Born Trump

by Emily Jane Fox

  None of that mattered much to the Kushners. They owned the building in which Fieri opened his restaurant and, technically, the wall on which he painted his famed “Welcome 2 Flavor Town!” slogan, which meant they got the space for their party on the cheap. They could not purport to have hosted it there because they wanted to dip a toe into “flavor town,” even ironically. The restaurant’s menu stacked itself with items like mac ’n’ cheese in a three-cheese sauce with bacon crumbles, cornmeal-crusted shrimp po’boys slathered in Creole mayonnaise, and slow-cooked pork shank dunked in sweet and spicy General Tso’s sauce—a selection of delicacies so flagrantly in violation of every law of kashruth that a rabbi examining the menu might think it a parody. The Kushners, of course, are Orthodox Jews. They don’t eat pork or bacon or shrimp, and they certainly do not mix any of those meats with milk, even within the same meal, let alone in one single dish. To get around that, Kushners brought in their own kosher caterer to handle the food for the party.

  A little more than a year later, the restaurant closed its doors; revenues were not enough to keep up with the rent Kushner Companies charged. “From what I understand, it wasn’t the right concept for the space in the long run,” a Kushner spokeswoman said after the restaurant shuttered on New Year’s Eve at the tail end of 2017. “I think he appeals to a more Midwestern aesthetic than a New York [one].”

  About a week later, the Kushners took another break. Charlie and Seryl wanted to treat their kids and their kids’ kids to a getaway, as they often did, and so they booked the family a villa at the Four Seasons Resort Hualalai in Hawaii. Jared and Ivanka had gone on vacation a few months earlier, as the guests of Wendi Murdoch aboard David Geffen’s yacht, on which they sailed around Croatia while Donald’s presidential campaign sank and floundered after his dour convention in Cleveland and his attacks on a Muslim Gold Star family who spoke out against him onstage at the Democratic National Convention. But every day felt like a year in the era of Trump. In 2016, they had welcomed their third baby; traveled across the country and back again and back again and again on the campaign trail; spoken onstage at the RNC; inserted themselves into every major hiring and firing decision; put out some media fires and started others, depending on how it served them; weathered self-inflicted crises in their shul; feuded with media executives and former friends; taken meetings with world leaders and Russian diplomats and CEOs of Fortune 100 companies; decided to move to DC; and tried to shed themselves of assets and positions that any of the thousands of people who wanted their heads could claim as a conflict of interest. With the move away from New York on the quickly approaching horizon—a move that would take them a few states south of the Kushners—and the brutal cold of an East Coast winter only just beginning, the prospect of uninterrupted time away with their family and apart from Donald, who himself was hunkered down in Mar-a-Lago, sounded nothing short of necessary.

  The whole Kushner family queued up in Terminal 5 at JFK Airport in Queens and boarded a commercial JetBlue flight en route to San Francisco, in coach, as they always did when the whole family flew together for these sorts of holiday trips. They had billions of dollars, and they flew private when they needed to, but there were two matriarchs, four children, four spouses, and a mess of grandchildren and their help. Billions of dollars do not grow on trees. Coach would do just fine, at least for this leg of the trip. A private plane was waiting for them in San Francisco to take them on the final leg to Hawaii.

  Ivanka, in black jeans, a navy zip-up with gray sleeves, and Puma slip-ons, her hair tousled and spilling out of her loosely tied ponytail, looked more like a normal traveler already exhausted before a cross-country flight with three kids under six in tow than an incoming First Daughter. She certainly looked more earthly than she did in the images of her fully made up and in pencil skirts or shift dresses and stilettos plastered across cable news for months on end and her own social media accounts for years.

