LARRY ZOLF
Larry Zolf is the host-writer for “Inside Zolf,” a weekly CBC Newsworld Online program. He writes on present day politics, on Canadian history and culture, and all aspects of the Canadian scene. He has been a writer, a reporter, a host, a producer, a consultant to CBC News and Current Affairs and Newsworld since 1962. He is the author of Dance of the Dialectic, Survival of the Fattest: An Irreverent View of the Senate, and Just Watch Me: Remember Pierre Trudeau. Scorpions For Sale, his first fiction, was nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1989.
THERE WERE NO SCREAMING, mini-skirted, mini-minded women shouting the praises of the Great Man’s godly powers or charismatic talents when I first met Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the fall of 1964. The encounter took place in a Montreal hotel room booked by Trudeau’s friend Patrick Watson, the executive producer of the CBC’s investigative television news program This Hour Has Seven Days.
Trudeau sprawled over one of the twin beds in the room, but I could see he was short, almost elfin-like in appearance, and dressed entirely in the British mode. His pock-marked face gave him a tough street-kid look, accentuated by his cold blue eyes. Oddly enough, given his later heart-throb image, he exuded little sexuality. If anything, he seemed asexual. In his shyness and aloofness, he resembled the Jesuits who had trained him at the classical Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf. Above all, there was a wonderful humble arrogance about him. A special kind of languid air about Trudeau suggested that he had better things to do than sit in a hotel room that afternoon and a Radio-Canada studio that night.
Watson was then thirty-seven years old and the boy wonder of Canadian television. In a matter of weeks, This Hour Has Seven Days had completely captured the media agenda and shoved newspapers and radio aside. Cabinet ministers and political leaders who accepted invitations to occupy its “hot seat” had a long shotgun microphone thrust before their mouths and soon found themselves exposed as bogeymen feeding voraciously at the public trough. The Salem witch hunt had come to Canada, to the delight of the lynchmob viewers. René Lévesque, who was a minister in the Quebec Liberal government, was the bogeyman who had gathered Trudeau, Watson, and me together in that hotel room in Montreal.
Lévesque even then had a reputation as a separatist. This Hour would put the boot to him and his crooked ways. Once again it would save the country—at least for seven days. Watson’s strategy was simple enough. Lévesque would occupy the hot seat, and Trudeau would ask all the tough questions about Lévesque’s treason to Quebec and to Canada. I, the Winnipeg Jew, was to play the Nice Guy in the interview. I would reassure Lévesque and the viewers that, despite Trudeau’s brutal questions, I and the English Canada I spoke for loved Lévesque and hoped he would become prime minister some day—perhaps after he tired of being prime minister of a sovereign Quebec. If necessary, I was to rebuke Trudeau for his heavy-handedness and ask: “But you do agree, Pierre, that we English Canadians have been barbaric to Quebec and now must pay the price?”
Watson asked for a run-through of my new role as Canadian WASP spokesman. I was thrilled at last to be a hot-seat interviewer for the greatest television show in Canadian history, and I ran through my scenario with an exaggerated bit of lusty bravado. Watson laughed heartily, but Trudeau smiled benignly and said absolutely nothing. I wondered if he were some kind of mute and whether he would sit through the actual interview again saying nothing, leaving me to run the show. At this point Watson brought the meeting to a close and told us to be at the studio for makeup at 7:30. Trudeau escorted me to his two-seater green Porsche, and we drove off for dinner to a private Montreal club that he frequented.
It was a strange place. The walls were covered with paintings of the English countryside and Irish setters, and the famous photograph of Churchill by Karsh hung in a prominent place. The menu consisted of variations on roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. It seemed like a perfect English gentlemen’s club. The first surprise was that everyone there spoke only French, and the second was the sound of two coins—two quarters—that Trudeau plunked on the table as a tip.
The atmosphere in the Radio-Canada studio was distinctly unpleasant. The makeup lady made it clear that the studio was Lévesque’s turf and that both Trudeau and I were mere interlopers. The studio director barely talked to us as he chatted up Lévesque and directed sardonic nods and winks in our direction every fifteen seconds or so.
The interview quickly became a disaster. Trudeau asked several questions about the forestry industry in Quebec and what Lévesque planned to do about it. Lévesque gave long, boring, tree-by-tree answers. The studio crew, once fearful that the beloved René would be hammered in the interview, was lulled to an early sleep. Suddenly Watson, from the control booth, signalled the reluctant studio director to pass a private message on to me. It was short and to the point: “DROP TRUDEAU. TAKE OVER THE INTERVIEW—COMPLETELY—NOW!”
