The Montreal Gazette  |  September 29, 2000

PASSION BEFORE REASON

Former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s turbulent marriage showed his human face

By Eric Siblin

It was a fairy-tale wedding that captivated the nation, reflected the swinging times and celebrated the romantic savoire-faire of Pierre Elliott Trudeau.      The bridegroom, a “millionaire swinger-thinker,” as one press account characterized him, ended his prolonged bachelorhood in March 1971 by marrying Margaret Sinclair, a woman of solid Liberal Party lineage, arresting beauty and conspicuous youthfulness.      At 51, Trudeau was nearly three decades her senior, a worldy, self-sufficient, highly disciplined man who was resolutely free from the emotional entanglements of other people. Margaret, the daughter of a former Liberal cabinet minister, was just 22 when they exchanged vows, and few accomplishments could be cited aside from her almond eyes, auburn hair and the fact that she'd baked the wedding cake.      Given their substantial differences — generational, temperamental, intellectual — the surprise wedding in a West Vancouver church, however enchanting, seems, in retrospect, like an unhappy fate waiting to happen.      Between the ruggedly individualistic mindset of Pierre Trudeau, which brooked little sympathy for personal weakness or emotional neediness, and the rigid protocol imposed on the wife of a prime minister, there turned out to be little wiggle room for a British Columbia flower child fresh out of the consciousness-expanding 1960s.      And so a story that began in standard Harlequin Romance fashion took off on some rough tangents. There were brouhahas over short hemlines, various undiplomatic activities, a public airing of Margaret's grievances and a separation that, when it finally took place, seemed painfully overdue. When Margaret broke free from Trudeau, it looked for all the world like she was running off with the bad boys of rock'n'roll, splitting from her husband in an unhinged tell-all escapade that was rich fodder for unparliamentary publications like Playgirl and People.      Though the very public crash and burning of their relationship dragged both parties through the mud and told most Canadians more than they wanted to hear, Margaret ultimately gave Pierre Trudeau something resembling a human face. For all the mania that surrounded his personality, Trudeau was short on the sort of human characteristics regular Canadians might relate to. He'd never occupied a permanent job before going into politics as a middle-aged man, and he'd held off on a serious romantic commitment.      Margaret changed all that. At first, the relationship seemed a continuation of Trudeau's abiding interest in younger women, a Trudeaumania narrowcasted into a marriage. The newlyweds took a skiing honeymoon in Whistler, B.C., media in tow, with everyone giddy over the refreshing hipness of Canada's First Couple.      When the Trudeaus took an official trip to the Soviet Union two months later, it was more groovy than governmental. Appearing on the cover of Maclean's magazine, the prime minister (sunglasses perched on forehead, hair longish in the back, open-necked floral shirt, sandals) and his wife (big shades, gypsy kerchief, beads, skin-tight dress) cut the glamorous figures of a film director and his starlet venturing behind the Iron Curtain for aesthetic purposes.      “Margaret Trudeau represented in her person a perfection that the press was prepared to embrace with something approaching fervour,” wrote Christina Newman, who covered the trip for Maclean's. “She was like all the pretty girls of the 1968 campaign rolled into one entirely acceptable form - young, lovely and apparently as adoring of her husband and as unharried by internal turmoil as the bride in a baby-oil ad.”      Back in Ottawa, Margaret added some peace, love and understanding to the affairs of state: she cooked organic meals for government ministers and tried to persuade her husband that the cabinet should take a course in transcendental meditation. Their first child, Justin, was born on Christmas Day 1971. Within four years there were two other sons, Sacha (also born on Christmas) and Michel, making Margaret the country's sainted mother, or as she lamented on an off day, “poor old Mother Earth.”      It was “a fairy tale at the beginning of our marriage and our relationship, it was bliss, just bliss,” Margaret recalled recently in the television documentary Passion Before Reason. “But I was very young and had a lot of growing to do, and the world was not a place for fairy tales. Fairy tales don't happen, real life happens.”      Real life surfaced in 1974 after the July election that the Liberals won - with her help. Margaret, then 25, had thrown herself into the political fray, criss-crossing the country by her husband's side and undertaking solo forays with 5-month-old Sacha, doing much to soften the prime minister's aloof demeanour. As young mother, dutiful wife, feminist - braving wolf whistles and the crush of crowds - she struck a chord among the electorate, and became a star in her own right. The Liberal votes rolled in. And then reality hit home. Holed up in 24 Sussex Drive, Margaret no longer figured in the political picture; she felt used and discarded.      In truth, not long after they were wed, disenchantment had set in for both husband and wife. Margaret's grievances and a separation that, when it finally took place, seemed painfully overdue.      From Trudeau's point of view, wrote his biographers Stephen Clarkson and Christina McCall, “his young wife's essential childishness and youthful vacuity began to alarm the serious man under the playboy mask.” And for Margaret, the notion she had married a playboy seemed anything but: “He turned out to be disciplined, preoccupied, given to the rigorous observance of health routines, devout in his religion, and frugal in a way that first discouraged her, then drove her to excess.”      