Trump Revealed

by Michael Kranish

  9

  * * *

  The Chase

  Ivana Trump moved along the line at Bonnie’s, a popular cafeteria-style spot for skiers, midway up Aspen Mountain, celebrated for its apple strudel, hot spiced wine, and shockingly reasonable prices. In the same queue for food stood Marla Maples, the model and actress who was Donald’s mistress. The Trumps—Ivana, Donald, and their three children—were spending the 1989 winter holidays in the postcard-perfect Colorado village. Not everything was copacetic between Donald and Ivana, however, especially after she overheard a conversation in their suite at the Little Nell, a five-star hotel that opened that year. “I did pick [up] the phone in the living room, and Donald did take the phone in bedroom,” Ivana recalled. “He was talking about Marla. And I really didn’t understand. I never heard a name like that in my life. And I came to Donald. I said, ‘Who is Moola?’ ”

  “Well, that’s a girl which is going after me for last two years,” Ivana recalled her husband saying.

  At Bonnie’s, Ivana saw Donald speak to a woman she believed was a friend of Maples’s. In the queue, Ivana stepped up to the woman and told her, “I understand from my husband that you have a friend which is after my husband for last two years. Will you give her the message that I love my husband very much?” Ivana, an expert skier, returned to the slopes without a clue that Maples had been standing right behind her friend “because I never met her, I had no idea.” Now, Maples came after Ivana—“just charged right behind me,” Ivana recalled. In front of the Trump children, the mistress declared, “I’m Marla and I love your husband. Do you?”

  “Get lost,” Ivana snapped. “I love my husband very much.” Her husband, rarely at a loss for comment, said “not anything, nothing,” Ivana recalled. The tabloids reported he took to his skis and schussed away.

  • • •

  WOMEN HAVE DEFINED TRUMP as much as any project or property. The Trump brand’s primary product line was a menu of ways to fulfill the workingman’s vision of a titan’s lifestyle, and Trump sold his products—casinos, hotels, condos—in part by surrounding himself with symbols of the high life, most especially beautiful women. The image Trump cultivated had no place for subtlety. He cared about how things looked, and he carefully created pictures, elegantly staged tableaux of beauty, positioning his dates, his girlfriends, his wives, and his children as avatars of wealth, all dressed and posed to impress the common man. At his public appearances, Trump would have seemed naked without gorgeous women by his side. And he loved a certain sort of woman: models, pageant winners, would-be actresses—most of them stereotypically feminine, long legged, ample chested, with big hair. His wives—Ivana, Marla, and, years later, a Slovenian model, Melania Knauss—were all New York City outsiders with distinctive accents, two from Eastern Europe and one from a small town in Georgia. None had been born to privilege. As Trump grew older, the age gap grew bigger. Publicly, the women grew quieter, too.

  Trump believed that the celebrity image he cultivated in the media did more to polish his reputation than any investigations by government officials or skeptical journalists might diminish it. “You know,” he said, “it really doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” He embraced, cultivated even, a playboy image. His marriages imploded in public, spilling boldfaced muck all over the tabloids. The excruciatingly public battle that Ivana and Marla, two former models with tabloid-perfect names, waged over Trump was a real-life version of Dynasty, the prime-time soap that mirrored the decade’s excesses. The ordeal was an emotional horror show by any measure, seemingly the height of embarrassment, and a costly fight, too, yet it also established Trump as a prize, an object of beautiful women’s desires. He spoke publicly about his relationships, as if his randy reputation would enhance his popularity. He used the media, the courts, and his lawyers to help manage his former wives. But beyond the parties and the sightings with models and actresses, despite the screaming headlines, his relationships with women rarely seemed romantic or even libidinous. With Trump, his friends said, women were always the object of a chase, a quest. The actual relationship seemed secondary. In everything he does, said former Trump executive Louise Sunshine, “He’s in pursuit. It’s such a turn-on. ‘Life with Donald must be a ball.’ People are drawn to his magnetism. There’s no ho-hum. He’s, like, ‘Oh my God.’ You go along for the ride. He’s so stimulating.”

