Changing My Mind Read online

  The driveway and entry to my parents’ house in North Vancouver were brilliantly lit up by television lights and crammed with reporters, stamping their feet in the snow and shouting out their congratulations. I was too happy to care. My siblings and my parents were suddenly thrust into the limelight and they found this every bit as overwhelming as I did.

  I changed into tweed culottes and a yellow pea jacket and we left for the mountains, pelted with rice, our eyes blinking in the yellow glare of the arc lights set out in a fan all around the drive. We were driven up to the cabin in the back of a police car, Pierre and I sitting in the back holding hands. Next day we skied, and I was overjoyed to discover that in the long months of diligently preparing for marriage, in one field at least I had aced the test. We set off from the top of the mountain and within seconds I was completely outskiing Pierre. He skied the old-fashioned way, using his shoulders to help make turns, whereas I had been taught to keep the upper body quiet, the skis tight together. But the two of us would have been completely mobbed on the slopes had the Mounties not kept people at a distance.

  Our wedding, it seemed, had made front-page news in newspapers all over the world. Time magazine devoted its cover story to us and described me as a “cross between Doris Day and the Flying Nun.” As for Pierre, the magazine remarked, somewhat snidely, that he was a man with a “sharp, almost snobbish sense of the fitness of things” and that he liked to let his own perception of himself show in his dress and “studied presence.” His long bachelorhood had apparently been “threatening to become tiresome.” I was about to change all that.

  We returned to Ottawa from our three-day honeymoon to a tumultuous welcome. We stepped through the glass doors of the airport into pandemonium: a mélange of reporters, friends, cabinet ministers and their wives, all deeply curious about Pierre’s new bride. I longed to tell them all how happy I was and what a success I intended to make of my new role.

  When we turned into the driveway at 24 Sussex, I observed that a fresh fall of snow had left the place looking peaceful and welcoming. We turned into the gates and the guards came to attention and saluted. Inside the house, a long line of friendly, smiling people—seven women and one man, Tom MacDonald, the steward of the household—were waiting to greet me. Verna, the maid, had arranged flowers in the form of messages all over the house. “Welcome home, Mrs. Trudeau” was spelled out on a banner, while roses and carnations decorated the winding staircase to the first floor.

  During those first months of marriage, we did what we had always done with what time we had away from Pierre’s political life: we skied, hiked, listened to music together. I often cooked us Japanese food, which we both loved. We had not had a proper honeymoon immediately after the wedding, so we made several trips during the spring and early summer of 1971—scuba diving in the Caribbean and sailing around Newfoundland on a naval icebreaker.

  I was able to set aside the fact that my French was getting no better, that the hours and hours of private lessons had achieved very little. This meant that at the French-speaking dinner parties and receptions we gave and attended, I often understood almost nothing of what was said, and simply sat smiling and nodding politely, hoping to make no gaffes. The French teacher we employed to come to 24 Sussex Drive gave up in despair.

  The halcyon days didn’t last very long. The warmth and sense of approval that had greeted my marriage to Pierre did not survive the long Canadian winter. I was used to living in a family of five girls, constantly dropping in on each other with young friends in an atmosphere of noise and laughter. Pierre himself was a relatively young member of the Liberal Party, but his colleagues and friends were all closer to his age than to mine—some considerably older. In Ottawa, I was far from my family in Vancouver, though my father, who as a retired businessman/politician sat on the boards of different companies (the Bank of Montreal, Alcan, Cominco—ten altogether), often flew east for meetings and I saw a fair bit of him. That was great, and he would later spend time with his grandsons. But I missed my mother and the brawling Sinclairs.

  I soon began to feel closed away in a tower. I had no young friends of my own and I certainly didn’t fit in with the association of parliamentary wives, who were all older than me. I have a twenty-one-year-old daughter now—just one year shy of my age when I was first ensconced at 24 Sussex with a husband almost thirty years my senior. Were my daughter to come to me as a twenty-two-year-old and seek my blessing to marry a man of fifty-two, I would react with horror. But wild horses couldn’t have stopped me then. I simply had no idea what my life would be like, how, like a goldfish, perhaps, I would come to resent my glass bowl.

