A Private War

by Brenner, Marie

  * * *

  All over Pakistan, editorials demanded the obvious: Were the military’s ties to extremists more important than human rights? Shouldn’t the government guarantee a proper education for girls? Within twenty-four hours, General Kayani was in Peshawar.

  Soon a curious counternarrative began to grow in the Urdu press. Malala’s picture with Richard Holbrooke was widely distributed. Yousafzai, who had always spoken openly with reporters, was suddenly incommunicado. In Mingora, posters were distributed with the headline: “Who Is the Bigger Enemy, the U.S. or the Taliban?” The bullet in Malala’s cranium had become a political instrument. At the hospital one doctor said, “We do not know if we can save her, but we think that if she lives she will be completely paralyzed.” Ziauddin said, “My God, who could do this to a child?” He was in shock as the Peshawar hospital filled with dignitaries, including Interior Minister Rehman Malik. When Ziauddin finally appeared before the press, Malik was by his side. Ziauddin said he would not be seeking asylum, and he thanked General Kayani.

  “I was not thinking about what general or what president. I was in a great trauma,” Ziauddin said. He was now dependent on the very establishment he had spent years criticizing. When he was finally allowed to fly to Birmingham, the hospital there arranged for a press conference. But Yousafzai took no questions.

  In the last decade, thirty-six thousand people have been killed in Pakistan, and the situation seems to worsen every week. In Birmingham, Ziauddin Yousafzai monitors the news from Pakistan as Malala recovers from two more delicate operations to replace part of her skull with a titanium plate. She plans to write a memoir. For Vital Voices, the women’s organization that has raised $150,000 for the Malala Fund, she announced in a widely distributed video, “I want to serve. I want to serve the people. I want every child to be educated. For that reason we have organized the Malala Fund.” Publishers have offered more than $2 million for the rights to her book. “I will not allow Malala’s story to be used for someone’s agenda. I love Pakistan, and I loved my land before it was Pakistan,” Ziauddin said.

  Hamid Mir, who almost lost his life when he discovered a bomb under his car before it exploded, said, “Malala called me. She spoke very softly. She said I must not lose courage. I must fight.” She also called Geo TV reporter Mahboob Ali in Mingora, the day Fazlullah’s forces blew up a nearby mosque, where twenty-two were killed. “Please do not let them put anyone in danger,” she said. “I don’t want my name to cause harm.” Meanwhile, in Mingora, the government renamed a school after Malala. Within a short time it was attacked.

  * * *

  In a phone conversation Ali had a day before Malala’s video was launched, he said that Ziauddin seemed resigned to a life that was no longer his to control. He told Ali, “You are a person who can go from one place to another in our town. And I cannot now. Sometimes I become very desperate. I feel I should go back to Pakistan and be in my own village and my own state.” Later he added, “This is a fourth life for me. I did not choose it. This is a great country with great values, but when you are taken from your own land, you even miss the bad people of your area.”

  In January, the Jirga demanded a full judicial commission to investigate “the mayhem that has occurred in Swat and is still happening”—an obvious reference to the military involvement, insiders say.

  Not long after I spoke briefly with Yousafzai on the phone, it was announced that he was going to work as a global-education consultant for the Pakistan High Commission in Birmingham. Malala will remain in England, recovering from the damage caused to her speech and hearing. Her left jaw and facial nerves have been reconstructed. A cochlear implant will lessen the deafness in her left ear. Pakistan recently announced that, by the end of 2015, girls’ education will be a compulsory legal right.

  In February, Malala was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. If she recovers, she has been primed to campaign, as Benazir Bhutto once did, against all religious extremism. “That little girl stood up and was not deterred,” said Faranahz Ispahani. “She paid a terrible price, but the price she paid may have awoken the world in a way that nothing else has.”

  AFTER THE GOLD RUSH

  SEPTEMBER 1990

  “This is in no way a comeback. Because I never went anywhere.”

