Trump Revealed

by Michael Kranish

  Trump, tenants said, tried to force them out by annoying them. He proposed to move homeless people into at least ten vacant apartments; the city declined the generous offer. Maintenance workers ignored leaky faucets and broken appliances and covered up windows of empty apartments with ratty tinfoil. A tenants’ group accused Trump of harassment, but he denied all. “Let me tell you something about the rich,” he said. “They have a very low threshold for pain.”

  After a five-year standoff, Trump dropped his demolition plans and said he would renovate 100 Central Park South into twenty-six luxury apartments. The existing tenants could stay. The Barbizon Plaza Hotel was closed so its 950 rooms could be converted into four hundred luxury apartments. In early 1983, before Trump went ahead with the conversion, he asked Stephen N. Ifshin, a niche commercial broker, if he could find a buyer for both the Barbizon Hotel and the apartment house next to it. Ifshin was sure he could.

  I want $100 million for the two buildings packaged together, Trump said.

  It’s a lot of money, Ifshin said, astounded by such a huge ask. Such a price was unheard of in Manhattan’s real estate scene at the time, even as an unofficial high number to be floated to favored buyers, called a “whisper number.” But brokering such a sale could earn Ifshin several million dollars in commissions, and he put out the word that the buildings could be had. Sherman Cohen, a tough negotiator in the Manhattan properties market, expressed interest and Ifshin set up a meeting in Trump’s office. Before taking a seat at Trump’s conference table, Cohen lit up a cigarette. But when he reached for the ashtray in the middle of the table, it would not budge.

  Donald, Cohen said, do you have this thing screwed down?

  This conference table comes from my hotel, the Barbizon, Trump said, and we screwed down all the ashtrays because people were stealing them as souvenirs. Trump’s self-satisfied grin suggested he was just protecting his investment. They got down to business, and Trump announced that the buildings were for sale, for $100 million, firm. When I give out a price, that’s the price, he said. Cohen replied that he didn’t have $100 million to offer, but he could see his way to $90 million.

  They were close, so close, Ifshin thought. Now a serious negotiation could begin. But Trump merely thanked Cohen and repeated the price, $100 million, nothing less. Cohen said no more. Trump said no more. It was a stare-down, an impasse. The meeting ended in less than half an hour. Cohen left, but Ifshin stayed behind, flabbergasted. Why? he asked Trump. Why turn such an offer down? You were close.

  It wasn’t what I was asking, Trump said. I never sell for less than I’m asking.

  Preposterous, Ifshin thought. There’s always a negotiation. And then it dawned on Ifshin that he had been used. Donald, he said, this was your way of getting an informal appraisal, to see if someone would bite, and for how much. Trump denied it, but Ifshin pushed back: This was just a ruse to see what the buildings might be worth in the marketplace, and now Trump knew, at least $90 million. You owe me a commission for getting you an informal appraisal from my buyer, Ifshin said. You owe me $10,000.

  Trump looked at him like he was insane, but said he’d pay him back with a favor in the future. That never happened. Ifshin never dealt with Trump again and Trump didn’t sell the buildings. “He wasn’t upfront,” Ifshin said. “He sort of hid his intentions. And that’s the part that bothered me—very clever but not straight.” Trump, Ifshin concluded, was someone who was unreliable, didn’t care about long-term relationships, and burned through people.

  Trump kept the buildings. The Barbizon was later renamed Trump Parc East, offering wood-burning fireplaces; the apartment building became Trump Parc. Three decades later, Trump’s son Eric lived on the thirteenth floor.

  • • •

  FRED TRUMP’S FIRST SON, Freddy, was supposed to follow his father into the family business. Carrying his father’s first and middle names (Frederick Christ), Freddy was the first focus of the father’s sky-high expectations. (Freddy was the second child, behind Maryanne, a year older.) Freddy attended an Episcopal school on Long Island, then enrolled at Lehigh University, where his passion was aviation. But after graduating in 1960, he returned to the Avenue Z office and joined his father. Fred was a stern taskmaster, and mild-mannered Freddy struggled to live up to his father’s demands. When Freddy installed new windows in an old building during a renovation, his father rebuked him for being wasteful. Freddy complained to his fraternity brothers that his father didn’t appreciate him.

