Born Trump

by Emily Jane Fox

  Those two days were enough for Ivana to get knocked up. Donald had told everyone even before they were married that he was desperate for kids. Ivana, at twenty-eight, didn’t hesitate much either. To be sure, clocks in the 1970s ticked earlier and more often and louder. The pregnancy was somewhat of a medical oddity; Ivana claims that she had an IUD implanted at the time, but she got pregnant anyway. In fact, all three times she got pregnant, she wrote in her books, she had an IUD in—which, if true, has to make her either a statistical anomaly or the victim of serial gynecological malpractice.

  Regardless, merrily along they went, planning for life as a family of three. Ivana took over more work at the Trump Organization, decorating the Trump-owned hotels and turning her attention to their interior. They looked for more space and eventually bought a new apartment in Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue, which she outfitted with beige velvet sofas and goatskin tables and a compendium of Steuben glass animals laid out on glass shelves and lit up with little white Christmas tea lights that they kept out all year long. It was hardly what people would call a babyproofed apartment, but that Olympic Tower home was telling of how the Trumps would always view parenthood. Their children would have to learn how to fit into their lives, not the other way around. That, of course, is the prechild fantasy all married couples repeat to themselves and their friends, both out of naïveté and necessity. Otherwise, no one would ever work up the nerve to procreate. But the Trumps, in all their militant self-discipline and self-absorption, actually made it happen for themselves. Their babies wouldn’t ruin the white sectionals or break the expensive glass animals. Not if Ivana had a say.

  Ivana hated being pregnant. She gained only a dozen pounds, continued to work long days, and wore heels until almost the end of her pregnancy. She made it through Christmas of 1977 before she lost patience. On New Year’s Eve, a year to the day from Donald’s Aspen proposal, she asked her doctor to induce, and he agreed. Don Jr. would later tell a reporter that there was something of a rush to get the whole show on the road. “My dad wanted to be able to claim me as a dependent on his taxes for 1977, so he told my mom that she had to have me before midnight,” their eldest son said to Forbes in 2006. “And if she didn’t, he’d make her take a cab home.” Ivana leaves that bit out of her book. In her recollection, it was noon, and Donald told her to come by the hospital at five that afternoon. She went to a meeting, got her nails and toes done, and checked in with Donald. Within minutes after induction, she felt the urge to push. She kicked Donald out of the room. “Let him witness the birth? Never,” she wrote. “My sex life would be finished after that.” Twenty minutes later, their son was born.

  “What should we name him?” Donald asked. She suggested Donald Jr., which made her husband balk. “What if he’s a loser?” he asked. The name stuck anyway, and by eight o’clock he’d left. She threw on her mink and a boa and visited a friend who also happened to be in the hospital. It was New Year’s Eve, after all, and as her friends tell it, she had something to celebrate. Donald, they whispered, had agreed to a bonus of $250,000 for each child. Happy 1978 to them all.

  On January 2 Don Jr., or Donny, as he came to be known, turned two days old. That morning Ivana sauntered into the Grand Hyatt. She felt fine—better than she had through all nine months of her pregnancy. It would be impossibly boring just to sit at home with a sleeping baby, even though that sleeping baby was hers and she had only met him less than forty-eight hours earlier. She wasn’t breastfeeding, and would give all three of her children formula from day one. How could she work all day with a kid latched to her chest? And how decidedly unsexy. Nothing about it appealed.

  Donald and Ivana did not let things like feedings—and the rest of the tedium that drives new parents to the depths of sleep deprivation and stir-crazy, so stuck in the sinkhole of diapers and spit-up and bottle cleaning and bathtime and witching hours that they hardly find time to wash their hair or heat up dinner—take over their lives. They had work at the Grand Hyatt to get back to. It wasn’t like Donald was going to be at home swaddling and concerning himself with diaper rash. As he told Gregg “Opie” Hughes and Anthony Cumia on their radio show in 2005, Donald didn’t do diapers. “There’s a lot of women out there that demand that the husband act like the wife, and you know, there’s a lot of husbands that listen to that,” he said, at that point on his third wife and fifth child. “If I had a different type of wife, I probably wouldn’t have a baby, you know, because that’s not my thing. I’m really, like, a great father, but certain things you do and certain things you don’t. It’s just not for me.” It seemed as though he never learned, because he never had to. After Ivanka had her first child, she told Redbook that Donald looked after Arabella all the time, but “he wouldn’t know what to do if she started crying or needed a diaper change,” although, she added, “I think he’d figure it out.”

