I am the creator of my own comic book, and I love living in it.
—DONALD TRUMP
Donald Trump never went bankrupt. He would frequently and energetically assert this in the years after he sought the shelter of the court for his Taj Mahal casino. The filing was made by a Trump corporation, not Trump the man, and he would describe this action as a sensible business move, devoid of shame, that gave him powerful leverage in his negotiations with creditors. “You have to be strong enough not to pay,” Trump would eventually explain, adding that the people he owed could rage with frustration but would eventually have to accept that his companies were not going to meet their obligations.1
At the time, lots of prominent businesspeople were using the courts to get out of corporate debt. In the year Trump’s Taj Mahal went bankrupt, so did United Press International, Bloomingdale’s, and Piper Aircraft. But while many well-known firms went under in the recession of 1990–91, none were associated with an owner who even approached Donald Trump’s level of fame and notoriety. “The show is Trump,” he said in a moment of candor that revealed his life to be a moneymaking construct. Having made his personality synonymous with his business, Trump’s troubles, including his marital problems, invariably affected his brand. This problem was widely discussed in the business press by experts in marketing and advertising. Renee Frengut, of the firm Market Insights, noted that people who became disillusioned with a celebrity “are not very forgiving.” Noted advertising expert Jerry Della Femina said that he would like to hire Ivana Trump, and not Donald, to promote his clients.
Remarkably, Trump continued to enjoy a life of luxury, retaining his many residences, including his home atop Trump Tower and his mansion in Palm Beach. His budget for personal expenses, approved by his creditors, was $450,000—per month. At home he was attended by servants. On the road he traveled with bodyguards. Any reasonable person would conclude that this material ease proved Trump was a success or, as he would say it, a “winner.” But in his frenzied sprint through life, he had continually sought to raise the bar in his own game, suggesting to the world that a successful man’s trophies must be ever more glittering and impressive, lest he be judged a failure. First he welcomed a writer from The Times to describe his luxury apartment in Olympic Tower. Then he brought Robin Leach to his mansion in the country, so it could be seen by the millions who tuned in to Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. His private airplane had to be a converted commercial jet. His Palm Beach home had to be Mar-a-Lago. His yacht had to be almost three hundred feet long. The woman at his side had to be beautiful in a way that everyone would admire.
Arriving at a time when wealth was being redefined—the real rich claimed not millions, but billions, in assets—Trump was not alone in his ambitions. In general, the rich men and women of his generation indulged at a level not seen since the medicine of the Great Depression quelled the fever of the twenties. In his prime, Fred Trump was among the richest men in America, yet he lived among doctors, lawyers, and accountants. He rarely traveled, except for vacations in Florida, and was careful about expenses. In 1955, when Fortune published a study on the subject, this far-from-ostentatious life was the norm for top executives across the nation, who remembered the excesses of the Roaring Twenties and refused to repeat them. Don Mitchell, president of Sylvania Electric, lived in an eleven-room house in Summit, New Jersey, and commuted by train to Manhattan. D. A. Hulcy, president of Lone Star Gas, counted a small lakeside cottage as his main indulgence.2
The top executives profiled by Fortune in 1955 enjoyed far more luxuries than the typical workers in their firms, but the gap that separated them was much smaller than the one that existed in 1990 between the wealthiest and everyone else. And in the top echelon, Trump was alone when it came to flaunting his power and possessions. In this way he came to symbolize changes that disturbed those who defined success along the lines of the traditional American Dream, which included a stable family life, a secure home, and a place in one’s community. Trump’s definition of a good life was a cartoonish fantasy, which he promoted with the help of media figures such as Robin Leach and Barbara Walters.
