TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022690/0226500.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.9 KB | 190 lines

                S                                                              PEOPLE, Page 64

Two for The Money


Awash in power and glitz, Donald and Ivana Trump carry
everything to excess, even their split

By EMILY MITCHELL -- Reported by Wendy Cole/New York


    They were the golden couple, shiny as newly minted coins.
Everything they touched seemed to turn to glitz. Buildings that
reached the clouds, a yacht that matched royalty's, myriad
businesses from casinos to an airline -- all mirroring a fortune
estimated to be $1.7 billion. Donald and Ivana Trump scythed
their way through New York society, a pair of posturing peacocks
before an adoring press. It seemed there was nothing their money
could not buy -- until last week.

    When the glittering Trump marriage collapsed, the ground
fairly rumbled beneath the streets of Manhattan. To think of New
York City's boy builder, invariably referred to as "the Donald"
by Ivana, carrying on life without his Czechmate and social
partner was to imagine the city without beggars, bagels without
cream cheese, sex without passion. During their 13 years of
marriage, Donald, 43, had acquired most of his wealth with
Ivana, 41, loyally at his side. In the process he became a man
for whom everything had to be the biggest and flashiest -- and
then be gilded by his name as well.

    TRUMP: the letters proclaimed power, gleaming on the casinos
and hotels, the tower, the shuttle, the yacht, the helicopters;
sprinkled over household and countinghouse like the SPQRs on the
public works of ancient Rome. In the world according to Donald
Trump, more -- not less -- is more. His marriage became a
pageant of celebrity appearances surpassing even the vulgarities
on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

    And so it was no great surprise that their dispute was
played out like a public event, an oversize, grandiose and gaudy
display of domestic discord. The imminent breakup between Donald
and a "devastated" Ivana was first announced in the New York
Daily News by the savviest, most influential of gossip
columnists, Liz Smith. After his departure from the couple's
spectacular three-story, 50-room penthouse atop Trump Tower, new
and old friends, lawyers and public relations minions began
lining up on one side or the other, telephones and fax machines
primed as deadly weapons.

    Tabloids and TV seized on the separation like sharks thrown
into a frenzy by the smell of such privileged blood. GIMME THE
PLAZA! blared the New York Post, seeking to keep Ivana at the
helm of the hotel Donald had given her to run. IVANA BETTER
DEAL, screamed the Daily News, taking up arms against a
prenuptial agreement that would seemingly award her a pittance
of the Trump holdings. Ordinary citizens took sides, too,
divvying up the Trump family fortune as if it were theirs to
dispense, passing out millions according to their sympathies.
Amid all the foofaraw, it may have been that the only ones who
had not heard about the separation were their three children:
two boys and a girl. It was said that when eight-year-old
daughter Ivanka learned the news in school, she began to cry.

    One report had Donald complaining that Ivana's "level of
arrogance has grown steadily worse in recent years. The bottom
line is I don't want to create another Leona Helmsley." It was
an ungentlemanly reference to the self-promoting hotel queen who
was recently sentenced to a four-year prison term for income-tax
evasion, fraud and conspiracy. (Donald denied making the
comparison.) Other stories impugned Ivana's managerial skills
as president of the Trump-owned Plaza Hotel, suggesting that she
was merely a figurehead. These stopped when her lawyer
threatened to sue Donald's p.r. firm.

    On the other hand, Ivana's partisans got in their shots as
news accounts blossomed with rumors of Donald's infidelities.
Donald protested his innocence: "I don't believe in cheating.
But if I look at somebody or somebody looks at me, immediately
they do Don Juan stories." The most persistently mentioned of
his sometime public companions, and the one about whom he made
the most cautious denial ("She's a friend; a very, very nice
girl"), was a peachy actress-model from Georgia named Marla
Maples, 26. SIMPLY MARLA-VOUS a tabloid promptly said of her and
then quoted Donald as rating her as "better than a 10." She in
turn reportedly confided to friends that he had given her the
"best sex I've ever had."

    Strategy sessions held by the couple's respective allies and
advisers focused on the prenuptial agreement. Signed shortly
before they said I do in 1977, it has been updated three times,
most recently two years ago. At present it would grant Ivana
only a small portion from the Trump treasury: $20 million and
their 47-room Greenwich, Conn., mansion, which is worth about
$10 million. Matrimonial lawyers cautioned that such an
agreement is close to being ironclad. It was rumored that she
was asking for more, and one story had her demanding that Donald
hand over $150 million, the Plaza and the Boeing 727 jet. Not
at all, said Ivana's spokesman John Scanlon. She wants "nothing
more than a fair and equitable share." What she would really
like, she has confessed to intimates, is a reconciliation with
the Donald.

