Donald was determined to have a large family. “I want five children, like in my own family, because with five, then I will know that one will be guaranteed to turn out like me,” Donald told a close friend. He was willing to be generous with Ivana, and a story went around that he was giving her a cash bonus of $250,000 for each child.
The Trumps and their baby, Donald junior, lived in a Fifth Avenue apartment decorated with beige velvet sectional sofas and a bone-and-goatskin table from the Italian furniture store Casa Bella. They had a collection of Steuben glass animals which they displayed on glass shelves in the front hall. The shelves were outlined with a string of tiny white lights usually seen on a Christmas tree.
Donald was trying to make time in the world of aesthetes and little black cocktail dresses. He had just completed the Grand Hyatt, on East Forty-second Street, and was considered a comer. He had put together the Fifth Avenue parcel that would become Trump Tower and had enraged the city establishment with his demolition of the cherished Art Deco friezes that had decorated the Bonwit Teller building. Even then, Trump’s style was to turn on his audience.
“What do you think? Do you think blowing up the sculptures has hurt me?” he asked me that day at “21.”
“Yes.”
“Who cares?” he said. “Let’s say that I had given that junk to the Met. They would have just put them in their basement. I’ll never have the goodwill of the Establishment, the tastemakers of New York. Do you think, if I failed, these guys in New York would be unhappy? They would be thrilled! Because they have never tried anything on the scale that I am trying things in this city. I don’t care about their goodwill.”
Donald was like an overgrown kid, all rough edges and inflated ego. He had brought the broad style of Brooklyn and Queens into Manhattan, flouting what he considered effete conventions, such as landmark preservation. His suits were badly cut, with wide cuffs on his trousers; he was a shade away from cigars. “I don’t put on any airs,” he told me. He tooled around New York in a silver Cadillac with “DJT” plates and tinted windows and had a former city cop for his driver.
Donald and I were not alone at lunch that day. He had invited Stanley Friedman to join us. Friedman was a partner of Roy Cohn’s and, like Cohn, a legend in the city. He was part of the Bronx political machine, and would soon be appointed the Bronx County leader. Later, Friedman would go to jail for his role in the city parking-meter scandal. Trump and Friedman spent most of our lunch swapping stories about Roy Cohn. “Roy could fix anyone in the city,” Friedman told me. “He’s a genius.” “He’s a lousy lawyer, but he’s a genius,” Trump said.
At one point, Preston Robert Tisch, known to all as Bob, came into the upstairs room at “21.” Bob Tisch and his brother, Laurence, now the head of CBS, had made their fortune in New York and Florida real estate and hotels. Bob Tisch, like his brother, was a city booster, a man of goodwill and manners, a benefactor of hospitals and universities.
“I beat Bob Tisch on the convention-center site,” Donald said loudly when Tisch stopped by our table. “But we’re friends now, good friends, isn’t that right, Bob? Isn’t that right?”
Bob Tisch’s smile remained on his face, but there was a sudden strain in his tone, as if a child had misbehaved. “Oh, yes, Donald,” he said, “good friends. Very good friends.”
* * *
Late on summer Friday afternoons, the city of noise takes on an eerie quiet. In June I was with one of Donald Trump’s more combative lawyers. “We certainly won’t win in the popular press,” he told me, “but we will win. You’ll see.” I thought of Trump a few blocks away, isolated in Trump Tower, fighting for his financial life.
The phone rang several times. “Yeah, yeah? Is that so?” the lawyer said, and then laughed at the sheer—as he phrased it—“brass balls” of his client, standing up to the numbers guys who were representing Chase Manhattan and Bankers Trust, whom he was into for hundreds of millions of dollars. “Donald’s very up. This is the kind of challenge Donald likes,” the lawyer told me. “It’s weird. You would never know anything is wrong.” “Don’t believe anything you read in the papers,” Trump had told his publisher Joni Evans. “When they hear the good news about me, what are they going to do?” Random House was rushing to publish his new book, Trump: Surviving at the Top, with a first printing of five hundred thousand.
