I am interviewing Maye Musk via Zoom on a sunny February morning and she’s seated in what looks like a chic apartment or hotel suite in the shadow of a bouquet of yellow roses the size of a small oak tree that is very nearly as radiant as the lady herself (you don’t become a supermodel in your late 60s for nothing). It is, she tells me, her fourth—and final—interview of the morning, in the fourth different country, after which she’ll be heading to pick up her rescue pooch from the parlour before their big move from Los Angeles to the Big Apple (“he needs to look a little more sophisticated for New York!”). Three years ago, Maye made headlines by becoming the oldest Covergirl, aged 69 years—fifty-four years after making her modelling debut in South Africa. But, there’s far more to this fascinating female than simply photogenic features.
For the best part of half-a-century, Maye has helmed an international nutritional business, becoming the first Representative of the Consulting Dietitians of Southern Africa; President of the Consulting Dietitians of Canada; and Chair of the Nutrition Entrepreneurs, Academy of Dietetics and Nutrition. Other achievements include winning the USA’s Outstanding Nutrition Entrepreneur Award and being the first dietician to be featured on a cereal box with her (now out of print) book, Feel Fantastic, in 1996; while her most recent offering, the 2020 memoir A Woman Makes A Plan, has been flying off the shelves and translated into several languages.
“My kids said that if you’re going to write something, then make sure you talk about your struggles,” Maye tells Verve. “So, there was this lovely lady, from New Zealand actually, called Sally Harding, based in Vancouver who had read some articles about me and thought them interesting. She said that I should write a book, but I thought, ‘Why would anyone want to read about my life?’ Afterwards, I realised that some of the stories really weren’t fun and that we should perhaps take them out, but the publisher said that they should stay because people will relate. Women will relate to the personal problems and men will relate to the business and adventure chapters—men really love the adventure chapters!”
And what adventures there have been, with childhood days spent tearing around the Kalahari Desert with her parents Joshua and Wyn Haldeman, and four siblings, in search of a legendary lost city, sleeping out in the open with their bags zipped over their faces so “the hyenas wouldn’t eat our faces”.
“I was eight years old and would have to run in front of the truck to make sure there were no ditches or rocks that we might hit,” laughs Maye. “Then I would have to run back to the back of the truck and my twin sister would take over and my parents never looked back to see if I had made it, they just presumed that I did, which made us responsible for ourselves. It was all very exciting.”
In the 1950s, her father also flew her mother from South Africa to Australia in a single engine plane.
“My father was fearless, but not reckless, he would still plan things,” she says. “But back then there was no GPS, just a compass. He would say that when you’re flying you’re either scared or you’re bored—scared when you take off and land, and bold when you’re flying! He was very adventurous. My mom lived until she was 98 and stopped working at 96. She was an artist but started shaking a lot in her mid-90s, so then she studied computer art instead. When I look back, she did so many admirable things, and we just didn’t appreciate it. We didn’t tell her, ‘We admire you,’ you know, because, I didn’t know how it is in New Zealand, but you don’t really praise people to their face.”
“There were a lot of painful memories, which I hope people will learn from so that they don’t experience as much pain as me,” she says. “My abusive marriage seems to have resonated a lot. Afterwards, there were nine years of lawsuits—he wanted to keep me poor and he was successful. So, when I moved to Toronto, the joy of him no longer being able to do that was incredible.”
“I had no confidence, and I was scared,” she recalls. “I didn’t know if I would be able to survive. I didn’t know how I was going to feed them. There were no luxuries. They went to public school, their uniforms and books were secondhand, and I cut their hair. I certainly didn’t dream I’d become a supermodel in my 60s or have billboards in Times Square!”
It must, I say, be especially satisfying then to have achieved so much since then, but Maye bats such a notion away like an irritating mosquito, saying that it was 40 years ago, and she “no longer cares what he thinks”. She couldn’t possibly have foreseen such a glittering future way back then, so I ask what her hopes and dreams were at the time.
In her book, she tells of how her kids helped her get her nutrition business up and running from her converted bedroom office. “I brought up my children like my parents brought us up when we were young,” she writes, “to be independent, kind, honest, considerate and polite, to work hard and do good things.”
The making of the Maye Musk the world knows and loves today was arguably when she finally left her husband, Errol, after nine years in an abusive marriage. The pair, who met in high school in South Africa, had three children—Elon, Kimbal, and Tosca—who moved to Toronto with their then 42-year-old mother in 1979. At one point, she was working five jobs to make ends meet, including working as a research officer at the Toronto University where she earned a master’s degree in nutritional sciences (having already attained a master’s in dietetics at the University of Orange Free State). One of her roles now is an ambassador for Dress for Success, a non-profit that helps women achieve economic independence by providing work attire and a number of personal and professional development programmes.
I ask how it felt to relive those tough times during the writing of her book.
I brought up my children like my parents brought us up when we were young,” she writes, “to be independent, kind, honest, considerate and polite to work hard and do good things.
Now, her daughter, Tosca, runs an entertainment company that produces films and novels; Kimbal, her younger son, is a prominent chef, restaurateur and entrepreneur who teaches kids how to build fruit and vegetable gardens; while her elder son, Elon, needs little introduction—the CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX and one of the wealthiest people on Earth, among many other things. As a child, Maye recounts how Elon was nicknamed “genius boy” because he read encyclopaedias and remembered everything: “I guess now we’d call him the internet.”
Maye has previously described her kids’ careers as her “best investment”, so I ask how she thinks that they would describe her.
“Oh, I’m sure with superlatives!”
