The phrase “Stockholm syndrome” is now used by Ivana’s lawyer Michael Kennedy to describe her relationship with Donald. “She had the mentality of a captive,” Kennedy told me. “After a while she couldn’t fight her captor anymore, and she began to identify with him. Ivana is deaf, dumb, and blind when it comes to Donald.” If Donald worked eighteen-hour days, so would Ivana. The Trumps hired two nannies and a bodyguard for their children. She went to work running Trump Castle casino in Atlantic City, often spending two or three days a week there supervising the staff.
Determined to bring glamour to Trump Castle, she became famous for her attention to appearances, once moving a pregnant waitress, desperate for big tips, off the casino floor. The woman was placed in a distant lounge and given a clown’s suit to disguise her condition.
In New York, Ivana did not resist her husband’s grandiosity. Soon after Trump Tower was completed, the Trumps took possession of their triplex. Ivana’s lawyers often talk about her love of the domestic arts and describe her homemade jams and jellies. Yet the kitchen of her city apartment, which she designed, is tiny, no more than a kitchenette, tiled with gold linoleum. “The children’s wing has a kitchen, and that is where the nanny cooks,” a friend said. The Trump living room has a beige onyx floor with holes carved out to fit the carpets. There is a waterfall cascading down a marble wall, an Italianate fountain, and the famous murals. Their bedroom had a glass wall filled with arrangements of silk flowers. After a time, Ivana tired of the décor. She called in a renowned decorator. “What can I do with this interior?” she reportedly asked him. “Absolutely nothing,” he said.
* * *
Christmas Eve, three years ago. Ivana had received another stack of legal documents the size of a telephone book. “What is this?” she is said to have asked Donald. “It is our new nuptial agreement. You get $10 million. Sign it!” “But I can’t look at this now, it’s Christmas,” Ivana said. Donald pressed her, according to Kennedy. Trump seemed extraordinarily concerned that she sign the papers, perhaps because an Atlantic City photographer was threatening to blackmail him with photos he had taken of him and Marla Maples. However efficiently Ivana ran Trump Castle, she seemed terrified of her husband. She signed the papers giving her $10 million and the mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. Later, Trump would tell reporters, “Ivana has $25 million.”
The tactics he used in business he now brought home. “Donald began calling Ivana and screaming all the time: ‘You don’t know what you are doing!’ ” one of Ivana’s top assistants told me. “When Ivana would hang up the phone, I would say, ‘How can you put up with this?’ and Ivana would say, ‘Because Donald is right.’ ” He began belittling her: “That dress is terrible.” “You’re showing too much cleavage.” “You never spend enough time with the children.” “Who would touch those plastic breasts?” Ivana told her friends that Donald had stopped sleeping with her. She blamed herself. “I think it was Donald’s master plan to get rid of Ivana in Atlantic City,” one of her assistants told me. “By then, Marla Maples was in a suite at the Trump Regency. Atlantic City was to be their playground.”
Ivana had once warned her husband against Atlantic City. “Why expand somewhere where there is no airport?” Trump, however, was determined to invest there, even though Las Vegas associates had told him that Nevada gaming had profit factors that could total $200 million a year. But by now Marla Maples was in Atlantic City, and it was close to New York. Trump had become, according to one friend, “so focused on Marla he wasn’t paying attention to his business.”
Though Ivana had established herself in Atlantic City to please Donald, her presence there now, with Marla on the scene, was an inconvenience to him. With the acquisition of the Plaza Hotel, he could deliver an ultimatum: “Either you act like my wife and come back to New York and take care of your children or you run the casino in Atlantic City and we get divorced.”
“What am I going to do?” she asked one of her assistants. “If I don’t do what he says, I am going to lose him.”
Trump even called a press conference to announce Ivana’s new position as the president of the Plaza Hotel: “My wife, Ivana, is a brilliant manager. I will pay her one dollar a year and all the dresses she can buy!” Ivana called her friends in tears. “How can Donald humiliate me this way?”
* * *
“I think Marla is very different from her image,” Donald Trump told me in July. “Her image is that of a very good-looking buxom blonde.” A Donna Rice? “She’s much different than that. She’s smart, she’s very nice, and not ambitious. She could have made a fortune in the last six months if she had wanted to!”
