Frost Set in Fast in Trudeau Marriage

A new biography of Canada’s former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau says he quickly gave up hope of intelligent conversation with his new young wife, Margaret, telling dinner guests to carry on in French although she hardly spoke the language.

“Don’t worry about her, she wouldn’t know what we were saying if we were speaking in English,” he would tell guests, according to “Trudeau and Our Times: The Magnificent Obsession,” published this week.

His marriage to the former Margaret Sinclair, 29 years his junior, exploded publicly in 1974, just three years after they were married, when she left him and their three children to join the glittering, globe-trotting jet setters.

While the book’s choice bits are not new--Margaret Trudeau having told all in her own 1979 book, “Beyond Reason”--authors Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson try to explain how such a brilliant man as Trudeau could be thus humiliated.

His big mistake, they conclude, was to marry a woman more like his exuberant father than his strait-laced mother: 22-year-old Margaret, described by his biographers as “the possessor of a sensibility best described as California (northern style).”

Even Trudeau’s bitterest enemies winced when she was photographed dancing at New York’s tony Studio 54 club on the night in May, 1979, when he lost an election.

Margaret briefly returned to Ottawa to help with the packing. In one of the book’s grimmer incidents, she laughingly urged two Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers to throw the defeated Trudeau into the swimming pool during a goodby party for the staff.

“For the onlookers, it was an unforgettable sight: the intellectual statesman clinging grimly with both hands to a door jamb until two beefy Mounties succeeded in breaking his hold and pitching him into the water fully clothed.”