Born Trump

by Emily Jane Fox

  A reporter from People Magazine reached out to Donald to get in on the Carla-for-Marla swap, and within minutes, a man calling himself John Miller phoned back. Miller, of course, was Donald himself, posing as his own spokesperson. The voice was unmistakable, and all of Donald’s friends and everyone within the Trump Organization knew he did this kind of thing. So Donald, as John Miller, unleashed on the People reporter. He truly didn’t care what Marla had to say. As for other lovers, his light was on. “Beautiful women call him all the time,” he said of himself, and if it were to come to marriage, “then that will be a very lucky woman.” Bruni wasn’t the only one he claimed to be dating at the time, creating something of a woman-on-woman fight club for his attention and affection. “Competitively, it’s tough. It was tough for Marla and it will be tough for Carla.”

  Bruni flatly denied the rumor in the months after. “Trump is obviously a lunatic,” she said. “It is so untrue and I’m deeply embarrassed by it all. I’ve only ever met him once, about a year ago, at a big charity party in New York.” To this day she denies it (she would go on to marry Nicolas Sarkozy, becoming for years the First Lady of France).

  People played the tapes for Marla, who immediately identified the voice as Donald’s. She was no longer taking his calls. “I’m shocked and devastated,” she said, listening to Donald speak that way about her and fessing up to seeing other women. Doubts about Donald had been festering as she went through the motions as his mistress, publicly living the improbable happy ever after. This stomped all over whatever delusions she had left. “I feel betrayed at the deepest level. My friends and family have been praying for me for a long time, and this may be the answer to their prayers.” In response to him, she mustered up a southern, “Baby, you’re on your own.”

  She herself started praying after she fled the Trump Park apartment to the Connecticut home of Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford. Donald couldn’t take being shut out that way. And so he caved and gave Marla what he knew she was after. He turned up in Connecticut when the Giffords were at the White House for a state dinner and handed Marla a little box from Harry Winston with a big 7.45-carat emerald-cut diamond, set in platinum, with sixteen graduated channel-set baguette diamonds along the band. Marla said yes, yes, yes. (In 1999, she sold the thing for $110,000. It was resold to a private collector in June 2016, weeks before Donald was officially named the Republican nominee in the general election, for $300,000.)

  The next morning Gifford broke the news on her ABC show Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, and Donald called in to dish. “She’s something special. It worked out great,” he said. “We’ve decided this is the thing to do.”

  The reality was that the ring was a shiny, expensive guarantee of absolutely nothing. Even after their engagement, Donald felt wishy-washy toward a second marriage and toward Marla in general. She hardly let him get away with it.

  Donald would dump her, go out, make certain he was photographed that night with a pretty young thing, and make even more sure that it would wind up in the paper. He would publicly pick on her. A friend who sat with them for dinner at Mar-a-Lago one evening remembers Donald turning to him and saying, “Don’t you think Marla looks terrible tonight?” The friend froze. Marla was beautiful inside and out, the friend managed to get out, and Donald was lucky to be with her. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you have to admit, she looks really terrible.” Donald was partly joking in the dry way he tended to, but, in part, he meant it. Marla had lost weight, hoping that shedding a few pounds might kick-start her fledgling acting career and finally land her a part. That meant she lost some of her chest, which, the friend remembers, Donald took as a personal affront. “Donald is the most transactional person you’ll ever meet, and the most possessive, too,” the friend said. “He was with her for her body, and she changed the way her body looked in a way he didn’t like, and so he thought, ‘How could you do that to me?’ He’s a narcissist, and a narcissist like that is incapable of understanding that saying something like that might not make for a great partner.” Marla ended the dinner in tears.

  Marla’s tongue could cut, too. She’d deride him in front of friends, calling him fat and out of shape. One colleague remembers carpooling with Donald and Marla on the way to an awards dinner one evening. It was during the week when the United Nations convenes in New York, which turns the city’s gridlock into an impassable mess. Stuck in traffic for an age, the car grew quiet. Donald and Marla never made much chatter, because, as friends noted, they had little in common. What would they talk about? So the friend commented on Marla’s new haircut. She’d lobbed off a good few inches days earlier, and he told her that it suited her just fine. “Thank you,” she said, beaming. “It’s been three days and the man I sleep with hasn’t even noticed.”

