In her Chicago show, Margaret Trudeau refocuses the microscope she lived her life under, and talks about that time the Queen kept her upright
Margaret Trudeau’s early life was burned by the spotlight. For her show in Chicago, she directs it.
It is as unfair to Margaret Trudeau as it is inevitable to frame her as the wife of one Canadian prime minister and the mother of another. But, look, I’m just going to start out by telling you that the current Prime Minister’s mom led an audience at Chicago’s Second City in chanting “F--K YOU!” one night recently, and it was entirely charming and everyone there seemed to enjoy themselves and feel that this was something they all really needed.
This swearing symphony occurred on the opening night of Trudeau’s solo show, Certain Woman of an Age, which was workshopped at the Second City in May and arrives at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival in July.
The production is a storytelling memoir with a sprinkling of stage directions and a set comprised of screens displaying photos from Trudeau’s life. It appeared that about half the audience were women who had achieved the same age of certainty as Trudeau, who is 70, and many of them responded to her with the kind of enthusiasm that Oprah inspires: not merely a celebrity, but a beloved friend they just hadn’t met yet.
Trudeau spent much of her early adult life gobbled up by the press and the public at large—married to Pierre Trudeau, so young, so beautiful and so obviously on the edge of shattering, possessed of an untameable wildness that she would only realize years later was undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Trudeau’s animating cause now is mental health, and her show is wrapped intimately around that issue.
Anita Rogers bought a ticket because she remembered Studio 54, the skimpy outfits, Pierre Trudeau dating Barbra Streisand, the whole swirl of it. The bipolar news years later was unsurprising to her. “I thought she was nuts,” she said. “I thought she was kind of inappropriate considering who she was.”
Kay Collins, the friend Rogers attended the show with—both are from Chicago, and exactly Trudeau’s contemporaries—had watched the antics of a young Margaret Trudeau through a different lens. “Her life was so much more interesting than mine,” she says. “I was in an office 40 hours a week, my life was so drab, and . . . you’d read about her and she’s close to my age, and my god, she can do all of this stuff.”
When the show started, Trudeau literally leaped out of the wings: Ta-da, here’s Margaret! Her entrance, like the entire show, felt like an exercise in choosing, directing and using the spotlight that had burned her earlier in life. “Maybe you heard whispers about me,” she said, leaning conspiratorially toward the audience to hiss, “Margaret is crazy!” Then she continued cheerfully: “You don’t have to whisper. I was crazy!” The audience was hers.
Trudeau’s beauty is nearly its own character in this show, but lest that sound distasteful, it comes across as both winsome and razor-sharp: yep, I was stunning, and the world treated that as a natural resource to be strip-mined, but now it’s mine and I’m going to have some fun with it. The posters and programs feature a photo of Trudeau surrounded by a flower-child crown, and the photo is remarkable both for being beautiful and for making zero attempts to blur out the years she’s earned.
There is a sense that perhaps Trudeau wants the show to be one thing—an exploration of mental illness, an exercise in li ing stigma and exhorting people to take better care of themselves—while the audience just has an endless appetite for stories about Being Margaret Trudeau. There’s enough of both, and a few moments when Trudeau elbows the audience in the ribs to satisfy both urges. (“I was dating a famous actor. I’m not going to say who, because he’s not important,” she said, then continued: “Ryan O’Neal.”)
The show is shaped by questions from the audience—which Trudeau had helpfully prepared herself in advance. The first question was, “Are you a feminist?” Trudeau affirmed that she was, then described how when she was younger, the message was that women were delicate creatures in need of protection. As she spoke, a black-and-white photo appeared on the screen beside her: a twentysomething Trudeau, almost painfully luminous and doe-like. “What a load of BS,” that woman’s older self drawled from the stage.
She was made an “accidental feminist,” she said, by virtue of moments like attending a dinner at the White House when, with her marriage disintegrating beneath her, she chose a dress she thought would li her spirits, only to learn from the next day’s newspapers that she had insulted Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter with her too-short hem.
“These days, young women are born into their own ‘f--k yous,’ ” Trudeau said appreciatively. Her own first attempts were a beseeching question—“f--k you if that’s okay?”—before she learned to own it. “Say it with me: ‘F--K YOU!’ ” she exhorted the audience, waving her arms like an eccentric symphony conductor, and they enthusiastically joined in.
