Born Trump_Inside America’s First Family

by Emily Jane Fox

  “He was there—because he was married and I didn’t see it ever being anything more,” Marla said in the interview, defending the infidelity every fiber of her moral being had screamed was wrong, until she caught a glimpse of the kind of life it could offer her. “We can’t really judge till we’re there,” she added. “I found that out.”

  They started meeting off Madison Avenue and outside the Trump family church. He snuck her down to his Atlantic City hotels when he knew Ivana wouldn’t be around. Donald and Marla tucked into his limousine, his driver making clandestine little circles around Manhattan with them in the expanse of the back seat. In the fall of 1987 Donald put in a cash bid to buy a 280-foot yacht—a vessel with a helicopter pad, five decks, a hundred cabins, room to accommodate fifty-two crew members, a master suite with a tortoiseshell ceiling and a ten-foot-wide bed, a dressing room with a barber’s chair leading into a bathroom that boasted a shower with thirteen nozzles in the shape of a scallop shell that a team of guys had spent a year carving out of a single slab of onyx. He renamed the yacht the Trump Princess, and on it Marla became something of an undercover queen.

  It all seemed like a fairy tale, apart from the fact that there was still legally another queen in the picture—one who knew nothing of the fantasy playing out behind her back, disrupting the version of the fractured fairy tale she thought she was living out with Donald. The way Ivana saw it, the Trump Princess was an extension of her kingdom, as was Trump Castle in Atlantic City. She ruled them, owned them, ran them. Certainly to her they were not free zones wherein her husband could stash his southern mistress. So when Donald shoved a foot-tall stack of papers in front of her on Christmas Eve of that year, she had no idea that her husband was asking her to redo their prenuptial agreement because a photographer from Atlantic City was threatening to blackmail him with photos he’d snapped of him and Marla. She was preparing to host the whole family at their home in Greenwich. She had no lawyer there. How could she even think about it at a time like that? But Donald pressed and pressed, and so she relented. He’d later say the revised prenup would give her $25 million and the Connecticut mansion, though the number was closer to $10 million, with an additional $12 million should they sell the Greenwich house before they got divorced. She would also get custody of the three children. It would be years before the number came up anyway, because Donald was able to keep the whole thing quiet, until it wasn’t, atop a snowy mountaincap in Aspen on the eve of a new year.

  Marla Ann Maples spent much of the summer of 1989 working on her tan on one of the Trump Princess decks as Ivana worked in Atlantic City. Occasionally Donald would kick her off when he knew his wife was due to come aboard. He had the same crew catering to both women. As was the case in Atlantic City, too, and at the Plaza, and in the Trump Organization office in Trump Tower, where Donald’s assistants toggled between the boss’s first wife and his number-one mistress, who often assumed a fake name when she called to speak to her beau. She even joined a few members of Donald’s family, including his sister Maryanne and her son David, along with some other friends aboard a helicopter from Atlantic City back to New York. When David, unaware of Marla’s relationship with his uncle, struck up a conversation with the young blonde, Donald nearly yanked him away. “That’s not for you,” he told his nephew. Maryanne had to sit her son down and explain, “Well, that’s your uncle for you.”

  Donald did as much juggling and explaining to both blondes as anyone. Marla grasped the basic outline of the situation: Donald was unhappily married, but the Trumps’ tangled finances and the ceaseless attention that followed them, to say nothing of the three children, all under twelve, who would be impacted by any marital disturbance, made things complicated. It was Ivana who was blind to it all, consciously or otherwise. Sure, Donald would throw fits about her priorities and her social climbing, but he never told her just how miserable he was. In his book Surviving at the Top, he wrote that he put down the phone with his wife after what he describes of “years of deadlock.” She had just run through their plans for another night out in New York. Hanging up, he declared to no one in particular, “My life is shit!” Nor could Ivana know that his distaste for the state of his life was made more bitter by the knowledge that the sweet-as-pie Marla Ann’s tanned, uncomplicated twenty-six-year-old arms were open wide, waiting for him. “I have to confess, the way I handled the situation was a cop-out,” he wrote. “I never sat down calmly with Ivana to ‘talk it out,’ as I probably should have.”

