In jeans, a short-sleeved white shirt and red patent leather shoes, she looks youthfully and radiantly beautiful.

That’s the view of Margaret Trudeau from the 10th row of the Jane Mallett Theatre. Although any vanity is dismissed in publicity posters for the show — “Certain Woman of an Age” — portrait photograph accentuating the wrinkles, the sags, of a 71-year-old matriarch who’s come by every crease and crevice honestly.

Wife of one prime minister, mother of another. Still and yet, very much the flower child of yore, the rebel of 24 Sussex Drive, a poor fit for the constrictions and protocols of public office by marriage: First Lady. A role she admits brought both pleasure and torment, complicated by well-documented mental illness and tragedies that would have driven anybody mad.

Coquettish enough, even as a septuagenarian, that she can name-drop celebrity lovers — Ryan O’Neal, Jack Nicholson, Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood, maybe Ted Kennedy, although that may have been more a platonic crush; hard to be sure by the way she references the late U.S. senator who once tracked her down, on the phone, to a hospital psychiatric ward where she’d been secretly stashed.

Coquettish and girlish as well in her body language, especially the hands on knees crouch, bum sticking out, familiar from her voguing posing on the dance floor of Club 54 in New York City, where she notoriously partied with the likes of Andy Warhol during days — nights — of drug-fuelled hedonistic exhibitionism. And mania. To be inevitably followed by periods of paralyzing depression. But it took decades before Trudeau was properly diagnosed.

Our Maggie, for those of a certain age. The woman who was the rose on her husband’s lapel, but with thorns.

Only a teenager when she first met Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1968 at a Club Med in Tahiti. She was there with her parents and really was much more taken with the grandson of the resort chain’s co-founder. But she did take note of an athletic older man — “great legs” — in a tiny Speedo water-skiing nearby, who then swam over to the raft where she was sunning, chatted her up. In inimitable Pierre style: “What do think about Plato? Do you think life is an illusion?”

That man, Canada’s prime minister, would afterwards tell a friend: “If I ever I marry, she’s the one.”

Or, as Margaret says now: “I’d been picked and I didn’t even know it.”

It wasn’t until a couple of years later that PET followed up, calling Maggie at her grandmother’s house, where she’d been sent as a handful by her exasperated parents. Asked for a date. And so the young woman’s life would be completed, unexpectedly, transformed.

She was a wild child but bright, compelling and effortlessly charming. From a political family yet scarcely interested in any of that. Margaret acknowledges that Pierre would have been better off picking a steady, mature partner. But PET quickened to her and she to him. “I think he thought he could mould me into the perfect wife. I was young, I was unfinished.”

When they married, she was 23, he was 51.

In an era of nascent feminism, she wanted to be a wife and mother. Gave her husband three sons, two of them born on Christmas Day, the growing family’s history chronicled in countless newspaper photos. I remember, in particular, a family vacation pic of Margaret walking along the beach with a diapered Justin. They were all just so damn photogenic.

Photos which, as Margaret told her audience, she could not bear to look at for many years after her third son, Michel, was killed in a 1998 avalanche while skiing in a glacier B.C. park. It sends shivers up the spine when Margaret recalls the last time she saw Michel, as he drove away from her home, excited about his upcoming adventure. But he stopped the truck not far away, ran back to his mother, swept her up in his arms, told her he loved her.

There was another photo, from Michel’s funeral, wherein a distraught Margaret is clinging to her ex-husband, holding on so tightly — the veins visible in Pierre’s hands — that it looks like her nails might pierce his skin. They both appear utterly destroyed.

I don’t know how any parent survives the loss of a child. And Margaret, remarried with two more kids, was already so fragile. When the darkness of chronic depression descended, she hid the extent of her mental disfigurement from her grown children. That, she says, was the bleakest gulch of her existence, resulting ultimately in a third psychiatric hospitalization.

But Margaret did survive, did emerge from the crushing sadness — even if her second marriage fell victim to emotional turmoil — and made peace with her bipolar condition, effectively treated with salvation drugs and talk therapy. She has become a leading advocate for mental health.

In “Certain Woman of an Age” — a work still in progress, Trudeau reading from the script she wrote — she delves into all of it, with something close to abandon. There are no ad-libs and just one fleeting, sly reference to Justin’s current troubles. Otherwise, it’s quite an astonishingly candid self-expose, a forensic detailing of an eventful life. Full of wry humour, delivered against a backdrop of photo images, retrieved from the boxes she’s packed up and stowed away. There are plenty of anecdotes about her missteps, her “comedy of manners’’ in trying to be a perfect political wife, hostess and globetrotter at her husband’s side, from the White House — that state dinner frock was a disaster — to the Vatican.

“I’ve had train-wrecks,” she observes.

Of course the exposition is PET-centric, unmasking the mess behind a marriage between a free spirit and a man who, for all his political progressivism, was very much a traditionalist at home. To be honest, that not-made-for-each-other dissonance was never a secret. Maggie wore her caged-bird wretchedness on her sleeve when it all started to fall apart, humiliating a proud man in the process.

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In the retelling of it, Margaret reminds me of another young woman, more naïve, who, decades later, would be similarly trapped in an unwise marriage, acting out her unhappiness — Diana, the Princess of Wales, portrayed as nuts. Just as Margaret heard the whispers that she was crazy. “You don’t have to whisper,” she once told nurses attending her. “It was true.”

There’s enough of the non-conformist in this grandmother-of-10 still that she thrills to the naughtiness of profanities.

“You can only suppress a F--- You for so long.”

F--- ’em all, Maggie.

Rosie DiManno is a columnist based in Toronto covering sports and current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno

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