The other thing about a second wife, or mother of your child, in this case, is that this go-around, you may get to name your child something your first spouse rejected. Donald had built his beloved Trump Tower after he secured the air rights over Tiffany and Co., the famed jewelry store next door, for $5 million. “Everything involved with Trump Tower has been successful,” he told the Times. “And Trump Tower was built with Tiffany’s air rights. But I’ve also always loved the name.” Tiffany was the name Donald tried to give Ivanka when she was born, but Ivana shot down his suggestion immediately.
Tiffany Ariana Trump, a seven-and-a-half-pound blue-eyed, blond-haired little girl, was born in the early afternoon of October 13 at St. Mary’s Hospital in Palm Beach. Donald called a reporter at the New York Times twenty minutes after Tiffany was born. “We have a perfect little girl, a combination in looks of both of us, to go with my three other wonderful children,” he said.
With Marla relenting to his long-favored name, would he relent to Marla’s request that they get married, especially with a new little baby Trump in the picture? Donald paused at the Times reporter’s question. “That is something being seriously contemplated.”
He was being quite honest. Even after Tiffany’s birth, he had his doubts and his moments of conviction, neither of which stuck around for very long, each of which could easily replace the other in his head. Marla had been loyal, but his family wasn’t crazy about her. Tiffany deserved to have her father and mother together, but he couldn’t go through the kind of divorce battle and near financial ruin he’d just barely crawled out of again. The should-I-or-shouldn’t-I indecisiveness that plagued Donald Trump—that continues to plague Donald Trump today—would have gone on forever if not for a red line drawn by Marla, a second line drawn by his business advisers, and, to a lesser extent, a mass shooting close to home that finally pushed him over.
Marla, who’d settled into life at Mar-a-Lago with her mother as a doting nanny and Marla whisperer for Donald after Tiffany was born, delivered her man an ultimatum: either he married her by Christmas, or she would take his daughter and move out. She’d had enough. She was not going to spend another Christmas with Donald, at Mar-a-Lago or anywhere, without a wedding band on her finger. Marla wasn’t even living with Donald full-time in New York; he lived part of the time in his Trump Tower apartment below the triplex, sometimes staying with her in the Trump Park apartment. It wasn’t the way she was going to raise her daughter, with a sometimes daddy who refused to marry her mother out of fear of losing his money and a desire to chase tail around town.
Ann, who wanted the wedding perhaps even more than Marla, did what she could to assuage Donald’s concerns with the financial side of things. Marla was resisting signing a prenup a month after Tiffany was born. Forget the money—which, of course, she couldn’t; she knew full well that with a premarital agreement like that came a subsequent nondisclosure agreement. She didn’t want to let go of the power that came from being able to tell the secrets Donald most cared about keeping close. Without that, what power could she wield over him? But it was a nonstarter for Donald to marry Marla without one. “A prenuptial is a horrible document,” he told Vanity Fair. “When you’re a believer in positive thinking, it isn’t good. But it’s a modern-day necessity.”
By late November, Marla relented. Donald wore down further under pressure from his advisers. They had a plan in the works to take his casinos public early the next year, and they didn’t want Donald’s personal life bandied about in the tabloids, as they knew it would be if he didn’t give Marla the wedding she wanted. No sane investors would put their money into a company whose CEO’s sex life made front-page news for weeks on end. “We had to tell him over and over again to settle down,” one adviser said. “He would say, ‘I know. I know I had to do it. It’s the right thing to do,’” but they all knew that only made matters harder.
When a New York man pulled out his Ruger P89 9-millimeter handgun on a Long Island Rail Road train as it pulled into the Garden City station at about 6:00 p.m. on December 7, walking backward down the aisle and staring passengers in the eyes as he fired thirty shots, Donald knew what he had to do. In the days that followed, authorities said six people had died and nineteen were left injured. “I figure life is short,” Donald said in the aftermath, which it is, though it is unclear why this tragedy struck so close to home. It’s hard to imagine that Donald himself ever commuted at rush hour on an LIRR train. Nevertheless, on the morning of December 10, Donald told the New York papers he would marry Marla in a ceremony before Christmas.
