It casts a colourful glow on a grey sidewalk on the edge of Chinatown, a bright beacon in the night. It’s one of the most iconic signs in Toronto: a neon palm tree topped by a crescent moon. Along the trunk shine the words that have been keeping watch over this stretch of Spadina Avenue since the 1940s: El Mocambo. The club has been a staple of the city’s nightlife for decades — with a history that stretches back even further than that. The building first opened as a music venue in the 1850s and is said to have given shelter to some of those who escaped slavery along the Underground Railroad. It was reborn as the El Mocambo in the wake of the Second World War, when bars and taverns were allowed to serve hard liquor for the first time since Prohibition. It became one of the city’s first cocktail bars, classy enough to birth stories of Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly stopping by for a drink. When the city lifted a ban on live music at cocktail bars — though singing along was still strictly forbidden — the “El Mo” took advantage. Over the next couple of decades, it played host to a German dance club, a strip tease act, and blues legends like Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy. By the late 1970s, it had earned a reputation for supporting Toronto’s up-and-coming young rock groups.
The band playing the El Mocambo on a rainy March night in 1977 seemed to be just another one of those local acts. No one had ever heard of The Cockroaches. But the name was a ruse, a cover story to hide the fact that that night the El Mo was playing host to one of the biggest rock bands in the world.
The Rolling Stones were having a very rough week. They had come to Toronto to record a live album, but things had been thrown into chaos from the moment they arrived. The band’s guitarist, Keith Richards, had brought his son and his common-law wife along with him — as well as her twenty-eight pieces of luggage. Inside those bags, customs officials found ten grams of hashish and a spoon coated with traces of heroin. Her arrest was shortly followed by Richards’s. When the RCMP showed up at the Harbour Castle hotel on the waterfront, where the band was staying, they found about four thousand dollars’ worth of heroin in the guitarist’s bathroom. Plus, some cocaine. “The Mounties always get their man,” Rolling Stone magazine wrote, “and they damn sure have him.”
Richards would eventually be let off with a light sentence: a promise to play a charity show. But at the time, of course, no one knew that was going to happen. Richards was facing a potential life sentence. For a while, it seemed as if The Rolling Stones might be done for good.
But that damp night in Chinatown, a limousine pulled up outside the El Mocambo. Out stepped the band’s legendary front man: Mick Jagger. For now, at least, the Stones were carrying on, going ahead with their plan to play a pair of secret shows at the El Mo, their first club gigs in fourteen years, to be recorded for their Love You Live album. Even as the rumours swirled and the drug scandal made headlines around the world, The Rolling Stones were going to keep the party going.
And there, stepping out of the limousine right behind Mick Jagger, came the wife of the prime minister of Canada.
It was during a Christmas in Tahiti that Margaret Sinclair first met the man she was going to marry. She was there on holiday with her family, enjoying the green palm trees, white sands, and a bronzed Frenchman named Yves — the grandson of one of the founders of Club Med. But one day, as she relaxed on a raft, gently bobbing in the bay, another man swam over to join her for a while. He was much older than she was: she was nineteen; he was forty-eight. But she did like the look of his legs. There under the bright Tahitian sun, they talked about Plato, the history of the Roman Empire, and whether existence was just an illusion. He was a politician; she was the daughter of a former cabinet minister. They got along well enough that they spent some more time together, snorkelling through the waters of the South Pacific, before returning to their regular lives back home in Canada. She didn’t think much of it: he was much too old and much too square for an aspiring hippie like her. But for his part, he was immediately smitten. At breakfast one day, while she ate at the far end of the table, he confided to his friends. “If I ever marry,” he told them, “she’s the one.”
It would be a while before they met again. He’d been in Tahiti pondering one of the biggest decisions of his life: whether to run for the leadership of the federal Liberal Party. In just a few months, he’d be the prime minister of Canada. He was pretty busy. And so, a couple of years passed before Pierre Trudeau finally asked Margaret Sinclair out on a date.
