Trump Revealed

by Michael Kranish

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  DESPITE THE TURBULENCE IN their marriages, his former wives never disparaged Trump publicly after their divorces. Trump made sure of that. The consummate negotiator, he had his wives sign confidentiality agreements, and he held the ultimate leverage: the kids.

  Trump often said he was not the kind of father who spent much time hanging out or playing ball with his children, but when they were old enough to learn the business, they spent far more time with him, especially at the office. Ivana had gone public with her allegation that “the children are all wrecks” from the turmoil surrounding the divorce—Donny Jr. had been teased at Buckley, his Manhattan private school, and Ivanka was often in tears at Chapin, her girls’ school on the East Side—but all three children from the marriage with Ivana would come to work by their father’s side at the Trump Organization. All three told of difficult times with their father—Donald was so competitive that when he and Eric were skiing, the son said “he would try to push me over, just so he could beat his ten-year-old son down the mountain,” and during the divorce battle, Donald Jr. went a year without speaking to his father. But they came to admire him as a businessman and as a parent who loved them in his own way and deeply wanted them to work together with him. “My parents . . . had their own thing, and it was public,” Eric Trump said, “and naturally kids get dragged into it because of the media. But my parents were so solid at keeping us away from it. And I think boarding school was their subtle way of also doing that, in a certain way.” The frenzy around his parents’ divorce nonetheless defined a period of Eric’s life: “Everybody, that’s all they want to talk about is this, because this is the biggest story in the world, hands down. And yet when you’re ten years old, your mind’s still developing and you’re trying to grow up as a little man . . . and you gotta be able to develop as a kid.” The solution was work, according to Eric and his siblings. As his father had done, Donald brought his children to construction sites and had them do hands-on labor.

  How his ex-wives might describe the family’s inner life remained uncertain, as Trump managed to hold their public comments in check. In January 2000, ReganBooks, a division of HarperCollins, announced plans for a book by Maples entitled All That Glitters Is Not Gold. The “remarkably candid memoir,” the press release stated, would be “the story behind the headlines” about “loving a man whose greatest passion was the empire he built.” Maples worked with literary agent Susan Crawford on what she described as “a cautionary tale” about being married to Trump. Crawford recalled taking Trump Tower’s service elevator up to meet Maples in the private suite, where she would share stories of her roller-coaster affair with Trump, the scandal on the ski slopes, their clandestine meetings and eventual wedding. “It would have been very sensational,” the agent recalled.

  The book never appeared. Two years after it was to be published, in 2002, “Marla called and said, ‘Susan, I can’t do it,’ ” Crawford said. It was unclear whether Maples didn’t want her daughter, Tiffany, to read about her mother’s love life in a bestselling book, or if Maples, who had a newfound commitment to spirituality, had had a change of heart, or if Trump quashed the project. Trump later said he was “not unhappy” about the turn of events. “She signed a confidentiality agreement,” he said. Earlier, he had set his attorneys on Ivana, after she granted a May 1991 television interview with Barbara Walters. Trump threatened to terminate her $350,000 annual alimony payment and $50,000 annual housing allowance, arguing that she had violated the terms of their divorce settlement.

  Once again, Trump sought to control the story. The divorce agreement, signed in 1991, barred Ivana from publishing or broadcasting “any diary, memoir, letter, story, photograph, interview, article, essay, account or description or depiction of any kind whatsoever . . . concerning her marriage to Donald or any other aspect of Donald’s personal business or financial affairs . . . without obtaining Donald’s written consent in advance.” Ivana did publish a memoir, but it carefully steered clear of any personal account of the marriage. She didn’t even offer her take on the infamous fight on Aspen Mountain, quoting instead from the New York Post’s version of what happened between her and Maples.

  Long after the marriage collapsed, Ivana and Donald remained friends, they both said. “Donald took the divorce as a businessman,” Ivana said. “He had to negotiate and he had to win. Once the financial part was settled, we’re friendly.” He attended her fourth wedding in 2008, held at Mar-a-Lago. Looking back at what he called his “three shots at being a husband,” Trump called them all “good women. Very good women. But my thing has always been I’ve been a worker. I have always been working, and it was always all-consuming.” Asked about his wives, he praised his company and its “great locations” and “very little debt.” Donald the husband? “I built a great company. The company is a great company with some of the greatest assets in the world, and you don’t do that by working five hours a day.”

  10

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  A League of His Own

  When the leaders of the nascent United States Football League gathered in New Orleans in January 1984, most of the team owners revered Donald Trump as the one man who might bring them into the promised league, the NFL. That would soon change. The business model for the USFL was simple: play America’s most popular sport in the spring, when there was no competition from the NFL or colleges. The USFL’s first season in 1983 had been a modest success. The television ratings were decent, some teams drew solid attendance, and some even had enough money to lure fringe NFL players and topflight college talent away from the dominant league. But the owners believed the eighteen-team USFL still wasn’t being taken seriously, or at least it hadn’t been, until September 1983, when the soft-spoken, aging Oklahoma oil baron who owned the New Jersey Generals sold the team to a thirty-seven-year-old New York real estate developer who had just opened a soaring fifty-eight-story tower in Manhattan with his last name emblazoned in gold above the entrance.