  Fellow passengers recognized her anyway. Of course they did. She was now one of the most recognizable faces in the United States, if not the world—and in New York, which had overwhelmingly voted against her father a few months earlier, one of the most vilified. Dan Goldstein, a lawyer in the city, stopped her after they boarded the flight. Overcome with the frustration built up throughout the campaign and the concern bubbling over since November, he shouted at her: “You ruined our country and now you are ruining our flight!” People around them froze. The flight crew sputtered. Goldstein continued, “Why is she on our flight? She should be flying private.” Ivanka told flight attendants that she did not want to make this a whole big thing, but JetBlue ushered Goldstein and his husband off the flight. “The decision to remove a customer from a flight is not taken lightly,” the airline said in a statement. “If the crew determines that a customer is causing conflict on the aircraft, the customer will be asked to deplane, especially if the crew feels the situation runs the risk of escalation during flight. In this instance, our team worked to re-accommodate the party on the next available flight.”

  They’d brushed it off by the time they arrived in their villa on the 800-acre Four Seasons property, where rooms start in the four figures and the three hundred homes and condos on the adjoining residential community in which they stayed are valued at up to $20 million a pop. There are two championship-quality golf courses with comfort stations stocked with free bourbon and candy bars, a spa with an apothecary peddling herbal remedies made right there before guests’ eyes, and attendants by the pool offering to clean guests’ sunglasses or present them with chilled towels or spritz them with Evian. Billionaires like Ken Griffin, Charles Schwab, and Howard Schultz own homes there, having paid the $200,000 initiation fee and $40,000 annual dues to cover their use of the resort facilities. There, the Kushners were perhaps the poor kids on the tropical block. But they did have something all those other more billionaire-y billionaires didn’t have: a First Daughter daughter-in-law and a son on the way to the West Wing. Not everyone there, however, saw that as a draw.

  The Trump-Kushners commanded enough attention that other guests snapped photos of them reading under the cover of plush tented lounges by the pool. They caught Jared in a swimsuit with a surprising number of abdominal muscles peeking through his wiry frame, carrying their youngest son to the beach. They nabbed Ivanka in leggings and sneakers picking up breakfast from the resort’s café on Saturday morning with her daughter Arabella, though it is unclear how she paid for the meal, given that it was Shabbat. Observers don’t exchange money from sundown on Friday through sundown on Saturday. Writing, like signing a name or room number on a receipt, is also prohibited.

  The family did celebrate Hanukkah while on the island. “This year is one of the rare and special occasions where Hanukkah and Christmas coincide. As we light the candles, sending love from our family to yours this holiday season! Merry Christmas & Happy Hanukkah,” she posted on her Instagram account, under a photo of her, Jared, and their children smiling in front of five lit menorahs—one for each of them. In Jewish tradition, you add to the mitzvah by lighting multiple menorahs in your home. The idea is that the more candles lit, the more people can see the miracles God makes for those who fight for justice and truth. By the end of those eight nights, just weeks before they officially descended onto Washington, the Trump-Kushners lit more than two hundred candles.

  Chapter 4

  Born/ Married/ Divorced/ Married/ Divorced/ Married/ Raised Trump

  If fate placed Ivana Zelníčková in the little Czechoslovakian town of Zlín with her grandmother, the president of a shoe factory, and her stay-at-home grandfather, or her parents, an engineer and a telephone operator living in a two-story government compound that amounted to nothing more than a concrete box, it was destiny that allowed her to rocket herself out of it and land in a glittering triplex atop Fifth Avenue in Manhattan three decades later.

  Ivana was born in 1949, a year after Stalin’s coup. Her family and most others living in those little government-o
wned boxes were essentially trapped there, burying fruit in their little yards in the summer in hopes of something sweet in the winter. Otherwise, they would wait in line for hours at the grocery for a taste of anything. Ivana’s father, Milos, whom she called Dedo, and mother, Marie (Babi), wanted something different for their only daughter. A daddy’s girl, as her own daughter would be, Ivana was taught how to ski by Dedo when she turned five years old. He also pushed her into a pool of freezing cold water and left her to figure out how not to sink. If she was going to make it out of there, she would not only need a hook, she would also have to learn how to quickly adapt and survive, as water rose around her.

