Dish

by Jeannette Walls

  Trump had expected his divorce to be big news, but not quite this big. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he declared. “Nelson Mandela’s probably calling up ‘Who is this guy? He blew me off the front page.’ … It’s been great for business. Business is hotter than ever.” The Post headlines were making him out to be a superstud: Don Juan, they called him. Another declared that Donald gave Maria “The Best Sex I Ever Had.” Ivana, according to the Post, was greedy. “Gimme the Plaza,” one headline blared. They dug up a story on her first marriage and an old picture of her with brunette hair and ran the headline: “Ivana’s Past as Dark as Her Natural Hair Color.” But some of Donald’s cronies didn’t have his skill in dealing with the press. Trump’s lawyer bragged to Cindy Adams: “I’m a killer. I can rip skin off a body…. I can cause pain. [I once made an opponent] collapse on the witness stand.” He was playing it too hard.

  Ivana’s side seized the opportunity to play the victim. “Mrs. Trump emigrated to America from a repressive police state where violence was commonplace,” said John Scanlon, Ivana’s P.R. guy. “She did not expect that she and her children would ever be threatened again, particularly by her husband’s lawyer.”

  The whole episode was beginning to turn into a public relations disaster for Trump. Liz Smith was a very effective advocate for Ivana. The press and the public, which had always seemed to adore him, began turning on him. According to a Daily News poll, 82 percent of the readers sided with Ivana. John Cardinal O’Connor consoled and counseled Ivana for forty-five minutes. Trump didn’t want to be seen in public with Maria, so Garry Trudeau made fun of his “Bimbo Limbo.” Trump began blasting the coverage as a “media circus.” Cindy, who took to calling him “P. T. Barnum Trump,” didn’t always help his case. “Well, he just has too much juice or too many chromosomes, whatever it is God gave him,” Cindy declared in Trump’s defense. “He’s got lots of aggression and he’s just not going to lose. He has not made a great many friends on the way up but it’s because that’s the way he is. He’s a killer and he knows it.”

  Trump demanded that Liz Smith be fired: “Liz Smith is being used, she was played like a fiddle.” He accused Liz of making up quotes and writing “whatever comes into her head.” He declared, “Liz Smith used to kiss my ass so much it was embarrassing.” She had, he said, “disgraced the industry.” There were rumors he might buy the Daily News and fire her.

  Then he played his Trump card. Maria Maples, the Georgia Peach who hadn’t spoken a word publicly, was going to be unveiled at the April 5 grand opening of the Taj Mahal—Trump’s massive Atlantic City casino gamble. On March 1, Trump gave Cindy Adams the scoop. When Adams asked Donald whether he was unveiling Maples as a “devoted lover” or “savvy businessman” he replied, “Use your imagination.”

  Liz Smith was outraged. “It’s just about the most tasteless thing I could imagine,” she said. “It is the absolute nadir, after all his denials [that they were involved] and his saying he’s worried about his children and his wife is a nice woman and blaming the press. It would just be the ultimate exploitation of this girl.”

  “So what if it’s tacky?” Cindy shot back. “Calm yourself. We’re talking about crap tables and slot machines, baby. We’re talking about the quintessential hype. The Garden State Parkway will be a parking lot from New York to Atlantic City that day. This is a guy who is very savvy, and he will turn a negative stream of publicity into a positive one. He had her lying—laying—low for a purpose.”

  “That’s like using her as a dishrag to wipe up some mess,” said Liz. “I think he’s finished in New York if he does something like this. I can’t see really nice people wanting anything to do with someone who does something like that.”

  In mid-March, Maria got uninvited.

  By late March, stories started appearing in Cindy Adams’s column distancing Donald from Maria. Cindy assured her readers that Trump had no intention of marrying Maria. She began referring to Maria as “the future Miss Maples.” The Post ran a story that Trump had dumped Maria, and that she “sobbed uncontrollably” during the “it’s been real” phone conversation and “begged him not to leave her.” Maria’s spokesman Chuck Jones* angrily denied the reports and accused the media of sloppy and irresponsible reporting. If there was any mystery about who was behind the leaks, it was solved during a peculiar interview that Donald Trump gave People magazine reporter Sue Carswell.

