by Ivana Trump
I bought my Cantieri di Baia–built 120-foot yacht, named M.Y. Ivana, in Naples in 1995 and had her for twelve years. The kids traveled with me on my floating home for a couple of summers, but then they went off to college and had their own lives and vacation plans. The last thing they wanted to do in June was to cruise around Europe with their mom and her crazy friends. I ran my yacht like a hotel, ordering supplies once a week, setting up accounts in different ports all around Europe, hiring the staff, managing maintenance. I did the sleeping and eating arrangements for the guests. I knew every noise on my boat. I could tell you which of my guests had made love the night before. (If the yacht is a-rocking, don’t come a-knocking!) After Riccardo and I broke up, I bounced back by throwing tons of parties on my yacht, picking up friends in every port, just enjoying the sun and sea, and thanking my lucky stars that this was my life. I called the top deck of the yacht “the pussy platform.” We’d jump off it, thirty feet into the water. All went naked, except for me. I remembered the time Jackie O. was photographed naked on the beach on Skorpios in Greece and the photo appeared all over the world. I kept my bikini on! One year, fur designer Dennis Basso came on the boat with his partner Michael, along with a handful of other friends. We made garlands and decorations, and the captain “married” Dennis and Michael (they got married for real years later). To celebrate, we all jumped off the pussy platform into the water. Dennis was the last to go, but he balked. We yelled, “Jump!” He still refused.
I said, “If you jump, I’m going to buy your sable coat!”
He never moved so fast—and made an impressive splash when he hit the water.
M.Y. Ivana was my home away from home for twelve years. We went everywhere. I fell in love with Roffredo and traveled with Rossano on it, had countless parties and nights of fun. After twenty years on Riccardo’s yacht and then my own, though, I’d seen enough of the Mediterranean for a lifetime. Plus M.Y. Ivana was expensive to maintain and dock. I was trying to figure out what to do with it, when someone knocked on my door at Concha Marina in 2007. I sent my houseman David to open the door.
There was a couple from Texas, well dressed, middle-aged, all-American looking. The husband said, “Excuse me, but we couldn’t help noticing the Ferrari in the driveway.” They’d have had to be blind not to! It was a Formula One race car, bright red, with a vanity plate that said ivana. I was never called a plain Jane, and neither were my vehicles.
“Is it for sale?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, no,” David said. There was a three-year waiting list for my car, so I couldn’t blame them for asking. But my Ferrari was a gift from Roffredo. I would never sell it.
The wife said, “We just came to Palm Beach, and we’re looking for a place to live. Are you selling your house?”
First they wanted my car, and now my house? No. But . . . what about the boat? After consulting with me, David told them, “She’s not ready to sell the house at this time, but do you want to buy a yacht?”
He took them to the marina where M.Y. Ivana was docked. They took a quick tour and said, “We’ll take it!”
Just like that. I sold it to them without a broker. The next day, I got a check and handed them the keys.
You know what people say, that the two happiest days of a boat owner’s life are the day she buys the boat and the day she sells it? That was a very good day.
• • •
Every June for the last forty years, I’ve attended the Royal Ascot horse races in Berkshire, England, a few miles from Windsor Castle, as a member of the Annabelle Goldstein Club, a very private club in London. In the late nineties, they realized they needed young blood and created a junior membership. Ivanka was the first junior member of Annabelle’s, and at fifteen, she started coming to the races with me.
You don’t just throw on any old thing to hobnob with the queen and the British aristocracy. The tradition is for the men to dandy up in gray suits and tails with top hats. The ladies wear garden-party cocktail dresses, high heels (that get stuck in the mud or grass), and extravagant hats. It’s really all about the hats. Ivanka and I would arrive a few days before the races to meet with a milliner. She would look at what we were going to wear and design gorgeous hats with wide brims, exploding feathers, and flowers in vibrant colors to match our dresses. The races last for five days, and depending on your schedule, you might need five hats. We attended on opening day, a Tuesday; Ladies Day on Thursday; and once more during the week.
