Bouchard’s Wife Was Raised in Orange County : Unpolitical: She is a self-described ‘Navy brat’ from Los Alamitos with a French mother and an American father.
If Lucien Bouchard seems the unconventional politician, then Audrey Best Bouchard is the equally unconventional political wife.
Born in France on the Cote d’Azur to a French mother and American father and raised a “Navy brat” in Los Alamitos, she holds both U.S. and French passports, but not Canadian citizenship. This means she can’t vote for her husband.
While she has campaigned with him in Quebec, she is no fan of the numerous political dinners, meetings and other events that can quickly fill his schedule, and she avoids many of them.
Audrey Bouchard rarely gives interviews, and the Canadian press seems unsure what to make of her. Often, writers here fall back on Southern California cliches, with references to her blond hair or labeling her the “Valley Girl” (though she never lived in the San Fernando Valley).
With barely suppressed dismay, Bouchard declines to discuss in detail her depiction by Canada’s press: “I guess they’ve portrayed me the way they see me, but it’s not always the way I see myself. . . . I don’t mean to complain about their attention, but I would prefer to be completely out, really.”
She laughs, however, at well-meaning friends who lament what they assume is her lonely life with two children in Montreal while her husband works in Parliament in Ottawa.
“I would say I’m very independent, first off, and . . . I enjoy my solitude immensely. . . . I have two small children, and that’s difficult, of course, raising my children when I’m alone a lot, but when I put the kids to bed and I’m all alone in the house, I’m very happy,” she says.
She is a booster of life in Quebec, extolling the charms and ease of living in Montreal. But she concedes there is much about Southern California that she misses “terribly,” mainly family, friends and, in the depths of a Canadian winter, the weather.
Her family moved to Orange County when she was 2, after her father, James Best, a U.S. Navy officer, was transferred from his Mediterranean posting. When they arrived in the United States, Bouchard’s mother, Marie-Josee Massay, spoke little English. Though she subsequently learned, to this day she speaks to her daughter in French, and Bouchard replies in English.
There’s a similar bilingual pattern developing with the Bouchards’ sons, Alexandre, 4, and Simon, 3. While French is the predominant language at home, Audrey Bouchard spent the spring working to improve her children’s English, so they could more easily make friends this summer while visiting her parents in Laguna Hills.
After graduating from high school, Audrey attended Cypress College for a year, then went to work at McDonnell Douglas in Huntington Beach. In 1986, with her first marriage to her high school sweetheart ended, she quit and traveled for a year.
While flying from Paris to London for a connecting flight to California, she dropped a magazine into the aisle. The man in the seat across from her picked it up and struck up a conversation. He was, he told her, Lucien Bouchard, a Canadian diplomat in Paris headed to Calgary on business. He asked her to breakfast in the London airport while they waited for their respective flights, but she hesitated.
“I was real leery,” she recalls, “I didn’t know this gentleman at all.”
She did give him her California address, and it wasn’t until the first letter arrived that she learned he was Canada’s ambassador to France. When she moved to Paris to live with her grandmother and perfect her French, they began dating. Two years later, they were married.
Never personally involved in politics, Audrey Bouchard admittedly had a difficult time understanding why her husband would want to leave the ambassadorship and, at Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s request, return to Canada to run for Parliament. “But I could see he was very tempted by it, and he had already been over two years in Paris and was ready to move on,” she says. “I didn’t try to dissuade him.”
The couple have stolidly accepted his up-and-down political career since, the explosive controversy he provokes and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police bodyguard assigned to him. In separate interviews, they expressed very similar sentiments: This is the life we’ve chosen. It comes with risks as well as opportunities. It’s worth it. Let’s get on with it.
The one resentment they both admit to is the separation from the children enforced on Lucien Bouchard by his career.
The result, Audrey Bouchard said, is that, when he is home, the children “have the run of the house, everything. . . . It’s pure fun, and that’s OK, because it’s so rare.”