Born Trump

by Emily Jane Fox

  Don Jr. had more willpower, and more anger toward his father too. Perhaps that is because Ivana told him the full truth: his father had a mistress, and the divorce was Donald’s fault. Without hesitation, he stopped talking to his father. He beat up a couple of classmates at Buckley who brought up some of the headlines about his mother in school. Ivana kept the kids away from the papers—as much as she could, at least, in an environment in which photographers would hold up the front pages to get their reactions as they made their way to and from school—but they would sneak looks when she went to her friends’ houses. Even some of Eric’s little friends knew enough to bring it up in class.

  No containment strategy could keep them from the pandemonium after the “Best Sex I Ever Had” headline ran. Within days, Ivana instructed her staff to start packing the family’s things, and asked the kids’ teachers to start forwarding their schoolwork. Donald’s plane was gassed and ready for them by the time Ivana, Don Jr., Ivanka, Eric, Babi, Dedo, Dorothy, and Bridget came down the elevator in Trump Tower and into the waiting limousine, into which their suitcases had already been loaded. They flew down to Palm Beach and pulled into Mar-a-Lago, where they would stay for three months—the three months in which Marla started making her way back from Guatemala to New York and into the public eye. Each day, the children would do the homework assignments their teachers dutifully sent each morning; they’d take tennis lessons and go swimming and fish with her father and splash around on the beach. Helicopters would fly overhead sometimes to catch photos of the family who’d fled the chaos in New York, but mostly, they found peace in Palm Beach, in the middle of what would have been a constant barrage had they stayed in New York. Ivana made sure of it. Even now, away from the bedlam that had followed her out of La Grenouille for the Valentine’s Day luncheon, the paranoia those weeks had instilled in her lingered in Palm Beach. She kept the staff at the mansion as bare-bones as she could manage—though that’s not to say she went without the maids, security, nannies, landscapers, and maintenance crews she’d become accustomed to—to limit the number of people who could sell stories about the family.

  They stayed there until May, returning in time for the kids to finish up the school year in New York. Though Don still wanted little to do with Donald, they had to spend some time with their father, since Ivana agreed to let him take their children on some weekends.

  Eventually, that meant spending time with Marla, too. “I hated Marla initially,” Ivanka admitted in an interview years later. She lost it when she saw Marla put her hair up in the sort of golden twist her mother fancied, and the photographers, seeing her from behind, took her for her mother. “Ivana! Ivana!” they yelled, to get her attention for a snapshot. “She’s not Ivana,” Ivanka growled at them. Together the three siblings would spy on their father’s girlfriend, a mini Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys trying to collect evidence of her betrayals and misdeeds to present to Donald, in hopes of turning him against her and getting her out of their lives for good. “We’d spend hours spying on her, trying to catch her on the phone saying something awful about my father,” Ivanka told the Mail on Sunday. “We thought that if we could catch her being nasty, we could report back to my father . . . and he’d get back together with my mom.” The kids played the same game with Ivana, pressing their little ears to doors to overhear her conversations with friends and lawyers, trying to glean more about what was going on with the divorce.

  With so much in flux, Ivana inconsolable, and Donald consumed with himself, the kids leaned on Babi and Dedo. They’d flown back to Czechoslovakia once the kids returned from Mar-a-Lago to New York in the spring, but Ivana took her children to stay with them for a few weeks in July. They came back in time for Don Jr. to move to Pottstown, Pennsylvania, to start his first year of boarding school at the Hill School.

  It is not hard to understand why Don Jr. wanted to get away from it all. In one year, his parents had blown up at each other on the mountain in Aspen on the day before his birthday, their marital discord then playing out so publicly that he got chased to school by gossip hounds and teased by his schoolmates to the point where he felt like he had to throw punches. For a Trump, being sent away for school was not so novel an idea; after all, Fred and Mary had sent an unruly Donald to military school as a kid, and Ivana had left home as a teenager to escape an oppressive regime in Czechoslovakia. But for much of his life, Donny had always seemed to get something of a raw deal within an otherwise undeniably lucky life. His first nanny had left him in a tub of water alone, and on a kitchen counter that he tumbled off, breaking his leg; his sister had blamed him for breaking the precious chandelier in Greenwich, leading to a few strikes on his backside at the hands of Ivanka; his parents’ public spat played out over his birthday.

