Changing My Mind Page 5

  Looking back on it, I realize that Pierre didn’t want me in any way involved; this was his work, and not something that we debated together. But we did discuss the finer points. I suppose I was one of those “bleeding hearts” he so famously dismissed. I felt a certain injustice that people were being deprived of their rights. But perhaps that’s precisely what we needed in our history of becoming the kind of strong nation that we are now.

  The War Measures Act was harsh. I understand the outrage over the interrogation and temporary incarceration of so many people. On the other hand, people were being murdered and there was a huge chance that an insurrection would follow, with more exploding mailboxes and more murders. This was the beginning of terrorism, of “us against them” in our own province, our own country, and he had to put a stop to it.

  There wasn’t an us and them; there was just an us. History has proven Pierre right. The violence ceased in the wake of invoking the Act; such violence didn’t cease in Ireland, and it hasn’t ceased in many other parts of the world. I think Pierre acted with the kind of courage that set him apart as a leader. Some in Quebec thought this was the worst injustice and they still think of him as a traitor. What are they talking about?

  Pierre fought hard and, if cornered, could be severe. But he fought hard for what he believed in, and I respect that. How ironic that some would remember him for taking away rights. This is the man who incorporated a charter of rights and freedoms into the Constitution, giving Canadians rights and freedoms unparalleled in the world. We should embrace and understand these freedoms and be proud of them. Aside from his wonderful children, I think this is Pierre’s greatest legacy. It’s what he set out to do as a fledgling justice minister, and he succeeded in a grand way.

  In time, five known members of the FLQ cell responsible were found, arrested and deported to Cuba; three other members were also later arrested in Quebec. And while I believed Pierre when he told me that without these tough measures, Canada would fall prey to continued separatist violence, these events had a real and harmful effect on our relationship.

  Within hours, the security around Pierre intensified mightily. When we next went up to Harrington Lake, we found army trucks and soldiers where previously there had been grassy slopes and clear views. On Thanksgiving weekend, I could see through the mists a neat army tent. On Thanksgiving Day, despite warnings by the police, we took a rickety old boat out onto the lake on our own, then climbed to the top of the hill where beavers had dammed the ponds.

  Walking silently through the trees on that rainy day, we heard the crashing sounds of what we took to be a large animal approaching. But out of the bush came a dark, heavily bearded man, and for a second we feared that the security officers had been right in making such a fuss. As he ran past, all he said was, “Do something about nuclear proliferation.” After getting lost on the way down, Pierre and I emerged somewhat shamefaced at the water’s edge to find a very agitated RCMP officer in a boat holding an umbrella in one hand and a rifle in the other. His gunshots had guided us home. We would never be really private again.

  I was, in fact, increasingly unhappy with my life in Ottawa. My work was boring; I had few friends. But for Pierre, I would have caught the next plane home. When I was with him, my gloom miraculously lifted and I simply forgot how lonely I was the rest of the time. As we became more and more content in each other’s company, I lived only for the times I could be with him.

  But even in our early courtship, I’d felt the chill of isolation. I thought of the day when Pierre asked me to a costume ball at the National Library—our first proper public outing. We had agreed that I would be bored by the formal receptions and diplomatic dinners, but this was to be a more lively occasion. He told me that he would be wearing black tie but pressed me to wear any fancy dress that I wished. I chose to go as Juliet, in a red velvet hippie dress with full sleeves that fell to the ground and my hair pinned up under a net of pearls.

  From the instant I stepped out of the car, the evening was a disaster. Not only were we stared at, photographed and cut off from one another, but every group we joined instantly fell silent. Jokes were stopped in mid-sentence; laughter froze in the air. When we danced, people watched. As soon as we got back into the car, I burst into tears. “Why did they treat us that way?” I asked him. “Why can’t we be normal?”

  Pierre was sympathetic but firm. We had to try again.

