“I absolutely did not know until I experienced it that there is a line between sanity and insanity,” says Margaret Trudeau, sitting on the sofa in her apartment in Montreal. It’s minus 7C outside. A log fire burns gently in the grate behind her. She speaks quickly, talking about two grief-filled years, in which she lost first her youngest son, and then his father, the great love of her life.
The son was Michel, a writer and contented ski bum. Skiing in British Columbia, in 1998, an avalanche swept him off the edge of a glacier and into a lake. At least, they think this is what happened. They never found his body.
The father was Pierre Trudeau, a giant figure in Canadian politics. The phrase “glamorous Canadian prime minister” is a bit like “warm day in Montreal”: it doesn’t mean much unless you live here. But it doesn’t make it any less true. He was a dazzling operator whose liberal reforms changed the country.
“I’d never met anybody like him,” says Trudeau. “I was only 19 when we met.”
Beside him, Margaret had been something akin to Diana, Princess of Wales, in the national consciousness: an ingénue who married the 51-year-old prime minister in 1971 and was catapulted into a life of protocol and public scrutiny. She bore him three sons and rattled around the grey stone mansion at 24 Sussex Drive, Ottawa – Canada’s 10 Downing Street – feeling trapped and lonely.
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They divorced in 1984 and she remarried, but he remained the dominant figure in her life, and the death of their youngest son forced them together again. Then he was diagnosed with cancer. He refused treatment and died two years after Michel, in September 2000.
“It was so much death, so much sorrow, so much grief,” she says. “I didn’t know that at a certain point you can’t take it any more. I was abusing myself: I was smoking a lot of marijuana; I was drinking fine Scotch. I was trying to hide. I cut myself off from everyone.”
On a snowy night in December of that year, at the begging of her second son, Sacha, a psychiatrist arrived at her home. “Margaret was in her nightgown, quite emaciated and with her hair unkempt,” Dr Colin Cameron later recalled. While Cameron was preparing forms to have her committed to a psychiatric ward, she went to the basement, put on a ski suit and ran out into the snow. When the police found her, they had to strap her to a trolley: she fought like a wild thing.
This was the turning point in her life: the moment she saw the line between sanity and insanity, accepted that she was bipolar and sought treatment.
Something else was emerging, too. In the paroxysm of national mourning for Canada’s great liberal leader, Canadians discerned the outlines of a political dynasty. “We have gathered from coast to coast, united in our grief, to say goodbye,” Justin Trudeau proclaimed at his father’s funeral. He recalled his father’s many political comebacks. “He won’t be coming back any more,” he said. “It’s up to us, all of us, now.”
“I tried to be a good wife, but I was lost in my gilded cage. I had to get free
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And now, of course, Justin Trudeau is the prime minister. You may remember the morning last October when news broke of his landslide victory and the world, which had not been paying attention, woke up to the fact that Canada was now being ruled by a muscular fellow who looked like a matinée idol. Photos were circulating on Twitter; you could see a tattoo on his shoulder. I remember thinking blimey! And then: why is he topless? He was about to take part in a boxing match, that’s why.
I ask his mother if she was surprised by the global swooning that followed. “No, Justin’s been golden since early in his life,” she says. “He was a bit of a bully because he was the eldest of three little boys. He was physically very good at everything. Learning to ski, no trouble; learning to swim, no trouble. Just sailed through easy-peasy.” Justin was very lucky, she says. And loyal. “He has the same friends: they’re called ‘the Boys’,” she says. “One of them is in parliament with him now.”
After his election, much was made of the fact that Justin would now be going to live in the house that he grew up in. But it was also a strange turn of events for his mother.
“Imagine my horror,” she says. “I thought of 24 Sussex Drive as the crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system.”
She spent so many years escaping that house – running off to New York to party with the Rolling Stones, or with Andy Warhol at Studio 54, while Canadians watched, scandalised. When she finally left for the last time, she slammed the door and said to herself, “Never again.”
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Well, has she returned? “I went back last week,” she says. Her son, his wife and their three children are not actually living at the house, because it was found to be unsuitable for a young family – something she could have told Canada years ago. “It’s toxic,” she says.
