by Ivana Trump
We went back the following year and the year after that, and I became a good skier. I “graduated” from Powder Pandas when I was four or five, and then went over to Aspen Mountain and was expected to keep up with the big boys and girls. In the Trump family, there wasn’t a whole lot of waiting around. You had to fend for yourself. We skied in order, with my mom in front, followed by Don, then Ivanka, and then me. I’d be totally out of control in the back trying to keep up. I had to rise to the occasion. I’d see the others walking to the gondola and I’d have to run with all my equipment to catch them. I certainly broke a lot of goggles learning how to ski that way, but I also got really good, really fast. And once I got the hang of it, I loved it.
* * *
On a typical Aspen vacation morning, I would hit the black-diamond expert slopes on one side of the mountain. In the afternoon when Donald was making calls, I joined Don, Ivanka, and Eric on the bunny slope with Rick, their instructor. On the lift, the kids whined about how cold and tired they were. They glanced at each other, and then Don spoke for all of them, saying, “We don’t want to ski anymore today.”
Aspen in December could hit twenty below. I was always cold in my thin ski pants with Hanes panty hose underneath, socks, a turtleneck sweater, a slim-fitting jacket, and a furry Cossack hat. The kids, meanwhile, wore five layers of goose down, double gloves, double socks, and big pom-pom hats. I would just look at them to feel warmer. If I could take it in my outfit, they would ski for one more hour in theirs.
I said, “Okay. You don’t have to ski, but that means Rick won’t get paid today. He won’t have money to buy dinner for his two kids. If you want his children to have food on the table, keep skiing. But if you don’t care if they go hungry tonight, we can quit right now.”
“No!” They looked horrified.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
We stayed on the slope for another hour. Once quitting was no longer an option, they had a great time. It was Aspen on a sunny day! What’s not to love?
For the record, I had no idea if Rick even had kids, and he got paid for the day regardless of when we stopped.
I had my reasons for pushing them so hard. If you quit at the first twinge of discomfort, you become weak. But if you exercise your endurance muscle, you grow strong. All those times I forced them to keep going added up. Look at what they endure now as public figures and business leaders. Would they have the strength to keep going today if I hadn’t taught them to ignore minor discomfort—“It’s cold!” “My boots hurt!” “I’m tired!”—back then? By enduring, they learned just how good it feels to push past preconceived limits.
I encouraged their competitive edge and sibling rivalry on the slopes by setting challenges for them. Who can get to the gondola fastest? Who can make the sharpest turns? I didn’t have to do much. The kids wanted to see who was the best. Donald would race against them, too. One time, Donald was slightly behind Ivanka, and he reached out, grabbed her pole, and pulled her back so that he could glide ahead and win the race. Ivanka didn’t get mad about it. She set out to beat him the next time.
The Kennedy family was always in Aspen at the same time as the Trumps, and we’d have side-by-side slalom races against them. It was Trump vs. Kennedy, and Trump always won. They were good sports about it and we always had fun with them. For the Trumps, the fun stayed on the slopes and didn’t trickle down to Aspen’s famous bar and club scene. The Kennedy kids were wild, always partying, sometimes while skiing. Just last year, RFK’s grandson Conor got in a fight at a nightclub in Aspen and was arrested.
I was on the mountain in 1997 when Michael Kennedy died. Halfway down my final run of the day, I noticed that a lot of people were gathered around a tree. It looked like a skier had fallen and broken an arm or leg. Most accidents happen at the end of the day when people are tired. Back at the hotel later, I put on the TV and learned that Michael and a bunch of his friends and relatives were playing ski football—tossing a ball back and forth while skiing downhill at high speeds—when he crashed into the tree, hit his head, and died soon after.
People do stupid things. They take reckless chances.
Not me, and not my kids. I taught them to take their own safety—and the safety of the other people on the slope—very seriously. They don’t always listen to me. Ivanka once went skydiving. If I’d known about it beforehand, I would have talked her out of it. “Why would you jump out of a perfectly safe plane?” I asked afterward.
