Derek removes her glasses. “You’re too pretty to be bad,” she purrs.
“You noticed,” Trump replies, his lips forming his famous pout (this performance won him a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actor).
Trump the mogul wanted the world to see a hard-nosed, almost imperious businessman, but Hollywood experienced Trump the actor as an eager, cooperative performer who learned his lines, did not require much direction, and was “particular about his hair,” said Shelley Jensen, who directed him in Fresh Prince. The cameos allowed Trump to poke fun at his reputation for cartoonish vanity while advertising his brand, at no cost, to millions of Americans. If he came off as thin-skinned in interviews and in his business relationships—he spoke often of suing his critics—this was his opportunity to present himself as a good sport, able to withstand barbs and even lampoon himself. “If you were going to pick a real estate mogul for a show,” said Jensen, “he was one of those guys you’d go after because he was one of the few who would actually do it.”
Four years later, Trump appeared as himself in another sitcom, Spin City, which starred Michael J. Fox as an adviser to fictional New York City mayor Randall Winston. With their topical scripts, the show’s producers liked to create bit parts for prominent New Yorkers such as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Senator Alfonse D’Amato, and Yankee pitcher Roger Clemens. In one episode, the fictional mayor experiences writer’s block as he tries to craft his memoir, which leads Fox’s character to invite Trump to City Hall.
“Mr. Trump here wrote Art of the Deal,” Fox’s character tells the mayor, “then he wrote a new bestseller, Art of the Comeback.”
“Wow,” the mayor responds, inviting Trump to take a seat. Ignoring the chair reserved for guests, Trump instead takes a seat behind the mayor’s desk, prompting guffaws from the audience. “Must have been tough getting started,” the mayor says of Trump’s writing.
“First day, nine chapters,” comes the casual reply.
Walter Barnett, a Spin City producer, said Trump’s aide had warned, prior to taping, that his boss “was shy, didn’t like to shake hands, and was germophobic. I was expecting this crazy, paranoid guy.” When Trump arrived on the set, Andy Cadiff, the episode’s director, braced for a “nightmare” because “you had an image of him that he could be difficult and demanding. Frankly, I remember him being delightful. He was having a good time. He was totally cooperative and game, he seemed genuinely happy to be there. I usually remember the pricks and assholes who came on the show, and he was not one of them.”
On a 1999 episode of Sex and the City entitled “The Man, the Myth, the Viagra,” Trump played himself at the Plaza Hotel, which he owned at the time. “A cosmopolitan and Donald Trump—you just don’t get more New York than that,” Sarah Jessica Parker’s character, Carrie Bradshaw, says as viewers see Trump finishing a business meeting at a table inside the hotel’s Oak Room. “Look, Ed, I’ve got to go—think about it. I will be in my office at Trump Tower,” he says. When Victoria Hochberg, the show’s director, handed Trump a sheet with his lines, Donald looked them over and promptly handed back the script. “Donald, don’t you want to study them?” Hochberg asked.
“Nope, I’ve got it,” he replied, causing the director more than a few anxious thoughts, including “Oh, dear, it’s going to require, like, twenty takes.” But then, Hochberg said, “he got it on the first try. One-take Donald.”
In 2000, Trump threw himself into a more risqué role. At New York’s Inner Circle show, an annual production featuring satirical sketches by City Hall reporters and the mayor, Trump, as himself, made a pass at Giuliani, who was playing a woman shopping at a department store. “You know, you’re really beautiful,” Trump told Giuliani’s character, who wore a dress and blond wig. When the mayor’s character sprayed a sampling of perfume on herself, Trump buried his face in Giuliani’s neck and breasts. “Oh, you dirty boy—Donald, I thought you were a gentleman!” Giuliani shrieked.
Elliot Cuker, the show’s director, was inspired to create Trump’s role because he knew Trump from New York’s social circuit, where their typical conversation involved assessing female beauty. “We would always talk about women; what do you think about this one or that one; it was like he was a traveling judge,” Cuker said. Asking Trump to “come on to Rudy” did not seem like a stretch: “I gave him the idea of what was going to happen—Rudy is an attractive woman, you’re going to have a love scene. You want to kiss her. Go with it. I did not tell him to kiss his breast. He did that himself. He was spontaneous and open to it, and those are the earmarks of a real showman.”