By then, Trudeau had already begun to make his mark on Canada as one of the boldest and most controversial leaders the country has ever known. During his very first year as prime minister, he’d started to change the country’s legal approach to love. In 1969 his government decriminalized birth control, legalized some abortions, and decriminalized homosexual acts between men — as long as they were both twenty-one years old and behind closed doors. “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” Trudeau famously declared, echoing an editorial in the Globe and Mail. “What’s done in private between adults doesn’t concern the Criminal Code.” It was far from a complete legal acceptance of gay rights. But it was a major step forward in a country where men had once been threatened with death if they fell in love with another man. As Trudeau put it, “It has knocked down a lot of totems and overridden a lot of taboos.… It’s bringing the laws of the land up to contemporary society.”
Canada was changing, and Trudeau was leading that change. While some Canadians reviled him, he was a hero to many. Since Margaret Sinclair had last seen him, Trudeaumania had swept the county. The young, bachelor prime minister had the aura of a rock star. Sinclair might not have been completely sold on the idea of dating a man nearly three decades her senior, but it was hard to turn him down.
Pierre and Maggie had their first date in Vancouver, dining at a restaurant high atop Grouse Mountain as they talked about student revolutions and the time she’d spent living in Morocco. By the end of the night, she’d fallen hard. When he casually suggested she might be interested in a government job, she dropped everything and headed for Ottawa. They began dating on and off at first; Pierre kept seeing a few other people, including Barbra Streisand; there were even rumours he’d proposed to the movie star. But he and Margaret were becoming closer and closer: having dinner together at 24 Sussex, hiking and skiing at the prime minister’s retreat on Harrington Lake, and spending time at his cabin in the Laurentians. They got engaged under the palm trees of the Bahamas, during a vacation spent diving through the blue waters and living in a ramshackle hut on the beach.
The prime minister almost missed their wedding. He had to talk a ground crew into letting him fly through one of the worst blizzards Ottawa had seen in years. But he finally arrived at the little church in North Vancouver — only half an hour late. They were married as the setting sun streamed in through the windows, surrounded by yellow candles and garlands of spring flowers.
It was a small, private event, with only about a dozen guests. They didn’t tell the press. But when news broke, they were suddenly the most popular husband and wife in Canada. “We were the golden couple … and everyone seemed to love us,” Margaret Trudeau would later remember. To the public, their marriage had all the allure of a fairy-tale romance, a glamorous love affair that resonated with Canadians who could feel their country finally coming into its own. And that impression only got stronger when each of their first two children were born on Christmas Day. Baby Justin was destined to become prime minister himself when he grew up. One newspaper called them “The World’s Most Glamorous First Family.”
But, like so many fairy tales, this one wouldn’t have a happy ending.
The first public sign of trouble came on the night of their sixth anniversary. Instead of celebrating together, the prime minister and his wife were hundreds of kilometres apart. Pierre was in Ottawa. And Maggie? Well, she was in Toronto, climbing out of Mick Jagger’s limousine outside the El Mocambo. Instead of spending her wedding anniversary having a romantic dinner with her husband, she would spend the entire night in a grimy club in Chinatown partying with a rock band whose guitarist was facing a possible life sentence for heroin possession. And the next night, too. She’d stay up until five in the morning, talking, playing dice, and smoking drugs with the band in her hotel room.
Maggie Trudeau had always been a free spirit, uncomfortable with the traditional role she was expected to play as the prime minister’s wife. Over the course of the 1970s, controversy seemed to follow her wherever she went. She smoked pot, drank, had an affair with Ted Kennedy, passed out at the Louvre, wore a scandalously short dress to the White House, and did peyote and broke into song at a state dinner in Venezuela. The list went on and on. “Margaret Trudeau did it again,” was the lede on the front page of the Globe and Mail the day after the peyote state dinner. It was far from an isolated incident. One day, many years later, she would talk openly about the truth behind those scandalous stories: she’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She would eventually become an advocate for mental health. “I wince when I look back at this really stupid, shameful behaviour,” she would remember in her autobiography. “I was so lonely. I was so sad.”