  Trump saw his very public love life as a service provided both to his potential customer base—creating an aspiration for people who craved more fabulousness in their lives—and to a few lucky women. “I create stars,” he said. “I love creating stars. And, to a certain extent I’ve done that with Ivana. I’ve done that with Marla. I’ve really given a lot of women great opportunity. Unfortunately, after they’re a star, the fun is over for me. It’s like a creating process. It’s almost like creating a building. It’s pretty sad.”

  In his bestselling books, Trump cast himself as the irresistible lust object, never the groper, always the gropee. “If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller (which it will be anyway!),” he contended in his 1997 memoir, Trump: The Art of the Comeback. In his telling, Trump was hounded by lustful women. He described one encounter with an unnamed married “lady of great social pedigree and wealth,” whose husband was seated at the same dinner table: “All of a sudden, I felt her hand on my knee, then on my leg. She started petting me in all different ways.” With Trump as the passive object of that desire, the woman was said to have insisted, “Donald, I don’t care. I just don’t care. I have to have you, and I have to have you now.” When Trump gave a limousine ride to another “truly great-looking and sexy” wealthy woman who was about to get married, “within five seconds after the door closed, she would be jumping on top of me wanting to get screwed.”

  Women desired him, Trump often said, yet he held them at a distance, suspicious of what he saw as their crafty, cunning antagonism. “Women have one of the great acts of all time,” he wrote. “The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers. . . . I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part. . . . There’s nothing I love more than women, but they’re really a lot different than portrayed. They are far worse than men, far more aggressive, and boy, can they be smart. Let’s give credit where credit is due, and let’s salute women for their tremendous power, which most men are afraid to admit they have.”

  As much power as women might wield, however, Trump rarely let the opportunity pass to proclaim his own virility. Asked for his view of Viagra, Trump once boasted that he never needed such assistance. What he really needed, he said, was an “anti-Viagra, something with the opposite effect. I’m not bragging. I’m just lucky.”

  • • •

  THE FIGHT OVER DONALD on Aspen Mountain was more than a tabloid sensation. It marked an evolution of Trump’s image, from flashy, brash real estate man to a different kind of celebrity, a showman who deployed his wife not as a business partner, but as a symbol of the glamour he was selling in ventures that would stretch from casinos to clothing and perfume lines. Ivana had been a top manager in the family firm, his contemporary, the woman credited with the over-the-top opulence of his real estate holdings. She had helped establish the signature Trump look—a sort of Vegas meets Versailles that detractors found gaudy, nouveau riche, even absurd. Marla, by contrast, projected youth. As Trump turned forty-five, with his empire rapidly expanding yet facing financial strains (“Trump in a Slump,” said a headline in the New York Daily News), he went public with a far younger woman. Marla generated buzz and heat yet didn’t play any role in the family business. If Ivana had enhanced Trump’s portfolio and helped Donald shift his image toward being a successful family man, now Marla expressed a different aspect of his personality—his desire to keep business and romance separate, as his father had done. �
��They are completely different from each other,” Trump observed of his first two wives. “Ivana is a tough and practical businesswoman; Marla is a performer and actress. . . . I have come to realize these two exceptional women represent the extremes of my personality.”

  The two women’s midmountain meeting seemed inevitable. Trump had assiduously kept the two women apart for more than two years. In Manhattan, Marla—often installed at the St. Moritz Hotel, three blocks from the family triplex in Trump Tower—was sometimes shielded by his security detail. Trump arranged for her to appear at public events in the company of other men who posed as dates, sometimes even when Ivana was in attendance. The subterfuge allowed Trump to be at once secretive and boyishly brazen about his mistress. Maples was spotted at a 1988 Mike Tyson fight when Trump flew a gaggle of celebrities, including Kirk Douglas and Jack Nicholson, to Atlantic City on his Sikorsky helicopter. On that trip, she was accompanied by Thomas Fitzsimmons, a close friend and former cop who many believed to be her boyfriend. Now, the two women entered the fevered orbit of tiny Aspen at the height of the Christmas season. How were they not going to run into each other?