In the Trump Tower conference room that week, one lawyer had reportedly told Trump the obvious: The Plaza Hotel might never bring the $400 million he had paid for it. Trump stayed cool. “Get me the Sultan of Brunei on the telephone,” he said. “I have a personal guarantee that the Sultan of Brunei will take me out of the Plaza at an immense profit.”
The bankers and lawyers in the conference room looked at Trump with a combination of awe and disbelief. Whatever their cynical instincts, Trump, the Music Man of real estate, could set off in them the power of imagination, for his real skill has always been his ability to convince others of his possibilities. The line between a con man and an entrepreneur is often fuzzy. “They say the Plaza is worth $400 million? Trump says it’s worth $800 million. Who the hell knows what it is worth? I can tell you one thing: It is worth a lot more than I paid for it,” Trump told me. “When Forbes puts low values on all my properties, they say I am only worth $500 million! Well, that’s $500 million more than I started with.”
* * *
“Do people really think I am in trouble?” Trump asked me recently.
“Yes,” I said, “they think you’re finished.”
It was an afternoon in July, when the dust seemed to be settling, and we were in the middle of a two-hour phone conversation. The conversation itself was a negotiation. Trump attempted to put me on the defensive. I had written about him ten years before. Trump had talked about a close friend of his who was the son of a famous New York real-estate developer. “I told him to get out from under his father’s thumb,” Trump told me then. “That was off the record,” Trump told me now. I looked up my old notes. “Wrong, Donald,” I said. “What was off the record was when you attacked your other friend and said he was an alcoholic.” Without missing a beat, Trump said, “I believe you.” Then Trump laughed. “Some things never change.”
“Just wait five years,” Trump told me. “This is really a no-brainer. Just like the Merv Griffin deal. When I took him to the cleaners, the press wanted me to lose. They said, ‘Holy shit! Trump got taken!’ Let me tell you something. It’s good for me to be thought of as poor right now. You wouldn’t believe some of the deals I am making! I guess I have a perverse personality. . . . I’ve really enjoyed the last few weeks,” he said, as if he had been rejuvenated at a spa.
Deals had always been his only art. He was reportedly getting unbelievable deals now from the contractors he had hired to build his casinos and the fiberglass elephants that decorate the Boardwalk in front of the Taj Mahal, for they were desperate, unsure that they would ever get paid for months of work. Trump was famous for his skill at squeezing every last bit out of his transactions. He was known to be making shocking deals now that he never could have made two months before. “Trump won’t do a deal unless there’s something extra—a kind of moral larceny—in it,” one of his rivals once said of him. “Things had gotten too easy for me,” Trump told me. “I made a lot of money and I made it too easily, to the point of boredom. Anything I did worked! I took on Bally, I made $32 million. After a while it was too easy.”
The fear of boredom has always loomed large in Trump’s life. He has a short attention span. He even gave the appearance of having grown bored with his wife. He told me he had grown weary of his deals, his companies, “New York phonies,” “Palm Beach phonies,” most social people, “negative” writers, and “negatives” in general. “You keep hitting and hitting and hitting, and after a while it doesn’t mean as much to you,” Trump told me. “Hey, when you first knew me, I basically had done nothing! So I had built a building or two, big deal.”
That morning, Trump had been yet again
on the front page of the New York Daily News, because Forbes had dropped him off the list of the world’s richest men, placing his net worth at $500 million, down from $1.7 billion in 1989. “They put me on the front page for this bullshit reason!” Trump said. “If they put me on the cover of the Daily News, they sell more papers! They put me on the cover of the Daily News today with wars breaking out! You know why? Malcolm Forbes got thrown out of the Plaza by me! You know the story about me and Malcolm Forbes, when I kicked him out of the Plaza Hotel? No? Well, I did. You’ll read all about it in my new book. And I didn’t throw him out because he didn’t pay his bill. So I’ve been expecting this attack from Forbes. The same writer who wrote about this also wrote that Merv kicked my ass! The same writer is under investigation. You heard about that, didn’t you?” (A Forbes writer is under investigation—for alleged use of outdated police credentials. He did not write that Trump was taken by Merv Griffin.) “What happened to me is what is happening in every company in America right now. There is not a company in America that isn’t restructuring! Didn’t you see the Wall Street Journal this morning about Revlon? What is going on at Revlon is what has happened to Donald Trump. But no one makes Revlon a front-page story. My problems didn’t even merit a column in the Wall Street Journal.” (Revlon was selling $182 million worth of stock to raise cash, but that was hardly the same as Trump’s crisis.)
