Stories About Storytellers by Douglas Gibson

Author:Douglas Gibson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2011-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Shortly after the news of Pierre Trudeau’s death was broadcast, I was sitting in the back of a cab in downtown Toronto. The cab driver and I shared our regrets about the news. The driver was a Greek who came to Canada as an adult in 1967, yet his heavily accented English allowed him to summarize elegantly how he felt: “I grew with him.”

Late in his life, I was fortunate enough to get to know Pierre Trudeau, the author. At McClelland & Stewart we paid a great deal of money to publish his Memoirs, based on the 1993 CBC TV series that began each episode with him, clad in an elegant buckskin jacket, paddling a canoe on a misty lake. It was a brilliant image, and the series drew millions of viewers.

When the manuscript came in, however, bearing the company’s hopes for a successful year, there were obvious problems with it. Such major problems, in fact, that after I had spent a sleepless night our chairman, Avie Bennett, and I decided that it had to be reworked: in rough terms, made chronological rather than thematic. We flew to Montreal, and Avie, who knew Trudeau, introduced me to him for the first time. Given a choice, I would have made our first meeting an easy, congratulatory one, but c’est la vie.

We sat in his prow-shaped office, jutting out high above the St. Lawrence River, with the snow starting to fall down past the deep windows. After the usual courtesies, Trudeau asked us what brought us to visit him. Avie turned the conversation over to me, and I started to explain why the book had to be rewritten.

Did Trudeau listen, shrug, and then say, “Sure, whatever makes sense to you”?

No. He leaned forward, the eyes narrowed in that look we all remember, and he started to make objections.

“But what about this?” “But what if we did this, what would happen to that?” On and on, a tough, unyielding barrage of questions. Had I considered this? How would I handle that? Obviously, I’d thought this through very carefully, so I was able to answer all his questions, while Avie watched like a fascinated tennis-match spectator.

If I’d ever said, “Of course, Mr. Trudeau, if you don’t like it, we don’t need to do this,” I’d have been lost. Because he was grilling me to be sure I knew what I was doing. And in the end he leaned back, changed his tone, and said, “Fine, your plan makes sense. Let’s do it your way.” And thereafter, with Memoirs and the other three Trudeau books we published, we had a terrific working relationship, marked by his professionalism in getting proofs back to me or my colleagues exactly when he’d promised, every time.

There’s a lesson here, I suggest, about Canadian politics. A prime minister runs up against people with all sorts of ideas, some of them excellent, some totally crazy. One way to spot the ones who do know what they’re talking about is to grill them aggressively — and I can tell you, he was very, very good at it.

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