Dish (33 page)

In early 1990, Liz Smith kept hearing upsetting stories about her friend Donald Trump: That he was cheating on his wife Ivana and their marriage was in trouble. Donald Trump was the most famous of the new celebrity tycoons—a billionaire who was adored by the masses. His name was plastered on his buildings and casinos; tourists gathered in front of his Trump Tower hoping to catch sight of him; his 1987autobiography had been a bestseller. If Liz could get him to talk to her about his marriage problems, it would be a big scoop. Liz thought Donald was a scoundrel, but she liked him anyway. “He was very interesting and entertaining and funny,” she said. “He was always sweeping me up in his arms and saying to everybody standing around, ‘Isn’t she the greatest?’ Of course, he did that to just about everybody.”

So, in January 1990, Liz Smith picked up the phone and gave Donald Trump a call. His assistant, Norma Foederer, cheerfully greeted Liz and put her right through. “Donald, there is a strong story going around and it just won’t die,” she told the tycoon. “Why don’t you either decide that you’re going to talk to me about it and let me print it in a way that won’t be too inflammatory or sensational, or fix the situation so this story ends.” She was concerned for Donald and Ivana, she says. “I thought he at least should know that things were going to explode if he didn’t do something, one way or the other.”

Donald was evasive. “When I told him the story, he said he would think about it,” Liz said. “He didn’t deny it.” At that point, Liz had enough to write the story, but she didn’t want to
do it without Donald’s approval. That wasn’t her style. She waited to hear back from him, but he never called. During the next few weeks, she heard more tales, including one about a screaming fight between Ivana and the other woman in Aspen. The story was getting around and Liz was eager to lock it up. She figured that a letter to Trump might work better than another phone call so she sat down at her battered Texas Instruments typewriter and banged out a note to him. She warned him that if he didn’t give her the story, “You’re going to be in someplace a lot worse than the Liz Smith column.”

Again, she waited for a response from him. Again, he didn’t answer. So Liz did nothing. As important as the story was, there was something that was more important: access. Liz had been around the block long enough to know that if you turn on your sources, you lose them. You become a pariah—an enemy of the closely guarded circle of people that you had worked so hard to penetrate. You don’t get invited to their parties and they don’t call you with their stories. She had watched as Walter Winchell, once the most feared and influential columnist in the country, lost it all. “He’d come to El Morocco—this man who had been so powerful—and pass out mimeographed copies of his column as it was appearing out of New York,” she says. “It was so pitiful. No New York paper picked him up because he was too much trouble. He’d made too many enemies.” She’d seen what happened to her former boss Igor Cassini when he’d crossed the crowd he wrote about.

Liz had almost made the mistake of alienating her sources over a decade earlier. For five years, she had worked on a tell-all book about Jacqueline Onassis. Some of Jackie’s defenders had warned Liz to drop the project, and eventually she had handed over the cartons of research to an ambitious reporter named Kitty Kelley. Thanks to Liz’s material, Kelley’s
Jackie Oh!
had become a huge best-seller, and the writer had gone on to skewer other powerful subjects. But she had become an enemy of the people Liz wrote about and they—and ultimately, Liz herself—had stopped speaking to Kelley. Going after the rich and powerful made you famous, but it also got you cut off.

“Access,” Liz says, “is everything.” Her good friend Barbara
Walters knew about access. “Barbara Walters’s whole career wasn’t made on her talent,” Liz told reporter Jonathan van Meter. “It was made on her ability to get access. So access was worth millions of dollars to NBC and then to ABC and then to herself.” Liz Smith, unlike so many of the upstart columnists who were trying to make a name for themselves, had a secret weapon: friendship. And it did help her get scoops. When Barbara Walters was getting a divorce, she gave the story to Liz. And when writer Nora Ephron split from Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, she called up her friend Liz and gave her the story. Nora Ephron knew that it would be written in a way that was sympathetic to her.

When Liz heard that Elizabeth Taylor was getting married to construction worker Larry Fortensky, “I wrote her a letter and told her that after twenty-six years of friendship, I should be at that wedding,” Smith says. She got the invite, and was the only journalist there.

Some people, especially those in the press, would attack and ridicule Liz, accusing her of being too close to her subjects, and it’s true that she treated her friends well. Sometimes, she was so enamored of the glamorous people whom she wrote about that she was somewhat oblivious of their follies. When Liz Smith got invited to Saul Steinberg’s jaw-droppingly extravagant fiftieth birthday party, she gushed in print over it. “I thought I was doing my job, and I got absolutely blown out of the water for ass-kissing the Steinbergs.” In private, Smith is a little more circumspect about Gayfryd: “She’s a very chic, severe, sort of frightened-looking person. She isn’t terribly friendly. Looks like she could pass for a dominatrix.”

