by John English
The immediate popularity of the charter, recorded in many polls, did not pass directly to the Trudeau government, whose ratings fell steadily throughout 1981 and even more in 1982. The Liberals began 1981 with a ten-point lead over the Tories, but despite much internal dissent directed toward Joe Clark, the Tories were leading 42 percent to 28 percent by the end of the year. Although the charter was received well in much of English Canada, Liberal support fell there while remaining stable in Quebec, where the government and much of the press strongly opposed the constitutional reform, although not the charter.
One of the casualties of collapsing Liberal support was Jim Coutts, who had left Trudeau’s office to run in a by-election in Toronto’s Spadina riding. Trudeau had appointed Peter Stollery, a canoeing pal of his, to the Senate, thereby opening the riding for his principal secretary. But the device seemed too clever, and Stollery much too young for the Senate—and the constituency, Liberal for thirty-six years, rejected Coutts and elected Dan Heap, a radical Toronto NDP councillor. Trudeau missed Coutts. Although they were not friends, they instinctively understood and trusted each other. Coutts had devilishly helped secure Trudeau’s return in 1979 and had managed the first months of power effectively. He retained the “lean and mean” staff of opposition days, and in the view of press secretary Patrick Gossage, he kept Trudeau’s focus on the things that mattered most politically—the constitutional file above all. Coutts’s departure brought a new mood, one that was more open but less disciplined. It meant, in Gossage’s words, that an “end of an era” agenda began to take shape.19
Jim Coutts, like Trudeau, jealously guarded his personal life, and, as a bachelor, he was particularly understanding of Trudeau’s insistence on privacy. One of the conditions of Trudeau’s return to politics, which he had set out clearly to his staff in early 1980, was sufficient time for his children and his own life. For the kids—Justin, Sacha, and Michel—the move back to 24 Sussex Drive was a belated 1979 Christmas present. They splashed about daily in the swimming pool, and their dad became boyish when he came home in the evening, swinging them about as they rushed to greet him and relating a few of the day’s events. Pierre was an enthusiastic father. After visiting him at home, a female friend wrote to him: “You are one of the most attentive, conscientious fathers I have ever met. It’s wonderful.”20 And it was, for both Pierre and the kids. Justin recalls the early eighties as a precious time, when his parents, despite their many preoccupations, played the central part in the boys’ lives. Not yet teenagers, and at that wonderfully curious stage when the world is particularly fresh, the children were encouraged to become individuals, to question, and to know that their parents wanted them to express their talents and their real selves as fully as possible. A young friend of Justin’s from their pre-teen years recalls that “time spent in the company of Justin’s dad was almost always defined by physical and mental challenges: show me what you have learned. Show me what you can do. Show me how you live.” And Pierre would readily show them what he could do, as on the summer day at Harrington Lake when none of the assembled kids could meet his challenge to stand on a surfboard in the water. The boys’ father showed it could be done as the “excited voices of children [counted] off second after unbelievable second” until he finally and elegantly disappeared into the depths.21
Family life became easier after the return to Sussex Drive because Margaret, by then, had a home just three blocks away. During the election campaign of 1979–80, she cared for the boys while Pierre was away. The purchase of the house, made possible by some funds from Trudeau and revenues from Beyond Reason, ended the arrangement whereby Margaret occasionally lived in her own room on the top floor of 24 Sussex or, when Trudeau was in opposition, at Stornoway. Although they tried to make the boys’ lives as normal as possible in the circumstances, they were not. Margaret and Pierre had sometimes fought furiously after the children went to bed.