In our dresses and hats, we’d take a Rolls-Royce from my apartment in London to Windsor Castle, right next door, and park on the grass on the edge of the Ascot fields. My friend Lizz Brewer hosted a picnic lunch on the field with chairs, tents, a buffet with champagne, of course, and bottomless Pimm’s cocktails—Pimm’s fruit drink, seltzer, lemon, cucumber, and gin—served in silver cups. Beware the Pimm’s Cup! You have one and think, It’s so sweet and harmless. Have two or three, and you are gone. They’re deadly!
After lunch, we’d take out Queen Elizabeth–approved badges to gain access to the paddocks, the “backstage” area, to see the horses, Ivanka’s favorite part of the day. She loved horses from her days taking riding lessons in Greenwich. We’d always have a moment to stop at the restaurant next to the paddocks for nibbles of lobster, spiced meats, and strawberries with cream. From there, we’d pass through the gates of the arena wearing our purple carnations and badges, smiling at the photographers and press from the BBC who asked for interviews.
By this point, half the crowd was drunk, and the races hadn’t even started yet. First, the royal family—Elizabeth and Philip in gold braids, Diana and Charles (and then Camilla and Charles), Andrew and the Duchess of York—rode in on horse-drawn carriages from Windsor Castle, waved at the crowds, and took their places in the queen’s suites above the fray. You could sit in the grandstands or, as we preferred, stand on the grass on the same level as the track, close enough to feel the earth shake when the horses thundered past. Sometimes, I’d place a bet, but only after I’d researched the horses, trainers, and jockeys. I broke my “never gamble” rule and would put down twenty or thirty pounds to win or place or both, and won most of the time. I’d stay until the late afternoon, and have our driver pick us up to go back to London to rest and then dress for a black-tie dinner at Annabelle’s.
A secondary celebration of Ascot week was the famous Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair. A member of the royal family would show up, give a speech, and open the show of incredible art and furniture. One June, Ivanka, Riccardo, Nikki, and I went to Grosvenor House and then to dinner at Annabelle’s. We got home at one a.m. We were just getting into bed when the phone rang. “Hello. Ivana Trump, please,” said the man.
“This is Ivana. Who’s this?”
“Scotland Yard. We need to speak to you.”
“What did I do now?” I asked.
Two detectives, a man and a woman, arrived at the door five minutes later and told us that they’d caught a gang of thieves. Under interrogation, they told the detectives that I was their next target. Somehow, they’d gotten my schedule, had been following me all week, and had planned on robbing me at Grosvenor House! They decided against it because our group was too large. Their backup plan was to wait until I got home, push me into the house, tie me up, and beat me until they got the combination for the safe.
I was horrified by the very idea of this plot. Ivanka was there with me. She was only sixteen at the time. An experience like that could have traumatized her for life. I called Laurence Graff, the English diamond jeweler, and asked, “Who is your best bodyguard?” and hired the man to sit in the lobby of my house for six months.
Several years later, we had another near miss in London. Rossano and I were in town and met Ivanka, who’d been staying at my apartment for a few days. Rossano and I went to a black-tie dinner that night, and Ivanka went directly to the airport to return to New York. When we got home later, Rossano started to get undressed and asked, “Ivana, did you move my watches?”
I hadn’t touched them.
“They’re gone,” he said.
I ran into the bedroom and went immediately to my Louis Vuitton jewelry box. I didn’t put my diamonds in the safe when we got there, just shoved them in my lingerie drawer, assuming they’d be safe. They were gone. Only a portion of the jewelry’s value was insured.
I called Scotland Yard to report the crime. “This is Ivana Trump,” I said.
“You again?”
There was no forced entry or fingerprints. The detectives were on the case for a long time, but the culprits were never found. They assumed it was an inside job. One of the stolen items was a diamond-and-gold Buccellati purse. Who would think the baubles on a woman’s clutch were real? The thieves had to know. A year later, we thought one of the stolen items, a canary-diamond Tiffany brooch in the shape of a bird, surfaced at an auction in Geneva. The detective went undercover, but it turned out to be a smaller brooch of the same design.
