I saw firsthand how difficult living with my grandfather had become for Gam. My grandfather’s odd behavior had started with small things, such as hiding her checkbook. When she confronted him, he accused her of trying to bankrupt him. When she tried to reason with him, he became enraged, leaving her feeling shaken and unsafe. He worried constantly about money, terrified that his fortune was disappearing. My grandfather had never been poor a day in his life, but poverty became his sole preoccupation; he was tortured by the prospect of it.
My grandfather’s moods eventually evened out, and the problem for Gam became the repetition. After getting home from the office in the evening, he’d go upstairs to change, often coming back downstairs wearing a fresh dress shirt and tie but no pants, just his boxers, socks, and dress shoes. “So how is everybody? Okay? Okay. Good night, Toots,” he’d say, and head back upstairs, only to descend again a few minutes later.
One evening as Gam and I sat together in the library, my grandfather came in and asked, “Hey, Toots, what’s for dinner?”
After she answered, he walked out. A few moments later, he returned. “What’s for dinner?” She answered again. He left and returned ten, twelve, fifteen times. With decreasing amounts of patience, she told him “Roast beef and potatoes” every time.
Eventually she lashed out at him. “For God’s sake, Fred, stop it! I’ve already told you.”
“Okay, okay, Toots,” he said with a nervous laugh, hands raised against her as he bounced up on his toes. “Well, that’s that,” he said, tucking his thumbs under his suspenders, as though we had just finished a conversation. The gestures were the same as they’d always been, but the glint in his eyes had become dully benign.
He left the room, only to wander in a few minutes later to ask, “What’s for dinner?”
Gam pulled me onto the porch—an uninviting square of cement on the side of the House just off the library that decades earlier had been used for family barbecues. It had been so long neglected that I often forgot it existed.
“I swear, Mary,” she told me, “he’s going to drive me mad.” The chairs that had been left out there and long forgotten were so littered with twigs and dead leaves that we remained standing.
“You need to get help,” I said. “You should talk to someone.”
“I can’t leave him.” She was close to tears.
“I would have liked to go home again,” she once told me wistfully. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t go back to Scotland, but she adamantly refused to do anything that might look selfish.
On weekends, if they weren’t at Mar-a-Lago, my grandparents would drive to one of their other children’s country homes: Robert’s in Millbrook, New York; Elizabeth’s in Southampton; or Maryanne’s in Sparta, New Jersey. They would plan to spend the night, and my grandmother would look forward to a quiet, relaxing weekend with other people. As soon as they arrived at their destination, my grandfather would ask if they could go home. He wouldn’t relent until Gam gave up and they got back into the car. The idea of a weekend (or day) retreat had been for Gam’s benefit, a chance for her to get out of the House and have company. Eventually the visits became just another form of torture. Like so much else in the family that didn’t make sense, they continued doing it anyway.
* * *
Gam was in the hospital again. I don’t remember what she’d broken, but after the hospital stay, she had the option of going to a rehab facility or having a physical therapist sent to her home. She opted for the rehab facility. “Anything to avoid going back to the House,” she told me.
It was better that way. After the mugging, she had had to sleep in a hospital bed in the library for weeks. My grandfather, who’d recovered very well from his hip surgery, hadn’t had much to say in the way of commiseration or comfort.
“Everything’s great. Right, Toots?” he’d say.
* * *
In 1998, we celebrated Father’s Day at Donald’s apartment at Trump Tower for the first time. It had become too difficult for my grandfather to be in public, so our traditional trip to Peter Luger in Brooklyn was out of the question. It was a family custom to go there twice a year, on Father’s Day and my grandfather’s birthday.
Peter Luger was a deeply strange, very expensive restaurant that charged extra for bad service and accepted only cash, check, or a Peter Luger charge card (which my grandfather possessed). The menu was limited, and whether you asked for them or not, huge platters of sliced beefsteak tomatoes and white onions arrived, accompanied by tiny ceramic dishes of hash fries and creamed spinach that usually went untouched. A side of beef was brought out on trays, punctuated with little plastic cows in varying shades ranging from red (still mooing) and pink (almost able to crawl across the table) to—actually, I don’t know. All of our little cows were red and pink. Most of us ordered Cokes, which were served in six-ounce bottles; because of the legendarily bad service, that meant at the end of the evening the table was littered with the wreckage of a couple of cow carcasses, dozens of Coke bottles, and plates full of food nobody in my family ever ate.
The meal wasn’t over until my grandfather had sucked the marrow out of the bones, which, given his mustache, was a sight to behold.
Since I’d stopped eating meat in college, dinner at Peter Luger had become a challenge. I’d once made the mistake of ordering salmon, which took up half the table and tasted about as good as you might expect salmon from a steak house would taste. Eventually my meal consisted of Coke, the little potatoes, and an iceberg wedge salad.
I wouldn’t miss the rude waiters, but I hoped there would at least be something for me to eat at Donald’s.