Trump did have his limits, though. Hosting Saturday Night Live in 2004, he rejected writer T. Sean Shannon’s proposal that he play a tattoo artist who inks only customers’ faces because all other bodily locations have grown passé. “He was, like, ‘No, I’m not doing that. What’s next?’ ” Shannon said. The writer came up with another sketch based on The Prince and the Pauper, in which Trump played a janitor and Darrell Hammond was his identical twin, who was a tycoon. As the janitor, Trump told his double that his office “looks like the Liberace museum” and that his comb-over “looks like you killed a squirrel . . . and put it right on top of your head.” But Trump asked that Shannon tweak the sketch so that the prince and the pauper were not siblings. “Just don’t make it my brother because I don’t want people to think I’m making fun of him,” Trump told Shannon.
Trump, Shannon said, “was willing to make fun of himself. He was prepared every day. He wasn’t nervous. He was very charming and straightforward. He was always that persona. He was Donald Trump at all times.” No more so than in his opening monologue. “It’s really great to be here at Saturday Night Live, but I’ll be completely honest—it’s even better for Saturday Night Live that I’m here,” he boasted. “Nobody’s bigger than me. Nobody’s better than me. I’m a ratings machine.” He then informed the audience that The Apprentice was the country’s most watched show and that he was the “highest-paid television personality in America. And, as everyone in this room knows, highest-paid means ‘best,’ right?”
At the Emmy Awards the following year, Trump ventured into a new realm as a performer. Before a live television audience, Trump, in straw hat and overalls and carrying a pitchfork, teamed with Will & Grace star Megan Mullally to sing a satirical rendition of “Green Acres” that included a plug for Trump Tower. The song was part of Emmy-Idol, a send-up of American Idol, in which stars performed and the audience voted for the winner. Trump and Mullally won, leading one critic to write, “The Donald’s transformation from business tycoon to pop-culture oddity is now complete.” The following day, Mullally’s cell phone rang. It was Trump calling to say, “Listen, we really needed to win that and we did and you were a big part of that, so I just wanted to say thank you.” Performing before 14 million Americans wasn’t enough. No matter the venue, Trump needed to win.
On January 22, 2005, Trump starred in another show that was the subject of breathless attention: his wedding to his third wife, Melania Knauss, a five-foot-eleven fashion model who had immigrated to the United States from the former Yugoslavia. Jeff Zucker, then chief of NBC’s entertainment division, wanted to broadcast the nuptials live, an idea that intrigued Trump, who thought the publicity could benefit The Apprentice. But he passed on the offer. In truth, the Trumps did not need NBC to draw attention to their wedding at Mar-a-Lago. Vogue produced a photo spread of Melania in her $100,000 Dior dress, which workers had spent 550 hours decorating with fifteen hundred crystals. Gossip columnists hyperventilated about the guest list, which included Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Barbara Walters, Derek Jeter, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Paul Anka, Tony Bennett, Elton John, and Billy Joel took turns serenading the couple. Trump used the celebration to show off Mar-a-Lago’s new ballroom, its ceilings and bathroom sinks adorned in gold leaf.
At fifty-eight, after two failed marriages, Trump appeared to have found a partner who fulfilled his long-standing desire for a “n
o-maintenance woman,” one who would not steal attention from him. Melania, who was thirty-four when they wed, did not generate headlines or seek to upstage him. Donald’s older children referred to her as “the Portrait” because she spoke so little. Born Melanija Knavs in the former Yugoslavia, she grew up in a nondescript concrete apartment building in the hilly village of Sevnica. Feeling stifled under her country’s socialist regime, Melania told high school friends that she wanted to escape their town and travel around the world. Modeling was her path. Changing her surname to Knauss, she worked as a fashion model in Milan, Paris, and, starting in the mid-1990s, New York.