  By the time she was fourteen, Ivana had become something of a little star, competing in slalom and downhill ski races. She joined the national juniors ski team, which took her to Italy and Austria, and eventually allowed her at seventeen to move to Prague, where she studied at Charles University while she trained. The city soon turned untenable. In 1968 thousands of Soviet tanks rolled in, and Ivana hid out for weeks in Italy. She and her then boyfriend hatched a plan for her to marry an Austrian man they’d skied with for years and obtain an Austrian passport, allowing her to leave Czechoslovakia but return to visit her family when she wanted. In 1971, at the age of twenty-two, she said “I do” in a government building in Prague. It was a politically charged marriage of convenience that would only last long enough to assuage governmental suspicion that the whole thing was a sham—which, of course, it was. She got the passport, and they divorced in 1973. In between, she packed her bags and flew across the Atlantic Ocean to Toronto, moving in with her father’s sister and brother before the divorce papers were even drawn up.

  Ivana enrolled in English courses, took ski trips to Vermont on the weekends, rekindled her romance with her old boyfriend, and started working with a modeling agent who booked her in little shows in local department stores. By the time she was twenty-seven, she got a break: a runway show for which she and seven other models in town would travel to New York to drum up attention for the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, modeling for Canadian designers. Initially, she turned the job down. Her father Dedo was coming to visit her, and she didn’t want to leave him after he had traveled all that way. But the show had already been booked and choreographed for all eight girls. If she didn’t go, her agent told her, she’d be spoiling the whole thing for everyone else.

  She relented, and arrived in the Americana Hotel on Seventh Avenue, exhausted and overheated by the July swelter that swallows Manhattan, and a bit homesick for her father. She nearly said no when the other girls pleaded with her to go out for dinner, but again, she gave in, leaving her straight blond hair spilling down over the cherry red minidress she’d slipped on, teetering into Maxwell’s Plum on a pair of her high heels.

  The eight models stopped in their tracks when they entered the restaurant on First Avenue at Sixty-Fourth Street. The din of voices bounced off the stained-glass ceilings and walls, a treasure trove of Tiffany lamps and ceramic animals and cascading crystals. It was a place where the likes of Cary Grant and Barbra Streisand came to dish over chili and burgers, and twentysomething flight attendants and hungry models looked for a free meal and a rich older boyfriend—of which there were many, all looking for twentysomething flight attendants and hungry models.

  Donald Trump approached Ivana, who was standing at the bar with the other models while they waited for a table. He offered to tell the manager to speed the process up. A few minutes later, the models took a seat at a table in the middle of the restaurant. The only catch was that Donald joined them, eating his hamburger in a seat he pulled up right next to Ivana’s. He disappeared toward the end of the meal, took care of the bill, and waited for them outside in his black Cadillac limo so that he could drive them back to the hotel. He let Ivana out of the car with a kiss on the cheek.

  She returned to her room at the Americana the next day after the rehearsal for the runway show to a hundred red roses and a note that read: “To Ivana, with affection,” signed Donald Trump. Moments later, he called to ask her to lunch. She parlayed it into dinner at a private club aptly named Le Club, and, at his request, a lunch the following day at the 21 Club, before she flew back to Canada. He called her most days thereafter, and soon asked her to spend Christmas with him in Aspen. As Ivana likes to tell it, she whupped Donald down the mountain on their first days on the slopes. He hadn’t known that she was once a competitive skier. It felt to her like a fun joke, but to him it was a humiliation that sent him storming off in his skis.

  He had sufficiently licked his wounds by New Year’s Eve, when, less than six months after they’d met, as Ivana recalls in her most recent book, he breezed off what sounded like a mixture of a proposal and a threat: “If you don’t marry me, you’ll ruin your life.” It was not exactly Shakespeare, but not quite Don Corleone, either. They hadn’t met each other’s families. They’d only met in a few times. They lived in different countries and essentially knew nothing about each other. But she was inching closer to her thirties, and he was rich enough to pay for a first-class ticket to Aspen and a chalet during peak season, which for many women is the perfect shiny poison apple, impossible to resist. She said yes. They agreed to marry in April, in New York. She flew home to Montreal, gathered her stuff, and got her passport stamped on a one-way trip to Manhattan.

