Changing My Mind

by Margaret Trudeau

  In 1980, I decided to be brave and watch a play called Maggie and Pierre. The one-woman play was written by Linda Griffiths, who played both parts. Explaining that she saw us as “epic characters” in that we contained “all the elements of humanity, magnified,” the writer and actress justified the play by saying that our story had already been shared by all of Canada, and “actually by a lot of the world as well.” I thought the playwright had caught Pierre’s aloofness and obsession with himself.

  The play starts in Tahiti, with me telling Pierre that I had no need to read about Bacchanalian rituals in Edward Gibbon’s classic history text, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because I had already “been there.”

  It continues:

  PIERRE: That sounds like a long journey. How much farther do you want to go?

  MAGGIE: Forever. And you? … I want to be world renowned, to shape destiny, to be deliriously happy. You might say, I want it all.

  PIERRE: I want to be world renowned, to shape destiny, to be deliriously happy. You might say, I want it all.

  Griffiths got it right: I had wanted it all. There was another bit in the play that felt very close to the bone. Maggie is leaving Pierre and begging him to come with her; not willing to abandon his political career, he refuses. Pierre is talking to a journalist called Henry (this is one spot where the play erred, for Pierre would never have spoken to a journalist this way): “You know something, Henry? As we were going through all those horrendous fights, my wife was at my feet, and she was crying and screaming and wailing and literally banging her head against the wall, and I stood there, frozen, in the classic pose of man, locked in my own gender, not knowing whether to go to her and comfort her, or leave because it’s too personal to watch, or hit her, or what to do. And my dominant emotion was jealousy … that she could be so free.”

  I actually liked the play, and so did many critics. In The Globe and Mail Ray Conlogue wrote, “The trouble with reviewing Maggie and Pierre is to know where to start admiring it … What lifts the play above expectations is its compassion. Griffiths explores our erstwhile first couple without ever taking a cheap shot.” At long last, someone had written about us without taking a cheap shot.

  Justin, Sacha and Michel took the separation of their mother and father very well. Soon they were like several others of their friends at Rockcliffe Park Public School (where I had studied for two years as a child in grades one and two), with two parents’ addresses and telephone numbers on the school list. What differences Pierre and I had over the boys’ upbringing—I was more indulgent when it came to television and occasional snack food but more demanding over their clothes—we worked out calmly between us.

  Pierre was a wonderful and loving father and now took to getting one of the boys to accompany him each time he went abroad on an official trip. In due course, Justin would go to Russia, Sacha to the Middle East, and Michel to Washington.

  On one of those trips, Pierre was huddling with Anwar Sadat at the presidential palace in Cairo, along with Léopold Senghor, the president of Senegal, and later UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali. An Egyptian who was translating for Pierre introduced Sacha to the three men. Sacha, then seven, had just returned from the zoo. He gleefully reported that earlier that day, he had seen four giraffes and three elephants, “and now I’m meeting two presidents.” Senghor understood English and he burst out laughing.

  A battle that I did have with Pierre concerned the children’s clothes for these trips. He saw no problem in taking them in the jeans and T-shirts given to them by well-wishers wherever they went. I insisted that they be properly dressed, as a mark of respect for their hosts, so I got them polo shirts and khaki pants and blazers. For the colder weather, and for the memorial ceremony on November 11, when they always accompanied Pierre, I found trench coats for them. From those days forward, they would look well turned out.

  We agreed that for the moment they would stay at Rockcliffe Park Public School, one of the oldest and most respected local schools. Generations of politicians’ and ambassadors’ children had been educated since 1922 at the school, which boasted an excellent French immersion program. I felt strongly that the three boys should be part of their local community and not somewhere apart, in a private school.

  But I had to accept that when they reached ten or eleven years of age, they would move into the French stream and have the kind of rigorous academic education that Pierre valued. As for sports, neither Pierre nor I were much in favour of team sports. We decided that they would play soccer, so as not to lose out altogether on team activities, but not hockey, which I thought violent and brutish. Instead, they would ski, canoe, hike and swim.