  As the owners’ meeting began in the grand ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Hotel on that January morning, Trump looked at the men seated around him. Some were on his level of wealth and ambition, he thought. There were a few other real estate moguls, a former US ambassador to Switzerland who also was part-owner of a large savings and loan, and the new owner of the Los Angeles team, the mercurial, eccentric Bill Oldenburg, who went by the nickname Mr. Dynamite and had an employee at his San Francisco mortgage firm ring a gong every time the company made another $1 million. The night before, Oldenburg had arrived at his first USFL owners’ dinner with an entourage that included singer Wayne Newton. Later in the meal, Oldenburg tore open his shirt and declared that his new team would “beat the shit” out of anyone else’s.

  Trump had his doubts about some of the other USFL owners, though. A few were just doctors and lawyers, guys who probably qualified as rich but lacked the wealth to compete with the NFL’s owners. A few were probably content for the USFL to remain inferior to the NFL. They didn’t see what Trump saw: an opening created by the NFL’s shortsighted, arrogant ownership. To maximize this opportunity, Trump argued, the USFL had to act, and quickly. His impatience was starting to nag at some of his fellow owners. They loved the attention he brought to their league, but some had started griping about things Trump said and did. And Trump didn’t appreciate their complaints.

  He let them know that the league had been “heading very rapidly downhill” until he’d bought the Generals four months before. In those few months, Trump alone, by his own account, had orchestrated a complete flip in the perception of the USFL among fans, reporters, and the people who controlled the purse strings at major television networks. A series of high-profile negotiations between Trump and star NFL players and coaches had generated a crush of media coverage. Network presidents were finally taking this league seriously, Trump said. He was tired of reading that some owners were concerned about his spending habits. He was particularly angry with Myles Tanenbaum, the shopping mall develo
per who owned the Philadelphia Stars. “Myles comes up to my office about a month ago to see me,” Trump told his fellow owners gathered in New Orleans. “The next day I read about this goddamn confidential meeting in the newspaper where he’s saying everything that I’m talking about. I write him a letter, a somewhat nasty letter—oh, good, Myles, I’m glad you’re here.” Trump interrupted himself as Tanenbaum entered the room. “And I say the next time you want to get publicity, don’t do it at my expense. . . . I’ll have the goddamn camera crews waiting for you. . . . If you want to play the game, I can play it myself. I don’t like having you talking about Trump, the guy that’s just throwing around money. The money that I throw around is for the good of the league. . . . It’s given the league credibility.”

  That morning in New Orleans, Trump reiterated his plan for the USFL’s success: move the games to the fall and compete head-to-head with the NFL for big television money and overall supremacy. The NFL had just vacated New York City proper—the New York Jets had moved out of Shea Stadium in Queens to join the New York Giants in the Meadowlands of New Jersey—presenting Trump with the opportunity to move his Generals into the city, giving the USFL the only major football team in America’s media capital.

  Trump had allies in the room: several other owners also wanted to move to the fall. The NFL was dealing with significant labor strife and had just had a players’ strike in 1982. Its television ratings had dipped for the first time in years. Some network officials, meanwhile, bristled at the exorbitant rights fees the NFL demanded, and they liked the idea of a little competition in professional football. But in an all-out war with the NFL, the USFL would be massively outgunned—the average NFL team got roughly $14 million a year from the league’s television contracts; the entire USFL made about $14 million from ABC per season.

  Still, Trump saw a path to victory. “I guarantee you folks in this room that I will produce CBS and I will produce NBC and that I will produce ABC, guaranteed, and for a hell of a lot more money than the horseshit you’re getting right now,” he said. “Every team in this room suffers from one thing: people don’t want to watch spring football. . . . You watch what happens when you challenge the NFL. . . . I don’t want to be a loser. I’ve never been a loser before, and if we’re losers in this, fellows, I tell you what, it’s going to haunt us. . . . Every time there’s an article written about you, it’s going to be you owned this goddamn team which failed . . . and I’m not going to be a failure.” In the worst-case scenario, Trump said, the USFL could sue the NFL for antitrust violations and either win a massive judgment or force a merger. What he didn’t say was that a merger would be a game of musical chairs: not every USFL team would get a spot in the NFL. Some owners would inevitably be left standing when the music stopped.

  A week later, Tanenbaum—the Philadelphia owner—wrote to a fellow USFL team owner who had missed the New Orleans meeting: ever since, a concern had been “gnawing at me virtually every day. That concern has to do with Donald Trump’s grand plan for the USFL.”