“How could you have allowed Marla to be the No Excuses jeans girl?” I asked Trump. “Because I figured she could make $600,000 for doing one day’s work. For the negative publicity, I thought, that $600,000 she can live on the rest of her life,” Trump told me.
This past February, Trump took off for Japan, telling reporters he would be attending the Mike Tyson fight. His real motive was reportedly to meet with bankers to try to sell the Plaza, for Arthur Andersen’s November audit had been dire. As he was flying back, he was radioed on the plane. Liz Smith had broken the story of the Trumps’ separation. The entire sordid history of Marla Maples and Ivana fighting on the Aspen ski slopes was all over the papers. Ivana had done to Donald what years ago he had done to Jay Pritzker in Nepal. From the airplane, Trump called Liz Smith. “Congratulations on your story,” he told her sarcastically. “I have had it with Ivana. She’s gotten to be like Leona Helmsley.” “Shame on you, Donald!” Smith replied. “How dare you say that about the mother of your children?” “Just write that someone from Howard Rubenstein’s office said it,” Trump told Smith, referring to his well-connected press agent. (“I never said that,” Trump told me. “Yes, he did,” said Smith.) The Japanese bankers with whom Trump had negotiated a tentative sale suddenly backed off. “The Japanese despise scandal,” one of their associates told me.
Several weeks later, Donald called Ivana. “Why don’t we walk down Fifth Avenue together for the photographers and pretend that this entire scandal has been a publicity stunt? We could say that we wanted to see who would side with you and who would side with me.” As the press became more sympathetic to Ivana, Donald would scream at his lawyers, “This is bullshit!”
Ivana began to repair old feuds all over town. “We can be friends now, Leonard, can’t we?” she said at a recent party, according to a friend of Leonard Stern’s. “Your problem was with Donald, never me. I always liked you.”
Trump’s lawyers tried mightily to catch up with Ivana. “Donald saw a bill this week that Ivana charged $7,000 worth of Pratesi sheets for their daughter, Ivanka,” one lawyer said. “He called in a rage. ‘Why does a seven-year-old need $7,000 worth of sheets?’ She charged a $350 shirt at Montenapoleone. Who was that for, her new best friend, Jerry Zipkin?” The lawyer described Ivana’s bills from Carolina Herrera: “We will get a bill for $25,000, and Ivana will have photocopied over the invoice, so instead of one dress at $25,000, in her own handwriting she will write, ‘Six items for $25,000.’ ” (A spokesman for Ivana says that this is completely untrue.)
The scandal was seriously affecting the Trump children. Donny junior was being ridiculed at the Buckley School. Ivanka had been in tears at Chapin. When Donald and Marla Maples attended the same Elton John concert, Donny junior cried, for his father had told the children he would give Marla Maples up. “The children are all wrecks,” Ivana told Liz Smith. “I don’t know how Donald can say they are great and fine. Ivanka now comes home from school crying, ‘Mommy, does it mean I’m not going to be Ivanka Trump anymore?’ Little Eric asks me, ‘Is it true you are going away and not coming back?’ ” However cavalier Ivana’s public behavior was, in private she often cried. Once her husband’s coconspirator, she told friends that she now felt she was his victim.
* * *
On the Saturday of Donald Trump’s forty-fourth-birthday celebration, I
tried to take a walk on the West Side yards above Lincoln Center in Manhattan. The railroad tracks were rusty, the land was overgrown. The property stretched on, block after block. It was cool by the Hudson River that morning, with a pleasant breeze whipping over the water. The only sign of Trump was a high storm fence topped with elaborate curls of barbed wire to keep out the homeless people who live nearby. It was on this land, at the height of his megalomania, that Trump said he would erect “the tallest building in the world,” a plan that was successfully thwarted by neighborhood activists who were resistant to having parts of the West Side obscured in shadow. “They have no power,” Trump said at the time, baffled that anyone would resist his grandiose schemes.