While 24 Sussex Drive is refurbished, her son and his family are lodging on the estate of the governor general, the Queen’s representative in Canada. It’s across the road. “It’s a lovely, lovely home,” she says. “There’s a forest; it’s easy for the RCMP [the Mounties].”
But there’s an indoor swimming pool at 24 Sussex Drive, built when the Trudeaus were living there the last time, so they all trooped over there to use it. “We just had a swim on Sunday. It’s surreal,” she says. “I had to have a moment with the guards at the gate.”
They were not, presumably, the same Mounties who struggled to contain her in the Seventies. “They all know the legends,” she says, waving her hand gleefully. “I said, ‘Can you believe I’m back?’ They laughed so hard.”
I go to meet the legend on a wintry day, landing at Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport. She lives in an apartment near the centre of Montreal. There’s a brief negotiation at her door, to get me in without letting out a long-haired black cat named Hiroke. “He’s a ninja cat!” she says. He keeps trying to escape. I must say this seems entirely appropriate.
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Margaret Trudeau is 67. She has very striking blue eyes and beautiful, very regular and very white teeth. I know it sounds odd to say that, but she is proud of them – she writes about them in one of her memoirs. I find myself admiring them. She reminds me of Vanessa Redgrave, circa the 1996 Mission: Impossible film, flirting huskily with Tom Cruise, incisors glinting wolfishly, except that Trudeau is more maternal, and slightly scatty.
Are those your Barbara Bush pearls, I ask, pointing at the bracelet around her wrist. I think you said you were going to get some.
“Yes, because we’re the only two right now that have had two,” she says. “A husband and a son … But no, these are just silver. I think the Barbara Bush pearls are a good idea as
I get older, because the neck starts getting very ugly, according to my grandchildren. They say, ‘Why are you so cracked, Grandma?’”
Besides the pearls, Grandma is wearing leggings and long patterned socks so thick they resemble boots. She was curling her hair when I arrived, and a green roller, which had fallen to the floor, embeds itself in one of her socks as we walk through to the living room. There’s a page of John Lennon’s diary in a frame on the wall, from May 22, 1980. “Justin found that for me,” she says.
“Justin has always been golden. just sailed through, easy-peasy
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It’s a To-do list. Item four is “Marmalade”, five concerns whether they ought to “make sure both cars have full gas tanks”, and item six is “Margaret Trudeau book” – presumably her 1979 memoir. He read your book! “It was on his list; we would assume so,” she says. “Whatever, he wrote my name!”
Trudeau sits on the sofa and begins to talk about mental health. From February to June she now travels the country, much as she did with Pierre Trudeau before the 1974 elections, except this time she is campaigning about brain diseases, depression and “my experience of untreated living” – of living without the medication she now takes. She is helping to break the last great taboo, she says. “The thing that people are most afraid of talking about.”
She is certainly not afraid to talk about it. She talks at a rate of knots. I begin to wonder if I will ask her anything at all. I also think: if this is Trudeau on mood stabilisers, what must she have been like, for all those years, when the mania struck?
She uses the stories of her own life in her speeches, “because I sure have battled”, she says. At mental health conferences, “I think of myself as the bit of fluff,” she says. “I come on after dessert. I entertain them because I have good jokes. But I hit them between the eyes.”
For she does have a cracking life story. She grew up with four sisters in Vancouver. Her father was a teacher; her mother had been his favourite pupil. After they married, he went into politics as an MP. Maggie was his tomboy: sparky, attention-starved and clever – she won a scholarship at university. She wanted to be a foreign correspondent or an ambassador.
During her last year at university, in 1967, the family travelled to Tahiti to holiday. There, Maggie dated the French national waterskiing champion, a 21-year-old Adonis from a wealthy family. Lying on a raft in the bay one afternoon, however, she watched another man slalom skiing. This man came to join her.
“My first thought was that he was old, with old skin and old toes,” she writes, in her 2010 book, Changing My Mind, although he “did have nice legs”. She was 19; he was 48. She had no idea that she had been chatting to Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian justice minister.
“He said, on that trip, to two colleagues, ‘If I ever marry, she’s the one,’” she tells me.
The future Mrs Trudeau was too busy ogling her waterskiing champ. “I didn’t give Pierre Trudeau a second glance,” she says. “He was the same age as my mum.”
