The kids shared their home with dogs and parakeets and hamsters and a little white mouse with beady red eyes that Eric and Don begged their parents to bring home from school one summer under the condition that it live in the garage, which it did, until it escaped and bred a teeming family of little white mice with beady red eyes, and the whole lot of them were unceremoniously evicted. They once took in an injured duck they’d found not far from the mansion; it lived happily in Don Jr.’s bathtub for a few weeks, until they released it back into the wild.
Greenwich was close and convenient and august and cozy in the Waspy sense, but the winters were cold and dark, and for New York couples looking to hoist themselves up to a certain rung of society, as Ivana was so keen to do initially, Palm Beach was the great frontier. Like Jay Gatsby before him, Donald set out to find his West Egg manse farther down the Atlantic coast.
Initially he plunked down a security deposit on a place at the Breakers, the historic hotel built by an oil and railroad tycoon and modeled after the Villa Medici in Rome, where society snowbirds take in ocean views and nibble on Sunday brunch under the main dining room’s thirty-foot frescoed ceiling. But the resort could not accommodate Donald’s desire to combine two penthouses, creating something of a Sunshine State version of his Trump Tower abode. The problem was, he didn’t exactly know where to look. As he later recounted it in Trump: The Art of the Comeback, he was sitting in the back of a car on the way to a dinner party one evening in the winter of 1985. As he looked out the window at the estates along the way, he asked the driver, “What’s for sale in town that’s really good?”
The driver pulled up to Mar-a-Lago, the 118-room, seventeen-acre palace that cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post had built in the Gatsby era—a new-money real estate mirage if there ever was one. As its name—Spanish for “sea to lake”—suggested, Mar-a-Lago stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Worth. Post scattered a potpourri of architectural styles and design themes from a handful of different countries and time periods across the 118 rooms—58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, a ballroom, a theater, a dining room—and over 110,000 square feet. The clay roof tiles and some of the marble used inside came from a castle in Cuba. A Persian tree-of-life motif adorned the entrance gateway, inspired by Moroccan souks. Overlooking the water’s edge were Venetian arches, and 1920s pastoral scenes were custom painted on the Steinway piano on display inside. Post bought a collection of 36,000 hand-painted fifteenth-century Hispano-Moorish tiles from Spain to use throughout, and commissioned Florence Ziegfeld’s set designers to paint Florentine frescos on panels in the formal dining room. The room that originally belonged to Marjorie Post’s daughter, Dina Merrill, and later became known among the Trumps as the Ivanka Room, had its own stone fireplace with ceramic cherry blossoms winding around it and all across its walls. An eighteen-year-old Walt Disney painted a castle on the room’s rug, as well as the nursery-rhyme-themed story depicted on the tiles bordering its bathroom.
By the time Donald took a walk-through in 1985, the place had been essentially abandoned for a decade and was languishing on the market. Post had willed the estate to the US government when she passed away in 1972, prophetically envisioning Mar-a-Lago as a winter White House to be enjoyed by presidents and visiting dignitaries for years to come. The reality was that the presidents in that era didn’t much fancy Florida and that sort of glitz, and the government did not much care for the idea of carrying the property’s million-dollar taxes and huge yearly maintenance fees. In 1981 the Carter administration handed the keys back to the Post Foundation, which had even less of an interest in that financial hurdle than the government did. So it listed the estate for $20 million. Until Donald, no one really bit.
The way he tells it, he swooped in with a startlingly low offer they had no choice but to accept. You see, he offered $2 million for a little beach lot in front of Mar-a-Lago, which the foundation had previously unloaded for a fifth of that price. The Washington Post reported that Donald said he bought it through a third party and “threatened to put up a hideous home to block Mar-a-Lago’s ocean view.” The structure, he joked, would be his “first wall,” more than two decades before the one he proposed on the 2016 presidential campaign trail. “That drove everybody nuts,” he said. “They couldn’t sell the big house because I owned the beach, so the price kept going down and down.” He didn’t actually close on the beach lot until the whole deal went through, but ultimately, the Post Foundation accepted Donald’s final offer. He took possession of the estate and all its furnishings for $8 million.
The Trumps’ move into Mar-a-Lago was part Beverly Hillbillies and certainly all a show. Unsure of what to do with all that space and how to tastefully fill it on her own, Ivana decided to keep much of what Marjorie Post had filled her mansion with, down to the worn fringed sofas and the original Sheraton table in the formal dining room. She sprinkled her touch in the silver picture frames placed around the house, stuffing them with magazine covers on which Donald appeared. Once they had all landed in Palm Beach, a Rolls-Royce would take Donald and Ivana the few miles to their estate. (Donald sometimes insisted they fly on separate planes, fearing that they would all die together in a horrific plane crash.) A second car—usually a station wagon—would be there to transfer the kids, the nannies, the bodyguards, and whoever else came along with them.