  Donald struck back. “Well, I dyed my hair and you didn’t notice.” The rest of the car fell silent.

  This level of distrust rotted the relationship from the inside, too. Marla had for years watched the ease with which Donald lied to Ivana, making her somewhat of an expert witness. She knew how he would cheat on her, and, armed with that knowledge, she acted as the first line of defense. Donald would often tell Ivana that he was going out for a day of golf when actually he was going to the Midtown hotel where he took all his other women—a nothing of a place where no one who knew him would ever go, certainly not in the light of day.

  Donald had developed a system with which Marla was intimately familiar. If he’d told Ivana that he was hitting the links, he would often remember to run his socks under water before he returned home, in order to make it seem to her as though he had, in fact, spent his day out on the course and not in the hotel room or house or limousine or helicopter where he had actually passed the day with Marla or someone else. By the time the divorce was finalized, Marla decided that she would tag along any time Donald said he was going out to play golf for the day. Friend and golf buddies remember having to pair up with her, driving around the course with her in the passenger seat of their golf carts. “The only reason Donald put up with it is that she knew well enough to turn up in a pair of Daisy Dukes and one of her very tight tops,” one friend who partnered up with her on a number of occasions said. “She knew that’s all he cared about, and she was absolutely right.”

  Marla also knew how territorial Donald could be. She saw it in the way he reacted to his nephew making small talk with her on the helicopter from Atlantic City to New York, back when he was still married to Ivana. When any of his friends would make a comment about her, even in a friendly way so as to compliment Donald, those remarks drew him closer to her. So when she needed to, she took a page out of Donald’s book. He might go out and have photos taken with models or actresses when they fought. She’d go out and make a younger, more handsome or famous guy go completely gaga over her.

  Donald would often tell the story about how, during one prolonged breakup with Marla, Michael Bolton fell head over heels for her. Bolton asked to take her out, she agreed, and, as things like this do, it got back to Donald. In one sense, this was validation for Donald. It was his Marla this rock star at the peak of his fame was after. That a guy like Michael Bolton would take his leftovers boosted his already outsize ego. But on the other hand, if a guy like Michael Bolton was after his castoffs, why had he left her in the first place? If she was good enough for Michael Bolton, surely she would do for him, at least for the time being, right? His self-congratulation quickly spun into a blinding, jealous rage. “I say to myself, Wait a minute. I don’t like this. Michael Bolton—he’s got the No. 1 fucking album in the world, Time, Love and Tenderness, and what that does to a guy like me, a competitive guy, it’s like an affirmation that the girl has to be great, because the No. 1 singer has fallen for her. There’s nothing wrong with what she’s doing. I left her. Not only that. I left her like a dog,” he said at the time.

  “So what happens is, I say, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ I do a Trump number on her. All-enveloping. I call her. She says, ‘How could you have left me the
way you did?’ She decides to go to Hawaii with me instead of to Europe with Michael Bolton. In Maui, this guy finds out where we are, and starts sending flowers. Yellow roses with a note: ‘I’ve got Georgia on my mind. Love, Michael.’ She’s torn. I’ve left her twice. But she drops him and comes back to me.”

  In the meantime, Marla got to work with a coach to prepare for an audition for the role of wealthy showman Florenz Ziegfeld’s sexy girlfriend in The Will Rogers Follies on Broadway. Marla was perfect for the role. She was already playing it, to a degree. The ledes for all the New York papers wrote themselves. It would have practically been malpractice for any producer not to cast someone as white-hot as Marla was in that role at the time, a year into the show’s run. They knew that her name in lights would pack the house with Donald’s pals and every critic in town and every lookie-loo who’d never get an up-close look at the woman who tore the 1980s golden couple apart if they didn’t buy a ticket to see her up close.

