She also wouldn’t remember the time before her parents separated, when they were an unconventional nuclear family. Of all the lucky breaks Tiffany Trump has gotten in her life, perhaps that is the luckiest break of them all.
Marla and Donald and their little baby girl Tiffany, and sometimes Donny, Ivanka, and Eric, shuttled between a few homes. There was Trump Tower, Trump Park, the other Manhattan apartment Marla and Tiffany stayed in, and Mar-a-Lago. None of them were particularly happy in any of them, in the conventional, nuclear family sense. That was largely because Marla and Donald, as the heads of this very modern family, weren’t particularly happy with each other. Marla—content in her New Age–iness, her mostly vegan diet, her distaste for harsh language, especially around Tiffany—stood in opposition to practically every character trait that defined her now husband. Around the time of his fiftieth birthday, Donald sat for an interview with Playboy, in which the reporter noted that he had lost weight on what he called the “anti-Marla diet.” Most anything she served him, he would grimace at. “What the fuck is this?” he’d say. “Want it?” And he’d cast off what he’d been served on to those around him. The regime got him down twenty pounds—a change he didn’t much mind on himself, but loathed on Marla. As friends recalled, he liked her with a little more meat on her bones. She, however, “felt sloppy” with extra weight, and “couldn’t wait to get rid of those pounds.” To her, they made her feel not much like herself. It just so happened, though, that that is the version Donald was attracted to, even if it made his wife feel dowdy and itchy in her own skin. They also fought over her spirituality. Donald didn’t mind going to church; that is, after all, where the couple had sometimes met in the heat of their illicit courtship. But he liked to do his worship in churches that knew they had to worship him a bit, too, in exchange for his presence on Sundays. “I don’t want to go to that hillbilly church you go to,” he’d tell Marla. “If I’m going, I want to go to a church where somebody knows me.”
On their way down to Mar-a-Lago one spring, on Donald’s 727 out of LaGuardia with a Playboy reporter on board, Donald took a seat in one of the big bucket chairs covered in buttery beige leather. Marla carried food aboard for everyone, along with all of little Tiffany’s things. The girl, in a plaid jumper, milled about, as if flying on a jet bearing her last name en route to her 118-room mansion on the ocean was as normal as going on a trip to the park or the zoo—as, in her very young reality, it was. Donald was in a sour mood and wanted to pop in one of the movies he kept in a cabinet on board his aircraft. Friends remember that he often settled on Zulu, the 1960s war flick depicting British soldiers fending off four thousand Zulu warriors in a bloody battle during the Anglo-Zulu War nearly a century earlier (“He loved the scene where the mountain in the background starts moving and you realize it’s thousands of Zulus,” one friend recalled). But he chose Pulp Fiction on that flight. Marla tore into her husband, in her gentle, southern way, of course. Surely there was a film more suitable in that cabinet for Tiffany than Pulp Fiction. Something with the Muppets, for instance. He popped the VHS in as if Marla hadn’t said a word. She dragged her daughter toward the front of the plane, away from her father and his TV screen, when the f-bombs started flowing freely almost as soon as the movie started. (The flight back was happier; the reporter noted that Donald swept up Tiffany onto his lap and asked her to hold open her little toddler arms to show him how much she loved her daddy. Her wingspan only went so far. “Only that much?” he teased.)
At Mar-a-Lago, Marla struggled with how to blend Donald’s oldest children, who made no secret of their feelings toward her, with his new family. From the get-go, the melding was fraught. In an interview with Geraldo Rivera a few days after Tiffany was born, Ivana said that she had to reassure her children that their relationship with their father was separate from his relationship with Marla and his new baby. “I sat them down and I told them there will be nothing changing in their lives,” she said. “They will have their father and he will love them the same, and we have to just explain to them because they might feel threatened by a new baby.”