Marla sprang into action. She had been furiously trying to lose the baby weight for weeks, just in case. Carolina Herrera was making her dress, and she had the first fitting for the gown exactly two months after Tiffany was born. At five feet ten inches, she weighed 151 pounds by the middle of October, and knowing that just maybe her ultimatum and the internal and external pressures on Donald might make him cave, she started a strict diet to slim down to wedding shape as quickly as possible. It was all seeds and vegetables and raw nuts and greens and fruits all the time. “Nothing in excess,” she told Vanity Fair. Breastfeeding helped, too. She fed Tiffany just about anywhere she pleased around Mar-a-Lago—in the dining room for breakfast, by the pool in the afternoons. One longtime guest of the private club remembers Mar-a-Lago staffers delivering Marla a breast pump on a silver platter as she bronzed herself on a lounge chair tilted toward the sun. A few days before her fitting, she was down to 127 pounds. If she was extra strict, she would reach the 125-pound mark she had stuck in her head by the time she walked into Herrera on December 13.
The wedding was set for December 20, which gave the designer less than a week to come up with a dress worthy of a Trump wedding and the circus this Trump wedding in particular would command. It was not going to be the dress she’d lugged around in her suitcase over the last year. That dress was immediately discarded after she got the official green light, Donald’s credit card, and an appointment with Ms. Herrera, who made clothes for British royals and American ones (namely, the Kennedys). Marla waltzed into her salon and chose double-faced satin from the famed Maison Bucol—a luxe fabric house in Lyon that’s been spinning its yarns for nearly a century—in bright white, belying the fact that their baby Tiffany would herself be there for the wedding (in a mini designer dress of her own, inlaid with pearls). The sleeves were cut off-the-shoulder, with a slight sweetheart neck and bodice fit close to her chest, leaving little of Donald’s favorite feature to the imagination. Down the back ran little traditional fabric-covered buttons leading to more white satin that fell in a removable train, which she could take off after the ceremony for the reception. She chose a very of-the-moment, vertically voluminous tulle veil that she found in the Carolina Herrera shop. For shoes, she went with Manolo Blahnik.
Donald’s tuxedo was sorted; he would wear Brioni, as he always did. He was far more concerned with who would actually show up to see Marla in white. There was no time for proper engraved invitations. There was no time for an official invitation at all, in fact. On the day Marla went to fit her dress, Donald’s assistants started working the phones. It was a week before the big day, which would take place just before Christmas in New York. The A-list celebrities and bigtime moguls Donald wanted there to watch his soon-to-be second wife walk down the aisle were busy or out of time or simply turned off by the spectacle of it all (some would call it more on the charade end of spectacle, which enticed some of the more gossip-minded members of the Trump Rolodex to come anyway and steered the more discerning away). Michael Jackson, Liza Minelli, Whitney Houston, they all declined. So did his three older children. Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric opted to stay with their mother, who, as usual, was spending the final weeks of the year in Aspen, where they’d watched their parents’ marriage unravel and caught a glimpse of their father’s bride-to-be for the first time four years earlier. In a statement a representative faxed to media, they said, “In discussion among ourselves, we decided to stay i
n Aspen with our mother and grandmother.” On the night before his big day, it was Ivana he sent a dozen red roses to. Ivana, however, had brought her younger Italian boyfriend along for the trip. Together, they spent December 20 with Donald’s children while Donald and Marla entered the Plaza Hotel, the place once managed by Ivana, to say “I do.”
With a week’s notice, Donald got 1,100 people to file into the Plaza on that Saturday evening, from New York mayor David Dinkins to Senator Al D’Amato, Bianca Jagger and Robin Leach, Howard Stern and Rosie O’Donnell, O. J. Simpson and Susan Lucci, Carl Icahn and Randall Cunningham, Don King, Evander Holyfield, and Joe Frazier. Some made a quick entrance out of professional courtesy, like billionaire Ron Perelman, who was spotted arriving at the last second and calling for his car a few minutes later. As Donald feared, the final guest list lacked the heavy hitters he and others at the affair had expected. “It’s just like I was afraid of,” Howard Stern told reporters that evening. “I’m the biggest name here. I don’t see any big stars.”