  Marla rehearsed for a few weeks, and on opening night, in the dog days of the summer of 1992, Donald invited some three hundred friends and associates to watch his fiancée’s Broadway debut. He told friends that he was astounded by Marla’s ability to handle herself under all the pressure leading up to that night. Donald, on the other hand, was cracking. He got up from his seat in the theater shortly after the house lights dimmed, pacing back and forth, his chin bowed toward the ground. Marla rose from a hydraulic lift in gold glittery cowboy boots and a matching gold cowboy hat under which her matching golden locks flowed out. According to The New York Times review of her opening night, a financial consultant who knew Donald whispered to his wife that the little gold hot pants Marla had on were too tight. “That’s the idea,” his wife replied. Everyone was in on the joke, Marla included. And so when the show’s directors specifically put back in an original line in which one of the other actors asked Marla’s character, “How did you get this part?” they knew the audience would immediately laugh in an on-the-nose moment of art imitating life. They roared at it on opening night, a reaction Marla anticipated, rolling her eyes as soon as it was uttered.

  She didn’t flub a note or forget a line or screw up in any of the ways revelers expected, or perhaps hoped, she might. Donald slung his arm around her shoulder at the Western-themed after-party in the ballroom at the plaza to which he’d invited five hundred guests, including Mike Wallace, Maury Povich, La Toya Jackson, Regis Philbin, and Kathie Lee Gifford. For the moment, they were full on again. They’d been off not long before, and on not long before that. They’d soon be off after, then back on and off and on and off and on like a ratty old fuse that they loved to see blow almost as much as the tabloids did.

  But by the following spring, they made an even greater spectacle at the theater. It was the first week in April, and the two arrived before Marla’s performance, a line of cameras there to meet them, Donald in a suit, Marla in a white one-shouldered gown, her lips painted cherry red. He leaned over, in full view of the cameras, and put his palm on Marla’s stomach, confirming speculation that she was pregnant. It was true—a new little Trump would arrive the following October.

  As gamely as Donald celebrated the news in public, he did not immediately take to the news in private. In an interview a decade later with Howard Stern, he said that he had assumed Marla was on birth control, and he had been stunned at the news. “At the time it was like, ‘Excuse me, what happened?’ And then I said, ‘Well, what are we going to do about this?’” he told Stern, obliquely suggesting he’d pushed her to get an abortion. Marla, he said, replied, “‘Are you serious? It’s the most beautiful day of our lives.’ I said, ‘Oh, great.’”

  Donald later admitted that he was “not the kind of guy who has babies out of wedlock and doesn’t get married and give the baby a name. And for me, I’m not a believer in abortion.” But he still couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of getting married again. It wasn’t about Marla, though his family still was not open to the idea of her legally binding herself to the clan, even with a baby Trump on the way. Mary Trump reminded him that Ivana still loved him, and that she would likely take him back. It wouldn’t be the worst decision he could make, she’d tell him. Donald knew that. He still called Ivana regularly, and he loved her still, too. But Marla had stuck by him. She had been loyal and patient and, mostly, nothing but kind and forgiving of his many sins. “It was a wrong time for me to have a relationship,” Donald said then. “At the same time, it was great to know somebody was there, and she was there like nobody I’ve ever seen.”

  He knew that it was the right thing to do, and that Marla wanted it more than anything. He polled his family, his friends, anyone who would feign interest and pick up the phone, for what he should do. He’d repeat that he only had one option, which perhaps made him want to go through with it less. Being put in a corner may be the quickest way to make some people cave, but for Donald, it’s the surest way to make him chew himself out of the room instead. He started referring to marriage as “the M word” and the “monster.” Publicly, he would say the phobia came from his battle with Ivana over the prenup, and the resulting trauma and legal bills. Marla found a way around that. She told him over and over again that she would sign anything, if that made him feel better. In an interview on The Today Show, she said that Donald had “a little freak out” when the subject came up, but she’d figure out how to tame “the fear monster.” And just in case she found him in a moment of weakness, she started carrying a wedding gown with her whenever they traveled. “I’ve always told Donald that I will do whatever I need to do,” she said on Today.