  We were delighted with our arrangements. They now had the best of all worlds and our individual concentration when we were with them. As the boys insisted on going to school by bus with their friends, we had their police escort follow the bus. I missed our times at Harrington Lake dreadfully. The lake was where I had been happiest, but Pierre took that away. A little revenge.

  Though I missed Pierre, I knew that we were doing the right thing. Our ages made us so very different, but we were also completely different people, with almost no tastes or ideas in common. Pierre was a devoted father and an exceptional man, but I now realized that I had always felt emotionally bullied by him. And I had accepted it because deep down I felt that I was no good and that I deserved it.

  That spring of 1980 I began to go out with other people, and for about a year I had a serious relationship with a man called Jimmy Johnson, a lawyer and businessman who had two children of his own. As children, he and I had lived on the same street in Ottawa, though we never kept company. Jimmy was Irish Canadian, a great guy and a great skier and a good role model for the boys, and I believed that he and I shared the same beliefs. We both loathed cocktail parties and organized events, and we both loved spontaneity. But I was in Nassau, hosting a special for the Ottawa TV station, when I realized that I couldn’t go back to Jimmy. On the whole, I was living a quiet life in a very dull city and I didn’t meet many people. Daunting to some men was the fact that I had been married to Pierre Trudeau and been the prime minister’s wife.

  When I got home, I took off with the boys and friends to ski at Mont Tremblant in the Laurentians. And there something wonderful happened. We had stopped in a brasserie for dinner. In the bar, I met a charming, good-looking German man called Fried Kemper. He invited us over to dinner at his chalet the next night and it was lots of fun, with all the children together. We played charades. As with all the important men in my life, one look and I knew. He felt the same. We skied together, we talked, we fell in love.

  Fried’s parents, John (Joachim) and Mary Kemper, had escaped from East Germany at the end of the Second World War. They described the terror as they were trying to get away, hiding in ditches and in the woods and hearing the Russian soldiers filing by. The Germans had invaded Russia earlier in the war; now the Russians were returning the favour. The Red Army cut a horrid swath, countless German civilians were raped and murdered, and many Germans committed suicide rather than face being caught.

  Applying for a visa at the Canadian consulate in Berlin, the Kempers had been promised a farm in their new country. They arrived to find that the farm didn’t exist and that they were entitled only to a flat in a tenement building. John got a job selling vacuum cleaners. But he prospered, and Fried, his brother and his sister were given good educations and a happy childhood. John had gone on to build up a successful real estate business. By the time we met, Fried was in partnership with his father.

  I felt us to be very well suited. I was now thirty-four, Fried thirty-three. He had never been married and he loved children. Though he had different interests from mine—he was an entrepreneur and a jock, never finished university and rarely read books—he was good and honest and straightforward and neither formal nor grand. He also loved to cook, as I did, and it was with him that I started to make osso bucco, an Italian dish that would become my
trademark meal. Above all, Fried made me laugh. Fried had a quick wit and he knew how to tease without hurting.

  Living with Pierre, who was by nature very serious and whose one kind of humour was slapstick and pratfalls (he loved Charlie Chaplin), I had forgotten how important laughter was to me. Fried had a crude sense of humour, but he was outrageously funny and he had me laughing all the time.

  Soon, Fried was like a delightful elder brother to the boys, joining in their sports, teaching them about the land and how to build—docks, sheds, a cottage. He was very handy. Before long, he sold his house and moved in with us. He wanted us to get married, but Pierre, as a Catholic, remained totally opposed to a divorce.

  By now, I had been given my own television show. In the winter of 1984, I invited a fertility expert, a doctor, to be my guest. To ask the right questions, I had done a considerable amount of research on the subject. I learned that after the age of thirty-six, the chances of getting pregnant drop dramatically. Even though I had three children, these statistics alarmed me: I realized that somewhere in the back of my mind, I had thought I would have children with Fried. After the show, I consulted the expert. I was using an IUD as contraception, so what did he advise? The doctor suggested that I visit his clinic, and twenty-four hours later, he removed my IUD.

