“Why don’t we walk down Fifth Avenue together for the photographers and pretend that this entire scandal has been a publicity stunt?” he asked Ivana over the phone, a few weeks into the whole public mess. “We could say that we wanted to see who would side with you and who would side with me.”
She never agreed. Instead, she started digging deeper into his soft spots. She charged thousands of dollars for a set of Pratesi sheets to his card—a necessary expenditure for an eight-year-old Ivanka, she explained. “‘Why does a seven-year-old need $7,000 worth of sheets?” he blew up at a lawyer. She had her lawyers push forward on a lawsuit contending that their marital contract was void, asking for what friends at the time recalled was somewhere close to $1 billion. “She wants a billion, but we just don’t have it,” Marla later told Vanity Fair.
She was not wrong about that. At that point in time, Donald was leveraged to within an inch of his life. He had millions upon millions worth of personal debt guarantees, on the Taj Mahal, on the Plaza, on the Greenwich mansion, and on Mar-a-Lago and the Trump Princess and the Trump Shuttle, along with personal guarantees to Bear Stearns for his positions on American Airlines and Alexander’s. The Wall Street Journal reported that the total amount he personally guaranteed could exceed $600 million. Thus, in the year of his very public separation, Trump suffered what could have been, to him, an equally gutting blow: Forbes slashed his estimated net worth to $500 million, down from $1.7 billion a year earlier. The estimate knocked him out of the so-called three comma club, perhaps the only club he ever cared about being part of.
While all of New York tuned its eyes on the former golden couple, the blond mistress who’d exposed the cracks between them had all but vanished. There was little else for her to do. Ivana’d had years to get used to the spotlight, though the glare had never been as blinding and harsh and constant as it was in the winter of 1990. She’d courted the press and befriended reporters and columnists as part of her planned ascent into the circles in which she wanted to run and gossip pages on which she wanted to appear. She cultivated a close-knit group of friends who also understood what that glare could feel like and how to manipulate it to show one’s best angles. It helped that she had two nannies who could take her children to school, security and drivers to shield her when she went out, restaurant hosts as friends who’d welcome her despite the hoopla, and—if all those things fell away—a triplex on Fifth and a hotel on Central Park in which to console herself, and three children who needed her there. It is true that she’d never thought she would turn up in the press the way she did after news of her divorce broke. She was dejected, degraded, and in pieces. But she had the blueprint of a system for how to keep things as together as she could, a skin toughened by years in the tabloids, and a stubborn, competitive streak not unlike Donald’s that made her not want to shrink away and hide.
Marla had no such conditioning at the time when her image was splashed for weeks on end across the pages of People magazine and every paper in New York. She’d made some waves in Dalton, in the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She was a star volleyball player at Northwest Whitfield High, and she had been elected homecoming queen in her senior year. She dropped out of the University of Georgia after a few years, making her way to Atlanta to pursue modeling. In the meantime, she competed to win Miss Resaca Beach, a local carpet-industry beauty contest in which the winner could take home $2,000 and the chance to host carpet shows for $150 a day. She came in fourth runner-up at Miss Teen Georgia, but snagged the title of Most Photogenic anyway. In 1985, at the age of twenty-one, she entered the Miss Hawaiian Tropic International pageant in Daytona Beach, Florida. Filling out the contest’s entry form in a hurry, like the other blondes with bikinis in their luggage and checking accounts counting on a win, Marla scrawled in what she saw as her “long-term goal” for the judges. “I hope to become successful as a screen actress some day and do Broadway,” she wrote in her bubbly script. She won the pageant that day, posing with her official sash over her teeny iridescent blue string bikini and white kitten heels, the Farrah Fawcett hair she perfected blowing in the breeze coming off the ocean behind her.