If Ivanka had delayed her travel by one day, she would have been home alone when the thieves came. She could have been attacked, kidnapped, or killed. Rossano had to talk me down for weeks afterward. Since that time, I’ve stopped traveling with jewelry. To be honest, I hardly ever wear my jewelry anymore. For one thing, dripping in diamonds makes you look old. For another, it’s like wearing a sign that reads rob me!
I felt bad for Kim Kardashian when she was robbed in Paris last year. But then the thieves told the police that she’d made it easy for them. She posted a photo of herself on Instagram wearing her $4 million ring, and updated on Twitter where she was staying and what she was doing. I’m not blaming the victim, but the robbers themselves said that they couldn’t have done the job if she hadn’t given them all the information they needed. You just can’t trust the whole world with sensitive information. One thing I’ve learned after all my years in the public eye is that you have to maintain some privacy to be safe. My children have absolutely followed my lead there. As open as they are with the media, they hold much more back than they let on.
• • •
Nowadays, the door to my house in Saint-Tropez is always (figuratively) open for the kids and their families, whether I’m there or not. Ivanka came often when she was in college, and I used to tease her for going to bed hours before I did. When Eric was in college, he went down there with a few friends and called me in New York their first night. “Mom, there’s a line of two hundred people at Papagayo. Can you help us?” he asked. Le Papagayo is a popular restaurant/disco, one of my favorite nightspots, and hard to get into.
I called security at the club and said, “My son and his friends are on line outside. Can you please let him in?” I helped my eighteen-year-old son get into a club. I knew they were good kids, and it was a special occasion for him. In France, my rules for the kids are looser.
My rules for myself are, too, unless I get caught. In Saint-Tropez, I used to ride a Vespa scooter around the village to do my shopping and get some air. I rode right past the police station, and one of the young cops flagged me down. “Ivana, you don’t have a helmet,” he said. “You can’t ride without one.”
I said, “I’m sorry, I just had my hair done. It won’t happen again.”
The next day, I went right by the station again. And I got stopped again.
“Today, you will have to pay a fine,” the cop said. “Eighty euros.”
I said, “Let me go and I’ll give the money to the florist who cuts my flowers or the farmer who sells me eggs. I’ll spend a fortune in the market today, and I promise not to do it again.”
I kept my promise and shopped up a storm. But no way was I going to put on a helmet! Instead of breaking the law, I got rid of the scooter, and now, when in the South of France, I prefer to walk. Better for the legs and my tan anyway.
PART SIX
ADVANCED PARENTING
-25-
I DON’T MEDDLE (MUCH)
Even when your kids become adults, you still worry and keep an eye on them, especially if they seem to be veering in the wrong direction.
After Don graduated from Wharton in 2000, I assumed he’d come back to New York and start working for his father’s company as he had been groomed to do from childhood. But instead, he moved to Colorado. He said he wanted to live and be free in the great outdoors, not stuck in an office tower—the same one he grew up in—in the city. He took his Ivy League business degree, moved into a tiny apartment in Aspen, and got part-time jobs teaching fly-fishing and bartending at the Tippler, a rowdy watering hole at the base of the mountain.
I was totally opposed to this plan. I’d never heard the phrase “gap year,” and it sounded like the stupidest thing in the world. That’s some American tradition, doing nothing for a year and losing the discipline and momentum you built up in college. I told Don, “You’ll become lazy. It’s a waste of time.” I was worried that when he decided to get a real job, he’d have forgotten everything he’d learned in school. The very idea went against all my beliefs. It was like stepping off the elevator of success to sit on your butt and let your brain turn into oatmeal. How would he ever get back on the elevator? His father disapproved, too.