  The Aspen meltdown forced Maples into hiding—she moved to Guatemala for some weeks to work for the Peace Corps—as the Donald-Ivana divorce played out in the tabloids and the lawyers’ offices. The divorce negotiations were toxic, the publicity relentless. Both sides tackled the case as if it were a military campaign. At one point, with TV cameras rolling, Trump’s attorney, Jay Goldberg, stood on the courthouse steps in lower Manhattan, waving a $10 million check that Donald proposed to give Ivana to end their dispute.

  The public squabbling got supremely ugly: Ivana alleged in a deposition that Trump had raped her after they argued over a painful medical procedure to remove Donald’s bald spot. Ivana had recommended the cosmetic surgeon, and Trump wasn’t happy with the result. Ivana said in the deposition, according to Harry Hurt III’s book Lost Tycoon, that Donald pinned back her arms, pulled hair from her scalp, tore off her clothes, and forced her to have sex with him. In 1993, after Hurt’s book was published, a note to the reader from Ivana was appended to the flyleaf at the insistence of Trump’s lawyers: “During a deposition given by me in connection with my matrimonial case, I stated that my husband had raped me.” On “one occasion during 1989, Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage. As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.” Trump vigorously denied that either the incident or the surgery ever happened. The allegation was, a Trump spokesman said, “a standard lawyer technique, which was used to exploit more money from Mr. Trump especially since he had an ironclad prenuptial agreement.” During a contentious meeting in 1990, the judge urged the two sides to settle for an amount Trump considered “inappropriate,” Goldberg recalled. Trump stood up and said to the judge, “You are full of shit. I am leaving.” Trump took his coat and left.

  • • •

  TRUMP ALWAYS MADE IT clear who was boss in his marriages. He and Ivana never had “tremendous fights” because, he said, “ultimately, Ivana does exactly what I tell her to do.” Trump came to regret having had her work for him, running hotels and casinos: “My big mistake with Ivana was taking her out of the role of wife. The problem was, work was all she wanted to talk about. When I got home at night, rather than talking about the softer subjects of life, she wanted to tell me how well the Plaza was doing, or what a great day the casino had. . . . I will never again give a wife responsibility within my business.” He didn’t.

  As Trump’s private life merged with his public identity, he came to see his marriages as something that either boosted his image and therefore his business’s reputation, or as a hindrance. “My marriage, it seemed, was the only area of my life in which I was willing to accept something less than perfection,” he said during divorce proceedings with Ivana. Maples would pose far less of a threat. She wasn’t one to challenge him, except for continually pressing him to wed her. This time, there would be no talk of a marriage of equals. In wealth and celebrity, experience and worldliness, he clearly bested her. “It had obviously been a torrid affair, but I didn’t see it lasting,” Goldberg said.

  Whereas Ivana maintained a busy social calendar that Trump openly disdained, with Maples, Donald became the social director. “Once we started going out in public, an image was expected,” Maples recalled. “The hair and the makeup and the designer dresses, and you become a caricature of yourself. And I think what he loved about me the most was that I wasn’t part of that world. But once we were together publicly, he wanted to change me into that social animal.” Years later, she recalled that “putting on gowns and going out hosting events and having Harry Winston put jewelry on my hands was always uncomfortable for me—that was me playing a role. I felt that’s what the job called for.”