As he thrived, others also began to display their wealth in excessive ways. Real estate magnate Gerald Guterman marked his son’s bar mitzvah with a $500,000 cruise for several hundred guests. Gayfryd Steinberg lavished $1 million on her investor husband’s fiftieth birthday celebration in the Hamptons. Malcolm Forbes spent more than $2 million on his seventieth birthday party in Tangier, where the entertainment included an authentic cavalry charge. In the precincts occupied by the Gutermans, Steinbergs, and Forbeses, vast sums were also spent on parties for wives and mistresses, and on plastic surgery to make wives look more like mistresses.3 As the lives of ultra-upper-income Americans became more extreme, middle-class Americans struggled to maintain their standard of living. Wages stagnated, debt rose, and high-paying manufacturing jobs continued to disappear. Beginning in 1984, personal bankruptcy rates had reached new levels every single year. In 1991, the year when the Taj went bankrupt, so did approximately nine hundred thousand individuals. Unlike Trump and others who used bankruptcy as a financial tool, ordinary people could not hide behind corporate entities or demand better terms from their creditors. Ordinary people who filed for bankruptcy suffered financial ruin as they lost their homes, their cars, and everything else of monetary value. In the late eighties and early nineties foreclosures and evictions spiked in suburban New York City, and homeless shelters filled to overflowing in Oregon. In the Midwest public-health experts blamed economic stress for a sharp spike in suicides by farmers. On both coasts, economists noted the development of a “dual” society in which the few thrived as the many struggled.4
In this environment, many people delighted in the troubles of men such as Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, two fraudsters whose crimes revealed the underside of financial engineering. Boesky had inspired filmmaker Oliver Stone’s Gordon Gekko when he told business-school graduates at the University of California, “Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” Boesky later paid a $100 million fine and served prison time for his violations of federal law. Milken, who was born a month after Trump and also attended Wharton, supported many greenmailing assaults and was, for more than a decade, one of the most adept and creative practitioners of the junk-bond trade. After Ivan Boesky implicated him in various crimes, Milken pleaded guilty, paid a $200 million fine, and also went to prison.5
Famous as they were, Milken and Boesky were not as well-known as Trump, whose face, voice, and unique hairstyle were recognized by almost everyone in America. Much of the Trump image was manufactured, by him, through the repetition of not-fully-accurate anecdotes, which he told in a consistent way. The holes in these stories made Trump vulnerable to those who considered him arrogant and overreaching. Skeptics took delight in his continued struggles even after the Taj reorganization and the sale of his yacht, the Trump Princess, to a member of the Saudi royal family. Trump was forced to put his two other casinos—Trump Castle and Trump Plaza—into bankruptcy in March of 1992.
For a man who openly confessed that “image means a great deal to me,” the ridicule and occasional pity that accompanied Trump’s losses must have seemed all the more painful. The cartoonist Berkeley Breathed installed Trump’s brain in the skull of a scoundrel cat in his comic strip Bloom County. A fake think tank called the Boring Institute named Trump the most boring celebrity of the year, and an entrepreneurial jokester began selling a game called Chump, which required players to compete over who could lose the most money. In Hollywood, movie executives began talking about Trump as the archetype for a new type of villain. In Boston, Malcolm Forbes provided the funding for some Harvard students to present a fake Marla Maples at a press conference as an April Fools’ joke. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion about Donald and Marla. Jeff Bulmer, a Vietnam vet, a helicopter pilot for Trump based in Manhattan, told a reporter, “I knew about Marla Maples before anyone else. She’s a gold digger.”
Despite the furor, Marla and Donald stayed together. When he appeared on the CNN, Trump lashed out at the media. “The press is very dishonest,” he told interviewer Larry King. “I’ve been quoted in various articles where I never spoke to people, where they just make up a quote. Donald Trump said this, and he said that.… They go with lies to an extent that I’ve never seen before. They make up stories.… I’d love to grab some of those guys, I really would.”6
Trump seemed sincere in his outrage, but his own lifelong pursuit of press attention had set the stage for his current troubles. This fact limited any sympathy others might feel for him. Marla Maples faced a similar problem since her own career aspirations practically required that she speak with reporters.
In April, Maples reluctantly agreed to appear on the ABC TV news program PrimeTime Live where she would be interviewed by Diane Sawyer. A one-time aide in the Nixon White House, Sawyer was persistent in her pursuit of a scoop. Her team had joined the media horde that had besieged Maples and her family. In deciding to submit to one high-profile interview, Maples hoped she might satisfy the demands of the press and ease the pressure on herself and her family.