Saving her earnings and avoiding Manhattan’s nightclub circuit, Melania preferred anonymity. “She was a homebody,” said Edit Molnar, a friend and fellow model. Yet, one night in 1998, Melania found herself at the Kit Kat Klub because her modeling agency was hosting a party. Donald, who had recently split up with Marla Maples, was at the event with a date, Celina Midelfart, a beautiful Norwegian heiress. But Trump noticed Melania and asked for her phone number. “She’s incredible,” Trump told Molnar that night. “I want this woman.” Melania resisted, aware that Trump had come to the party with another woman. But Trump was persistent and soon they began going out. He introduced her to celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Céline Dion, Michael Douglas, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Melania was not altogether impressed. “I was with a celebrity myself,” she said, “so it’s not something new for me.”
On Trump’s arm, the brunette with ice-blue eyes and full figure was more of a target for paparazzi than she had been on her own. Trump boasted that his new girlfriend was “a very, very successful model,” but her most high-profile moment occurred after their relationship started, when Sports Illustrated featured her in its swimsuit edition. In January 2000, she was on the cover of GQ’s British edition, lying on a fur throw in Trump’s Boeing 747, apparently naked but for a diamond choker and matching bracelets. The headline read, “Sex at 30,000 feet. Melania Knauss earns her air miles.” The spread also showed Melania handcuffed to a leather briefcase stuffed with jewels, and perched on an airplane wing, wearing a red bra and thong and pointing a pistol, as if she had stepped out of a James Bond movie.
After her wedding to Trump, Melania sold jewelry on a home shopping channel and launched a line of caviar-infused face cream. Following their son Barron’s 2006 birth, the same year that she secured US citizenship, Melania devoted herself primarily to parenting. If Donald was too busy to join his wife and son on vacation, as often was the case, she went ahead with Barron. Her parents helped out with the baby, staying at Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago, as Donald’s former in-laws had with his older children. Trump’s absence did not appear to bother his wife. “We are both very independent,” Melania said in her halting English (she also speaks Italian, French, and German). “We give ourselves and each other space. I allowed him to do, to have his passion and his dreams come true—and he let me do the same. I believe not changing anybody. You need to understand them and let them be who they are.”
For all the freedom she allowed Trump, Melania was no pushover: “I am very opinionated. I’m very strong. I have yes or no. I’m not a maybe person. I know what I like.” She bristled when a journalist described her as a woman who exists quietly in Trump’s shadow: “I am not shy. I’m not reserved, [but] I don’t need . . . to be an attention seeker.” She and her husband, she said, embrace traditional roles: “We like the same things. We are both very detail oriented.”
To Trump’s confidants, his third wife’s temperament seemed to best balance his perpetual histrionics. “Of all three women, Melania handles Donald the best,” said Louise Sunshine, who for decades served as a close adviser to Trump. “She’s very independent. He’s very independent. She doesn’t hesitate to tell Donald good from bad, right from wrong.” As the years passed, Melania was more the stay-at-home mom than the glamorous model. In her view, their lives were defined by bland routine. They awoke at 5:30 a.m. She did Pilates. He read the newspapers. When he was in town, they preferred to eat dinner at home and watch baseball or basketball on television while he monitored his Twitter feed. She tried, not altogether successfully, to discourage him from eating too many desserts: “I tell him my opinions. Sometimes he listens, and sometimes he doesn’t.”
Donald’s view of Melania was similar: “She’s a very private person. . . . She’s very smart. And there’s no games. You know, it’s boom—it’s all business. But a very smart person; and considered one of the great beauties.” Trump credited Melania with being his greatest booster, the partner “who grounds me.” At last he had a wife who knew how to fulfill her primary duty, serving as Mrs. Donald Trump, smiling, standing by his side (usually his left), strengthening his brand, and creating not a moment of drama to steal the spotlight or distract him from his roiling ambition.
In 2011, Trump’s stature as a showman of far-reaching renown was confirmed anew when Comedy Central made him the target of a star-studded roast, a distinction previously conferred upon the likes of Hugh Hefner, Chevy Chase, and William Shatner. With Melania and Ivanka in the audience, Trump grinned and grimaced while Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, rapper Snoop Dogg, and others made fun of his hair, his multiple marriages, and his vanity. “You’ve ruined more models’ lives than bulimia,” said comedienne Lisa Lampanelli. MacFarlane described Trump as “the second-worst tragedy to hit New York,” and comedian Jeff Ross said Trump’s ego is “so big he videotapes himself masturbating and then masturbates to the video.” Trump and Melania, Ross said, “are so compatible they both yell out Donald’s name when they climax.”