I made the mistake of arriving at the penthouse early and alone. Although Donald and Marla were still married, she was already a distant memory, replaced by his new girlfriend, Melania, a twenty-eight-year-old Slovenian model whom I’d never met. They sat on an uncomfortable-looking love seat in the foyer, a large, undefined space. Everything was marble, gold leaf, mirrored walls, white walls, and frescoes. I’m not sure how he managed it, but Donald’s apartment felt even colder and less like a home than the House did.
Melania was five years younger than I was. She sat slightly sideways next to Donald with her ankles crossed. I was struck by how smooth she looked. After Robert and Blaine had met her for the first time, Rob told me that Melania had barely spoken throughout the entire meal.
“Maybe her English isn’t very good,” I said.
“No,” he scoffed. “She knows what she’s there for.” Clearly it wasn’t for her sparkling conversation.
As soon as I sat down, Donald started telling Melania about the time he’d hired me to write The Art of the Comeback and then launched into his version of my “back from the brink” redemption story. He thought it was something we had in common: we’d both hit rock bottom and then somehow clawed our way back to the top (in his case) or just back (in mine).
“You dropped out of college, right?”
“Yes, Donald, I did.” It was exactly how I wanted to be introduced to someone I’d never met. I was also surprised he even knew about it
“It was really bad for a while—and then she started doing drugs.”
“Whoa,” I said, holding up my hands.
“Really?” said Melania, suddenly interested.
“No, no, no. I’ve never done drugs in my life.”
He slid me a look and smiled. He was embellishing the story for effect, and he knew I knew it. “She was a total disaster,” he said, smiling more broadly.
Donald loved comeback stories, and he understood that the deeper the hole you crawled out of, the better billing your triumphant comeback would get. Which was exactly how he experienced his own journey. By conflating my dropping out of college and his hiring me to write his book (while throwing in a fictional drug addiction), he concocted a better story that somehow had him playing the role of my savior. Of course, between my dropping out of school and his hiring me, I’d dropped back into school, graduated, and got
ten a master’s degree—all without taking any drugs at all. There was no point in setting the record straight, however; there never was with him. The story was for his benefit as much as anybody else’s, and by the time the doorbell rang, he probably already believed his version of events. When the three of us rose to greet the new guests, I realized that Melania had said only one word during our time together.
* * *
On June 11, 1999, Fritz called to tell me our grandfather had been taken to Long Island Jewish Medical Center, another Queens hospital my grandparents had patronized in recent years. He said it was likely the end.
I drove the ten minutes from my house and found that the room was already full. Gam sat in the only chair near the bed; Elizabeth stood next to her, holding my grandfather’s hand.
After saying hello, I stood by the window next to Robert’s wife, Blaine. She said, “We’re supposed to be in London with Prince Charles.” I realized she was talking to me—something she rarely did.
“Oh,” I said.
“He invited us to one of his polo matches. I can’t believe we had to cancel.” She sounded exasperated and made no effort to lower her voice.
I could have topped that story. In a week I was supposed to be getting married on a beach in Maui. Nobody in the family knew; they’d always been spectacularly uninterested in my personal life (when necessary, I asked a guy friend to accompany me to any family occasion that required a plus one) and never asked about my boyfriends or relationships.
A couple of years earlier, Gam and I had been talking about Princess Diana’s funeral, and when she had said with some vehemence, “It’s a disgrace they’re letting that little faggot Elton John sing at the service,” I’d realized it was better that she didn’t know I was living with and engaged to a woman.
Seeing how serious my grandfather’s condition was, I had a terrible feeling that when I got home, I’d have to break the news to my fiancée that, after months of planning and overcoming several logistical nightmares, our mostly secret wedding would have to be postponed.
I noticed a hush in the room, as if everybody had run out of small talk at the same time. We were reduced for the moment to listening to my grandfather’s uneven breathing: a ragged, uncertain inhalation, followed by an unnatural pause for longer than seemed safe until finally he exhaled.
CHAPTER ELEVEN The Only Currency
Fred Trump died on June 25, 1999. The following day, his obituary was published in the New York Times under the banner “Fred C. Trump, Postwar Master Builder of Housing for Middle Class, Dies at 93.” The obituary writer made a point of contrasting Fred’s status as “a self-made man” with “his flamboyant son Donald.” My grandfather’s propensity for picking up unused nails at his construction sites to hand back to his carpenters the next day was noted before the details of his birth. The Times also repeated the family line that Donald had built his own business with minimal help from my grandfather—“a small amount of money”—a statement that the paper itself would refute twenty years later.
We sat in the library, each with our own copy of the Times. Robert was raked over the coals by his siblings for having told the Times that my grandfather’s estate was worth between $250 million and $300 million. “Never, never give them numbers,” Maryanne lectured him, as if he were a stupid kid. He stood there shamefaced, cracking his knuckles and bouncing on the balls of his feet, just as my grandfather used to do, as if suddenly imagining the ensuing tax bill. The valuation was absurdly low—eventually we would learn that the empire was probably worth four times that—but Maryanne and Donald would never have admitted that it was even that much.
Later we stood upstairs in the Madison Room at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the most exclusive and expensive bereavement services provider in the city, smiling and shaking hands as a seemingly endless line of visitors passed through.
