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When we last left the former First Lady of Canada in May 1979, MARGARET TRUDEAU, her ‘loose lips’ in public {seated in front of Liza Minnelli} had just cost her husband his position as Prime Minister and made her an outcast…
“I miss being exposed to the leading thinkers of the world,” she later lamented to Vanity Fair.
Maggie was blamed not only for the pantyless pic, but also for having danced the night away as her estranged spouse went down to defeat: “On the night Pierre lost the Canadian election—May 22, 1979 {11 days after her frontal flash]—Margaret had a fabulous time,” recounts the New York Post, “donning white pants and stilettos at her favorite club of infamous decadence [Studio 54]. It was the third night in a row spent there.”
Though, to be fair, dancing does seem to run in the family, eh?
With his wife boogying in the Big Apple, Trudeau was forced to face the press with young son Justin as his only support—the future Prime Minister whose pants could not support him 32 years after his parents split {a repeat of mom’s wardrobe malfunction} as he worked out at (would you believe?) Prostate Day Canada…the disease his dad died of in 2000.
“My days of paparazzi fame are behind me,” Margaret Trudeau says today. “I am no longer the fresh-faced first lady of Canada.” But her son is now the face of the nation {“He’s my boy and he’s taking on the biggest, biggest job”}, so Mom says she was “obviously hurt” when critics wrote “he was more of his mother’s son than his father’s, a dig that suggested Justin Trudeau was all Margaret’s flash without Pierre’s intellect.”
As Canadian Broadcast News put it recently: “‘Justin is a mixture of us both,’ she said. But the irrepressible Margaret Trudeau can’t resist adding one more thought (and flashing the famous Trudeau temper): ‘He may have my hair {hopefully not there}. He certainly doesn’t have his dad’s.’”
“I smile at the memories,” 67-year-old Maggie reflects today, “wince and wink for the bad ones, and know that I have lived.” So let’s re-live them with her…
When she left Trudeau, Margaret was 29—he, 29 years her senior. “We were doomed from the start,” she wrote of the marriage. “I was a free-spirited hippie who yearned for wide-open spaces.” And intimate bedrooms: “There’s nothing anti-feminist about showing a lovely body,” she boasted back then. “I don’t have a single négligée, but I’ll normally wear a garter belt and stockings {with lovers}. I like putting them on. It’s a turn-on.”
Among those turned on was Love Story stud Ryan O’Neal…who was dancing in the sheets with Maggie even before she’d moved out of Pierre’s pad. Dumping date (and tragic co-star) Ali MacGraw at Studio 54 to spend the night with Canada’s foxy first lady—note his same shirt holding hands with Ali before Mrs. T moved in (below)—the duo began what she termed “a one-week stand of Hollywood romance…a rather sordid affair.”
“At the end of the week,” Margaret “went banging on Ryan’s door and was told to go away—his son was visiting.” Undeterred, she writes: “Hitching up my short red leather skirt, I scaled the incredibly high wall around his house…Ryan was not pleased.” She sought solace by heading to Hollywood to meet up with Jack Nicholson—whom she’d earlier had sex with in the back seat of his luxury car: “I discovered just how much room there is in the back of a Daimler,” she recalled. The actor…and the actual auto below!
Days later, Maggie says, “We made love all night”…until his live-in lover Angelica Huston arrived in the morning! Needing a shoulder to cry on after being ousted by O’Neal, the still-First Lady reunited with Jack “to explain her previous embarrassing behavior and instead got caught by a house detective getting it on with Nicholson in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel’s men’s room” (just off the lobby, below).
The one lengthy liaison that the current Canadian P.M.’s mum has kept mum about involved another famous politician: “It was sudden, it was fantastic,” Margaret gushed in her first autobio. “He was a high-powered American, a charming southerner [south of Canada that is] whose name is of no importance.” Unless it happens to be Sen. Edward Kennedy: “Every paper in town was spreading the story,” she wrote in her second memoir. “Rumor has it that Margaret Trudeau’s Southerner is none other than Teddy Kennedy. Were they right? It’s a secret I intend to keep.”
But no longer: “Sex is a basic instinct,” she admitted in her third tome, in April 2015 {well after the senator’s death}, “and sexual attraction can be incredibly powerful. I remember the first time I met Teddy Kennedy. I felt such a pull toward him that we couldn’t stand within a couple meters of one another. Pierre {her husband at the time, early 1977} was not amused.” In fact, “he became suspicious about her New York fling and asked if she’d been unfaithful,” according to the Celebrity Sex Register. “In reply she seized a kitchen knife and ran out into the snow,” as she writes, “tearing off my clothes to find a bare spot for the lethal blade. ‘O.K.,’ I screamed at Pierre. ‘I’ve fallen in love.’ ‘You’re sick,’ he answered.”
“In the eyes of the world my weekend with the Rolling Stones was the freedom trip to end all freedom trips,” Margaret mused in her 1979 memoir. “My escapade was yet another example of what a wicked wife I had become, flaunting my infidelities in Pierre’s face.” Considering that it was the couple’s sixth weddinganniversary (March 4, 1977), his wife’s visit to the Stones’ Harbour Castle hotel suite caused quite a scandal: “Maclean’s, the top Canadian magazine, had a front cover of Maggie Mick [Jagger] in a bathrobe with what looked like a joint in his hand.” Snipped the Prime Minister: “That’s a band I don’t care for.” But who did Mrs. Trudeau care for? “I’m not a groupie,” she snarled. “There was no mucking with Mick.” Apparently not, but that didn’t stop a much-repeated joke from making the rounds: “The Trudeaus have been doing some work to their new garden. Pierre has been mowing the lawn, and Margaret has been laying the stones.”
Actually just one—as guitarist Ronnie Wood revealed in his 2007 memoir: “From the moment I met her,” he wrote, “we spent as much time together as possible. We shared something special for that short time. We had a wonderful time and her husband’s name never came up. And that was the way it went down.”
Apparently she went down a few years later with an up and coming journalist who is all mouth: “It was like she had never been made love to before,” Geraldo Rivera wrote in his 1991 book—which became ironic after he tweeted kudos to Maggie’s son upon his election. “It was like she was unleashing years of pent-up frustration.” Things exploded, the rat Rivera reveals, in a small boat on a lake in Central Park: “I rowed us to a secluded spot. Right there, the estranged First Lady of Canada lent new meaning to the term ‘head of state.’”
