Changing My Mind

by Margaret Trudeau

  Since meeting in New York, we had not seen each other again, but we did have long telephone conversations. While I was in hospital, he encouraged me to get psychiatric care. He would phone me and tell me that he was thinking of me. In my mania and confusion, I saw him as a knight in shining armour who was going to save me. Here he was reaching out to me through the universe, so to speak, on an unlisted telephone number. Only many years later would I realize how much I had lost all sense of proportion, all idea of boundaries, that I was merely reaching out to the wrong people in the wrong places, mistaking flattery for love, sexual attraction for commitment.

  When I got back from the hospital to 24 Sussex, I found Pierre and the entire household walking on eggshells. Nobody knew what to do with mad Mommy. The children, of course, were very loving, and I was intensely relieved to discover that however peculiar I felt, something in me continued to function as a good, warm, consistent mother. My private pain, my despair, my madness, none of these things seemed to come out in my mothering. Pierre and I tacitly agreed never to fight in front of them, and he begged me to try not to appear too agitated when they were around. They were just little boys, but they were aware of the tension between us. We all resumed our weekends at Harrington Lake, our boating. Pierre was talking of teaching Justin, who would soon turn five, to ski.

  Pierre had long since shown himself to be a totally committed father, and there was nothing he didn’t do or take on for the boys. He would play “monster” with them in the dark, hiding somewhere in the house and waiting for one of the boys to find him, then springing out to chase them to bed. He would put a flashlight under his chin, fling out his arms and grow tall. The boys were frightened and charmed in the same breath. I sometimes felt jealous, as if the boys had usurped my place in my husband’s heart, and at my most bitter I used to think that I had given Pierre what he wanted and that I was now dispensable. But even in the pit of my despair, I could see how happy they made him, and how much they loved him.

  In his memoirs, published much later, in 1993, Pierre would write about fatherhood: “I didn’t know about this marvellous feeling. It makes you eternally grateful for the miracle of life and for the mother that bore those children.” As a father, he was strict but fair; he never raised his voice, and the idea of all physical punishment was abhorrent to him. He wanted his children to read the classics, not watch television, and he wanted them to be able to talk to him about everything, which they did. Inevitably, I felt at times as if I were simply not good enough for him.

  Nothing, in fact, had really changed, and I kept looking for a way out. When you are mentally ill, escape is on your mind most of the time. To escape the thoughts in your mind, to escape the people, the way they look at you, to escape the unhappiness of your life. For me, always, the easiest way to escape was with marijuana. What I did not know then was that marijuana, in some people, can trigger mania, and mania, with its rushes of glorious energy and its feelings of power and success, was exactly what I yearned for. A second way was alcohol. A third—extremely common, as I would later discover—was to blame other people (husband, nanny, press, police) for all that was happening to me and not to take any responsibility for it myself (this couldn’t possibly be my fault). I did a bit of all three: drinking too much, occasionally smoking too much, and certainly devoting a lot of energy to blaming Pierre.

  I blamed him for being such an inadequate husband, for not being there for me, for not understanding me, for being too important a man to find the time to worry about his wife. All that was not true and profoundly unfair. Pierre was deeply concerned and worried, and my woes took years off his life.

  One of the worst things, looking back on it, was my lack of real anger. Since my parents had never shown anger with each other, I had no model for expressing myself when I was furious. Had I known how to voice my anger, rather than stifle it, Pierre and I might between us have handled the situation better. There were all sorts of things that I could have been angry about, not least the hostile way the press treated me. And when, later, I learned about anger, the long litany of hurt had already unfolded and our relationship was beyond repair.

  To make things worse, after I left hospital, I continued to talk to Teddy Kennedy on the phone. Pierre found this unacceptable; he viewed these long talks as a form of emotional infidelity. The romance escalated, and Pierre was furious and heartbroken at the thought of losing me. I felt so desperate that I told Pierre the marriage was over. Even during the worst of my sickness, I knew there was no future with Teddy; this was the mania talking. He and I fantasized about running away together but then laughed off that possibility as nothing more than a foolish dream.