That year Marla made it to New York, landed on a Delta Airlines billboard in another bikini, made a onetime appearance in an episode of Dallas, and scored a split-second role in the Stephen King flick Maximum Overdrive, in which she was crushed to death when a truck carrying watermelons dumped its cargo on a car she was driving. She’d had no time to develop the thick skin and the support system Ivana had built up over the years as Mrs. Trump before her name and face were everywhere as Mistress Trump. “Trump Mistress Close to Suicide,” one headline said. Others promised details of their secret hotel “romps” and rendezvous behind Ivana’s back.
Donald shuttled her off to Southampton when the news first broke. His buddy Larry Russo’s beach house out there was empty, so she hid out inside the mansion of a man she’d never met (later, once she had met him, and could look back on the whole period as something of a frenetic blip, she joked to friends that he’d renamed the home “Marla Lago”). Once photographers and reporters figured out her whereabouts, she made it down to the Jersey shore, bunking at another one of Donald’s friend’s houses outside Atlantic City. For two months she lived like a method actor preparing for a role, though this was not some part she would play onscreen. It was her real life, whether she was ready to fully grapple with that or not. She donned a red wig and a straw hat when she went out, though Donald hired a bodyguard to protect her, and she used service elevators and entered buildings through dark garages so no one could see her, anyway. She used her friends’ names when calling Donald—a system his assistants accepted with eye rolls.
It was the part of a lifetime for a budding actress, and she gave it her everything. But it wasn’t all the coquettish games and self-inflicted wounds that found-out mistresses of powerful men sometimes have to endure. There was real pain in realizing that her newfound celebrity meant finding out how much she was worth to the people she once trusted. Her old boyfriend sold his story to the National Enquirer for what she thought was $11,000. Dogged paparazzi started following her family around their small town. High school friends and neighbors blabbed about her to any reporter who would ask—and many did. Marla lost ten pounds from the stress before she flew away from it all, staying for nearly a month with a friend in Guatemala City who had served in the Peace Corps. Finally, she felt at ease. No one knocked on her door. Camera crews weren’t peeking through the windows. But her absence didn’t help the story die down; perhaps it even prolonged it. By the end of March, Donald told her it was time to come back and face it head-on.
From there, the full-blown public relations romance offense took off like a rocket. They made their first outing together as a couple in Atlantic City—what was once Ivana’s domain—at the grand opening of Donald’s new Trump Taj Mahal at the beginning of April. By mid-month, Marla agreed to sit down with Diane Sawyer in what would be the highest-rated installment of Prime Time Live in its history on ABC News at the time. They taped the interview in the home in which she hid out in Atlantic City before their coming out, Marla in a peach suit, her curls brushed out into a blond 1990s halo, a gold band around her left ring finger—an intentionally far cry from the oiled-up string bikini photos the press had been printing of her in the weeks and months leading up to the sit-down. “I didn’t want to bring any more havoc into my friends’ lives,” she explained of her weeks in isolation. “I knew I had to get away. I knew I needed to turn off the television, not read newspapers, just not be affected by words. I needed to get back to what’s real.” She had turned down million-dollar offers to sell her story because she felt she had to “keep a bit of dignity,” and the story really had to do with other people’s problems. “I don’t think I would be able to face myself. This isn’t the publicity I want. This isn’t the way I envisioned my life to be.”
As for those “problems,” she insisted they had nothing to do with her. “Peopl
e just grow apart,” she said of Donald and Ivana. “I believe that that’s a very sad and very serious thing between two people, and I would’ve only hoped that it could have stayed more private. Everything happened so fast that I wanted to be very careful about the decisions I made.”
As for those careful decisions, including the one to make it even less private by talking to Sawyer, she told the anchor that it was Donald who insisted that she do the interview, because “he hated the fact that I felt like I had to be in hiding. I mean, he has a lot of sympathy for how we’ve been besieged by all of this and I think he wants to see me come out looking okay. He’s very sorry.” She, too, wanted to stick up for herself and her family. “My family has been so besieged by the press, and I feel like it’s time that I step out and I take the heat for a bit for what they’ve had to go through.” She expressed sympathy for Ivana, whom she called an “absolutely beautiful woman.”