Trump spoke in a hypnotic, unending torrent of words. Often he appeared to free-associate. He referred to himself in the third person: “Trump says . . . Trump believes.” His phrases skibbled around and doubled back on themselves like fireworks in a summer sky. He reminded me of a carnival barker trying to fill his tent. “I’m more popular now than I was two months ago. There are two publics as far as I’m concerned. The real public and then there’s the New York society horseshit. The real public has always liked Donald Trump. The real public feels that Donald Trump is going through Trump-bashing. When I go out now, forget about it. I’m mobbed. It’s bedlam,” Trump told me.
Trump is often belligerent, as if to pep things up. On the telephone with me, he attacked a local writer as “a disgrace” and savaged a financier’s wife I knew as “a giant, a three in the looks department.” After the Resorts International deal, at a New Year’s Eve party at the Aspen home of Barbara Walters and Merv Adelson, Trump was asked to make a wish for the coming year. “I wish I had another Merv Griffin to bat around,” he said.
Before the opening of the Taj Mahal, Marvin Roffman, a financial analyst from Philadelphia, correctly stated that the Taj was in for a rough ride. For that, Roffman believes, Trump had him fired. “Is that why you attacked him?” I asked Trump. “I’d do it again. Here’s a guy that used to call me, begging me to buy stock through him, with the implication that if I’d buy stock he’d give me positive comments.” “Are you accusing him of fraud?” I asked. “I’m accusing him of being not very good at what he does.” Congressman John Dingell of Michigan asked the SEC to investigate the circumstances of Roffman’s firing. When I asked Roffman about Trump’s charges he said, “That’s the most unbelievable garbage I’ve ever heard in my entire life.” Roffman’s attorney James Schwartzman called Trump’s allegations “the desperate act of a desperate man.” Roffman is now suing Trump for defamation of character.
* * *
“Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory,” his lawyer had told me. “If you say something again and again, people will believe you.”
“One of my lawyers said that?” Trump said when I asked him about it. “I think if one of my lawyers said that, I’d like to know who it is, because I’d fire his ass. I’d like to find out who the scumbag is!”
One of Trump’s first major deals in New York was to acquire a large tract of land on West Thirty-fourth Street being offered by the bankrupt Penn Central Railroad. Trump submitted a plan for a convention center to city officials. “He told us he’d forgo his $4.4 million fee if we would name the new convention center after his father,” former deputy mayor Peter Solomon said. “Someone finally read the contract. He wasn’t entitled to anywhere near the money he was claiming. It was unbelievable. He almost got us to name the convention center after his father in return for something he never really had to give away.”
Trump’s first major real-estate coup in New York was the acquisition of the Commodore Hotel, which would become the Grand Hyatt. This deal, secured with a controversial tax abatement from the city, made Trump’s reputation. His partner at the time was the well-respected Pritzker family of Chicago, who owned the Hyatt chain. Their contract was specific: Trump and Jay Pritzker agreed that if there were any sticking points they would have a ten-day period to arbitrate their differences. At one point, they had a minor disagreement. “Jay Pritzker was leaving for a trip to Nepal, where he was to be incommunicado,” a lawyer for the Pritzker family told me. “Donald waited until Jay was in the airplane before he called him. Naturally, Jay couldn’t call him back. He was on a mountain in Nepal. Later, Donald kept saying, ‘I tried to call you. I gave you the ten days. But you were in Nepal.’ It was outrageous. Pritzker was his partner, not his enemy! This is how he acted on his first important deal.” Trump later even reported the incident in his book.
“Give them the old Trump bullshit,” he told the architect Der Scutt before a presentation of the Trump Tower design at a press conference in 1980. “Tell them it is going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.” “I don’t lie, Donald,” the architect replied.
