Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci Read Free Book Online Page B

original in the Trudeau family, it was not Pierre but his father, Charles. Charles had indeed trained in the law but quickly grew bored with it and turned his mind to other pursuits. Correctly predicting the great future that lay ahead for the motor car, he started the Automobile Owners’ Association, a sort of loyalty program that for a small membership fee offered discounted gas and repairs at Charlie’s growing string of service stations. In 1932, by which time he had thirty stations and fifteen thousand members, he sold the business to Imperial Oil for $1.2 million. Then he took the money and made such clever investments—in mining, mostly, but also in an amusement park and the Montreal Royals baseball team—that in the very heart of the Depression he quickly managed to turn a small fortune into a much larger one.
    Whatever hardships, then, Pierre may have endured while his father was establishing himself, by the time he was thirteen the family finances were such that money would not be a concern for him for the rest of his life. By then Charlie Trudeau,a hard-living bon vivant who dominated any room he was in and was forever holding late-night gatherings and jetting off to parts unknown, had apparently taken on a godlike status for the young Pierre, having managed by sheer force of will to pull the family up from the common lot into the upper crusts of Quebec society. Trudeau’s take on his father in later life was usually as this exalted figure, slightly distant and unknowable, but all the more godlike for that. Yet the sheer energy of the man must have put a fright in him. It was Charlie’s irritation at his son’s frail, sensitive nature as a young boy that had started Trudeau on the path of the athleticism he was constantly parading in later life. In home movies of the time, Pierre was always mugging for the camera or engaging in antics that foreshadowed the ways his own sons would one day behave around him in an effort to get his attention. In any event, Charlie, in between his late nights and his business trips, set high standards for Pierre, and Pierre, whether in worship or terror, always did whatever it took to live up to them. Though by nature almost his father’s opposite—retiring where his father was the consummate extrovert and tending toward the refined where his father tended toward the crude—much of what he became could be seen as a kind of offering to him, a re-channelling of his father’s irrepressible energy and will through his own, very different character.
    “My father was gregarious, outgoing, expansive,” he told Gale Zoë Garnett years later. “I am not. Never have been. I am a solitaire, really. When I do something big and playful, like that pirouette behind the Queen, I am, I believe, pretending to be my father.”
    Just a few short years after he made the family rich, Charlie, never one to slow his pace for the sake of his health, fell dead from a heart attack. He was in Florida for the Royals’ spring training when he came down with pneumonia. Pierre’s mother and sister went to tend to him, though the next news Pierre and his brother Tip had in Montreal was of their father’s death. Fifteen at the time, Trudeau said afterwards, “His death truly felt like the end of the world.” His other reaction, however, was to think that “all of a sudden, I was more or less the head of a family; with him gone, it seemed to me that I had to take over.” It might be simplistic to read an Oedipal wish-fulfillment in this thought, though over the next years—when he wasn’t off at Harvard or the Sorbonne or chasing revolutions—Trudeau would come to fulfill this role as the family’s head mainly with regard to his relationship with his mother, Grace. When Charlie died, Grace came out of the shadows to become a dominating presence not only in the family but on the Montreal social scene, and the man who was invariablyon her arm when she was out and about was her son Pierre, who kept