  “We have an old custom here at Mar-a-Lago,” Donald Trump was saying one night at dinner in his 118-room winter palace in Palm Beach. “Our custom is to go around the table after dinner and introduce ourselves to each other.” Trump had seemed fidgety that night, understandably eager to move the dinner party along so that he could go to bed.

  “Old custom? He’s only had Mrs. Post’s house a few months. Really! I’m going home,” one Palm Beach resident whispered to his date.

  “Oh, stay,” she said. “It will be so amusing.”

  It was spring, four years ago. Donald and Ivana Trump were seated at opposite ends of their long Sheraton table in Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post’s former dining room. They were posed in imperial style, as if they were a king and queen. They were at the height of their ride, and it was plenty glorious. Trump was seen on the news shows offering his services to negotiate with the Russians. There was talk that he might make a run for president. Ivana had had so much publicity that she now offered interviewers a press kit of flattering clips. Anything seemed possible, the Trumps had grown to such stature in the golden city of New York.

  It was balmy that night in Palm Beach; Ivana wore a strapless dress. The air was redolent with the fragrance of oleander and bougainvillea, mingled with the slight smell of mildew that clung to the old house. To his credit, Trump had no interest in mastering the Palm Beach style of navy blazers and linen trousers. Often he wore a business suit to his table; his only concession to local custom was to wear a pink tie or pale shoes. To her credit, Ivana still served the dinners her husband preferred, so on that warm night the guests ate beef with potatoes. Mrs. Post’s faux-Tiepolo ceiling remained in the dining room, but an immense silver bowl now rested in the center of the table, filled with plastic fruit. As always, it was business with the Trumps, for that was their common purpose, the bond between them. In recent years, they never seemed to touch each other or exchange intimate remarks in public. They had become less like man and wife and more like two ambassadors from different countries, each with a separate agenda.

  The Trumps had bought Mar-a-Lago only a few months earlier, but already they had become Palm Beach curiosities. Across the road was the Bath and Tennis Club, “the B and T,” as the locals called it, and it was said that the Trumps had yet to be invited to join. “Utter bullshit! They kiss my ass in Palm Beach,” Trump told me recently. “Those phonies! That club called me and asked me if they could have my consent to use part of my beach to expand the space for their cabanas! I said, ‘Of course!’ Do you think if I wanted to be a member they would have turned me down? I wouldn’t join that club, because they don’t take blacks and Jews.”

  As if Mar-a-Lago and the Trump Princess yacht were James Gatz’s West Egg estate, invitations were much prized, for the local snobs loved to dine out on tales of the Trumps. And now this! Embarrassing their guests by having them make speeches, as if they were at a sales convention!

  When it was Ivana’s turn to introduce herself that night, she rose quickly. “I am married to the most wonderful husband. He is so generous and smart. We are so lucky to have this life.” She was desperately playing to him, but Donald said nothing in return. He seemed tired of hearing Ivana’s endless praise; her subservient quality appeared to be getting to him. Perhaps he was spoiling for something to excite him, like a fight. Maybe all the public posturing was beginning to get boring, too. “Well, I’m done,” he said before dessert, tossing his napkin on the table and vanishing from the room.

  Palm Beach had been Ivana Trump’s idea. Long ago, Donald had screamed at her, “I want nothing social that you aspire to. If that is what makes you happy, get another husband!” But she had no intention of doing that, for Ivana,
like Donald, was living out a fantasy. She had seen that in the Trump life everything and everybody appeared to come with a price, or a marker for future use. Ivana had learned to look through Donald with glazed eyes when he said to close friends, as he had in the early years of their marriage, “I would never buy Ivana any decent jewels or pictures. Why give her negotiable assets?” She had gotten out of Eastern Europe by being tough and highly disciplined, and she had compounded her skills through her husband, the master manipulator. She had learned the lingua franca in a world where everyone seemed to be using everyone else in a relentless drive for power. How was she to know that there was another way to live? Besides, she often told her friends, however cruel Donald could be, she was very much in love with him.