  Ivana knew no one at first, including the Trump family. Close-knit enough that they shared regular Sunday lunches over Mary Trump’s famous meatloaf at Donald’s parents’ home in Queens and Wednesday-evening dinners gnawing on T-bones at Peter Luger in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn, the family all showed up to meet the soon-to-be Mrs. Trump over lunch at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. Prompt as ever, Donald’s parents Fred and Mary took their seats, as did his brothers Fred Jr. and Robert, sisters Elizabeth and Maryanne, and all their husbands and wives and children. It was before noon, and one by one, they went down the line, ordering steaks. Ivana bucked, asking the waiter for a fillet of sole. Fred Sr. interrupted her, telling the waiter that, actually, she would have the steak like the rest of them. Ivana didn’t budge. When her fish arrived, she ate the whole thing with her father-in-law’s eyes glued to her.

  She was less assured when it came to their wedding, having no idea how to find a florist in New York, let alone one suitable for the wedding of a fairly wealthy real estate developer with lofty ambitions. Nor did she have any sense of where they should hold the ceremony or the reception or who to put on the guest list. She invited a half dozen people who attended their six-hundred-person wedding. Donald and his secretary took care of the rest, booking the Marble Collegiate Church, where the Trump family had for years prayed from within the giant slabs of Westchester white marble, beneath the Dutch-style weather vane and the tower bell that had rung after every American president’s death since Martin Van Buren passed in 1862. The 21 Club was the natural choice for a dinner reception, where comedian Joey Adams, gossip columnist Cindy Adams’s husband, kept the evening running as an MC. Ivana did choose her own dress, created by a Canadian designer friend of hers.

  She had never heard of a prenup, either, until Donald slid one her way not long before their big day. He told her she had to sign the agreement, a document designed to protect his family money. She relented, settling for $20,000 for each year they stayed together. At least, that’s what the first version of the contract called for.

  The florists were late on the day of the wedding, though eventually they turned up with a white bouquet for her and boutonnieres for the men. Her fiancé and her father met that morning for the first time. Her mother, who’d stayed behind in Czechoslovakia, would not meet him until after they were legally wed. The church’s original swinging doors parted for Ivana and her father to enter. Light streamed through the diamond-patterned stained glass, glittering on the burgundy-and-gold walls of the church as she made her way past dozens upon dozens of mahogany pews filled with friends and business associates of the Trumps, Mayor Abe
Beame included. She chose a decidedly un-Ivana dress—stark white and modest, with long sleeves that billowed into little cumulus clouds at her wrists, blousy around her bust until it tapered at her waist, then formed a peasant skirt that pleated and drifted into a slight A-line. There were no great diamonds. None of the collar necklaces or glitzy earrings that would famously define her style in later years—no gold or precious jewels of any kind, really. There was no hint of cleavage. She had very little skin showing at all, in fact.

  All of the drama happened north of her collarbones, where her butter-blond blunt bob fell stick straight to her shoulders, held down flat by the weight of her white tulle veil. The veil connected to a froth of a white flower crown at least a quarter-foot high that she stuck to her head. It created something of a willowy arch framing her face, which she’d caked tall with makeup. Cheeks painted a deep rouge, eyes lined on top and bottom, smudged a thick charcoal. Lips smeared an iridescent mauve. She looked older than her twenty-eight years, and scared straight, and like her head did not match her body and her outside was disengaged from her inside. Something about her seemed stunned—the face of Suzanne Somers stuffed into a late 1970s bridal shoppe fever dream. With Donald in his tuxedo and big black bow tie, his longish sandy blond hair parted deep on the left of his forehead, hanging down to the cut of his cheekbones, the couple belonged atop a wedding cake. Or, at the very least, printed across the pages of a New York tabloid.

  Donald spared two days for a honeymoon in Acapulco before he jetted back to New York to square away his deal to buy the Commodore Hotel in Midtown, which would become the Grand Hyatt and his first real foray into Manhattan from the outer boroughs his father had already conquered.