  While he sweated over the decision and Marla started planning for new baby Trump, Donald’s three children had their lives rattled again. It was the Friday of Memorial Day weekend of 1993, and Don Jr. came home from the Hill School for the long weekend to be with Ivanka and Eric at the house in Greenwich. Ivana was in Tampa, taping a segment for the Home Shopping Network, where she’d started shilling goods after she left her job at the Trump Organization. Ivanka had gotten into bed and was waiting for Bridget to tuck her in and say their prayers together, as they did every night, but she never came. The phone started ringing, and Bridget didn’t answer it as she usually had, swatting away reporters who’d sometimes call the house. Ivanka went to find Donny and Eric, who were watching TV together, and asked if they knew where Bridget was. The boys volunteered to go look for her, eventually running down to the basement to see if maybe she was down there, unable to hear the phone ring. Bridget was unconscious by the time they found her there. After an ambulance came, they told the family that she had had a heart attack and passed away immediately. Ivanka was devastated. They all were. Within three years, the kids had seen their parents’ marriage publicly unravel, their grandfather, who was much more their father figure, die of a heart attack at sixty-three, and Bridget, their nanny, who was much more their mother figure, die of a heart attack at sixty-seven. Their dad’s sex life was thrown in their faces, and his mistress, whom they didn’t much like at all, was now expecting another baby, while the press hounded them throughout.

  A wedding date still had not been set by the time Marla went into labor in October 1993. It was her first, Donald’s fourth, but different for him in every imaginable way. Don Jr. came into the world before Ivana even had time for an epidural. Ivana had time enough to shoo her husband out of the room, for fear he’d never want to sleep with her again. Donald had not protested much, given the profoundness of his germophobia. Much was the same when Ivanka and Eric were born; he stayed clear until they were all cleaned up and Ivana had time to make herself look presentable again.

  Second wives often have the benefit of a softer version of the man the first wife married—a man beaten down by vows kept and those deserted, who’s reflected on what he missed the first go-around and how he’d do it over again if he could. If the man is successful, and the woman younger and more beautiful, as tends to happen, particularly in New York, the women have leverage. Sure, the me
n have the outward-facing power, but the women, in their own way, own their husbands, too. Marla was not yet a wife, despite that traveling wedding gown and Donald’s own internal pressure cooker ticking away, but when she went into labor, she knew full well Donald was going to be there, whether he wanted to or not. And Donald, who’d missed out on the births of his eldest three kids, complied. He was in New York when Marla’s water broke at Mar-a-Lago at two o’clock in the morning. An hour later he boarded his plane, bound for the hospital Marla had chosen in Palm Beach. By six o’clock he was by Marla’s side in the delivery room.

  Perhaps he should have chosen Don Jr.’s light-speed delivery instead. Marla was in labor for ten hours, and as someone who prided herself on her spirituality, she turned the birthing suite into a full-blown New Age wonderland. Candles were lit all around the room. New Age music played softly in the background. She invited her manager’s fiancée, a Native American who called herself a “nurturer,” to give massages and send prayers to help make the birthing process more peaceful for mom and baby. “Pray for me now,” Marla would shout as a contraction neared. Donald was a wreck. Marla’s mother Ann and her closest friend were in the room, too, trying to settle things down, to keep things as calm as possible for Marla and make sure Donald did not run away or blow all the candles out in frustration. “He could not stand all the hippie-dippie stuff Marla was into,” one longtime friend of his remembered. “It infuriated him, particularly when it came to his child. You have to remember this is a man who ate steak and potatoes and heaps of ice cream and fast food and can after can of Coke. You think he cared about his kid being brought into the world with Native American prayers in candlelight?”

  What he wanted was the ob-gyn to give Marla drugs. Strong drugs. Drugs that might make her stop all that screaming, because all of it was freaking him out. “I was very nervous, because she was in a lot of pain,” Donald said. “I tried to convince her to take something, but she wouldn’t. I asked the doctor to convince her, but he knew Marla was determined not to take any drugs. She’s so strong, such a strong woman. I’m amazed.” Marla added that she and Donald “did a lot of kissing while I was delivering,” and once the baby was born, it was Donald who cut the umbilical cord.