Overall, more than eight hundred people moved through the rooms. Some were there to pay their respects, including rival real estate developers such as Sam LeFrak, New York governor George Pataki, former Senator Al D’Amato, and comedian and future Celebrity Apprentice contestant Joan Rivers. The rest were most likely there to catch a glimpse of Donald.
On the day of the funeral, Marble Collegiate Church was filled to capacity. During the service, from beginning to end, everyone had a role to play. It was all extremely well choreographed. Elizabeth read my grandfather’s “favorite poem,” and the rest of the siblings gave eulogies, as did my brother, who spoke on behalf of my dad, and my cousin David, who represented the grandchildren. Mostly they told stories about my grandfather, although my brother was the only one who came close to humanizing him. For the most part, in ways both oblique and direct, the emphasis was on my grandfather’s material success, his “killer” instinct, and his talent for saving a buck. Donald was the only one to deviate from the script. In a cringe-inducing turn, his eulogy devolved into a paean to his own greatness. It was so embarrassing that Maryanne later told her son not to allow any of her siblings to speak at her funeral.
Rudolph Giuliani, New York City’s mayor at the time, also spoke.
When the service was over, the six oldest grandchildren (Tiffany was too young) accompanied the casket to the hearse as honorary pallbearers, which meant, as was often the case in our family, that others did the heavy lifting while we got the credit.
All of the streets from Fifth Avenue and 45th Street to the Midtown Tunnel more than sixteen blocks away had been closed to cars and pedestrians, so our motorcade, with a police escort, slid easily out of the city. It was a quick trip to All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, for the burial.
We drove back to the city just as quickly, but with less fanfare, for lunch at Donald’s apartment. Afterward, I accompanied my grandmother back to the House. The two of us sat in the library and chatted for a while. She seemed tired but relieved. It had been a very long day; a very long few years, actually. Other than the live-in maid, who was asleep upstairs, it was just the two of us. I was supposed to be on my honeymoon. I stayed with her until she was ready to go to bed.
When she said she was ready for bed, I asked her if she wanted me to stay or if there was anything I could get for her before I left.
“No, dear, I’m fine.”
I bent over to kiss her cheek. She smelled like vanilla. “You are my favorite person,” I told her. It wasn’t true, but I said it because I loved her. I said it, too, because nobody else had bothered to stay with her after her husband of sixty-three years had been put in the ground.
“Good,” she replied. “I should be.”
And then I left her alone in that large, quiet, empty house.
* * *
Two weeks after my grandfather’s funeral, I was home when a DHL truck pulled up and delivered a yellow envelope containing a copy of my grandfather’s will. I read through it twice to be sure I hadn’t misunderstood anything. I had promised my brother I’d call him as soon as I knew anything, but I was reluctant to do so. Fritz and Lisa’s third child, William, had been born hours after my grandfather’s funeral. Twenty-four hours after that, he’d begun having seizures. He had been in the neonatal intensive care unit ever since. They had two young children at home, and Fritz had to work. I had no idea how they were managing all of it.
I hated to be the bearer of more bad news, but he needed to know.
I called him.
“So what’s the deal?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I told him. “We got nothing,”
A few days later, I got a call from Rob. As far as I could remember, he had only ever called me before to let me know when Gam was in the hospital. He acted as if everything were fine. If I signed off on the will, he implied, everything would be great. And he did need my signature in order for the will to be released for probate. Though it’s true that my grandfather disinherited me and my brother—that is, instead of splitting what would have been my father’s 20 percent share of his estate betwe
en me and my brother, he had divided it evenly among his four other children—we were included in a bequest made separately to all of the grandchildren, an amount that proved to be less than a tenth of 1 percent of what my aunts and uncles had inherited. In the context of the entire estate it was a very small amount of money, and it must have infuriated Robert that it gave me and Fritz the power to hold up the distribution of the assets.
Days passed, and I couldn’t bring myself to sign. In the breadth and concision of its cruelty, the will was a stunning document that very much resembled my parents’ divorce agreement.
For a while, Robert called me every day. Maryanne and Donald had assigned him to be the point person; Donald didn’t want to be bothered, and Maryanne’s husband, John, had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and his prognosis was not good.
“Cash in your chips, Honeybunch,” Rob said repeatedly, as if that would make me forget what was in the will. No matter how many times he said it, though, my brother and I had agreed not to sign anything until we had some idea of what our options were.
Eventually Rob began to lose patience. Fritz and I were holding everything up; the will couldn’t go to probate until all of the beneficiaries had signed off. When I told Rob that Fritz and I weren’t yet willing to take that step, he suggested we get together to discuss it.
At our first meeting, when we asked Rob to explain why my grandfather had done what he had, Rob said, “Listen, your grandfather didn’t give a shit about you. And not just you, he didn’t give a shit about any of his grandchildren.”
“We’re being treated worse because our father died,” I said.
“No, not at all.”
When we pointed out that our cousins would still benefit from what their parents were getting from my grandfather, Rob said, “Any of them could be disowned at any time. Donny was going to join the army or some bullshit like that, and Donald and Ivana told him if he did, they’d disown him in a second.”
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