The ceremony took place in the hotel’s mezzanine, where they’d constructed an altar covered in white orchids and birches, from which cut-glass teardrops cascaded. As the New York Times Vows column the following day noted, other than those teardrops, “as the writer Julie Baumgold remarked after the ceremony, ‘there wasn’t a wet eye in the place.’”
Though perhaps no one else felt it, Marla radiated in what she called “all the warmth in the room.” For her, it was about “looking out and seeing our friends and family that have been there through everything with us. Reading from ‘The Prophet.’ Just holding his hand tight and knowing we were home.”
Fred Trump, Donald’s father, who’d never much cared for Marla, served as Donald’s best man. Janie Elder, whose name Marla had often assumed when she was in hiding as Donald’s mistress during the chaos following his divorce from Ivana, was the maid of honor. A singer from the Metropolitan Opera sang throughout the ceremony, and the reverend from the Marble Collegiate Church, where Ivana and Donald were married and Marla and Donald flirted during their affair, performed the traditional vows.
After they promised to be there for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer, till death do them part, the thousand people looking on broke into a round of applause. It was all a big show, after all, and everyone there had a prime seat witnessing a moment in a very specific sort of modern American history. “He’s our P. T. Barnum,” longtime Spy Magazine and Vanity Fair editor and Trump foe Graydon Carter said of Donald that evening. “This is the triumph of romance over finance.” Mayor Dinkins had a rosy view of what he’d just witnesses to share with reporters. “The bride was a vision in white,” he said. “Donald just beamed. It was a lovely, lovely ceremony.” Once it was all said and done, Fred Trump lifted up Marla’s veil, revealing her baby face and a $2 million tiara she’d borrowed from Harry Winston, all of its 325 diamonds flashing in unison. Donald winked at Marla, his wife, before planting a faint little kiss on her cheek.
The following morning, every New York paper put the affair on its front page, including the New York Times, all with the same raised eyebrow and snark in their tone that revelers had adopted the night before. “The bride is taking her husband’s name,” the Gray Lady said in its Vows column. “The bridegroom is keeping his name, The Donald, a legacy from his former wife, Ivana.”
The snark was not unnecessary. Marriage is no great healer. It’s not even a Band-Aid. So the wounds from their courtship continued to bleed long after they said “I do,” or perhaps because they had. Donald never wanted to be married; he’d been pressured to marry a woman he lusted after but didn’t truly love. As his one longtime friend reminded, the only person Donald ever really loved was Donald; and the rest were just accessories who, for a period of time, piqued his interest or served his needs. Marla expected the kind of loving husband and doting father Donald never had been and never would be. The gaps between what they each wanted had led them to break up and make up ad nauseam before the wedding. But legally bound as they now were, they instead just fought—about everything.
Marla’s New Age inclinations irked Donald to no end. Tiffany’s birth was just the start. Friends recall that Marla would take her Jeep—her car choice alone annoyed her husband—up to a property he owned in Westchester to be one with nature. “She would tell him she was going up to gaze at the stars and look at the moon and spend the night out there, and he fucking hated it,” one friend recalled. “Part of him maybe didn’t trust that she was going up there alone, but part of him just despised the fact that that is how she wanted to spend her time.” Donald, all steak and potatoes and meatloaf and fast food, balked at Marla’s habit of mostly ordering things in various shades of green when they went out to dinner. At Mar-a-Lago, she would brew a special tea that Donald looked at with disgust. “I would never drink that,” he’d seethe at her. That she was passing that on to their daughter sent him into a rage. “She didn’t even like Tiffany to have whole milk, and she was married to my dad, who’s like the biggest pig ever—a real McDonald’s guy,” Ivanka said in an interview in 2000. “I remember once he bought a Big Mac for Tiffany, and Marla said, ‘Don’t give her that, she likes carrots.’ So my dad ended up waving the Big Mac and a carrot in front of Tiffany and asking her which one she wanted, and she picked the Big Mac.” The Trumps intervened when Marla hesitated to get Tiffany vaccinated. Donald’s sister Maryanne went ballistic. She called Donald’s closest friends, begging them to talk sense into him. “The baby’s health is at stake,” she fumed into the phone. After that, Donald took Tiffany to get vaccinated behind Marla’s back. (By the time Donald started campaigning for the 2016 election, he had been swayed more in Marla’s direction. “I am totally in favor of vaccines but I want smaller doses over a longer period of time,” he said in a Republican primary debate in 2015. “We’ve had so many instances, people that work for me. . . . [in which] a child, a beautiful child went to have the vaccine, and came back and a week later had a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”)
Donald grew frustrated by Marla’s mother, Ann, whom he told friends he found overbearing and always around, which she was. She doted on her daughter and her granddaughter and gave Marla some company, which she desperately needed, since her husband was off working most of the time. Donald told people he felt like he had no space from his mother-in-law, who’d butt in and give her opinion when Donald just wanted his space. He told his friends that she was a mooch and that she needed to worry about her own life and get out of his.