  When Carswell called Trump’s office to ask about the reported split with Maples, Trump wasn’t sure he could trust her. He’d barely spoken with her and didn’t have the relationship with her that he had with so many other reporters in town. Trump returned Carswell’s call and said that his name was John Miller. “I’m sort of new here,” Miller said. “I’m handling P.R. because Trump gets so much of it.” He confirmed the sordid details of the split with Maria, and said it had never been that serious between them. “He’s somebody who has a lot of options and frankly he gets called by everybody—everybody in the book in terms of women…. A lot of the people that you write about—and you do a great job by the way—but a lot of those people you write about, they call to see if they can go out with him,” this “John Miller” told Carswell.

  Donald Trump had a new woman in his life, he said, “Her name is Carla Bruni Fredesh. I don’t know how to spell the last name…. She was having a very big thing with Eric Clapton and Eric Clapton introduced her to Mick Jagger and Mick Jagger started calling her and she ended up going with Mick Jagger and then she dropped Mick Jagger for Donald and that’s where it is right now, and again, he’s not making any commitments to Carla just so you understand.” Madonna had called wanting to go out, too. Kim Basinger was also after Trump, said Miller. “She wanted to come up and discuss a real estate transaction. And you know, she wanted to go out with him. That was the reason she came up. Competitively, it’s tough. It was for Maria and it will be for Carla.” But, said Miller, Donald Trump wasn’t in the marrying mode right now. “When he makes the decision, then that will be a very lucky woman.”

  Trump didn’t know that Carswell had taped the twenty-minute conversation. When she played the tape for some other People reporters, they burst out laughing. “That’s Donald Trump,” one said. He had talked to Trump often enough to recognize his voice. Carswell didn’t know whether to believe it. She played the tape for Ivana. That’s him, Ivana confirmed. Maria Maples also recognized the voice, and was devastated. Trump was horrified. Trump the trickster, Trump the great media manipulator had been caught. The curtain had been thrown back to reveal the Great Wizard of Trump at the controls. The jig was up.

  Over at Forbes magazine, the editors were eager to get an angle on the hot Trump story. A former cop named John Connolly was trying to pitch an article on casino operator Merv Griffin. Executive Editor Jim Michaels wasn’t interested in Griffin. After years of running the magazine, Michaels was being eased out. He needed to make a big splash to keep his job. Years earlier, he had made headlines by running an exposé on the finances of William Zeckendorf, the high-flying real estate developer who was the Donald Trump of the 1960s. “I don’t want Merv Griffin,” Michaels told Connolly. “Get me Donald Trump. I want Donald Trump.” Trump claimed that Malcolm Forbes was out to get him because he had kicked Forbes and some underage male friends out of the Plaza. The magazine hit the newsstands in May 1990, saying that the tycoon was worth considerably less than he claimed—Trump put his wealth at $5 billion; Forbes said $500 million would be a “generous” estimate. The spooked creditors came knocking, and that summer, Trump filed for bankruptcy.

  Cindy Adams said the bad publicity over Trump’s messy split directly led to his financial problems. “You cannot urinate on a long-term marriage and not have the white glare of spotlight publicity come down on you,” she said. “And the bankers are a very conservative lot.”

  Says another Trump defender: “It was because he was so high flying that he became such a target.”

  Jim Michaels kept his job.

 
Ivana prospered. She got $25 million in the divorce settlement—what the pre-nup had called for—but, more important, she won over public favor. Ivana came out with her own line of clothing, a fragrance called Ivana, a newspaper advice column for the lovelorn, a line of jewelry that she hawked on television, and a novel about an immigrant socialite who bounced back after being cheated on by her tycoon husband. She denied that it was based on her life. She also denied that a wicked, smart-mouthed gossip columnist named Sabrina who sided with the husband was modeled after Cindy.

  Liz Smith also prospered. On February 1, 1991, a year after the Trump story broke and while bankruptcy was looming over the Daily News, Liz Smith was snatched away by Newsday, at a salary that was reported to be as high as $1 million a year. The deal solidified her position as the highest paid print journalist in the country and, perhaps, the most powerful.