“I feel like she’s gone through a lot of pain,” she said of Ivana. “You know, I, I can’t lie about it.” She blushed. “Oh, I do. I do love him.” Would they marry? “I’m taking my life day by day,” she demurred. “I mean, who knows what life is going to bring in the future.”
Marla was reluctant to answer specifics about her relationship with Donald, like how they met and the extent of their affair, which she downplayed anyway. “I don’t feel like at this time it’s appropriate for me to say,” she said, citing “pending litigations” between Donald and Ivana, in which she might be called to testify.
Donald did not give any more answers about Marla in an interview he did with Larry King on CNN that week, calling the press “very dishonest” and saying that much of what was printed about his relationship with Marla was lies and made-up stories. As for the attention those stories have gotten, he didn’t shy away from that. He recalled that the news of his matrimonial distress broke on the same day that Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Mandela, he said, “is probably calling up, ‘Who is this guy? He blew me off the front page.’”
Marla followed her debut by accepting an invitation from Time to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington. She was red meat to a drooling Washington press corps hungry for a piece of a juicy story that, until that spring evening, they had been entirely left out of. More than two hundred people crammed into the Time prereception at the Washington Hilton, an affair where most people typically look around the room midconversation in search of someone better they should be talking to. That night, everyone’s eyes were on the doors, waiting for Marla to walk through. Once she did, she was mobbed. Ed McNally, the White House speechwriter responsible for President George Bush’s monologue for the event, asked partygoers to introduce him. Saturday Night Live comedian Dennis Miller, the headlining entertainer at the annual dinner, brought Marla up in his remarks in front of the 2,500 people sitting in the ballroom. He cracked a joke about Donald before looking out in the audience toward his girlfriend, saying, “Kidding, Marla. Kidding. I love him too.” The crowd erupted as he alluded to her recently aired interview on ABC: “I think she should have asked Diane Sawyer if Mike Nichols was the best sex she’s ever had.”
There is little question why Time wanted Marla as its guest. The better question was why Marla wanted to go in the first place. She had never had to face a live line of press before. Besides, the evening is dry and dull even for people whose whole social calendar revolves around it and never get to dress in black tie or see a comedian and a sitting president poke fun at themselves and people in the room. “It’s a very elegant affair,” she explained to reporters. “I felt like this would be a chance for me to meet people more one-on-one and express who I am. The president is here. Mrs. Bush. What better environment than this?”
Mrs. Bush, it turns out, was equally as fascinated by Marla. The next morning, she chatted with reporters after attending Sunday worship services with the president at St. John’s Episcopal Church across the street from the White House, admitting that she was disappointed not to have seen Marla at the correspondents’ dinner. Stuck at the head table with her husband and heads of the White House Correspondent’s associations, she never got a chance to “catch a look” at the tabloid curiosity, as she had hoped, she joked.
Donald tried to continue the spectacle once he saw that Marla had turned into a budding media darling. He negotiated a deal with Playboy, reportedly in the seven figures, but Marla blew it up. She wouldn’t pose nude, and with that off the table, Playboy was little interested. Marla had been in itty-bitty bikinis in every other glossy and paper; they weren’t going to pay that kind of top dollar for the goods everyone had already gotten for free.
By the end of summer, Marla had started handing some things out gratis. Even with Madonna sitting in the Trump Organization box at the US Open in Queens, Marla was still far and away the story, at least for the New York press, and she was far too busy to much notice. While the pop star took in the match from the seats outside, Marla sat inside signing eight-by-ten photos of herself in a hard hat and cutoff shorts for the hordes of photographers and kids who had lined up asking for pictures and autographs.