His work schedule weighed on Marla, too. “Why can’t you be home at 5 o’clock?” Donald recalled her asking in Art of the Comeback—a request Donald viewed as “very selfish.” On the flip side, Marla’s acting career, which she tried to restart over and over again, with frequent trips to Los Angeles and auditions on both coasts, got under her husband’s skin. “He really has the desire to have me be more of a traditional wife,” she said in an interview—an expectation he’d had with Ivana, too, once she started working for him in Atlantic City and at the Plaza. “He definitely wants his dinner promptly served at seven, and if he’s home at 6:30, it should be ready by 6:30.”
That Marla didn’t much trust her husband did not help matters. There were only so many golf games she could tag along to, especially with a little daughter in tow. Donald did little to reassure her that he’d changed, because the reality was that he hadn’t. He once took a New Yorker writer on a tour through Mar-a-Lago, stopping in its Spa. He introduced the writer to the resident physician—a woman named Dr. Ginger Lea Southall, who’d recently graduated from a chiropractic college. Donald wasn’t sure where she got her degree. “Baywatch Medical School?” he joked. “Does that sound right? I’ll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger’s photograph, I didn’t really need to look at her résumé or anyone else’s. Are you asking, ‘Did we hire her because she’d trained at Mount Sinai for fifteen years?’ The answer is no. And I will tell you
why: because by the time she’s spent fifteen years at Mount Sinai, we don’t want to look at her.”
A year and a half into their marriage, Marla had a dalliance of her own, which Donald never really forgave. The National Enquirer ran a story detailing how a cop caught Marla and her bodyguard, Spencer Wagner, who was more than six feet tall and fifteen years younger than Donald, huddled behind a lifeguard stand in the middle of the night while her husband was back in New York. On April 16, at four o’clock in the morning, a police officer happened upon a car parked next to a stretch of beach twelve miles south of Mar-a-Lago. The way Marla tells it, she had been out to dinner in Fort Lauderdale with friends and then on to a jazz club. When they were headed back to the mansion, nature called. She couldn’t make it the extra few minutes, and instructed the bodyguard to pull over so she could relieve herself on an empty beach. The officer didn’t see Marla initially when he walked onto the sand to investigate. Wagner insisted he was alone, until the cop spotted Marla, in spandex and a sports bra, crouching behind the lifeguard chair. The Enquirer reported that she tried to sweet-talk the cop initially, saying there just had to be a way to make this go away. She resorted to pleading with him not to put her name over the police radio. He let them go with a couple parking tickets and a warning to get on home. Donald called the story garbage once it came out: “Along the lines of Elvis sightings and Martian invasions, the National Enquirer has once again fabricated a wholly unreliable cover story for this week’s issue,” he said in a statement. But privately, he didn’t trust Marla’s story. The validity of what she told him, though, mattered less than a public perception that Marla was running around on him. “It made him look like a cuckold, and that really disturbed him,” a friend noted. “Their relationship, and everything, was always supposed to be all about him, about how adored and wanted he was, and when it wasn’t, he couldn’t stand it.”
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