(C) Common Dreams
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After the Gold Rush [1]

['Condé Nast', 'Marie Brenner']

Date: 1990-09-01 19:08:10+00:00

The scandal was seriously affecting the Trump children. Donny junior was being ridiculed at the Buckley School. Ivancka 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. Ivancka now comes home from school crying, ‘Mommy, does it mean I’m not going to be Ivancka 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 co-conspirator, 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 which 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 which, 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 saw-horses 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 F.B.I. 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 pressroom 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.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/07/donald-ivana-trump-divorce-prenup-marie-brenner

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