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. 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. 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.
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.”
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. 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.”
Back in Vancouver, as the marriage, set for March 4, 1971, neared, the wedding dress took shape in the Sinclair house and the cake was baked. 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 noticed that he was intense and frustrated, especially in the Commons in February, when he mouthed the infamous “fuddle duddle.” A week before the wedding, Margaret went to her 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.” But he kept the news from everyone else, including those with whom he worked most closely. A snowstorm closed the Ottawa airport the morning of Thursday, March 4, but when the skies opened briefly, Trudeau rushed off to fly to Vancouver. Marc Lalonde accompanied him in his limo, 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.
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. 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 Margaret’s sister 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 14. 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 to their honeymoon in the Sinclairs’ mountain log cabin.
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 in 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.
Excerpted from Just Watch Me. Copyright © 2009 by John English. Reproduced by permission of publisher Knopf Canada. All rights reserved.
