Just Watch Me

by John English

  Trudeau then flew to Nassau with Margaret, Joe and Debby MacInnis, and other friends and booked in at the Small Hope Bay Lodge on the little island of Andros in the Bahamas. Trudeau’s aides warned MacInnis that scuba diving was “a hobby, not a passion” for the prime minister. The aides seem to have completely misunderstood their boss’s nature. He was never a man of “hobbies” in anything that he undertook—including his lifelong, passionate exploration of the seas with MacInnis. MacInnis would eventually take Trudeau on dives of remarkable depth, including one of 250 feet. He later said that Trudeau was always “curious about the natural world and his place in it.” But at the time there were other passions to satisfy. Margaret and Pierre “lived in a derelict shack on the beach and dived all day, spending romantic and exhausted evenings pacing the sand” as Pierre asked endless questions about her past. He claimed he needed to know everything, to prevent blackmail, and he kept saying, “I know you’ll leave me one day.” She said she would never leave him, but they agreed to test their love by a separation: Margaret would return to Vancouver, not Ottawa. When they were ready, they would marry, but in the meantime, they would tell no one of their intention. Margaret did tell her mother, who initially opposed the match, and then they began to plan for the wedding. Jimmy Sinclair was kept in the dark until late, as were Margaret’s friends, most of whom learned about the relationship when they read the wedding notice.

  Margaret began to take instruction for conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, and after some debate, she agreed to give up marijuana. She also began French lessons at the Alliance Française in Vancouver. She describes Father Schwinkles, the priest who guided her conversion, as a shy man with little imagination: he presented her with a manual called What It Is to Become a Good Catholic, with the relevant parts underlined in black. When Margaret professed concern that the book suggested that only Catholics went to Heaven and asked what would happen to her Protestant friends, he reassured her that Catholicism represented the “jet plane to Heaven.” Protestants, presumably, were condemned to turboprops. A disturbed Pierre, who called nightly, gave her a more academic reading list, which included Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and St. Augustine’s Confessions, to complement her mandated reading. It was a practice he continued after they married, as he tried to ensure that Margaret appreciated the intellectual foundations of her new faith.33

  In November 1970 Trudeau was scheduled to meet Streisand again in New York, but if he did the press learned nothing of it and, presumably, neither did Margaret. She recalls, however, coming upon a pile of photographs of various women in Trudeau’s desk drawer, with Streisand’s picture on top. “Are you ranking us?” she asked. “Maybe,” he replied wryly. By Christmas 1970, however, Streisand had begun an affair with Hollywood star Ryan O’Neal, then at the height of his popularity for his performance in the saccharine Love Story. Margaret, as we know, had been with Trudeau the night Pierre Laporte was killed (it was Thanksgiving), and the experience had brought them closer together. The security was a shock, and the lovers, accustomed to secrecy but not heavy security, misbehaved by trekking into the forest one rainy day at Harrington Lake to escape watchful eyes. They got lost, the security forces panicked, and when the pair finally emerged in a clearing, they heard gunshots. There, in the middle of the lake, was an “absolutely bald policeman” holding an umbrella in one hand and shooting a rifle in the air with the other to guide them home. Margaret later wrote that the security bothered her greatly, but she did not heed her doubts about her upcoming marriage to the prime minister. In her dream, she would “turn his cold, lonely life into a warm, happy one.” Late that fall she became completely certain of her choice.34

  Margaret returned to Vancouver in November and began to sew her wedding dress, modelled on a sari Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had given her mother in 1954. Margaret finally told her father that she and Pierre were to marry in the new year, and the former Liberal Cabinet minister was overjoyed. He wrote to Trudeau just before Christmas: “Margaret told me her good news this weekend. Welcome to the family. My very best wish for the two of you is that you will always be as happy together as Kathleen and I have been since our marriage thirty years ago. Sincerely, James Sinclair.” Margaret mischievously asserts in her memoirs that her marriage fulfilled her father’s own dream of occupying 24 Sussex Drive. Whatever the reason, the two Liberal politicians quickly bonded, and Sinclair would later stand by Pierre when Margaret did not.