Don rebelled against our wishes and said he could make his own decisions. Apparently, that meant he was going to live in the woods and shoot rabbits, whether we liked it or not. I couldn’t force him to do what I thought was best, but I made my point clear by not visiting him in Colorado and cutting him off. If he was going to waste his life, he’d support himself doing it. We didn’t have a heated discussion, nor did I threaten him. I just stopped sending checks. It took eighteen months, but he eventually came around to my way of thinking on his own. He quit his job in Aspen and returned to New York to take his place in the Trump Organization.
* * *
DON
I joke that I’m the first person to graduate from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to move out west to be a bartender. It was a calculated move. I felt like I needed to get stuff out of my system and make sure I didn’t have any regrets before I entered the real world. I always knew that it was a temporary break between college and working at the Trump Organization. After a while, I did feel a need to use my education and return to New York. I planned my trip home, hoping for a smooth transition from living in the country to working in the city. But that’s the opposite of what happened. My first day of work was scheduled for September 17, 2001, one week after 9/11. My long drive home starting on the fifteenth gave me plenty of time to reflect on the tragedy of what happened.
* * *
While Don was planning his trip home, I was in Montreal visiting my old friend George and appearing at the opening of the philharmonic orchestra to help them raise funds. It was a short trip. I only packed one dress in my bag. After I did my thing at the concert, I invited my friends to come to my hotel suite. We had some wine and snacks, and stayed up talking and laughing until four a.m., having a good time. My flight from Montreal to New York was at nine a.m.—on September 11, 2001. I thought, Why go to sleep at all? I don’t need a lot of sleep. High-energy people generally don’t. I had the concierge rebook me on the first flight out, at seven a.m. I boarded with nothing to check and had a short, pleasant flight to LaGuardia Airport. We landed at 8:35 a.m. I got in the car to drive home, and as we were approaching the Triborough Bridge, the first plane hit the north tower at 8:46 a.m. We could see the fire and smoke from the car. Then the second plane hit the south tower at 9:03 a.m. Already the sirens and craziness had overwhelmed the city. My driver took me straight home and stayed with me. Dorothy didn’t know I’d switched my flight. She was calling my hotel in Montreal, trying to tell me not to check out. I tried to call her, but landlines and cell phones were dead. She had no idea I was sitting in my living room, watching the news in disbelief and horror. We figured out later that the planes that hit the Twin Towers were in the air at the same time mine was. Roffredo was downtown, jogging along the Hudson River, and saw everything; he returned home covered head t
o toe in mortar and dust.
Of course, I thought about my children, even though I knew they were safe. Don was still in Colorado, Ivanka was in college, and Eric was at boarding school. They were trying frantically to reach me all day. Late that night around ten p.m., I was able to get in touch with them and Dorothy to say I was home safe.
What a horrific, traumatic time for our country. I stared at the TV for weeks afterward, and my heart broke for all the families of the victims. All over New York, people put up signs asking about the missing, who were presumed dead. The smoke and smell of the disaster lingered in the city for days and carried all the way uptown to my town house. After a long period of sadness for the loss of lives and our sense of security, my feelings turned to anger at those criminals who did this to us. I was furious that my beloved city had been scarred. I knew we’d come back stronger than ever, and we have. Unfortunately, the threat of terrorism hasn’t gone away.
September 11 made me love New York even more. I think it had the same effect on the kids. Ivanka didn’t bother with a gap when she graduated from Wharton in 2004. She worked for a year as a project manager at Bruce Ratner’s Forest City, a real estate management and development firm, to see how business was done from a different perspective before joining her brother and father at Donald’s company. Eric went directly to work alongside his siblings as soon as he graduated with honors from Georgetown in 2006 with a degree in finance and management.
And then, in a blink, the kids were no longer children. One minute, they were babies, and the next, they were all grown up. Although I felt a little sad that that part of their lives, and mine, was over, I was proud of them and glad to see them settle in at the Trump Organization. Each one had launched into adulthood and taken to their career like they were born to it, which, in every sense, they were. All the hard work I’d put in to get them ready for a fabulous life had come to fruition, making me one happy mama.