Marla didn’t always ease those concerns. Playboy noted that Marla bristled at the oil portrait of Ivana and Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric hanging in his office. Donald brushed her off, so she took it upon herself to commission an oil painting of her own to replace it. None of Donald’s children sat for this one, of course, but she commissioned an idealized portrait of all of his children, this time with Tiffany included, sitting on Ivanka’s lap. It was a masterful trick that Donald accepted as a gift on his fiftieth birthday. The old painting was carted out, the new one hung in its place.
There was some levity, particularly when Donald viewed Marla as the starlet she came to New York to be, not as the rail-thin, hippie-dippie wife he never much intended to have in the first place. In the summer of 1992, when Marla spent a few long weeks practicing for her role on Broadway. Donald was taken by Marla’s coolness around it. Marla not only faced her critics head-on, but she also gave them a performance strong enough to shut up all the people who went in practically drooling to have nasty things to say about it. As her star rose, so did his. For that time, Marla was not his mistress, or a liability, or a minder keeping him from living the bachelor life he knew he could live if not for her sticking around. Marla was a Broadway actress—a not-so-bad one, at that. She elevated him. And that one fact sometimes brightened up their more common state of gloom. Tiffany was not yet born when her mom stepped onto the Broadway stage in the Will Rogers’ Follies for the first time, but she was conceived during her stint in the show. In fact, her parents announced that they were expecting a little baby Trump one night before Marla went onstage to perform, to a group of hungry photographers and reporters waiting in the wings for the couple’s latest publicity maneuver. It was one of the points in their relationship in which Donald took great pride in Marla.
Tiffany could not, as a baby or a toddler, have known that the one aspect of Marla that really lit Donald up was that she could be this bold, calm star. But Tiffany, in gestation and in her genetic makeup, unquestionably inherited some of her mother’s showmanship. She got that from her father, too, who never met a crowd he did not like. That was the case long before he ran for president. He was the man who barely kissed Marla at the altar after their wedding ceremony at the Plaza, but smooched her four times in front of the flashbulbs and onlookers who came to catch a glimpse of the couple after the nuptials outside the hotel. He starred in a reality television show and relished every magazine cover on which he appeared, hanging them in his office and strewing them across Mar-a-Lago in silver frames Ivana bought. He’s sat for countless interviews on cable TV and with Howard Stern, splashed his name across buildings and steaks and water bottles and ties and colognes and mattresses. That Tiffany would have a flair for the dramatic in her blood is hardly surprising. It would be far more surprising if she did not.
But there is a bit of nurture at play, too. She was too little to have picked up on the fact that her father praised her mother for her star power, but children are perceptive enough to pick up on when their parents are affectionate and when they are at odds. The theme was so common that it would hardly be shocking that the little girl, who for all intents and purposes grew up an only child in the Trump house, picked up on that, subconsciously or otherwise.
Tiffany never shied away from a performance, even at a very young age, and it was a trait that never much faded away—apart from the nerves that came before she went onstage at the Republican National Convention during her father’s presidential campaign. But that performance was far different. That wasn’t about being a star; that was about being a political savior, and that was not the kind of secret stardust Tiffany was born with and had grown into. She made her own debut in an ad for the agency Lois/USA, in a spot for a Minolta camera they shot in Long Island City in the summer of 1995. Tiffany, just three years old, with a mop of tight, white-blond ringlets, and honking baby blues, had a giggle spread across m
ost of her face for most of the shoot. “I can keep my little girl at any age with Minolta’s Freedom Family Zoom,” Marla said as she snapped a photo with the Japanese-made camera of Tiffany, who sat next to her mother, playing with a delicate little tea set. A year later Donald and Marla trotted their daughter downtown to the opening of his shiny new trophy building, 40 Wall Street, which J. P. Morgan built before anyone had an inkling that Wall Street would turn into the world’s financial epicenter. Donald bragged to the crowd he had assembled that June evening in 1996, feeling ascendant, triumphant, and back on top. He had invited one hundred people, he told them, and four hundred showed up. All eyes turned toward Tiffany, three at the time, who Marla held up like a prize. Her parents let her be the one to draw a raffle ticket that would award one lucky winner a weekend at Mar-a-Lago. Undeterred by the attention, she didn’t hesitate, not even for a second.
