A moment later, the phone rang again. It was Cohn. Expecting another tirade, Brady told Cohn if he was going to sue, he should call the newspaper’s lawyer. “Jim, Jim, Jim,” Cohn said. “There’s going to be no lawsuit. It’s very good for Donald to let off steam. That’s just Donald. And we encourage that kind of thing, but no one’s going to sue anybody. I’m just telling you that there will be no lawsuit.” There was no lawsuit.
Trump quickly figured out that some tabloid reporters would publish an item just on his say-so; he took advantage of that to float notions that might help his business. Among the tall tales he fed the tabs, according to former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res, was one that the White House was considering moving the president’s New York suite to the Trump-owned Plaza Hotel. “Donald had a way of getting to print whatever he would say, even if it weren’t necessarily the whole and honest truth,” Res said. “He had tremendous self-confidence, which is important. He managed to say what he would say, and people would write it and then it would be the truth. That was the thing with him that they call the big lie. You say something enough times, it becomes the truth. And he is the master of that.”
Trump had a knack for laundering quotes or rumors under the cloak of anonymity. If he didn’t want his name connected to something, he’d persuade reporters to attribute statements to “a friend of Trump’s” or “a high-ranking official in the Trump organization.” Years later, reporters unfamiliar with Trump would express confusion when, during an initial interview, he would say something was “off the record, but you can use it.” “He knew how to play the game,” George Rush said. “A lot of things would come from ‘a friend of Donald’s,’ and so he would talk in the third person about what Donald was thinking.”
Some reporters criticized the tabloids’ willingness to be used. Mark Singer, a reporter at the New Yorker who profiled Trump in 1997, said Trump used the tabloids as “his mythmaking apparatus.” But reporters at the tabloids said their readers—and especially blue-collar New Yorkers—loved any item about Trump. “When we would talk particularly to immigrants, recent immigrants who were the readers of the Daily News, they would always want to know about Donald Trump,” Rush said. “He embodied the American Dream to them. Excessive, conspicuous consumption is not a bad thing in New York to a lot of people. It’s kind of comic what he was doing. I’ve always felt like Donald was in on the jokes. He knows he’s over the top, but that’s where he likes to live.”
Trump’s fan base was particularly strong outside Manhattan. “New Yorkers are very attuned to accents, and he had an outer-borough accent,” said Ed Kosner, the former editor of New York, Esquire, and the Daily News. “Even though he went to Penn and all the rest of it, he sounded like a guy who grew up in Queens, which is what he did, and I think people recognize that in him. They didn’t think he was a snooty guy. They thought he was a regular guy who’s made a lot of money.”
As impressed as Trump’s fans were, many reporters concluded that the payoff for all the media attention was greater for the celebrity than for his admirers. “He was literally addicted to publicity and recognition,” said former New York magazine writer John Taylor. “He would get this, like, dopamine surge in his brain. I would walk with him into some building or room, and Trump would kind of hang back and watch the room, and wait until the room had filled, and he could have that moment of recognition, when you’d see waves of people turn and realize it was him. . . . He lived for those moments.”
Sometimes it seemed as if recognition was the only thing that mattered. In 1988, when Jeffrey Breslow, one of the country’s leading inventors of board games, visited Trump Tower to pitch Trump on a Monopoly-like game that would be named after him, the inventor was prepared to get down on the floor and pit his strategic wiles against the guy whose picture would be on the box of Trump: The Game. But Trump had no interest in playing or even hearing the details of the game. He took a quick glance at the mock-up of the box’s cover and said, “I like it—what’s next?” What came next was a lightning-fast negotiation, a promotional blitz, and the sale of about a million units. Trump happily made appearances to sell the game, but wanted no role in determining its content.
Trump’s focus on getting his name onto products, buildings, and news stories left some of his top executives, as well as reporters, wondering if there was more to the man than his public persona. He would grant an in-person interview, in the hospital room, on the day his daughter Tiffany was born. For many years, he would call columnists and ask for their assessment of his latest romantic conquest, preferably with a numerical rating on a 1-to-10 scale. “Everywhere Donald Trump turns, he sees Donald Trump,” Singer said. “He doesn’t see the other guy much. It becomes really hard to distinguish [how much] of the promotion and publicity . . . is good for business and how much of it is to fill that hollowness inside of him.”
