Too Much and Never Enough

by Mary L. Trump;

  “Our father didn’t have that luxury,” I said.

  Rob sat back. I could see him trying to recalibrate. “It’s pretty simple,” he said. “As far as your grandfather was concerned, dead is dead. He only cared about his living children.”

  I wanted to point out that my grandfather hadn’t cared about Rob, either, but Fritz intervened. “Rob,” he said, “this just isn’t fair.”

  * * *

  I lost track of how many meetings the three of us had between July and October 1999. There was a brief respite in September while I was in Hawaii for my postponed wedding and honeymoon.

  At the very beginning of our discussions, Fritz, Robert, and I agreed that we would leave Gam out of it. I assumed she had no idea how we’d been treated in my grandfather’s will and saw no reason to upset her. Hopefully we would be able to resolve everything, and she’d never have to know there had been a problem at all. I spoke to her every day while I was away and, once back in New York, resumed my visits to her. The negotiations, if they could even be called that, also resumed. There was a numbing sameness to our conversations. No matter what Fritz and I said, Rob came back with his clichés and canned responses. We remained at a standstill.

  I asked him about Midland Associates, the management company my grandfather had set up decades earlier in order to avoid paying certain taxes and benefit his children. Midland owned a group of seven buildings (including Sunnyside Towers and the Highlander) that were referred to in my family as “the mini-empire.” I knew very little about it—none of my trustees had ever explained what role it played or how money was generated—but I received a check every few months. We wanted to know how or if my grandfather’s death would affect the partnership going forward.

  We weren’t asking for a specific dollar amount or a percentage of the estate, just some assurance that the assets we already had would be secure in the future and if, given the family’s enormous wealth, there was anything they could see their way clear to doing as far as my grandfather’s estate was concerned. As the executors and, along with Elizabeth, sole beneficiaries, Maryanne, Donald, and Robert had a wide latitude in that area, but Rob remained noncommittal.

  At our final meeting, in the bar of the Drake Hotel on 56th Street and Park Avenue, it was clear that Robert had begun to understand that we weren’t going to back down. Prior to that, despite the unpleasant things he’d been saying to us, he had maintained an affable “Hey, kids, I’m just the messenger” attitude. That day he reminded us, once again, that my grandfather had hated our mother and had been afraid his money would fall into her hands.

  That was laughable, because for more than twenty-five years my mother had lived according to the terms the Trumps had set, following their directions to the letter. She had lived in the same poorly maintained apartment in Jamaica, Queens; her alimony and child support payments had rarely been increased, yet she had never asked for more.

  Finally, Fred had disowned us because he could. The people who’d been assigned to protect us, at least financially, were our trustees—Maryanne, Donald, Robert, and Irwin Durben—but they apparently had little interest in protecting us, especially at their own expense.

  Rob leaned forward, suddenly serious. “Listen, if you don’t sign this will, if you think of suing us, we will bankrupt Midland Associates and you will be paying taxes on money you don’t have for the rest of your lives.”

  There was nothing left to say after that. Either Fritz and I gave in, or we fought. Neither option was a good one.

  We consulted with Irwin, who felt like the only ally we had left. He was incensed about how poorly our grandfather had treated us in the will. When we told him how Robert had responded when asked about Midland Associates and our share in other Trump entities, he said, “Your share of the ground leases under Shore Haven and Beach Haven alone are priceless. If they’re not going to do anything for you, you’re going to have to sue them.”

  I had no idea what a ground lease was, let alone that I had a share in two of them, but I knew what priceless meant. And I trusted Irwin. Based on his recommendation, Fritz and I made a decision.

  After all those months, William was still in the hospital, and Fritz and Lisa were feeling overwhelmed. I told him I’d take care of it and called Rob that afternoon.

  “Is there anything you guys can do, Rob?” I asked.

  “Sign the will, and we’ll see.”

  “Really?”

  “Your father’s dead,” he said.