One night at Stornoway, after Margaret had asked for money and Pierre had offered her only fifty dollars, she exploded in frustration, and in the scuffle that followed, tried to scratch out his eyes. A brown belt in judo, Pierre quickly pinned her down, but the children heard her screams and came running. They pleaded with their father not to hurt her. Finally Micha, who was only four, asked Pierre to come to his room. In Margaret’s words, “they were gone half an hour, talking things over, and Pierre always says that Micha put a lot of sense into him. Then he left.” The incident shook both parents, and they took counselling from a family therapist, undoubtedly a wise move under the complicated circumstances because, however much Margaret sometimes irritated Pierre, such occasional violence was a troubling sign of the anger and concealed furies within Trudeau’s closed self. With the therapist, they discussed their marriage and discovered, again in Margaret’s words, that they “had thought all along that we were really communicating with one another, [but] we were not.” Margaret claims that she became aware that Pierre was essentially a loner—though he used the term “solitary”—and that he had erected “an immense barrier between himself and the outside world,” which made intimate and trusting relationships difficult. But she also learned of, and was touched by, his “appreciation” of her as a mother. He liked the way she “handled” the boys, and she realized that she did love Pierre as a parent for her sons. For Trudeau, the children were a way for him to penetrate that barrier, perhaps for the first time. And despite the turmoil and the emotion, Margaret and Pierre gave the boys a good foundation on which to build the rest of their lives.22
And so Margaret settled into her small house nearby, with its porch and bunk beds. The boys came to her after classes were over at Rockcliffe Park Public School and had their snacks and their playtime before the waiting police car escorted them to 24 Sussex Drive, where they waited for their father to return at approximately 6:45. Having told the boys in the fall of 1979 that they were separating permanently, Margaret and Pierre worked out what was, in effect, joint custody. When they had first split in 1977, Pierre had retained sole custody of the boys but had agreed to “generous” access to the children.* His anger swelled after the publication of Beyond Reason and Margaret’s escapades in the late seventies, but he recognized that the boys loved their mother and wanted to be with her. The new circumstances offered an ideal situation. They agreed that each would “have the boys” a week each, with the weekends negotiated. Pierre wanted them to go with him to Harrington Lake on alternate weekends, but Saturday morning TV cartoons at Margaret’s were too popular. The boys’ tastes triumphed, and Harrington Lake weekends began at noon. Their parents developed, Margaret writes, a “mutual agreement about values such as honesty and loyalty, education (that it should be bilingual) and behaviour (at least when it comes to manners and regular meals). Out of these strengths has come a way of life.”23
Trudeau cherished his time with the boys, and he frequently arranged for them to accompany him on his travels. On one memorable occasion in 1980, he took six-year-old Sacha with him on a trip to Saudi Arabia, where Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the legendary Saudi minister of oil, invited the Canadian party to spend two nights in the desert. Trudeau, always an adventurer, accepted and, with Sacha in tow, stayed in a Bedouin tent. One evening the Arab music began and Trudeau, in desert garb, began to sway to the rhythms with Sacha. Then Trudeau and Yamani danced together in the desert night in an encounter that enthralled the Canadian reporters—and, of course, Sacha. But the memorable moment came when Sacha, clad in Arab dress, eagerly mounted a white camel and rode off. “Sacha of Arabia,” his father joked, “off into the desert. See you tomorrow.”
The boys, like their father, came to love the Canadian North and the frontier. And they were often present when the most eminent visitors arrived in Ottawa. One they particularly liked was President Ronald Reagan, who, like Trudeau, charmed children with his undivided attention and actor’s wiles. On one occasion, former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian, had to act as a translator for a meeting between Tr
udeau and President Sadat of Egypt at the presidential palace. Trudeau solemnly introduced Sacha to the president and to another guest, President Senghor of Senegal. Sacha, who had just returned from the zoo, commented: “At the zoo, earlier today, I saw four giraffes, three elephants, and now I’m meeting two presidents.” Senghor, who understood English, burst out laughing; Sadat, who did not—and Boutros-Ghali did not translate—accepted the words as the praise a president was owed. Even when the kids didn’t travel with their father, they had access to the best tickets for Sesame Street and other shows, and the chance to meet the stars backstage after the performance. And there were their dad’s new friends—the many women who came to call at Sussex Drive.24