Accidents do happen, though, no matter how much you try to avoid them. When Ivanka was a teenager (this was several years post-divorce), she and I were skiing together in Aspen at Christmastime before she went to her father’s place in Palm Beach for New Year’s. I took the lead by the tree line and could hear her edges on the ice right behind me. After a few minutes, I realized I couldn’t hear her. She fell? I wondered. Ivanka is an excellent skier and rarely falls. I went to the ski lift and waited for five minutes . . . and another five. After twenty minutes, I waved down a ski instructor friend of mine and asked, “Have you seen Ivanka?”
He said, “I did. She’ll be down soon.”
And then I spotted her, skiing toward me slowly. When she was close enough, I saw her eye had a big red blotch around it, and there was blood on her cheek.
“What happened?” I asked.
“A snowboarder ran into me.”
She told me that the snowboarder wasn’t paying attention at all, and just bombed out from the woods and leveled my daughter. He didn’t even stop to see if she was okay.
“Son of a bitch!”
I started looking around for random snowboarders to kill, asking, “Was it him? Or him?” Ivanka couldn’t identify the culprit. It happened so fast, she didn’t see what he was wearing (probably some dumpy outfit with pants falling down his butt).
“Forget about that, Mom. But what do I tell Dad? He’ll never let me ski again.”
Oh God. She was right. If he thought Ivanka was in any danger, he’d freak out. I said, “Tell him that you slipped on ice in front of the Little Nell.” The Little Nell is the hotel we stayed in.
She did, and he believed her. I’m shocked he didn’t sue!
• • •
Skiing wasn’t the kids’ only sport. The boys played soccer. Ivanka had a brief fling with field hockey, an inelegant sport I talked her out of playing, and was on the gymnastics team. They all took karate lessons, which I encouraged for fitness and self-defense. Donald’s company renovated Central Park’s Wollman Rink, a five-minute walk from Trump Tower, and we took the kids skating on winter weekends. In the summer, they Rollerbladed around Central Park.
Tennis became a big family sport when, in 1985, Donald and I bought Mar-a-Lago, the 126-room, 110,000-square-foot gilded palace by the sea in Palm Beach, a historic landmark previously owned and built by heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. We lived right next door to the Bath & Tennis Club. The kids took lessons and became very good players. Donald is pretty good, too. They all played in the club tournaments and were savagely competitive, especially when playing against each other.
Donald put golf clubs in the kids’ hands as soon as they were tall enough to swing them. The boys are, to this day, addicted to golf. For the Trump Organization, Eric oversees and opens golf courses all over the world.
I never liked golf. Back when we were dating, Donald tried to get me into it. We went to a golf course that later became the Trump National Doral resort in Miami. I preferred going to the spa rather than the links, but Donald didn’t have anyone else to play with that day, so I tagged along. He hit a ball, it landed in the cup, and he started jumping up and down and screaming, “Did you see that! Hole in one!”
I shrugged. “What’s the big deal? Isn’t it supposed to do that?” I had no clue. I thought people got holes in one all the time.
Donald insisted that I learn the game, or at least give it a good try. He’d learned to ski for me, and even though golf seemed to be about standing around and riding in
little carts—not much of an active sport and boring as hell—I agreed.
I hated it right off the bat (or should I say “club”?). The course had a ridiculous rule against women and men playing together, so I had to go out with a bunch of women in patterned skirts and visors who prattled on and on about their kids and grandkids. I hate small chat. Small talk, whatever you call it.
I teed off and hit the ball out of the fairway into the rough. I had to go over there and hunt in the grass to find it. At least I can get away from these annoying women for a few minutes, I thought. I found my ball and took a swing at it.
Then I heard a voice even worse than those of the chatty women, a man yelling at me from the other side of the fairway. “Hey! Stop that! What are you doing!” he screeched.
I thought golf was supposed to be a quiet sport.
The burly man in pink pants stormed up to me and said, “You bitch! You took my ball!”
Did I? I didn’t realize. I just saw a ball and whacked at it.
“I’ve got ten thousand dollars on this game! I’m going to kill you!” He shook his club at me.
I walked straight off the course and back to the clubhouse. That was it. I never played golf again. It’s too freaking dangerous!