When it was his turn to speak, Trump played to his caricature, telling the audience, “What a great honor it must be to honor me tonight.” He also had an answer for the hair insults. “What’s the difference between a wet raccoon and Donald J. Trump’s hair? A wet raccoon doesn’t have seven billion fucking dollars in the bank.” At a moment when he was contemplating entering the 2012 presidential race, the show was a vehicle for Trump to demonstrate that, for all his riches, he was not above poking fun at himself. Trump had “proved to every American voter that you have thick skin,” Ross told the audience, “that you can take a joke, that you are a man of the people.”
Despite the veneer of good fun, performers said that Trump had asked in advance of the show that his roasters steer clear of the one subject he deemed off-limits: the true extent of his wealth. “Trump’s rule was, ‘Don’t say I have less money than I say I do,’ ” said Anthony Jeselnik, one of the comedians who performed that night. “ ‘Make fun of my kids, do whatever you want. Just don’t say that I don’t have that much money.’ ”
In 2013, McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment inducted Trump into its Hall of Fame during a raucous ceremony at Madison Square Garden. After a promotional video introduced him as a “business mogul, bestselling author, reality television show star,” Trump walked onstage to a roiling mix of cheers, boos, and chants of “You suck! You suck!” Undaunted, Trump called his induction his “greatest honor of all.” He promised a rematch with McMahon, in which he would “kick his ass!” The booing and catcalls persisted, subsiding only when Trump introduced his wife and daughter Ivanka, who were in the audience. “I really do love you people,” Trump said as he concluded his speech, “even the ones who don’t love me so much.”
Two years later, just after his sixty-ninth birthday, Trump declared that he was ready for a far different sort of spectacle. He was determined to prove that the ultimate showman could play on any stage, even the biggest one in the world. This would involve adjustments. He would get out of the beauty pageant business, for example, selling off his shares of Miss Universe for $49.3 million. “I sold it because I’m running for president,” he said. He would reconsider the wisdom of some of his more outlandish moments, including the crude remarks about sex he had made on Howard Stern’s radio show: “I never anticipated running or being a politician.”
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Political Chameleon
Donald Trump, dressed in a dark navy suit, walked into Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue, a mile and a half south of Trump Tower. This had been the setting of so many memorable moments: the place where he married Ivana, and where he learned the power of positive thinking from the church’s longtime minister, Norman Vincent Peale. Now he was here to say good-bye to his father. Fred Trump had died four days earlier, on June 25, 1999, at ninety-three years old. The first signs of Alzheimer’s disease had surfaced five years earlier. Donald and Fred were riding together in a car when Donald proudly told his father that he had just bought the land under the Empire State Building. “That’s a tall building, isn’t it?” Fred replied. “How many apartments are in that building?”
After that day, Donald had watched his father fade little by little, and now Fred lay in a casket surrounded by white roses. Hundreds of mourners—politicians, developers, and celebrities—filled the church. As late-morning sunlight streamed through the sanctuary’s ten stained glass windows, family members shared stories about the elder Trump: how he whistled and bounded up the front stairs as he arrived home at night after working long days, how he taught his grandchildren the value of a dollar, how his favorite poem was “Don’t Quit.” Mayor Rudolph Giuliani proclaimed that Fred Trump had helped establish New York as “the most important city in the world.”
When it was Donald’s turn, he reflected upon his father’s greatness by listing iconic projects that Donald had built with his father’s unwavering support—the Grand Hyatt, Trump Tower, Trump Plaza, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Castle. It was an irony, he said, that he had learned of his father’s death just after reading a New York Times story about his latest development, Trump Place, on Manhattan’s West Side. It was yet another success, and a testament to the work ethic Donald had learned from his father. Fred had passed down Donald’s most treasured asset, the emblem of all his accomplishments: the Trump name. “The name just sells,” Donald was quoted as saying.
Trump Revealed Page 32