  This night Ivana had managed to wedge in the publisher of the local social paper, “the Shiny Sheet.” As usual, Donald’s weekend guests were paybacks, for he trusted few people. He had invited one of his construction executives, the mayor of West Palm Beach, and the former governor of New York, Hugh Carey, who in his days running the state as “Society Carey,” boosted by huge Trump donations, had been crucial to Trump’s early success.

  For years, Ivana appeared to have studied the public behavior of the royals. Her friends now called this “Ivana’s imperial-couple syndrome,” and they teased her about it, for they knew that Ivana, like Donald, was inventing and reinventing herself all the time. When she had first come to New York, she wore elaborate helmet hairdos and bouffant satin dresses, very Hollywood; her image of rich American women probably came from the movies she had seen as a child. Ivana had now spent years passing through the fine rooms of New York, but she had never seemed to learn the real way of the truly rich, the art of understatement. Instead, she had become regal, filling her houses with the kind of ormolu found in palaces in Eastern Europe. She had taken to waving to friends with tiny hand motions, as if to conserve her energy. At her own charity receptions, she insisted that she and Donald form a receiving line, and she would stand in pinpoint heels, never sinking into the deep grass—such was her control.

  This spring night, a squad of servants had been outside to greet the guests, as if they had arrived at Cliveden between the wars. Most of the staff, however, were not a permanent part of Mar-a-Lago; they were local caterers and car parks, hired for the evening. In addition to the dining-room ceiling, Ivana had left Mrs. Post’s shabby fringed sofas and Moroccan suites totally in place, giving the impression that she was trying on Mrs. Post’s persona, too. One of the few signs of the new owners’ taste was the dozens of silver frames on the many end tables. The frames did not contain family pictures, but magazine covers. Each cover featured the face of Donald Trump.

  When the Trump plane landed in Palm Beach, two cars were usually waiting, the first a Rolls-Royce for the adults, the second a station wagon for the children, the nannies, and a bodyguard. Occasionally, state troopers were on hand to speed the Trump motorcade along. This took a certain amount of planning and coordination, but the effort was crucial for what Ivana was trying to achieve. “In fifty years Donald and I will be considered old money like the Vanderbilts,” she once told the writer Dominick Dunne.

  * * *

  This past April, when his empire was in danger of collapse, Trump isolated himself in a small apartment on a lower floor of Trump Tower. He would lie on his bed, staring at the ceiling, talking into the night on the telephone. The Trumps had separated. Ivana remained upstairs in the family triplex with its beige onyx floors and low-ceilinged living room painted with murals in the style of Michelangelo. The murals had occasioned one of their frequent fights: Ivana wanted cherubs, Donald preferred warriors. The warriors won. “If this were on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it would be very much in place in terms of quality,” Trump once said of the work. That April, Ivana began to tell her friends that she was worried about Donald’s state of mind.

  She had been completely humiliated by Donald through his public association with Marla Maples. “How can you say you love us? You don’t love us! You don’t even love yourself. You just love your money,” twelve-year-old Donald junior told his father, according to friends of Ivana’s. “What kind of son have I created?” Trump’s mother, Mary, is said to have asked Ivana.

  However unlikely it seemed, Ivana was now considered a tabloid heroine, and her popularity seemed in inverse proportion to the fickle city’s new dislike of her husband. “Ivana is now a media goddess on par with Princess Di, Madonna, and Elizabeth Taylor,” Liz Smith reported. Months earlier, Ivana had undergone cosmetic reconstruction with a California doctor. She emerged unrecognizable to her friends and perhaps her children, as fresh and innocent of face as Heidi of Edelweiss Farms. Although she had negotiated four separate marital-property agreements over the last fourteen years, she was suing her husband for half his assets. Trump was trying to be philosophical. “When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass—a good one!—there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left,” he told me.

  Ivana had hired a public-relations man to help her in her new role. “This is all very calculated,” one of her advisers told me. “Ivana is very shrewd. She’s playing it to the hilt.”

