by John English
It was, from a mother to a distraught son, a sensitive and wonderful letter.
As with most sons, some parts of Pierre Trudeau’s life remained closed to his mother, but most did not. She had gently chided him about the “tricks” that he and Roger Rolland were up to in Paris and wondered, when Pierre was in London, whether he missed the “street fighting” in which he and Roger had partaken. She anxiously worried whether he was healthy and whether he had friends. In November 1947 she told him that when people inquired about him, she replied that he was making the most of his stay in London, “getting about to listen in on lectures, conferences as well as communist meetings.” Perhaps, she speculated, he was “freer to go about not having many friends or am I wrong and do you have a circle? You never mention anyone.” For good reason, of course, Grace had quickly realized that, in London, there was no “circle.”16
As Trudeau published his articles in Notre Temps, Grace carefully monitored reactions. She told him that some of “the clergy” said that one article was a “deep and well-sounding piece,” although she did seem a bit troubled that the former Quebec fascist leader Adrien Arcand “wanted to write to” him with compliments about the other article. However, “Dr. Turgeon was tickled that you knocked [Prime Minister Mackenzie] King” in yet another essay. Surely, she remarked, “by the time you enter journalism in this town your name will be a byword.” Wherever she went she heard praise for her exceptional son. Madame Décarie predicted a great future for Pierre, “just as we all think! Naturally—me especially.”17
She fretted that he lacked money and, occasionally, operated on the black market for him, especially when postwar Canadian currency restrictions were put in place in 1947. In February 1948 she offered to get some funds in Boston if he ran short during his studies at the London School of Economics. And she made certain that he was well prepared for his adventures. Later, when he was short of funds after a trip to Africa, she sent him $500 by cable immediately and, when she heard nothing, sent $200 more a month later and told him not to “wait until the last minute” for further requests.18 These were large sums for the time, equal to almost $6,000 today; in 1948 a decent meal could be had in a Left Bank bistro for twenty-five cents. When he proposed to tour Britain, she wrote: “I shall send you socks, army ones? Also shirt, long sleeves? I bought one a khaki color, perhaps it is not heavy enough—a gabardine cotton would be best, I shall look around altho’ for hiking it might be the right weight. I also bought a short sleeved cotton jersey—dark blue—you could use for underwear—instead of wearing pyjamas if you get cold.” Then she concluded, typically: “Thinking of you every day dear boy and praying the Lord to keep you safely. My love to you and God bless you. Mom. Enclosing $10.” When he sent her saris from India, she proudly showed them off to her friends. She wore them for Pierre on his return, and the two of them hosted an “Oriental afternoon.” She also reassured some priests, who wondered about his articles, that he was, most definitely, a strong Roman Catholic.19
Grace understood well his urge to wander. She even quoted Whitman to him: “O farther, farther, farther sail!” and told him that she, like him, “early in life … felt imbued with the desire to forever seek unknown worlds.” Yet she advised him that he must come home and forget the wounds he bore, though she knew they would not heal soon.20 She was wary as he began once again to introduce new female friends to his family. When she received a few photographs from a woman whom he had spent some time with after the relationship with Thérèse ended, Grace wrote to Pierre about his great love affair. Like mothers generally, she was unfair to the one who had rejected her son:
I sincerely hope—and I am much in earnest, that you won’t go out of your way for her—from things I learned in the past year my sympathy for her has completely turned … Perhaps I shouldn’t have said so much—but you know how mothers feel when they could fight for their children’s happiness—and I don’t want you going through once more—the agony of last summer—we were all very much affected, in spite of saying little about the episode.
Grace worried about these strong words she had written to her son, concluding, “I hope you won’t take offence at all this.”21
Trudeau did not, but Grace’s letters now lacked the sensitivity of her letter a year earlier when she had first learned of the break-up with Thérèse. Gone are the hints that Trudeau may have been “brusque” or that he was not always “affectionate.” Grace, as always, came down strongly on her son’s side. Trudeau likely believed that his mother’s words reflected the continuing gossip in Montreal about what had happened between the couple. Many of his old friendships must have been affected by the end of his close relationship with Thérèse. In one letter Grace reflected on his future after he told her he had danced “socially” in Asia. “By the time you return and begin looking about for a ‘wife,’ many comparisons will be made—certain standards must be met—but then you have your ideal no doubt—the older one grows the more difficult one becomes—but I couldn’t say or accuse you of having those bachelor ways which are hard to deal with—you still are the young enthusiastic youth I am sure.”22
Grace Trudeau deeply affected her son, not least because he lived with her for most of her adult years. After his move to Ottawa, when he returned to Montreal on weekends, he brought his laundry. “I noticed you didn’t bring your towel along this time,” she wrote in October 1950, telling him that he should not send it to the laundry.23 She became an authority on foreign currency rates as she made certain that he had the necessary funds for travel and study. She supervised cooking in their home—a skill that her epicure son, who cultivated his knowledge of fine wines and restaurants, never mastered. A later female companion recalled that, after several elegant dinners together, she visited his country home in the Laurentians, where she discovered that, if a meal was not cooked by someone else, dinner was spaghetti out of a can.24 In his mother’s home, Grace or her staff served him.