Sawyer, who was a worthy rival to Barbara Walters, had a way of establishing an almost instant emotional rapport with her subjects. This skill allowed her to ask deeply personal questions, and get answers. When she asked Maples if she loved Donald Trump, her subject answered, “I can’t lie about it. You know I do.” However, when Sawyer asked if she and Trump had ever discussed marriage Maples said, “No. He’s, he’s a friend. You know? He has a family, and that’s number one to him, I know.”
Maples, who had lost ten pounds due to the stress of events swirling around her, appeared wearing a peach-colored suit and a silver necklace. Speaking in a soft voice she said Trump supported her decision to be interviewed because “… he has a lot of sympathy for how we’ve been besieged by this. And I think he wants to see me come out looking okay.” When she addressed the breakup of the Trump marriage, Maples kept herself out of the equation. “I believe that that’s a very sad and very serious thing between two people, and I would’ve only hoped that it could have stayed more private.” She also expressed some distress over the publicity that had attended the scandal that she had touched off, which was an odd claim for anyone to make while appearing on a TV program that regularly drew more than nine million viewers. As Norma Foerderer predicted, ABC benefited immensely as it captured five million more viewers than usual for PrimeTime Live. It was the biggest-ever audience for the program, which had long lagged behind its competitors.7
But for the scandal, Marla Maples would never have heard from anyone at ABC. Nor would she have received Time magazine’s invitation to attend the 1990 Washington Correspondents Dinner. But there she was, a week after the PrimeTime broadcast, causing a bigger stir than any of the assorted senators, movie stars, and administration figures including President and First Lady Barbara Bush, who would complain that she didn’t get to meet Ms. Maples. At Time’s pre-dinner reception, photographers pushed aside Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in the rush to take her picture. During the banquet itself, the comedian Dennis Miller, who was chosen to entertain the crowd, quipped that Marla “should have asked Diane Sawyer if Mike Nichols was the best sex she’s ever had.”
In her star turn, Marla Maples proved far more adept than Ivana Trump had ever been, playing her role with the same kind of ease that Donald usually brought to the stage. Maples would later say that she had dreamed that a life with Trump would allow her to practice philanthropy and somehow contribute to the greater good. She saw in him the reincarnation of a former monarch. He was “a king … a ruler of the world, as he sees it.” Maples hoped she could cultivate the benevolent side of the man for humanitarian work and soothe “the little boy that still wants attention.” At least that was her dream.
Donald spent the spring and summer of 1990 dealing with the troubles of his business empire and preparing for the publication of his second book. To promote the sales of the book Trump agreed to press interviews, including a session with Barbara Walters, whom he told, “I’m not going to let my guard down.” Walters managed to get him to say, “I make mistakes,” but he fessed up to little else. Trump also agreed to cooperate with writer Marie Brenner for an article published in Vanity Fair. Thinking better of the idea, he called editor Tina Brown to complain before the piece was actually published. When it did appear, Brenner’s story presented him as a reeling, desperate man. In one passage she quoted a Trump attorney saying, “Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory. If you say something again and again, people will believe you.” In another passage Brenner recalled that a remorseful news reporter had told at her, “He was always a phony, and we filled our papers with him!”8
Trump responded by writing Brown: “It was only at your request that I agreed to do the interview with Marie Brenner. Prior to your call, I was adamant about not doing it. It is indeed unfortunate that you, based on our friendship, prevailed upon me.” He called the piece “a fabrication and a disgrace” and added, “Vanity Fair has libeled me.” Days after the magazine article was published, Trump’s book appeared in stores. Coauthored with journalist Charles Leerhsen, Trump: Surviving at the Top was liberally salted with attacks on those Donald perceived to be his enemies, especially those in and around the practice of journalism.
