Donald Trump has always viewed his father as a role model. In The Art of the Deal, he wrote, “Fred Trump was born in New Jersey in 1905. His father, who came here from Sweden . . . owned a moderately successful restaurant.” In fact, the Trump family was German and desperately poor. “At one point my mother took in stitching to keep us going,” Trump’s father told me. “For a time, my father owned a restaurant in the Klondike, but he died when I was young.” Donald’s cousin John Walter once wrote out an elaborate family tree. “We shared the same grandfather,” Walter told me, “and he was German. So what?”
Although Fred Trump was born in New Jersey, family members say he felt compelled to hide his German background because most of his tenants were Jewish. “After the war, he thought that Jews would never rent from him if they knew his lineage,” Ivana reportedly said. Certainly, Fred Trump’s camouflage could easily convey to a child the impression that in business anything goes. When I asked Donald Trump about this, he was evasive: “Actually, it was very difficult. My father was not German; my father’s parents were German . . . Swedish, and really sort of all over Europe . . . and I was even thinking in the second edition of putting more emphasis on other places because I was getting so many letters from Sweden: Would I come over and speak to Parliament? Would I come meet with the president?”
Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke.
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”)
Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
Is Ivana trying to convince her friends and lawyer that Trump is a crypto-Nazi? Trump is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitler’s speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitler’s genius at propaganda. The Führer often described his defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa as great victories. Trump continues to endow his diminishing world with significance as well. “There’s nobody that has the cash flow that I have,” he told the Wall Street Journal long after he knew better. “I want to be king of cash.”
Fred Trump, like his son, has never resisted exaggeration. When Donald was a child, his father bought a house that “had nine bathrooms and columns like Tara,” Fred Trump said. The house, however, was in Queens. Donald would someday envision a larger world. It was Donald’s mother, Mary, who revered luxury. “My mother had a sense of the grand,” Trump told me. “I can remember her watching the coronation of Queen Elizabeth and being so fascinated by it. My father had no interest in that kind of thing at all.”
Donald Trump often went with his father to construction sites, for they were extraordinarily close, almost kindred spirits. In family photographs, Fred and Donald stand together, often arm in arm, while Donald’s sisters and younger brother, Robert, seem off in the ether. Ivana has told friends that Donald even persuaded his father to put him in charge of his three siblings’ trust funds.
Donald was one of five children, the second son. As a child, he was so boisterous that his parents sent him away to military school. “That was the way it worked in the Trump family,” a longtime friend told me. “It was not a loving atmosphere.” Donald was chubby then, but military school slimmed him down. He became forceful, and grew even closer to his father. “I had to fight back all the time,” Trump once told me. “These guys like my father are tough. You have to be hitting back! Otherwise they don’t respect you!”
Family members say that the firstborn son, Fred junior, often felt shut out by the relationship between Donald and his father. As a young man, he announced his intention to be an airplane pilot. Later, according to a friend of Ivana’s, Donald and his father often belittled Fred junior for this career choice. “Donald would say, ‘What is the difference between what you do and driving a bus? Why aren’t you in the family real-estate business?’ ” Fred junior became an alcoholic and died at age forty-three. Ivana has always told her close friends that she believed the pressure put on him by his father and his brother hastened his early death. “Perhaps unknowingly [we did put pressure on him],” Trump told me. “We assumed that [real estate] came rather easy to us and it should have come easily to him. I had success, and that put pressure on Fred, too. What is this, a psychoanalysis of Donald?”
Donald’s relationship with Robert has also had troubled moments. Robert, who did go into the family business, has always been “the nice guy,” in his brother’s shadow. There has been additional friction between Robert’s wife, Blaine, and Ivana. Blaine is considered a workhorse for New York charities, and Robert and Blaine are extremely popular—“the good Trumps,” they are called. “Robert and I feel that if we say anything about the family, then we become public people,” Blaine told me. The brothers’ suppressed hostility erupted after the opening of the Taj Mahal. “Robert told Donald that if he didn’t give him autonomy he would leave,” Ivana told a friend. “So Donald did leave him alone, and there was a mess with the slot machines which cost Donald $3 million to $10 million in the first three days. When Donald exploded, Robert packed his boxes and left. He and Blaine went to her family for Easter.”
* * *
As his father had had Bunny Lindenbaum for his fixer, Donald Trump had Roy Cohn, the Picasso of the inside fix. “Cohn taught Donald which fork to use,” a friend told me. “I’ll bring my lawyer Roy Cohn with me,” Trump often told city officials a decade ago, before he learned better. “Donald calls me fifteen to twenty times a day,” Cohn once told me. “He has a maddening attention to detail. He is always asking, ‘What is the status of this? What is the status of that?’ ”
In a Trump tax-abatement case, according to Cohn’s biographer Nicholas von Hoffman, the judge was handed a piece of paper that looked like an affidavit. It had just one sentence on it: “No further delays or adjournments. Stanley M. Friedman.” By then Friedman had become the county leader of the Bronx. It wasn’t necessary to exchange money for such favors. This was a classic “marker”; the power of suggestion of future favors was enough.