  “I know he’s dead, Rob. But we’re not.” I was so sick of having that conversation.

  He paused. “Maryanne, Donald, and I are simply following Dad’s wishes. Your grandfather didn’t want you or Fritz, or especially your mother, to get anything.”

  I took a deep breath. “This is going nowhere,” I said. “Fritz and I are going to hire an attorney.”

  As if a switch had been flipped, Robert screamed, “You do whatever the fuck you need to do!” and slammed the phone down.

  The next day, there was a message from Gam on my answering machine when I got home. “Mary, it’s your grandmother,” she said tersely. She never referred to herself that way. It was always “Gam.”

  I called her back right away.

  “Your uncle Robert tells me you and your brother are suing for twenty percent of your grandfather’s estate.”

  I felt blindsided and said nothing right away. Obviously Rob had broken our agreement and told my grandmother his version of what we’d been discussing. But the other thing that held me up was that my grandmother spoke as if our getting what would have been my father’s share of the estate was somehow wrong and unseemly. I was confused—about loyalty, about love, about the limits of both. I’d thought I was part of the family. I’d gotten it all wrong.

  “Gam, we haven’t asked for anything. I don’t know what Rob told you, but we’re not suing anybody.”

  “You’d better not be.”

  “We’re just trying to figure this out, that’s all.”

  “Do you know what your father was worth when he died?” she said. “A whole lot of nothing.”

  There was a pause and then a click. She’d hung up on me.

  CHAPTER TWELVE The Debacle

  I sat there with the phone in my hand, not knowing what to do next. It was one of those moments that changes everything—both what came before and what will come after—and it was too big to process.

  I called my brother, and as soon as I heard his voice, I burst into tears.

  He called Gam to see if he could explain what we were really asking for, but they had basically the same conversation. Her parting shot to him was slightly different, though: “When your father died, he didn’t have two nickels to rub together.” In the world of my family, that was the only thing that mattered. If your only currency is money, that’s the only lens through which you determine worth; somebody who has accomplished in that context as little as my father was worth nothing—even if he happened to be your son. Further, if my father died penniless, his children weren’t entitled to anything.

  My grandfather had every right to change his will as he saw fit. My aunts and uncles had every right to follow his instructions to the letter, despite the fact that none of them deserved their share of Fred’s fortune any more than my father did. If not for an accident of birth, none of them would have been a multimillionaire. Prosecutors and federal judges don’t typically have $20 million cottages in Palm Beach. Executive assistants don’t have weekend homes in Southampton. (Although, to be fair, Maryanne and Elizabeth were the only two of the siblings, other than my father, to work outside of the family business.) Still, they acted as if they had earned every penny of my grandfather’s wealth and that money was so tied up in their sense of self-worth that letting any of it go was not an option.

  On Irwin’s advice we approached Jack Barnosky, a partner at Farrell Fritz, the largest law firm in Nassau County. Jack, a pompous, self-satisfied man, agreed to take us on as clients. His strategy was to prov
e that my grandfather’s 1990 will should be overturned: Fred Trump had not been of sound mind at the time the will was signed, and he had been under the undue influence of his children.

  Less than a week after we served the executors, Jack received a letter from Lou Laurino, a short, wiry pit bull of a lawyer who was representing my grandfather’s estate. The medical insurance that had been provided to us by Trump Management since we were born had been revoked. Everyone in the Trump family was covered by it. My brother depended upon this insurance to pay for my nephew’s crushing medical expenses. When William had first fallen ill, Robert had promised Fritz that they would take care of everything; he should just send the bills to the office.

  Taking away our insurance didn’t benefit them at all; it was merely a way to cause us more pain and make us more desperate. William was out of the hospital by then, but he was still susceptible to seizures, which more than once had put him in a state of cardiac arrest so severe that he would not have survived without CPR. He still required round-the-clock nursing care.

  The family all knew this, but none of them objected, not even my grandmother, who was as aware as anybody that her own desperately ill great-grandchild would probably need expensive medical care for the rest of his life.