Liz didn’t believe that you have to write everything you know about people. She knew how it felt to have people hounding you about your private life—stuff that she felt was irrelevant. Staffers from a gay magazine were always threatening to reveal details about her sex life. “I think they’re terrorists,” she once told a reporter. “I think they must be very frightened and desperate people. They’re so hateful and irrational. Talk about not living-and-let-living. I don’t get it. I also think they’re jealous of anybody that they think made it. I mean, what do they want me to be,
the great lesbian of the Western world? Forget it! If I was Sandra Bernhard, maybe. But even then I’m not so sure.”

“Jealousy,” Liz says of her media critics. “I think a lot of it is just jealousy that they can’t get invited to these parties. So they bitch and carry on that people who do get invited are all co-opted. But we’re all co-opted by our friends to some extent. I don’t know how you can avoid that.”

Despite all her efforts to be nice, Liz still made some enemies. “I once had a terrible fight on the phone with Bette Midler, who called me up and said, ‘I don’t want to be in your fucking column.’ ” Mel Gibson and Burt Reynolds wouldn’t speak to her. Sean Connery once got so angry with her that he told her, “I’d like to stick your column up your ass.” Liz laughs: “I told him it was the best offer I had all week.” Frank Sinatra was the cruelest. Liz knew better than to carry on a feud with the well-connected crooner; she and Sinatra later had lunch and she never mentioned his unkind comments. “It’s like walking a tightrope,” she explained. “If you disagree, in print, with anyone, they go nuts and try to kill you! Why do people get so inflamed abut being mentioned in a mere gossip column?”

Nearly a month had passed since Liz Smith first called Donald about his marriage. It was early February 1990, and she was working in her office, trying to make her 1
P.M
. deadline when her assistant St. Clair Pugh told her that Ivana Trump was on the phone. “She knew,” says Liz. “I heard she was a basket case over this whole thing. She wanted to have a private meeting.” Donald was in Japan at the Mike Tyson fight so they could meet in the Trumps’ Fifth Avenue apartment—the marble and mural-covered condo on the top three floors of the Trump Tower. Ivana answered the door herself, and Liz was shocked at the state she was in. She was nearly hysterical, tears streamed down her face and her nose and eyes were red and puffy. “She cried and wept and sobbed through the whole thing,” says Liz. “She was in such a state of shock.”

Ivana had accidentally discovered that Donald was seeing another woman. “I did find out first time on the telephone,” Ivana recalled. “When I did pick up the phone in the living room and
Donald picked up the phone in the bedroom. In Aspen. And—he spoke to a mutual friend of ours. And he was talking about Mula and I really didn’t understand. I never heard a name like that in my life. And I came to Donald—I said who is Mula? And he said, well, that’s a girl who is going after me for the last two years. And I said, Is that serious? And he said, Oh, she’s just going after me.”

Ivana, a one-time model and an alternate on the Czechoslovakian Olympic ski team, had immigrated to Canada in the early 1970s and married Trump in 1977 when he was just another brash real estate developer. She worked with Donald on some of his properties, especially the Plaza, and was the quintessential 1980s socialite: she loved to lunch at places like Le Cirque and enjoyed wearing flashy jewels and designer clothes. “I don’t ever intend to look a day over twenty-eight,” she once joked. “And it’s going to cost Donald a lot of money.”

Liz Smith liked Ivana. “She’s a nice woman,” said Liz, though she was, to put it kindly, “not a rocket scientist.” For years, there had been rumors linking Donald with high-profile women—the reports were often denied by the women—including ice skater Peggy Fleming, Mike Tyson’s wife Robin Givens, socialite Georgette Mosbacher, and
Dynasty
star Catherine Oxenberg. Not long before, Ivana had returned from a trip looking so dramatically different that some friends didn’t recognize her. She denied that she’d gone under the knife, but the word among her crowd was that she’d visited Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon, Steven Hoefflin, and had her face done to resemble Catherine Oxenberg’s.