Friedman had also been crucial to Trump’s plans for the Commodore Hotel. “In the final days of the Beame administration,” according to Wayne Barrett, “Friedman rushed a $160 million, forty-year tax abatement . . . and actually executed the documents for the lame duck Beame.” Friedman had already agreed to join Cohn’s law firm, which was representing Trump. “Trump lost his moral compass when he made an alliance with Roy Cohn,” Liz Smith once remarked.
In New York, Trump soon became known for his confrontational style. He also became the largest contributor to Governor Hugh Carey of New York, except for Carey’s brother. Trump and his father gave $135,000. He was moving quickly now; he had set himself up in a Fifth Avenue office and a Fifth Avenue apartment and had hired Louise Sunshine, Carey’s chief of fund-raising, as his “director of special projects.” “I knew Donald better than anyone,” she told me. “We’re a team, Sunshine and Trump, and when people shove us, we shove harder.” Sunshine
had raised millions of dollars for Carey, and she had one of the greatest address books in the city. She took Donald to meet every city and state power broker and worked on the sale of the Trump Tower apartments.
Real-estate tax is immensely complicated. Often profit-and-loss accounting does not run parallel with cash flow. Sometimes a developer can have tremendous cash flow and yet not report taxable earnings; tax laws also permit developers to have less cash flow and greater taxable earnings. It is up to the developer. When Donald Trump broke ground on a new apartment building at Sixty-first Street and Third Avenue, Louise Sunshine was given a 5 percent share of the new Trump Plaza, as it was called.
There was some friction in Sunshine’s relationship with her boss. As a result of Trump’s accounting on Trump Plaza, Louise Sunshine, according to a close friend, would have had to pay taxes of $1 million. “Why are you structuring Trump Plaza this way?” she reportedly asked Donald. “Where am I going to get $1 million?” “Sell me back your 5 percent share of Trump Plaza and you can have it,” Trump said.
Sunshine was so stunned by this that she went to her friend billionaire Leonard Stern for help. “I wrote out a check for $1 million on the spot so that my close friend would not find herself squeezed out by Donald,” Stern told me. “I said to Louise, ‘You tell Trump that unless he treats you fairly you will litigate! And as a result, the details of his duplicitous treatment would not only come to the attention of the public but also to the Casino Control Commission.’ ” Louise Sunshine hired Arthur Liman, who would later represent the financier Michael Milken, to handle her case. Liman worked out a settlement: Trump paid Louise Sunshine $2.7 million for her share of Trump Plaza. Sunshine repaid Leonard Stern. For several years, Trump and Sunshine had a cool relationship. But in fine New York style, they are now friends again. “Donald never should have used his money as a power tool over me,” Sunshine told me, adding, “I have absolved him.”
Like Michael Milken, Trump began to believe that his inordinate skills could be translated into any business. He started to expand out of the familiar world of real estate into casinos, airlines, and hotels. With Citicorp as his enabler, he bought the Plaza and the Eastern shuttle. He managed them both surprisingly well, but he had paid too much for them. He always had the ready cooperation of the starstruck banks, which would later panic. A member of the board of the Chase Manhattan Bank recently demanded at a meeting, “What in God’s name were you thinking of to make these loans?” No satisfactory answer was forthcoming; the Rockefeller bank had once kept Brazil afloat, too. The bankers, like the Brooklyn-machine hacks from Trump’s childhood, were blame shufflers, frantic to keep the game going.
“You cannot believe the money the banks were throwing at us,” a former top legal associate of Trump’s told me. “For every deal we did, we would have six or eight banks who were willing to give us hundreds of millions of dollars. We used to have to pick through the financings; the banks could not sign on fast enough to anything Donald conceived.”
“He bought more and more properties and expanded so much that he guaranteed his own self-destruction. His fix was spending money. Well, his quick fix became his Achilles’ heel,” a prominent developer told me.
Trump’s negotiations, according to one lawyer who worked on the acquisition of the Atlantic City casino of Resorts International, were always unusually unpleasant. After the success of The Art of the Deal, Trump’s lawyers began to talk about “Donald’s ego” as if it were a separate entity. “Donald’s ego will never permit us to accept that point,” one lawyer said over and over again during the negotiations. “The key to Donald, like with any bully, is to tell him to go fuck himself,” the lawyer told me. When Mortimer Zuckerman, the chairman and CEO of Boston Properties, submitted a design that was chosen for the site of the Fifty-ninth Street coliseum, Trump became apoplectic. “He called everyone, trying to get his deal killed. Of course, Mort’s partner was Salomon Brothers, so Trump got nowhere,” a person close to Zuckerman remembered.
* * *
One image of Ivana and Donald Trump sticks in my memory. Wintertime, three years ago. They were at the Wollman Rink. Donald had just fixed it up for the city. He had been crowing in the newspapers about what dummies Mayor Koch and the city had been, wasting years and money and coming up with nothing on the skating rink. Trump had taken over the job and done it well. If he grabbed more of the credit than he deserved, no one really held it against him; the rink was open at last and filled with happy skaters.