  Donald Trump knew that. In June 1991, Liz Smith got a letter from her former foe, Donald Trump. “Liz, you crucified me for a whole year,” Trump wrote. “But you’re terrific.”

  * Liz suspected that Bernstein was still smarting over her coverage of his split from Nora Ephron. “He uses me in lectures as the great devil of American journalism,” says Liz. “He came up to me at a party one night and threw himself in my arms and cried and said how much I’d hurt him. He blamed me for the divorce.”

  * The shoe fetishist who would later admit to stealing and having “an intimate relationship” with Maria’s pumps.

  15

  the rise of tabloid television

  “How can you do this to me, Jessica?” Steve Dunleavy shouted through the door. It was April 27, 1987, and Dunleavy, the senior correspondent for Rupert Murdoch’s television program, A Current Affair, was standing outside the Massapequa, Long Island, apartment of Jessica Hahn, the curvaceous, big-haired former secretary who earlier that month had revealed that she had had an affair with the televangelist Reverend Jim Bakker. Dunleavy had been trying for weeks to get an interview with Hahn; he had offered her money, he said he would make her famous. He and Peter Brennan, one of the show’s producers, had even stood under the window of her apartment serenading her at 4 A.M. But Hahn had so far resisted his importunities, and earlier that evening, while Current Affair’s host Maury Povich was watching the ABC Evening News at a bar with Dunleavy, he saw Ted Koppel appear in a teaser and announce, “Tonight, our guest will be Jessica Hahn, in her first interview since the scandal broke.”

  “I yelled out to Dunleavy, who had been promising he would get the first interview with Jessica,” said Povich.

  Dunleavy rushed off to the secretary’s apartment. Through the door, Hahn made apologies. The Nightline appearance, she explained, had been set up by the agent she had just been forced to hire. The agent thought Hahn needed to establish her credibility and that the best way to do this would be through one of the serious network news shows. Dunleavy was undeterred. As he stood out on the middle-class Long Island street contemplating his next move, the limousine that ABC had hired to drive Hahn to its New York studio arrived. And that was when Dunleavy, who is nothing if not resourceful, realized what he had to do. Identifying himself as a friend of Hahn’s, he told the driver that the young woman had become sick and needed to go to the hospital. The limousine driver accepted this story, turned around and drove back to New York without his designated passenger. Dunleavy, meanwhile, summoned an ambulance and escorted Hahn out to the vehicle when it arrived. Meanwhile, at home in his New York apartment, Maury Povich turned on Nightline. “First, a schedule change,” Koppel said when the show began. “Earlier this evening, Jessica Hahn, who was going to join us later in the program, went briefly to a hospital. She was seen by a doctor, treated, and is now back at home. I spoke to her a short time ago, and she’ll be joining us another time.”

  But before that could happen, she gave her first exclusive, a few days later, to Steve Dunleavy.

  Dunleavy, whom Time magazine once called “America’s most renowned and reviled tabloid journalist,” had been a central figure in the tabloidization of the American media since the mid-seventies. A native Australian who grew up in Sydney, Dunleavy was the head of a youth gang called the Blackhawks. When he was fourteen, Dunleavy quit school to work as a copyboy at the Sydney Sun. His father, a well-known news photographer, also worked at the Sun. “He taught me a few tricks in skullduggery,” Dunleavy said. To escape charges of nepotism, Dunleavy went to work for the rival Daily Mirror at the age of fifteen. This put him into direct competition with his father, and according to one story, he slashed the tires of his father’s car in order to beat him to a story. “I did not know at the time it was my father,” he once said. “But after I did slash his tires, I snickered and he looked blankly at me and said, ‘Son, wonderful. Dirty and wonderful.’ ”

  In the sixties, Dunleavy worked for several Asian newspapers, including the South China Morning Post, and then in the seventies he caught the attention of Rupert Murdoch. The publisher—then in the initial stages of what came to be known as his “Australian invasion” of the American media market that would ultimately lead to a dominant presence in the newspaper, book, magazine, television, and movie industries—was launching the Star, his four-color tabloid, to compete with the National Enquirer. Impressed with Dunleavy’s tenacity, his working-class sensibility, his energy, and his lack of scruples, Murdoch hired him as the Star’s chief reporter.