What began as a storybook romance was unraveling. In the wake of the 1974 election, Margaret put her disaffection into action, jetting off to Europe for a trip that produced more friction with Trudeau. She was admitted to the psychiatric wing of the Royal Victoria Hospital for stress. After her hospital stay, Margaret's behaviour clashed more openly with protocol. Unscripted singing at a formal dinner in Venezuela; a see-through T-shirt in Cuba - she wasn't fitting in. Margaret later spoke on television of reaching “kind of a crisis stage” and entering the hospital for treatment of emotional illness. She said she felt “very, very weary and emotionally tight,” and was unprepared for the strains of entering such a public marriage.      As Trudeau himself would later describe in a BBC interview: “Marriage can be a regressive institution. You are young, you're free, you've at last got rid of parental authority. Suddenly you get married, and authority is here again.”      By most accounts, Trudeau's authority did not help. “Tenderly, without realizing he was doing it, Trudeau set her inside a bell jar and cut her off from life,” wrote Richard Gwynn in The Northern Magus, his biography of Trudeau.      Margaret's frustration went public in March 1977 when she celebrated her sixth wedding anniversary in the company of the Rolling Stones. She flew to Toronto for a Stones show at the El Mocambo club, took photographs and was spotted leaving the venue with singer Mick Jagger in a limousine. The headlines screamed accordingly: “Premier's Wife in Stones Scandal,” said London's Daily Mirror. She emphatically denied there was a tryst with Jagger, but the separation had begun with unseemly fanfare.      As Trudeau attempted to run the country and raise their sons, his estranged wife embarked on an extended freedom bender that involved photography, low-budget movie acting, and highly public trysts, most notably with Jack Nicholson and Ryan O'Neal.      “All else is overshadowed by the vagaries of the PM's wife,” Patrick Gossage, Trudeau's press officer, recorded in his diary in 1977, “and the traumatic effect her wanderings have on all those who dote on the moods of power.”      The strain showed on the prime minister, who was seen as distraught whenever Margaret blew through town; the cool devotee of reason who for so many years had neatly avoided relationship baggage was now weighed down by it.      As to his own standing among the electorate, the difficulties in his marriage initially won Trudeau a measure of sympathy. He was able to cast himself as a single father juggling office responsibilities and three kids, coming across - uncharacteristically - as an ordinary citizen with ordinary burdens.      Yet the sympathy vote gave way to a sense that he'd lost control of his own affairs, casting doubt on his governing abilities. Biographers have suggested that between 1974 and 1979, when the prime minister enjoyed a solid majority for his third term in office and should have been at the top of his game, his governing performance fell apart.      In May 1979, political defeat followed the marriage meltdown when Trudeau lost the general election to Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark. Margaret had launched her tell-all memoir, Beyond Reason, timed for a compromising kaboom at the start of the election campaign. The day after the election, newspapers ran a picture of Margaret in full disco throttle at Studio 54.      The post-election atmosphere, however, eventually brought about a mellowing in relations. Margaret moved back to Ottawa, purchased a townhouse and expressed remorse over her escapades. After Trudeau bounced back to power in the unexpected re-election of 1980, he agreed to share custody of the boys with her, each parent alternating one week at a time. Relations were not without rockiness, exacerbated by Trudeau's refusal to give support payments.      Divorce officially came in 1984, around the time that Trudeau quit as Liberal leader and moved back to Montreal. Trudeau demanded and received sole custody of the boys. That year, Margaret married Fred Kemper, a handsome Ottawa businessman one year younger than she, gave birth to two children (Alicia and Kyle) and went through a number of career false-starts.      In November 1998, Michel Trudeau and three friends were returning from a two-day back-country ski trip in eastern British Columbia when an avalanche swept him into a frigid mountain lake. Weighed down with skis and hiking equipment, the 23-year-old microbiologist and ski bum was unable to make it back to shore, and his friends were unable to save him. A search during the summer of 1999 after the ice melted failed to find his body.      Once again, Margaret and Trudeau were back in public view, hand-in-hand at Outremont's St. Viateur Church for Michel's funeral. They still exuded beauty and panache, though transfigured by age and gripped by tragedy. Trudeau seemed suddenly an old man. Margaret was by then 51 - the same age Trudeau was an eternity ago when they became husband and wife. The couple who long ago dazzled Canadians with their elan and youthfulness once again captivated the nation, this time with overwhelming sadness.      Margaret separated from Kemper six months later, saying a major factor in the breakup was her grief over Michel. Her bond with Trudeau, meanwhile, seemed to have grown closer.      “I know that they have remained very attached to each other,” said John Curtin, a film-maker who co-directed the TV documentary Passion Before Reason. “Although they didn't necesssarily hit it off as a married couple, they seem to have given their boys two different sides of life which somehow complement one another: the passionate, romantic side embodied by Margaret, and the more rational, sensible, disciplined side of Pierre Trudeau.”      Looking back a few years ago, Margaret characteristically viewed the relationship in romantic terms undimmed by the passage of time: “Love doesn't die,” she said, “it just freezes, if it's true love.”