  Donald and Ivana’s way of figuring it out when they had their own children was to throw money at the problem and bring in nannies. It is not an uncommon arrangement, particularly among those who can easily afford it and have the space. For two parents working full-time, having consistent, reliable childcare is almost essential—but the Trumps took it a few steps beyond necessity. First they brought in a Swiss nanny to look after Don Jr. The strict sleep schedule she imposed for the baby and the brisk way in which she scolded Ivana for disrupting it lost her the job after a few weeks. In came a German nanny who would last five years, despite the fact that she once left baby Don in a hot bath, alone, while she took their dog for a walk, and put him on the kitchen counter as a toddler while she chopped vegetables, only to have him tumble off and break his leg.

  Three years after Donny was born, another IUD mishap led to a little baby girl, whom they named Ivana Marie, after Ivana and Ivana’s mother. They nicknamed her Ivanka, the diminutive of Ivana’s name. A year and a half later, along came Eric. That pregnancy was not without concern. Ivana and Donald rented a cottage in East Hampton from Michael Kennedy and his wife Eleonora for eight summers. (Years later, Kennedy famously represented Ivana in her divorce from Donald.) Friends remember that Ivana spent those summer days shuffling her children to piano practice and tennis lessons. Donald would disappear, most of the time in white golf shirts, though no one could tell if he spent all that time on the links, and resurface sometime in the late afternoons, or at the least in time for sunset. He was not there when Ivana, four months pregnant with her third child at the time, took out a dune buggy and whipped across the beach, catching air as she bopped over one mound of sand after another. When she got inside, she noticed she had started to bleed, and immediately rushed to the emergency room. The baby was fine, though as Ivana tells it, Eric never let her live it down. “Eric uses it as ammunition when he says I didn’t really want him,” she wrote in her book. After he was born, she had her tubes tied.

  With three new children and a move into the Trump Tower triplex, Ivana got rid of the German nanny and hired two religious Irish women in their place—Bridget Carroll, who instantly took to Ivanka, and Dorothy Curry, who Eric refers to as his “second mother” and who still works as Ivana’s personal assistant to this day. They each worked two days on, two days off, giving each other some time to live a life outside of the Trump orbit. When they were on, they shared a little room in the children’s wing of the triplex, which happened to take up an entire floor.

  The children’s floor, spilling into the entire sixty-eighth floor of Trump Tower, sat atop the family’s triplex. Ivana chose to decorate the sixty-sixth floor, the most public-facing of the family home, in a megadose of what is known as the classic Trump aesthetic: beige onyx floors inset with brass; fabric banquettes gilded with twenty-four-karat gold; low-slung ceilings covered in more gold leaf and a Michelangelo-style mural, the latter having caused quite a skirmish between Ivana, who insisted it feature cherubs, and Donald, who much preferred warriors. He ultimately won out, boasting that the painting’s quality was in line with that of the Sistine Chapel. The staircase was
mirrored, the railings bronze; just about everything else was gold or crystal or lacquered or, at the very least, shiny. And then there were the views—all of Central Park bloomed and the skyline glittered, depending on from where you looked, giving the place the feel more of a dictator’s palace than a family home for five plus staff.

  The children’s floor itself could have fit several normal New York apartments within its walls, but at least it looked like it belonged to a family. There was a little kitchen, off of which was the room where Bridget and Dorothy alternately stayed. There were two guest bedrooms, one suite primarily for Ivana’s parents, Dedo and Babi, who spent months each year tending to the kids, and one for anyone else who came to stay overnight. Each child had his or her own bedroom. Don Jr. settled on blue and white for his room, and covered the walls with posters—a Grateful Dead one, another, for The Terminator, read “I’m back.” His bedroom floor was littered with lacrosse sticks and tangled sneakers and the mess a normal young man accumulates. Ivanka lined her lilac walls with Madonna posters and shots of the cast of Beverly Hills 90210 and shelves filled with china dolls and delicate glass animals and silver picture frames and stickers stuck haphazardly about. Her white wrought-iron bed backed up into a frilly floral fabric, and a drapy lilac canopy hung above it. The floor-to-ceiling windows put her face-to-face with Central Park as soon as she opened her eyes every morning. Eric’s room, yellow and white and bright, did not have his sister’s view.

