Trump, page 6
As comforting as he found her, Donald was not blind to the career uses she might have attached to their budding relationship. She had come to him in part through Tom Fitzsimmons, a former cop and current model who had dated her virtually from her arrival in New York in the mideighties. Fitzsimmons, a sometime bodyguard and driver for Trump, had known Donald since the early seventies, and when his two friends became lovers, he took on a peculiar facilitating role. Marla’s constant companion, he began posing as her date, even on a helicopter ride with Donald and Ivana to an Atlantic City boxing match. Sometimes he wound up awkwardly sitting between Donald and her at concerts the three attended. Marla even registered in Atlantic City at times as Marla Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons’s reward was that Donald would fulfill the dream Tom had had since he and his twin brother were savvy street cops. He would arrange financing for a movie project called Blue Gemini, starring the brothers and Marla—an actress whose biggest prior credit was as the victim of a watermelon avalanche in the otherwise forgettable Maximum Overdrive. Almost two decades earlier, young Donald had speculated about becoming a Hollywood producer. He now gladly fed Fitzsimmons’s obsession, beginning with a token payment for a screenplay. (Tom told friends Trump advanced $15,000 on the screenplay.) Donald also insisted that the Trump Plaza Casino use Fitzsimmons as a model in its television commercial. The passing months never deflated Fitzsimmons, who bubbled over in conversations with friends about both the prospects for his movie and Donald’s love for Marla, as if the two were part of the same plot in his mind.
Fitzsimmons had been developing grander plans as well. He believed that Donald could become President. It was a notion the golden boy himself had begun toying with at least as early as 1985, when New York state Republican chairman George Clark visited with him at Trump Tower to try to talk him into running for governor. “Have you ever thought about running for high public office?” Clark asked. Donald replied without a smile: “Yes. President of the United States.” By the end of 1987, he’d advanced this almost eerie ambition with a well-timed appearance in New Hampshire and the formation of a nascent Trump-for-President committee. “This is a serious test of the political waters,” his top casino executive, Steve Hyde, said at the time. “If things shake out, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he decided to do it.” Donald continued conscientiously planting the seeds, talking about the presidency quite seriously in wide-ranging interviews and buying full-page ads on national political issues.
Fitzsimmons told friends that Donald believed Ivana was incompatible with such a campaign. Not only did her awkward English immediately convey her foreign roots, but she was raised in a Communist country. Marla, on the other hand, could be a key to his southern strategy; they would sweep the country with glamour.
The staff members who genuinely cared about Donald—who did not see him as merely their own ticket to success—adopted his secretary Norma Foederer’s early and insistent demand that no one snicker at the relationship with Marla. “We don’t know how he really feels,” Norma had said. They knew his marriage had died years ago, and they agreed that he “was entitled” to reach out for love. They wanted him to find it, though even those who loved him did not really believe he had the capacity for it. To them, even with Marla, he would still be alone—“unaware,” one said, “of his own tragedy.” As they saw it, his deeply ingrained remoteness was so much a part of his unexamined life that he neither understood it nor regretted it.
From the moment the Liz Smith story of his breakup with Ivana hit, Marla became a hunted woman. For reasons never explained by either Donald or Marla, she hid out like an international fugitive for two months. Her disappearance, all carefully orchestrated by Donald’s corporate police force, made no public relations sense, since it only fed the mystery. If she had parked herself at a desk in the city room of the New York Post, she could not have gotten more ink than she got on the lam. Sequestered in the Southampton beach home of a real estate broker friendly to Donald, she was whisked away at the last moment, just as Daily News reporters were closing in for the kill. Ivana’s detectives, who were feeding the News tips on Marla’s whereabouts, even came up with phone records from an apartment in Trump Tower a few floors below where Ivana and the children lived and across the hall from the apartment where Donald had retreated. The bills revealed calls to Marla’s home, Dalton, Georgia—and were interpreted by Liz in one more spellbinding column as evidence that the cad had brought his wench right under his wife’s nose. Ivana was said to be crying over the fact that the children might have bumped into Marla on trips downstairs to visit their father.
When Marla finally surfaced several weeks later, she appeared in a ratings-smashing interview on ABC’s network newsmagazine, Primetime Live, questioned by her designee, Diane Sawyer. Conducted under the tightest of security, the interview occurred in the Atlantic City home of casino executives Jack and Caroline Davis, who told reporters that Marla had in fact been hiding there for a month, not in the Trump Tower apartment claimed in Liz Smith’s columns. A few months after the interview, Donald named Jack Davis to succeed Bucky Howard as the new Taj president, and made Caroline the casino’s special events coordinator (he also hired the broker who’d hidden her in the Hamptons).
The only memorable Maples remark during Sawyer’s interview—described by PBS anchor Robert MacNeil as “one of the low points” in television journalism history—was that she loved Donald. “I can’t lie about it,” she said, though she seemed to have no problem vigorously denying that Donald was supporting her. “He’s not the type of man that would choose to support someone else while he’s married,” she insisted, suggesting implicitly that she’d been paying for her St. Moritz and Waldorf suites, as well as a $2,700-a-month East Side apartment.