  Pierre would work all day, returning only in the evening to jog through the governor general’s estate at 1 Sussex Drive, across the road. The eighty-eight-acre property is a splendid, and uniquely Canadian, place to run—roads and pathways meander through sugar bush, open parkland and many gardens. Foreign dignitaries who visit the governor general are asked to plant a tree; that and other tree-planting campaigns mean that some ten thousand trees now dot the property.

  The jog done, Pierre would then eat dinner before returning to his papers. During the few hours we had together, he seemed reluctant to discuss his work, and though I read the newspapers, I was often at a loss as to what filled his days. He abhorred chitchat, and when we dined out had me phone ahead to find out what time we would be sitting down to eat. Pierre drank very, very little—he would have one sip of wine just to taste the fruit of the vine, and he particularly liked a white dessert wine from Bordeaux called Château d’Yquem. And he loved caviar, which we would eat on toast, along with good Russian vodka poured into tiny vodka cups that Mrs. Michener, the wife of the governor general, had given us. But Pierre refused to waste time standing around drinking before the meal.

  The first year of my marriage to Pierre was filled with wonder and delight. I had never been happier, but perhaps I was seeing my new world through rose-coloured glasses.

  I don’t wear those glasses anymore. I see now with clarity 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. It was all so simple, and all so complicated.

  One fine June day Pierre suggested that we drive down to see his mother in Montreal. He said that he wanted to stop on the way to visit his lawyer because there were some papers for me to sign. I asked him what they were for.

  “It’s to ensure that if anything happened to me and I went bankrupt,” he said, “you wouldn’t be affected.” The papers were waiting for us, and, over a pleasant cup of tea, I signed them. As I handed the pen back, the lawyer said to me, “Well, Margaret, you just signed away your rights to be a very wealthy woman.”

  His words meant nothing to me. I had no idea how much money Pierre had and I didn’t care. Only at his funeral would I fathom the scope of his wealth, measured in the millions of dollars. Looking back, I see that he had an issue—a mental issue, an obsession—with money. It would cause me trouble all during my married life and all the while we parented our children together. Pierre had huge trouble parting with money. It was his Achilles’ heel.

  When the issue of money came up, I tried to reason with him, and I suppose there were tears. I accepted that this was simply how it was. He didn’t like to be criticized or questioned. Pierre was a bit of a bully, and I didn’t know about bullying fathers (my father was not one) or bullying brothers (I had none), so I didn’t know how to fight back. And I became quite isolated as well; he cut me off from a lot in my life and he kept me to himself—where he wanted me.

  But he adored me as the mother of his children because I loved my babies with all my heart and he loved that I loved them.

  He could never look away from that through the long years that we had together. What I gained—and in hindsight I can see that the price I paid for this was not too great—was his respect and his endur
ing love. And had I gone into the courts and demanded “my fair share” of his money, he would have stomped on me so hard.

  And yet he was a kind, sweet man. He would say lovely things to me when they were due, and horrible things to me when they were due as well. I was pretty unsophisticated, not like him. We were so different. He would say, “Margaret, for someone with so many needs, you have no avariciousness.”

  Pride usually stayed my hand.

  One day soon after signing the documents, I asked Pierre for some money for something I needed, and he reluctantly went to the safe and took out an enormous pile of Canada Savings Bonds, carefully peeled one off and gave it to me. Pierre never had any money in his pocket and was always borrowing from me or his aides when we went out. I was beginning to notice that he seldom repaid it.

  I was noticing other things about Pierre’s frugality. He had grown up as the middle child in a household with little money; only when Pierre was about ten did his father—a lawyer and a businessman—make his fortune. Charles-Émile Trudeau did so by acquiring gas stations and later selling them to Imperial Oil. His death, when Pierre was only fifteen, hit the family hard. They were now exceedingly well off, but Pierre’s mother, who carried both Scottish and French blood in her veins, was parsimonious by nature and never ceased to instill in him a horror of waste and needless luxury.

