Margaret Trudeau’s manic sparkle hid depression

FORMER Canadian “wild child” First Lady Margaret Trudeau turns 70 today.

Margaret Trudeau, wife of Canadian prime minsitner Pierre Trudeau, dancing at New York’s Studio 54 disco in the late 1970s.

PHOTOS show her flinging around the dance floor at Manhattan hot spot Studio 54, demurely accompanying then husband, Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, and standing by Prince Charles in a frilled, plunge-neck cocktail frock.

Even as she scandalised officials by smuggling drugs in prime ministerial luggage and smiled alongside Cuban president Fidel Castro as he held her toddler son, it appeared Margaret Trudeau was having a ball.

In 2000 she revealed her critics, who included Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, had been right: all was not well with Canada’s wild, flowerchild First Lady. Known for affairs with Rolling Stone Ron Wood, actors Ryan O’Neal and Jack Nicholson, and possibly US senator Edward Kennedy, slim, brunette Trudeau was the cover-girl of politics in the late 1970s.

Trudeau, whose eldest son Justin was elected as Canadian prime minister in 2015, was born 70 years ago today in Vancouver, the fourth of five daughters of Scots-born James “Jimmy” Sinclair, a former Canadian fisheries and oceans minister, and his wife Kathleen.

Margaret Trudeau in the 1970s

Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau with his wife Margaret, and their young son Justin in 1974. Picture: AP

She grew up between Vancouver and Ottawa during her father’s political career, and in 1969 graduated from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. Describing herself as “a highly sexualised teen”, she then spent seven months “on the hippie trail” in Morocco, using marijuana and mescaline and “obsessed with Keats”. At 19 she joined her family for a Christmas break at Moorea in Tahiti, where she began dating Yves Lewis, 21, a French waterski champion whose grandfather was a co-founder of Club Med. While rafting alone an older man, “clearly an athlete”, joined her.

Their lively discussion progressed to snorkelling together, although Trudeau thought the Canadian politician “was old” and had odd holiday reading tastes with History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Then a sociologist in Ottawa, she was with her grandmother in British Columbia in 1969 when her mother telephoned to say Pierre Trudeau, then Canadian prime minister, had called to invite her to dinner.

Margaret Trudeau swings to the music at New York’s Studio 54 in the late 1970s.

Actor Ryan O'Neal with Canadian prime minister’s wife Margaret Trudeau at New York's Studio 54 club circa 1979.

Uncertain about their future, Trudeau romanced a student while Pierre dated singer Barbra Streisand, who later also had an affair with O’Neal.

Only close family knew when Pierre and Trudeau decided to marry in 1970. She converted to Catholicism, agreed to give up marijuana and took French lessons. She also sewed her own wedding dress and her family baked the cake for the wedding in Vancouver on March 4, 1971. Pierre was 51, she 22.

Dubbed Pierre’s “flowerchild bride”, their son Justin was born on Christmas Day, 1971, followed in 1973 by Alexandre, and Michel in 1975. “After the birth of my second child I fell into the deepest depths of depression,” she says. Although the life of the party in her youth, Trudeau says she was sometimes also “really sad”, but that her mother’s family routines “kept me balanced”.

From the pits of depression, Trudeau rose to extremes of “mania, where you do these, what other people would think are really bad acts, reprehensible things. There’s so much dopamine in your brain that you can’t access logic or reason. And you’re so high, so high, sparkling about, but you don’t sleep and you don’t eat and you don’t get better.” Jagger also picked up on her sparkle when he denied an affair, saying “She is a very sick girl in search of something. I wouldn’t go near her with a barge pole.” In Ottawa, she says a psychiatrist and political colleague of Pierre’s suggested Trudeau may be manic-depressive, “which might account for my strange behaviour and my acting-out and our difficulties”.

Margaret Trudeau Kemper and second husband real estate Fried Kemper with their son Kyle in 1984.

In 1979 she socialised with Andy Warhol in New York as Pierre contested an election. A psychiatrist who “was a socialite as well” prescribed lithium as a mood stabiliser. “I started taking it, and within a month, I wrapped up my acting classes and moved back to Ottawa.”

When Pierre lost an election in May 1979, she was partying in New York in white pants and stilettos. As he again served as prime minister from 1980 to 1984, she studied photography and made two movies, L’ange Gardien and Kings And Desperate Men.

Their sons remained with Pierre when the Trudeaus divorced in 1984. She married real estate agent Fried Kemper and had son Kyle in 1984 and daughter Alicia in 1988, when she again had post-natal depression. She had been in hospital twice before her marriage collapsed when son Michel died in an avalanche in 1998, triggering her “final psychosis, my complete breakdown”. After Pierre died in 2000, she could not eat or drink. “I was forced into hospital by intervention, by the police taking me in,” she says. “It is the best way to get into a psych ward. I took it on, and I got better. I didn’t want to let people down any more, fall into that depression.”

Trudeau has since volunteered as honorary president of WaterAid and a mental health advocate.