On a more positive side, they travelled together often and maintained into the sixties their custom of attending concerts and gallery openings. “My dear boy,” she wrote in 1951, “once more we had to say good-bye—after such an enjoyable trip in Italy—for myself at any rate. It will remain one of the highlights in my late life.”25 Her support for him was generous financially and emotionally, and their relationship had an astonishing familiarity. For his thirty-first birthday, for example, she sent him a card with an attractive woman on it and wrote: “Hurrah—it’s Pierre’s birthday—many happy returns of the day dear boy. We must celebrate over the weekend. All my love, Mom.” Then in a small note that could be detached, she wrote: “Happy birthday to the best son in all the world.” She did, after all, have two sons. When Pierre despaired, Grace, more than anyone else, was the rock upon which he built his hopes.
But she may also have been the reef on which his romances sometimes foundered. Certainly, Thérèse came to believe that she was, even though, like Madeleine Gobeil, she admired the way Trudeau softened in Grace’s presence, and the devotion mother and son felt for each other.26 In his psychiatric sessions in Paris, he portrayed his father, Charles, as almost Apollonian, distant and heroic, but, like the Greek gods, indifferent to the world in which humans live. Grace, however, troubled Trudeau. He required her approval; and, because of her strong presence, she represented forces such as the church and the social approval he occasionally and impetuously struck out against in a way that others found puzzling or inconsistent. Although, on the surface, his mother often had good relationships with Pierre’s female companions, the women themselves, beginning with Camille Corriveau, came to believe, first, that she was a formidable individual not easily challenged and, second, that she had an enormous, perhaps decisive, influence on her son. Though Grace sometimes grumbled about her son-in-law, despite a good personal relationship with him, she forgave Pierre many flaws. Interestingly, Pierre Trudeau delayed marriage until he moved out of his mother’s house and, indeed, until she was virtually an invalid, no longe
r fully aware of events around her.
In her memoirs, Margaret Trudeau wrote that, for her husband, women fell into three categories: “There were his female colleagues, and these he saw only as working companions and not as women, though many were also close friends. Then there were possible dates and here, like Edward VIII, he preferred actresses and starlets, glamorous women who were perfect for flirtations and candlelight dinners. Then there was his wife, and she had to be dependent, at home, and available.” The last of these roles, she and others suggest, was an impossible one played most effectively by Pierre’s own mother. Trudeau, Henry Kissinger once quipped to Richard Nixon, was best understood as a “mommy’s boy.”27
In a very real sense he was, but Kissinger’s dismissal is a cheap shot. To her timid son, Grace Trudeau brought confidence and a belief that he had few limits on what he could accomplish. He adored her because of her exceptional combination of playfulness and discipline, both qualities he inherited, and the strong sense of family that carried her children through first the turbulence of Charles’s death and then the religious and social change in Quebec. She introduced him gracefully to the arts and provided stability as he moved into different worlds. She wrote to Pierre on May 11, 1948, her thirty-third anniversary:
Tuesday, May 11, 1915—our wedding day, your father and I—strange that I happened to write it down just to-night—Since 13 years I like to think I have forgotten or at least overlook it—and you three children helped me carry on. What a blessing you have been to me—what would I have become without you—looking after your needs when you were young filled my life and now that you are all older and capable of carrying on without me—I still like to think I can be of help somehow.28
And in so many ways, she surely was.
Grace influenced Trudeau’s relationships in two key ways. Obviously, she was a model of the domesticity he championed from the forties, when he quarrelled with Thérèse about her plans for a career and further study, to the seventies, when he opposed Margaret Trudeau’s decision to work or return to school. His attitude troubled not only Thérèse and Margaret but also the other women to whom he talked of marriage. More subtly, and also more positively, his close relationship with his mother, their easy bantering and affectionate exchanges, made him seek out women as his confidantes. In his early days at Brébeuf he had resolved to stand apart from his classmates, and his correspondence with even his closest male friends tends to be brief, impersonal, and surprisingly rare. Always the disciplined correspondent, he kept lists of those with whom he corresponded while he was absent, and women were consistently at the top. Moreover, with male friends he tended to write about public or even philosophical matters; with women, he blended these topics with intimate discussions of his own feelings and ambitions—just as he did with his mother.
Anecdotes bear out the same impression presented in his private papers. Jacques Hébert, with whom he travelled frequently, said that Trudeau never spoke with him about religion, a view echoed by the devout Catholic Allan MacEachen, his House of Commons seatmate. MacEachen also reported a conversation with Jean Marchand in which he indicated, to MacEachen’s surprise, that he and Trudeau had not spoken for several months. Marc Lalonde, Trudeau’s closest adviser, said in the early 1970s that Trudeau spoke to him only once about a personal matter—the break-up of his marriage. He was, Lalonde added, like an oyster that opened with great difficulty. Yet with women, from Camille Corriveau in the early forties to the celebrity Kim Cattrall in the late eighties, he often bared his soul. To Cattrall, Trudeau was “epicurean.” The actor Margot Kidder, with whom he later had an affair, described him as “the gentlest, sweetest little boy you’d ever known … When you realized this (as he eagerly handed you the simple-minded dinner of pork and beans and bacon out of a can that he’d cooked; or when he held you in his arms in the morning, beaming and enormously pleased with himself), it felt as if you knew a secret no one else knew, and in knowing it, you’d been anointed keeper of his flame.”29
From de Grandpré at school in 1940, through his closest male colleagues in succeeding decades—Pelletier, Hébert, and Lalonde—the private Trudeau remained a secret they never really knew.