  Unsurprisingly, other people did the talking for him. Ivana first heard whispers of the existence of a Marla in the weeks leading up to Christmas of 1989. Donald by that point wanted to offload the Trump Princess. Yachts cost a pretty penny, long after you pay the $30 million to buy them, and he needed the money. He asked Ivana to come with him to Tahiti, where they would show the boat off to possible Asian buyers. She heard murmurs about another younger woman on the trip, but brushed them off. When she got back to New York, the Post’s gossip-column stalwart Cindy Adams approached her at a party at the Waldorf Astoria. Adams asked if the rumors about Donald cheating were true. They weren’t, as far as Ivana knew.

  But everyone else, it seemed, knew better. Donald had been flying Marla to Aspen on his plane or his friends’ planes, and Aspen is a small town with a rumor mill always churning. People had seen Donald and Ivana together in town for years, and now they were talking about the new woman he had his buddies shuttling in. Word was that Gary Triano, a real estate developer and serious gambler from Tucson, flew Marla on his plane. (Later Gary and his wife, Pam Phillips, spent time with Donald and Marla, inviting them to a Wildcats game in Arizona, where the four of them were photographed. In 1996 Triano finished a round of golf at his club, got into his car, and was promptly blown into a million little pieces when a pipe bomb placed there by a hit man detonated. The blast was so powerful it sent debris flying some two hundred yards in the air. It took until 2014 to bring the case to trial, but Phillips was convicted of first-degree murder. She is currently serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Arizona.)

  Right after Christmas, it was Trump’s plane that picked Marla up in Tennessee and headed west to Colorado. He put her up in a three-story penthouse at the Brand Building, with views of the mountain at the base of which Donald and Ivana and the kids would be staying at the Little Nell for a reported $10,000 for the week. They all ran into each other on the ski lifts that week, though they kept enough distance, at least initially, for everyone to keep it together.

  The next part of the story is told a few different ways, depending on whom you ask. As Ivana tells it, she and her family were eating lunch at Bonnie’s, the place for anyone skiing in Aspen that week to stop for a midday meal on their way down the mountain. Out of nowhere, a blonde she had never seen or heard of before came right up to her as she, Don Jr, Ivanka, and Eric waited in line for food. “I’m Marla, and I love your husband,” Ivana remembers her saying.

  “Do you?” said Ivana, who then told Marla to “get lost,” and said that she loved her husband.

  The same basic facts appear in Marla’s version, though the details diverge. Ivana knew who she was by that point, Marla contends, and laid into Donald once she saw Marla at Bonnie’s, shouting loudly enough to raise the eyebrows of everyone who’d stopped in off the slopes. It was Ivana who charged up to her, Marla recalls, and started screaming at her, before returning to Donald and continuing to yell. “She couldn’t pronounce my name, but she was asking me if I was Moola or whatever,” she said in an interview not long after the fight. “And she just asked if I was the one who had been loving her husband for years.”

  The way locals and other vacationers retell it is a mixture of both versions, sometimes with the added detail that Ivana told her friend to approach Marla and “give her the message that I love my husband very much” before they directly confronted each other. Stories of this sort and magnitude are sponges. They expand, grow denser, weightier, and start to stink as time passes. They’re
retold until the witnesses are blue in the face.

  Those who witnessed the whole thing that day in Aspen may not be sure who started it, but they do remember what ended it. There was so much yelling that everyone at the restaurant was mortified on behalf of the children. “It was horrible,” one local Aspen woman who was there that day said. “The words were flying back and forth so fast, and I felt sorry for the kids. For the whole family, really, I felt so badly.” Don Jr. was on the last day of being eleven. Ivanka was eight, and Eric five. When they heard Marla shout, “It’s out! It’s finally out!” and Ivana bellow at her to stay away from her husband and her family and how happy her marriage was, they knew it was a story they’d have to commit to memory, because everyone would ask what happened that day for years to come.