• • •
Is fishing a competitive sport? It is for us. My father competed every year in Zlín in a carp fishing contest at the local lake. The winner with the biggest fish would get a prize. He would wake me up before dawn and we’d go to his favorite carp spot. He’d fish all morning and would take his biggest catch to be weighed by the deadline of two p.m. When I was seven, Dedo hadn’t caught anything all morning. Then, at one forty-five p.m., he felt a tug on the line, and he reeled in a monster! It wouldn’t matter how big it was, though, if we couldn’t get the fish to the judges by the deadline. He put this enormous fish in my arms—it was probably half my body weight—and said, “Run, Iva! Run!” I sprinted half a mile to the judges’ table with this slippery fish, screaming, “Wait! Wait!” the entire time. At one minute till two, I dropped the fish on the judges’ table. Another few seconds, and we wouldn’t have won. But we did, and my father and I shared and savored our victory, and the prize of a new fishing rod!
My father taught the boys to fish, too, and they would do it every chance they could. In Greenwich, the boys and my father would set up a little tent in front of Long Island Sound, which bordered the property, and the three of them would sit in there—summer, winter, didn’t matter—for hours. Whoever got the biggest catch was the winner of the day, and bragging rights were very important for Trumps. Mar-a-Lago is right on the Intracoastal Waterway, a three-thousand-mile waterway from Boston and around the tip of Florida, popular with migrating fish. My father and the boys would cast their lines from the beach and pull in tunas and big sharks, then let them go. This past March, Don took his sons to Mar-a-Lago for spring break and they caught and released a six-foot-long blacktip shark, and saw eight-hundred-pound hammerheads from shore. For Eric’s bachelor party, Don took him to Alaska to fish for salmon, a brothers’ bonding trip they try to make every year.
The boys also go hunting often, which I’m not fond of. Don started hunting in boarding school in rural Pennsylvania, and it became a lifelong passion of his—and, by extension, Eric’s. I don’t object to their going to Patagonia to shoot birds. There are a million of them there, enough to spare. Hunting rabbits in Westchester? No big deal. But why go to Zimbabwe to shoot Bambi and Dumbo? I don’t blame people for giving them a hard time about it. I’ve told them I disagree with shooting animals, but they’re grown men. They aren’t breaking any laws. As Don recently explained to the New York Times, he enjoys the camaraderie with his brother and their friends on a big-game adventure even more than the thrill of the hunt. Sitting in a duck blind for hours not talking is his form of meditation. To each his own. I’d rather sit on a lounge chair at the pool or in the garden.
• • •
Sports weren’t only for developing a competitive edge. We bonded over our love of activity and being outdoors. One of our most memorable vacations was on horseback. Ivanka was the best rider in our family. She took English-style riding lessons in Greenwich. (Recently, I auctioned off her helmet and made a few thousand dollars for charity.) We all saddled up for a three-day September camping trip in Aspen when the kids were eleven, eight, and five, organized by a friend of mine who owned a horse ranch. My parents were with us in Aspen that year (as they were most years). My mother elected to stay at Little Nell, the hotel, but my father came along with me, Dorothy, the kids, and the cowboy guides on the trail though the mountains and into the valley.
My horse was named Pepsi, and Ivanka’s was Cola, both lovely, sweet animals. My father’s horse was stung by a bee, took off like a shot, and almost killed him. He survived and we rode on through the trees, which were just turning red, orange, and yellow. We got to the first campground and put out one huge tent for all the girls, and three smaller ones for the guys. The cowboys made our dinner at a campfire. One broke out a guitar and we sang John Denver songs. He gave the guitar to my father, and he played and sang some Czech folk songs. I remember glancing around the campfire as the light danced on my children’s faces and thinking how beautiful they were and it all was, the woods and the singing.
And then it started to rain, heavy drops that were so fat, they put out the campfire. We ran for our tents. Ivanka, Dorothy, and I were in the large one. In the rush to get out of the rain, I forgot to watch out for the strings holding the tent in place, tripped over one, and landed face-first in the mud. It was cold away from the fire, so we got into our sleeping bags. I wasn’t so happy about that, being wet and covered in mud.