Ivana was distraught by the news that yet another woman was going after her Donald. The next day in Aspen, Ivana confided in a friend, who pointed out someone who knew this Maria. “I saw [Maria’s friend] in the line—in the food line [at a restaurant called Bonnie’s]—and I said, Will you give her the message that I love my husband very much. And that was it. And I walk outside. And I didn’t know this Maria was standing behind the girl in line because I never met her, I had no idea. And then Maria just charged right behind me and she said—in front of my children—‘I love Donald. Do you?’ And Donald was just looking up like nothing happen or so … I said—I said—I really said—I said, ‘Get
lost. I love my husband very much.’ It was very unladylike, but it was as much as I really could—I—I—that was as much as I really—as harsh as maybe I could be.”

Donald was standing by, watching the whole thing, not saying a word. When the confrontation was over, he said to Ivana, “You’re overreacting.”

Word of the Aspen catfight spread quickly among members of the social set. Friends who had long known about the affair called Ivana to comfort her—and confirmed her worst fears, that Donald was seeing someone else. For two months, Ivana tried to live with the idea, but, she sobbed to Liz, she couldn’t bear it. She had a lawyer, she wanted a divorce.

Now Liz had a dilemma: Ivana didn’t want her to write the story. “She called to confide in me,” said Liz. “She was afraid Donald was going to announce it. She said she knew Donald would ruin her, that he would take me away from her—he would take Barbara Walters and all her friends away from her. She asked if I knew of any good public relations people, because she was going to need one if the story came out. I left thinking it would be really dirty pool to betray her by printing the story.”

Liz had learned long ago, when she was a struggling writer trying to make a name for herself in New York, that the key to her success was helping her high-profile friends. Donald wasn’t going to give her the story, but if she could talk Ivana into it, that might be nearly as good. “Within a day, I was talking to her lawyer and to the publicist, trying to convince them that it was in Ivana’s best interest to release the story before Donald did,” said Liz. “They agreed with me, and I guess they talked her into it.” Sometimes, to maintain access, Liz knew, you had to take sides. Liz promised Ivana and her lawyer that she would treat Ivana well—and she lived up to her word.

On Friday February 9, 1990, Liz Smith had the manuscript hand-delivered, in secret, four blocks uptown from her office to the East Forty-second Street offices of the
Daily News.
She was biting her nails. It was two whole days before the
Daily News
was going to break the story in the Sunday paper. She included a note to Fran Wood, her editor: “I only got this by swearing in blood to do it their way and Ivana’s lawyer doesn’t want his name
revealed yet…. After [Donald] gets off the plane Sunday night I’m afraid he’s going to kill her—or me. But that’s show biz. My chief hope is that we can keep someone on staff from leaking to the
Post
or
Newsday.
The lawyer (hers), however, says so far there are no calls or nibbles, so maybe nobody knows she has this lawyer yet. I will be available until the wee hours.”

“LOVE ON THE ROCKS,” the February 11, 1990, page one banner headline declared. “Mrs. Trump is reportedly devastated that Donald was betraying her” the article read. Ivana was so busy “rearing their three young children and being her husband’s full-time business partner that she had absolutely no idea the marriage was in trouble … Intimates say Ivana had every chance to continue being Mrs. Trump by allowing her husband to live in an open marriage so he could see other women. But the bottom line is she won’t give up her self-respect to do it.”

It wasn’t a big story—it was epic. The Trump Divorce erupted into a tabloid war like the city had rarely seen. For days, New Yorkers talked about little else. The couple that had it all—wealth, power, fame—was kaput. It signaled the real end of the eighties—the fall of the mighty, the comeuppance of arrogance and greed. It was, Liz later admitted, the biggest scoop of her career. It made Liz a celebrity and it put her in the center of the world that she had always covered. It was exactly the sort of story that she had once dreamed of writing.

Mary Elizabeth Smith was raised far from the glamour and power of New York. Born on February 2, 1923, in Fort Worth, Texas, to a cotton broker and his wife, Smith grew up in what she calls “the Booth Tarkington era, when America was innocent, when little boys fished with a bent pin and a dog could sleep in the middle of the street and not be run over.” Like many Depression-era children, she was enthralled by the movies and religiously went to the nearby Tivoli Theatre. She wanted to become cowboy star Tom Mix, or, better yet, Fred Astaire. She became so fixated on the stars that she began to follow their real-life stories in the movie magazines and in Walter Winchell’s column. Her father gave her a typewriter when she was eight and she made a fake
newspaper—with columns and all. During World War II, she worked in an airplane factory while her first husband, an Army Air Corps pilot named Edward Beeman, fought in the Pacific. They divorced soon after he returned. “I really loved this guy a lot, but I sure wasn’t meant to be anybody’s wife,” she says. “I had very high expectactions for myself. I wanted to be like Myrna Loy.” She enrolled in the University of Texas, where she majored in journalism.