  With their decision to marry now firm, Margaret’s parents agreed to let her spend Christmas with Pierre. He wanted her to meet his family, and understandably, she dreaded the experience. They quickly selected some presents from the gifts that Trudeau had received in his capacity as prime minister and drove from Ottawa to Montreal. Pierre’s brother and sister, Charles and Suzette, were warm and charming and, according to Margaret, knew immediately that the relationship was serious because Trudeau had not brought other girlfriends home for Christmas. His mother, Grace, who was suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease, could only clasp Margaret’s hand silently as her future daughter-in-law sat beside her bed. In Margaret’s eyes, the past overwhelmed the Trudeau house, in which “not a corner had been altered since Pierre, as a little boy, had fled in terror from a surrealist painting of a skeleton holding a skull.” The parlour where guests were received was dark and oppressive, “full of browns and lace,” with “petit point upholstered chairs.” Pierre and Margaret escaped the ghosts and gloried in the abundant Christmas cheer of a family devoted to one another.35 And sometime during those happy days, they set the date for the wedding: March 4, 1971.

  Back in Vancouver, as the marriage neared, the wedding dress took shape in the Sinclair house and the cake was baked. One by one the other members of the family learned that Margaret was getting married. Pierre called every night in an increasingly concerned state, asking, “Are you sure you want to go ahead with this?” Margaret no longer had doubts. She still had hippie friends and had had a narrow escape when she joined three of them on a trip to the United States a few weeks before the wedding. They were stopped at the border and ordered out of the car, whereupon the police seized a box containing ashes from India, mistaking it for contraband drugs. A matron subjected Margaret to a total body search while a portrait of Richard Nixon “leered” at her. Fortunately, the incident attracted no attention. Trudeau’s friends in Ottawa noticed that he was intense and frustrated, especially in the House of Commons in February, when he mouthed the infamous “fuddle duddle.” A week before the wedding, Margaret went to the shy priest Father Schwinkles, told him she was ready for conversion, and confessed quite a few sins, including the fact that she’d lied about the identity of the man she was dating. It was not “Pierre Mercier” but Pierre Trudeau. The priest gasped, then hurriedly commanded: “Go down on your knees and say the Lord’s Prayer. Do three Hail Marys for your sins.”

  As the day for the wedding approached, Pierre became ever more “nervous and jittery.” He made it “much harder for himself by telling no one,” Margaret says, “locking himself up with a secret and worrying.” He arranged to see Madeleine Gobeil in mid-February and told her he had fallen in love with Margaret and that it was a serious relationship. Madeleine had been his close public companion, and most of his friends thought that she would be his choice should he marry. He had already told Carroll Guérin that he intended to marry a much younger woman he was dating, and they had talked together about how important a family was to him. But Trudeau kept the news from everyone else, including those with whom he worked most closely. On March 3 he gave a speech in which he reflected on the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. “Society,” he declared, “cannot become mature without the full participation of women.”36 That speech and other duties kept Trudeau in Ottawa until the last moment—a dangerous decision, given the weather in that region in early March. Not surprisingly, a snowstorm closed the Ottawa airport the morning of Thursday, March 4, but when the skies opened brief
ly, Trudeau rushed off to fly to Vancouver. Marc Lalonde accompanied him in his limousine, and engulfed in files, they worked all the way through the drive. At the airport, Lalonde asked Trudeau, “What are you doing for the weekend?” “I’m getting married,” Trudeau replied without hesitation and sprinted to the plane.37*

  The wedding day was cool and clear in Vancouver, but the atmosphere in the Sinclair home was feverish. The best-laid plans for a secret ceremony were going awry. Margaret’s hairdresser had influenza, and his replacement had styled her hair to look like a “fuzzy poodle.” The cake Margaret and her mother had baked so carefully was not iced plainly as Margaret had instructed but decorated with little figures of bride and groom, surrounded by bees and doves. Margaret ripped them off, knowing how offensive they would be to Pierre. Trudeau’s sister, Suzette, who had not told her husband why they were going to Vancouver, finally filled him in as they were stuck in a snowstorm in downtown Montreal, missing their flight. Finally, Pierre arrived a half-hour late at the small church where he would wed. It was bedecked with garlands of spring flowers and sprigs of wheat as a late afternoon sun lit the interior. Father Schwinkles had agreed to preside—rather reluctantly, according to Margaret; Pierre’s brother, Charles, was best man; and Lin Sinclair, the maid of honour. Trudeau’s assistant Gordon Gibson, who had been fooled to the last minute, was drawn in to make the wedding party an even fourteen. Margaret’s wedding dress was white, hooded, and exquisite in its simple elegance, and the ceremony proceeded flawlessly.