Having participated vigorously in the tabloid battle of the headlines during his marital crisis, Trump now complained that “the publicity dehumanizes you.” He criticized Time magazine, the cartoonist/satirist Garry Trudeau, and the writer Wayne Barrett. Of Liz Smith, he wrote that she “used to kiss my ass so much that it was downright embarrassing.” Trump’s most pointed assault was against publisher Malcolm Forbes, whom he described as a kind of shakedown artist who favored those who advertised in his magazine. He wrote that Forbes had screamed at him when staff at the Plaza Hotel wouldn’t allow his two underage male companions drink at the bar. He also characterized Forbes as a hypocrite because he lived openly as a homosexual but insisted that others keep his orientation secret. Long the subject of gossip, Forbes’s sexual identity has been dissected by many press outlets, and they generally agreed that besides having a long marriage and fathering three children, he also had male sexual partners.
The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney called the attack on Forbes a bit of “smarminess worthy of Richard Nixon.” Only the most informed readers would know that Trump’s view of Forbes was affected by Trump’s own long-standing complaints about where he ranked in the annual Forbes magazine list of wealthy individuals.9
When Trump turned to the subject of fame and its effects, he wrote from a unique perspective. Fame, which was part of his business plan, had contributed substantially to his successes even as it exacted a price. It is, he wrote, “a kind of drug, one that is way too powerful for most people to handle.” Trump: Surviving at the Top was filled with firsthand reports on the bizarre behavior of fame-addled celebrities. Trump described Frank Sinatra as screaming to a bodyguard when he was approached by a fan, shouting “Get this bum out of here!” Trump devoted a full page to Howard Hughes, whose eccentricities became pathologies in the years prior to his death. In his youth, the sandy-haired Hughes could have passed as Trump’s brother. Like Donald, Hughes was linked to many beautiful women and operated a gambling business. He was also famously germophobic, a trait that Trump confessed he too possessed. “I’m constantly washing my hands, and it wouldn’t bother me if I never had to shake hands with a well-meaning stranger again.”
Trump’s seemingly frank statements about his contamination anxiety and his angst over his financial struggles—“My life is shit,” he declared—gave the impression of a man who was willing to reveal himself. But all he copped to were a few missteps and quirks and forgivable sins such as working too hard. Sprinkled into a text that was otherwise an exercise in name-dropping and chest-thumping, these confessions revealed nothing meaningful about the man. The book was savaged in The Times by the prominent journalist Michael Lewis, who observed, “He’s not exposing himself so much as he is shopping for new identities.” Lewis found the book to be “a strained, sloppy exercise in facade restoration.” Trump’s businesses were crippled, Lewis wrote, “Yet he still insists, like a captured tyrant, that he is in charge.”10
* * *
Trump’s second book coincided, roughly, with a flurry of works from writers who attempted to sound an alarm about 1980s-style excess. Barbarians at the Gate, by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, painted a picture of breathtaking avarice and ego as it told the story of the $25 billion takeover of RJR Nabisco. In The Politics of Rich and Poor, former Republican Party strategist Kevin Phillips showed how a new Gilded Age had begun. Others reported that the portion of national income going to the richest 1 percent had risen from 8.1 percent to 14.7 percent, and that salaries for Wall Street’s top earners had increased 1,000 percent in ten years. Earl Shorris, author of A Nation of Salesmen, named Donald Trump specifically as he decried the crass “subversion” of American culture by those who believed that anything, from the admiration of the masses to the policies of Washington, could be bought and sold.11
On television, the celebration of wealth offered by Robin Leach on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was challenged by those with a more critical eye. ABC joined with the Public Broadcasting Service to present a new series called The New Explorers, which reported on the lives of those who helped the super-rich spend their money. In Beverly Hills and Manhattan, the program’s producers revealed the lives of caterers who were asked to deliver environmentally sound meals and florists challenged to outdo themselves with every assignment. Personal trainers also got plenty of attention, with the cameras entering an oak-paneled workout room to capture Marla Maples and Donald Trump learning the best way to perform jumping jacks.12
Trump was an easy target for anyone who was distressed by the rise of tabloid culture and gold-plated materialism. He also mystified those who sought to measure his achievements. His many complex business dealings were conducted in private, which made it almost impossible for anyone to know which bold proposals were moving forward and which had been abandoned. Was he still planning to build the world’s tallest building on the West Side? How about Television City? A New Yorker needed a scorecard to keep track. Trump’s personal life was another matter. A married man’s dalliance with a much younger woman, who fit everyone’s idea of a blond bombshell/home wrecker, fit into a narrative understood by all. A photo of Marla Maples on the front page of a tabloid was enough to shame Donald Trump in the eyes of the world. To make matters worse, even mainstream publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, having added gossip columns and People-magazine-type features to their menus, gleefully attended to the smarmier aspects of the lives of the rich and famous.