Trudeau kept many secrets in Ottawa after he arrived in the late summer of 1949. After briefly considering External Affairs and the Finance Department, he opted for the Privy Council Office because, he later wrote, it was “the key decision-making centre, and because I wanted to observe in practice what I had just been studying in theory.” His initial salary was a decent $2,880 per year, with a 5 percent deduction for his pension, and his office was in the historic abode of prime ministers, the East Block of the Parliament Buildings. A Victorian Gothic classic with high ceilings, impressive vaulted windows, and elegant fireplaces in the major offices but cubbyholes for junior clerks like Trudeau, the edifice was sufficiently small for Trudeau to encounter the “key decision-makers,” including External Affairs Minister Lester Pearson and Prime Minister St. Laurent. In those days, however, to encounter was not to meet. The British traditions of formality and rank had formed a hardened crust around the so-called mandarins, whose sway in Ottawa was decisive in the postwar years. Even though St. Laurent was a francophone, he brought the manners of Quebec City’s Grande Allée to an Ottawa that warmly embraced his almost regal bearing. His style contrasted strongly with the rough bonhomie of Premier Maurice Duplessis in Quebec. Despite their propinquity, there is no evidence that Trudeau and St. Laurent ever had a conversation during his time in Ottawa. Trudeau had considerable respect for St. Laurent, however, particularly for his work when, as justice minister, he made the Canadian Supreme Court the final court of appeal for Canadians.30
Ottawa at mid-century was very different from London or Paris. In contrast to London’s West End, where the great thespians performed nightly, there was only sporadic amateur theatre in Ottawa. Paris bistros, with their excellent cheap Chablis and fine fare, were another distant fantasy. Junior civil servants normally brought bag lunches to work, while senior officials dined at the cafeteria of the Château Laurier. Across the river in Hull, alcohol flowed more freely, but few bureaucrats dared risk any hint of the bohemian life. Trudeau correctly described mid-twentieth-century Ottawa as “an English capital” where English was the only working language.
Later studies confirmed this view; the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism pointed out that the recruitment of francophones actually decreased considerably in the Department of External Affairs after the Second World War. In his account of Ottawa’s mandarins at the time, historian J.L. Granatstein is scathing in his description of the “cultural blindness” that “has to be seen as an unconscious expression of the English-Canadian view of Quebec as a land of happy (if slightly disloyal) peasants, notaries, and priests.” Pauline Vanier, the wife of the pre-eminent francophone Canadian diplomat of the time, told him that her husband’s francophone compatriots were treated no better than “natives.” Trudeau’s experiences as a public servant testify to these criticisms: most of his lunches were with the relatively few francophones in Ottawa, while his memoranda are nearly all in English.* His most frequent luncheon partner was his old friend Marcel Rioux.31 However, he was completely bicultural—indeed, multicultural—in his choice of female companions in Ottawa.
As always, Trudeau was extraordinarily diligent. Although he was eligible for twenty days of leave in his first sixteen months, he took only seven of them. His supervisor was the similarly industrious Gordon Robertson, perhaps the finest Canadian public servant of his generation. Robertson, who was only two years older than Trudeau, recognized that a well-educated young francophone was a precious asset in federal-provincial relations and assigned Trudeau major responsibilities in that area. Trudeau, in turn, approached the arcane details of the Canadian Constitution with a zest for the subject that he retained until his death. In a climate where the correction of grammar and prose style was usual, Robertson rarely found fault with Trudeau, and in most cases he resp
onded with such comments as “Thanks, very interesting.”32
Both the quality and the quantity of Trudeau’s work were remarkable, even though some of it was surely not congenial. As in law school, Trudeau may have resented the unimaginative tasks, such as the list of over fifty pages of federal-provincial agreements he was asked to compile, but he completed it quickly and thoroughly. When he finally went on vacation in October 1950, he described how all his major responsibilities were being fulfilled. His duties included such diverse subjects as civil aviation, territorial waters, peace treaty implementation, loans to immigrants, and the Sub-Committee on Coastal Trade. He gently chided Norman Robertson, the clerk of the Privy Council, over this last project, indicating in a note to his supervisor—Gordon Robertson—that the most senior public servant had not responded to Trudeau’s memorandum on the subject: “Presumably there is no urgent business.”33
Trudeau himself attended promptly to business, a quality that impressed and sometimes surprised his superiors. Obviously, they did not expect the opinionated and spirited intellectual to carry out menial tasks with dispatch. Like a seasoned lawyer, he could argue a case where his own opinions were different. This fierce foe of conscription and wartime registration dispassionately analyzed “national registration” between 1940 and 1946, concluding that it might serve to “locate individuals who had been separated from one another during an evacuation.”