I switched gears quickly, eager to show Lévesque the dark side of English Canada that I was now so nimbly representing. My sudden role reversal reduced Trudeau to virtual silence, especially when I asked Lévesque if he hated English Canadians, if he would drive non-Québécois out of his homeland, and why he and the Québécois were angry when we English Canadians had already made our dollar bills bilingual. Lévesque broke into raucous laughter and said: “I see you’re really acting, playing a role, aren’t you?” I refused to say yes or no, but inwardly I glowed at the star recognition Lévesque had given me by his on-air observation.
On the flight back to Toronto, I quaffed a half-dozen scotches to celebrate my triumphal debut as the television champion of English Canada. This interview with Lévesque I knew would be the making of me. As for Trudeau, he had said goodbye to me politely—and the scotches soon made me forget him completely.
Trudeau was the farthest thing from my mind when I checked into Seven Days’ Toronto headquarters the day after the Lévesque interview. There I was greeted by producer Beryl Fox, a fellow North End Winnipeger, who hailed me as a great interviewer. “Christ,” she said, “if it weren’t for you, your mealy mouth of an interview partner would have put Lévesque and the whole country to sleep! Who is this guy Trudeau anyway, apart from being one of Watson’s upper-class French buddies?”
I barely had time to sit down before I discovered that my next hot-seat assignment would be none other than Lévesque in Montreal that coming Saturday night. CBC brass insisted that the show be redone. Once again, Trudeau would be my partner. Again, he would be the heavy, and I would be Mr. Nice Guy.
For Round Two of Réne Lévesque versus Seven Days featuring Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Larry Zolf, Watson did not accompany me to Montreal. I knew he had engaged in a private chat with Trudeau, trying to get him to drop his long-winded questions for shorter, punchier approaches. He hoped the new Trudeau would be able to carry the second Lévesque interview, while my Good Guy Canada stuff would provide needed filler and contrast.
Oddly enough, I met Trudeau in the same Montreal hotel room as the previous week. He, too, looked the same: serene, stoic, irritatingly calm, and dangerously bland. The only stylistic difference this time was that he was elegantly attired in a three-piece Harris tweed suit.
Trudeau and I were alone in the hotel room, but that was not the cause of the sense of foreboding that crept upon me. I began to sense jitters and uncertainty in the air—and not just mine. Perhaps I was overreacting to Trudeau’s silence. Perhaps Trudeau had nothing to say. Perhaps, once again, I would have to dart into the fray. In my nervousness, I took a strange route trying to cut the ice with Trudeau. I decided to tell him about my sexual exploits and steamy adventures. This erotic performance drew a strange Cheshire cat smile from Trudeau that spread slowly from below his high cheekbones to the corners of his aristocratic mouth.
Thinking I was making headway, I told him about my pet hate—socialists who pretend to love the people but who are, in fact, hypocrites, misanthropes, and exploiters of the humble and weak. I worked myself up to a particular froth against a former professor of mine in Winnipeg who had marked me harshly after he found me drunk at a college function. This obscure bit of personal trivia got an even wider Cheshire cat response from Trudeau. I didn’t know why then, but later on I learned that my professor was a close socialist friend of Trudeau. As prime minister, he appointed my prof to a senior government post.
Still, while I didn’t really know Trudeau, I liked him. There was an aura of decency and conviction about him. He was well mannered and courteous and, although he was obviously a duck out of water on television, he was still determined to do his best to massage the medium.
Before the interview was to begin, Trudeau took me in his Porsche convertible for a short sightseeing tour of Montreal, his home town. During the ride, he spoke in short, punchy statements of his love for the city. It seemed to me that it was just these kinds of statements that would make our interview a success. For the first time, I really believed Trudeau could pull it off. I was as happy as I could possibly be—confined as I was to the secondary and far less exciting role of Mr. Seven Days Nice Guy.
Our arrival at the Radio-Canada studio at 7 that evening banished these reveries. Again, the makeup women were surly and unfriendly. The francophone technicians and crew were openly contemptuous of le juif et le vendu, the Jew and the sellout. Lévesque had not yet shown up, and panic calls to Watson soon followed.
An hour and a half passed. The tension in the studio was acute. Finally, at 9 p.m., Lévesque arrived with a entourage of aides and persuaders. A half hour later, he mounted the interviewee’s dais. As he did so, he gave Trudeau a withering look of scorn and contempt. Trudeau did not flinch. My respect for Trudeau increased a bit more.