  Until Don went to boarding school, his only experience with life outside his gilded bubble was with his Dedo. In Greenwich, they’d set up a tent on the edge of the Long Island Sound and cast lines to reel in fish. At their grandfather’s suggestion, Don and Eric would venture into the woods and disappear for hours. At Mar-a-Lago they’d catch tuna and mini sharks straight from the Intracoastal Waterway at the edge of the club’s property. Since he was a young kid, Don had been spending about half of his summer break at Ivana’s parents’ home in Czechoslovakia—speaking to them in their native language so much that when he returned, especially in his youngest years, other mothers at his school often wondered who the little boy in Sears clothing with a Czech accent was, until they realized that he was the eldest Trump boy and simply spent too much time with his mother’s parents abroad. With Dedo, Don learned how to hunt, fish, shoot an air rifle, aim a bow, climb rocks, and appreciate the beauty of getting lost in the woods for hours alone, not returning until well after dark.

  “My grandfather was a blue-collar electrician from what was then communist Czechoslovakia,” Don Jr. told a hunting publication in the early stages of his father’s presidential bid, noting that his grandfather saw the charms of growing up in an affluent family in New York City. “While he recognized clearly some of the benefits of that he also probably recognized a lot of the downfalls of that.” Don came around to his grandfather’s way of seeing things once he hit his early teenage years and the stress within his nuclear family and the reverberating chaos started to weigh on him. “It was sort of a mess, reading about that every day as a young kid growing up, in that stage where you think you are a man but you’re not really yet,” he recalled. “So it would be great to get out of New York.”

  That Buckley, Don’s prep school in Manhattan, counseled him out of the school, telling his parents he would be better suited elsewhere, made the decision even easier. He could leave the ghosts haunting him in Trump Tower—the media scrutiny, the simmering contempt for his father and the new blond model who hung on his arm—for the peace and quiet and relative normalcy that a fairly low-key boarding school would allow.

  The Trumps settled on the Hill School, located in the steel-country sticks in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, a town of 22,000 about 40 miles outside Philadelphia and 120 from Trump Tower. The school, founded as the Family Boarding School for Boys and Young Men in 1951 before it changed its name to Hill a quarter century later, sits on two hundred acres. In its first years, it charged students, some of whom boarded and some of whom came for English, Greek, and Latin courses, $200 per year. Today, it costs boarders nearly 285 times that. It is now co-ed, and male students are required to wear coats and ties to class. Twice each week, students must attend nondenominational chapel services. The school colors—blue and gray—were chosen as a symbol of reconciliation between the North and South after the Civil War. All students operate under the motto “Whatsoever things are true.”

  This was a fresh start for Don Jr., who, for most of his twelve years had been regarded as the rich son of a rich father with a flashy mother and a flashy apartment and a well-known last name that, at least in New York and Palm Beach, stood for a comically public and opulent way of life. None of that brought him happiness,
and all of it is what he wanted to leave behind in New York and scrub as clean as he could at the Hill School.