“In fifty years Donald and I will be considered old money like the Vanderbilts,” Ivana reportedly told the writer Dominick Dunne. A number of her friends noted that the Trumps put on airs as if they already were, and as if the money were far older than that. As Marie Brenner reported in Vanity Fair at the time, her acquaintances joked that Ivana suffered from “imperial couple syndrome.” She ditched the Hollywood version of rich she’d first adopted when she moved to New York and married Donald, to fit the mold she thought a Mrs. Trump should fill. Once in Mar-a-Lago, “she had become regal, filling her houses with the kind of ormolu found in palaces in Eastern Europe. She took to waving to friends with tiny hand motions, as if to conserve her energy. At her own charity receptions, she insisted that she and Donald form a receiving line.”
Ivana claims to have received actual royalty at her own Palm Beach Palace in the late 1980s. Prince Charles, in Wellington, Florida, as the guest of honor at the International Polo Club, on short notice requested a tour of Mar-a-Lago. Ivana says he turned up not long after the request and found himself quite impressed with her home. As she tells it in her book, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric all approached him and shook his hand, offering him tea and small talk. (He turned down the former in favor of something stronger, she wrote.)
Donald had a royal vision of his own. He constantly told friends that he thought he and Princess Diana would make a great couple. “This is the way Donald’s mind works,” one longtime friend recalled. “He said that so many times that it did not take long for the story to morph in his mind. Soon, it became that Diana had wanted to date him, had been dying to date him. And he believed it. He truly did. He believes his own lies and creates his own realities.”
The kids’ reality was not much closer to earth. Many of Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric’s winter weekends were spent shuttling back and forth between New York and Palm Beach, particularly in the first few years after their parents purchased Mar-a-Lago, where they always returned for spring breaks and for Easter. Winter breaks were often spent in Aspen. The family flew out before the holidays and took up three suites—one for Donald and Ivana, one for the children, and one for Ivana’s parents, the nannies, and security—in the Little Nell, a posh ski-in, ski-out hotel at the foot of Aspen Mountain that stored the Trumps’ Christmas ornaments for them and let them drag a tree through the lobby and up to their rooms. Like all true kids of privilege worth their salt—though their competitive skier of a mother and competitive-in-general father also had something to do with it—the three younger Trumps learned to ski almost as early as they learned to walk. Their parents put the kids in the Powder Pandas ski school until they were sturdy enough on
their feet to make it down the mountain with a private instructor, and their mother insisted that they stay on the slopes all day, no matter how cold or tired they were or how much they did not enjoy skiing at first. Eric, in particular, hated it. His mother, he wrote in her book, bribed him with McDonald’s apple pies if he went through the motions. He loved the pies enough to suffer for them.
Until the start of the 1990s, the family stayed in Aspen to the first of the year, through the kids’ whole winter breaks. They would celebrate Don Jr.’s New Year’s Eve birthday in a small celebration with family and friends in town and cake before Donald and Ivana left for their own evening out with friends. Once they returned to New York, they’d shut down Wollman Rink—the ice-skating rink in Central Park that Donald owned—for a proper celebration with Don Jr.’s classmates. Sometimes, since Eric’s birthday was only a week after Don’s, they two would share their party. Ivanka’s birthday falls the day before Halloween, so she got to have costume parties, often at the Plaza Hotel. That the Trumps owned the Plaza too—a theme unto itself—made that easy to pull it off and, almost as importantly, free. All of the kids ultimately had birthday parties there, whether in costume for Ivanka’s birthdays or in little suits and ties and party dresses for the rest. The staff would transform a meeting room with balloons and an open bar and pass hors d’oeuvres. About a hundred people would come by, watching the mini Trump heirs blow out candles stuck into the multitiered cakes the Plaza’s pastry chefs had painstakingly prepared for the occasions.
Well before he started elementary school, Don Jr. spent his summers in Czechoslovakia with Ivana’s parents, Dedo and Babi. Ivanka got her own time away, too. Ivana would bring her along to couture shows in Paris, where the small circle of New York women she palled around with would fly twice a year to sit among magazine editors and the people who graced their pages. They would stay at the Plaza Athénée, the storied century-old hotel with a view of the Eiffel Tower out one eye and the Champs-Elysées out the other.
These trips were all dazzle and fantasy and escape, with the added bonus of being an opportunity for Ivana and her little Ivanka to spend time alone together, without the nannies, her brothers, and Donald and Atlantic City and the Plaza sucking up all the oxygen. It was a front-row look at the life Ivanka could choose for herself, both as a model, if she wanted to put in the work, and as a woman who could spend her adult life traveling across the Atlantic to watch hand-sewn confections worth tens of thousands of dollars being paraded down a well-lit runway, if she chose to play the same kinds of cards her mother had to get there.
In the summer of 1991 an airline lost both Ivana’s and Ivanka’s luggage, meaning that all the designer outfits Ivana had packed for the two to wear to the shows were circulating somewhere in an airport’s ether. They were due at a Versace show not long after they landed. Fortunately for Ivanka, her mother happened to have worn a brightly colored blouse on the plane, which she tied and pinned to fit the ten-year-old. It looked good enough to impress the designer himself.
