Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (12 page)

In interviews in the early 1980s, Fred claimed that Donald's success had far exceeded his own. “I gave Donald free rein,” he said. “He has great visions, and everything he touches seems to turn to gold. Donald is the smartest person I know.” None of that was true, and Fred must have known that a decade before he said it.

After Steeplechase, Fred had lost a lot of ground. If he wanted to expand the reach of his empire, he would need a new playing field and a surrogate. He needed Donald to go out in the world and create the brand. It hadn't taken Fred long to realize that his profligate middle son wasn't suited to the unglamorous, tightly budgeted, and highly regimented routine of running rental properties. But with his father's backing, maybe he could use his hubris and shamelessness to make the push into
Manhattan. Fred wasn't living vicariously; he was intimately involved in all aspects of Donald's early forays into the Manhattan market, getting things done behind the scenes while Donald played to the crowd up front. Fred made it possible for Donald to play a role that fulfilled his own desire for recognition while allowing his son to garner the reputation as a Manhattan developer that Fred had always aspired to. Fred would never get the public recognition, but it was enough for him to know that the opportunities Donald had to make his mark and promote himself would never have materialized without him. The success and the acclaim were due to Fred and his vast wealth. Any story about Donald was really a story about Fred. Fred also knew that if that secret was uncovered, the ruse would fall apart. In retrospect, Fred was the puppeteer, but he couldn't be seen to be pulling his son's strings. It's not that Fred was overlooking Donald's incompetence as a businessman; he knew he had more than enough talent in that arena for both of them. Fred was willing to stake millions of dollars on his son because he believed he could leverage the skills Donald did have—as a savant of self-promotion, shameless liar, marketer, and builder of brands—to achieve the one thing that had always eluded him: a level of fame that matched his ego and satisfied his ambition in a way money alone never could.

When things turned south in the late 1980s, Fred could no longer separate himself from his son's brutal ineptitude; the father had no choice but to stay invested. His monster had been set free. All he could do was mitigate the damage, keep the cash flowing, and find somebody else to blame.

Over the next two years, Dad became more taciturn, more grim, and, if possible, thinner. The apartment in Sunnyside Towers was grey—grey because of the northwest exposure, grey from the unending clouds of cigarette smoke, grey because of his terrible moods. There were mornings when he barely managed to get out of bed, let alone spend a whole day with us. Sometimes he was hungover; sometimes it was his depression, which grew heavier. If we didn't have anything scheduled, Dad
often made an excuse to leave us alone, saying he had to work or run an errand for Gam.

Once Dad told us he had a job managing paperboys. I'd briefly had a paper route, and as far as I could tell that meant he was the guy who handed out the papers to the delivery kids from the trunk of his car, then collected the cash from them when they'd finished their routes. He told me once that he made $100 a day, which seemed like an enormous sum to me.

One evening, we were at the apartment having dinner with Dad's girlfriend, Johanna. I preferred it when she wasn't there; something about her was off-putting. She didn't connect—or even try to—with me and Fritz. It was bad enough that she said things such as “Freddy, light me a fag,” considering she wasn't British, but Dad started saying them, too.

We'd just finished eating when I started to recount the adventures I'd had with my mother at the bank that afternoon. While she had waited in the very long line, I had stood at one of the counters and filled out deposit slips with all sorts of aliases and wild sums of money I planned to withdraw in order to fund various schemes. I could barely contain how funny I thought the whole thing was. But as I told them about the secret identities, the secret withdrawals of cash, and my fiendish plots to disperse them, Dad got a wary look in his eyes.

“Does Mr. Tosti know about this?” he asked.

If I'd been paying closer attention, I might have known to stop, but I thought he was kidding, so I kept telling my story.

Dad got increasingly agitated, leaned forward, and pointed his finger at me. “What did you do?” As moody as my father could be, I'd rarely seen him so angry, and I'd almost never heard him raise his voice. I was confused and tried to retrace my narrative back to the point where he had started to think I'd done something wrong. But there
was
no such point, and my explanation about what had really happened only agitated him further.

“If Mr. Tosti finds out about this, I'm going to be in trouble with your grandfather.”

Johanna put her hand on Dad's arm, as if to draw his attention away from me. “Freddy,” she said, “it's nothing.”

“What do you mean ‘nothing'? This is really goddamn serious.”

I flinched at the curse word.