In terms of the political men against whom Trudeau is o en defined, Pierre looms large, and unflatteringly, in the show: he was, in Margaret’s telling, cerebral to the point of absurdity (“What do you think of Plato?” as a pickup line is an interesting choice), retrograde and disengaged from her suffering in the glare of his political spotlight. But she also portrays him as charismatic and an excellent co-parent once they realized they were better off not married. ( Justin gets only glancing mention in the show, and then mostly as a set along with his four siblings.)
Margaret Trudeau, of course, has incredible stories. There was the time she attempted to curtsy to Queen Elizabeth while wearing
‘I THOUGHT I WAS JUST REBELLIOUS AND RESTLESS, BUT IT WAS MUCH MORE THAN THAT,’ SAYS TRUDEAU
a “very high, very fabulous” pair of heels, then felt herself keeling over, on the verge of humiliation; the monarch maintained a steely grasp on Trudeau’s hand and, without ever dropping her rope-line smile, wrested her back to a vertical position. Then there was Pope John Paul II talking politics and faith with Pierre at length, then turning to literally pat Margaret on the head and congratulate her for being blessed with three sons, which led to her furiously disavowing the Catholic Church on the steps of the Pope’s summer palace.
Then there is the epic scale on which you can have a manic breakdown as the Prime Minister’s wife. A er the 1974 federal campaign, Trudeau was struggling, and she decided a day of shopping in Montreal was needed. Then she got to Montreal and found it wasn’t quite the thing, but Paris surely would be. And since you could get on a plane with no passport or money in those days if you were her, off she went to Paris. But then of course Paris wasn’t the tonic she needed, but Crete had to be. Pierre finally tracked her down when she went to the Canadian consulate to ask about a passport.“I thought I was just rebellious and restless, but it was much more than that,” she said. When she was eventually hospitalized, she found odd similarities—space that isn’t your own, protocol for everything, constant surveillance—with life at 24 Sussex. “Do you know what prepares you for the mental hospital?” she asked. “Being a prime minister’s wife.”
In spite of the more obvious parallels with his father, Justin Trudeau has said he is his mother’s son, sharing her sense of spontaneity and her drive to connect emotionally. “I’m definitely proud that I’m more like my mom in many ways,” he told Mac
lean’s in 2012. It is precisely that expressive quality in the Prime Minister that seems to have curdled for the public in recent months, amid scandal and upheaval. That made it all the more arresting to watch the mother from whom he inherited those qualities be goofy and earnest and exposed, and have a crowd lap it up. A er the show, when much of the audience had le the theatre, Trudeau emerged to mingle. It was impossible to tell which of the people she was greeting were personal friends and which were strangers and fans, because there was mutual hugging and gushing and intense emotional exchanges all around.
Collins and Rogers were among the audience members remaining. When Trudeau made her way toward them, Collins asked a question she’d been mulling over: was the crisp white shirt Trudeau was wearing from Max Mara? Trudeau grasped the front of her shirt, stretched it forward and proudly declared that it had cost $65 and come from Madewell. “Max Mara is too expensive!” she hollered.
Rogers had been surprised that the show was as heavy and serious as it was, because she’d expected something more akin to standup comedy. Indeed, the weightiest and most heartfelt moments in the show arrived when Trudeau spoke about the loss of her son, nature-loving Michel, who was skiing when he was killed by an avalanche in 1998 at the age of 23. Trudeau recalled the last time she saw him, when they said goodbye and he drove away, but then inexplicably slammed on his brakes and ran back to sweep her up in a hug and tell her he loved her. “Some things you don’t want to live through,” she said.
A year a er Michel was killed, Pierre was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and Margaret says he refused treatment. And so she found herself standing beside his casket in the fall of 2000 with their two remaining sons, buckling under her grief. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder; it was Jimmy Carter, quietly insisting she was strong and could withstand this. She saw Justin collapse onto his father’s casket, and another hand fell upon her shoulder: Fidel Castro exhorting her to let Justin collect himself and stand up, as a man should be allowed to do.
In the months that followed, her children would call and she would click back into place the mask she had needed at various points in her life. But slowly and painfully, she realized that she had her four surviving children, her friends and, ultimately, herself to live for. In preparing for the show, Trudeau said she had finally opened the boxes of photos she hid away a er Michel died, and they made her weep and then smile and laugh. She had hoped to help others with this show, she said, but she ended up helping herself, too.
Trudeau’s parting message to her rapt audience was that there is always a way to go on. There is always something you can do to make it better, a reason to keep going, someone who will offer a kind word or a firm hand on your shoulder when you need it. “If your life has been utterly bizarre,” Trudeau said, “sometimes it’s Jimmy Carter or Fidel Castro or the Queen of England.”