Ivanka did, of course, decide to become a model for a time in the mid-1990s. In the summer of 1997, before she started her sophomore year at boarding school in Connecticut, she cohosted the national broadcast of the Miss Teen USA pageant, which, again, her father happened to co-own. After being introduced as “a young teen who has taken the runways of high fashion by storm, the exquisite, adorable, beautiful Ivanka Trump,” she sauntered onstage in a shiny strapless silver snakeskin dress that barely hit a third of the way down her thighs, her curled hair swept up into an ornate, prom-like swirl. Her cohost, the soap star J. Eddie Peck, twenty-three years her senior, took one look at her and mused that “they didn’t make them like that when I was fifteen.” She told him that she loved modeling but thought she would end up going into business once she graduated from school. “Well, gee, I hope there’s someone out there who can help you get your foot in the door,” he joked as the camera panned to Donald, sitting front row in a tux alongside Ivana in a white satin gown, a bleached-blond Eric, and Ivana’s mother, Babi. Ivanka—with no television experience and all the insecurities of a normal teenager—fumbled through the rest of the live broadcast as the resident “teen expert.” She had not quite yet mastered the art of hiding the fact that she was forcing a smile on as she delivered her teleprompter lines, nor the scramble in her brain as she tried to work out, on the spot, whether she should respond to Peck’s off-the-cuff jokes. She did manage a few interviews with the contestants, a wardrobe change into a shimmery lavender velvet gown, and a scripted joke of her own after the swimsuit competition. “I can guarantee my brothers were loving that,” she said to the camera. “Are any of you up there single?”
Her brothers took on odd jobs that were not nationally broadcast nor as glamorous. But they too wanted to earn their own spending money. All three hustled to learn the tricks of the Trump trade that would ultimately give them a head start on their jobs as executives in the Trump Organization. It is fitting that Ivanka’s earliest gigs were on television, as the public face of the family and apple of her father’s eye. By contrast, Donny worked as a dockhand at Trump Castle, helping guests on and off the boats and carrying their luggage and doing whatever odd jobs the marina master came up with. He cut grass on the Greenwich property, too. Once Eric was old enough, he and his brother would stay over in the caretaker’s cottage on their father’s Seven Springs property in Westchester, New York. Up at dawn and at the job site by 7:00 a.m., the two worked on renovating the main mansion under the watchful eyes of the experts who actually had to be there to pay their bills. One of Donald’s longtime friends—a golf partner and business contemporary—recalled meeting Donald for a round of golf on the Westchester course one sweltering August day in the late 1990s. He’d never met any of his friend’s children before. When Donald asked if he wanted to pop in to say hello to his eldest, Don Jr., he said, “All I remember was how hot and muggy it was out there, and as we walked toward the house, we approached Donny, who was on all fours wearing kneepads, laying bricks down in front of the house. That is not necessarily what I would have thought his kids would be doing on a day like that.”
That in 1990 it all unraveled in the winter wonderland Donald and Ivana and their children escaped to each holiday season, on the eve of Don Jr.’s twelfth birthday, is a dark sort of poetry—a coda for the end of the gilded, everything-is-just-perfect-and-we-belong-here-aren’t-we-so-lucky Trump family epoch.
In truth, though, it began years earlier, on Madison Avenue. Donald walked right up to a young blonde, a god-fearing small-town Georgia peach who’d turned down a mother-daughter Playboy spread when she was a teenager but took home the top prize, bikini clad, in the Miss Hawaiian Tropic pageant. She had moved to New York City in 1985 with dreams of becoming a famous actress. The reality was less rosy; she fell into living with an ex-cop turned broke actor, both of whom might have traded a limb to book a little role on one of the soaps. Marla Maples had seen Donald Trump around town a few times before, and it took not much more than the line-iest of lines—“Don’t I know you?”—for her whole world to quake, for all the Good Book’s preaching about fidelity and faithfulness to fall away. Donald was charming and handsome, and he really saw her. Mostly, though, he was rich. He was famous. He was her way up.
He was also, inconveniently, married. “I never had respect for anyone who didn’t honor their marriage vows,” Marla told Vanity Fair in 1990. But she and Donald started meeting in the pews of the Marble Collegiate Church, the same chapel where Donald and Ivana had exchanged marriage vows eight years earlier. Those vows, though, before Ivana started flying back and forth to Atlantic City to run his hotels there, a decision he later referred to as a grave error. “I think that putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing,” Donald later told Primetime Live. “I think that was the single greatest cause of what happened to my marriage with Ivana.” A “softness disappeared,” he added, the “great softness” she’d once showed him, once she started taking some of t
he reins within his company. “She became an executive, not a wife.” She was good at what she did, “but when I come home and dinner’s not ready, I go through the roof.” Ivana’s professional schedule grew to irritate him almost as much as her social calendar did. He had not come down with the so-called imperial couple syndrome that her friends joked inflicted his wife. He’d already tired of the social elbowing she was just starting to dig into.
So maybe what Marla’s Baptist preacher back home in Dalton, Georgia, could not quite understand was that “Till death do us part” doesn’t take into account all the ways money and power and fame and ego can creep into a quickie marriage’s cracks. How could he know how a wandering eye and a hot little bottle blonde could light a match with a throwaway pickup line on Madison Avenue and, within months, burn everything down?
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