At that point both Johanna and I knew there was no talking him down. He was drunk and trapped in some old narrative. I tried to explain it to him, to steady him, but he was too far gone. And I was only eight.

In the summer of 1975, Donald gave a press conference during which he presented a rendering of the architect's plans for the Grand Hyatt, as if he'd already won the contract to replace the old Commodore Hotel next door to Grand Central Terminal on 42nd Street. The media printed his claims as fact.

That same summer, just before Fritz and I were scheduled to leave for camp, Dad had told Mom that he had some news. She invited him to dinner. I answered the door when Dad rang the bell. He was wearing what he almost always wore—black slacks and a white dress shirt—but his clothes were crisp and his hair was slicked back. I had never seen him look so handsome.

While Mom tossed the salad, Dad grilled the steak on our small terrace. When the food was ready, we sat at the small table next to the terrace, propping the door open so the mild summer breeze could blow in. We drank water and iced tea.

“I'm moving to West Palm Beach at the end of the summer,” he told us. “I found a great apartment on the Intracoastal with a dock in the back.” He already had a boat picked out, and when we visited, he'd take us fishing and waterskiing. As he spoke, he seemed happy and confident—and relieved. All of us knew it was the right decision; for the first time in a very long time, we felt hope.

I
sat at the dining room table with the shoe in front of me, trying to figure out what the point of it was. I had looked through the remaining boxes under the tree, thinking that perhaps the shoe's twin had been wrapped separately, but no, there was just the one—a gold lamé shoe with a four-inch heel filled with hard candy. Both the individual candies and the shoe itself were wrapped in cellophane. Where had this thing come from? I wondered. Had it been a door prize or a party favor from a luncheon?

Donald came through the pantry from the kitchen. As he passed me, he asked, “What's that?”

“It's a present from you.”

“Really?” He looked at it for a second. “Ivana!” he shouted into the foyer. She was standing on the other side of the Christmas tree near the living room. “Ivana!”

“What is it, Donald?”

“This is great.” He pointed at the shoe, and she smiled. Maybe he thought it was real gold.

It had all started in 1977 with a three-pack of Bloomie's underwear, retail $12, my very first Christmas present from Donald and his new wife, Ivana. That same year, they had given Fritz a leather-bound journal. It looked as though it were meant for somebody older, but it was really nice, and I felt a bit slighted until we realized that it was two years out of date. At least the underwear wouldn't expire.

On holidays, Donald and Ivana pulled up to the House in either an expensive sports car or a chauffeur-driven limo that was even longer than my grandfather's. They swept into the foyer like socialites, Ivana in her furs and silk and outrageous hair and makeup, Donald in his expensive three-piece suits and shiny shoes, everyone else looking conservative and unfashionable by comparison.

I grew up thinking that Donald had struck out on his own and single-handedly built the business that had turned my family name into a brand and that my grandfather, provincial and miserly, cared only about making and keeping money. On both counts, the truth was vastly different. A
New York Times
article published on October 2, 2018, that uncovered the vast amounts of alleged fraud and quasi-legal and illegal activities my family had engaged in over the course of several decades included this paragraph:

Fred Trump and his companies also began extending large loans and lines of credit to Donald Trump. Those loans dwarfed what the other Trumps got, the flow so constant at times that it was as if Donald Trump had his own Money Store. Consider 1979, when he borrowed $1.5 million in January, $65,000 in February, $122,000 in March, $150,000 in April, $192,000 in May, $226,000 in June, $2.4 million in July and $40,000 in August, according to records filed with New Jersey casino regulators.

In 1976, when Roy Cohn suggested that Donald and Ivana sign a prenuptial agreement, the terms set for Ivana's compensation were based on Fred's wealth because at the time Donald's father was his only source of income. I heard from my grandmother that, in addition to alimony and child support as well as the condo, the prenup, at Ivana's insistence, included a “rainy day” fund of $150,000. My parents' divorce agreement had also been based on my grandfather's wealth, but Ivana's $150,000 bonus was worth almost twenty-one years of the $600-per-month checks my mother received for child support and alimony.

Before Ivana, there had always been a sameness to the holidays that made them blur together. Christmas when I was five was indistinguishable from Christmas when I was eleven. The routine never varied. We'd enter the House through the front door at 1:00 p.m., dozens of packages in tow, handshakes and air kisses all around, then gather in the living room for shrimp cocktail. Like the front door, we used the living room only twice a year. Dad came and went, but I have no recollection of his being there one way or another.

Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners were identical, although one Christmas, Gam had the temerity to make roast beef instead of turkey. It was a meal everybody liked, but Donald and Robert were pissed off. Gam spent the whole meal with her head bowed, hands in her lap. Just when you thought the subject was dropped for good, one of them would say some version of “Jesus, Mom, I can't believe you didn't make turkey.”

Once Ivana became a part of the family, she joined Donald at the power center of the table, where he sat at my grandfather's right hand, his only equal. The people nearest to them (Maryanne and Robert and Ivana) formed a claque with one mission: to prop Donald up, follow his lead in conversation, and defer to him as though nobody was as important as he was. I think that initially, it was simply an expedient—Maryanne and Robert had learned early on that there was no point in contradicting their father's obvious preference. “I never challenged my father,” Maryanne said. “Ever.” It was easier to go along for the ride. Donald's chiefs of staff are prime examples of this phenomenon. John Kelly, at least for a while, and Mick Mulvaney, without any reservations at all, would behave the same way—until they were ousted for not being sufficiently “loyal.” That's how it always works with the sycophants. First they remain silent no matter what outrages are committed; then they make themselves complicit by not acting. Ultimately, they find they are expendable when Donald needs a scapegoat.

Over time, the discrepancy between Fred's treatment of Donald and his other children became painfully clear. It was simpler for Rob
and Maryanne to toe the party line in the hope that they wouldn't get treated any worse, which seems to be the same calculation Republicans in Congress make every day now. They also knew what had happened to my father when he failed to meet Fred's expectations. The rest of us at the other end of the table were superfluous; our job was to fill the cheap seats.

A year after the gold lamé shoe, the gift basket I received from Donald and Ivana hit the trifecta: it was an obvious regift, it was useless, and it demonstrated Ivana's penchant for cellophane. After unwrapping it, I noticed, among the tin of gourmet sardines, the box of table water crackers, the jar of vermouth-packed olives, and a salami, a circular indentation in the tissue paper that filled the bottom of the basket where another jar had once been. My cousin David walked by and, pointing at the empty space, asked, “What was that?”

“I have no idea. Something that goes with these, I guess,” I said, holding up the box of crackers.

“Probably caviar,” he said, laughing. I shrugged, having no idea what caviar was.

I grabbed the basket handle and walked toward the pile of presents I'd stacked next to the stairs. I passed Ivana and my grandmother on the way, lifted the basket, said, “Thanks, Ivana,” and put it on the floor.

“Is that yours?”

At first I thought she was talking about the gift basket, but she was referring to the copy of
Omni
magazine that was sitting on top of the stack of gifts I'd already opened.
Omni
, a magazine of science and science fiction that had launched in October of that year, was my new obsession. I had just picked up the December issue and brought it with me to the House in the hope that between shrimp cocktail and dinner I'd have a chance to finish reading it.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Bob, the publisher, is a friend of mine.”

“No way! I love this magazine.”

“I'll introduce you. You'll come into the city and meet him.”

It wasn't quite as seismic as being told I was going to meet Isaac Asimov, but it was pretty close. “Wow. Thanks.”

I filled a plate and went upstairs to my dad's room, where he'd been all day, too sick to join us. He was sitting up, listening to his portable radio. I handed the plate to him, but he put it on the small bedside table, not interested. I told him about Ivana's generous offer.

“Wait a second;
who
does she want to introduce you to?”

I would never forget the name. I'd looked at the magazine's masthead right after speaking to Ivana, and there he was: Bob Guccione, Publisher.

“You're going to meet the guy who publishes
Penthouse
?” Even at thirteen I knew what
Penthouse
was. There was no way we could be talking about the same person. Dad chuckled and said, “I don't think that's such a good idea.” And all of a sudden, neither did I.

It was impossible to laugh about the presents my mother received. Why she was still expected to attend family holidays years after her divorce from my father was a mystery, but why she went was an even bigger mystery. Clearly, the Trumps didn't want her there any more than she wanted to be there. Some of the presents they gave her were nice enough, but they always came from lesser stores than the gifts for Ivana and Robert's wife, Blaine. Worse, many of them had clearly been regifted. A handbag she got from Ivana one year bore a luxury brand but contained a used Kleenex.

