Changing My Mind

by Margaret Trudeau

  My hope then was that word of the movie and my being in France might allow Yves Lewis, my old boyfriend, to find me. I had lost contact with him and always wondered what had become of him. I had an address for him in Paris, and before going south to do the film I went there and knocked on the door, and this beautiful, doleful young woman came to the door. She had long hair and the light was behind her. I asked her, in English, if Yves Lewis still lived there.

  No, she replied, and I must have looked so sad at this news that she reached out, touched me and said, “Ma petite fille, l’amour change.” Indeed, it does.

  I did find Yves, in a way. I was in a makeup trailer on the set of the movie with my co-actor in the film, a very well-known character and comic actor in French cinema named Francis Lemaire. He was a very sweet man, and both he and his wife were very kind to me. But this day he looked stricken and sad.

  “Francis,” I said to him, “what’s wrong? Are you having a bad day?”

  He explained that a good friend had just lost his son. “He was the most beautiful boy,” he said. “I have known him since he was a child and was very close to him. He had been wandering the streets of Paris wearing a white robe, then hanged himself.”

  Somehow I knew.

  “Is it Yves?” I asked Francis, “Yves Lewis?”

  “Ah,” Francis said, “you’re Margaret.”

  That was so terribly, terribly sad. Later, I met with Yves’ stepfather in Paris for lunch. This man thought that Yves was the most complete human being he had ever encountered—so beyond anyone whom we would label a Renaissance man. A childlike spiritual questing layered over a very serious, disciplined mind. Looking back, I can see that you never get over your first love, especially when taken in this way. I see now that I have no regrets about the choice I made. One look at my family is all it takes.

  In the early spring of 1978, I was approached by John Marqusee, the director with his wife, Janet, of a small British publishing house, Paddington Press. He suggested that I write my memoirs, and he offered an advance of $60,000. What with movie and serialization rights, he said, I could hope to make something in the order of $400,000. At last, here was a real chance for financial independence. I flew to London, signed the contract and began work.

  I hadn’t been there long when I was introduced by friends to Jack Nicholson, who was in England to make The Shining. His long-term partner, Anjelica Huston, had not accompanied him. Soon Jack and I were spending our evenings in the terrace house he had rented in Cheyne Walk, a historic street in Chelsea overlooking the Thames. Laurence Olivier, Henry James, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones are among those who have lived on this street.

  Under Jack’s tutelage I learned how to move calmly and safely through the streets of London—without alerting packs of paparazzi. I knew our relationship could not last: Anjelica kept threatening to turn up, and Jack had made it plain that ours was no more than a passing affair. But for a while I was happy. He was elegant and gracious and talented and kind, and I owe him a lot. I adored him; he was sweet—no, more than sweet. He was fun, fun, fun.

  I was enormously attracted to everything about him: his good manners, his soft, slow voice, that twinkle in his eyes, the smile, the way he could make going to a party or a restaurant feel like you had deliciously succumbed to something wild. I had never thought that any man could hold a candle to Pierre, but Jack could. I felt, once more, young and sexy, and what a treat it was to drive around London in Jack’s chauffeur-driven Daimler.

  One night, after a day of shooting on The Shining—about a man’s descent into madness—Jack related how director Stanley Kubrick had made him eat thirty-four grilled cheese sandwiches as they struggled to get that perfect take. He wasn’t hungry that night.

  But Jack also taught me about a lifestyle of no strings, of freedom, of independence. I had talked the talk, but could I walk the walk? Could I have the romance without the commitment? Turns out I could. He taught me how to be free.

  The Marqusees had put me up in the Savoy, where I felt pampered. “How strange and marvellous,” I wrote in my diary. “Perhaps it is over—the years of pessimism and self-destructiveness. I feel good, alive.” But then, I always felt good and alive when I was falling in love. Like pregnancy, the adrenaline of love was and is a powerful antidote to depression.

  My diary conveys with clarity just how much of the time I was ricocheting between highs and lows. When something went well, I ascended, and as I climbed, I began to feel invincible and act accordingly. My mind raced and I couldn’t slow it down. I would spin around, cooking up wild plans, feeling incredibly attractive and wanted by every man who set eyes on me, whirling out into the night to go to yet more parties. There was nothing I could not do, and no one who did not profoundly desire me. I was the life of every party: I was irresistible and promiscuous. And it didn’t matter how much I spent because there would always be more money coming in, and if there wasn’t, well, I could make more. Wasn’t I a brilliant actress and a gifted photographer?

  Then would come a setback—an ugly article in a newspaper, a taunt from a reporter, a slight from a casual lover—and I would sink again. I would come home from a heavy night and collapse into a dreamless sleep, not waking before noon, only to start out again on another round of parties and flirtation.

  I was drawn towards celebrity yet repulsed and revolted by it. My mind was awhirl in guilt and fear and fantasy. For a while I imagined myself as Joan of Arc, in a new version of her life, this one ending with her rebirth as a boy child.