  Pierre was extremely angry that I had given my heart to Ted Kennedy. “Why not a prince of a man?” he remonstrated. “Why someone who cheated on his Harvard exams?”

  I look back on our romance and of course I question my own judgment. The prime minister’s wife having an affair with an American senator? What was I thinking? But the same could be said of him—what was he thinking?

  When, years later, Ted Kennedy visited Ottawa as part of a tour to investigate Canadian medical facilities and learn more about how universal health care works, staff in the prime minister’s office were baffled when Pierre refused to grant him even a five-minute courtesy chat. Again, I have to wonder about Ted’s judgment. Did he think that Pierre had somehow forgotten or forgiven the transgression? Did he really believe that Pierre would give him the time of day?

  With Pierre I just went back to ranting and goading, rising to intolerable highs and sinking into equally intolerable lows until eventually Pierre began to hit back, as any normal man would. And this in turn drove me to such despair that one day I seized a knife and rushed out into the snow. Whether I would have done anything to myself I don’t know, but Pierre came after me. This was all absurdly dramatic and intense and inappropriate, and all I could wonder, years later, was why no one had known to help me at the time. Looking back, I see clearly that I bore responsibility for my own illness, but there’s a lesson here, too, for those close to me. Knowing my frailties, why did they not intervene sooner? Why did they wait?

  However, that sad and desperate day marked a turning point. I was now seen—by Pierre and probably by the staff as well—as a totally deranged, mentally ill person. I felt hopeless, defeated. I capitulated. Pierre said he would put behind him everything that had happened providing I gave up all this nonsense about another man, became a good wife and mother again, and took my place at his side in a proper fashion, with all the Catholic guilt and confession and redemption that my disgrace involved. But he wouldn’t love me again. He didn’t say as much, but I knew that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, ever again. Something had broken. We limped on.

  Our official life continued. Of all the state visits I paid, the one to France in the autumn of 1974 was the most difficult. My precarious mental state was a great burden, as was the fact that the formality and protocol were more extreme than for any other occasion of its kind. The contradictions building up all around me were almost impossible to bear.

  This state visit to France was the first since Charles de Gaulle had made his “Vive le Québec libre” speech in Montreal during Expo ‘67, which had effectively cut off relations between France and Canada for almost a decade. On this state visit, we simply had to do not just well but superbly. We had to open the door of good relations again, yet at the same time assert that France could not treat Quebec as a separate, independent country.

  My first function in Paris without Pierre—he had been invited to an official, men-only lunch—was a reception given by Bernadette Chirac, the prime minister’s wife, a chic woman with nice, soft eyes. The food was superb. The guests were all women, the wives of cabinet ministers, and all some twenty-five years older than I was. There is no doubt that the French can be the rudest, most arrogant and condescending people in the world, and here they were in their element.

  Outwardly, all was civility and charm, but n
ot one missed a chance of making me feel illiterate, ill informed and gauche. I had taken with me Marie-Hélène Fox, Pierre’s political secretary, a woman who was pursuing a serious professional life. The conversation soon came round to the selfishness of career women and their foolishness in not marrying and having children. I struggled to support Marie-Hélène, but with my lamentable French and my own position as a woman raising a family, there was not a great deal I could do.

  I had one afternoon off and planned to spend it at a fashion show. Yves Saint Laurent was changing his neat, tailored look and presenting wild peasant costumes in his new collection. Madame Chirac, hearing of my plan, pressed me to go with her to a more conservative, haute couture fashion parade. I demurred.

  Finally, she said she would come with me to the Saint Laurent show. Madame Chirac voiced the opinion that the clothes were hideous. I, on the other hand, loved the collection; Saint Laurent was my favourite designer, and he was freeing women, putting them in pantsuits and tuxedos.

  For the French state visit, clothes were even more important to me than for the many other formal occasions I attended: if I felt correctly dressed, my confidence got a boost and, I felt, enabled me to cope. If my shoes were scuffed, I felt distracted and self-conscious. I had asked to take a maid with me to Paris but the expense had been deemed extravagant.