  This time he took me to dinner at the home of very old friends. I made particular efforts to look my best. The first question I was asked, on walking through the door, was whether I spoke French. Pierre answered for me: of course I spoke French. And so, though all present spoke perfect English, the entire evening’s conversation was conducted in French, which I neither spoke nor understood. I had studied French for two years at university and maybe I thought I could manage; I could not. I plastered a grin on my face and pretended to follow. No one actually addressed me. They were interested in themselves and in the prime minister. At 10:30 p.m., Pierre announced that he had to go home to work. I fled with him, once again in tears, wailing that I had never felt so insulted and betrayed. We resolved to try no more social occasions.

  I was, however, getting to know his family. On weekends, we would sometimes go down to Montreal, where his mother lived in the original family house not far from his sister, Suzette, and his brother, Tip, who was an architect, and Tip’s wife, Andrée. We would spend parts of the holidays with them and I was growing very close to Suzette. Pierre’s mother was always immaculately turned out and extremely elegant, but dementia was already clouding her mind.

  Pierre and I separated then came together again, as the on-again, off-again romance tried for surer ground. I took up briefly with a divinity student and even imagined that I might marry him. Meanwhile, I continued to correspond with Yves Lewis and was still immensely drawn to him. I urged Pierre to take other women out on dates, but I was furious and jealous when he did so. My mother was full of dire warnings: don’t be the mistress of a politician twice your age, she kept saying. Pierre is never going to marry you.

  After Easter in 1970, I quit my job and decided to go home and live with my parents. I no longer wanted to be Pierre’s secret mistress; I wanted to live with him and have his children. For a while Pierre vacillated, but we were both too unhappy without each other, and in the summer of 1970, Pierre finally proposed.

  Before committing himself, he told me, he needed to know every single detail of my past life, for fear of later blackmail. At the time, the end of August, we were on a wonderful holiday in the Bahamas, staying at the Small Hope Bay Lodge on the island of Andros, and we walked up and down the beach while I recited the litany of boyfriends, marijuana and past indiscretions.

  One of those old boyfriends, Yves Lewis, had sent a letter to me, care of my parents—the only address he had for me. Only later would I learn that my mother burned the letter.

  Pierre was drawn to my Scottish bloodlines (ones he shared and understood), and he liked my independence and sense of comfort in nature and in the garden. He liked my homespun skills, how I could cook and sew. My being Anglican was an issue for this devout Catholic, but conversion would solve that. He was looking for a wife and children, and I longed for children. As for my other shortcomings (my lack of French, for example), that too was easily addressed. Pierre thought he could educate me, shape me.

  Once he made up his mind, Pierre became the most loving and attentive of suitors. He told me that he had prayed for a long time that he would find someone he loved and have children of his own. He knew what he wanted, but he knew, too, that he had to be convinced our marriage would work. His motto was “Reason before passion.”

  Now, looking around at his friends, he knew that the moment had come to have children. Because he was passionately opposed to all kinds of drugs and pills, he had persuaded me to give up the birth control pill some months before. As for me, I didn’t care where, how or when we would marry; I just knew that I wanted to be with him.
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  We agreed that I would return to Vancouver and work hard to equip myself to become the wife of the prime minister of Canada. I was to study French, I was to take catechism classes and convert to the Catholic faith, and I set out to become an expert skier—in an attempt to keep pace with Pierre’s athleticism. I fulfilled all my promises to Pierre. I proved that I could be faithful through the months of waiting; I gave up marijuana (though, as you will see, that vice would return); I learned to ski well and converted to Catholicism, taking instruction from Father John Schwinkles at St. Stephen’s Church in North Vancouver.

  In one of his lessons, the priest described the different ways to get to heaven. Catholicism, he assured me, was the jet plane. I was perturbed to be told that my parents’ Protestantism constituted a very slow boat. As for learning French, I had done less well—despite ninety-minute lessons every day with a private tutor.