  Trudeau once again stunned Canadians with this unexpected move, and there were neither crowds nor reporters until the family reached the Sinclair home after 9:30 that evening. The newlyweds lingered long at the reception there, then changed into informal clothes for the drive away on their honeymoon. Margaret’s confused father directed Pierre to a separate room to dress—a suggestion he refused. Late in the night, Margaret and Pierre left in a police car for the Sinclairs’ mountain log cabin.38

  At 6:30 the next morning, the telephone rang. A startled Trudeau leapt from the wedding bed and answered. It was Richard Nixon, thinking the newlyweds were in Ottawa and calling to offer congratulations from Pat and the American people. Other unexpected good wishes appeared on Canadian editorial pages, ranging from the chauvinist greetings from the Vancouver Sun, which congratulated Trudeau for his good sense in choosing a British Columbia beauty, to Le Devoir’s whimsical account of how the provinces had all competed with their own candidates. The gorgeous wedding photos that dominated the media on March 5 were followed by breathless stories of Margaret’s athleticism, recounting how the happy couple had put in four hours of skiing. But of all the well-wishers, John Diefenbaker captured the most headlines with his brief comment: the prime minister, he sonorously declaimed, had had two choices—to marry her or adopt her. Trudeau, who liked Diefenbaker despite many angry exchanges, took the remark in good humour.39

  * Trudeau had dined the previous night with Marshall McLuhan, his wife, Corinne, and his daughter Teri. McLuhan called the visit an “incomparable honour” and reported that Teri and Corinne “insist that their lives have an entirely new dimension as a result of that event!” Referring to Trudeau’s stylish costuming for the football game next day, he praised the “unveiling of the dramatic hat and cloak, the kick-off and the [Montreal] Alouette win.” McLuhan to Trudeau, Dec. 3, 1970, MP, MG31, Series D-156, Microfilm reel H-2069, LAC.

  * Some senior federal Liberals had thought poorly of the three candidates for the Quebec Liberal leadership in 1969. In a discussion on October 2, Jean Marchand reported that all the candidates were “weak and that the Party was going to have difficulty staying together.” Two federal ministers from Quebec, Bryce Mackasey and Eric Kierans, said that “Bourassa was morally weak and would be pushed around.” Bourassa, who had initially supported René Lévesque against Kierans in the 1967 provincial debates about autonomy, was thought likely to “accept Lévesque” as part of the Quebec Liberal Party. Marchand had refused to consider taking on the leadership of the Quebec Liberals, although many had urged him to enter the race. Had he done so, history might have been considerably different (Richard Stanbury Diary, Oct. 2, 1969, privately held). Stanbury was president of the Liberal Party of Canada at the time.

  * Attacks on Trudeau by radical separatists continued to be virulent, though the mocking took different forms. He was often compared to Hitler, Goering, and Mussolini, but his sexual orientation was no longer questioned as it had been in the notorious manifesto. The poet Gérald Godin, who was locked up during the police raids and who later became a Parti Québécois Cabinet minister, contemptuously attacked Trudeau in 1971 as a pimp who managed his whores (his Quebec MPs) for the benefit of American corporate interests (Québec-Presse, Sept. 12, 1971). Vallières, who was gay himself, was surely uncomfortable with the mocking of Trudeau as a “fairy” in the FLQ manifesto, and he became increasingly dissatisfied with his FLQ colleagues while still profoundly suspicious of federalist intentions. He argued in a 1977 book that the entire October Crisis was manufactured by the federal and Quebec governments and that the murder of Pierre Laporte was not carried out by the Chenier cell. The true aim of the invocation of the War Measures Act, he claimed, was to smash the Parti Québécois (Pierre Vallières, Les Dessous de l’opération [Montreal: Québec Amérique, 1977]). Although some members of the Chenier cell repudiated Vallières’s exoneration of them, the belief that the two governments’ goal in invoking the War Measures Act was to destroy the Parti Québécois remains a widely held point of view. However, that view is explicitly denied by Trudeau in interviews and in his memoirs, and the documentation largely supports him. His target was the FLQ, and his anger against Levesque, Parizeau, and others reflected his belief that they were tactically wrong in urging compromise.