The studio director cued Trudeau. He proceeded to rattle off the major benefits federalism provided Quebeckers, followed by the economic problems that would beset Quebeckers if Canadian federalism were to disappear. Trudeau questioned whether Lévesque had fully considered the implications of Canadian federalism and the problems that the Quebec balance sheet would suffer if federalism collapsed.
Lévesque completely blew his cool. Pushing aside the shotgun mike, he shouted: “This is Montreal, Saturday night. I refuse to spend it in the company of jackasses!” Then he and his entire entourage marched briskly out of the studio.
Trudeau accepted all this negativity with complete equanimity. He gave me an idle shrug of the shoulders, the first of many to come in his long and remarkable political life. I shook his hand and said goodbye.
On my arrival in Toronto, I headed home for some well-earned sleep. In my absence, the CBC and Seven Days had one of their early major battles. Seven Days now wanted to air the first version, the original taping of Lévesque, Trudeau, and me. The program won that round. News that the first interview was running and in the key spot bowled me over. Once again, I would be Mr. Hot Seat, master of the leer, the sneer, the innuendo. Once again, I could wag fingers and shake jowls. Now for sure I would phone home to Winnipeg and exult: “LOOK MA, I’M A STAR!”
This Hour Has Seven Days was more a cult, a private religion, than a mere public affairs television show. On Sunday night, the weekly air date, staffers would gather to watch the show, providing cheers and boos, thumbs up or thumbs down, laurels or darts, to the items as they appeared on the screen. Their response to my Tough Guy Canada stance was extremely gratifying. They cheered every venom- and innuendo-loaded question I asked Lévesque. They booed lustily and voted thumbs down to Trudeau’s few tiptoes into the fray. The odd “wimp,” “sissy,” “coward” greeted Trudeau’s long question about Quebec’s forests. Instead, the staffers shouted “Right on” to my remarks.
On Monday morning, Seven Days had its traditional postmortem meeting. Beryl Fox had just come back from risking her life in Mississippi, where she had finished “One More River” and “Summer in Mississippi,” both soon to become Canadian classic documentaries. She launched into an attack on Trudeau. “He has no balls,” she cried. “He let Larry carry the can on this one. He is a television disaster! I move that Seven Days never use Trudeau again!” Shouts of “yes, yes” filled the meeting room. A motion to bar Trudeau from Seven Days for life was made and duly carried. It was as if Trudeau had never been one of us at Seven Days. It was as if the Lévesque hot seat was a solo performance, done all by me alone.
I was a star at last. People all over Canada were now asking who that quiet little guy was, with high cheek-bones and an aristocratic mouth, who couldn’t get a word in edgewise against real hot seaters like Réne Lévesque and Larry Zolf.
Two years later, when I was at home in Winnipeg watching the CBC with my mother, a familiar face appeared on the screen driving the familiar Porsche around Montreal’s hot spots. The interviewer was Norman DePoe, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the newly appointed justice minister, was on the move. I snickered to myself and thought, Can a bad interviewer be a good minister?
My mother had no such doubts. When the program was over she turned to me and said: “That, my son, is the next prime minister of Canada.” “Sure, Ma, sure,” I replied sarcastically, wondering if an extended stay in the Jewish old folks home was, perhaps, not a bad idea for her. But I was forgetting that my mother had accurately predicted the outbreak of two world wars and, in the old country on November 7, 1918, had told the Jewish women in the Zastavia marketplace: “An armistice is coming any day now. Trust me on this one!”
There is a myth in Canada that the media made Trudeau and that he was their patron saint and protector. But the truth is far more complex. Beginning with Trudeaumania in 1968, the media really covered Trudeau only in a raw-meat fashion. Their ignorance of Trudeau’s true skills and intellectual clout was appalling. Their dislike of him was palpable. Some even said he hated the Québécois, his own people, or that he preferred the Elliotts to the Trudeaus. To these media types, Trudeau was the freak show to their Barnums and Baileys, and they would get the sucker readers and viewers into the tent. Many in the media felt sorry for or superior to Trudeau. They saw him as a spoiled rich boy who would soon get his come-uppance. Other media veterans grumbled about Trudeau’s alleged physical cowardice and his chicken war record, draft-dodging during the Second World War. And so it remained. To my recollection, none of the media were ever close to Trudeau.
Trudeau’s ignorance of the media was equally pathetic. He knew nothing about how a prime minister should charm the press and tickle its rump. Take the annual Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinner. Traditionally, prime ministers get funny on this occasion and laugh at the press and at themselves. Trudeau, the non-media man, hated this most sacred media ritual most of all. Several times as prime minister he refused to show up, unthinkable behaviour for an alleged media guru. In 1972, when Trudeau blew his majority and needed everyone to keep his marginal minority government afloat, he was told that he had to make the dinner appearance and deliver a satirical speech.