The headlines from her nights with The Rolling Stones were especially brutal, made all the more shocking by Keith Richards’s arrest. “SEX ORGY IN PRIME MINISTER’S WIFE’S SUITE,” one newspaper cried. Rumours she’d slept with Mick Jagger were everywhere. (In fact, she spent the night with guitarist Ron Wood.) And there would be more headlines to come when she turned up a few days later, living with a princess in New York City, attending the ballet with Mikhail Baryshnikov. And then again when she was photographed dancing at the notorious disco Studio 54 on the night her husband lost the next election. Some even worried her behaviour was going to cost him his career, and — in an era of rising Quebec separatism — that it would lead not just to the breakup of her marriage, but to the breakup of Canada, as well.
But the truth was that their marriage had been on the rocks for years, and had long been coming to an end. “I see now with clarity,” she wrote many years later, “how opposites and contradictions can coexist in a human being, how a generous man can also be tight-fisted, how a husband can say adorable things one minute and hard things the next, how a sweet, sweet husband can turn on his wife.”
Pierre Trudeau could be kind and charming, but he could also be mean, distant, and cheap. She felt isolated and controlled, like she didn’t have a voice. “He literally wanted me barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.” He might have believed, intellectually, in gender equality, but, as she remembered it, “it was very hard for him to allow that freedom to me or to any women in his life.” For years, he kept her from going back to school or even volunteering for charity. And the age difference was a problem, too. “He thought that by bullying me he could turn me into the perfect wife — in the way that a father might bully a recalcitrant teenager. Unfortunately, Pierre was not my father; he was my husband.” And as prime minister, he was so busy that even their love life had to be tightly scheduled. “Reason over passion,” was his favourite phrase.
They’d fallen out of love in 1974. And while there were still some good times, things had pretty much fallen apart. “The day came when I started to hate Pierre,” she wrote later, “and I knew that if I didn’t leave, I would go insane.” The morning of their sixth wedding anniversary, just hours before Maggie turned up at the El Mocambo, the Trudeaus agreed to separate. That weekend, she wrote an entry in her diary: “March 6. Toronto. Done. I have left Pierre and the children in Ottawa and I am heading out into the world to seek my fortune. Either it will work or it won’t.”
By then, divorces were much easier to get than they had been in the days of Elizabeth Powell, or even Elizabeth Taylor — and that was thanks to Pierre Trudeau. His government had loosened the restrictions as part of the same big bill that changed the laws around birth control, abortion, and homosexuality. Adultery was no longer the only acceptable reason to end a marriage; now there were multiple grounds for divorce — you could even just both agree to end it after spending three years apart. For the first time since Toronto had been founded, couples weren’t forced to stay together long after they’d fallen out of love. In 1984 the Trudeaus would make use of the new law, officially ending their marriage. Canada’s fairy-tale couple got divorced.
And so, that night with The Rolling Stones wasn’t a shocking betrayal of her marriage vows; it was Margaret Trudeau’s first step into a new life. She was on her way to New York, where she would begin to build an existence apart from her famous husband, and pursue a new profession: photography. That night in Chinatown, when The Rolling Stones took the stage in front of the El Mo’s palm tree–covered backdrop, she had her camera in her hand. As the legendary rock group belted out some of their most beloved tunes — songs that had helped fuel the social revolution of the sixties, songs that helped usher in new attitudes toward love, songs that were the soundtrack of Margaret Sinclair’s youth — she took photographs, hesitant at first, but more and more confident as the night wore on. “It was,” she wrote, “an exhilarating start to my new career.” She’d met her husband under the palm trees of Tahiti. She’d promised to marry him under the palm trees of the Bahamas. And now, under the palm trees of the El Mocambo, she was promising herself a new, better, happier life.
“It was a good night, and it was my new world.”