  Fritz and I had no choice but to launch another lawsuit to make them reinstate William’s medical insurance. The suit required depositions and affidavits from the doctors and nurses responsible for William’s care. It was time consuming and stressful and culminated in an appearance in front of a judge.

  Laurino defended the cancellation of the insurance by first claiming that we had no right to expect the insurance in perpetuity. It was, rather, a gift that had been bestowed upon us out of the goodness of my grandfather’s heart. He also downplayed William’s condition, insisting that the round-the-clock nurses who attended to William and had saved his life more than once were overpriced babysitters. If Fritz and Lisa were worried that their infant son might have another seizure, he said, they should just learn CPR.

  The depositions did nothing to help us. I couldn’t believe what a terrible interlocutor Jack was. He failed to follow up and went off on tangents. Despite the fact that Fritz and I had prepared long lists of questions for him, he rarely, if ever, referred to them. Robert, much more detached than the last time I’d spoken to him, reiterated my grandfather’s hatred of my mother as his central justification for the disinheritance; Maryanne angrily referred to me and my brother as “absentee grandchildren.” I thought of all the times she had called the House when I was visiting my grandmother; now I understood why she’d never told my grandmother to say hi. My grandfather, she said, had been furious with us because we had never spent time with our grandmother, completely ignoring the history of the last decade. Apparently, my grandfather had also hated that Fritz never wore a tie and I, as a teenager, had dressed in baggy sweaters and jeans. When he was deposed, Donald didn’t know or couldn’t remember anything, a kind of strategic forgetfulness he has employed many times to evade blame or scrutiny. All three of them claimed in their sworn depositions that my grandfather had been “sharp as a tack” until just before he died.

  During that time, my aunt Elizabeth ran into a family friend, who later relayed the exchange to my brother. “Can you believe what Fritz and Mary are doing?” she asked him. “All they care about is the money.” Of course wills are about money, but in a family that has only one currency, wills are also about love. I thought Liz might have understood that. She had no power. Her opinion about the situation wouldn’t have mattered to anybody but me and my brother, but it still hurt that she was toeing the party line. Even a silent, powerless ally would have been better than none at all.

  After almost two years, with legal bills piling up and having made no progress on any kind of settlement, we had to decide whether to take our family to court. William’s condition remained serious, and a trial would have taken the kind of energy and focus my brother didn’t have. Reluctantly, we decided to settle.

  Maryanne, Donald, and Robert refused to settle unless we agreed to let them buy our shares of the assets we’d inherited from our father—his 20 percent of the mini-empire and the “priceless” ground leases.

  My aunts and uncles submitted a property valuation to Jack Barnosky, and, using their figures, he and Lou Laurino arrived at a settlement figure that was likely based on suspect numbers. Jack told us that, short of a trial, it was the best we could expect. “We know they’re lying,” he said, “but it’s ‘He said, she said.’ Besides, your grandfather’s estate is only worth around thirty million dollars.” That was only a tenth of the estimate Robert had given the New York Times in 1999, which itself would turn out to be only 25 percent of the estate’s actual value.

  Fred no doubt believed that my dad had been given the same tools, the same advantages, and the same opportunities as Donald had. If Freddy had thrown them all away, that wasn’t his father’s fault. If, despite them, my dad had continued to be a terrible provider, my brother and I should consider ourselves lucky that there were trust funds our father couldn’t squander when he was alive. Whatever happened to us after that had nothing to do with Fred Trump. He had done his part; we had no right to expect more.

  * * *

  While the lawsuits were still in progress, I received word that, after a brief illness, Gam had died on August 7, 2000, at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, just as my grandfather had. She was eighty-eight.

  If I had known she was sick, I think I would have tried to see her, but the fact that she hadn’t asked to see me clarified just how easy it had been for us to let each other go. We had never spoken after that last phone conversation, just as I had not spoken again to Robert, Donald, Maryanne, or Elizabeth. It had never occurred to me to try.

