The Trumpishness of Ivana
In a new memoir, Ivana Trump provides a soft-focus look at her marriage to Donald Trump, which lasted from 1977 to 1992.
Late last month, Ivana Trump, who was married to Donald Trump from 1977 to 1992, told an interviewer, when asked if the President would seek reëlection, that she thought the President was “missing a little bit of his old life,” the days when “he would go to Mar-a-Lago, he would go to play golf on Westchester, and things like that.” He still does all of these things, of course; Ivana meant that, back then, he wasn’t “working, working, working,” as she put it. The comment evoked the glitzy eighties period in which she and her ex-husband were prominent character actors in the all-night play of New York—conveniently, a period she details in her new memoir, “Raising Trump,” a soft-focus self-portrait of a woman who did not become First Lady but has lately made a point of calling herself the “first Trump lady.”
Ivana has always embodied the Trump brand, and still does: she is keen, in the book, to seem dominant, invulnerable, new-money deluxe. Like her daughter, Ivanka, she basks in the spotlight; like her ex-husband, and in contrast to silent Melania, she loves to speak her mind. (“I wouldn’t want to be in Melania’s Louboutins right now,” Ivana writes, after half-heartedly denying the report that she trash-talked Melania’s public-speaking abilities at a luncheon.) Along with “The Art of the Deal” and Ivanka’s two listen-up-ladies self-help books, “Raising Trump” joins the canon of ghostwritten literature that demonstrates the appeal of Trumpishness as well as its considerable shortcomings as an ethos. Ivana is shameless, superficial, and sometimes surprising—strict in her adherence to a personal code and private ambition, louche in terms of most everything else. (In a cameo in “The First Wives Club,” she memorably said, “Don’t get mad; get everything.”) Because she can broadcast these lively qualities without also maintaining a controlling stake in our government, and because she seems to genuinely work hard at her particular hustle, Ivana is the most appealing of the Trumps.
This is not to say that the new book is candid. Whatever honesty exists in “Raising Trump” is curtailed by a gag order that Ivana signed during her divorce: she can’t speak publicly about her marriage to Donald without his permission. She contested that provision, unsuccessfully, in a seemingly rare instance of her dealmaking skills proving less adept than her ex-husband’s. Though this doesn’t make it into the book, she first negotiated with Donald in March, 1977, when they sat down to discuss their prenuptial agreement. It was three weeks before their wedding and six months after they met. At one point, Ivana stormed out, offended by a stipulation that, in the event of a divorce, she’d have to return all jewelry received as a gift—and also by Donald’s refusal to set up a “rainy day” divorce fund of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars (fair compensation, Ivana believed, for giving up her modelling career). Donald eventually agreed to a hundred-thousand-dollar fund. Two years later, Ivana renegotiated, upping the cash fund to seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. In 1984, she got it to $2.5 million. She signed a fourth contract in 1987, after six months of talks, which awarded her ten million dollars in the event of a divorce. Shortly afterward, according to the 1993 book “Lost Tycoon,” by Harry Hurt, which details these negotiations, Donald slept with Marla Maples for the first time. (He had been romancing her by sending her positive press clippings, Hurt reports.)
The elisions in “Raising Trump” are large and predictable. Ivana doesn’t mention, for instance, the time that she accused Donald, during divorce proceedings, of violently raping her in a fit of anger over a botched “scalp reduction” procedure. (He was angry because Ivana had recommended her own plastic surgeon, according to Hurt; Ivana told Hurt that she didn’t mean “rape” in a “literal or criminal” sense.) She doesn’t discuss the brazenness of her husband’s affair with Maples—whom she calls “the showgirl” throughout—choosing instead to take a shot at Hillary Clinton: “Nowadays, I look at political wives who stand by their cheating, lying husbands at press conferences with a glazed look in their eyes, and I can’t believe they put it up with it . . . I’m thinking of one particular political wife who became a politician herself.” Ivana paints herself as a campy, bitchy post-Soviet icon, a woman obsessed with excess and hierarchy and shiny objects, a woman who could sit ensconced in her gown closet and tell a cocktail tall tale about how she emerged victorious from a marriage to the Donald. She is still, like her ex-husband, obsessed with her identity as a winner.
This quality is less off-putting in Ivana, whose career didn’t start with a million-dollar loan from her father. Ivana was born in 1949 in what was then Czechoslovakia, to Catholic parents who refused to join the Communist Party. In her early teens, she started skiing competitively, which allowed her to travel outside the country; she was astonished, abroad, by the marvels of consumer freedom. Ivana was an only child, a “real daddy’s girl.” (“Ivanka and Donald’s relationship growing up reminded me of mine with my father,” she writes.) Her high-school boyfriend connected her to an Austrian skier who was willing to marry her so she could travel freely on an Austrian passport. She had to sit for a police interview after each international trip; she learned to bring presents for the officers’ girlfriends and to keep a poker face.
