Changing My Mind Read online

  By the end of the trip, I had reached a point of acute exhaustion, and something was giving in me. As we were walking down the stairs on our way to the final press conference, with the staff lining up on either side, Ivan Head informed me that I would not be attending it. I had always loved the press conferences at the end of official trips: here was a chance to learn how the trip had gone and what people felt about it. I was outraged. I turned round and began running up the stairs again, shouting “Fuck you!” at the top of my voice. This was a terrible and embarrassing thing to do, and I look back on it with shame. Pierre came after me and said that I could accompany him, but that since the press conference excluded spouses, I would have to sit in a little glass booth on my own.

  Towards the middle of February 1977, we made an official visit to Washington. As I sat listening to Pierre address a joint session of Congress, I felt torn between an intense need for him and a longing for Teddy Kennedy. I then attended a State Department lunch hosted by Grace Vance (the wife of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance), and later visited a mental health centre with Rosalynn Carter. That night, at a dinner given at the Canadian embassy, Elizabeth Taylor leaned across the table and said to me, “You look absolutely bored out of your mind. I know precisely how you feel.”

  Hers was a kind and sympathetic gesture, but I was appalled that I had made my ennui so transparent. I was jolted back into the present and I felt deeply ashamed at this lapse in manners. But the shame I felt was fleeting. Afterwards I arranged a discreet meeting with Teddy. We met in his office and sat drinking cold white wine. I told him that he had not destroyed my marriage but that I had used him to help me destroy a marriage that was already over. I added that to change one’s life completely is not an impossible challenge—but a necessity. Still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to make the break.

  In the meantime, I had a target on my back. I had worn a short dress to the official dinner that night, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, my stockings had a run in them. The White House that night was full of celebrities—from Harry Belafonte to John Kenneth Galbraith—but my dress and torn nylons seemed of greatest interest to the press.

  Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were quick to support me. Pierre and I had barely set foot home when we received a handwritten letter from the president, addressed to us both.

  “Rosalynn and I really enjoyed your visit with us, and we look forward to seeing you often in the future. Pierre, your experience and naturally frank discussion were very helpful to me as a new president … Margaret, you brought a delightful breath of fresh air and charm to Washington. Thank you. Your friend Jimmy.” I felt just a little bit better.

  In 1977, I heard that Jiddu Krishnamurti, then eighty-two years old, was to hold a conference in California, near Santa Barbara. I had long been interested in the teachings of this Indian-born writer, speaker and spiritual philosopher, and now that I was so surrounded by formality and protocol, by a way of life that seemed to me so artificial and pretentious, I began to yearn for the simplicity that his words conjured.

  I thought of him as a non-guru guru, a wise man without pretensions, and I kept remembering Leonard Cohen’s words: “The wise man said, ‘follow me,’ and he walked behind.” Calling myself by my maiden name—Margaret Sinclair—I arranged to go to California to meet Krishnamurti. He knew who I was because we had a mutual friend, a young man with whom I had once been very close, and soon after my arrival he called me over to talk to him. There had been no place set for me at the conference, and he indicated that I should sit by his side during the proceedings.

  In the evenings, Jiddu and I walked together in the orange groves and talked. His message seemed to be about freedom, about the need to express oneself and be true to oneself and not to be limited by the constraints of others. “Plumb the depths of your own consciousness,” he said. “The only thing that is real is creative love; everything else is a distraction.” I went home in a pensive mood. Jiddu Krishnamurti did not believe in organized religion or power of any kind, yet here I was, married to one of the Western world’s most powerful and controlling men. Something would have to give, and it did.

  Not long after getting home, on a terrible evening full of misery and rage, I attacked a priceless quilt by Joyce Wieland, a piece of art that hung on the sitting-room wall and one that Pierre particularly loved. Stitched on the front, neatly and smugly (it seemed to me then), were his favourite words: “Reason over Passion.” I seized a pair of scissors and cut the words off. Taking a box of pins, I then switched the words round, so they read “Passion over Reason.” I was in one of my manic phases, and I had concluded that the only way to make Pierre Trudeau listen was to desecrate art.

  Pierre’s rage was justified. Next morning, one of the maids dutifully repaired the damage, but the real damage—to my relationship with Pierre—was very much beyond repair.

  And then the day came when I started to hate Pierre, and now I knew that if I didn’t leave I would go insane. I knew, both for myself and for the three boys, that I could not survive in this state bordering on insanity. I could not stay with Pierre for the wrong reasons, and there did not seem to be many right ones. I blamed him—unfairly—for his discipline and asceticism and his lack of intimacy and spontaneity; I blamed him for growing old and for not having the time to look after me, and for the fact that while I was struggling to grow up, he was too busy to notice what was going on.

  I turned into a harridan, and a desperate one. The courage that it took me to leave was unquestionably fuelled by the mania that once again was pulsing through me. But deep down, leaving was also rooted in an instinctive desire to survive. I knew that I simply had to find the courage to walk out of 24 Sussex, leave behind the loneliness and isolation and discover who I was and what I could do. My hope, my ambition, was to find meaningful professional work.