Ivana had left for London to take part in one more public-relations event promoting the Plaza, only this time her friends the Baron and Baroness Ricky di Portanova were rumored to be paying the bill. Ivana had had her New York media campaign orchestrated by John Scanlon, who had handled public relations for CBS during the Westmoreland libel case. In London, she was cosseted by Eleanor Lambert, the doyenne of fashion publicists. A story went around London that she couldn’t afford her hotel and had moved in with a friend on Eaton Square. She was treading the same ground as Undine Spragg, who so carefully calculated her rise in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. Sir Humphry Wakefield assembled a list of titled guests for a dinner, but there was friction between him and Ivana. When the guests, including the Duchess of Northumberland, arrived, many of them were displeased that they had been lured to a dinner that, to their surprise, was in honor of Ivana Trump. “Humphry will pay for this,” one guest reportedly said.
That Saturday, New York seemed oddly vacant without the Trumps. Donald had left for his birthday party in Atlantic City. Hundreds of casino employees had been told to be on the Boardwalk to greet him, since Manhattan boosters were in short supply. The day before, he had defaulted on $73 million owed to bondholders and bankers. Clowns and jesters borrowed from Trump’s Xanadu attempted to entertain the waiting employees and reporters underneath Trump’s minarets and elephants, which soon might be repossessed.
Trump arrived very late, flanked by his bodyguards. His face was hard, his mouth set into a line. With an elaborate flourish, Trump’s executives pulled a curtain to reveal his birthday tribute, a huge portrait of Donald Trump, the same image the Japanese stared at in his Manhattan tower. The size of the portrait was unsettling on the Atlantic City Boardwalk: ten feet of the Donald, leaning forward on his elbow, his face frozen in the familiar defiant smirk.
Within days, the bankers agreed to give Trump $65 million to pay his bills. Much of his empire would probably have to be dismantled, but he would retain control. His personal allowance would now be $450,000 a month. “I can live with that,” Trump said. “However absurd this sounds, it was smarter to do it this way than to let a judge preside over a fire sale in a bankruptcy court,” one banker told me. Trump crowed about the bailout. “This is a great victory. It’s a great agreement for everybody,” he said.
Not exactly. Trump’s bankers were said to be so upset at Trump’s balance sheet—he was reportedly over half a billion dollars in the hole—that they demanded he sign over his future trust inheritance to secure the new loans. Trump’s father, who had created him by helping him achieve his first deals, now seemed to be rescuing him again. “Total bullshit,” Trump told me. “I have been given five years by the banks. The banks would never have asked me for my future inheritance, and I would never have given it.”
Soon after, Trump announced that the French department store Galeries Lafayette would take over the vast space Bonwit Teller had vacated in Trump Tower. “This is in no way a comeback,” Trump told me. “Because I never went anywhere.”
* * *
I was still searching for Donald Trump. On a rainy Thursday in July, I went down to federal court, where he was set to testify in a civil case in which he was a defendant. Along with his contractor, Trump had been accused of hiring scores of illegal Polish aliens to do the demolition work on the Trump Tower site. “The Polish brigade,” as they came to be called, had been astonishingly exploited on the job, earning four dollars an hour for work that usually paid five times that.
The last time I had been in this neighborhood was to hear the verdict in the John Gotti trial. I had come to know the area well. The guard inside greeted me by name. I was often here dipping in and out of the courtrooms to observe the notorious figures of the last decade. I thought of Bess Myerson, Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Leona Helmsley, Imelda Marcos, and Adnan Khashoggi, shattered and brought down in the crazy kaleidoscope of the 1980s. Each one had, at one time in his or her life, been thought to be like Donald Trump, a figure of greatness, anointed with special powers. In front of the courthouse, the police barricades were up. So many celebrities passed through these revolving doors that the yellow sawhorses were left routinely on the massive courthouse steps.
I thought about the ten years since I had first met Donald Trump. It is fashionable now to say that he was a symbol of the crassness of the 1980s, but Trump became more than a vulgarian. Like Michael Milken, Trump appeared to believe that his money gave him a freedom to set the rules. No one stopped him. His exaggerations and baloney were reported, and people laughed. His bankers showered him with money. City officials almost allowed him to set public policy by erecting his wall of concrete on the Hudson River. New York City, like the bankers from the Chase and Manny Hanny, allowed Trump to exist in a universe where all reality had vanished. “I met with a couple of reporters,” Trump told me on the telephone, “and they totally saw what I was saying. They completely believed me. And then they went out and wrote vicious things about me, as I am sure you will, too.” Long ago, Trump had counted me among his enemies in his world of “positives” and “negatives.” I felt that the next dozen people he spoke to would probably be subjected to a catalogue of my transgressions as imagined by Donald Trump.