  “If you wanted a miracle cancer cure, a flying saucer, a Hollywood scandal or a rip-off of an upcoming book in the guise of a ‘review,’ Dunleavy was your man,” recalled Jim Brady, who was the paper’s editor. “He wrote fast, he wrote, if necessary, all night. He knew policemen and shysters and charlatans and never took ‘No Comment’ for an answer.” Dunleavy did more than just break news. “One of his great achievements was a ‘hooray for America’ column decorated with his picture and, I believe, several American flags,” Brady continued. “The fact that Steve was an alien had nothing to do with it. He lashed out every week at the commies and pinkos and wimps and perverts he knew were scheming to take over.”

  Dunleavy was a slender, stooped man with a roguish Outback accent. He had an exaggerated pompadour haircut and chainsmoked Parliaments. In New York he became as notorious for his drinking and brawling—”going to the knuckles,” as he called it—as for his right-wing politics and tabloid antics. He was never a graceful writer; in fact, when the journalist Pete Hamill learned that Dunleavy’s foot had been run over by a car, he joked, “I hope it’s his writing foot.” Nonetheless, Dunleavy could concoct eye-catching headlines. He became a favorite of Murdoch—who had deeply involved himself in the Star, personally approving page layouts and rewriting stories—and when the Australian tycoon bought the New York Post from Dorothy Schiff in 1976—promoting “Aussie Takes Gotham” cover stories in both Time and News-week—he appointed Dunleavy city editor. Dunleavy presided over the Post, where circulation had fallen below 500,000 and annual losses exceeded $50 million, during its fierce battle for New York tabloid supremacy with the Daily News. He was the man responsible for notorious Post headlines such as the legendary “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR” and for the fevered coverage of the 1977 blackout, “24 HOURS OF TERROR.”

  But the story that put Dunleavy on the map was the Son of Sam serial murder case. Since July 1976, when eighteen-year-old Donna Laurie was killed with a .44 pistol while sitting in a car outside her family home in the Bronx, the city had been stalked by a homicidal maniac named David Berkowitz. The police, however, did not know his identity and referred to him as the Son of Sam. “There’s only one game in town and that’s Son of Sam,” Murdoch told his staff, which began pursuing the story relentlessly. In the summer of 1977, after two more people had been murdered, the Daily News’s star columnist Jimmy Breslin began addressing columns to the Son of Sam, who read the columns and wrote replies, which the News duly published. On July 31, when another woman was murdered, the Post ran the headline “NO ONE IS SAFE FROM SON OF SAM.” Dunleavy, imitating Br
eslin, began to publish personal appeals to the killer to surrender to Dunleavy himself. These tactics, however egregious, doubled the Post’s circulation to 1 million. Some of its most controversial ploys occurred after Berkowitz was finally arrested. A Post photographer snuck into the jail and took a picture of the suspect as he slept in his cell. Another Post photographer, together with a Daily News photographer, was arrested for trespass after breaking into Berkowitz’s Yonkers apartment. The Post published the photographs under the headline, “INSIDE THE KILLER’S LAIR.” The Post also obtained letters, reportedly by paying for them, that Berkowitz had written to a former girlfriend and published them under the headline “HOW I BECAME A MASS KILLER BY DAVID BERKOWITZ,” a headline that prompted criticism in the New York Times and the New Yorker and that Murdoch later apologized for, admitting that it was “inaccurate and wrong.”

  To many journalists, the entry of the once-liberal and literate New York Post into the tabloid war came to epitomize the alarming debasement of their profession. Two years after the Son of Sam media frenzy, Osborn Elliot, the former editor of Newsweek who at the time was dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, wrote an article in the Columbia Journalism Review viciously critical of Murdoch’s values. “It is no longer enough to judge the paper solely by journalistic standards,” Elliot wrote. “Here we enter a moral universe in which judgments are of a different order altogether, suggesting, as they do, that the matter ought not to be allowed to rest after the press critics have pronounced their anathemas. For the New York Post is no longer merely a journalistic problem. It is a social problem—a force for evil.”