She touched the hearts of those who mattered most
Marilyn Lastman imparted valuable lessons to her children
Stripped of the vestments we wear — public or privately adorned — we are what we leave in people’s hearts, especially those close to us, those who see us, feel us, experience us when the crowd is not watching.
Marilyn Lastman, it seems, touched the hearts of those who mattered most — especially her first-born son, Dale, considered the “substance” in a once flashy family of showboat flamboyance. When Dale came home one day, proud of his accomplishment as a law school graduate, Marilyn, told him, in effect, to “drop the attitude.” It’s not how educated you are, she said, but how you carry yourself, and how kind and compassionate you are to others. “I spoke to my mom every day of my life,” Dale told mourners at her funeral on Jan. 5. “I could never have loved anyone more, nor could anyone love me better. The pain I feel at 62 is as palpable as the fear I felt at age 5. A large part of me left this earth.”
We only had glimpses of Marilyn — a peacock among pigeons, extravagant in a Presbyterian town, exhibitionist and panegyrist on the edge of a last-century town that was unsure of its unchallenged relationship to the British monarchy and certainly skeptical of the Lastmans, its local, uncrowned royals. But there she was, staging the most tongue-wagging exhibitionist bar mitzvah that Hogtown has ever seen. Mel and Marilyn had Toronto agog.
Marilyn was the voice on the other end of the phone when cub reporter Royson James tried the home phone number when he couldn’t find Mel at his other numbers in the 1980s. She was the one who answered the door the only time I knocked on Mel’s door. She gave me medical updates from his
bedside where she rooted herself during his illness. And when the scandal over Mel’s extramarital affair rocked the megacity, she stood beside him at a city hall news conference, unbowed, holding together a love that started when they were teenagers.
Despite the persona and the larger-than-life, over-the-top conspicuous consumption of the nouveau-riche Lastmans, scratch away the patina and you found two ordinary people whose routine centred around family, and a shocking absence of friends and hangers-on.
In 1988, when Mel was Bad Boy Mel, the king of North York, Marilyn contested the city’s Ward 13 council seat. On the campaign trail, she had nothing but name recognition — Mel, Marilyn and Mel’s publicity person knocking on doors was the sum total of the campaign. Where was the team, the heavy hitters? The social butterfly, the woman who took on the establishment to sell the radar-sniffing “Fuzzbuster” device, the big personality was defeated easily by former school board trustee Bob Bradley.
This was no Lastman political machine. Unlike the Ford family, with its wave after wave of would-be kings, a self-inscribed manifest destiny and base of populist support, the Lastmans were a happenstance of political history. When younger son Blayne, who carries on the Bad Boy furniture legacy, dipped his toe in the political pool in 2018 as a candidate for mayor, he quickly recoiled.
So Marilyn’s funeral wasn’t overrun with political operatives. The cantor sang, the rabbi and the family spoke. And none more eloquently than Dale, the lawyer son who rubs shoulders with the elite of the sports and business world, the one who masterminded the merger of the Leafs and Raptors, a member of the Order of Canada, and the one who became a mover and shaker in ways his mom never imagined.
“You can never love someone as much as you miss them, but you should spend every day trying,” he told the mourners, before Marilyn’s six grandchildren eulogized “the true brains behind Bad Boy, a true matriarch” who met their grandpa, “dated at age 14 and married at 18” and insisted the whole family have dinner together every Sunday. We no more knew Marilyn Lastman than we know the spouses of our political leaders — be they Trudeau, Ford, Tory, Miller, Crombie, Harris or Harper.
But they also serve who wait in the shadows as mayor or premier or prime minister, suffer the slings and arrows or bask in the glare of public scrutiny. We get hints when a son — decorated and respected in the public square as philanthropist and a giant of commerce and business — says his “greatest compliment” is to be told, “You are so like your mom.”