  Her job was to turn heads. The tabloids dubbed her the Georgia Peach. Maples grew up in Dalton, Georgia, which called itself the Carpet Capital of the World. Her father was a real estate developer. After Marla’s parents divorced, her mother married a carpet-plant manager. Blond with blue-green eyes, Marla was eager from an early age to act, on Broadway and in Hollywood. She competed in pageants—and won several, including the Miss Resaca Beach Poster Girl contest—but didn’t enter some of the more prominent beauty contests because they had a talent component. Friends knew her as sweet and generous; she made jams and jellies and gave them away. At Christmas, she surprised friends with homemade sweaters and baskets. She arrived in Manhattan in 1985 and soon landed bit parts in B movies and a larger role in a workout video. In the Stephen King 1986 science fiction horror movie, Maximum Overdrive, her unnamed character was pummeled to death by a truckload of watermelons. She and Trump met soon after she got to New York, and Maples knew immediately that “we had this connection, but it wasn’t appropriate timing. So we’d spend a lot of time on the telephone with each other without ever being out together in public. By ’88, I knew I truly loved this guy.”

  For three years after the Aspen incident, Trump and Maples’s love life became a running tabloid soap opera. They were on. They were off. Spat. Rinse. Repeat. All of it chronicled in the gossip pages and on TV. In 1990, shortly after Ivana argued that her husband’s adultery had violated the terms of their marital contracts, Maples went on ABC to be interviewed by Diane Sawyer at an Atlantic City house that a friend of Trump’s owned. “He hated the fact that I felt like I had to be in hiding,” the twenty-six-year-old told a national TV audience of more than 13 million. Maples refused to discuss Aspen, instead paying her rival a barbed compliment: “I think she’s an absolutely beautiful woman. I think she was before surgery. And, I mean, now she’s very, very gorgeous.” Maples could dish, but she was also often portrayed cruelly in the press. A Vanity Fair story said, “Getting to know Marla Maples is akin to pressing your thumb on an aerosol can and watching mountains of Reddi-wip flow out.”

  In July 1991, Trump gave Maples a 7.5-carat diamond ring—which for a time he contended was not meant to imply any engagement. Maples said she hoped to be married by winter. But she would wait two more years. In the meantime, she appeared as “Ziegfeld’s Favorite” in the Broadway production of The Will Rogers Follies. Trump packed the house with guests, including singer La Toya Jackson, TV newsman Mike Wallace, and TV talk show host Maury Povich. Trump threw an after-party at the Plaza, which his first wife had helped redecorate.

  Once again, Trump insisted on a prenup, and Maples went on TV to talk about it: “I’ve always told Donald that I will do whatever I need to do. I will sign, so your bankers will feel good. But I don’t want to call it a prenuptial agreement. I’m willing to give him my word on paper that I’m not going to interfere with his business dealings, if it ever came down to that.” The wedding, in December 1993, was planned in ten days. Maples wore a
$2 million diamond tiara on loan from a Fifth Avenue jeweler. A thousand guests joined the couple in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza. Their daughter, Tiffany, had been born two months earlier. At the wedding, football star O. J. Simpson voiced doubts about the marriage: “I think everybody in the country believes if their relationship can work, then anyone’s relationship can work.” (Six months later, Simpson was charged with killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and was ultimately acquitted.)

  Maples, who had spoken of wanting a quiet, simple wedding, shimmered in a Carolina Herrera gown as she cut the six-foot-tall cake in front of guests from politics, sports, and entertainment, including Liza Minnelli and Howard Stern, who said of the happy pair, “I give it four months.” (It lasted six years.) Seventeen television crews and close to a hundred photographers documented the event. “There wasn’t a wet eye in the place,” the Times reported. Trump said the caviar alone cost more than $60,000. But his conquest paled next to the adrenaline rush of the chase. “I was bored when she was walking down the aisle,” Trump recalled later. “I kept thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ ”

  That sense of anticlimax was evident to people around the couple, too. “Once married, they seemed distant and their behavior was often at odds with one another,” Goldberg said. Trump was annoyed by Maples’s entourage of relatives. Within a few years, Trump was publicly airing their problems. In Trump: The Art of the Comeback, he described a typical day in the marriage: “6:30 p.m. I leave the office and go to my apartment. Marla is waiting for me with dinner, and while I really appreciate it, I realize that this is a marriage coming to an end. It just doesn’t seem to be working out. Maybe it’s my schedule, and probably it’s my fault. But you’ve just got to really look forward to going home, and if you don’t, something is critically wrong.”