  His parents brought him to school in a limousine, which didn’t exactly set him up for that kind of clean break. Hoping to get them off campus and away from his new classmates as quickly as possible, Don Jr. suggested that they have dinner as far away from Hill as possible. There weren’t many options in and around Pottsville in the early 1990s, but the Trumps obliged as best as they could. When the local Taco Bell broke it to Ivana that they did not, in fact, have the Chablis she ordered with their tacos, she took it in stride, as she did when the register did not have change to break the hundred-dollar bill she tried to pay with. Luckily, their driver agreed to find another store that would make change for them. As much as Don Jr. hoped all of this would be the end of Page Six following his every move and chronicling his parent’s foibles as they related to him, they somehow caught wind of the fact that Ivana had to make a stop at a local Kmart to get her son some items she’d forgotten to buy him, things like sheets and towels and shampoo—things a kid moving into boarding school dorms might need, yet inexplicably got overlooked. They ran a photo of the superstore on the cover. The story spread as wide as the Houston Chronicle, which reported a week later that the family “stopped at a Kmart and filled two carts with items for their son.” As for their behavior, Donald and Ivana were “very civil” to each other in the store, and “when the items were totaled, Donald handed the woman behind the register an American Express card but was refused.” At the time K-Mart apparently did not accept American Express, so he offered cash instead. According to the report, “an assistant store manager would not say what the Trumps spent.”

  Don Jr. had learned his lesson by the time he arrived on campus at the University of Pennsylvania years later. Former classmates remember him driving up in a dirty pickup truck. “Talk about trying to come off as the anti-rich kid,” one Penn friend joked. “It was very much a statement, not that anyone couldn’t see right through it,” another recalled.

  That October, about a month after Don Jr. moved to Hill and his siblings started back in classes, Dedo had a heart attack, followed by a second one a day later. He died at sixty-three in Ivana’s hometown. She hopped on Donald’s plane with her shell-shocked children, and after the pilot dropped them off, he turned around to New York to pick up Donald and his mother Mary, who would fly right back to meet them in time for the funeral. Paparazzi hid in the cemetery to snap shots of them at the gravesite—the boys with blond bowl cuts and suits and ties, Ivanka with her hair swept back in a braid, standing in height order beside their parents and a priest, all holding flowers and weeping. The anguish hung from the baby fat of their cheeks as they placed their wreaths on Dedo’s grave, honoring a man who had been far more a dad to them in the conventional sense than their own father. For the moment, Donald draped his arm around Ivana, but he would soon be back in Marla’s grasp in New York. Dedo had done things with them. He’d taught them things. He’d sat with them for dinner and let them know that if they grew up to be kind and appreciative and unspoiled by all of their spoils, they would be loved not because of their money but despite it. For the second time that year, a man they idolized left them, and nothing would ever be the same. For the second time, too, the leaving spoiled one of their birthdays. Just as the Aspen showdown had played out just before the celebration of Don Jr.’s twelfth birthday, Dedo’s funeral took place on Ivanka’s ninth.

  A little more than two months later, in a Manhattan dressed up in its Christmas best, with millions crowded around department store windows and hundred-foot trees with their thousands of lights and crystals, Donald and Ivana’s lawyers met in front of New York State Supreme Court justice Phyllis Gangel-Jacob. After thirteen years of marriage, and just shy of a year after the Bonnie’s incident in Aspen, the judge granted the couple a divorce, citing cruel and inhuman treatment by Donald as grounds. Donald wasn’t in the courtroom, but his attorney, Jay Goldberg, said that the grounds for divorce were based on his very public year with Maples, and that was the real cruelty in the situation. “It caused Mrs. Trump to have anxiety and sleeplessness. The claim was that media attention to the relationship supposedly between himself and Miss Maples in 1990—that’s important, 1990—caused Mrs. Trump to endure pain and suffering that amounts to cruel and inhuman treatment.”

  Judge Gangel-Jacob said that unless the couple could come to an agreement about the equal division of property and the validity of the premarital and postmarital agreements, the two would be forced to head to trial, where these things would be decided for them. The two sides were so far off that initially a trial seemed likely. Ivana’s lawyers were pushing for half of what Donald said he was worth, at the time upward of $5 billion. The truth, of course, was that he was worth far less, and the year around his divorce had nearly brought his business to its knees, forcing him to ask his lenders for money to help pay off his bills. There was no gussying up Donald’s financial reality. You can squeeze only so much out of a cow with no milk. Short on cash and with miles of debt, Ivana realized that she’d do better to take what money was there now than wait for more that might or might not come. And there was the danger he could file for personal bankruptcy, which would put her in line behind Donald’s many hungry creditors.