When I got to the courtroom, Trump had gone. His lawyer, the venerable and well-connected Milton Gould, was smiling broadly, for he appeared to believe that he was wiping the floor with this case. Trump had said that he knew nothing about the demolitions, that his contractor had been “a disaster.” Yet one FBI informant testified that he had warned Trump of the presence of the Polish brigade and had told him that if he didn’t get rid of them his casino license might not be granted.
I wandered down to the press room on the fifth floor to hear about Trump’s testimony. The reporters sounded weary; they had heard it all before. “Goddamn it,” one shouted at me, “we created him! We bought his bullshit! He was always a phony, and we filled our papers with him!”
I thought about the last questions Donald Trump had asked me the day before on the telephone. “How long is your article?” “Long,” I said. Trump seemed pleased. “Is it a cover?” he asked.
FRANCE’S SCARLET LETTER
JUNE 2003
“I tried to bring the techniques of simple police interrogation. Ask the name, the address, the phone number, the place of the attack.”
It would take many months for David de Rothschild to realize that what was happening to Jews in France was a powerful predictor of a war that was coming down history’s long stream. In May 2001, when he and a group of French business leaders arrived in Jerusalem for meetings with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and members of his Cabinet, he reluctantly agreed to speak to a reporter from the Jerusalem Post. Then fifty-eight and the head of the French branch of his family’s banking dynasty, he was just beginning to be aware of a wave of attacks on French Jews by French Muslims that would escalate into an unimaginable nightmare and affect France, the United States, and the Muslim and Jewish populations of both countries.
Rothschild was actively involved in Jewish organizations in France, but, as he told friends, he was not particularly croyant, or religious, by nature. In restaurants, however, if he overheard a conversation that struck him as anti-Semitic, he was known to walk over to the table and
silently present his card. That day in Jerusalem, he did not yet comprehend how dangerous the situation in France had become. The facts were these: Between January and May 2001 there had been more than three hundred attacks against Jews. From Marseille to Paris, synagogues had been destroyed, school buses stoned, children assaulted. Yet very few of the incidents had been reported in the French media, which have a distinctly pro-Palestinian tilt. So Rothschild was largely uninformed concerning the accurate numbers. He and his friends were still operating in a near vacuum, because of what is called in France la barrière du silence, which minimizes and mystifies reporting on French Jewish matters and the Middle East.
Rothschild would later be disturbed that he had not been made more aware faster of the degree of violence, which would be perceived outside France as the return of classic anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism and would infect France and much of Europe over the next two years. By the spring of this year, the number of hate crimes had risen above one thousand, and the relationship of the United States, poised to declare a war on Iraq, and France, implacably opposed to such a war, was glacial.
* * *
About six million Muslims live in France, nearly 10 percent of the population, a potential voting bloc. In contrast, there are only about 650,000 Jews, but it is the third-largest Jewish population in the world, after Israel and the United States. The victims of the attacks appeared to live mostly in working-class areas in the banlieues, or suburbs, on the outskirts of Paris, a laboratory of assimilation where much of the unemployed Muslim population also lives. The situation, Rothschild later told me, was fraught with complexity. In addition to a large number of distinguished Arab intellectuals, France was also home to cells of terrorists, fundamentalist imams, and firms with strong business ties to Baghdad. When Rothschild arrived in Israel in May 2001, he had also left behind him another, subtler struggle, going on behind closed doors, between the establishment Ashkenazi Jews of central Paris and the pieds-noirs, French citizens formerly of North Africa, many of them lower-middle-class Sephardic Jews who live in the suburbs. The Sephardic communities in the Paris outskirts were the principal targets of anti-Western paranoia spewing up out of the Middle East. A widely shared position of the upper-class Jewish establishment in France was to let such things alone and not jeter de l’huile sur le feu (throw oil on the fire).
A Private War Page 17