  The floor also had a playroom, with stacks of Legos and Lincoln Logs, toy trucks and cars, videotapes and a big-screen TV, a game system and a couch and blankets and enough going on to entice Michael Jackson, their neighbor in Trump Tower, to regularly come over to play video games with the kids. (Ivana’s recent book makes clear that her children were never left alone with Michael when he came around; either she or the nannies supervised the visits.) The kids would play in other parts of the triplex, too, raiding Ivana’s temperature- and humidity-controlled fur closet, sneaking minks and coats of any little animal off their hangers and back up into their quarters. How could a kid build a proper fort without those, anyway?

  That the kids lived like little princes and princess did not mean they were always treated as such. Ivana, Dorothy, and Bridget kept them on a military schedule: up at the crack of dawn for breakfast, down some forty floors within Trump Tower to visit their father in his office before the nannies took them to school. Afterward Bridget and Dorothy would pick them up and, most often, take them to their scheduled after-school activities. Eric took painting classes at the Museum of Modern Art. Don Jr. primarily stuck to sports and anything that kept him outside or running around in Central Park. Ivana studied piano for a few years, even playing at a party her mother threw for Kathy Keeton, whose husband, Bob Guccione, had founded Penthouse. She took up ballet too, before she grew too tall and no longer wanted to miss her family’s Christmas vacations to rehearse for the Nutcracker performances she would appear in at Lincoln Center, as part of the New York City Ballet’s annual production. Twice she was cast in it, first, aptly, as a “party scene girl,” and then as an angel, in a long white dress with gold stars sewn onto it, gold trim around the collar and hem, and a round gold halo atop her pulled-back blond hair. Michael Jackson turned up that year to watch her from backstage, which, understandably, caused quite a stir within the company. As soon as the other girls caught wind of his impending arrival, they hatched a plan to each wear one glove as they performed, as a nod to the Prince of Pop’s sartorial bent. The adults in the room chastened them, nixing the idea before they got anywhere near the stage.

  Afterward the children would come home, stop in for some more time playing on their father’s office floor while he rolled calls, and went upstairs to the triplex for an early dinner prepared by the nannies. Ivana and Donald would get dressed for their nights out, with Ivanka sometimes helping her mother choose which cocktail dress to wear that evening or watch her apply her makeup at her vanity, before the children said their prayers with Dorothy and Bridget and were tucked into bed, and Donald and Ivana hopped in the limousine downstairs.

  Ivana was strict about her children’s daily schedules; she ruled with an iron fist in just about every area, even though she left much of the day-to-day operations to Bridget and Dorothy. “My mother was much stricter than my father when we were growing up,” Ivanka once told an Evening Standard reporter. “She was the disciplinarian. She is European and a great athlete. You didn’t mess with my mother.” She recounted how her mother would pull down her pants and spank her in front of her friends until she was about ten years old. “People are shocked but she didn’t chase me around with a whip.”

  None of Ivana’s children is shy about the fact that she would spank them from time to time, and neither is she. “Mom was not afraid to spank,” Eric wrote in his mother’s book. “If one of us messed up, he or she was punished, so we learned to behave.” Ivana told a story of Don Jr. misbehaving at a dinner with the whole Trump family—Fred and Mary and the sisters and brothers and children—at Gurney’s, the resort overlooking the ocean at the tip of Long Island, in Montauk. Her son was making faces and banging his silverware. For many elementary-school-aged kids, that may be what some parents regard as normal behavior out at a restaurant. For the Trumps, particularly in front of Donald’s parents, it was simply unacceptable. Ivana took Donny to a hallway away from the rest of the family and spanked him a few times before telling him to shape up. For the rest of the dinner, he sat stone-faced and quiet.

