Roy MacLaren - student of literature and history, sailor, diplomat, businessman, writer, politician, and cabinet minister - has led a good life, and an interesting one, sometimes as a witness, often as an actor. In The Fundamental Things Apply, MacLaren recounts the details of his varied life and career with wit and with charm.
Of all the great and good – and a few not so good – to whom the Trees introduced us in New York and Washington, David Ogilvy and his American wife, Anne (sadly plagued by alcoholism), became frequent companions, sharing with us weekends at their country house amidst the Amish near Intercourse, Pennsylvania, or dinners at their commodious townhouse on East 84th Street. In Washington Susan Mary Alsop also became a dear friend, always discrete about her famous affair in postwar Paris with Duff Cooper, then the British ambassador, but otherwise full of lively political stories about Washington, London, and Paris. She in turn introduced us to such friends as Alice Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s acerbic but invariably witty daughter, and the less articulate Henry Kissinger, for whom her homosexual second husband, the journalist Joe Alsop, had an erratic admiration. Lee and I were equally taken up, thanks again to Marietta, by David and Vangie Bruce (they of the dinner party at which Schlesinger was first bouleversé by Marietta). Recollections by Bruce of Andrew Mellon, his first father-in-law, in the interwar years and of the OSS in wartime London were matched by their more contemporary insights into attempts to find peace in Vietnam and the convoluted circumstances surrounding the opening of the newly established US embassy in Beijing, both of which Bruce headed, along with his earlier tours as ambassador in London and Paris. Offstage, Lee and I also soon became instant friends of one MP on the Canadian delegation to the UN General Assembly, the compellingly iconoclastic member for Mont Royal.
During the autumn of 1966, we saw much of Pierre Trudeau, who frequently lunched or dined with us, sometimes with Marietta as a fourth, and eventually spent a winter week together at Heron Bay in Barbados. We sensed immediately that what Lord Blake had once said of Lloyd George was equally applicable to Trudeau: “He was an iconoclastic enemy of conventional procedure, set routines, stuffy traditions. Where others accepted he questioned. Where they bowed to orthodoxy he challenged. He had the gift of seeing through the jargon … He took nothing for granted and queried everything.” We were delighted.
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