Golly, Margaret, what next?

SEOUL, South Korea Nobody and no place is safe from Margaret Trudeau. Even here, where I am trying to do some serious reporting, Margaret's little episodes jump out of the papers.

I am forced to focus for a moment on little Margaret. I do it because of one nagging factor: She: is the one type of woman in the world I am simply thoroughly incapable o understanding.

I can understand the homebody, the earth mother, the devoted wife,. the bitch, the aggressive career woman, the community servant, the militant feminist, the radical lesbian and even the nice ordinary

woman.

For the life of me, I cannot understand the woman who brags: about all the men in the world who will agree to sleep with her.

This, you see, is Margaret's whole: thing. She considers conquests what: most women consider favors or choices.

What other women hold back: from because it is so common she celebrates like Arbor Day.

And now she is telling about it in her new book (which I resolutely refuse to name) and is letting it be known through a Canadian magazine (which I also refuse to name) that she had an affair with an American politician (whom I also refuse to name) for whom she might have been No. 10,542.

Georgie

Anne

Geyer

Now, in this super-analytical age, we have to ask why Margaret, who also thinks it's good she abandoned her three infant children because it will teach them to stand on their own six little feet, should have this bedroom-as-proving-ground

obsession.

Those who think about it at all think she is probably getting back at her husband (certainly nobody calls him Lucky Pierre anymore). This could well be so. She stops intermittently to ponder soberly how she really loves Pierre and the children.

The high point in their relationship was when he slapped her, she has said, which one can certainly understand, at least from his point of view.

I suspect she just needs to be talked about. In a remarkably short period of time, she has proved conclusively that she 1) can't act, 2) can't take photographs and 3) can't write. What is left, I ask you, for a pretty woman who wants, to use the word lightly, to make good?

Well, if she were just plain Margaret Gooch from the Wide Open Spaces, she would make a nice receptionist. But she has Pierre Trudeau's name, so she can indeed sell something.

In short, the only thing that turns out to be noteworthy about Margaret Trudeau is her willingness. And she has indeed been selling that to

us.

I am really afraid that this may sound catty. God knows that is the

last thing I would have wished. I am just trying to gain some understanding of this certain kind of woman who so perplexes me.

But, I admit it, perhaps I am being unfair. Perhaps what I am really afraid of is the Margaret Trudeaus glutting the market.

After all, if girls like Margaret are any indicator of the future, it is the men who will be murmuring to themselves, don't give away anything you can sell.