  * The problem of context was recognized by Anthony Westell, whose 1972 study of Trudeau’s first government, aptly entitled Paradox, is a model of political journalism. In December 1968 Trudeau responded to the question “How and when are you going to sell the western Canadian farmers’ wheat?” with the rhetorical remark “Why should I sell the Canadian farmers’ wheat?” These words sparked outrage and became central to the litany of western Canadian complaints about Trudeau’s indifference. Westell pointed out, however, that the infamous sentence was part of a five-hundred-word answer that incorporated economic theory, political assessment, and personal thoughts on international development. It might have worked had it appealed to the West’s tradition of economic self-sufficiency, but, writes Westell, “it was never seen in that light, probably because the region was looking for comfort from Ottawa but half expecting a rebuff from mistrusted Easterners.” Trudeau often fell short, with his cutting clips on the one hand and ponderous academic reflections on the other. Paradox: Trudeau as Prime Minister (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 67–68.

  * Under the Canadian Constitution (Section 91 of the British North America Act 1867), criminal law is under federal jurisdiction. It was first codified in 1892 by Sir John Thompson and has been revised several times. It was not exclusive, and prosecution continued to be possible for offences at common law under the British system. The Trudeau-Turner revision, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, came into force on August 26, 1969. This broadest revision to date included the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults, access to contraception and abortion, legalized gambling, controls over gun ownership, and breathalyzer tests for suspected drunken drivers. The code also had many other important clauses, but the “sixties” issues attracted the attention of the press and the public.

  * When similar changes transpired in Britain, those whom it most affected recognized that they represented a sea change. In his diary the British society photographer Cecil Beaton, who was bisexual, observed on December 26, 1966: “This week, one of the most important milestones in English law has been reached, and hardly any of my friends, even those most closely involved, have mentioned the fact that, at last, the recommendations o
f the Wolfenden Report regarding the behaviour of homosexuals have been accepted…. No more important event has happened since the declaration of peace. Yet few people seem to have looked back to remember with what anguish their natural inclinations made them law breakers.” Beaton expressed regret that the change (very close to the later Canadian reforms) had not come earlier: “It is not that I would have wished to avail myself of further licence, but to feel that one was not a felon and an outcast would have helped enormously during the difficult young years.” Many Canadians surely shared these emotions in the spring of 1969. Cecil Beaton, Beaton in the Sixties: The Cecil Beaton Diaries As They Were Written, ed. Hugo Vickers (London: Phoenix, 2004), 168–69.

  * The previous volume of this biography relied on the correspondence between Guérin and Trudeau and erroneously conveyed the impression that Ms. Guérin borrowed money from Trudeau, suffered a serious illness that forced her to use a wheelchair and made her less than a “full woman,” and was “disappointed” by Trudeau when he failed to meet her on one occasion in 1967 as planned. Having now discussed these matters with Ms. Guérin in several conversations, I have learned that she never had need of a loan, that the wheelchair was used only at an airport when she met Trudeau, and that the missed appointment was a misunderstanding, not an angry separation.

  * Many stories indicate that the news of the wedding surprised Madame Gobeil and that Trudeau left their mutual friend Gérard Pelletier to break the news to her. Christina Newman, who knew Gobeil well, suggested that a Toronto Star reporter awoke Gobeil with the shocking news and that Pelletier acted for Trudeau in dealing with her. Pelletier, then secretary of state, did assist Madame Gobeil in securing a position in Paris with UNESCO, a cultural agency, where she went on to have an outstanding career. Trudeau did tell Gobeil about the seriousness of his relationship with Margaret Sinclair in February, but he did not mention any wedding plans. This misunderstanding accounts for the discrepancy in the stories. Many of the friends of Trudeau and Gobeil believe that Trudeau was unfair in the way he handled this incident. The Trudeau Papers indicate that they became good friends once again in the 1980s. See also Christina Newman, Grits (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 330–33. Interview with Madeleine Gobeil, May 2006; confidential interviews.