  When I arrived at 24 Sussex, I found him berating the staff for changing his towels every day, saying that all he needed was one small hand towel, and that it didn’t matter how old it was. My father had always trusted us with money, and when Pierre insisted that I write down every single item I bought, including shampoo and stamps, and then show him my list of expenses, I was both astonished and humiliated. Pierre did not want me to have an allowance or a credit card and insisted that I ask him whenever I needed anything.

  One of my aunts later gave me a card for Harrods, the luxury department store in London’s west end. My “aunt,” Lady Molly Sinclair, was married to my “uncle,” Sir George Sinclair—two very colourful Scots. George was actually my father’s cousin and the two men had studied at Oxford together. Like my father, George was a member of parliament (he sat on the Conservative bench), but before that he was deputy governor of Cyprus and was knighted in 1960 for his service to the colonies.

  I used my aunt’s gift card to buy things for the family, but Pierre was outraged when he learned of this and forced me to tear the card up. I began to see his meanness as a sort of sickness, and some of my resentment spilled over into arguments. I felt that his attitude was paternalistic and patronizing—never mind hypocritical. For himself, Pierre always bought and wore the best: a gold Rolex watch, a vintage 1960 Mercedes-Benz roadster. But he was downright stingy with me. Perhaps because he had inherited his wealth, he believed himself to be its steward and felt reluctant to use it freely, preferring to pass it on.

  The battle royal really started with 24 Sussex. I inherited the house complete with cooks, maids and gardeners, and they had long since developed their own patterns and routines. The new mistress of the household was not only far younger than they were but completely inexperienced in the duties at which they excelled. They had been looking after a single man, a man of austere, modest tastes, for more than three years and there had been relatively little for them to do. And I knew myself to be a perfectionist, determined to turn Pierre’s grey existence into something comfortable and homey. As the newspapers had suggested at the time of our wedding, my role was to “throw open the curtains of 24 Sussex Drive, and let the sun shine in.”

  My first fight was with the cooks. I love cooking, an interest that dates back to my father’s starting to work for Lafarge, the Paris-based cement conglomerate, when I was twelve years old. Trips to France, wining and dining in fine restaurants and acquiring books on French cuisine, had dramatically changed our lives. Nutritious but bland meat-and-potato meals gave way to food with both finesse and flavour. And because my sisters and I as children were sous-chefs in my mother’s kitchen, we all learned how to prepare these wonderful meals. Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking was my mother’s kitchen bible.

  But at 24 Sussex, I was immediately made to understand that I was not welcome in the kitchen. The two cooks—both of the plain, old-fashioned English school of cooking—wanted to make steak pies, meatloaf and chocolate chip cookies. Two days after I returned from my honeymoon, I started work on the menus, emboldened by the story that Pierre told me about Golda Meir’s recent meal at 24 Sussex. He had carefully explained to Margaret and Rita that everything had to be kosher, but what turned up, calling itself sole au gratin, was a great greasy casserole of fish, complete with its bones, lying in a deep, unappetizing bed of sauce and cream. Another fiasco was when Caribbean leaders came to lunch and were served frogs’ legs—no delicacy in that part of the world.

  I set to work, went out and bought a dozen cookbooks, and began to make lists and study recipes, comparing ways of cooking fish and sauces and meat to come up with those that sounded most delicious and most nutritious. From here, I drew up a series of healthy, balanced menus. Then, braving the wrath of the cooks, I insisted on being present when a new dish was tried out and refused to order anything for a dinner party until we had tried it several times ourselves. This was a battle. While one cook was pleasant and helpful, the other was—less so.