  Donald looked up to his older brother. In the early sixties, Freddy would take Donald, then in high school, on summer fishing trips in his Century speedboat. In his dorm at New York Military Academy, Donald kept a photograph of his brother standing next to a plane. Early on, growing up in his older brother’s shadow, Donald competed for his father’s affection. But as he watched his brother fall short of Fred’s approval, Donald came to believe that his brother lacked the toughness to survive in his competitive family. “Freddy just wasn’t a killer,” Donald said, echoing the term his father liked to use for a successful son.

  After a proposed Trump development set for Coney Island’s Steeplechase Park fell apart, Freddy left the business and went to work as a pilot with Trans World Airlines. At age twenty-three, he married a stewardess, and the couple had two children, Fred and Mary. Freddy seemed far happier than he had been under his father; Donald, however, couldn’t help but pick on Freddy’s run-of-the-mill ambitions, asking him, “What’s the difference between what you do and driving a bus?” Freddy’s smoking and drinking, which worsened in his midtwenties, would lead Donald to avoid cigarettes and alcohol for the rest of his life. Freddy divorced and quit flying. By the late seventies, he had moved back in with his parents and was supervising a maintenance crew at one of his father’s Brooklyn apartment complexes. In 1977, Donald asked Freddy to be best man at his wedding to Ivana, saying he believed it would be “a good thing for him.”

  On September 26, 1981, Freddy, eight years Donald’s senior, died of a heart attack following years of alcoholism. He was forty-three. Freddy was buried in Queens at a family plot in a Lutheran cemetery. Donald called his death “the saddest part in what I’ve been through.” He said he learned from his brother’s failure “to keep my guard up one hundred percent.” “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat,” Trump said two months after his brother’s death. “You just can’t let people make a sucker out of you.”

  • • •

  TRUMP TOWER WAS A HIT. Its 266 condos, which went on sale in late 1982 and started at $500,000 for a one-bedroom apartment, sold for a combined $277 million, enough to pay off the entire building even before the first tenant moved in. Interested buyers would meet with Sunshine and Trump, who would sometimes join them for a tour. Sales brochures touted a hidden Fifty-Sixth Street entryway advertised as “totally inaccessible to the public.” Trump explained his strategy for winning over apartment buyers: “You sell them a fantasy.” Many units were sold as corporate apartments or pieds-à-terre for wealthy foreigners. But to Trump’s promotional delight, several celebrities bought in, including Steven Spielberg, Michael Jackson, and Johnny Carson, who would accuse two building workers of stealing his vicuña-wool coat. After Trump fired the men, Carson found the coat in his closet. Trump spread a rumor, printed in the New York papers, that Britain’s royal family—Charles, Prince of Wales, and his wife, Princess Diana—were interested in spending $5 million to buy a twenty-one-room condominium, an entire floor of Trump Tower. They never showed. Trump didn’t confess to creating that rumor, which the Times attributed to “one real estate official,” but he did say that the rumor “certainly didn’t hurt us.”

  To boost the tower’s image, Trump sought world-renowned upscale brands for his shopping atrium. The first forty-eight retail tenants included Mondi (clothes), Botticellino (fashion), Charles Jourdan (shoes), Buccellati (Italian jeweler), Ludwig Beck (German department store), Harry Winston (jewelry), a
nd Asprey (London jeweler), some of whom paid rents as high as $1 million a year. Within the first few years, some initial tenants bailed out after struggling to turn a profit from the tower’s many middle-American tourists.

  As Trump Tower reached for the sky, so, too, did the Trump mythos. In 1982, Trump made Forbes’s inaugural list of America’s four hundred wealthiest people; the magazine estimated his worth at $100 million. But although Trump’s deals were starting to expand his wealth, his income remained more modest. New Jersey investigators sizing him up for a casino license said that in 1982, Trump made $100,000 working for his father, got a $1 million commission from the Grand Hyatt, and had $6,000 in savings and a $35 million line of credit from Chase, arranged with his father’s help.

  The tower, which some Manhattan traditionalists disdained as a gaudy display of nouveau riche excess, won accolades from Times architectural critic Paul Goldberger, who admitted that he’d assumed the building “would be silly, pretentious and not a little vulgar.” Instead, he found the atrium to be “warm, luxurious and even exhilarating . . . the most pleasant interior public space to be completed in New York in some years.” In the tower’s early days, homeless people moved onto the atrium’s marble bench to listen to the music; Trump dispatched security guards and instructed landscapers to cover the bench with potted plants. It was “kind of comical,” Res remembered. “All this glass and marble in the ultimate tower of opulence, a brilliant musician playing show tunes on this $50,000 piano, and the city’s poorest citizens sitting with their paper bags just passing the day.”