The women began to appear soon after Pierre and Margaret separated, but Margaret’s intermittent presence at 24 Sussex made matters difficult. Margaret describes the nervous atmosphere one Friday, when she arrived home just as Pierre was preparing to welcome Liona Boyd. Trudeau quickly changed his plans, and he and Boyd spent an unexpected weekend at Harrington Lake. After Margaret found her own house, Trudeau had more freedom, which he grasped with alacrity. He had told his staff when he returned to office that he must have privacy when he was not working, and he scrupulously separated his private life from public concerns, in a way he could not do when he and Margaret were married. His personal secretary, Cécile Viau, carefully maintained the separation and, on Trudeau’s behalf, expressed outrage when private correspondence was opened in his political office. Trudeau’s closest friends, usually but not always female (architect Arthur Erickson was a constant correspondent), were told to stamp “confidential/personal” on their letters, postcards, or notes, and Viau gave them to Trudeau at the end of the day. The friends knew Mme Viau, and she regulated the various degrees of access they had to Trudeau and enforced the restrictions. She was, Marc Lalonde observes with a wry smile, the “soul of discretion.”25
Trudeau himself was obsessively discreet. To be sure, he regularly squired attractive women on his arm at public events, but he set out clear rules for the numerous women with whom he developed more intimate friendships in the eighties. They were not to speak publicly about the relationship, and their times in Ottawa were normally cloak-and-dagger affairs. Sometimes they would get a flight on the government Challenger when it was nearby. At the airport Trudeau’s chauffeur, who shared Mme Viau’s passionate confidentiality, would whisk them away through private exits and entrances to their meeting with Pierre. The women themselves were generally young, often in the arts or theatre, usually intelligent, frequently extroverted and witty, and invariably beautiful. His personal papers are replete with letters, notes, postcards, and Christmas greetings from women he met on beaches, in airplanes, at diplomatic gatherings, or on the Hill. He flirted continually and outrageously, and despite his concern for privacy, he seemed to enjoy flaunting his attractiveness in the presence of women.
Margaret, for example, recalls one night when she was in her room on the top floor at 24 Sussex while a group gathered downstairs after a reception at Rideau Hall. Trudeau came up to her room, said she would know everyone, and asked her to join them. She discovered Liona Boyd, who had played at the Governor General’s reception, among the group and said “wickedly” to Trudeau, “so you had a mistress play.” Trudeau quickly replied, “Not one, but two”—a chanteuse had also performed that evening. In a similar vein, Allan Gotlieb, Trudeau’s ambassador to Washington, complains in his wonderful diary about a dinner he hosted in honour of Trudeau, which “turned out to be one big pain in the ass,” not least because there were three Trudeau “girlfriends” among the fifty guests.26
Margot Kidder, then at the height of her celebrity, was accustomed to Trudeau’s multiple dates. On March 30, 1983, after a dinner in Toronto with Greek prime minister Andreas Papandreou, she thanked Trudeau “for the evening with the Greeks,” but, she added, “why didn’t you tell me you had a date? How do you expect a girl to flirt over dinner when the man she wants to make eyes at has another girlfriend on his right?” Playing in Pygmalion at the time, she drew Trudeau’s attention to a Shaw quotation: “Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?”
The “girlfriend” on Trudeau’s right that evening was probably Gale Zoë Garnett, a warm, talented writer, actress, singer, and wit who thoroughly charmed Trudeau after they met in the early eighties. Orphaned at fifteen, Garnett had moved from Toronto to New York, where she appeared in plays and wrote, as a teenager, the words and music for the song “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine,” which reached the top of the popular music charts in the United States and endures as a sixties classic. Provocative in its content for the time—a young woman saying she’ll live with a man for a while and then move on—the tune brought royalties and freedom to the young Garnett. When she returned to Toronto, she appeared in the first production of Hair and began a career as a journalist. Her first encounter with Trudeau occurred when she asked him for an interview, and he responded with an invitation for dinner. She replied, “Interviews I can get—good company for dinner is a far greater rarity.” They went out for a Japanese meal in Ottawa sometime in the spring of 1981. Garnett had already learned about Trudeau’s zeal for privacy and wrote: “I could kick myself for not ringing you sooner! What a silly business! I just didn’t think you’d be up for anything that public.”27
The friendship, marked immediately by “naturalness and ease,” blossomed quickly, and Garnett’s frequent letters give a clear idea of what they spoke about. She wrote on June 12, soon after a visit to Ottawa: “God. I keep meaning to ask you about this—it’s been on my mind since I visited 24 Sussex. You told me about Sacha’s 3-question ritual with you. You said that one of his questions that night was ‘Who made God?’ You went on to say ‘and I answered that.’ You were on your way to making a point and I did not wish to interrupt you. But I keep asking, ‘Who made God?’”