  Many floors beneath the Trumps, Japanese tourists roamed the Trump Tower lobby with their cameras. Inevitably, they took pictures of the display of Trump’s familiar portrait from the cover of his book Trump: The Art of the Deal, which was propped on an easel outside the Trump Tower real-estate office. The Japanese still took Donald Trump to be the very image of power and money, and seemed to believe, as Trump once had, that this red-marble-and-brass monument was the center of the world.

  For days, Trump rarely left his building. Hamburgers and French fries were sent up to him from the nearby New York Delicatessen. His body ballooned, his hair curled down his neck. “You remind me of Howard Hughes,” a friend told him. “Thanks,” Trump replied, “I admire him.” On the telephone he sounded ebullient, without a care, as confident as the image he projected in his lobby portrait.

  Like John Connally, the former governor of Texas, Trump had millions of dollars signed away in personal guarantees. The personal debt on the Trump Shuttle alone was $135 million. Bear Stearns had been guaranteed $56 million for Trump’s Alexander’s and American Airlines positions. The Taj Mahal casino had a complicated set of provisions that made Trump responsible for $35 million. Trump had personally guaranteed $125 million for the Plaza Hotel. In West Palm Beach, Trump Plaza was so empty it was nicknamed “the Trump See-Through.” That building alone carried $14 million worth of personal debt. Trump’s mansions in Greenwich and Palm Beach, as well as the yacht, had been promised to the banks for $40 million in outstanding loans. The Wall Street Journal estimated that Trump’s guarantees could exceed $600 million. In one astonishing decade, Donald Trump had become the Brazil of Manhattan.

  * * *

  “Anybody who is anybody sits between the columns. The food is the worst, but you’ll see everybody here,” Donald Trump told me at the “21” Club. Donald had already cut a swath in this preserve of the New York establishment; we were immediately seated between the columns in the old upstairs room, then decorated with black paneling and red Naugahyde banquettes. It was the autumn of 1980, a fine season in New York. The Yankees were in the pennant race; a movie star was running for president and using the term “deregulation” in his campaign. Donald was new then, thirty-four years old and very brash, just beginning to make copy and loving it. He was already fodder for the dailies and the weeklies, but he was desperate for national attention. “Did you see that the New York Times said I looked like Robert Redford?” he asked me.

  Trump hasn’t changed much physically in the last ten years. Then, as now, he was all cheeks and jaw, with a tendency to look soft in the middle. He retains the blond hair, youthful swagger, and elastic face that give him the quality of the cartoon tough Baby Huey. Trump is a head swiveler, always looking around to see who else
is in the room. As a boy, he was equally restless. “Donald was the child who would throw the cake at the birthday parties,” his brother Robert once told me. “If I built the bricks up, Donald would come along and glue them all together, and that would be the end of my bricks.”

  He was already married to Ivana, a former model and athlete from Czechoslovakia. One night in 1976, Trump had been at the bar in Maxwell’s Plum. Maxwell’s Plum is gone now, but the very name evokes the era of frantic singles underneath the Art Nouveau ceiling. It was the place where flight attendants hoped to find bankers, and models looked for dates. Donald met his model, Ivana Zelnickova, visiting from Montreal. She liked to tell the story of how she had gone skiing with Donald, pretending to be a learner like him, and then humiliated him by whizzing past him down the slopes.

  They were married in New York during Easter of 1977. Mayor Beame attended the wedding at Marble Collegiate Church. Donald had already made his alliance with Roy Cohn, who would become his lawyer and mentor. Shortly before the wedding, Donald reportedly told Ivana, “You have to sign this agreement.” “What is this?” she asked. “Just a document that will protect my family money.” Cohn gallantly offered to find Ivana a lawyer. “We don’t have these documents in Czechoslovakia,” Ivana reportedly said, but she told friends that she was terrified of Cohn and his power over Donald. The first agreement gave Ivana $20,000 a year. Two years later, Trump had made his own fortune. “You better redo the agreement, Donald,” Cohn reportedly told him. “Otherwise you’re going to look hard and greedy.” Ivana resisted. “You don’t like it, stick to the old agreement,” Trump is said to have replied.