A Portrait of QA by Margaret Trudeau
The following excerpts are from Margaret Trudeau's book "Beyond Reason":
I made a few intimate friends, with whom I could laugh about official life and briefly forget how much of a prisoner I was. The closest of these was Queen Alia of Jordan.
I met her and King Hussein for the first time when they came to Ottawa for an official visit, immediately after the 1974 election. We took to each other at once. Alia was magnificent to look at: a mass of striking blonde hair, green eyes, an irresistable smile. She arrived when I was at my lowest ebb....Within hours, she had taken me in hand, forced me to laugh about our lives, poked fun at my fears.
There was no formality between us: despite her being Palestinian born on the West Bank, and me a politician's daughter from Vancouver; we were just two girls, sitting and giggling in her bedroom, me in my jeans, her in her invariably magnificent clothes with trunks of silk lingeria and boxes of priceless jewels scattered about the floor. The fact she understood what I was talking about was enough to comfort me. "You're lucky, don't you understand," she kept repeating. "Pierre will eventually leave politics and you'll be free; mine is a life sentence."
More soberly, she wrote to me on October 17, 1974:
"Dearest Margaret, I finally received your letter, as I was reading it I felt I was talking to myself....it's not easy to find friends, especially in our positions--if we raged and screamed everyone would think we were absolutely crazy and yet I say only people who have feelings and love in them go through this....
Don't overload Pierre. Try to control yourself and when he is away, rage, break, scream and cry and get everything out. That is what I have learned to do and it has helped me and my husband.
.....I am scared to death because I am afraid for his life. I have never felt so insecure in my life as I do now because as you might know how many assasination attempts he has escaped. I only pray to God everything works out."
These were brave words. The fact I knew she was having a much harder time than I was and kept smiling also made my sentence easier to bear. When we went to Amman in June 1976, I found her just as exuberant but a little worried. Her extravagance and high spirits were beginning to make her enemies in Jordan and she was now frightened that a plan she had had to put up a monument to her daughter, Haya in the shape of a community center on a prime plot in the city was coming unglued. She had been rather haughty and sent in the bulldozers without permission and the mayor was furious and determined to put a stop to it. "I know I have produced a Crown Prince, and that is something," she said to me doubtfully, "but Hussein will be so angry."
Once again, we talked, we gossiped, we comforted each other. We even made plans to share a little London house where we could escape for holidays together. She had a fantasy we would join the European jet set and decorate our Chelsea home with all the taste she complained was lacking in her Amman palace. She was quick, she was sharp, she was witty. She made me laugh with her stories. I remember she told me that she had just overheard Haya, than three years old, say graciously to the elder child she and Hussein had adopted, "I am a Princess." The girl had sat silent for a moment, then replied gravely "I am the Queen Mother."
Our friendship was cemented by the marvelous present of cameras she gave me.......I saw her far too seldom but it was enough to know she was there. Our relationship became almost telepathic. On the days I was most depressed, the phone almost always rang: "Margaret, are you all right?"