  The fighting continued that night back at the Little Nell, where, again, it was hard for the kids to escape. They didn’t leave Aspen, as Ivana initially wanted to do. They kept up appearances, and the next night Don Jr. turned twelve, while his parents left the fact that his family was crumbling around him in a way they could never rebuild unaddressed.

  Back in New York, they continued to hold up with spit and phony smiles and quiet desperation. Ivana and Donald went on as normal. Each went back to work. They slept in the same bedroom. They continued to hide what was going on from the children. Marla, meanwhile, reentered the Trump-style witness protection she’d endured for years.

  The miracle was that all of those people at Bonnie’s, who could barely hold in the gossip as it was happening, were tight-lipped enough that the New York papers could not confirm the story for weeks. Ivana mostly disappeared for a few weeks, returning in time for an event in the Plaza’s ballroom looking almost unrecognizable—her face pulled tighter, her chest enhanced, transformed into a tragic blond Jessica Rabbit. No one, even at the event in her own hotel, among close friends, recognized her until she opened her mouth and that unmistakable accent flew out. If there was still anyone in her circle in New York not yet convinced about the tales of a catfight in Aspen between Ivana and Donald’s other woman, they fully believed once they caught a look at the work she had done. She looked different and, frankly, sensational enough that the rumors had to have been true.

  Donald sat for an interview with Playboy at the end of January, and the flimsy wall they’d built around themselves all but crumbled. When the interviewer asked, Donald answered that his marriage was “just fine” and praised Ivana for being a “very kind and good woman,” with “the instincts and drive of a good manager.” But as a wife, not a manager? “I never comment on romance. She’s a great mother, a good woman who does a good job.” But is marriage monogamous, to you? He dodged. “I don’t have an answer to that.”

  He went on to say that he never spoke about his wife, “which is one of the advantages of not being a politician. My marriage is and should be a personal thing.”

  It wasn’t so for long. Liz Smith from the New York Daily News, who had heard rumblings about what happened on the mountain in Aspen but couldn’t quite nail it, caught onto these quotes. Smith had socialized with the Trumps for years, jetting off with them to parties in cities across the country and sitting with them at dinner parties and luncheons. They weren’t friends, exactly. She was a gossip columnist teetering on the tightrope separating access journalism and conflict of interest. It was not out of character when she picked up the phone and dialed Donald. She asked outright if the rampant cheating rumors were true. If they were, she said—and by now, she knew they were—she would print them in a way that was sensitive to what was happening to his family. He did not deny the affair. He told her he would think about it and hung up.

  After that, Smith wrote Donald, warning him that it could turn out far worse for him if he didn’t let her write the story. It was Ivana who called Smith in early February. It was essential that they meet, Ivana said, privately and quickly, and she gave her the number of a suite in the Plaza and asked her to wait there. “She threw herself, sobbing, into my arms,” Smith wrote of that meeting, years later. Ivana admitted that Donald was having an affair, that he no longer loved her, and that he couldn’t be attracted to anyone who had a child. Not even the work she had done did it for him. “Mostly,” she wrote of Ivana, “she wept.” Ivana’s other friends at the time remember how hard she tried to keep it together for her children, but every time they saw her, as one close confidant at the time recalled, “Ivana was on the floor, completely devastated. How much of a help could she really be to the children?”

  Donald was in Japan at the time, due to fly home on Sunday, February 11. That morning the story ran on the front page of the News, with “Love on the Rocks” scrawled across it in big black type. “Ivana Trump Is Devastated ‘That Donald Was Betraying Her,’” the headline ran. At the top of the page was a black block in which the paper declared it “Trump: The War.” Smith started off her column saying that Ivana still loves Donald and still wants to be his wife. “But the bottom line is—she won’t give up her self-respect to do it. That’s why, despite the glitz, the parties, the riches, and the preeminence of being one half of the Trumps of New York City, Ivana drew the line.”

  She continued: “Intimates say she had every chance to continue being Mrs. Trump by allowing her husband to live in an open marriage so that he could see other women. But she had no idea, friends say, that he was seeing any woman at all, this has come as a terrible shock to her.”