Her next boyfriend died in a car crash; Ivana packed up her dog, a black poodle named Chappy, and flew to Toronto, where she moved in with her uncle and aunt. There she was scouted by a William Morris agent and started working as a model. She met Donald on a modelling trip to New York City, at the restaurant Maxwell’s Plum: he offered to help her and her friends skip the wait, then insisted on sitting down with them. The next morning, he sent roses. The gesture didn’t impress her: “I was twenty-seven and had been hit on by countless men since the age of fourteen.” Nonetheless, she started talking to him on the phone, and they were engaged a few months later. Donald’s father, Fred, froze her out when she refused to participate in the Trump family tradition of ordering steak at brunch.* He didn’t like Ivana’s revealing clothing, either. At one event, she wore a dress that concealed her cleavage with a high neckline, and Fred complimented her. “I turned around so he could see that the dress was backless and dipped all the way to my G-string,” she writes. Her wedding to Donald, on Easter, was officiated by Norman Vincent Peale. There were six hundred guests; Ivana knew six of them.
“Raising Trump” has a novelistic degree of specificity—a credit, perhaps, to Valerie Frankel, Ivana’s ghostwriter (though Ivana prefers the term “collaborator,” which she used when she published her romance novel “For Love Alone,” in 1992). The most chilling detail in the memoir, possibly, is that Ivana got pregnant with all three of her children while she had an I.U.D. in. (After Eric, she tied her tubes.) She hated pregnancy. “Start to finish, my entire labor and delivery lasted twenty minutes,” she writes, of her first time. “It would be the same for each baby: a horrible, mercifully brief, and beautiful experience.” She suggested the name Donald, Jr., and her husband hesitated: “What if he’s a loser?” he asked. Cuddling their brand-new potential loser, they talked about what a great life he would have, and also about the Trump Organization: Ivana was in charge of interior design at the Grand Hyatt. She went back to work two days later.
Ivana is proud of her children, and their children—“It’s so many freaking Trumps,” she writes. She tells stories about helping her kids with their homework before she went out at night, ordering them to keep the eraser rubble away from her dresses. “History wasn’t my strong suit,” she recalls. “They’d ask me about things that happened a hundred years ago and I would say, ‘I live in the now!’ ” Unlike her daughter—whose most recent book, “Women Who Work,” talks a lot about parenting but not at all about nannies—Ivana gives credit to her household help. She slides quickly over the divorce, noting that it was especially hard on Don, Jr., who stopped speaking to his father for a year; she blames “the showgirl” and the media for their ordeal. When a tabloid called Ivana an unfit mother, Donald sent a bodyguard to fetch Don, Jr., telling Ivana that he wanted to keep him, she writes. (She had been awarded full custody.) Ivana agreed to the plan; Donald, his bluff called, quickly sent his son back.
She implies that she’s a secret adviser to her ex-husband, and when she does insult our President it’s in the passive manner of a woman acknowledging an enemy at a luncheon: “I was too successful to be Mrs. Trump,” she writes. She rebounded with a divorced Italian man; later, she found herself on a boat, trying to choose her next boyfriend. “I sat between Roffredo, a slim, dark Italian, and Henrik, a huge Viking, and wondered, Which one shall I choose?” She picked Roffredo; seven years later, he died in a car crash. In 2006, at fifty-seven, Ivana began dating a twenty-nine-year-old named Rossano. “I’d rather be a babysitter than a nursemaid,” she writes. For one Halloween, she goes as Little Bo Peep, and Rossano as Donald.
Self-fictionalized, Ivana makes a decent heroine. She’s different from the Ivana of “Lost Tycoon,” who once fired two Trump Hotel staffers, one of whom had been employed by the organization for twenty-eight years, because they’d used her letterhead to make a prank memo. She’s also different from the Ivana who was so often in the tabloids—a model with a work ethic as remarkable as her capacity to swallow mistreatment, remaking her hotels, remaking her face. But, in every version of herself, Ivana is a living mixed message: a woman who married into her money and then worked tirelessly to prove that she deserved it, who preferred jewels and houses and divorce bounty to the salary and equity she might easily have drawn. She is all compromises, and completely uncompromising—a real first Trump lady, who created another one: Ivanka Trump’s legal name is also Ivana. (Donald wanted to name his elder daughter Tiffany, in honor of his purchase of the air rights over the Tiffany’s building—a desire that apparently persisted until 1993, when he and the showgirl had a daughter.) Ivanka inherited her mother’s canniness and added a thick coat of subtlety. Ivana thinks Ivanka could be the next President Trump.
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