After university, she cashed in some shares her grandmother had given her and travelled to Morocco, where she built herself a hut on a hippy commune. She tried free love, liked it; she smoked marijuana, loved that, too. She met Leonard Cohen; they hung out for a bit in Casablanca. She also met a cocaine smuggler who tried to recruit her as a mule: that was when she decided it was time to come home.
I tell her it puts my gap year in the shade.
Back home, she went off to stay with her gran to think about what to do with her life. Her mother called her there one day, to say that fellow she met in Tahiti had phoned. Not the waterski champ; the old fellow. He was now the prime minister.
So 30 years before Richard Curtis imagined the PM going round to a young lady’s house to take her out on a date in Love Actually, this very thing came to pass in north Vancouver.
The PM arrived in a blazer and shades, tanned and charming. She recalls her sisters giggling nervously, and their mother trying to pretend it was no big deal. Trudeau liked his “boyish manner” and adds, “I couldn’t stop myself sneaking a quick look at his tight butt.”
His car was in the driveway, with two plain-clothes officers in the front. And off they went for dinner at a mountain-top restaurant. They talked about her life and he asked if she’d thought about working in government. It seems to have been a casual inquiry, but she was now “infatuated”. A month after his “brotherly kiss” goodbye, she got a job in Ottawa as a sociologist at the Department of Immigration and spent a fortnight working up the nerve to call the PM. When she did, he invited her for dinner at Sussex Drive. So began a courtship, conducted there and at his official summer retreat at Harrington Lake, north of Ottawa.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single prime minister with a huge personal fortune must be in need of a wife. In the summer of 1970, many thought he ought to marry Barbra Streisand, who had called him a cross between Marlon Brando and Napoleon. Instead, Trudeau was secretly engaged to a 21-year-old hippy.
They married on March 4, 1971, at a Catholic church in north Vancouver, and travelled to her parents’ ski chalet for a brief honeymoon. At 6.30 the next morning, the phone rang: it was the Queen, calling to offer her congratulations. Apparently, Her Majesty had failed properly to calculate the time difference.
Maggie says she supposes it was a good thing to tease Her Majesty about in later meetings. “She and Pierre were good friends,” she says. “They had a little flirt going on; they were about the same age. No, she’s a little younger than him.”
I ask if she looked to Prince Philip for guidance on being a noted spouse. “Never met a man like him. No.” She thinks, “He is very smooth; he does a very good job.” She just isn’t entirely on board with the way he does it. “I tried to be quite careful about it because, quite frankly, I didn’t know about the way of making everybody laugh by putting one person down,” she says. “Walking through an audience, he would pick on one [person]: ‘Her blue eyeshadow, was she a mermaid?’ Everybody was laughing, but that one person is mortified.”
There were many other encounters like this. Zhou Enlai, Mao’s right-hand man, talked to her about women’s lib. Fidel Castro chatted her up one night on a beach. He told her his eyes were weak, and “every day to make them stronger I force myself to look at the sun. I find it very hard. But do you know what I find harder? To look into the blue of your eyes.”
He’s probably incorrect from an ophthalmic point of view, but still, what a line! “Oh, my darling Fidel!” says Trudeau. “And he’s still hanging in there.” You ought to do a world tour, I say. Go and hit up all the old stagers.
“I know!” she replies. “I’ve had some great lovers; I’ve had some great friends.”
But life on the home front was not nearly so much fun. The new Mrs Trudeau found herself confined to an old mansion, guarded by Mounties, with a workaholic husband who believed in the equality of the sexes but seemed incapable of applying his charter of rights and freedoms within his own household.
He would not allow her to work, she says. “He wanted a good wife, barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen.” Gloria Steinem started posting her copies of Ms magazine. “He said, ‘Oh my God, what kind of garbage are you reading?’”
On top of this, she suffered depressions and manias. Once, after a ferocious row, she ran out into the snow, clutching a knife. In 1974, she was hospitalised, though to keep it secret, she was confined not in a psychiatric ward but a suite for men with erectile dysfunction.
Being the PM’s wife appears to have exacerbated her as yet undiagnosed bipolar disorder. One moment she would be riding on the back of a Harley-Davidson through the desert, clinging to the King of Jordan; the next she was shut up in 24 Sussex Drive.
