Pierre and Margaret Trudeau - a unique love story
It was a love story that began as a fairy tale, mesmerized a nation, but ended far short of happily ever after.
Yet more than 20 years after Margaret Trudeau walked away from 24 Sussex Drive and her marriage to Pierre Trudeau, the pair maintained a close bond right up until the former prime minister's death.
Lunches to discuss their now-grown children had been routine before Trudeau's health began to deteriorate. Margaret Trudeau urged Canadians to pray for him during a severe bout of pneumonia and she rushed to his side during an illness. She was at his house when he died.
Their friendship, driven in large part by the needs of their three children, was also a most telling example of the healing power of time.
"I just value him so much, I'm so grateful for him," Margaret Trudeau said in a 1998 documentary prepared for the CBC program Life & Times.
"If you really are a loving person, even when you change your relationship with someone, the respect and love you have is something that will never be extinguished.
"Love doesn't die, love grows -- if it's true love."
Margaret Sinclair was just 22 when she married Pierre Trudeau, almost 30 years her senior, in a secret ceremony in Vancouver in 1971.
Sinclair, a flower child and graduate of English literature, had met Trudeau a few years earlier on a Club Med vacation in Tahiti.
An unknowing Margaret engaged in a three-hour conversation -- ranging from idle chit-chat to Plato and rebellion -- with an impressive water-skier who also happened to be the federal justice minister.
When her stunned mother, who had been watching the scene from afar, asked her daughter if she realized who she was talking to, Margaret replied: "Oh, Pierre someone or other."
Learning Trudeau was a politician like her father -- former Liberal fisheries minister James Sinclair -- she grew disinterested, even standing him up for a deep-sea fishing date a few days later.
"I was young and romantic; Pierre struck me as very old and very square," Trudeau wrote in her 1979 autobiography, Beyond Reason.
Eighteen months after their initial meeting, however, Trudeau, who had become prime minister, pursued Margaret for a date. Her earlier coolness quickly evaporated and a passionate romance blossomed.
"It was a fairy tale at the beginning of our marriage and our relationship," Margaret Trudeau said in the documentary. "It was bliss, just bliss.
"But I was very young and had a lot of growing to do. The world was not a place for fairy tales. Fairy tales don't happen, real life happens."
Reporters who covered Trudeau's days in power often turned their attention to Margaret.
"Margaret was a real personality in her own right and in a sense kind of rivalled him (Trudeau) in terms of the fascination the public had for her," recalled Peter Desbarats, who worked in Ottawa for both the Toronto Star and Global TV throughout the 1970s.
On several occasions she became the news -- for not wearing a floor-length dress to an official White House dinner, for acting as Cuban president Fidel Castro's photographer-for-a-day and for public outbursts that included shouting "the" four-letter word to her husband in Japan.
"She was the bane of my existence in many ways," Desbarats said in a recent interview.
"She courted publicity in a very deliberate fashion and then if it backfired and she didn't like the publicity she would then go into a kind of victim routine and people would then have a tendency to blame us for picking on her."
In 1977, Margaret Trudeau left her marriage and the couple's three young sons, feeling unappreciated by her husband and tired of the lack of privacy and loss of individuality she attributed to her role as the wife of a prime minister.
Before she left, she had a secret affair with Ted Kennedy and spent time in a Montreal psychiatric ward suffering from depression and emotional stress. She also battled anorexia.
There was also a whirlwind weekend with the Rolling Stones in Toronto, which she insists consisted of nothing more than a few hours of smoking hash, drinking and playing dice.
For the next two years, however, Trudeau horrified Canadians and fascinated the tabloids with her wild nights at New York's trendy Studio 54 and London's Tramp. There were brief relationships with celebrities such as tennis star Vitas Gerulaitis, and actors Jack Nicholson and Ryan O'Neil.
Upon her return to Canada, she rebuilt close ties to her sons Justin, Alexandre (Sacha) and Michel.
Now 51, Trudeau has expressed regret for her wild behaviour, chalking it up to the folly of youth and an insatiable desire for social freedom after the confines of the political spotlight.
The Trudeaus officially divorced in 1984. Soon after, Margaret married real-estate developer Fried Kemper.
The couple had two children and succeeded in living the private family life that Margaret had always wanted for the Trudeau boys.
That privacy was shattered once again, however, in November 1998, when Michel was killed after an avalanche swept him to the bottom of B.C.'s Kokanee Lake.
"I miss him every day, but I understand that death is part of life," Trudeau said in an interview published in the National Post in early September.
"I've survived the worst of it. Such a horror no one can survive without faith."
Trudeau has cited Michel's death as the driving factor in her separation from Kemper a year after the accident.
Friends say the Margaret Trudeau -- she dropped the name Kemper immediately after her separation -- they know is much different than the "lightweight" she was often portrayed as during her marriage to the former prime minister.
"I think some people misinterpreted her carefree behaviour as something an unintelligent person would indulge in and that's not necessarily so," said John Curtin, who has remained friends with her following the Life & Times documentary he produced with Paul Carvalho.
He describes her as an intelligent, articulate, well-read woman whose literary tastes range from the poetry of William Blake to self-help books such as You Can Negotiate Anything.
The impulsiveness and spontaneity that so often drew the scorn of the media and Canadian public was the very reason Pierre Trudeau loved her, said Curtin.
Her children also seem to admire and appreciate those same qualities.
"My father is the thinker, my mother is the lover," Michel Trudeau said in the documentary, which aired just weeks before his death.
"She represents a lot of what he (Pierre Trudeau) would have liked to be in a different situation and he very much reached for that when he reached for her," eldest son Justin said in the same interview.
In recent years, most of Trudeau's public appearances have been in connection with the charity WaterCan, an Ottawa-based organization dedicated to providing clean drinking water in developing countries.
Since Michel's death, she has also worked to raise awareness about avalanches through the Canadian Avalanche Association.
In addition to fund-raising and speaking engagements to support WaterCan, Trudeau has also visited Uganda twice.
"Margaret has a huge heart, she's very generous," said friend Christina Lubbock, who is also executive-director of WaterCan.
Lubbock believes public interest in Trudeau has long outlived her infamous marriage because Canadians have identified with both her vitality and vulnerability.
"One sort of feels protective of Margaret. She has a certain fragility about her and that's really what draws you to her."
International interest in Trudeau also remains high.
Last spring, she was interviewed by CBS This Morning as part of a Whatever-Happened-To series. Months later, the BBC also requested an interview.
And an old black-and-white photo of a beaming Margaret Trudeau dancing at Studio 54 illustrated an article on It Girls in a recent issue of Vanity Fair.
The magazine defined It Girls as those who have "the ability to change the chemistry of a room just by walking into it ... can use legs as well as their head ... and who have had a minimum of one billionaire, actor, royal and rock star to their credit."
A distinction even her harshest critics would be hard-pressed to dispute.