After dinner and the opening of presents, we split up—some of us went to the kitchen, some to the backyard, and the rest of us to the library, where I sat on the floor near the door with my legs crossed. From a distance I watched whatever Godzilla movie or football game Donald and Rob happened to have on. After a while, I noticed my mother wasn't around. I didn't worry at first, but when she didn't return, I went to look for her. I checked the kitchen but found only my grandmother and aunts. I went out to the backyard, where my brother
and David were throwing a football around. When I asked Fritz where she was, he said, “I have no idea,” clearly not interested. With time, I would know where to find her without needing to ask, but the first few times I felt panic.

Mom was in the dining room, sitting alone at the table. By then the sideboard had been cleared, and the only evidence of the meal was a few stray cloth napkins on the floor. I stood in the doorway, hoping she would notice me and that my presence would set her back into motion. I was afraid to say anything, not wanting to disturb her. While the clatter of dishes and talk about leftovers and ice cream cake filtered out from the kitchen, I approached the mahogany table in the fading afternoon light. The chandelier had been extinguished, but I wished it had been even darker so that I didn't have to see my mother's face, how stricken she looked.

Careful not to touch her, I sat in the chair next to her. There was no comfort I could give or take except in solidarity.

Eight months before the gift of underwear, Donald and Ivana were married at Marble Collegiate Church and held their reception at the 21 Club. Mom, Fritz, and I were relegated to the cousins' table, and Dad wasn't there. The lie the family told was that Dad had been asked to be Donald's best man and his MC at the reception (a role Joey Bishop actually filled) but the family had decided he needed to stay in Florida in order to take care of Uncle Vic, Gam's brother-in-law. The truth was, my grandfather simply didn't want him at the wedding and he had been told not to come.

While Donald was cruising Manhattan looking for foreclosures, I was losing tens of thousands of dollars almost every week. On Fridays after school, I went to a friend's house and we played our version of Monopoly: double houses and hotels, double the money. Our sessions were marathons spanning the entire weekend. One game could last
anywhere from thirty minutes to several hours. The only constant in all of that gaming was my performance: I lost every single time I played.

In order to give me a fighting chance (and my friend something of a challenge), I was allowed to borrow increasingly huge sums of money from the bank and eventually from my opponent. We kept a running total of my enormous debt by writing the sums I owed in long columns of numbers on the inside of the cover.

Despite my terminally poor performance, I never once changed my strategy; I bought every Atlantic City property I landed on and put houses and hotels on my properties even when I had no chance of recouping my investment. I doubled and tripled down no matter how badly I was losing. It was a great joke between me and my friends that I, the granddaughter and niece of real estate tycoons, was terrible at real estate. It turned out that Donald and I had something in common after all.

Since my father's death, Donald has suggested that “they” (meaning he and my grandfather) should have “let” Freddy do what he loved and excelled at (flying) rather than force him to do something he hated and was bad at (real estate). But there's no evidence to suggest that my father lacked the skills to run Trump Management, just as there is none to suggest that Donald had them.

One night in 1978, Dad woke up in his West Palm Beach apartment with excruciating stomach pains. He managed to drag himself to his car and drove to the emergency room. He later told Mom that when he had gotten to the hospital, he hadn't gone in right away. He had stayed in his car, wondering if he should bother. Perhaps it would be simpler, he had thought, if it just ended. The only thing that had forced him to get help was the thought of me and Fritz.

Dad was very sick and was transferred to a Miami hospital, where the doctors diagnosed him with a heart defect that required surgery. Fred told Maryanne to fly to Florida, get him out of the hospital, and bring him back to New York. It would be my father's last trip north. After three years in Florida, he was going home.

In New York, doctors discovered that Dad had a faulty mitral valve and his heart had become dangerously enlarged. He needed to undergo an experimental procedure to replace it with a healthy valve from a pig's heart.

When Mom and I got to the House to see Dad the day before his surgery, Elizabeth was already there, sitting with him in his tiny childhood bedroom, which we called “the Cell.” He lay in his cot, and I kissed him on the cheek but didn't sit next to him for fear of breaking him. I'd seen Dad sick before—with pneumonia, with jaundice, with drunkenness, with despair—but his condition now was shocking. Not yet forty, he looked like a worn-out eighty-year-old man. He told us about the procedure and the pig valve, and Mom said, “Freddy, it's a good thing you're not kosher.” We all laughed.