  • • •

  IN TRUMP’S ZERO-SUM WORLD of winners and losers, sports had always held a special place. As a child in Queens, he was a fan of both the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees, and a fanatical collector of baseball cards. In school, he and his childhood friend Peter Brant were caught several times listening to baseball games in class on their transistor radios. At New York Military Academy, Donald had excelled at sports, and especially at baseball—he played first base and was a star hitter. And in college, at Fordham, Trump had played football, until an ankle injury sidelined him, and then squash. As a young man in Manhattan in the 1970s, he had mingled with celebrities at Le Club and developed a friendship with George Steinbrenner, the imperious owner of the New York Yankees and a master at winning publicity (and notoriety). In the early 1980s, Trump had flirted with team ownership several times. He unsuccessfully bid $20 million for the New York Mets, and when the Cleveland Indians were up for sale, Trump went as high as $34 million. That deal fell through over Trump’s reluctance to promise to keep the team in Cleveland. Trump had had preliminary talks with Robert Irsay about the NFL’s Baltimore Colts before Irsay decided to move the team to Indianapolis.

  Trump’s worth and liquidity were already topics of constant debate, and buying an NFL team required both deep wealth and verifiable cash. In 1983, the going rate for an NFL team was about $70 million. After Trump bought the Generals for about $6 million, he told anyone who asked (and some who didn’t) that he could have bought an NFL team, but chose the USFL because it presented more of a challenge: “I feel sorry for the poor guy who is going to buy the Dallas Cowboys. It’s a no-win situation for him, because if he wins, well, so what, they’ve won through the years, and if he loses . . . he’ll be known to the world as a loser.”

  • • •

  TRUMP WENT ON A spending spree to convert his new football team into one of the USFL’s best. The atrium at Trump Tower became the stage for a series of press conferences where Trump held court about his war with the NFL.

  In the Generals, Trump had purchased a team with one bona fide (and expensive) star: Herschel Walker, the Heisman Trophy–winning running back. In an era when the NFL forbade teams from drafting underclassmen, Walker had bucked tradition by leaving the University of Georgia as a junior for a three-year contract with the Generals that paid $5 million, then the richest deal in football history. In the USFL’s inaugural 1983 season, Walker led the league in rushing yards, but the team around him sputtered to a 6-12 record. Trump went to work surrounding Walker with talent, but first he needed a new coach.

  Trump set his sights high, trying to lure Don Shula—one of the winningest coaches in NFL history—from the Miami Dolphins. Shula made about $450,000 a year, so Trump offered him $1 million. But the coach apparently asked for a deal-sweetener. Trump went on CBS’s NFL Today show to discuss his ongoing negotiations with the coach. The deal was almost done, Trump said, but for one hang-up: Shula wanted an apartment in Trump Tower, and the developer wasn’t certain he could offer one. An infuriated Shula—who had publicly entertained the notion of jumping to the USFL for weeks—announced the next day that he had broken off talks and would stay in Miami. Trump claimed he, not Shula, ended the talks. “I could not give up an apartment in Trump Tower,” Trump said. “Money is one thing, gold is another.”

  Spurned by Shula, Trump turned to someone who would be popular with New York football fans—Walt Michaels, a former coach of the Jets. Next, the mogul raided several NFL rosters to build his new coach a winning team. Trump plucked quarterback Brian Sipe—a former NFL Most Valuable Player—from the Cleveland Browns, among other NFL players. Trump marveled at how much more press he got for routine football transactions than he did for his usual business dealings: “I hire a general manager to help run a billion-dollar business and there’s a squib in the papers. I hire a coach for a football team and there are sixty and seventy reporters calling to interview me.”

  The player who probably generated the most publicity for Trump’s team never actually suited up for the Generals. One day, Jim Gould, the man Trump hired to be president of the Generals, was sitting in Trump’s office. Lawrence Taylor, the fearsome linebacker for the New York Giants, had recently been in the news over his displeasure with his contract. “Maybe we oughta sign Taylor,” Gould suggested. Trump agreed; certainly Taylor would sell tickets. There was one problem: Taylor was signed to play with the Giants through 1987. Gould and Trump came up with a plan.

  That day, the Giants star got an unexpected phone call: “Mr. Taylor, please hold for Mr. Trump.” A few hours later, one of the greatest players in football history arrived at Trump Tower, in a car Trump had sent. Gould greeted Taylor and told him that Trump insisted he first watch an eight-minute slide show. The promotional presentation heaped praise on Trump Tower and its “visionary builder”: “This is Manhattan through a golden eye, and only for the select few. . . . Any wish, no matter how opulent or unusual, may come true.�
� Taylor was still uncertain why he was there. He wasn’t interested in a condo. He was, however, very interested in what Trump had to say a few minutes later.

  Trump offered Taylor a $1 million bonus to sign a contract guaranteeing he’d play for the Generals after his deal with the NFL’s Giants expired. If Taylor signed that day, Trump offered to wire him the $1 million immediately. “He had me call my bank, and sure as shit, thirty minutes later he wired a million dollars into my account,” Taylor recalled. “I was like, ‘Thanks, Don.’ I respected that he put his money where his mouth was.” Before Taylor even got back home that night, word leaked to the press about the deal, and there was little mystery about who had leaked it. Trump dealt coyly with questions about Taylor in a New York Times story. (The Times reporter, Ira Berkow, was also made to sit through the promotional video before he could meet Trump.) “No one knows if we signed him—actually, only three people know, that’s Lawrence, his agent, and me,” Trump said.