The Trudeau office commissioned me to write that speech. It was a funny speech, simply written and full of comic effect. I twitched in my seat at the dinner as Trudeau read my speech in a slow, unhappy cadence. When he at last got some laughs, he did not stop to take them in and respond. Instead, he kept reading, as the laughs from the audience drowned out the next laughs on the page. It was a disaster.
As far as Trudeau was concerned, the media were always on the make and the take, but they were not going to make and take him. Nor did they ever really cover him well. Rather, he covered them, wrapped them in a nice warm magic blanket of his making, and spun them out on the floor when he needed them. The media were always grateful for Trudeau’s Oriental carpet treatment. Trudeau’s favourite TV interviewer was shrill, rough, tough, no-nonsense Jack Webster from Vancouver. Trudeau would appear with Webster any time, any place. He knew that Webster’s feigned boorishness only made him look good. The rawer the interview, the better Trudeau liked it.
During the October Crisis in 1970, the anglo Press Gallery interpreted the War Measures Act as an example of Trudeau putting the frogs in their place. They loved him for that, and they also loved being at the centre of the world’s biggest story of the day. Trudeau gave them preferential treatment over the likes of Robert McNeil, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Mike Wallace, and other stars of American TV who were trying to get into Canada. The media jumped into bed with Trudeau—for the first and last time—and found Trudeau already there, grinning.
Trudeau’s handling of the media was enhanced by his rapidly acquired on-air skills with the electronic media. On the first day of the War Measures Act, Trudeau was confronted in Ottawa by a CBC TV News camera crew. Asked about the tanks in the street and how far he would go, Trudeau said: “JUST WATCH ME!” These three marvellous words fully expressed the smooth efficiency, the delicious ambiguity, and the unveiled threats that were the essence of Trudeau during the crisis.
I heard Trudeau pronounce these words as I stood beside Tim Ralfe of the CBC. Ralfe’s bleeding-heart outrage at the soldiers in the street did not move me at all. The kidnapping of one innocent and the cold-blooded murder of another, plus the holding of a state to ransom, moved me far more. After he had answered Ralfe, Trudeau turned to me and asked if I had anything to say. “Yes, Prime Minister,” I replied, “what took you so long?”
Few in the Press Gallery shared my view, but my respect for Trudeau rose dramatically. I still didn’t like having my Canadian identity boiled away in a vat of multiculturalism, and I still felt bilingualism was for the élites, but all that criticism was forgotten in the October Crisis. Trudeau’s TV speech invoking the War Measures Act really hit home for me. It was the best TV performance ever by a Canadian.
Just watching Trudeau deal with the War Measures was a treat. The Platonic gowns had been put in mothballs, and the humble, arrogant mask of Machiavelli now separated Trudeau from the smug, haughty faces in the Trudeau lyceum. A wonderful opportunity soon presented itself to Trudeau as Machiavelli. The Red Tories, led by student leader Hugh Segal, had come out against the War Measures. To the former Conservative leader, John Diefenbaker, these Red Tories were akin to traitors. Trudeau sensed his opportunity in this Tory division and wooed Dief without ever asking him once to support War Measures. First, Trudeau moved to secure Diefenbaker, who was high on the FLQ hit list, against attack. When I went to Dief’s house to bring him to the CBC for an interview, his home was guarded by an armoured car and several dozen Canadian soldiers. A soldier with an FN-C2 escorted us to the taxi and climbed into the front seat. When the taxi driver made a wrong turn, the soldier put the barrel of his gun against the man’s temple. It took Dief ten minutes to talk the young soldier down. Dief loved “Fort Diefenbaker” and knew who had made all that excitement possible. His love for the prime minister knew no bounds when, some time later, Trudeau had a shower installed in Diefenbaker’s office, the first shower on the Hill.
During the October Crisis, my relationship with Trudeau became almost strategic. The Liberal Party held a policy convention in the early days of War Measures, and Trudeau addressed the delegates in an open session, fielding all kinds of tough questions. I asked for an interview with Trudeau and got it, but it came with a stern prohibition: “You’re to confine your questions to the party convention and its policies only.” “Sure,” I said, surprising Trudeau with the speed with which I had accepted his castrating diktat.