• • •
IN THE FALL OF 1984, Roy Cohn fell ill. A year later, he entered the National Institutes of Health hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, maintaining that he had liver cancer. But he was suffering from the effects of HIV infection. As Cohn struggled to stay alive, Trump pulled back from his friend for a time. Trump had always known that Cohn was gay. Cohn was “invariably with some very good-looking young man,” Trump wrote in his first book. “But Roy never talked about it. He just didn’t like the image. He felt that to the average person, being gay was almost synonymous with being a wimp.” If someone brought up gay rights, Trump noted, “Roy was always the first one to speak out against them.”
Now Cohn, fighting his final battle, was miffed by Trump’s apparent betrayal: “I can’t believe he’s doing this to me. Donald pisses ice water.” As Cohn’s health deteriorated, his unethical behavior as a lawyer caught up to him. The Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court accused him of “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation.” A host of luminaries rose to defend Cohn’s good character, including Trump, who pivoted again, returning to his friend’s side and inviting him to visit Mar-a-Lago.
In 1986, Cohn was disbarred. “For an attorney practicing for nearly 40 years in this state, such misconduct is inexcusable,” the court said. Cohn died five weeks later. He was fifty-nine. His friends held a memorial service for him. Trump attended, standing silently in the back.
• • •
“MY AREA IS CONTROVERSY,” Cohn once said. “My tough front is my biggest asset. I don’t write polite letters.” Throughout his first decades in business, Trump littered New York with his own aggressive correspondence. Sometimes handwritten, sometimes typed, usually on the distinct gold-embossed Trump-organization letterhead, the letters landed on the desks of competitors and detractors. When Trump wanted media attention, he’d send a copy of a letter to selected reporters or columnists. When New York magazine’s architecture critic Carter Wiseman panned a Trump building, Wiseman got a letter calling him a loser and a poor dresser who wore corduroy suits. Times architecture critic Goldberger found his dress habits critiqued on Page Six after Goldberger wrote negatively about Trump’s Television City plans. Sometimes Trump eschewed the company letterhead and just annotated a copy of the offending piece of journalism and sent it to the author. When Times columnist Gail Collins called Trump a “financially embattled thousandaire,” he sent her column back with her face circled. Next to it, Trump had written, “The Face of a Dog!”
Sometimes letters weren’t enough—for example, when the offending party was dead. In 1990, Forbes magazine published an article downgrading Trump’s wealth from $1.7 billion to $500 million. The magazine’s owner, Malcolm Forbes, had died a few months earlier of a heart attack at the age of seventy, but Trump believed the deceased publisher was to blame for the article. About to publish his second book, Trump: Surviving at the Top, Trump called his coauthor, Charles Leerhsen, with a request to add a few pages about Forbes. In a television interview a few weeks later, Trump said his book would be “very interesting with regard to Forbes. It’s nothing I wanted to
tell, but after [Forbes] did that number on me, I figured I might as well.” In the book, published later that year, Trump criticized Forbes for having kept his homosexuality secret. In New York’s elite social circles, Forbes’s sexual orientation was well known, but publicly he was closeted; he’d been married for thirty-nine years and had four sons before divorcing. Trump wrote that it was a “double standard” that Forbes “lived openly as a homosexual—which he had every right to do—but expected the media and his famous friends to cover for him.” The story about Trump’s diminished wealth, he wrote, was payback after Trump refused to let Forbes bring two underaged young men into the bar at the Trump-owned Plaza Hotel.
• • •
WHILE SOME JOURNALISTS FOUND themselves in the midst of a Trump media feud by accident, or merely by doing their jobs, one fledgling publication actively courted the tycoon’s fury: Spy magazine, an acid, brilliantly funny monthly that delighted in popping the inflated egos of the Reagan years. Spy’s founders, Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter, had coincidentally both written profiles of Trump—Andersen for Time magazine, Carter for GQ. Andersen and Carter started Spy in 1986 with the mission to be “smart, fun, funny, fearless.” The monthly quickly developed a reputation for an acerbic tone and creative insults. In Spy, CBS president Laurence Tisch was a “dwarf billionaire,” and Vice President Dan Quayle a “dumb blond rich white kid plunked down in water far over his head.” No public figure drew as consistent, heated attacks, though, as Trump. Andersen and Carter targeted Trump because he epitomized what their magazine was created to mock: the “ostentation, brashness, and vulgarity of New York in the ’80s.”