  Fritz and I decided to attend Gam’s funeral, but, knowing we were unwelcome, we stood in one of the overflow rooms at the back of Marble Collegiate Church. Along with a couple of Donald’s security guards, we watched the service on a closed-circuit monitor.

  The eulogies were remarkable only for what was not said. There was a lot of speculation about my grandparents’ reunion in Heaven, but my father, their oldest son, who had been dead for almost twenty-seven years, was not mentioned at all. He didn’t even appear in my grandmother’s obituary.

  I received a copy of Gam’s will a few weeks after she died. It was a carbon copy of my grandfather’s, with one exception: my brother and I had been removed from the section outlining the bequests for her grandchildren. My father and his entire line had now been effectively erased.

  PART FOUR The Worst Investment Ever Made

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Political Is Personal

  Nearly a decade would pass before I saw my family again, in October 2009 at my cousin Ivanka’s wedding to Jared Kushner. I had no idea why I’d received the invitation—which was printed on the same heavy-gauge stationery favored by the Trump Organization.

  As the limo I’d taken from my home on Long Island approached the clubhouse at Donald’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, which looked eerily like the House, I was unsure what to expect. Ushers handed out black shawls, which made me feel a little less exposed as I wrapped one around my shoulders.

  The outdoor ceremony took place beneath a large white tent. Gilt chairs were lined up in rows on either side of a gilt-trimmed runway carpet. The traditional Jewish chuppah, covered in white roses, was about the size of my house. Donald stood awkwardly in a yarmulke. Before the vows, Jared’s father, Charles, who’d been released from prison three years earlier, rose to tell us that when Jared had first introduced him to Ivanka, he had thought she would never be good enough to join his family. It was only after she had committed to converting to Judaism and worked hard to make it happen that he had begun to think she might be worthy of them after all. Considering that Charles had been convicted of hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, taping their illicit encounter, and then sending the recording to his sister at his nephew’s engagem
ent party, I found his condescension a bit out of line. After the ceremony, my brother, my sister-in-law, and I entered the clubhouse.

  As I walked down the hallway, I saw my uncle Rob. My last exchange with him had been when he’d hung up on me in 1999 after I had told him that Fritz and I were hiring a lawyer to contest my grandfather’s will. As I approached him now, he surprised me by breaking into a smile. He put his hand out, then leaned down—he was much taller than I was even in my heels—shook my hand, and kissed me on the cheek, the typical Trump greeting.

  “Honeybunch! How are you?” he said brightly. Before I could answer, he said, “You know, I’ve been thinking that the statute of limitations on family estrangement has passed.” Then, bouncing on the balls of his feet, he smacked a closed fist into his open palm in a not-quite-accurate imitation of my grandfather.

  “That sounds good to me,” I said. We spent a couple of minutes exchanging pleasantries. When we were done, I walked up the stairs to the cocktail reception, where I spotted Donald speaking to somebody I recognized—a mayor or a governor—although I can’t recall who it was.

  “Hi, Donald,” I said, as I walked toward them.

  “Mary! You look great.” He shook my hand and kissed my cheek, as Rob had. “It’s good to see you.”

  “It’s good to see you, too.” It was a relief to discover that things between us were pleasant and civil. Having established that, I gave way to the next person in the lengthening line of people, some of them waiting to congratulate the father of the bride. But The Apprentice had just concluded its eighth season, so it’s just as likely that many of them were simply there for the photo op. “Have fun,” he called after me as I walked away.

  The reception was being held in an enormous ballroom quite a distance from the hors d’oeuvres. Along the way I saw my aunt Liz in the distance, chasing after her husband. I caught her eye and waved. She waved back and said, “Hi, sweetie pie.” But she didn’t stop, and that was the last I saw of her. I walked past voluminous bunting and the highly polished dance floor and finally found my place at the second cousins’ table on the periphery of the ballroom. In the distance I could hear the occasional thwap of rotors as helicopters landed and took off.