  Donald called Smith from his plane that day, as he flew back to the firestorm awaiting him in New York—though not even Donald, the media genius he and millions of others claim him to be, could have predicted the five-alarm that had only just begun its blaze. He congratulated Smith on the scoop, and gave her a statement of his own. “It is better for Ivana and me to separate at this time,” it read. “I am leaving because I want to leave. Ivana is a wonderful woman and a very good woman and I like her. We might even get back together. I can’t say we won’t. Who knows what could happen?” He denied that his involvement with any other woman was anything but strictly platonic. “Just friends and that’s as far as it goes.”

  Donald and Ivana met for an hour at the Plaza the following day, where Ivana told him she wanted the hotel as part of her settlement. Both sides lawyered up. Donald insisted that the last iteration of their prenup was iron-clad. Her lawyers would argue that it was void, with Marla already in the picture. The Post reported that Ivana threatened another suit after she was locked out of her office at the Plaza and his PR folks trashed the work she did for the Trump Organization.

  There was a Ping-Pong match in the New York tabloids—one delicious nugget printed across the Post one day, an even more salacious headline in the Daily News the next. It was the 1990s version of yellow journalism—gold-plated journalism, perhaps—and sales at newsstands went through the roof. “They Met at Church!” one headline read. “Separate Beds,” another.

  As unrelatable a figure as Ivana had become in her years as Mrs. Trump, it was hard not to sympathize with her humiliation, especially as photographs of Marla started to surface. The coverage, at least from the Daily News, started to bend in that direction. “Ivana is now a media goddess on par with Princess Di, Madonna and Elizabeth Taylor,” Smith wrote in one of her columns. Smith was by her side as she exited a birthday lunch Ivana’s friends threw her on Valentine’s Day at La Grenouille, right off Fifth Avenue in Midtown. All of the ladies who were invited, including Donald’s mother, Mary, and his sister-in-law, Blaine, brought heart-shaped gifts for the guest of honor (both Trump women toasted Ivana, who vacillated between laughter and tears in her red dress). As the emotion swelled inside the restaurant, so did the crowd outside. Police cleared cars off the street and held streams of people back as the women left the luncheon arm in arm, cameras flashing in Ivana’s face. “Don’t forget to smile like Jackie Onassis!” one friend shouted to Ivana as she headed out into the mayhem. She could hardly hear it over the crowd around her cheering her name and yelling “Get the money!” Days l
ater, the Post ran its “Best Sex I Ever Had” headline—a quote it attributed to Marla speaking about Donald, though she denied saying anything of the sort. As Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric made their way to school that morning, the paparazzi who’d started trailing them to get photos held up the paper and asked the children their opinions on the headline. Inside school, some of their classmates reminded them of those words on the front page throughout the rest of the day.

  Don Jr. immediately blamed his father. “How can you say you love us?” friends of the family told Vanity Fair the twelve-year-old bellowed at Donald. “You don’t love us! You don’t even love yourself. You just love your money.” Donald swore he would stop seeing Marla, but when photos surfaced of the couple at an Elton John concert, Don Jr. burst into tears. Ivana told Liz Smith that all of her kids were suffering. “The children are all wrecks. Ivanka now comes home from school crying, ‘Mommy, does it mean I’m not going to be Ivanka Trump anymore?’” As for her six-year-old? “Little Eric asks me, ‘Is it true you are going away and not coming back?’” Mary Trump wrung her hands to Ivana: “What kind of son have I created?”

  One longtime friend of Donald explained that it wasn’t his children’s suffering that got to him. He didn’t once put up a fight for custody, or actually stop seeing Marla to ease their pain. What got to him, at his core, was that the press had turned so starkly in Ivana’s favor. Far worse than taking his children, she was going after his money. The combination was lethal. His animating principles were then, as they are now, being well liked and accepted, or at least respected, and at the very least thought of as very, very rich. The feuding with Ivana, the lawsuit she filed, and the unyielding coverage of both made him crack. Donald raged to anyone who would listen—and even those who had no interest—that it was bullshit. It was unfair. And it needed to stop.