  The night before, Fried and I had shared a hot tub out on the deck. It was snowing hard and as we sat in the bubbling hot water we drank a bottle of champagne. That romantic evening was momentous in both my life and Pierre’s, for he had spent it out walking through the blizzard, trying to decide whether or not to step down from politics. I, on the other hand, was conceiving a child.

  Pierre had reached the decision that his political days were over. He was sixty-four and had spent almost his entire life in politics; in all, he had been prime minister for fifteen of the last sixteen years. He wanted time to read, to see his friends, to listen to music. He decided not only to leave politics but to move to Montreal, to get back to his childhood roots and to his French life. There was nothing sadder, we agreed, when he told me what he was going to do, than an aging former politician hanging around the fringes of political life.

  Several weeks later I was in New York, where I had gone to record interviews for my show, when someone handed me a glass of red wine. I took a sip and found it tasted very peculiar. Since with all three boys the same thing had happened—one sip of wine and I felt sick—I knew that I was pregnant.

  Fried was delighted. My first act was to tell Pierre. We both cried. We had loved each other, but life—his wisdom, my capriciousness—had gotten in the way. Not wanting the new baby to bear his name, Pierre now agreed to a divorce. He thus became, as he told friends, the first prime minister to become a single parent as a result of divorce, though he had few weeks left to serve in office.

  Fried and I were married very soon afterwards. On the day of the wedding, our car was stopped by Pierre’s chauffeur as we drove towards the registrar’s hall. He handed me a huge bunch of roses, with Pierre’s love.

  While Fried and I had been in Jamaica on holiday, my father had died—on February 7, 1984. He had had heart problems, and surgery, but he was only seventy-six; I was sad, but looking back on it I realize I did not mourn him properly. At our wedding dinner, a simple family occasion with a close friend as maid of honour, I was immensely touched by the way that John Kemper welcomed me into the family. He announced that since my boys had recently lost their grandfather, he would like to ask them to allow him to be their new one.

  On November 17, 1984, Kyle was born—a big baby weighing well over eight pounds, with lots of dark, curly hair. He was the most perfect baby in the whole wide world.

  I had chosen to have him in a birthing room, and Justin, Sacha and Michel came to view their new brother within minutes of the birth. They were now thirteen, eleven and nine years of age, and this new baby was an object of great excitement to them. For them, this was better than a puppy. The obstetrician had given me a shot of Demerol after the birth and I remember that I felt as if I were a bird, perched high in the corner of the room, looking down on the wonderful scene of Michel in his round granny glasses and old jeans, holding the baby in his arms.

  We hadn’t been able to decide on a name so we had leafed through a then-popular baby book, Never Name Your Baby Bill, and had come across Kyle in the K’s.

  For his second names, we called him after our fathers, James and Joachim. The day before, my sister Jan had had a baby girl she called Jamie, so there were now two cousins who were almost identical ages. I had given up my television show, having simply assumed that pregnant women could not appear onscreen; and, in any case, I intended to look after Kyle myself. I wanted to put behind me the years when my busy schedule as the prime minister’s wife meant that there were times when my babies were cared for by nannies.

  This was my second chance at happiness, and at being the kind of person I wanted to be—and I was allowed to be that with Fried. Those first years, we were so happy. I was in love with my husband and this newborn, who was everything I wanted. He was beautiful and he was mine. I was not obliged to attend any fancy parties and there were no nannies to contend with—which was a good thing because Kyle didn’t like even a babysitter. We were besotted with him. Fried was playful and funny with him, Fried and I were working together on our dream summer house, and we had good friends. Everything was good.