Questioned about whether Ivana’s long-speculated plastic surgery changeover in 1989 was “an attempt to make herself look more like you,” Marla confirmed what Ivana had long denied: “I think she’s an absolutely beautiful woman. I think she was before surgery.” Asked how she had met Donald, she replied: “I don’t feel like, at this time, it’s appropriate for me to say. There’s pending litigation, Diane.” Pressed about the then much-reported, jaw-to-jaw confrontation between her and Ivana in Aspen, the previous Christmas, she took the same position: “I just don’t feel like I can talk about Aspen at this time.”
While she refused to answer Sawyer’s question about the Aspen flap, she confirmed the gist of the story a few months later in another carefully rationed series of public statements. According to Marla, Ivana had confronted her publicly, demanding to know if she was having an affair with her husband, apparently provoked by Marla’s presence in Aspen while she, Donald, and the children were vacationing there. “I looked into her eyes and asked: ‘Do you love him? Are you really happy? That’s what’s really important.’ I wanted to strike something inside of her, make her think, and I needed to know if she really cared for him. She repeated over and over again the same warning: ‘I have a happy marriage. I love him, stay away from him.’ But I didn’t believe her. The relationship was for the eye to see—but not the heart.”*
Marla’s account left no doubt that, in her own eyes, Ivana was no victim. In this confrontation with the woman whose husband she was stealing, there was not only an absence of shame, there was almost a missionary righteousness. Marla saw herself as the champion of unselfish love, cast in this scene against a picturesquely snowlit day, daring to challenge her loveless rival who wanted only the trappings that came with Donald.
In fact, he had placed her at a $10,000-a-week triplex penthouse for the second Christmas season in a row, more expensive lodgings than his own family had. The night of the snowy facedown he went with her, not Ivana, to a trendy New Year’s Eve party. The host took a call that night from a broken wife asking if her husband was there with another woman. Though no one understood it at the time, the marriage was over.
Donald had orchestrated the Primetime Live and subsequent appearances as a substitute for the public debut he and Marla had planned but been forced to cancel. Trump had intended to unveil Marla at the grand opening of the Taj back in early April and had even told casino brass to print thousands of T-shirts announcing her presence. Extra security was planned to help handle what promised to be a massive media event, and a sequined designer dress was ordered. In March, Donald leaked the story to Liz Smith’s counterpart at the Post, Cindy Adams, whose front-page celebration of this spectacular publicity stunt went so far as to suggest that Marla’s Taj debut was the culmination of a conscious Trump media strategy that began with the split in February. Donald had a “no comment” response when Cindy asked whether he had actually bet someone, as she had heard, that he could make Marla “the world’s hottest name in three months,” in time for the Taj opening.
But pressure from Fred Trump and other members of the family had forced him to reconsider. It was just too tawdry and gigantic a display—her hanging on his arm before the cameras of the world, with the children back in New York and no divorce action yet filed by either party. When Donald called off Maples’ Taj appearance, he’d done it unilaterally, even catching Marla by surprise. Marla’s press agent, whose consultant fee was paid by Trump, insisted at first she’d be there, claiming that “if they decided she shouldn’t go, Marla and Donald [would] issue a joint statement.” Subsequent news reports indicated a testiness between them that lasted weeks. But the opening had come and gone—with little pizzazz other than a laser light show and a genie—and Marla had remained in hiding. Instead, the Sawyer interview, and a curious late April appearance at the White House Correspondents Association dinner in Washington, were her coming-out parties, with Donald far away on both occasions.
Then, in late May, she and Donald finally made their first public appearance—at Elton John’s concert at the Taj—but they sat with different people. She was still riding Trump limos and helicopters and showing up on the arm of a Trump stand-in, casino executive Ed Tracy. In early June, she and Donald went out to Las Vegas for a publishers’ convention to peddle Surviving at the Top, his upcoming second book. It was the same day the Wall Street Journal ran the first Donald’s-broke story, exposing the secret sessions with his bankers. A few days later, the Post reported that she was going to accompany Donald to the birthday celebration, even predicting a public kiss in a story just hours before the party.
But, in a repeat of the Taj turnaround, she was not present. Fred had again put a stop to her appearing. He reportedly said he would not be at the party if she was. Fred had not only directly urged Donald to patch his marriage up, he’d gone to business associates he believed Donald listened to and tried to convince them to do the same. They had, but there was no changing Donald’s mind. At Ivana’s birthday luncheon months earlier, Mary had pointedly laid claim to Ivana as a daughter—forget the in-law part, she said. The family pressure about Marla, as well as Ivana’s lawsuit and other factors, were contributing to his growing isolation, cutting him off from her in the midst of the tensest days of his life.
Nonetheless, he was determined that night to show the crowd in the Crystal Ballroom, designed by Ivana and built during her reign at the Castle, that all the pressure wasn’t getting to him. The payment he’d missed the day before was the first default in his life. As of that moment, he had nine days left of the grace period granted by the bondholder trustee before the casino could legally be taken away from him. It was a time for grit, and Donald had it.