Between weekends at Mar-a-Lago and in Martha’s Vineyard and Atlantic City, Marla managed to meet the Trump family. The way she saw it, things went swimmingly. “It was just like going over to my grandparents’—very solid, very relaxed,” she told Vanity Fair in her interview that fall. The Trumps saw it somewhat differently. Maryanne, Donald’s sister, and Blaine, his sister-in-law, supported Ivana through the spectacle of the breakup and the subsequent divorce proceedings, frequently and openly criticizing Marla. “The Clampetts” became the nickname for the Maples family among the Trumps, in reference to the fish-out-of-water family from The Beverly Hillbillies. The Maples had gripes of their own. Publicly, they were all smiles and support and fronts united. To close friends, though, they noted that of course Donald was a narcissist, and the Marla charade was just a symptom of that disease. They made their feelings known to Donald’s associates at the time, through not-so-subtle snide comments here and there. “Can you remind your friend to visit his mother?” they would repeat in the jokey, passive-aggressive tone all family members use when they are actually dead serious. In his lucid moments, Fred Trump, Donald’s father, who was suffering from dementia, weighed in, saying that he ought to stay with the mother of his children.
The Maples were initially bewitched by the spoils and flash Donald offered their daughter, but once the initial love haze wore off and the reality of the disruption of their quiet little life in Georgia by a brash big-city bigwig more than fifteen years their daughter’s senior set in, their tunes changed.
As tepid as the rest of the Trumps were toward Marla, Donald’s children were, understandably, far colder, both toward their father’s girlfriend and their father himself. That Ivana would retain custody of their three kids in the event of their divorce was the one piece of the prenuptial agreement Ivana had signed under great pressure from Donald on that Christmas eve years earlier that neither Donald nor Ivana contested. After their tense meeting at the Plaza, after Smith’s scoop about their split in the Daily News, after Donald moved tens of stories down from Trump Tower triplex to another apartment within the same building, Ivana sat the kids down one by one to tell them what was going to happen, though she herself did not yet know how it would all play out. To Eric, she told the least. He was still so young, and really only needed to hear that he was very much loved and that his life would change very little. And mostly, that was true. Unlike most children when their parents separate, his mom and dad would continue to live under the same roof within the same building, albeit on different floors. But the Trump kids already slept on a separate floor from their parents within the triplex. Both of their parents already went out most nights, so it was not as though their evening activities would change dramatically, either. Both parents had been working so much and so separately that it was not as if they’d see them less, either. They would still go see their father before a
nd after school in his office, as they had before the marriage fell apart. As far as divorces went, the Trumps was perhaps among the most publicly dissected and salacious. But they had not been present parents to begin with, and their lives would still mostly operate within Trump Tower, as they always had. In terms of day-to-day changes, the split was relatively easy for the kids to digest.
The emotional side—their father leaving their mother for a younger woman, and the confrontation playing out in front of their eyes in Aspen and then relived in gross detail for months in the paper—was a different story, particularly for the two older children. Some of Ivanka’s friends had parents who were divorced, so she understood the concept, though she still asked if there was a chance her parents would get back together. It took her quite some time to let go of the idea. A decade after the split, in an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Ivanka was still saying that she would not totally be shocked if her parents somehow found their way back to each other. “I know probably every child of divorced parents hopes that they’ll get back together, but I’m old enough to have outgrown that whole thing,” she said in 2000. “I do think that in lots of ways they were ideally suited. Perhaps it was because they were just too similar and both so stubborn that they had too many clashes, but I reckon if they did get remarried within the next 10 or 15 years, the chances are it would work this time around, because they know everything about each other—the best and the worst.”
At the time of the divorce, at the age of eight, Ivanka clung to her father even more. She’s admitted that she sees any other woman in her father’s life as competition, and the fear that he might replace her or not always be around for her led her to visit him more in his office, call him more when she was at school. “I got angry with him,” she told the Daily Mail in 2006, but she did not turn her back on her father—not necessarily because she forgave him or felt as though he deserved her attention, but because she couldn’t help herself. “I’m such a loudmouth that giving him the silent treatment would only seem to be punishing me, rather than him,” she said.
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