  A right-wing tabloid inveigled me into doing an interview. Next morning, I opened the paper to find the story. “She walked out on the Prime Minister,” it began, “left her three little boys, rocked the world with her weekend with the Rolling Stones.” The piece went on to describe me as a “self-confessed” hippie who smoked dope, used four-letter words and didn’t wear a bra. I bitterly resented the piece. In her frumpy, superficial, nasty way, the reporter had managed not to understand a single thing I was trying to say. I thought I would die of misery and shame.

  An ominously dark diary entry for April 1978 reads: “Again the thought of death (sweet release) comes over me, here, now. Would I not be better off?”

  My life in London could not go on and I was lucky to get away. The book was finished and delivered, Jack Nicholson returned to Anjelica and I went back to New York.

  But before leaving Chelsea, I met a wonderful man, a Formula One race-car driver named Jorge Koechlin. His paternal grandfather had been an officer in the Peruvian army and his maternal grandfather was a direct descendant of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria. Jorge’s family had gone from Austria to Peru in the late nineteenth century. I adored Jorge. In New York, we continued to see each other. We stay in touch even now. He was one of the great knights of my life.

  Back in Canada, there had been dramatic changes. With only four weeks left of his five-year term, Pierre had called an election and lost. The cards had been stacked against him: Canadians professed themselves tired of their charismatic prime minister and his patrician ways. While Pierre toured the country with almost arrogant disdain, Joe Clark and the Conservatives wooed them with bonhomie and earthiness.

  Early on election night, May 22, 1979, it became clear where the vote was headed. The defeat was overwhelming. Though Pierre himself kept his seat, fourteen members of his Liberal cabinet lost theirs.

  Unfortunately for me, I had assumed that Pierre could only win. I was devastated that he had suffered defeat, and humiliating defeat at that. We talked on the telephone that evening, and I commiserated with him on the loss.

  “It’s true, quite true,” he told me. “We’re out.”

  Against the advice of friends who were with me that night, I insisted on going to Studio 54—where the press found me. I was seen to be dancing the night callously away, and it was thus that they portrayed me next morning, pirouetting around with a naked midriff and dishevelled hair, dancing o
n my husband’s political pyre. I could not have felt more ashamed.

  My humiliation that summer was complete when I saw the article that appeared in Playgirl magazine. One of the first things that happens with the swing from mania to depression is that the body plummets into sickness. I had agreed, after much persuasion, to do an interview with a reporter from Playgirl. When still in New York, before news of Pierre’s defeat, I had rung to cancel the interview, telling her that I was sick.

  The young woman was friendly, solicitous. Could she at least drop by with some chicken soup for me? Foolishly, very foolishly, I agreed, touched that someone would want to go to such trouble. She arrived, was charming, listened to my woes, asked a few kind questions. Before I knew it I was pouring out my woes, the coziness and apparent safety of the situation making me confide in her my deepest secrets. The resulting article was more of a disaster than even I could have imagined. I was in complete disgrace.

  Pierre, however, was reassuring. He never blamed my outrageous behaviour for his political defeat. This was one form his generosity took: tight-fisted with money, yet loath to cast blame when that would have been so easy to do. And he was never judgmental about my mental illness, always proactive—he wanted help for me. That is so important for a depressed person, to have the support of one’s inner circle.

  Pierre was a complicated man, and full of contradictions. He was a kind man who could be extraordinarily mean, a very modest and shy man who could be monumentally arrogant. That’s true of all of us: we are all yin and yang, light and dark.

  My antics in London that year had not gone unnoticed. Soon after landing back in Manhattan, I went to a dinner party where I was seated next to a fashionable psychiatrist, Dr. Ron Fieve. I had met him before, with his wife, and knew that he worked at Columbia University. He didn’t beat around the bush.

  “Margaret, you mustn’t mind my saying this, but I really think you need professional help. I believe that you are manic depressive. I can help you.” I was taken aback, but at the same time deeply relieved. When he suggested that I go to see him in his office, I agreed.

  Next day, sitting across from his desk, it all came tumbling out. I told him about the highs, about the days when I felt that I was invincible and immortal and there was nothing I could not do and no one whom I could not attract, and then the days when I didn’t want to get out of bed, felt so full of guilt and insecurity and bleakness that I could only cry. I told him about the rushes of joy and elation versus the nights when I wanted only to be dead. I have no real memory now of what I actually said. I know only that once I had started I couldn’t stop talking and that as I talked I knew how badly I wanted to find some peace of mind. What struck him was not so much what I said but the way I said it. He listened, then confirmed his original diagnosis.

  Then Dr. Fieve told me that he had been working with a new treatment, a salt called lithium, and that it provided stability and balance to people like myself with violent mood swings. Lithium, he said, had been used since 1870 to treat mania after links were established between excessive uric acid and a range of psychiatric disorders. The treatment had fallen out of fashion only to be rediscovered by an Australian psychiatrist, John Cade.

  In 1949, Dr. Cade had described experiments using lithium on rodents and in some trials with people. But the medical profession had been slow to follow suit because of lithium’s effect on thyroid and kidney function and one other serious drawback—even minor overdoses could lead to death.