  I had also given considerable thought to my appearance as the future wife of the prime minister and acquired a trousseau of ladylike clothes. I had been informed that, soon after our wedding, we were to pay an official visit to Russia. One of the dresses I had made was based on a magnificent sari given to my mother by Jawaharlal Nehru, then the Indian prime minister, when she visited India in 1954.

  And I made my wedding dress myself, with a bit of help from my mother and following a round of evening classes with the best haute couture sewing teacher in Vancouver. The dress was a simple, hooded gown made of light ivory Finnish wool and silk, with angel sleeves. I decided to wear no formal headdress but to scatter a few daisies in my hair and to carry a posy of white daisies. I even baked the wedding cake myself, again with the help of my mother. My sister Lin was my maid of honour. For jewellery I had a large silver medallion on a chain, given to me by my parents and made by the same West Vancouver jeweller who made our wedding rings.

  The rest of my trousseau came from a designer who had a small shop in West Vancouver. At first he seemed the answer to my prayers—painstaking, friendly and always happy to have another fitting, another minute alteration. Between us, we decided to make the colour scheme of the trousseau centre on three colours: deep royal blue, rust and creamy white. There was, for example, a mid-calf dress in wool crepe, studded with pearls, to be worn with an off-white wool coat with a detachable scarf. I was delighted with all these things, and it was only later that I discovered that this designer was not quite as he seemed.

  The moment the marriage was announced, he held a press conference, during which he displayed to journalists the sketches of all my clothes, gave them my measurements and told them personal stories about me, gossipy tidbits about how I came to him like a ragamuffin in jeans and sneakers and how he had guessed the truth at once. This incident should have warned me about what was to come. I had no idea as the PM’s wife—the PM’s twenty-something wife—what cannon fodder I would become.

  What especially upset me, and this may seem small, was the way the designer smugly took all credit for the designs.

  My plan was for the evening wedding to be as unfussy as possible. My father had booked a private room at the Capilano Golf Club, ostensibly for the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of his arrival in Canada, and I had ordered oyster soup, smoked salmon with sour cream and caviar, filet de boeuf with Béarnaise sauce, and champagne. There were to be yellow candles set in silver candelabra and, despite the snow, three different arrangements of spring flowers.

  We had kept our engagement secret, so I told no one beyond a few members of my immediate family—we did not want the wedding to be mobbed by reporters. To get the marriage licence without alerting anyone, my father drove up to the small town of Squamish, where he found a friendly Mountie who swore to say nothing. Not even Pierre’s immediate aides knew the reason for his insistence that the runway at Ottawa be cleared despite the heavy snow and bad forecast.

  He had told his aides only that he desperately needed a break and wanted to go out west to ski. Even on the plane to Vancouver, where he began to change into a morning suit, he told his executive assistant, Gordon Gibson, that he had to go to a funeral first. Something of Pierre’s sheer determination came across in his absolute refusal to be deflected from making the flight, even in the face of strong warnings from the airport officials. So bad was the blizzard that struck both Ottawa and Montreal—the worst storm in many years—that Pierre’s sister, Suzette, and his brother-in-law, Pierre Rouleau, spent five hours trying to cross Montreal and never made it to the wedding. His brother, Tip, and Tip’s wife, Andrée, did make it to Ottawa but only after a nightmarish eight-hour drive from their home in the Laurentians. As for Gordon, when he reached the church, he was surprised to see my father standing outside.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. “I’m the father of the bride,” my father replied. Gordon was too astonished to speak.

  I married Pierre Elliott Trudeau at 5:30 p.m. on March 4, 1971, before thirteen witnesses. Afterwards we had dinner at the golf club in a private dining room. I had spent months preparing for the day. I was very much in love. The country was already feeling a little cooler, sexier and more hip with Pierre at the helm, and now—with his youthful bride at his side—that feeling rose another notch or two. I was a catch for him, as he was for me. As a couple, we were a breath of fresh air.

  There was only one thing wrong. Pierre was fifty-one and the prime minister of Canada. I was twenty-two, heedless, not long out of university, a child of the ‘60s, immersed in the hippie, drug-taking, freedom-seeking culture of the day.