In Spy’s debut issue, Trump was included on a list of the Ten Most Embarrassing New Yorkers. The next year, the first Spy 100 list of “the most annoying, alarming, and appalling people, places and things” ranked Trump number three. In 1989, Spy explained that Trump had become so appalling that he had advanced to “another plane altogether.” That year’s Spy 100 ranked people by how much they were like Trump, or according to their “Trumpscore.” Spy staffers coined epithets to refer to Trump, a lengthy list that included “well-fed condo hustler,” “shuttle-owning dilettante-megalomaniac,” and “joyless punk millionaire.” One insult bothered Trump more than any other, though, outliving the magazine that created it: “short-fingered vulgarian.” Soon after Trump: The Art of the Deal was published in 1987, Trump sent a copy to Spy’s office. On the book’s cover, Trump had circled his own fingers in gold marker, an apparent rebuke of the suggestion that his digits were short. Spy staffers thought perhaps Trump had a better sense of humor about himself than they had given him credit for—until they opened the book. There, Trump had tucked a handwritten note that could have been penned by Cohn: “If you hit me, I will hit you back 100 times harder.”
The more Spy hit him, the more Trump struck back. He told Playboy that Spy was “a piece of garbage.” He repeatedly threatened to sue the magazine. He told the News’ Liz Smith that Spy would close in a year; Spy embraced the prediction and added a monthly feature: a countdown to its own extinction. “He made it like a volleying sport,” former Spy editor Susan Morrison said. “It was so fun to poke at him. It was like bearbaiting because he would respond and write us letters and call us losers. He was the gift that kept on giving.” The magazine didn’t just poke Trump with inventive epithets. Spy fact-checked the financial claims Trump made in Trump: The Art of the Deal, and in 1990 included him in its prank experiment, “America’s Cheapest Zillionaire.” The magazine created a company—the National Refund Clearinghouse—and, starting at $1.11, mailed checks of decreasing amounts to dozens of well-known wealthy people. When Spy got down to its smallest refund checks—for thirteen cents—only two people deposited them: Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian arms dealer and billionaire, and Trump. (Years later, the New Yorker’s Singer, who became a Trump target after Singer wrote a critical profile, mailed Trump a check for $37.82, also as a joke. Trump deposited it.)
Trump’s prediction of Spy’s demise eventually proved right; the magazine briefly folded in 1994, then closed for good in 1998. Spy’s insults left a lasting sting, though. For years Carter, who became editor of Vanity Fair, periodically received photos of Trump torn from magazines and newspapers, sent by Trump, who circled images of his hands in gold. As recently as April 2015, Trump sent a picture with a note affixed: “See, not so short!” Carter sent it back, with his own note: “Actually, quite short.”
• • •
IN LATE 1989, SOMEONE sent a photograph of a blond model named Marla Maples to the newsroom of the New York Post, along with a note saying the woman was dating a prominent married businessman. Maples was of little intrinsic interest to the tabloids; she was a homecoming queen from Dalton, Georgia, America’s carpet capital, who had done some modeling for a ceramic-tile adhesive maker and Delta Airlines before she arrived in Manhattan and rented a $400-a-month studio apartment in Chelsea, determined to make it in the big city. But Page Six published her picture, along with a short, cryptic story, because the rumor was that the model was having an affair with a “business tycoon”—Donald Trump was cheating on Ivana.
In the newsroom of the Post, word spread that the story was off-limits. Murdoch had sold the paper to Peter Kalikow, a real estate developer who was friendly with Trump. A Post staffer had once walked into Kalikow’s office to hear Trump on the phone berating the publisher for what he perceived as negative coverage. When word got to Kalikow that some of his reporters were pursuing rumors of Trump’s infidelity, he told Lou Colasuonno, the paper’s managing editor, “We cannot break this story.” Why not? the editor asked. “Please,” Kalikow said. “I’m going to have so much grief at home.” He explained that his wife was close to Ivana, and his paper simply couldn’t be the one that made public the rumored trouble in the marriage.
In her East Thirty-Eighth Street home office, Liz Smith was hearing the same rumors. Smith had been writing regularly about the Trumps for more than a decade. She’d been socializing with the couple, too, traveling with them on their private jet, attending their family anniversaries, weddings, and birthdays. When the Trumps refurbished Mar-a-Lago, Smith spent a weekend at the estate with a group of Ivana’s girlfriends, including ABC-TV’s Barbara Walters. Smith made no secret of her friendship, and when Donald’s name appeared in her columns, it was often preceded by two words: “my pal.” This may have bothered journalism ethicists, but Smith explained that she was a gossip columnist, not an “authentic journalist.” Anyway, Smith liked Trump. When they bumped into each other at parties, he would pull Smith in for a hug, turn her toward the next person, and say, “She’s the greatest! Isn’t she the greatest?”—an act Smith always found embarrassing and a bit endearing, given Trump’s germ phobia.
