WHEN WE FIRST met in 1980, Margaret Trudeau was stunningly beautiful, in her mid-twenties, too young to be the mother of three little children, and much too young to be the wife of Canada’s prime minister. Pierre Trudeau, despite all his dashing ways, was thirty years older and unable to share in her sense of fun, her lightness of being a former “flower child.” That thirty-year age difference was one of the factors in their publicly failing marriage, but only one. Her resistance to the coddled, formulaic existence expected of the wife of a prime minister, his highly intellectual approach to problem-solving, her desire to be free of constraints, her insensitivity to embarrassment, his natural superiority to those he regarded as intellectually less capable (most people) than he was, his frequent long absences, and his unrelenting work schedule all contributed to their breakup. Margaret’s first memoir, Beyond Reason (Grosset & Dunlap), did not help the situation. Her US promotion tour, with interviews on Phil Donahue and Merv Griffin’s talk show, her star treatment—appearing with actresses Liv Ullman and Hermione Gingold—and all the questions about her secret lover added to her notoriety.
But here she was in my office with chapters of a new book and there I was thinking it would be an easy sale. Even Alun Davies, who had been optimistic that I would settle for maybe one new book a month, had no doubt that Margaret Trudeau’s memoir would be a bestseller. She was front-page news wherever she went. Washington was scandalized when she wore a short dress to a White House state dinner; in Venezuela she sang an impromptu accolade to the country’s first lady; in Mexico she gave a passionate speech—uninvited—about women’s rights. People magazine ran a feature on her “Manhattan escapade,” which turned into a plea for freedom. She made the covers of Look, Time, People, and Maclean’s (“The Margaret Factor” and “Margaret and the Rolling Stones”).
She was angry at her situation and she felt let down; her sense of having been wronged was reason enough for a second book. Hadn’t she been a big part of Pierre’s first election campaign? She felt she had “humanized” him. She had made him seem less of the cool intellectual and more like the charming father of cute children, the romantic husband of a beautiful wife. But by the 1979 election, she was no longer at his side.
The manuscript itself was not nearly as salacious as the public expected, but it did mention Margaret cavorting with the Rolling Stones, her appearances at New York’s Studio 54, her wild “freedom trips” to jet-set parties in New York and London, and her usually swift returns because she desperately missed her children.
Consequences also revealed her affairs and her addiction to drugs and to the limelight. She was drawn to Hollywood, thrilled with meeting the stars, with giving in to Jack Nicholson’s irresistible “sneering charm.” She dined with Ryan O’Neal in a Polynesian restaurant in Beverly Hills and thought she had fallen in love, only to become disillusioned with O’Neal’s inexhaustible self-regard. She accepted an invitation from a Peruvian race-car driver to visit South America while Pierre was in the thick of an election campaign. Her every move brought out the paparazzi. She had come to share the view, widely held by the media, that her presence would only detract from Pierre’s chances of reelection.
In a moving passage, Margaret wrote about wanting to destroy Joyce Wieland’s colourful quilt Reason Over Passion, hanging on a wall in the prime minister’s residence. Its message was a reflection of one of Pierre’s sayings, one that had become absolutely hateful to her.
Later we talked about the coincidence of our both having Christmas babies—Justin and Sacha Trudeau were both born on December 25, and both my stepdaughter Jessica and Catherine were born on December 26I—and about her ambition to become a photographer. I thought she was talented, troubled, insecure, and undisciplined, too anxious to stay still, always wanting to be on the move. I liked her courage and her honesty, her refusal to take either herself or her position as wife of the prime minister seriously. Sometimes she left one of her little boys at our house for a few hours while she visited friends in Toronto. He was a charming child with a minor problem around toilet training but he was not a bawler and we got along fine.
After Joe Clark’s short-lived occupation of 24 Sussex Drive as prime minister, Pierre handily won the 1980 election and Margaret returned to Ottawa. She took pains to acknowledge Pierre’s affectionate bond with their three boys, their shared values of honesty and loyalty, and the way all three boys adapted to the separation.
At the end of Consequences, Margaret also became more thoughtful. She wrote of her regrets for having “robbed Pierre of his dignity at various stages of our life together,” and she acknowledged her own failings, her need for an audience, her romantic delusions, and her “outbursts of despair.” She relished the time she spent with the children, then nine, seven, and five, the “warm cocoon of happiness” she helped build for them.
I had no idea then that she would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but in hindsight, all the symptoms were there, I just hadn’t recognized them. Once when I visited her in the Ottawa house she shared with her second husband, Fried Kemper, the other Margaret greeted me at the door. She was depressed, almost immobilized, seemingly trapped in a vortex of what she called her “tunnel of darkness.” It was not until 1998, when her son Michel was killed in an avalanche in BC, that Margaret was finally diagnosed and could get the help she needed. In her third memoir, Changing My Mind, she wrote about facing her demons. It had been, she said when we met in Saanich, BC, during the summer of 2010, an excruciatingly painful book to write but one that had helped her and was going to help others with mental illness.
If the tearfully applauding audience at the Sunshine Coast Festival was any indication, her message has been welcomed, as has her presence at the side of her eldest son, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
I. We usually celebrate their birthdays together and they both hate having birthdays so close to Christmas.