  Verna, the maid who had arranged the flowers in words of welcome, did her best to help and protect me. She was a cheerful, good-hearted woman who had children of her own and treated me just like one of them. “Don’t get involved. You are the lady of the house,” she advised. But it was impossible for me not to, and it was soon clear that the one cook who was the architect of so much misery had to go. She was a very difficult woman and it took great courage on my part, but go she did. For a while, the other cook was in sole charge, but later I found a French-trained chef called Yannick Vincent who was not only a superb cook but a family man who raised sled dogs and painted in his spare time.

  I loathe braggarts, but friends have pointed out to me that I was often ahead of my time (and was teased and mocked for it) on nutritional and other issues. I was a foodie before that term was invented. I insisted that my husband be there for the birth of my children, I breastfed my children, I baked bread and cooked international cuisine, I served raw vegetables at state receptions (which raised eyebrows), I raised the alarm on cigarette smoke and fought the use of pesticides. These stands are now seen as progressive and are taken for granted; they weren’t then.

  My battle to budge the status quo did not make me any less lonely at old 24 Sussex. On snowy mornings in winter I would put on my boots and stride around the gardens. But then would come a week of blizzards, when an icy wind came roaring up from the Ottawa River, and I was trapped indoors, chafing at the restrictions and nagging away at the staff.

  And I was bored. I had few real friends in Ottawa, and though I received several requests to involve myself in charities and foundations, Pierre was reluctant to let me take them on. My role was to be his wife. My isolation was increased by the fact that he had decided that there was no need for me to get involved in politics and had ordered his staff not to pester me or to ask me questions. I was to give no interviews, though I found myself an object of ceaseless curiosity—often of the perfectly friendly sort, but curiosity just the same. Everything I did, wore or said was instantly repeated around town.

  I found both managing staff and running a large establishment daunting, as well as the extreme formality that now surrounded me. The transformation from easygoing, peasant-skirted hippie into gracious first lady did not come naturally to me—not least because on almost every occasion I was the youngest person in the room by far. At the tea parties and luncheons for the wives of visiting heads of states or Liberal Party dignitaries, I was continually put down. I found several of the wives of Pierre’s colleagues to be ambitious and snide, quick to mock the slightest mistake. Pierre’s closest friends were suspicious of my English educati
on, as if it didn’t measure up to theirs.

  One exception was Nancy Pitfield, wife of Michael Pitfield, the head of the civil service. She was calm and friendly and unflustered, and had a wicked sense of humour. She made me laugh rather than cry. Another great friend I made was Lyn LeBlanc, the wife of Roméo LeBlanc, who was then Pierre’s press secretary. Lyn’s intelligence and wit kept me from feeling completely out of place.

  One political wife who was immensely kind to me from the day I entered 24 Sussex was Norah Willis Michener, wife of the governor general. Somewhat regal in both appearance and style, Mrs. Michener (as I always called her) set out, kindly and firmly, to coach me in the art of protocol. She was a small, elegant, immaculately groomed woman, with a crisp, intelligent voice, and over tea in her house she would coach me on what to do when. “Protocol,” she explained, over my protestations, “is learning all the things that you have to do, however much you find them unnatural and trying.” If, for example, I found myself sitting next to the wife of a head of state and she lit up a cigarette, I was to do likewise. I abhorred cigarettes and cigarette smoke, but this was my theatre of the absurd. (I did, though, take up smoking when I was forty-eight.)

  I am both an optimist by nature and a perfectionist at heart, but I fear I wasn’t a very good pupil for Mrs. Michener. I would hurry home from her teas with lists of tips and full of good resolutions. I still have the pamphlet on protocol she gave me. What I could not reconcile myself to was the way that everyone, from policemen to Pierre’s colleagues, from the mayor to every visiting dignitary, would pat me on the shoulder, take my arm, press me forward, move me to one side—as if I were a mannequin.

  One day I could bear it no longer and said to Pierre, “If one more person touches me, I am going to scream.” The word went out: don’t touch Mrs. Trudeau. This worked fine with the police and the staff, but the message could not go out to the wider world. There were many times when I just had to grin and bear it.