Portrayed in the press, Julie Couillard says, as a whore, she was dressed like a virgin yesterday, in a demure white sweater top that tied at the neck, a slim skirted suit, minimal makeup.
It is a theme that appears frequently, if awkwardly and is never quite reconciled, in Ms. Couillard's tell-all book, My Story, available in stores tomorrow. It was to promote the book that she submitted yesterday to a daylong series of interviews in a suite at the boutique Hotel St. Paul in Old Montreal.
Ms. Couillard is spitting mad still at her ex-lover, the former foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier, but the way she has chosen to defend herself – by laying bare her private life and detailing her lovers, albeit mostly by pseudonym – is curious.
I pointed out to her that on Page 229 of her book for instance, she was outraged that at their first meeting, a restaurant dinner with a group of people, Mr. Bernier had kissed her on the cheek. “I don't wish to appear prudish,” she wrote on that page, “but I must say that I found him quite forward.”
Yet two pages later, Ms. Couillard was describing their first date, which ended up with them in bed – or as she delicately put it, “what was bound to happen happened.”
I had planned to say that no worries, she didn't appear prudish in the slightest, but as with much and many, Ms. Couillard is easier to make fun of from a distance. In person, all I managed was to suggest was that perhaps this wasn't the way to convince the Canadian public of her essential goodness.
“It's obvious here we are in 2008,” she snapped. “And maybe it's because I'm a very naive woman, but I was under the impression that what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
“We're not in the 1950s. How is it that a woman, and I'm going to be turning 40 next year, how is it that a woman who has more than, what, three or four men in her life at 40, all of a sudden it's normal to be seen a slut?”
She also had an explanation for the discrepancy between the woman enraged by a peck on the cheek and the one who slept with Mr. Bernier on their first date – but even that was replete with contradictions.
That group dinner, she said, was a business occasion; she was there as a businesswoman, and with two of the top dogs at Kevlar Group Inc., Philippe Morin and René Bellerive, for whom she was then working. “It [the kiss] was totally out of context,” she said. “We're 10 people at a table, it's a business context, I'm meeting Maxime, I'm there in front of my brokers.” But, as she writes in the book, Mr. Morin had also brought along four young women, scantily clad: How much of a business setting could it have been, really?
But the people who mattered to her, she said, were there on business. And, “Especially because of those young girls who showed up,” she said. “I didn't want him to mistake me for one of those. I had to make that clear to him.”
Just what her business is, or has been, remains fuzzy to me.
In the book, she describes a variety of jobs – she tried selling cars, waitressing, modelling, acting, studied hotel management and for a brief period, trained to be a dental hygienist – most of which by her own admission she stayed at only a short time. Various business development deals kept folding, usually when she was betrayed by one or another of her male partners (and once by a woman, who also fell in love with her); startup companies, including one that would service refrigerated trucks, seemed never to get off the ground.