Unlike the reserved society types of yore, who strove to present themselves as better than the unwashed masses, the new celebrities willingly offered the public a pageant of shamelessness. In early 1991, for example, Trump and Maples were among hundreds who donned tuxedos and gowns for a ballroom party to honor Joey Adams, comedian husband of the gossip columnist Cindy Adams. The swells included Sydney Biddle Barrows, who was best known as a madam for high-end prostitutes, and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, whose criminal record (illegal campaign donations to Richard Nixon) had been wiped clean by Ronald Reagan in the last days of his presidency. Imelda Marcos, kleptocrat wife of the deposed dictator of the Philippines, sang “Happy Birthday” to the eighty-year-old Adams. Cindy Adams used her finger to remove lipstick from the teeth of Bess Myerson, who had recently pleaded guilty to shoplifting. A comic named Pat Cooper brayed, “Marla, ya picked another loser!”13
For Maples, who was just a few years removed from Cohutta, Georgia, the concoction of crass and class displayed at Joey Adams’s party blended into the blur that was life with Donald Trump. “I was caught up in the drama,” she would recall many years later. “I was so caught up in that. I couldn’t get out.… I didn’t know how to get out, and like he’d say, ‘Well, I wasn’t stopping you.’ But the truth was it felt like I was swimming against the current every day. I felt completely smothered and I didn’t know how to get out.”
Others seemed to thrive on controversy and notoriety. In the new economy of celebrity, famous people who behaved abysmally could overcome almost any disgrace—and continue to make money based on their fame—if they remained in the spotlight long enough for the public to move on to a new scandal. This required an exceedingly thick skin, but few people ever rose to such prominence without developing quite a few calluses. Those who would be famous had to show they were tough enough to suffer derision and indignity and keep on flashing their perfect smiles. As Trump observed, modern fame was like a drug, and addicts will do almost anything to get a fix. This included feeding the maw of the publicity machine yourself to remain relevant.
In June 1991 Donald Trump scheduled a big public celebration of his birthday, and the Taj Mahal’s first full year in business, for the last weekend of the month. (The resort was operating under the supervision of the federal bankruptcy court.) He and Marla planned to serve as hosts. He told Newsday that he had begun asking women he wanted to date to visit his doctor’s office for an HIV test. “It’s one of the worst times in the history of the world to be dating,” said Trump with characteristic grandiosity. The test was “one way to be careful,” he explained. “There are lots of ways. I’m saying take all of those ways and double them.” The same article noted that Trump, who had said he was commencing a search for the “right woman,” was dating the European model Carla Bruni, future wife of French president Nicolas Sarkozy. According to the paper, Trump regarded his relationship with Bruni as “just the first in what he expects to be a long, hard search for ‘the right woman.’” Marla was hopeful that he would someday return to her and told Newsday, “If a miracle happens and Donald finds God—I’m there.”14
Any woman with the slightest romantic connection to Trump would rightly feel hurt, angered, even humiliated, by his comments. Bruni didn’t respond publicly, but according to writer Harry Hurt, she complained loudly to Trump, who couldn’t believe she wasn’t delighted by the publicity. When a writer for People magazine called Trump’s office, she spoke to a man who identified himself as John Miller but sounded an awful lot like Trump and noted that “important beautiful women call him [Trump] all the time.” Among them, he said, were actress Kim Basinger and the pop superstar Madonna. Turning sympathetic, he added, “Competitively it’s tough. It was tough for Marla, it will be tough for Carla.” Upon hearing a recording of the “Miller” interview, Maples said it was in fact Donald. She said she felt “shocked and devastated.”