Two days later, she reacted to the latest news, knowing that Trudeau himself was angry about the policies of Likud, the leading Israeli right-wing party: “The news is full of Israel. I think I hate Menachem Begin. I hate everything about the way he thinks. Sometimes would you, could you talk to me about this. It is hard to talk about because of the guilt button that gets pressed whenever anyone mentions Israel critically.”
About other aspects of Canadian foreign policy she had doubts—but not about Trudeau’s constitutional success. On November 9 she sent Trudeau “a massive, multiple BRAVO! My God, what an incredible reversal! Yours is a sparely-occupied pantheon—others include Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra, & Olmec Jaguar of the Aztec. Maybe Houdini.” An amusing grouping, but Trudeau took flattery well—and, like most men, especially from women.28
They met the next summer, when the parliamentary furies were at their height. Afterwards, she told him that she had enjoyed a “super visit.” Then she added: “I am always rather skittish about paying you (honest) compliments as I know the Spartan part of you is discomfited by them. I sort of sneak ’em in sideways.” She offered “a whole collection of them” that he could “have upon request.” That Christmas she gave him “the book of nonsense,” and Trudeau thanked her and told her he was already enjoying it. Garnett granted Trudeau respectful admiration for the demands imposed on him by public life. She urged him to take “silliness breaks” often, which she correctly advised were important “when one leads a ‘big life.’”
Now in his sixties, Trudeau was troubled by aches and pains, particularly in his back and shoulder. In September 1982, after he and Garnett had enjoyed a swim in the pool and she had joined him in the sauna, she massaged his creaking joints. He especially liked the massage oil she used. So she sent him a bottle of the oil, and in his note of thanks, he referred to it as “half a loaf.” She responded poetically:
In order for this half-loaf to be bred
Into pleasure
You must have a masseuse
Fortunately,
The masseuse
Can be
Had.
It was, she added affectionately, a very “silly note,” written early in the morning. She thanked him for “a lovely time—and it was, as always, wonderful to see you.”
Garnett, not surprisingly, charmed Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou when Trudeau asked her to sit with him and the Greek leader at that Toronto dinner.* The timing was perfect: Garnett hoped to spend the spring and summer in the Greek islands, and Papandreou asked her to stay in touch—which she did. Her next visit was at the invitation of Papandreou and his wife. On her arrival a presidential car met her, and Papandreou, well known for his attraction to engaging women, invited her to dinner and, in Garnett’s words, “talked with me all evening, on all subjects.” She reported to Trudeau on May 30, 1983, “he genuinely liked you, politically and personally, and would deeply welcome a state visit. He suggested October or November (Mrs Gandhi, whom nobody likes very much, is coming in September). He says the Greek people like you very much and that a visit would probably be pleasurable for you. Considering all the things he’s giving me, he’d probably give you Crete!” Encouraging her to sample the Greek islands, Papandreou lent Garnett a seventy-four-foot private yacht, and she embarked on her personal odyssey in early June.29 On June 22 a telegram arrived at the Department of External Affairs from a puzzled Canadian Embassy in Athens: a “Gale Garnette [sic] hospitalized … Subj requested that Prime Minister [be told] that she is presently being treated in infectious disease hospital Aghia … for meningitis…. Subj told us she lives in Toronto, no/no family in Canada and has refused twice to show us a [passport].” An official, accustomed to whimsical demands for prime-ministerial intervention, sent it, with a dismissive note, to Cécile Viau in the Prime Minister’s Office. Immediately, a message came from Mme Viau to Athens and External: “PM Trudeau, who knows Ms Garnett well, is dismayed by the news in your telegram and wishes her quick recovery. Are you able to send flowers in his own name…. For your own information, Ms Garnett was at the table of honour at the Toronto reception in honour of Prime Minister Papandreou.” The flowers, Ms Garnett wrote in a letter that reflects her very serious illness, were “elegant, graceful and a bit exotic—rather like the sender.” Papandreou, on learning of Garnett’s illness, flooded the room with flowers and sent his own personal physician. With such care, Garnett recovered from the meningitis. Her main nurse, “a gutsy delightful creature named Despina,” told the orphan Garnett: “Others have mothers & fathers, you have Prime Ministers.”30 Indeed.