  Fried was part of a huge and loving extended family, and I realized how much I had missed the bustle and the affection of family life. We used the money from the sale of Fried’s house to renovate mine and put in a new kitchen, family room, and master bedroom and bathroom. In 1971, John Kemper had bought 350 acres, with five miles of waterfront, on Newboro Lake. In the nineteenth century, engineers had built the Rideau Canal and a series of locks, thereby allowing boat access to a number of lakes and rivers. Newboro marked a dividing line, with all waterways north of the town flowing up towards Ottawa and all waters to the south flowing down to Kingston. John had sold off most of the waterfront land but kept two bays next to each other, and he had given each of his children the right to build a cottage while retaining the land himself in case of any splits in the family. Here, on an island just off the waterfront, Fried and I built a house.

  The place was exactly what I had always wanted. We made it very cozy, with a wraparound deck and a hot tub, and I put in a show kitchen that I had been able to acquire at half price. Wood defined the cottage: cedar on the outside, golden pine inside. I decorated the long, narrow house in some of my favourite colours—white and yellow and blue. There was a children’s room with bunks, a spare room for friends and a loft where we put futons for more children. Fried already owned a chalet at Mont Tremblant in the Laurentians, a ski resort first made fashionable in the late 1930s. That was my idea of bliss: day after day of skiing with the family.

  On Saturday nights, wherever we happened to be, we played card games and board games, and we built space stations out of Lego. On Saturday mornings, as a treat, the boys were allowed to make their own breakfasts while we slept; on just this one day, they could have as much sugared cereal as they wished and they ate it sitting in a row before the television, watching cartoons—Spider-Man, Bugs Bunny, the Road Runner.

  I like to think that with Pierre and me as parents, Justin, Sacha and Michel got the best of both worlds—and I think they would agree. They had a wonderfully old-fashioned, strict father: no television in the house, they had to read the classics and discuss them at dinner, they had to put a penny in a jar when they didn’t speak correct French. Pierre was generous with them, with his time, with his love. They had a wonderful outdoor life up at the cottage at Morin-Heights, north of Montreal.

  And I had them on the weekends. Fried was the best possible stepfather they could have had. The boys would take the train down from Ottawa when they were at school from fall to spring. Where Pierre had high expectations of them—their education, he believed, was his responsibility—I was the empathetic one.
What could I do to ensure they grew up strong?

  And Pierre and I would talk constantly on the phone. How did Justin do on that test? How was Sacha eating? Had Michel’s cold cleared? There was no snarkiness between us, no getting even. That was all behind us now. We had done our fair share of horrid battling. I wince to think of the ferocity between us, of words and emotion, but that was gone. At last, there was peace between us. We had failed as husband and wife, but as father and mother, we succeeded.

  From spring to autumn I was based on the lake with the children, though we also went to the lake in winter, when, on magical, blue sparkling days, we skated and tobogganed. Life was perfect. Before the snows arrived in January, the frozen water of the lake was so clear that you could see through the transparent ice down to the pebbles.

  By now the older boys had moved for their French schooling to Montreal, where they stayed with Pierre at his house. On weekends, a police driver brought them up to us.

  “When are the brudders coming?” Kyle would ask as soon as he could talk.

  Around this time, when Sacha was in his early teens, he invented a game called Survivor, which we played at the cottage on Newboro Lake. All the kids, adults and house guests would play, though the company sometimes disappointed.

  I remember one of the kids complaining to me, “She’s such a wuss. I don’t want her on my team!”

  The game worked like this. Sacha had written with indelible ink on plaques the words water or food, and placed these plaques throughout a two-acre perimeter in the woods that defined our play space in the huge property. Once you found a plaque, you took a token as proof you had located the station. And before the game began, we all plucked tokens from a hat to determine whether we were herbivores or carnivores. Sometimes I was a bunny—so there were lots of creatures out for me. The herbivores had to hide and the carnivores sought them out, and once the former had been spotted, the latter took their tokens. The herbivores could win the game by picking up food and water tokens without being spotted. It was a wonderful game, and players really got into their roles: I remember a shy little girl being transformed when she picked a bear token—did she ever assume that role!