All of Marla’s reaction to Trump’s stunt was reported in print, along with her sad observation that “I came into this for love, and I hope he finds happiness.” However, by the time the magazine hit the newsstands, Trump and Maples had conducted a semipublic reconciliation that was too strange for fiction. The episode began with Maples baring her wounds to the TV talk-show host Kathie Lee Gifford and her husband, the former football star Frank Gifford, during a visit to their home. Kathie Lee had a few things in common with Maples. Like Maples, she was married to a much older man. She also craved attention. Descended from a family of snake handlers, Kathie Lee Gifford was trained in theater at Oral Roberts University and had worked hard to become a celebrity. Her conservative religion, burning ambition, and theatricality made her a comforting presence for Maples. Kathie Lee lent an ear to Marla until Donald arrived at the house.
Putting his salesmanship skills to work, Trump implored Maples to come back to him, promising marriage and an enormous diamond ring.15 Marla employed a specific logic to get to the point where she could renew the relationship. As she told People magazine writer Karen Schneider, she believed that on a subconscious level Trump had deployed Carla Bruni, Kim Basinger, and Madonna “to push me farther away from him.” He was, in this analysis, like a little boy who does something bad to test his mother’s love. At the same time, said Maples, “John Miller” had moved her to realize “I could be happy alone.” Brief as her alone time may have been, it was enough to make her certain that she could love Trump, not out of desperation, but “out of choice.” This kind of reasoning reflected New Age psycho-spiritual thinking, which blended various religious principles with concepts of popular psychology. Among the popular maxims of the New Age movement is the saying “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it is yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.”
On the day after his reconciliation with Marla, Trump telephoned the studio of Kathie Lee Gifford’s TV show to report that Maples had accepted his marriage proposal. Technicians at Live with Regis and Kathie Lee arranged for the call to be broadcast to millions of viewers, who heard the distinctive voice of The Donald say he was “indeed” engaged to Maples and “Marla’s a very special girl.” In the afternoon, Trump and Maples played golf with Frank Gifford and William Fugazy, a well-known New York businessman. (One of Roy Cohn’s major clients, Fugazy would eventually plead guilty to committing perjury in a bankruptcy proceeding. Like George Steinbrenner he would receive a presidential pardon.) While on the course, Trump was met by a messenger who delivered the big ring he had promised to give Marla. He promptly gave it to her, thus sealing the engagement in front of prominent witnesses.16
The televised announcement delivered big doses of publicity for both Trump and Maples. Members of the celebrity press would continue to follow the couple like eager puppies, reporting breathlessly on, among other matters, her consideration of a prenuptial agreement and his apparent struggle to remain committed. Ten weeks after he gave her the ring, the Daily News trumpeted, HERE WE GO AGAIN … TRUMP DUMPS MARLA. Amid the turmoil, Maples’s acting career got a boost with a guest spot on a television comedy called Designing Women, as she appeared as herself with the show’s fictional characters. Trump attempted a more serious pose, traveling to Capitol Hill to tell a congressional committee that he thought they should raise taxes on the rich. Reagan tax cuts that had reduced the maximum rate to 31 percent ought to be abandoned, he said. A top rate of 50 or 60 percent would be better for the country.
Coupled with a previous statement suggesting that illicit drugs should be decriminalized, Trump’s tax comments placed him left of center on the political spectrum, but they gained him little press coverage. The press and public were far more interested in the spectacle that was his personal life, and those who made a living by ridiculing public figures had a field day with him. Often Trump couldn’t resist responding. When New York radio host Don Imus declared Trump had “fat, grandmotherly arms,” Trump announced he would no longer advertise on Imus’s program. Imus, who like Trump, thrived on attention, gleefully replied, “We want only advertisers who can pay their bills.” In the spring of 1992, Ivana Trump traveled the country giving interviews and talks at bookstores to promote her romance novel, For Love Alone. She also got a spot on Oprah Winfrey’s hugely popular talk show, where she was greeted as a stand-in for every woman ever wronged by a man.17
In the same summer of 1992, Marla Maples was offered the role of Florenz Ziegfeld’s mistress in a Broadway play called The Will Rogers Follies. She prepared by taking acting lessons, which wasn’t easy considering she was one of the most recognized women in New York. Later she recalled, “Donald would say, ‘Take the limo.’ … I would get out two blocks away from where I had to go just to not be seen in a limo because I was embarrassed that I’m working with other struggling actors and I just didn’t want to show up” in a limousine. Marla also worked with famous voice coach David Sorin Collyer, whose clients had included Bette Midler and Paul Simon.18
The Will Rogers Follies was presented at the Palace Theatre, where Rogers himself had performed his vaudeville act. On Maple’s first night, Kathie Lee and her husband were in the audience along with scores of friendly celebrities. The reviews were mostly favorable, but Marla’s previously established fame was as much of an attraction as her singing and dancing.