  Trump Tower permanently ingrained Trump, his name, and his celebrity into the firmament of Manhattan, just as he had dreamed about as a young boy looking over the bridge from Queens. He moved into a honey-colored office on the twenty-sixth floor, where he would work for decades to come, his custom-made mahogany desk stacked with magazines featuring himself, his walls jammed with awards and tributes; all framed by a dramatic view of the Plaza and Central Park. Ivana moved into the office next door, at least for a time (in the design phase, Trump asked the architect to plan for a second apartment just for Donald, in case the marriage fell apart). In March 1984, the Trumps—Donald, Ivana, and their three children—moved into the three-story penthouse. The fifty-three-room gilded triplex boasted a twenty-nine-foot-high living room, maid’s quarters, ceiling murals of Renaissance cherubs, crystal chandeliers, a remote-controlled Romanesque fountain, blue onyx mined from “deepest, darkest Africa,” and its own elevator. The couple had his-and-her bathrooms: Donald’s was dark brown marble; Ivana’s, translucent pink onyx. Trump reserved an apartment below his penthouse, with an imported marble mantelpiece, for his parents. They mostly stayed in Queens.

  The Grand Hyatt had made Trump famous in New York. Trump Tower made him famous everywhere. GQ sized up his hands (“small and neatly groomed”), his stature (“trim but well-nourished”), and his instincts (“I know what people want”). Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Robin Leach’s breathless TV juggernaut, said Trump’s Greenwich, Connecticut, mansion was a $10 million estate—three times what he had actually paid. “I believe in spending maybe more money than other people would think almost rational,” Trump told the camera.

  Banks were finally willing to lend him enough to meet Trump’s appetite. In 1985, he bought a 118-room Palm Beach mansion called Mar-a-Lago with an $8.5 million loan. “Every lender was a starfucker,” said Jon Bernstein, a former partner at Dreyer & Traub, Trump’s principal law firm in the eighties. “They all wanted to be attached to Donald Trump in any way they could.”

  • • •

  THAT SAME YEAR, TRUMP returned to one of the first pieces of Manhattan real estate he had fallen in love with—the Penn Central railroad’s large block of land on the Upper West Side. He bought the property from another developer for $115 million and declared his intention to build the world’s tallest building, a 150-story tower overlooking the Hudson River, accompanied by six 76-story towers, eight thousand apartments, a shopping mall, eighty-five hundred parking spaces, forty acres of parks, and a headquarters for the National Broadcasting Company, which Trump hoped to lure from Rockefeller Center. “Television City” was, his own press release said, “the master builder’s grandest plan yet.”

  The neighbors were having none of it. They promised a hell of a fight. The Times called the proposal Trump’s “bid for immortality.” Opponents lined up to block Trump’s path, creating a not-for-profit called Westpride, which hosted a fund-raiser that drew celebrities such as TV host Bill Moyers, feminist Betty Friedan, and Robert Caro, Lyndon Johnson’s biographer. One year into the battle, Trump switched architects and shrank his plan. He and Koch got into a verbal war, with the developer calling the mayor a “moron” and a “disaster” for New York. “If Donald Trump is squealing like a stuck pig, I must have done something right,” Koch declared, before adding, “piggy, piggy, piggy.”

  Under financial pressure, Trump eventually surrendered his ambition to construct the world’s tallest building. He embraced the opponents’ alternative plan, with less than half the density Trump had proposed. Trump praised the new plan at a meeting with Roberta Gratz, a prominent opponent, saying, “This is brilliant! My architects have been wasting my time for years.” Stunned to hear such a concession, Gratz replied, “Donald, someday I want to hear you say that in public.” Trump shifted in his seat and did not respond.

  • • •

  ON MAY 28, 1986, Trump wrote Koch a letter: “Dear Ed, For many years I have watched with amazement as New York City repeatedly failed on its promises to complete and open the Wollman Skating Rink.” For years, Trump had gazed out his office window at the shuttered rink in Central Park, appalled by the city’s inability to fix the public facility. Now he was ready to do what the city couldn’t—and show up the mayor while he was at it. Building the rink, he promised Koch, “which essentially involves the pouring of a concrete slab, should take no more than four months’ time.”

