From the VFArchive: Ivana Trump once told her lawyer that, from time to time, her husband read a book of Hitler's collected speeches—and kept a copy in a cabinet near his bed.
e have an old custom here at Mar-a-Lago," Donald Trump was saying one night at dinner in his 118-room winter palace in Palm Beach. ''Our custom is to go around the table after dinner and introduce ourselves to each other." Trump had seemed fidgety that night, understandably eager to move the dinner party along so that he could go to bed.
husband. He is so generous and smart. We are so lucky to have this life." She was desperately playing to him, but Donald said nothing in return. He seemed tired of hearing Ivana's endless praise; her subservient quality appeared to be getting to him. Perhaps he was spoiling for something to excite him, like a fight. Maybe all the public posturing was beginning to get boring, too.
This spring night, a squad of servants had been outside to greet the guests, as if they had arrived at Cliveden between the wars. Most of the staff, however, were not a permanent part of Mar-a-Lago; they were local caterers and car parks, hired for the evening. In addition to the dining-room ceiling, Ivana had left Mrs. Post's shabby fringed sofas and Moroccan suites totally in place, giving the impression that she was trying on Mrs. Post's persona too.
Many floors beneath the Trumps, Japanese tourists roamed the Trump Tower lobby with their cameras. Inevitably, they took pictures of the display of Trump's familiar portrait from the cover of his bookwhich was propped on an easel outside the Trump Tower real-estate office. The Japanese still took Donald Trump to be the very image of power and money, and seemed to believe, as Trump once had, that this red-marble-and-brass monument was the center of the world.
They were married in New York during Easter of 1977. Mayor Beame attended the wedding at Marble Collegiate Church. Donald had already made his alliance with Roy Cohn, who would become his lawyer and mentor. Shortly before the wedding, Donald reportedly told Ivana,"You have to sign this agreement.""What is this?" she asked."Just a document that will protect my family money." Cohn gallantly offered to find Ivana a lawyer.
"What do you think? Do you think blowing up the sculptures has hurt me?" he asked me that day at"21.""Who cares?" he said."Let's say that I had given that junk to the Met. They would have just put them in their basement. I'll never have the goodwill of the Establishment, the tastemakers of New York.
"I beat Bob Tisch on the convention-center site," Donald said loudly when Tisch stopped by our table."But we're friends now, good friends, isn't that right, Bob? Isn't that right?" The bankers and lawyers in the conference room looked at Trump with a combination of awe and disbelief. Whatever their cynical instincts, Trump, the Music Man of real estate, could set off in them the power of imagination, for his real skill has always been his ability to convince others of his possibilities. The line between a con man and an entrepreneur is often fuzzy. ' 'They say the Plaza is worth $400 million? Trump says it's worth $800 million.
Deals had always been his only art. He was reportedly getting unbelievable deals now from the contractors he had hired to build his casinos and the fiberglass elephants that decorate the Boardwalk in front of the Taj Mahal, for they were desperate, unsure that they would ever get paid for months of work. Trump was famous for his skill at squeezing every last bit out of his transactions. He was known to be making shocking deals now that he never could have made two months before.
Before the opening of the Taj Mahal, Marvin Roffman, a financial analyst from Philadelphia, correctly stated that the Taj was in for a rough ride. For that, Roffman believes, Trump had him fired."Is that why you attacked him?" I asked Trump."I'd do it again. Here's a guy that used to call me, begging me to buy stock through him, with the implication that if I'd buy stock he'd give me positive comments.""Are you accusing him of fraud?" I asked.
"Give them the old Trump bullshit," he told the architect Der Scutt before a presentation of the Trump Tower design at a press conference in 1980."Tell them it is going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.""I don't lie, Donald," the architect replied.
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