Pearson in Canada-France relations. The truce between the two old acquaintances was brief, however, and it broke once Trudeau appointed Head as an adviser, expanded Cabinet scrutiny of foreign policy, and announced that there would be a full review of that policy—despite a recent one conducted by the dean of Canadian diplomats, Norman Robertson. This review had generally approved of the current policies (ones that Cadieux had directed).32

  Unexpectedly, foreign policy, a subject Trudeau claimed was not his primary interest, became the major topic of public debate during his first year in office. When Charles Ritchie, the Canadian high commissioner to Britain, returned to Ottawa in late summer, he found the “Establishment” uneasy and clucking “nervously.” The worldly, reed-like Ritchie was the model for an enigmatic British double agent in a novel by his lover Elizabeth Bowen, In the Heat of the Day, and he was an anglophile with profound doubts about Canada’s criticism of Britain during the Suez Crisis. Ritchie epitomized so much of what Trudeau disliked about External Affairs. When the seasoned diplomat saw Trudeau for the first time on August 29, he recorded the moment in this memorable way: “I turned, and it was Trudeau, looking like a modern version of the Scholar Gypsy i
n sandals and open-necked shirt, as if he had just blown in from Haunts of Coot and Hern. He is physically altogether slighter, lighter, smaller than his photographs suggest. His air of youth—or is it agelessness?—is preternatural in a man of forty-eight [sic]…. The manner is unaffected and instantly attractive; the light blue eyes ironical and amused, but they can change expression, and almost colour, to a chillier, cooler tone.”

  At that first meeting, Ritchie found Trudeau puzzling. The following day, however, ambiguities vanished as Trudeau began his meeting by asking whether Ritchie thought External Affairs was “really necessary.” Ritchie justified the department but left believing that Trudeau “has got it into his head the Department is divorced from the real interests of Canada and is embarking on international projects which have no firm basis in Canadian needs.” According to Ritchie, when External Affairs Minister Mitchell Sharp asked Cadieux about the “Swedish” option of neutrality, a favourite of Trudeau, Cadieux acidly replied that the department had “no expert on neutrality.” Anti-NATO sentiment was strong, and the “British connection” was unpopular with the new crowd.33

  Ritchie’s shrewd and accurate observations proved the value of diplomacy, and his concern about NATO reflected his understanding of the difficulties of extracting Canada from the alliance, given the nation’s centrality in East-West relations. Not surprisingly, the Departments of Defence and External Affairs responded negatively to Trudeau’s demand for another full review. They presented papers for Cabinet that generally called for the status quo to remain, with a few minor changes in troop deployments and policy. Trudeau rejected the studies and told the departments to try again. They foolishly underestimated Trudeau’s will and the extent to which outside criticism was affecting the government. Even Escott Reid, a former senior External Affairs official and principal architect of NATO, shared Trudeau’s view that Canadian forces should be withdrawn from Europe and that military expenditure should be greatly reduced.34 Trudeau later said that his opinions were affected by the rise of Europe, his antipathy to mindless anti-Communism, his concern for North-South questions, and not least, his friends, who tended to be intellectuals hostile to the Vietnam War and wary of the military. Even within the department, some shared those views.