  However, lithium had at last been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1970, and it was already altering the lives of untold numbers of people throughout the world. Dr. Fieve warned me of two things: one, lithium did not suit everyone; and, two, the nature of the manic depression beast was such that those afflicted often stopped taking it the moment they felt better, only to set off on yet another roller coaster of mood swings until persuaded to go back into treatment. I listened, and agreed to try lithium. He wrote me out a prescription; I took it to a pharmacist and swallowed my first dose in the fall of 1979.

  The effect on me was dramatic and almost immediate. Within days, my horizons had ceased to swing dramatically, I was sleeping at the proper hours and I had lost my taste for the wild life. The febrile and dangerous pleasures of New York had lost their charm. I looked around and thought, “What am I doing here?”

  For the first time in almost two years, I felt normal. And I knew, with absolute certainty, that I had to go home. Looking back over my wild and incoherent months, I felt overwhelmed with horror and disbelief.

  Jorge Koechlin was a great help to me around this time. He was with me in New York and he knew how badly I missed my children. He urged me to go back home and I could see that he was right.

  “Peace is descending on me,” I wrote in my diary. “I feel grounded.” I packed my bags and went back to Ottawa, not as a penitent, seeking forgiveness, but as a mother, restored to some kind of normalcy.

  Pierre and I now discussed the future calmly, with affection towards each other. The tension between husband and wife when a marriage is crumbling dissipates dramatically when the two parties no longer have to cohabit. The same opportunities for sniping and venting aren’t there. What a relief!

  We agreed that I would find a house, not far from Stornoway, the house of the leader of the Opposition, into which he was about to move, and that we would share the boys. By great good luck, a small red-brick Victorian house on Victoria Street—within walking distance of Pierre and not far from St. Bartholomew’s, the oldest church in Ottawa—had just come on the market.

  I saw the for-sale sign as I was walking along the road. The owners were asking for a $60,000 deposit. Hearing rumours that Paddington Press was going bankrupt, I flew to London and asked for my advance. With great reluctance, but fearing that refusal would push their creditors to close in, they gave me a cheque, which I immediately used as a down payment on the house. Pierre generously agreed to pay the mortgage on the rest.

  A few months later, I moved into what was my first real home. Pierre and I, living on government property, had had nothing of our own—save a few sheets, some pots and pans at Harrington Lake and a magnificent yellow Chinese rug, which I had once admired in an exhibition and he had bought for me. With these and other items, I began to furnish my house, turning it into a real home for Justin, Sacha and Michel, for whom I now shopped and cooked.

  The moment I moved in I was delighted with my purchase: it was attractive, unpretentious and superbly and totally renovated, with track lighting and pine floors. I hung heavy curtains against the winter cold and painted the walls of the master bedroom blush pink, to go with a thick, pale pink carpet and flowery curtains in the Japanese style. I did, and do, love pink for its calming effect, a fact that prison wardens and hospital administrators fully understand and often deploy.

  For the little boys, my house was a dream come true. They had bunk beds and they kept their bicycles in the garage and could play and bike for hours in total safety in the lane behind the house with all the other local boys, and there was a yard where they could play soccer and badminton.

  The first caller at my new home was a large van from Johnson’s Antiques delivering a butcher-block kitchen table. I solemnly laid a picnic lunch on it and proceeded to inaugurate my new life. Many years later, Justin was asked whether there was, in fact, anything in particular that he remembered his mother saying to him. He replied, “She said to have fun,” and that, indeed, was what I wanted for them.

  In my life, I’ve been lucky in real estate—I was so pleased with my new acquisition. Above the kitchen sink in my house was a ledge, and here I put a row of African violets. From the street, the house looked small, with its screened-in porch, but beyond the threshold lay a big sitting room and four bedrooms, with a large garden in the back. Pierre, when he came to see it, admitted that what I had finally pulled off was a “real home”—something we had never had.

  Pierre, too, had his own house. In the f
all of 1979, he acquired an art deco house on Pine Avenue in Montreal, the former residence of architect Ernest Cormier. I found it a bleak mausoleum, dark and chilly with marble floors. On the other hand, it had a water-bed, and the boys whooped when they found that.

  On New Year’s Eve of 1979, Pierre came to my house in Ottawa and, over champagne, we toasted the joys of house ownership. We put the boys to bed and as he was about to leave, I raised the matter of an allowance. I thought I was being reasonable. Pierre would be away campaigning for the next several months and I would have exclusive charge of the boys.

  When he took out $50 from his wallet and asked if that would be enough, I felt I was being both mocked and humiliated. Enraged, I went at him and he pinned me to the floor, and my screams wakened the three boys—who were all very afraid and alarmed.

  Michel, then just four, saved the day. He asked Pierre to come to his room, and I have no idea what was said but they were gone half an hour. Little Michel, Pierre would observe later, always put sense into him.

  Both Pierre and I were mortified by what had happened, and we did get counselling. But there was no repairing our marriage. I had seen hate in his eyes that night, as he had seen hate in mine.

  Pierre was not a violent man, and I absolutely forgave him. I look back and I understand that by all my antics I had wounded his pride. Worse, I had broken his heart.