THE QUALITY THAT allows most federal politicians to survive their grimy trade is a profound sense of detachment. Issues and principles dissolve into cynical responses to the call of each passing hour; private lives are relegated to an incidental distraction. Eventually, their souls leak out of them, mixing with the comatose decor of the House of Commons’ neutral walls.
Judy was different.
Julia Verlyn LaMarsh had that rare and terrible gift of natural rudeness. Loyal to her friends, merciless to her enemies, generous with herself, above all she was gloriously gutsy, governed by the unvarnished dictates of her feelings. She never tried to hide anything, least of all her emotions, existing within the tumult of her own making, as vulnerable as an open wound. She elevated honesty to a profound moral option. While some of her fellow female politicians insisted that their formal photographs be taken through so many layers of cheesecloth they were made to appear like mummies behind mosquito netting, Judy just stuck out her chins and told them to click away. When she landed at Eskimo Point in the Northwest Territories during the Centennial celebrations, she introduced herself to a group of Inuit by patting her ample hips and exclaiming, “See, I brought my own supply of blubber!” After her helicopter landed on Steele Glacier in the Yukon, she just stood there and yodelled.
She lost her temper easily, once threw an ashtray at Senator Keith Davey (even though he was one of her most ardent supporters) and resigned from the Pearson cabinet (for two days at a time) on at least a dozen occasions. Her legislative achievements were considerable, but her behaviour in office often shocked the fastidious and discomfited the established. “She was very democratic,” recalled George Loranger, one of her former aides. “She treated the office boy and her deputy minister exactly alike—she constantly gave them hell.”
The novels she wrote were her final passion, but she just couldn’t get the sex scenes right. “When you’re engaged in a sexual act,” she would explain, “no one’s there getting a bird’s eye view. When I was trying to describe it, I kept giggling.” It was typical that when she was awarded the Order of Canada on her deathbed, as a farewell gesture by a nation that had rewarded her contributions with remarkable stinginess, Judy’s main reaction was to bitch about some of the people she thought were fools who had been similarly decorated.
She died with the raw courage and primitive dignity that exemplified her life, deciding late on the afternoon of Friday, October 24, 1980, “Okay, no more medication. That’s it.”
The reason Judy’s death touched so many Canadians is that so few celebrities manage to preserve their real selves inside their public masks. Judy LaMarsh endowed each of her many careers with energy, intellect and commitment. To the end, she never for a minute gave up her essential, gutsy humanity.
— 1980