She flinched less on Donald’s fiftieth birthday, when Marla invited four hundred people to the Trump Tower triplex to fete her husband and toast his half century on top. She had commissioned a statue of her husband made out of sugar, depicting him as a sickly sweet Superman with a dollar sign emblazoned across his chest. She ordered waiters to pass around champagne and strawberries, and as Eartha Kitt crooned “Happy Birthday,” six hundred gold-hued balloons fell from the ceiling onto the crowd. All of that was before little Tiffany got up in front of the hundreds of people in her sweeping apartment to sing her dad a song and perform a little dance. “A little sunny and a little sad,” as Playboy described the scene.
This became something of a habit for Tiffany. When she traveled to Nantucket with Marla for a film festival in the summer of 1997, she sat down next to a pianist playing a tune in the Chancellor’s Restaurant in the Point Breeze Hotel, having him scooch over a bit so she could settle her three-year-old self right next to him. They broke into “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz together, before going into “Tomorrow” from Annie, and then belting out “A Whole New World” from Aladdin. “She has a nice pitch,” the pianist, Bob Ford, told the Boston Herald, shortly after their duets. The mother-daughter duo left only because Marla was hungry—for caviar, in fact, and knew her daughter would want some too. The restaurant sent them home with doggie bags filled with the delicacy, enough for mom and toddler to enjoy.
By the time Tiffany turned six, she and Marla had made their first television appearance together, for the Lake Tahoe International Spring SnowFest in 2000. Marla and Tiffany appeared as part of a celebrity challenge that would air on PAX television that spring, sledding down mountains and trekking through snow and ice. At fourteen, she appeared in her first fashion show at the Beverly Hills Hotel for Anand Jon, a designer whose shows Ivanka had walked in before her, as had Nicky and Paris Hilton and Elizabeth Jagger. (At the time Tiffany was asked to strut down his runway, however, the designer was facing multiple counts of sexual assault and held on $1.2 million bail in a Los Angeles jail. “Donald is going to throw up when he hears Tiffany is doing this,” one friend told the New York Post. In reality, until her plan appeared in the Post, it is hard to say if Donald would have heard about it at all.)
Marla never balked at Tiffany’s star. In fact, she helped facilitate it. In 2011, when Tiffany was a senior in high school, Marla reached out to her friend Steban Demari, a songwriter who went by the name of Sprite. The two had become close nearly two decades earlier, and once Marla and Tiffany moved to Los Angeles, they would write music and go to music events together around town. In 2010, for instance, they posed for a series of photos together on a red carpet outside of the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, before an Artists for Peace and Justice and We.The.Children Project benefit for Haiti. Demari placed one hand on Marla’s shimmery gold, beaded minidress, and another around her leather jacket, his nose nestled into her cheek. Marla asked him to help write a song for her daughter, and her old friend obliged. He brought on a producer Marla also knew to work on the track, and the producer recruited an Antiguan rapper, who goes by the name Logiq, to record a verse in the song. “They wanted a hip-hop verse on it ’cause I’m a hip-hop recording artist and I’m a songwriter,” Logiq said in an interview of how he ended up connected to the teenage Trump and her budding music career. “[The producer] is a friend of mine and mutual friend of Marla Maples, so he called me up and was like ‘Yo, I want you on this track.’” He said that he listened to the track and he liked what he heard, “so it was basically a done deal from there.”