Ivana was wearing a striking lynx coat that showed her blonde hair to advantage. Their arms were around each other. They looked so very young and rich, living in the moment of their success. A polite crowd had gathered to congratulate them on the triumph of the rink. The people near Donald appeared to feel enlivened by his presence, as if he were a hero. His happiness seemed a reflection of the crowd’s adulation.
Next to me a man called out, “Why don’t you negotiate the SALT talks for Reagan, Donald?” Ivana beamed. The snow began falling very lightly; from the rink below you could hear “The Skaters’ Waltz.”
* * *
Some months before the Trumps’ separation, Donald and Ivana were due at a dinner party being given in their honor. The Trumps were late, and this was not a dinner to be taken lightly. The hosts had a family name that evoked the very history of New York, yet as if they had recognized another force coming up in the city, they were honoring Donald and Ivana Trump.
Trump entered the room first. “I had to tape the Larry King show,” he said. “I’m on Larry King tonight.” He seemed very restless. Trump paid little attention to his blonde companion, and no one in the room recognized Ivana until she began to speak. “My God! What has she done to herself ?” one guest asked. Ivana’s Slavic cheeks were gone; her lips had been fluffed up into a pout. Her limbs had been resculpted, and her cleavage astonishingly enhanced. The guests were so confused by her looks that her presence created an odd mood.
All through dinner Donald fidgeted. He looked at his watch. He mentioned repeatedly that he was at that moment on the Larry King show, as if he expected the guests to get up from their places. He had been belligerent to King that night, and he wanted the guests to see him, perhaps to confirm his powers. “Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is very bad—it really is,” he had told Larry King on national TV.
* * *
“Come on, Arnold! Pose with me! Come on!” Ivana Trump called out to the designer Arnold Scaasi on a warm night this past June. They were at the Waldorf-Astoria, at an awards ceremony sponsored by the Fragrance Foundation, and Ivana was a presenter. The carpet was shabby in the Jade Room; the paparazzi were waiting to pounce. PR materials covered the tables of this “must do” event, of the kind that often passes for New York social life. The most expensive couture dress looked, under the blue-green tint of the lights, cheap.
I was surprised that she appeared. The day before, her husband’s crisis with the banks had provided the headlines on all three of the local tabloids. TRUMP IN A SLUMP! cried the Daily News. One columnist even said Trump’s problems were the occasion for city joy, and proposed a unity day. “Ivana! Ivana! Ivana!” the photographers called out to her. Ivana smiled, as if she were a presidential candidate. She wore a full-skirted mint-green satin beaded gown; her hair was swept off her face in a chignon. However humiliated for her children’s sake she may have felt by the bad publicity, she had elected to leave them at home that night. Ivana was at the Waldorf by 6:15 p.m., greeting reporters and paparazzi by name. She could not afford now to alienate the perfume establishment by canceling, for soon she would be merchandising a fragrance, and she would need their goodwill.
Ivana seemed determined to keep her new stature in the city of alliances, for her financial future depended on her being able to salvage the brand name. As a woman alone, with a reduced fortune, Ivana was entering a tough world. She had no Rothkos to hock and no important jewels. But she did have the name Ivana, and she was making
plans to market scarves, perfumes, handbags, and shoes, as once her husband had been able to market the name Trump.
Several feet away from us, the local CBS reporter was doing a stand-up for the evening news. The reporter was commenting on the unraveling of the Trump empire while Ivana was chatting with Scaasi and Estée Lauder. Lauder, a tough businesswoman herself, had reportedly told Ivana several months earlier, “Go back with Donald. It is a cold world out here.” I was reminded of a crowd scene in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust. Ivana even allowed the CBS reporter to shove a microphone into her face. “Donald and I are partners in marriage and in business. I will stand beside him through thick or thin, for better or worse,” she told the reporters with bizarre aplomb. Ivana had become, like Donald, a double agent, able to project innocence and utter confidence. She had, in fact, almost turned into Donald Trump.
“To tell you the truth, I’ve made Ivana a very popular woman. I’ve made a lot of satellites. Hey, whether it’s Marla or Ivana. Marla can do any movie she wants to now. Ivana can do whatever she wants,” Donald Trump told me on the phone.
“New York City is a very tough place,” Ivana Trump told me years ago. “I’m tough, too. When people give me a punch in the nose, I react by getting even tougher.” We were walking through the rubble of the Commodore Hotel, which would soon reopen as the Grand Hyatt. Ivana had been given the responsibility of supervising all the decoration; she was hard at it, despite the fact that she was wearing a white wool Thierry Mugler jumpsuit and pale Dior shoes as she picked her way through the sawdust. “I told you never to leave a broom like this in a room!” she screamed at one worker. Screaming at her employees had become part of her hallmark, perhaps her way of feeling power. Later, in Atlantic City, she would become known for her obsession with cleanliness.
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