In 1990, Smith called Donald and told him a “strong story” was going around about him cheating on Ivana. She tried to sell him on giving her the exclusive, offering to print it in a way that wouldn’t be “too inflammatory.” Donald didn’t deny the rumors, but he wasn’t ready to go public. A few weeks later, Smith sent Trump a letter: “Give me this story or you are going to be in someplace a lot worse than the Liz Smith column.” Trump never replied.
In early February, as Smith sat at her desk cranking out a column, she got a call from Ivana. Donald was in Japan to watch a Mike Tyson fight and talk to Japanese investors about buying the Plaza Hotel. Ivana invited Smith over, and when she arrived, Ivana was in tears. She told Smith the whole story. Even before Ivana discovered his affair, Donald had told her he’d lost sexual interest in her, and even a battery of plastic surgery she’d gotten recently hadn’t made a difference. Now, like her husband, Ivana didn’t want to go public about the affair. She feared that when Donald inevitably left her, he’d take away friends like Smith and Barbara Walters. Smith tried to allay Ivana’s fears and urged her to call a prominent publicist, John Scanlon. The three of them developed a plan. On Friday, February 9, 1990, Smith had her Sunday column hand-delivered f
rom her apartment to her editor at the News. She attached a note, half joking, “After Donald gets off the plane [from Japan] Sunday night, I’m afraid he’s going to kill her—or me.”
“Exclusive! Love on the Rocks,” the headline blared across the bottom of the front page on Sunday, next to a smiling picture of Smith. The story inside had few details, but was accompanied by a biography of Donald and a story chronicling his twelve-year marriage to Ivana—a full two-page spread on the couple. “The marriage of Ivana and Donald Trump seems to be on the rocks, and inside sources say lawyers are already at work trying to divide the complex Trump holdings,” Smith wrote.
It’s unclear whom the story infuriated more: the Post staffers who had wanted to break it, or Donald. With the story finally out, Kalikow no longer stood in the way. An old-fashioned tabloid war broke out. It would be several months before Smith’s editors let her write about a different topic. As the paper assigned an army of reporters to the story, an editor explained to Smith, “If this isn’t a tabloid story, then there are no tabloids.” The next day, the Post’s front screamed, “Split.” A story inside offered Donald’s version: he already had left Ivana. A source described only as “one intimate” of Trump’s provided this quote from Donald: “I like Ivana, but we’ve grown apart. Her level of arrogance has grown steadily worse in recent years.” The Post reported that what angered Trump most was not that his private marital issues were now public, but rather one phrase in Smith’s story: “The megadeveloper became positively apoplectic over a newspaper item yesterday suggesting that Ivana was his business partner.”
February 1990 was a newsy month. Nelson Mandela was freed from prison. Drexel Burnham Lambert, a major Wall Street investment banking firm, went bankrupt. President George H. W. Bush welcomed the new president of Czechoslovakia, the former dissident playwright Václav Havel, to the White House, as the collapse of the Soviet empire accelerated. But for weeks, one story dominated the front pages of the city’s tabloids: Donald vs. Ivana. After putting Mandela on the February 12 cover, the Daily News plastered Trump items on its front for twelve straight days. The Post ran page-one Trump items for eight days in a row. The obsession in the nation’s media capital spread to serious national publications. No morsel of news was too small. When the AP reported that Trump and Marla Maples had attended the same church, the Post’s front page blared “They Met in Church.” When Trump flew to Mar-a-Lago for Ivana’s birthday, it led the Daily News; the Post returned fire the same day with “Trumps Share Fla. Palace, but in . . . SEPARATE BEDS.” The News ran a reader poll gauging support for Donald or Ivana and put cardboard cutouts of both in its lobby and let readers pose for pictures next to their favorite Trump. The Post compared vital statistics for Marla and Ivana—age, height, weight, dress size—under the headline “Tale of the Tape in the Battle of the Belles.” The next day’s Daily News included a chart breaking down which members of New York social circles sided with Donald or with Ivana. Donald had Cher, Elton John, Frank Sinatra, and “everyone in Atlantic City,” while Ivana’s supporters included Calvin Klein, Oprah Winfrey, Princess Diana, and “all of N.Y. City’s florists.” (Barbara Walters was part of a smaller group of “fencesitters,” along with George and Barbara Bush.)
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