  Trump offered to pay for the construction and run the rink himself.

  Koch wrote back the same day, saying he’d be “delighted” if Trump managed the repair work, but rejecting his offer to then manage the rink. And the mayor discouraged Trump from seeking to rename the rink after himself: “Remember, the Bible says that those who give charity anonymously or, if not anonymously, then without requiring the use of their names, are twice blessed.”

  Trump quickly turned the Wollman project into a free-media gold mine. He held half a dozen press conferences as the work unfolded, irritating city officials. Parks Commissioner Henry Stern arrived at the first news conference to find a sign that said OWNER: TRUMP ICE INC. He ordered his staff to remove the sign. Instead of naming the rink for Trump, Stern offered to plant a tree in his honor. Parks workers chose a ten-foot-tall Japanese pine, which they dubbed the Trump Tree. The developer happened to arrive at the rink as workers prepared to plant the tree. Infuriated, he shouted, “Tell Ed Koch and Henry Stern they can shove the tree up their asses.” Thirty years later, when Trump was running for president, the mature tree, now forty feet high, stood tall outside the rink.

  Free from the bureaucratic regulations that had stymied the city’s efforts to rebuild the rink, Trump got it fixed two months ahead of schedule and under budget, winning the PR battle against the mayor—and the hearts of many New Yorkers.

  • • •

  TRUMP PARLAYED THAT GOODWILL into a new wave of celebrity, portraying himself as a can-do dealmaker with a showy billionaire’s tastes and a populist’s penchant for plain talk. Media magnate Si Newhouse noticed that sales of his GQ magazine spiked when Trump appeared on the cover, so he approached Trump with an idea: write a book for my publishing house, Random House. Ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz, Trump: The Art of the Deal packaged Trump’s celebration of ego, excellence, and expansive business ambitions into an easy-to-read book of prescriptions. His business bible reviewed the joy of tax abatements, the power of a sensational story, and the importance of p
laying to customers’ fantasies. The book tore into critics (the Koch administration was “both pervasively corrupt and totally incompetent”) and boosted his cachet (“Deals are my art form. I like making deals, preferably big deals”). In an echo of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale’s “positive-thinking,” Trump offered an eleven-step formula for success. In step one (“Think Big”), Trump said “many highly successful entrepreneurs” exhibited a level of focus he called “controlled neurosis.”

  Reviewers trashed the book as shallow, pompous, and self-promotional. A Washington Post critic said, “The man’s lack of taste is as vast as his lack of shame.” But in the first few weeks after its release, the book rocketed to the top of bestseller lists. It sold more than a million hardcover copies, in part thanks to a Trump publicity blitz that looked like a presidential campaign: taking out full-page newspaper ads calling for a tougher US foreign policy; giving a speech in New Hampshire at the cusp of the primary season; handing out I ♥ DONALD TRUMP bumper stickers. But that campaign was not about running for office, just about selling books—and himself. “It was all about being high-visibility,” said Peter Osnos, who edited the book for Random House. “Trump had this urge to be a really big name, so he cultivated celebrity. But his lifestyle was surprisingly unglamorous. He’s quite disciplined in some ways. Doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, lives above the store. He was not a big New York socialite, never was. He basically enjoyed going upstairs and watching the tube. What he was interested in was celebrity and his businesses—construction, real estate, gambling, wrestling, boxing.”

  • • •

  AS TRUMP’S EMPIRE SPREAD, some of the people closest to him noticed a change. He grew more distant, sometimes petulant, sometimes explosive. In the Grand Hyatt days, the Trump organization, as much as it talked big, thrived with a small office and tight crew: Sunshine; Trump’s attorney and adviser Harvey Freeman; a close group of leasing agents, lawyers, and secretaries. Trump’s vanity instilled a strong tribalism in his team: his workers, he often said, were the best. Though he would later become known for the catchphrase “You’re fired,” Trump usually felt uneasy getting rid of an employee. If it had to be done, he would rather delegate the task to an underling. “We always felt that if you were close enough to Donald that he would have to be the one to let you go, you had a job for life,” Res said.