  On a Saturday in late March 1991, they reached a settlement. Ultimately, what they agreed to that day did not afford Ivana much more than she’d agreed to when she signed the redone prenup Donald presented her on that Christmas Eve years earlier. She ended up with $14 million—$10 million in cash and a $4 million housing allowance—along with the Greenwich estate. Donald also had to pay her $650,000 a year, broken down into $350,000 in spousal support and an additional $100,000 to support each one of their children. It also spelled out that Ivana was entitled to one month out of the year at Mar-a-Lago. Donald got the Trump Tower triplex in the agreement, though Ivana and the children stayed for another few years before Ivana moved out to a townhouse of her own and Donald moved back in with Marla. Donald was so cash-poor that he reportedly needled his bankers for the $10 million to cut Ivana the check, but was promptly turned down. He got it sorted, and everything was signed and delivered on that early spring weekend day.

  Ivana was in Palm Beach the day she signed the papers, not far from where Donald was also staying. She was preparing to host one of the ladies’ weekends she’d started hosting after the divorce—a small group of coiffed women doing their best Jane Fondas in Lycra and leg warmers, sweating by the pool during the day, swigging something harder as the afternoon rolled along. Ivanka would go along with her mom, crafting place mats out of seashells or construction paper for each guest. In her mother’s book, Ivanka recalled getting up on the stage in the Mar-a-Lago screening room dressed up like Madonna, belting out “Express Yourself” and “Vogue” to a round of applause.

  While Ivana toasted her girlfriends as the ink dried on her divorce settlement, Donald held a scheduled press conference announcing his plan to liquidate his ownership of Trump Plaza of the Palm Beaches, upward of sixty condominiums that he’d bought for $40 million in 1986. He borrowed $60 million to finance improvements—all of it cash he needed and needed now. At the end of April, he unloaded all sixty-three of the stalled waterfront apartments he had on his hands. He said at the time that he walked away breaking even.

  Officially single, Donald spent a good deal of time with Marla in an apartment in Trump Park, another building with his name on it on Manhattan’s East Side. With Ivana legally out of the picture, they could freely be together for the first time in six years, which certainly had to be a relief. It also had to make it feel real, and real is often not what draws a fortysomething married man-about-town to a wide-eyed twentysomething aspiring model. Once the real sets in, well, where’s the fun in that?

  Donald and Marla knew that, which perhaps is why they would pick at each other and push each other away. They would not settle into the dull, steady rhythm most couples do, because D
onald saw what that did to his first marriage, and Marla was living what happened when the man she loved got bored by that and strayed away. So they fought. They teased each other. She knew enough to grow paranoid about what he would do behind her back, and he didn’t much care to give her peace of mind. It was all about him. He made her a star, and she was lucky, and if she didn’t act as such, she could and would be replaced. Add the self-destructive tendency that made Donald almost want to get caught, and they had all the makings of a perfectly toxic pairing. On that, they both got off.

  They broke up and got back together within the span of one issue of the New York Post going to press and the following day’s paper going to bed. There were promise bands and diamond rings worn and rejected. And then there was a phone call from someone called John Miller that threatened to end it all for good.

  On June 26, the Post splashed a photo of Marla and Donald smiling next to each other under the headline “It’s Over.” “The Donald boots Marla from his East Side Condo,” the bold text below the photo read. Donald had apparently dumped Marla in favor of an Italian model named Carla Bruni. Word started spreading that Donald felt caged in. He had been married for so long, and the pressure he felt from Marla and her family to settle down didn’t feel right. It was too soon. Plus, in his mind, Bruni and every other model and actress in town was after the new bachelor, and who was he to turn their advances down? As long as they complied with one request Donald reportedly made, that is. The known germophobe was scared straight of sleeping around for fear of what he could contract. All of his dates, he told people, would have to go to his doctor and submit to an AIDS test.