  Around the same time, Don Jr. took another few lashes for no reason at all. His sister Ivanka had been playing a game with her brothers at their home in Greenwich in the glass solarium, which was filled with the kinds of fancy, fragile things many parents with young children remove from their homes. The Trumps’ solution to this was to have separate rooms or wings in which the children were permitted to play and eat and socialize, and the rest off-limits, a rule enforced by the nannies when the Trumps were at work or out to dinner or attending parties. The kids found ways around the system, of course. The three siblings decided to toss around a tennis ball inside, and to do so in the solarium, where their mother had chosen two porcelain chandeliers to hang over the informal dining table. When Ivanka tossed the ball a little too hard and a little too high, directly hitting one of these, the chandelier crashed to the ground in tiny, expensive pieces. Ivana came back from work in time to see the mess, and demanded to know who was to blame. Ivanka piped up first. It was Donny, she told her mother. And so Donny, without uttering a word in his own defense, took a few spanks from Ivana. He was a lucky kid, mostly, but no one catches every break.

  However tight Ivana kept her children’s schedules, and however much they came to fear her retribution, there was no question how truly fortunate and overwhelmingly privileged they were, living the way their parents themselves wanted to live. No child is born demanding a silver spoon. It takes a parent or a grandparent or a family to strive for that kind of life and pass it on to unwitting descendants. Those descendants, knowing little else, learn to expect it, and either opt to strive for the same material objectives their parents reached for and pass them along to their own children or actively reject that existence and forge their own paths.

  In most meaningful ways, all of the Trump children chose the former, despite occasional minor rebellions. When you consider the sort of childhood the Trump children had, it is not difficult to imagine why they never wanted to wander far. Around the time when Eric was born, in the mid-1980s, the Trumps purchased a home in Greenwich, Connecticut—much closer and with far less traffic than the cottage they’d rented in the Hamptons for years. At the time, Donald was working like a madman, and Ivana was in charge of the Trump Organization’s business in Atlantic City. It was an easier trip back to Manhattan for Donald at the end of a weekend away, and a seaplane could whisk Ivana off the backyard dock that dipped into Long Island Sound and back to the casinos. Donald payed $4 million for the 5.8-acre estate built on a pen
insula near the tip of Indian Harbor Point. The house itself, all 20,000 square feet of it, had been built in 1939 by a local superheater executive, and the facade looked much like that of the house Donald would move into with his third wife in early January 2017. The front door of the white Georgian Colonial mansion was buttressed by a grand portico not unlike a miniature version of the one at the front of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The interior just as grand. There was a three-story rotunda and a sweeping double staircase, where the family would set up a Christmas tree at least twenty feet tall as they celebrated Thanksgiving in the house. Adorning the tree with all of Ivana’s Czechoslovakian crystal bulb ornaments took weeks. The formal dining table sat twenty. There were dozens of bathrooms and bedrooms, a bowling alley, and a ten-car garage, though Ivana says she took to driving the family’s limousine up to the house from the city herself, with their kids and nannies and pets strapped in the back. Donald never joined them for that.

  Once they arrived in Greenwich, the family settled into a routine. Eric and Don Jr. explored the woods for hours on end; Ivanka and her brothers cultivated a few little side hustles to earn some spending money of their own. They once fashioned fake Native American arrowheads that they would bury in shallow ditches they dug in the woods, then pretend to uncover in front of unsuspecting friends, offering to sell them each rare, uncovered treasure for the low, low price of $5 a pop.

  Ivana recalled Greenwich as providing them some freedom from their mother’s low-grade paranoia and image control. In the city, Ivana would not let her kids set up a lemonade stand on Fifth Avenue, nor were they allowed to do so in the lobby of Trump Tower. (They were not permitted to go trick-or-treating with their nannies alone on Halloween, either; the Trump security team would inconspicuously trail behind as they went door-to-door on the Upper East Side.) In Greenwich, though, they had the autonomy to sell lemonade at their leisure. It was rich, suburban America, after all, and if young heirs couldn’t be free to make even more money off powdered Country Crock, then this was not the nation its founders intended to create. The only trouble, as Ivanka saw it, was that the houses were perhaps too sprawling, the neighborhood too private at the end of the cul-de-sac on which their own estate stood. “In every other respect, this was a prime spot, but it was a dead zone for aspiring lemonade magnates,” she wrote. Here’s where their good fortune came in yet again. The family had a bodyguard on staff, and several maids, and all sorts of household help financially indebted to the family. They “took pity on us,” Ivanka recalled, though undoubtedly that is not the precise emotion they felt for the children as they “dug deep for their spare change” until the kids had recouped enough money for the day. “We made the best of a bad situation, I guess,” Ivana recalled.