She noted that Queen Alia of Jordan, the third wife of a Middle Eastern potentate, seemed to have more freedom than she did. “She and King Hussein saw how pathetically I was doing,” she says. “I certainly didn’t get any help from Pierre. I tried to be a good wife, but I was lost in my gilded cage. I had to get free. I got free.”
On one of the first of her escapes, she ran away to Toronto and spent the night in a hotel suite with the Rolling Stones.
But I should imagine many people would have liked to have run off with the Stones.
“I know. [But] the consequences of that were huge.” Not least because the Rolling Stones’ PR called the press, thinking it would be rather good publicity for the band if even the wife of the PM turned out to be a groupie.
“Pierre and the Queen were good friends. They used to flirt a little
In the wake of that controversy, Trudeau began leaving the PM and the children for weeks at a time, to take acting classes in New York, popping up beside Andy Warhol at the edge of the dancefloor in Studio 54. “He’d just be going, ‘Oh, gee,’ pointing out people,” she says. “I enjoyed being next to Andy.”
She gets up to fix us both a snack. I follow her to the kitchen and lean against the fridge, taking care not to dislodge the photo of her son, the prime minister, attached to it with a magnet.
“Studio 54 was a raving drug scene,” she says. “There was a lot of cocaine, as I recall.”
The club’s founder, Steve Rubell, would call her up in the morning and say, “ ‘Maggie, you got to come tonight. All the stars are going to be there.’ He’d say, ‘I’ll send a car.’”
His limousine would collect her and drop her off at the end of a long night. On the way home, there were these “garbage bags full of money” in the car, she says. Rubell and his partner, Ian Schrager, were eventually jailed for tax evasion.
“I say, ‘I saw nothing!’” says Trudeau, smiling, as she pulls some cheese and cold cuts from the fridge.
Well, you don’t want the FBI coming after you.
“No. I know nothing!” she exclaims. “What else do you want on your plate? I’ve got some lovely, lovely chutney.”
She tells an anecdote about a famous New York author, but then spoils it by withholding his name. “It was a party. Liza Minnelli had like 1,000lb of feathers coming down and … He was passed out on the floor covered with feathers and blubbering, and I had to help him home. He had mixed cocaine and Quaaludes. I was a bit of a mother hen at Studio 54.”
Her New York exploits were plastered all over the papers. Canada watched with horrified fascination. They called her “Mad Maggie”, and every interviewer asked the same question: Mrs Trudeau, why have you abandoned your children?
Eventually a psychiatrist prescribed her lithium for manic depression, and although she later came off it, she returned to Ottawa in a better state to negotiate the end of their marriage. She did not seek a financial settlement, in spite of Pierre Trudeau’s fortune, and they shared custody of the children. She feels she was made to shoulder the blame for the end of their marriage.
“He punished me for the audacity [I had] to walk away. I didn’t walk away. It was mutual,” she says. “Any woman would have [done the same]. Any mother who wanted to protect her children from the isolation that Pierre lived in, and his disdain for anyone crowding him, which is what we call friends.”
There were two places where she felt really happy in that marriage. She had a living room designed at 24 Sussex Drive that was for family only. The two-year-old Justin Trudeau, on seeing it for the first time, ran around shouting, “Freedom! Freedom!” and it became known as “the Freedom Room”.
The other place was the PM’s summer cottage at Harrington Lake. “It was just nirvana,” she says. And now it is her son’s.
She recalls going back there and the memories it triggered. “Both Justin and I, we walk in after his election. Our eyes were welling up. The smell! It’s there. I can’t believe that I’m back where I once belonged, because I never belonged there, I thought. It never was ours.”
And yet they are back, occupying those rooms once more. When she watches the news, she sees the caption at the bottom of the screen “that says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. I think, ‘It should be saying Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.’ That’s what it used to be saying, and now it’s our boy.”
Sometimes she wonders “why I’ve been cast as a leading lady in such a big reality show for so many years”, she says.
But she has survived, and all is forgiven: Canadians have forgiven her. “You know what this means,” said a friend of mine from Montreal, after Justin Trudeau’s election. “We’ll be hearing from Maggie again.”