    Sudden as the separation seemed, whispers of trouble in
Trumparadise had been heard for at least two years. In the
fashionable circles frequented by the Trumps, a wife often
tolerates excursions off the marital preserve, keeping her man
on a long tether while she maintains an unassailable place as
wife-in-residence. But Donald apparently snapped his leash after
meeting Maples.

    A bit player in two films (The Secret of My Success and
Maximum Overdrive), Maples has posed for ads and other
promotional campaigns. After she met Donald, the two allegedly
worshiped each other "fairly regularly" at Sunday services in
Fifth Avenue's Marble Collegiate Church, the site of Donald's
marriage to Ivana. Last year Maples was rumored to have been
installed for two months in the pricey St. Moritz Hotel, less
than half a dozen blocks from the Tower. (Maples' publicist says
he booked his client into the hotel himself for a commercial.)
By some accounts, Marla and Ivana, who is said to have called
her rival "Moolah" (as in money), had an impromptu summit
confrontation at an Aspen, Colo., restaurant around
Christmastime. In one version, Marla asked, "Are you in love
with your husband? Because I am." The two Trumps were later seen
publicly arguing in Aspen.

    As Donald's attention wandered, say friends, Ivana went to
great lengths to compete with the beautiful (and younger) women
who constantly crossed his path. She endured several rounds of
plastic surgery last year to smooth her face, enhance her lips
and improve her cleavage. She replaced the hardened movie-queen
makeup and lacquered hairstyle with a softer, more youthful
look. The stakes were high: quite apart from her feelings for
her husband, she loved being Mrs. Donald Trump.

    An avid skier from Czechoslovakia, Ivana was modeling in
Montreal when she met Donald. "She had done things in a
half-baked way," says an observer. "Ivana was never a top skier,
a top model. She always wanted to be really good at something."

    It was a mixed marriage: pleasure was combined with
business. Aglitter in sequins, Ivana smiled through charity
benefits and banquets, adding a veneer of glamour for her
up-from-the-boroughs husband. Even more to her liking, Donald
made her CEO of Trump's Castle Hotel and Casino in Atlantic
City, where she presided over a staff of 4,000 with alternating
infusions of charm and callousness. She adopted the Ronald
Reagan style of management, dismissing details that were boring
or too complicated. However, in Trump: The Art of the Deal,
Donald lauded her as being "incredibly good at anything she's
ever done, a natural manager."

    But what Donald gives, he can also take away. He removed her
from the Atlantic City post in 1988, softening the blow by
putting her in charge of the Plaza. Her fee, he joked, would be
$1 a year and "all the dresses she wants." She has conceived of
no less a goal than transforming the fading Plaza into, as she
has said, "the world's greatest hotel." Having acquired her
husband's name, she had taken on his hyperbole as well.

    In an interview last week, Donald maintained again that
Ivana had done "a good job" at the Plaza. And if she wants to
stay on, he said, "it's something that I think I would honor.
She likes running the hotel. It gives her something to do."
Donald has wasted no tears over the breakup, but he did his best
to Trump up a wistful attitude: "We just grew apart. I think
Ivana is a fabulous woman, but sometimes people change and go
on different paths." With Donald, of course, a deal is a deal
is a deal. He insisted that the prenuptial contract is "a sacred
document," an agreement that is "bound in stone." But, should
he choose to be generous and "go a step further because I happen
to love Ivana, that's a decision that I will make." In fact,
there were reports that he was considering a settlement of $100
million.

    Rich or poor, an abandoned wife usually has little trouble
gaining sympathy. Donald's mother, two sisters and sister-in-law
joined Barbara Walters and, of course, Liz Smith to rally around
the tearful Ivana last week, toasting her at a previously
planned birthday party in a chichi Manhattan restaurant. Ivana's
spirits were further brightened by the arrival of a celebratory
cake, compliments of onetime billionaire Adnan Khashoggi. For
a time, Ivana can count on the support of her society sisters,
who will clasp her to their bony bosoms. But unless there is a
private settlement or reconciliation, the court will have the
last word about the division of spoils. Until then, welcome to
the noisiest, gaudiest show in town -- Trump: the Divorce.