In the year to come, Donald and Marla would set, and miss, several wedding dates. In October 1992, after the Daily News announced, SPLITSVILLE—NEW YORK’S FUN COUPLE CALLS IT QUITS … AGAIN, Maples and Trump each made a point of flaunting their happy comings and goings for the tabloid press. Trump even invited a camera crew from the TV program Entertainment Tonight to film him with a gaggle of fashion models at a party he threw at Mar-a-Lago. In November, Marla was absent when he invited a big crowd of people to the ballroom at the Taj Mahal, where they were serenaded by entertainers who impersonated Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.
Under most circumstances, Elvis and Marilyn impersonators would be enough to mark an event as certifiably odd. In this case, the attendees were treated to much more strangeness. At each of the tables in the ballroom the partygoers found Trump’s head on a stick, or rather, a life-size photo of Trump’s head on a stick, and a camera they could use to capture themselves as The Donald for posterity. As the ballroom was filled with the rousing theme music from the movie Rocky, an announcer bellowed, “Let’s hear it for the king!”—and Trump burst through a large paper screen. He emerged wearing big red boxing gloves and a red robe draped over a tuxedo. Then, as if this weren’t sufficiently awkward, Trump casino executive Nick Ribis offered the crowd a paean to his boss in the style of Muhammad Ali:
He was tough and resilient
and he had no fear.
He made the comeback of the year.
Against all odds, his opponents
buckled with a thump.
The winner was, Donald J. Trump.19
In the post-Boesky, post-Milken moment, Trump was one of the few business figures still strutting as if it were 1985. Was it true he had made “the comeback of the year” and become, once again, a “winner”? Given that no reliable data could be had, the claim could only be regarded as hype. But in time it would appear that with a variety of maneuvers, including the sale of assets, Trump had reduced his personal debt by hundreds of millions of dollars. Like the good behavior that gets a prisoner closer to freedom, his accomplishment wasn’t so much a victory over his “opponents,” whoever they were, as a sign that he had accepted reality. His businesses continued to bob in a pool of red ink, but the lenders who held this debt were, like wise prison guards, hoping to see him get out from behind bars as soon as possible. If he profited, so would they.
The general public, including those who gambled at Trump casinos and shopped at Trump Tower, weren’t required to determine whether claims about a comeback were accurate. He was, for them, like a character in a soap opera. Depending on a viewer’s perspective, he could be a hero, a villain, a king, or a clown. For the convenience of the audience, he offered a never-ending monologue to support the variety of narratives. He was reflexively tough on crime, as his response to the Central Park “wilding” showed, but wanted to legalize street drugs. He often wore a tuxedo and owned the most impressive mansion in Palm Beach, but regularly complained about high-society phonies. In his business life, Trump could favor women executives such as Barbara Res, but he often spoke about women in the most sexist terms.
By saying almost everything, Trump created a record that allowed him to appeal to various kinds of people depending on what he hoped to achieve. He also developed a set of anecdotes and claims that he offered as filler in conversations and interviews. These generally focused on his possessions—homes, aircraft, commercial buildings—or his superior qualities as businessman, athlete, or evaluator of human beings. Like many monarchs, his proclamations did not necessarily rely on established facts. He deployed all of these rhetorical techniques as journalists buzzed around him in the early 1990s. In a single article by Julie Baumgold, published in New York two days after the comeback party he threw for himself, Donald offered vintage Trump:
On his reputation: People do not know “how smart I am.”
On Marla: “I’m the greatest star maker.”