  John Diefenbaker, then leader of the Opposition in Parliament, had a good line about the new bride and groom and the age gap between them. I appreciated his humour then and I still do now.

  “You can either marry her,” he advised Pierre in a rhetorical comment to the press, “or adopt her.”

  I should, of course, have been warned. Our differences were plain to see; that I chose not to see them said much about my fantasies, my desire to please and my denial of reality. I was not just a product of the ‘60s; I was, by nature, volatile, oversensitive, quick to take offence, prey to bursts of exuberance and energy soon followed by deep troughs of melancholy.

  I was still a very young woman, unsure of who I was and what I wanted to do with my life. I was a romantic with a BA in English; I was scattered and confused, with one trip abroad under my belt and still so, so young. I was a Canadian girl, simple, unsophisticated, nothing special. And maybe that’s what Pierre wanted all along, but the expectations of me were huge.

  Pierre, on the other hand, was decades older than me, devout, cerebral, rational and clear headed, with a résumé that included schooling from Harvard, the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics and time spent teaching constitutional law at the Université de Montréal. In his backpack travels, he had been to five continents and twenty countries. When I asked him whether he dreamed in English or French, he replied—like a professor patiently explaining a tricky concept to a child—that he dealt only in the abstract.

  He was oil, I was water, and we had decided to mix.

  What I remember now is that our relationship, until that moment, had been so much fun, so secret, so intense. Now it was about to become public, lonely and extremely scary. After dinner, we were driven up to my parents’ ski chalet at Whistler. We were woken next morning at 6:30 a.m. by the telephone. The queen was calling to congratulate Pierre; she had got the time difference wrong. Later came a telegram from the president of the United States, Richard Nixon. Scary, but also the stuff of fairy tales.

  My mother had serious misgivings about the marriage, chiefly because of the difference in our ages, though she also worried about how I might fit into Ottawa, with all its constraints. For her part, she had hated living in Ottawa as a politician’s wife.

  But her nature was to keep her feelings in check and never let them show. My father, the proud, good Liberal, was overjoyed that one of his daughters had married a Liberal prime minister, and he saw how happy I was. (And, of course, when
I later left Pierre, my father was crushed and angry and my mother was relieved.)

  Since he was very gregarious by nature and found keeping secrets hard, my father had singled out his most discreet friend, who had once worked for the intelligence services, taken him off to a remote beach and spent the evening telling him the news. My sister Jan, on the other hand, had very little discretion. When, just before the wedding, she saw me dressing up in a long white wedding dress, she looked amazed.

  “What kind of stupid dress is that?” she asked me.

  “My wedding dress,” I replied. We had to stop her from rushing straight to the phone, but just the same, when she went off to collect the wedding cake, she stopped at a pay phone and told a reporter friend—who turned up with a photographer at the church. I couldn’t really be cross and was later very grateful for the beautiful photographs he took.

  The signs of the rifts and the sadnesses to come were all there, on that snowy day in North Vancouver with the crocuses and daffodils just visible. Plain for anyone to see were the oppressive police presence, the end to my independence, the public scrutiny, Pierre’s ferocious willpower, the huge gaps in age and character and personality between us.

  As March 4, 1971, came and went, all I could think of was the happiness of my life to come. I was so young, so naïve.

  CHAPTER 3

  HORMONES TO THE RESCUE

  “Over my dead body!”

  MY RESPONSE TO THE NOTION OF REPLACING THE ORIGINAL WOODEN CLAPBOARD ON THE HOUSE AT HARRINGTON LAKE WITH ALUMINUM SIDING, 1972

  For a while, we were very happy. We had planned to be away, up in the mountains in my parents’ chalet at Whistler, before Gordon Gibson made the press announcement. But by the time we set out from the club, first reports were already circulating. When we reached my parents’ house—where a few friends had gathered for the immigration-to-Canada “anniversary” celebration—the circus had begun.