  On the night of our grandest dinner, held at the Élysée Palace—the official residence of the president of France—I planned to wear an ultra-feminine pink silk organdy Valentino dress with painted peonies. I kept it for the most important occasions. To show it off at its best, I decided to have my hair done by Alexandre, whose salon was one of the best in Paris, and who kept it open especially for me. His makeup man spent three-quarters of an hour on my lips alone.

  The result, however, was a disaster. He had removed all my curls and slashed my hair into what was known as the “mandarin look,” all severe straight lines and bangs. With the heavy makeup and the bright red lipstick, I looked like Cleopatra. I came out in tears.

  This was not the look to go with a pretty and pink, elegant and décolleté dress. Looking in the mirror, I began to scrub off some of the layers of lipstick, but there was little that I could do about my eyes, which had vanished under more coats of greens and greys than even Elizabeth Taylor wore. In despair, I decided not to wear the Valentino but chose instead a long black evening skirt with a white silk blouse. No sooner did I step inside the Élysée than I realized that I, alone of all the women present, was not wearing haute couture.

  The evening started badly and rapidly proceeded to get worse. On one side I had President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who wanted to talk to me about hippies and marijuana, as if I were a species from another planet. On the other, Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, hearing the word “marijuana,” weighed in with a story about how his own nephew had started smoking it, and how he had been threatened with expulsion from the family.

  “We just made it perfectly clear to him,” said the prime minister, “that if he carried on with it, he would be disowned, his money stopped, and that he would never be allowed in the house again.”

  I looked at him. “And has he ever smoked marijuana again?”

  Monsieur Chirac looked incredulous. “Certainly not.”

  The visit, from my vantage anyway, continued its perilous descent. Next day, Giscard d’Estaing’s wife, Anne-Aymone, and a group of ladies had invited me to come with them to the Louvre to look at the paintings. My French was still atrocious, and we moved from painting to painting while I tried to summon up suitable phrases of appreciation. Finally I could stand it no longer. I had had all that I could endure. I passed out cold on the floor, my fall broken only by the wife of the French ambassador to Canada, Madame Viot, who was my one ally in all this.

  Fainting was an unconscious escape that I had already taken on various occasions, especially when pregnant or very anxious. I had once fainted in Charlottetown and slipped off a chair on a podium when the queen was halfway through an address. President Josip Tito came on a state visit to Canada and I almost fainted then. After the official welcome toast by the governor general, the men got out their cigars and started puffing, and I had to stumble out of the room before I fell over.

  Dressing up—as the state visit to France made clear—was not without its pitfalls, but its pleasures were undeniable. Fancy costumes had the potential to take me into a magical fantasy world, a reward for all the boredom and stuffiness of the long social events. I knew I could make myself look good, and that once I threw myself into the part I could transform myself from a girl who usually wore jeans and sneakers into a sophisticated woman. During the pomp and grandeur of these state visits I sometimes pretended to myself that I was in a fairy tale. What made the fantasy easier was the fact that each time Pierre put on his black tie or his tails, I fell in love with him all over again. On these occasions, we were on show, the flower child and the world’s most glamorous politician. We acted the part.

  Sometimes, the show was of the one-woman kind. One evening when Pierre was away, I had been invited to a dinner party—a rare occasion given Pierre’s feelings about parties. He didn’t go, so neither did I. But from the first moment, this one was surprisingly fun. There were drinks before dinner, and several different wines with each course. After dinner, I had a glass of Cointreau. Suddenly, I felt extremely dizzy. I made my way uncertainly to the bathroom, was violently sick and collapsed. One guest at dinner was a doctor, and he realized that I was not only drunk but totally dehydrated. I was taken to hospital and given intravenous liquids. Next morning I woke up completely recovered but extremely embarrassed. When I saw the doctor in the emergency room, he reassured me: “Even people with psychological problems sometimes get drunk and have hangovers.” I would never again mix my drinks so freely.

  As for the psychological problems, things were about to get worse before they got better.