After a few moments of silence, Ivanka asked, “Is it raining inside the tent?”
Through a few holes, the rain was leaking in, and the tarp “floor” was turning into a puddle. We didn’t have tape to close the hole. I thought, What can I use to plug it up and stop all that water from getting in? It has to be narrow, absorbent . . .
“Give me my bag,” I said to Dorothy.
I opened it up and found exactly what I needed. “Aha!” I said, holding up a Tampax. I shoved it in the hole and the leaking stopped. I felt like MacGyver, the hero of Don’s favorite TV show. Ivanka and Dorothy gave me a round of applause.
An hour later, the tampon landed with a soggy splat on the floor of the tent. I went through my whole box that night. If I needed protection later on the trip, I would have to MacGyver that somehow, too. (Moss?)
The second night, we didn’t put the tents up. We slept on cots under the stars in a circle around the campfire. The cowboys formed a second circle outside ours because they heard coyotes nearby. In the middle of the night, I woke to a loud noise. The cowboys were walking around the circle, banging the cooking pots with sticks. I asked the lead cowboy, “Coyotes?”
He said, “Bears.”
The kids were thrilled, jumping on the cots, so excited by the idea of seeing an actual bear or a coyote, anything hairy with teeth. I might’ve dozed for an hour before dawn and woke up feeling and looking like hell. I brushed my teeth in a freezing-cold river with fish in it. I rummaged in my makeup bag for my foundation with sunblock . . . and it was frozen solid.
“That’s it,” I said. “I’m going back to the hotel to get a massage.”
On the third day, the plan was to ride along some trails to a good fishing spot in the valley and make a camp there for our last night, but the horses didn’t want to go. They were acting nervous and kept walking in the wrong direction, back toward their home. The cowboys tried to force it, but I said it was okay. The horses had the right idea. When we got back to the ranch, we found out that the team had stepped on porcupine needles. The little spikes were stuck to the bottom of their hooves.
For me, that trip was a near disaster, but the kids talked about it for years. “Remember that time we went camping and it rained all night, and we were almost attacked by bears? Best. Trip. Ever!” What’
s fun and memorable on a family vacation is always what goes wrong.
We stayed very friendly with the man who ran the ranch, and he amazed us all by deciding to start a line of dog food and pet accessories. His line was a huge success, and now he’s worth millions. We were invited to dinner at his cabin in the woods every year. Once, the kids were out sledding and he asked me to put a pizza in the oven for them. By the time they finished, it would be done. But I didn’t know how to work his oven and I put the temperature too high. The pizza caught fire and almost burned his cabin to the ground! And he still invites us back, every year.
-10-
REAL ENRICHMENT
Along with athletes, artists were national heroes in communist Czechoslovakia. Many of my friends in college were musicians, dancers, and painters. Jiří, my first love, was a songwriter. I grew up with a deep appreciation and respect for artists, and the belief that music, fine arts, and dance are the gold of life. Culture feeds the soul. The more time and money you spend on appreciating and making art, the richer you become.
Of course, not all of us are gifted artists. When I was seven, my father’s friend, a piano teacher, said to him, “Bring Iva for lessons. Let’s see what she’s got.” My father signed me up. I tried to concentrate, but my heart wasn’t in it. I cared a lot more about the chewing gum that my Canadian aunt and uncle sent to me as a gift. You couldn’t buy gum in Czechoslovakia, so it was a big deal when a package arrived. I showed off by blowing huge bubbles at piano class, and all the other kids were transfixed (and so jealous!). The teacher called my father and said, “Milos, can you please take Ivana out of my class? She’s distracting everyone!” My father sat me down and asked what was going on. I told him the truth: “I love gum and hate piano!” That was that. No more lessons. What would have been the point? My father knew that if I hated it, I would never be good at it. And if you can’t be the best, why bother? I don’t have regrets about quitting piano so soon. My father tried again and taught me how to play guitar. I was quite good at it as a child, but when I got older, I grew out my nails and that was it for my musical career. I do feel like everyone should know how to play at least one instrument.