  All of my sisters worked. Heather had become a widely respected professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia and she would be awarded a medal from the queen for her work with the British Columbia Ministry of Education helping to redefine the provincial school curriculum. Jan would have a long career working first as a dentist’s assistant, then as a ticketing agent with Air Canada and, more recently, in the airline’s union at the bargaining table. She always was, and remains, a champion of the underdog. Lin had been a very shy, insecure pupil who would retreat to her room and read Harlequin romances, but for grades eleven and twelve, my mother sent her off to boarding school—the elite Havergal College girls’ school in Toronto. She came back transformed, and never looked back. She specialized in nuclear medicine, training technicians in the use of new radiology equipment, and had chosen to live in Tucson, Arizona. And Betsy had become a dedicated nurse and hospital administrator. What about Margaret?

  In my mind, my calling card read: Margaret Trudeau, photographer.

  CHAPTER 7

  POOR MAD MRS. ROCHESTER,

  HIDDEN IN THE ATTIC

  “God, please please help me to know what to do with my life.”

  ENTRY FROM MY DIARY, JUNE 22, 1977

  I recently came across a red leather diary, one I started in the spring of 1977, in the month that I decided to leave Pierre. The diary covers the worst year of my life, my twenty-ninth, and certainly the most destructive. The red book makes for painful reading.

  On the first page is this short entry: “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.”

  Two days earlier, on March 4, our sixth wedding anniversary, Pierre and I had agreed on a trial separation. He had made it clear that he wanted me back, but he was going to “let me explore my new freedom,” as I noted in the diary, and would help me financially until I found my feet. I was to spend a few weeks at a time away, then return for a long weekend or more with the children, who would be in the care of two excellent nannies and Pierre himself. Justin was five, Sacha three and Michel not qui
te eighteen months. Looking back on it, I can see I didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew I had to go.

  I was feeling completely overwhelmed and overpowered, to the point where I was becoming invisible to myself and I thought I was going to disappear. There was just such an imbalance between my desire for freedom—which Pierre completely respected—and his desire for control, which was the way he lived.

  The boys didn’t want me to go, but they were mostly stoic about it. “Mommy has to work” is how Sacha put it. Justin, the eldest, had figured out that both his mother and father had jobs. His father, he understood, was “the boss of Canada.”

  The Toronto business was an accident, but it set the tone for what would be two years of mayhem and a prolonged attack on me by the world’s press. I had planned to go straight to New York and to start work with Richard Avedon, a high-profile fashion and portrait photographer who had said he would take me on as an apprentice for a week. But then a friend named Penny Royce invited me to spend a few days with her to meet the Rolling Stones, who were in Toronto to play in a small nightclub, the El Mocambo.

  The tavern’s distinctive neon-green palm tree has graced Spadina Avenue since 1946, and the bar has drawn over the years a wide variety of rock and jazz stars—from Jimi Hendrix to Charles Mingus. The Rolling Stones recorded two live concerts at the El Mocambo on March 4 and 5 of 1977, both folded into their Love You Live album.

  I took photographs as the band played. At first I felt rather shy, like an aging groupie hanging around the edges, but as I began to work, my spirits rose. Watching Mick Jagger, I liked him, thinking how intelligent and professional he was. Later I met them all individually, and since night and day readily mixed with them, I ended up spending much of the night in their company at the Hilton Harbour Castle Hotel. And all of it, in fact, with Ronnie Wood. Mania is an aphrodisiac, for oneself and for those you come in contact with. The night was fun, an exhilarating start to my new career, but it meant nothing, and in the morning my excitement had been replaced by a sensation of bleakness. I felt sad and lonely and wondered whether I shouldn’t just turn around and go home.

  What I had not reckoned on was the publicity. My lastminute decision to divert to Toronto had been catastrophic. In my mania, I had failed to understand that Paul Wasserman, the Rolling Stones’ publicity manager, would use me as good fodder for the press and that Canadian journalists were sitting waiting for scandals. I had used the Stones, and now the Stones were using me. There were already rumours that Pierre and I had split up; reporters were avid for more news.

  I left Toronto and made my way to New York, where I hooked up with an old friend, Yasmin Aga Khan, then twenty-eight. The daughter of actress Rita Hayworth and Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United Nations General Assembly, she’s now a prominent philanthropist. In those days, she was a friend, and I had need of one. I loved Yas’s free spirit and deep elegance, and how she laughed often and sang like a songbird. I had barely settled in with her when the story broke. “Prime Minister’s Wife and the Rolling Stones” and “Sex Orgy in Prime Minister’s Wife’s Suite.”

  Such treatment was to be expected, perhaps, but still it was both hurtful and terrifying. The March 10 entry in my diary reads: “My life is beginning to spin very fast. I must use all my strength to control the crisis.” Bianca Jagger was reported to be furious, my mother was distraught (she told reporters, “If she has any problems, she knows she has a home and parents and sisters who love her”), and the Canadian press were baying for more. Asked whether he had slept with me, Mick Jagger was reported to have said, “I wouldn’t touch her with an eleven-foot barge pole.” A smart move on his part, but for me the humiliation was total.