  CHAPTER 6

  REASON OVER PASSION,

  OR PASSION OVER REASON?

  “Margaret Trudeau did it again.”

  THE GLOBE AND MAIL, AFTER I BROKE INTO SONG DURING A FORMAL DINNER IN VENEZUELA, JANUARY 1976

  I was still many years away from understanding the delicate brain chemistry that ruled me, but experience had taught me one thing: I always came back to life when I was pregnant.

  During Christmas of 1974, Pierre and I went down to Jamaica for a holiday. He was still angry about my romance with Ted Kennedy, but I worked my charms, managed to seduce my husband and got pregnant. Pierre was not happy to learn I was carrying another child; he didn’t think it was the right thing for such an unhappy couple. But the moment I was pregnant I began to feel much, much better. The loneliness, the isolation, the feelings of inadequacy and lack of purpose were all replaced by that complex and mysterious series of hormonal surges—estrogen, progesterone, insulin, relaxin, oxytocin, prolactin. Whatever the cocktail and however it works, I know only that I felt human once again.

  Though this was a holiday, Pierre had brought work with him, of course. But with two days left in the holiday, he closed his last brown box of documents.

  “I have no more work,” he announced. That had never happened. Today, computers and hand-held communication devices mean that the supply of work is endless, but not then. We were in a somewhat remote location and when Pierre closed that last box, he had nothing to read.

  “Margaret, what are you reading?” he asked me. Pierre never read fiction unless it was a classic. I rather sheepishly showed him what I had been reading: Erica Jong’s feminist novel Fear of Flying, about a married woman who takes a trip to Europe with her husband and decides to act on her sexual fantasies with a new lover and perfect strangers.

  Pierre could not believe what he was reading. We had lively dinner-table discussions while he was reading that book—one of the first really strong feminist novels, and published just the year before, with millions of readers. Here was a new way of thinking, and Pierre’s sense of justice and fai
rness accepted that women are, in fact, equal to men on so many levels, when it had always been assumed that we were less capable. He knew the truth in his heart of hearts, and yet it was very hard for him to allow that freedom to me or to any women in his life. He was a deeply religious man who totally honoured his Madonna and his mother. She gave him very strict ideas on what was proper and what was formal and possible.

  Pierre’s mother also gave him freedom, but he lived with her until he became prime minister, so he had a long history of living with a dominant woman. He picked me when I was nineteen: I carried Scottish blood, I was simple, I gardened, I made my own clothes, I was thrifty, I was a good girl. But more importantly, what he was looking for was a wife and a mother for his children. He wanted the whole package. Pierre also thought that because I was so young, he could mould me into the kind of person he wanted me to be. The wife and mother he got; the clay model suitable for sculpting, no.

  Just for a while, it was like the old days. I began to function better. In the spring of 1975, I gave my first public speech, to the wives of the Commonwealth leaders at the Commonwealth Conference in Jamaica. I had decided to talk about the place of wives in politics and to touch on my own feelings about getting out of the kitchen and into work, and about how I didn’t wish to end up being a rose on my husband’s lapel. There were about a hundred people present and I was terrified. Pierre had helped me with the speech. I made them laugh when I quoted a sentence from an earlier edition of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946 and for decades the mother’s bible. The sentence, which Dr. Spock removed from subsequent editions, read: “Biologically and temperamentally, I believe women were made to be concerned first and foremost with child care, husband care and home care.” Pierre obviously didn’t agree. He would change the kids’ diapers as readily as I or the nanny would.

  Pierre was delighted once the baby, a third boy, was born, on October 2, 1975. We knew that we would both love the baby forever. Unlike the other two, this one was born in a rush. I had warned the doctors and nurses at the hospital that I intended to do a primal scream. I had read in books about the theory of primal screaming—how the releasing of air, the holler of triumph, was supposed to diminish the pain. But I had forgotten to tell the RCMP officer, Henry Kennedy, who was sitting outside my room and who had become something of a friend. Henry’s own wife was expecting her first baby, and the sound of my appalling scream just about frightened him to death.