The interview was to be a full half hour. My first question to Trudeau was, “If I were a delegate to the Liberal Party convention, I would ask you this”—and I fired off a tough War Measures question. Trudeau stared at me with a flinty eye. He wanted to see how far I would go. I repeated my “if I were” preamble for the next four questions. He was now hopping mad and knew he had been had by Winnipeg’s gift to the media. He tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You can drop the preamble. Just ask your question.” “Are you sure, Prime Minister? I don’t mind doing the preamble at all.” “Yes, but I do,” he retorted. I dropped the preamble and the interview went so well that the Toronto Star called it “deft but refreshingly undeferential.”
Ottawa in Trudeau’s time was a small town full of secrets, which everyone knew. The favourite secret about Trudeau whispered to me by some of the most intelligent members of the Press Gallery was that Trudeau was either gay or bisexual or both. According to gallery gossip, Trudeau was madly in love with a senior Ottawa bureaucrat. Several gallery members swore they had seen him and his “friend” strolling hand in hand down Ottawa’s corridors of power. Bizarrely, Trudeau’s alleged love companion was anything but handsome and possessed the charisma of a spent firecracker. Nevertheless, his wife and children loved him, as did the hundreds of civil servants who served under him.
None of this deterred the rumour mongers. Nor were they discouraged by the array of beautiful women Trudeau squired around town. One of his all-time favourites would go to 24 Sussex for alleged intimacies while her boyfriend waited in the car outside to take her home,
Another Trudeau favourite was a neighbour of mine. Extraordinarily beautiful, she was the sex fantasy of all Ottawa, including those gallery members peddling the “Pierre is gay” line. One day, as I left the CBC parking lot, the attendant yelled: “Did you know Pierre got married today?” I forgot all this as I drove home. There the Trudeau beauty, her husband, and her children were our guests. After dinner, I remembered and blurted out the news. My neighbour broke down, locked herself in a closet, and wouldn’t come out for hours. This married woman, it seems, was weeping at the loss of the one real man in her life. All I could think of was, if the rumour mongers could see this scene, they’d have to wonder how an alleged gay like Trudeau could have such a hold over so many beautiful women.
Shortly after I left Ottawa and the Press Gallery, I returned to Toronto. There I decided to write a shrivelled opus on Trudeau and the press. It was called Dance of the Dialetic.
The Dance attracted a great deal of attention. In honour of my book, the Parliamentary Press Gallery decided to hold a party and invited the prime minister and all the party leaders. I felt fine until I saw that Trudeau had shown up and I realized there would be speeches. Public speaking is my number one phobia. I went white with terror. A good friend dragged me off to a private cubicle and poured a bottle of gin down my throat.
I now felt fine, but I couldn’t walk well. I staggered to the podium. Trudeau stuck out his hand in congratulations. I, right out of my skull, retorted: “You look familiar! Who the fuck are you, anyway?” Trudeau slapped his chest in total surprise and said, “Why, I’m Pierre Elliott Trudeau!” Everybody laughed, thinking Trudeau and I were part of a vaudeville act. Incredibly, the event went on, with Trudeau making regular checkups to see if I was okay.
These days Trudeau and I have a lot of fun talking on the phone, having lunches, writing bizarre letters to each other, dissecting idiots, displaying our prejudices, and getting our dossiers ready. Occasionally I read him satiric material I have written. There is nothing like the sound of convulsive laughter coming from Trudeau at the other end of the phone.
It’s hard to be objective and analytic when writing about a friend. It’s easier when you’re younger and your friends are younger—and can take it in stride. Suffice it to say, in all objectivity and honesty, that Trudeau was once a bit of a prig, a callow and insensitive person, a too-decisive person, a person who may have gone too far with the War Measures Act. Trudeau, of course, denies any such criticism. As Trudeau’s friend, so do I.
As a friend, Pierre, let me say I miss you at the helm. I want an end to government by Sales Team Canada. I want an end to “I’m sorry” leadership and government by apology. I want an end to deficit reduction as the official weight-loss mantra of the fat cat Chrétien-Martin government.
Here is my idea, Pierre. You come back as prime minister, but this time you will not have to stand alone as the second-guessed Seven Days hot seater, the northern magus, the philosopher king. This time the Canadian people will give you three fresh cabinet ministers you can always count on: Justin, Michel, and Sacha. Trudeau’s Gang of Four or the Four Wise Trudeau Men has a nice media ring to it. Add Sheila Copps to this mix for gender balance, Pierre, and you can govern safely at least until the millennium.
Now that’s an offer only a cranky, cantankerous old man with too much time and too many beautiful women on his hands could possibly refuse.