  When I next returned to Ottawa I found Pierre furious and wretched. He felt a terrible sense of failure and he loathed the publicity. By now I was on the crest of a destructive wave of mania, and I was really acting appallingly. Pierre reached the breaking point. Whenever we argued, he always had to have the last word—and he certainly did that night.

  What angered him most, he kept saying, was that I was “bringing shame on the family name.” We were due to go to the ballet that night, and by the time we stopped arguing my face was blotchy with tears. I assumed that I would stay at home, and that he would go without me. But he was adamant: he wanted me there, by his side, for all the world to see. He wanted me shamed, and I was ashamed. So I went. The evening was sad and pathetic. After that there was no going back. I was a sick, confused and very angry young woman; staying at 24 Sussex was not an option. I returned to New York.

  When I went round to Richard Avedon’s studio to start my apprenticeship, I heard, through the intercom, what the reporters camped outside were saying: “Is there a bed in there? Is she sleeping with Avedon too?”

  My earlier indiscretions—the embarrassing song in Venezuela, the occasional outbursts in Canada—had been forgivable, but this was different. This transgression, an appalling misjudgment on my part, had transported me into a cold and hostile world where people were out for gossip. Overnight, whatever privacy that remained to me had gone. The entry in my diary that night was defiant: “No one should have to put up with the grossness and viciousness of people’s prejudices and narrow minds … It is over. I am no longer Canada’s First Lady … I have had enough of being sad and lonely, bored and aching.”

  The trouble was that I was no longer in control—either of myself or of the paparazzi. The reporters’ hunger for my ill-judged behaviour, brought on by these bouts of overexcitement, was insatiable. Wherever I went, whatever I did, provoked fresh stories. There were not many weeks when I did not appear in Time magazine’s People column, usually linked to some new man. I became a cover girl, a celebrity in an age before the celebrity culture, famous for nothing except for my scandalous behaviour. From People columns I moved into “notorious” columns. I was quoted as saying that my marriage had been a “total catastrophe in terms of my identity,” and that I didn’t think a politician’s wife should be “a rose on his lapel” (in hindsight, I was more thorn than rose). The fact that Keith Richards and his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, were facing heroin-trafficking charges and that my name had been linked to theirs became a “national embarrassment.” I could do no right.

  Wrong I did in spades. One day, when I had been invited to appear on The Phil Donahue Show, members of the audience began to shout out questions:

  “Margaret, is it true that you have abandoned your children?”

  “Who’s your lover?”

  “How do you justify doing all this to your family?”

  One of the horrors of the show was that the victim was placed on a chair in the middle of blinding lights. I struggled, tried to give coherent answers until I could stand it no longer, and then I swivelled my chair round, with my back to poor Phil and the audience. That provoked laughter, even jeers, but enough was enough.

  Another time, a respected Globe and Mail columnist wrote that everybody knew Pierre could not wait to get his children away from such a bad mother. I was branded irresponsible, promiscuous, a seeker after celebrity, even half mad. Because my mind seemed to be in free fall, I was easy prey.

  One evening, I agreed to do an interview with Jane Pauley for NBC’s Today Show. I knew and admired her work, and as we sat down she told me that she, too, was “Margaret Trudeau”: her given name was Margaret and she would soon marry Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau (who could, like Pierre, trace his ancestry back to Étienne Trudeau, who had come to New France as an engagé, or indentured servant, in the late seventeenth century).

  The interview with Jane Pauley started well. But soon the questions about Teddy Kennedy began. I dodged and ducked, but she kept on and on at me. Finally I could bear it no longer. I stood up and said, “I know exactly where you’re trying to go and I am not going there.” Then I walked off the set. Everyone was furious, but I was just beginning to get a glimmer of a lesson I would need to learn: you have to know when to exit.

  You ma
y wonder why I kept going back to journalists who laid siege to my character. I look back and see that it was all part of the career I was trying to build, but clearly I was new and ill prepared, and the madness kept propelling me back for more. With mania comes extraordinarily poor judgment. I thought I was acting properly but I was not. To the outside world, I must have seemed incredibly naïve, but at the time I really did feel that I could make people understand what I was trying to do. And the harder I tried, the deeper the hole I dug for myself.

  There is a dark postscript to that interview with Jane Pauley. In 2001, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and in 2005 wrote a book about the experience. In Skywriting, Pauley describes a manic moment that was all too familiar to me:

  Feelings came shooting in and out at the speed of bullet trains, along with ideas, followed by phone calls that produced action plans. My mind was racing. Mostly it was good, but I was aware that I was in hyper mode from the moment I woke up at six-thirty and started the day with a bang. When the phone rang at about eight o’clock one morning, it felt like half the day was already done, and I asked my mother-in-law if I could change phones because I was standing in the utility room with a hammer in my hand. Me wandering the house with a hammer in my hand had become almost a metaphor for my home life.

  I found British journalists, particularly, to be smarmy and clever and lethal. They practised gutter journalism of the worst and most abusive sort. I was no match for their seductive ways, falling again and again for their apparent sympathy only to find myself portrayed in their newspapers as wayward and publicity mad.