The track they came up with was “Like a Bird,” a synthetic dance-pop tune featuring a voice hardly decipherable as human as a result of all of the autotune and other crafty postproduction tricks. “Like a Bird” was the only song Tiffany released, though Logiq has said in an interview that they recorded two or three others together that he hopes will someday see the light of day. The song got little attention when it first came out, apart from a mention in an appearance Tiffany and Marla made on an episode of Oprah filmed in 2013. Tiffany takes her cameras into the recording studio with her, and she discussed her budding music career for the first time. “I love music,” she said in an interview from her childhood bedroom in Calabasas. “It’s always been very dear to me. It’s more of a hobby right now, but we’ll see in a couple of years if I actually want to take it to the next level as a professional.” It was not unlike the way Ivanka talked about her modeling career, though Tiffany’s older sister pursued photo shoots and runway shows with far more vigor than Tiffany went after recording and writing songs. Ivanka, though, had an agent, and her father pushing her along to be the sort of celebrity he wanted for himself. Friends have said there is no question he would have been more than happy for Tiffany to find that sort of fame, too, though it’s not likely he took as much of an interest in her career as he did with Ivanka’s. Plus, becoming a full-blown pop star takes a lot more elbow grease—and, for the daughter of a billionaire, greased palms—than becoming a run-of-the-mill model.
Tiffany’s pop stardom was over before it started. It stayed a hobby, and she never did take it to that next level as a professional, as she suggested to Oprah. That Tiffany’s brief stint as a recording artist was done alongside her mother, aided and arranged by her, in fact, falls in line with how the mother-daughter duo operated from the time Tiffany was born. With Donald working so often, as he had with his older children during his first marriage, Marla and Tiffany were often left to their own devices. Before the split, she would take Tiffany to Central Park, trailing up a jungle gym behind her little toddler to race down a slide (a bodyguard Donald hired from his security team at the Plaza to look after his youngest daughter would trail them closely, lingering on the playground as they chased each other around). To the press, Marla painted a rosy image of a happy home, in which she and her daughter lived their own Kumbaya existence within Donald’s twenty-four-karat life. “Tiffany and I rise at about 8 a.m. and give big hugs to each other while we sing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ or ‘Oh What a Beautiful Morning,’” she told the Guardian in an interview, describing her daily routine with her daughter. “Most mornings I make her an organic sunshine egg. I cut out the center of a piece of wheat bread and fry an egg in organic butter. It makes an egg face inside the bread. My mom, Tiffany and I usually do a little workout. Tiffany has even got a baby tennis racket.”
Of course, that was a snapshot of their day and a snippet of their lives, the cleaned-up, see-everything-is-just-fine, grin-and-bear-it veneer she’d perfected and packaged. It was the version of her life, and of her daughter’s, that she wanted the press to believe; maybe she said it because she wanted to believe it, even if she knew the reality was not quite as pollyannaish. If she projected that part and repeated that story enough, maybe she could will it to come true. Maybe, for a moment, everyone, including Marla, would buy that that was how her fractured fairy tale turned out.
It was far more fractured than she let on for years. And once she and Donald announced that they were separating in the spring of 1997, a
ll the truths about her life and her relationship and the father of her daughter that she had shoved down deep in her stomach upchucked right out of her. In an interview that summer, Marla said that the marriage hadn’t worked because her values and concept of a partner and father differed so wildly from Donald’s. Marla, as a mistress turned girlfriend turned fiancé, had a distinct advantage over Donald’s early girlfriends and Ivana in that when she decided to settle down with Donald, she already had a window into the kind of father he would be, the sort of effort and attention he gave to his three older children long before Tiffany came around. And yet she either did not care or thought he would be different the second time around. To be fair, some men, who were young and still working like maniacs when they had children with their first wives, relish the opportunity for a do-over when they remarry and have a second set of children. But that wasn’t Donald. “After all these years, I realized that he couldn’t change who he was,” Marla recalled. Who he was turned out to be exactly what she did not want for her daughter—for many reasons. “I wanted a man who would read stories with me to the baby,” she said. “I absolutely wish he would have been present in all of their lives. I would have loved to have seen him be the kind of dad who would take us all to Disney World and sit around the dinner table without having the financial news on.” What irked her was that Donald cared more about work than his children, and spent far more time concerned with building “the prettiest buildings all around the world” than nurturing his family within his own home. “His main priority is moneymaking and that’s where we differ tremendously,” she said. “I don’t think that’s a good life to bring a child up in. I think basic values are much more important. That’s something money can’t buy.”
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