Just Watch Me by John English

Author:John English [English, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37298-7
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2020-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE FALL OF

PIERRE TRUDEAU

For Pierre Trudeau, the world was not unfolding as it should. When, on election night, he spoke of a beautiful world despite all its cynicism and grief, he again drew upon “Desiderata,” the poem often found hanging in college dorms and hippie hangouts in the sixties—a reminder of halcyon times when it seemed that a new political age had dawned. That vision of change crumbled on May 22, 1979, as English Canadians decisively tore up the remnants of Trudeaumania. The next morning, melancholy mingled with sadness when newspapers throughout the world featured a photograph of Margaret Trudeau dancing wildly in the early morning at New York’s fashionably notorious Studio 54. The newspaper coverage that followed was not kind. According to the Los Angeles Times, which published a large photograph and a detailed story of the event, Margaret thought Pierre’s defeat was “a shame because [she] loves Canada.” The conservative Chicago Tribune, which also featured the photograph, mocked her claim that Pierre would be good in opposition because he would fight “boringness.” She told reporters amid the din of the disco that the defeat had upset her greatly and that she planned to fly home soon to be with Pierre. “I’ve never left him,” she declared. “He’s the most wonderful man I know. We’re always together even though we’re apart.”

The marriage had been irremediably broken for some time, but the erstwhile fairy-tale couple came together again as they prepared to move their possessions out of 24 Sussex Drive. Apart from his mother’s home, it had been the only house in which Trudeau had lived as an adult. The eleven years he had spent there changed his way of life dramatically—initially, because of the large retinue that served him and, later, through the presence of a wife and three children. When Pierre and Margaret legally separated in 1977, he gained custody of the children, but Margaret remained very much a part of their lives and had visiting rights for her sons, which she exercised fully. She spent five days every two weeks with them when she was in Ottawa, and sometimes Pierre joined the group. On one visit in 1978, for instance, they took the boys on a day’s canoeing trip. According to Margaret, “we packed a picnic of their favorite food [and] joked all day long.” But then it was time to depart. “Mommy, don’t go,” Michel, the youngest, pleaded when Margaret told him she had to leave to finish her latest film. Justin, the oldest, explained: “She has to go. She’s working.” Sacha, the bluntest, rejected this justification: “Why doesn’t she work at being a mother then?”1 But as we shall see, she did, very hard.

Anger drove Pierre and Margaret apart, but as Margaret said on election night, her love—let’s use her word—for him endured. Pierre’s feelings for her seem to have been an unusual blend of frustration, occasional bitterness, a sense of failure, and lingering affection. The children were a continuing bond, and, to their

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