There once lived a prince charming with his beautiful wife and three sons. Life in the prime minister’s residence was a fairytale for the dashing Pierre and his flamboyant wife Margaret. The couple was Canada’s royal family, loved and adored by all. But the restless fireworks fuelled by an age difference between husband and wife always lurked in the shadows. They began to close in around the young Margaret she was 22, he was 51. Smothered with protocol and security that demanded her carriage to be politically correct, the wife rebelled, breaking free of the confines imprisoning her. “From the day I became Mrs Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” she wrote in her memoir, “a glass panel was gently lowered into place around me, like a patient in a mental hospital who is no longer considered able to make decisions and who cannot be exposed to a harsh light.” Later, in an interview she said, “It was a total catastrophe in terms of my own identity.”

Soon Margaret became Maggie; New York became her watering hole; Studio 54, Manhattan’s most famous disco became her playground. Partying, dancing and schmoozing with celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor, Russian ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov and artist Andy Warhol became her new identity. And love blossomed. The romance between Mick Jagger of Rolling Stones and the prime minister’s wife fired the gossip columns, as did her steamy affair with the English rock musician Ronnie Wood. Senator Teddy Kennedy too, reportedly had a roaring fling with Canada’s first lady. Maggie jetted between New York and Ottawa. She continued to stun and shock everyone with her outrageous acts unbecoming of a prime minister’s wife. At an official banquet in Caracas, Margaret suddenly climbed the table to serenade her hostess, the Venezuelan first lady; at a state dinner in the White House she came dressed in a mini dress; at a dedication ceremony in Havana, she arrived wearing jeans!

Finally youth won and age lost. At age 28, Margaret left Pierre, 57, and their three young sons to become a fulltime ‘jetsetter’. Alcohol and drugs left her with a nervous breakdown and mental illness. The woman who once said “I want to be more than a rose in my husband’s lapel,” filed for divorce in 1984. She remarried a month later. But her second marriage, too, ended in a divorce. Margaret loved to gross out the world with her bohemian free spirited lifestyle. At her menopause, she told the Globe and Mail in 1997, “If they would just legalise marijuana and capsulise it, I’d take it every day instead of a drink!”

In echoes of the Kennedy dynasty in the US, the Trudeau name is also shadowed by grief, glamour, power and tragedy

Trudeau ‘curse’ climaxed in November 1998, when an avalanche swept the Trudeaus’ youngest son Michel to the bottom of a lake, instantly killing him. Broken hearted, old and ailing, the once irresistibly handsome prime minister died two years later in 2000. The woman he had loved fiercely sat by his bedside holding hands along with their two surviving sons Justin and Alexandre. “Just because our marriage ended didn’t mean the love stopped,” a bereaved Margaret said of the man, who despite being 29 years her senior, never remarried. She remained his only love. At his father’s funeral, Justin gave a soul-stirring eulogy, broadcast live that immediately won the hearts of Canadians.

Fast forward to November 2015: Enter Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Born on Christmas Day in 1971, Justin’s future was foretold when he was only four months old. The visiting US President Nixon raised his glass at a state dinner in Canada’s capital Ottawa saying: “I’d like to toast the future prime minister of Canada: to Justin Pierre Trudeau.” But the “future” prime minister’s career was convoluted to say the least. Before becoming a lawmaker in 2008, Justin Trudeau juggled many jobs — he was a teacher, engineer, bungee jumper and an environmental geography coach. He tried his hand at boxing and once performed a partial public striptease! He even acted in a 2007 film The Great War spotlighting Canada’s role in First World War. Hit by the same bug of restlessness and oomph that never let his mother lead a settled life as the first lady of Canada, Margaret’s firstborn’s DNA led him on a parallel trajectory. But the similarity between mother and son stops here — Justin’s path ended not in tragedy as his mother’s but into triumph taking the 43-year-old back to the PM house where he was born!

Today Margaret Trudeau, 67, is much changed. She’s not the wild, tempestuous, uninhibited woman who hit the headlines in the seventies. Dressed in everyday clothes, a face not without wrinkles and hair just falling loosely over her shoulders, Margaret looks the part of a typical mom. She can’t stop smiling, talking and placing both her weather-beaten hands across her heart in gratitude, as she speaks about the new prime minister. Serenely calm, gracefully poised and unassumingly natural, her persona radiates the thrill of a woman whose own life has suddenly changed from tragedy to triumph. Six years ago she had said: “I worked hard to become happy. It was a real struggle. I smile at the memories, wince and wink for the bad ones, and know that I have lived.”

Life oftentimes throws up a second chance. Margaret Trudeau may have “lived” as she told her interviewer in 2009, but she could never have guessed even in her wildest moments (pun intended) that fate would offer her another opportunity at happiness, true happiness, that would lead her back to the home that she walked out off 31 years ago, abandoning her three young sons to be brought up by their father, the prime minister. Now, a glowing mother of the prime minister will once again say with conviction: “I smile at the memories … and know that I have lived.”

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, November 8th, 2015

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