On the dangers of asbestos: “One of the great cons is asbestos. There’s nothing wrong except the mob has a strong lobby in Albany … because they have dumps and control the trucks.”
On Barbara Walters: “A disloyal lady.”20
In almost every case, Trump’s opinions depended on how a person, place, or thing reflected on him. Walters could be a steadfast friend to the likes of Roy Cohn, whom many considered unworthy of such kindness, but after she asked Trump some tough questions, she became categorically “disloyal.” Asbestos was “harmless” despite all the science that proved it caused lung disease and cancer. As he offered opinions with a smirk, a scowl, a grin, or a poker face, Trump dared the world to guess when he was serious and when he was not.
No one was more challenged by the puzzle of Trump than Marla Maples. Despite his proposal, they remained unmarried through her pregnancy and the arrival of their daughter, Tiffany. Finally, after consulting those he trusted on how a marriage might affect his business, Donald went forward with the plans for a wedding. A guest list was compiled, and invitations were sent. Donald and Marla were to be married on Monday, December 20, 1993, a week after the planned introduction of Maples’s new line of fashionable maternity clothes.
Just days before the ceremony, Maples was confronted with a prenuptial contract. As she later reported, her fiancé informed her that he would cancel the wedding if she didn’t sign. “I refused to read it because I felt it was sealing our fate,” she would tell a reporter. “Prenuptial agreements contradict the marriage vows. If you expect someone to sign one, you’re not expecting the marriage to work.” If she had read the contract, Maples would have seen that she would receive far less in a divorce than the settlement Ivana got. Donald would justify it by saying, “I built this empire and I did it by myself.” Marla signed.21
Years later Trump would elaborate on women and prenuptial agreements in a book called Trump: The Art of the Comeback. In this book he allowed, “There are basically three types of women and reactions” to a proposed prenup. One type refuses to sign a contract “on principle.” She should be abandoned. The second type won’t sign because she intends to exploit “the poor unsuspecting sucker she’s got in her grasp.” The third type signs but quickly seeks divorce to get “a fat check for very little work.” Although he would acknowledge that his views might appall those who “lead a more normal life than I do,” he would insist, “People are really vicious, and no place are they more vicious than in their relationships with the opposite sex.”
Marla and Trump’s wedding ceremony and celebration were held at the Plaza, which had, like other Trump properties, gone through a bankruptcy that left him with far less equity in hand. The bride wore a white dress designed by Carolina Herrera, whose previous clients included Caroline Kennedy and Kate Capshaw, wife of Steven Spielberg. Maples felt uneasy amid the splendor, especially wearing a $250,000 diamond tiara borrowed for the night from a Manhattan jeweler. She would recall that her mother and stepfather told her, “You should just enjoy it. People love to see people living big.” She did smile and pose for the cameras, but would later insist, “It didn’t feel right to me.”
Although she found much to worry about in the Trump way of life, Maples at least felt good about the man she was to marry. The groom was not as certain. “I was bored when she was walking down the aisle,” he would tell writer Timothy O’Brien. “I kept thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’” For him the getting was everything. The having, not so much. Shortly after the wedding he would tell ABC TV correspondent Nancy Collins, “I’ve really given a lot of women great opportunity. Unfortunately after they’re a star, the fun is over for me. It’s like a creative process. It’s almost like creating a building. It’s pretty sad.”22
No sadness was apparent as the Reverend Arthur Caliandro, successor to Norman Vincent Peale at the Marble Collegiate Church, consecrated the Trump-Maples union in a ceremony that resembled nothing as much as it did the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, which had captivated Donald Trump’s mother when he was just seven years old. The nine hundred guests included Liza Minnelli, Robin Leach, Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, the entertainer Rosie O’Donnell, and athlete-turned-media-star O. J. Simpson. A generous-hearted Liz Smith described the wedding as “part of the pageant of New York.” A less generous Amy Pagnozzi of the Daily News declared it “tacky. Overblown. Depraved in its conception.” The Trumps honeymooned at a ski resort not far from where Ivana was vacationing with her three children, who did not attend the wedding. Norman Vincent Peale died while the couple was away.23