Escorted onstage by a Buster Poindexter–led marimba band, showered by confetti dumped from a ceiling duct, surrounded by stars like Peter Allen and Joe Piscopo, Donald opened with some shots at the media, claiming he’d “gotten bad publicity” all his life “but it gets worse every year.” He reminded the cheering crowd of his role in getting a site for the New York City Convention Center and rebuilding the Wollman Rink, expressing his certainty that the Taj would be a similar success. He even tried to make a joke out of the financial squeeze he was in, pointing to the Castle’s new, thirty-two-year-old president, Tony Calandra, and quipping: “I hire Tony to run this place and a couple of days later I default on the bonds.” (One of a rash of inexperienced new Trump executives, Calandra, who had suddenly been elevated from a junket sales supervisor to casino president, would be replaced in a matter of months.)
Donald thanked Robert, Blaine, and his sister, Elizabeth, and then praised “the world’s best father,” calling Fred to his feet for a spotlighted moment of appreciation. He tried the same upbeat tease he’d used that morning on the Boardwalk. “Some would say there’s a method to my madness,” he said with a smile. “Well, I have a few surprises ahead.” The buzzword among those who heard that message and still believed in him was that he was deliberately causing the dramatic decline in the bond prices for all three of his casinos because he secretly planned to buy them cheap. The power of his hype was so strong that ordinarily savvy observers bought into these theories, including a prevailing hypothesis that he’d precipitated the entire crisis to mislead Ivana into a two-bit settlement.
Though a few dozen “entertainment reporters” were allowed to attend the festivities, straight news coverage was barred, and an army of twenty to thirty roving security agents enforced that edict. Most of the invited guests were the connoisseurs of risk Donald had come to admire. As he put it in Surviving at the Top, “I love the excitement of the scene, and I love hanging around with important casino customers. These are colorful, gutsy, unpretentious guys who usually come from modest backgrounds but who’ve managed to live by their wits and live rather lavishly.” He’d compared this crowd with Ivana’s “society people” and found them “far more attractive, and certainly more real.”
One of the reasons for Donald’s affinity for the high-roller crowd may have been that so many of them had other business interests that could be helpful to him. For example, one birthday party celebrant, Manny Ciminello, a frequent big spender at Trump casinos, was a construction contractor Donald used in New York whose ties with the racketeers dominating the city’s concrete business had been spelled out by federal prosecutors in open court just a couple of years earlier. Donald knew that Ciminello’s joint-venture partner in a project he had built for Trump was a company secretly owned by Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family, and Fat Tony Salerno, boss of the Genovese family. In fact, the concrete contract Trump had awarded this partnership had become a count in the racketeering indictment of Salerno.
Ciminello—whose close friend and sometimes traveling companion city councilman Jerry Crispino was the chairman of the key committee that passed on all major development projects in New York—was a birthday symbol of the seedy characters who had often appeared in Donald’s life, just like “good old boy” Bucky Howard.
The rest of the party show was a mix of the absurd and the jaded. A huge model of the Trump Shuttle, his hemorrhaging airline, was rolled onstage in front of replicas of the Taj, Castle, and Trump Plaza, all of which were in dire trouble. Out of the Shuttle stepped Robin Leach and a co-host, comic Freddie Roman. Leach blathered on about what a bad time it was to be doing a show on the rich, but urged the crowd not to count Donald out, insisting that he was the best there was and that he had made a career out of doing what others said couldn’t be done. Leach was already filming his umpteenth Lifestyles show built around Trump—a feature on the Taj.
Dolly Parton and Elton John appeared on giant screens to wish Donald a happy birthday, with Parton asking to work the Taj instead of her regular Castle gig and promising to charge only $100,000 a show. Joe Piscopo did his Sinatra imitation on the birthday song, followed by a string of Jap gags—oblivious to the presence of several Japanese high rollers in the front rows—even cracking that Atlantic City would be owned by the Japanese if it weren’t for Donald. A George Bush imitator declared Donald should be President. Donald introduced Edwin Edwards, the three-time former governor of Louisiana who had survived two federal felony trials, as “the past and future governor.” A chorus line in skintight outfits gyrated around chairs singing longingly about Donald’s dollars. Then Andrew Dice Clay appeared on another giant screen to thank Donald for the Taj hookers, saying they had stamps on their asses to show they’d had their shots. It had to be the high-water mark of Donald’s day.
One more birthday surprise awaited Donald: a Monday morning Neil Barsky story, greeting Trump on his return to New York and announcing on the front page of the Wall Street Journal that Donald had personally guaranteed between $500 and $600 million in loans. The story—which, it turned out, understated the extraordinary level of Donald’s personal exposure by $300 million—unveiled a recklessness not even Donald’s longtime critics had imagined. It was one thing to saddle his properties with debt—if one of them couldn’t carry the load, he could just walk away from it and leave it to the bank. Guarantees, on the other hand, were a chain around his own neck, leashing him to the banks. The only advantage to Donald of his $840 million in personal guarantees was that the sheer weight of his loans made it possible for him to pull some of his biggest lenders down with him, but most of the tug at the moment was coming from the other end.
