There’s something dark, almost to the point of the occult, in the way Pierre Trudeau is often remembered. Scan across the shelf of books about him: titles refer to his “shadow,” the notion he remains “hidden,” and one even calls him a “magus.” The most famous biographical quote about him claims “he haunts us still.”
Perhaps it’s all this gloom that makes the story of his courtship and marriage such welcome leavening in the tale. The dancing entrance of Margaret Sinclair, quintessential flower child, brings to the story a tie-dyed splash of contrast, occasionally sheer silliness—not to mention doomed romance, rare beauty and rock-star celebrity. No wage and price controls or constitutional amendments in this chapter.
Yet the famous Maggie and Pierre saga is more than a mere diversion from the main current of the Trudeau narrative. This exclusive excerpt from Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968-2000, the second volume of John English’s authoritative biography of Canada’s 15th prime minister, fits their love story into tumultuous political times. The University of Waterloo history professor had exclusive access to Trudeau’s papers, and interviewed his family members and friends, some of whose privacy he protects by quoting them anonymously.
He shows Trudeau’s private and public sides intersecting poignantly when he is drawn closer to Margaret by their being together on the night Pierre Laporte, the Quebec labour minister, is murdered by his FLQ kidnappers. Yet it would be a mistake to try to integrate Margaret too tightly into Trudeau’s political life. He certainly didn’t.
In fact, English says if he had to pick one aspect of Trudeau’s character that struck him repeatedly in his research, it was the way he kept the different parts of his life from intermingling. “I was surprised how compartmentalized he was. It allowed him to be a very disciplined person as prime minister,” English said. “People who were very close to him on something fundamental were totally closed off from other parts of his life.”
For instance, Jim Coutts, enormously influential as Trudeau’s principal secretary from 1975 to 1981, never considered himself a friend of his boss. Marc Lalonde, who also served as principal secretary and then emerged as a powerful cabinet minister, was never invited to Trudeau’s house for dinner. But then, they were men. “Trudeau seemed to pour his heart out with women,” English says. “With men, he always had his elbows up.”
Just Watch Me reveals how Trudeau’s private circle saw his public persona. In early 1969, he erupted several times in short order, railing against the media at a news conference, storming out of a meeting, and swearing at a protester. The public saw a mercurial leader. An old flame from the 1940s, Thérèse Gouin Décarie, saw an unhappy friend. “Pierre, our Pierre,” she wrote in a note English found in his papers, “what has happened to you?”
He was famously disciplined about everything, from keeping fit to exercising his mind. If he behaved erratically, Trudeau instantly regretted it. But he was consistently attracted to women who were impulsive. He liked the excitement of dating outspoken celebrities like Barbra Streisand and Margot Kidder. More involved was his relationship with Carroll Guérin, whom he’d first dated in the late 1950s. She’s described by English as “strikingly beautiful, Catholic, liberal, fluently trilingual, independently wealthy, and knowledgeable about the arts,” and, perhaps most importantly, “not in awe of Trudeau.” Remarkably, Trudeau consulted Guérin, to whom he had repeatedly proposed, about marrying Margaret.
In hindsight, the pairing of the 52-year-old prime minister with a 22-year-old hippie looks bound to fail from the start. To his detractors, the folly fits with their view of Trudeau as a less than serious figure. Indeed, by the time he took his walk in the snow in 1984, it was easy enough to see him—except on the Constitution and national unity—as increasingly irrelevant. After all, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had ushered in a new faith in free markets and deregulation. But English finds Trudeau throwing himself into a 1981 bid to persuade the rich North that its economic priority should be doing much more to help the poor South. His skepticism about the anti-government-intervention vogue in economics looked retrograde.