Eventually Trump bought out the Equitable Life Assurance Company’s share of the commercial space in Trump Tower. “He paid Equitable $60 million after an arm’s-length negotiation,” a top real-estate developer told me. “The equity for the entire commercial space was $120 million. Suddenly, Donald was saying that it was worth $500 million!”
When The Art of the Deal was published, he told the Wall Street Journal that the first printing would be two hundred thousand. It was fifty thousand fewer than that.
When Charles Feldman of CNN questioned Trump in March about the collapse of his business empire, Trump stormed off the set. Later, he told Feldman’s boss, Ted Turner, “Your reporter threatened my secretary and made her cry.”
When the stock market collapsed, he announced that he had gotten out in time and had lost nothing. In fact, he had taken a beating on his Alexander’s and American Airlines stock. “What I said was, other than my Alexander’s and American Airlines stock, I was out of the market,” Trump told me swiftly.
* * *
What forces in Donald Trump’s background could have set off in him such a need for self-promotion?
Ten years ago, I went to visit Trump’s father in his offices on Avenue Z on the border of Coney Island in Brooklyn. Fred Trump’s own real-estate fortune had been made with the help of the Brooklyn political machine and especially Abe Beame. In the 1940s, Trump and Beame shared a close friend and lawyer, a captain in a Brooklyn political club named Bunny Lindenbaum. At that time, Beame worked in the city budget office; thirty years later he would become mayor of the city. Trump, Lindenbaum, and Beame often saw one another at dinner dances and fund-raisers of the Brooklyn political clubs. It is impossible to overestimate the power of these clubs in the New York of the 1950s; they created Fred Trump and gave him access to his largest acquisition, the seventy-five-acre parcel of city land that would become the thirty-eight-hundred-unit Trump Village.
In 1960, an immense tract of land off Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn became available for development. The City Planning Commission had approved a generous tax abatement for a nonprofit foundation to build a housing cooperative. Fred Trump attacked this abatement as “a giveaway.” Soon after, Trump himself decided to go after the tax abatement. Although the City Planning Commission had already approved the nonprofit plan, Lindenbaum went to see Mayor Robert Wagner, and Beame, who was in Wagner’s camp, supported Trump.
Fred Trump wound up with two-thirds of the property, and within a year he had broken ground on Trump Village.
Lindenbaum was given the City Planning Commission seat formerly held by Robert Moses, the power broker who built many of New York’s highways, airports, and parks. The following year, Lindenbaum organized a fund-raising lunch for Wagner, who was running for reelection. Forty-three builders and landlords pledged thousands of dollars; Trump, according to reporter Wayne Barrett, pledged $2,500, one of the largest contributions. The lunch party made the front page of the newspapers, and Lindenbaum, disgraced, was forced off the commission. But Robert Wagner won the election, and Beame became his comptroller.
In 1966, as Donald was entering his junior year at the Wharton business school, Fred Trump and Lindenbaum were investigated for their role in a $60 million Mitchell-Lama mortgage. “Is there any way of preventing a man who does business in that way from getting another contract with the state?” the investigations-commission chairman asked about Trump and Lindenbaum. Ultimately, Trump was forced to return $1.2 million that he had overestimated on the land—part of which money he had used to buy a site nearby on which to build a shopping center.
Fred Trump’s office was pleasantly modest; the rooms were divided by glass partitions. The Trump Organization, as Donald had already grandly taken to calling his father’s company, was a small cottage on the grounds of Trump Village. At the time, Donald told reporters that “the Trump Organization” had twenty-two thousand units, although it had about half that number. Fred Trump was seventy-five then, polite, but nobody’s fool. He criticized many of his son’s early deals, warning him at one point that expanding into Manhattan was “a ticket on the Titanic.” Donald ignored him. “A peacock today, a feather duster tomorrow,” the developer Sam Lefrak is said to have remarked of Donald Trump. But ten years ago it was clear that Donald was the embodiment of his father’s dreams. “I always tell Donald, ‘The elevator to success is out of order. Go one step at a time,’ ” Fred Trump told me. “But what do you think of what my Donald has put together? It boggles the mind!”
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