I always say you can learn from your mistakes, but it’s much better to learn from other people’s mistakes because you can learn from other people’s mistakes without having to make the mistakes. Learning how to win is a very important thing. Very few people understand how to win. Very few people.
—DONALD TRUMP
Marla Maples dreamed of stardom, built on her performance in The Will Rogers Follies, and a happy family life with her daughter, Tiffany, and her husband, Donald. She also hoped that over time she could win him over to certain causes. She believed that a big measure of his money should go toward making the world a better place. This belief was mainly a spiritual concern, based on her sense that something unseen was at work in her life with her new husband. She would recall it this way: “I thought, ‘My, gosh. Can you imagine what we could do with his ability to do business and with my heart and passions?’ I really felt that there must be something bigger in the picture going on than I could understand.… I thought we were really supposed to do some great things together.”1
The greatness Marla Maples imagined would depend on her husband’s efforts to recover his fortune and his developing a strong commitment to the common good. A bettor would get long odds if he or she wagered on Donald Trump’s devoting himself to humanitarian or spiritual causes. This man reflexively put his own interests first. How else could one explain his effort to overturn a law that allowed impoverished Indian tribes to operate casinos? His suit alleged that he was the victim of unlawful discrimination because, like laws granting special tax breaks for developers, the Indian gaming law benefited only a “very limited class of citizens.”2
Trump’s court challenge failed, but he would continue to attack his Indian competitors. In 1993 he got into a shouting match with California representative George Miller at a congressional hearing as he insisted that tribal casinos were courting “the biggest scandal since Al Capone.” He yelled, “Organized crime is rampant on Indian reservations. People know it; people talk about it. It’s going to blow.” Trump also said of the tribal representatives at the meeting, “They don’t look like Indians to me, and they don’t look like Indians to Indians.” After the hearing an Indian leader accused Trump of “economic racism.” An official of the FBI refuted Trump’s charge, which came as New Jersey congressman Robert Torricelli proposed legislation that would protect Trump’s casinos from Indian competition. The proposal was never made law and Torricelli would leave politics amid a scandal over campaign donations from a Chinese businessman.3
In this time period Trump also moved to restore his personal finances and his control over his businesses. He turned to his siblings for a $10 million loan, pledging his share of their father’s estate as collateral. Trump also began pursuing new deals in real estate and laid the groundwork to recover his equity in the three casinos he had built.4 Under proper management, casino gambling is supposed to be a sure thing for the house, returning steady revenues. Proper management required putting limits on debt and operating expenses, including promotional events and the freebies offered to high rollers, known in the industry as whales. When the famous whale Akio Kashiwagi visited Trump Plaza in 1990, the casino hired a Japanese chef for him. The secretive Kashiwagi, who said his wealth came from real estate, bet $200,000 per hand at the baccarat tables and won $6 million. Killer whales were not the only problem affecting the casino. In 1989, Trump Plaza lost $800,000 on performances by the Rolling Stones, who did not sell out the hall and did not draw people who added to the money wagered on the casino floor. But while losses on promotions mattered, all casinos suffered these kinds of setbacks. What mattered far more was the burden of the debt piled onto Trump’s Atlantic City operations.5
As he sought to manage the debts on his various holdings, Trump turned Mar-a-Lago into a membership club, reserving only part of it for his own use as a residence. He sold a controlling interest in the iconic Plaza Hotel to Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. Just forty years old, the prince was younger and much richer than Trump. His personal jet was a Boeing 747, and his homes were actual palaces. His previous investments in debt-strapped American enterprises had included $800 million poured into Citicorp and a $338 million investment in Disney.6
The Plaza was an ideal investment for a Saudi prince who coveted premier properties and had the cash to buy them when their owners were in distress. More ordinary investors, whom Trump would court with new bond and stock offerings, could be more difficult to entice. As he implemented his recovery plan, Trump tried to sell bonds that would be paid from the revenues of the Taj Mahal but failed to attract enough interest. Then he notified the federal Securities and Exchange Commission that he intended to sell $295 million in securities to finance the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, which was considered the best of his properties in Atlantic City. Although he had to hike the interest rate to 15.5 percent, which qualified them as junk bonds, these did sell. Trump also floated a stock offering, which was given his initials—DJT—for a ticker symbol. It sold for $14 per share. This debut price was at the bottom edge of the range expected by investment analysts. Nevertheless, both offerings—the bonds and the stock—were judged a success on Wall Street, and they allowed Trump to retire $88 million in debt.7
At first the investors who bought Trump stock were rewarded with a price increase of more than 50 percent as an improving economy brought droves of East Coast gamblers to Atlantic City. By November 1995 his three casinos ranked at the top of the market in profits. On Wall Street, brokers eyed Trump’s new winning streak like gamblers drawn to a poker player who has won a big pile of chips. Some, such as the managers of Putnam Securities in Boston, expected the streak to continue and pledged to back him. Others, including Jerry Paul of Invesco Trust, were skittish. “I don’t think you want to spend too much time holding Trump paper,” he told The Wall Street Journal.8
Anyone who held Trump stock for more than eighteen months would lose big. After peaking at $35.50 in the middle of 1996, it plummeted to below its initial price of $14 by the end of the year. The big drop happened after shareholders approved Trump’s plan to have the publicly traded firm—DJT—purchase his third casino, Trump Castle. Stockholders took note of the price paid for the property, and the payments being made to make good on the 15.5 percent bonds, and began selling. By early 1997 Trump stock had fallen below $10. By by this time, Donald Trump had worked diligently to accomplish the comeback he had announced years earlier by punching through a paper screen. His personal finances had stabilized and improved as many of his investors lost.
A new, successful Donald Trump was created through ventures he formed with wealthy partners who, unlike individual stockholders and bond investors, possessed the kind of financial power that he respected. In Manhattan he negotiated with a new group opposed to his plans for the old Penn Central yard. Called Westpride, it included historian Robert Caro, former mayor John Lindsay, and the novelist E. L. Doctorow. The members of Westpride developed their own plan for the site, which would be less ambitious but also less expensive to build. Trump privately agreed to work with the new plan, which would include fewer apartments and a park covering more than twenty acres. As the arrangement was announced, Trump said, “All you folks have persuaded me to really do what was right.” In fact, he was responding to both a new political reality and the financial pressure associated with the huge loan payments he had to make just to hold on to the property.9
When the City of New York finally approved the development, which would be called Riverside South, it instantly increased the value of the land. However, by the time this happened, Trump lacked the financial strength to proceed on his own. In the summer of 1994 he relinquished control of the property to five Hong Kong businessmen, who formed a partnership called Hudson Waterfront Associates. They would pay Trump a salary to lead the development, and he stood to earn a share of eventual profits, but his partners, who said they had built much bigger projects elsewhere, would make all the biggest decisions.
As so often happens with large-scale urban developments, Riverside South would change in many ways as construction began in 1997 and continued for more than a decade. The elevated highway remained. The buildings that were constructed were taller and less attractive than the structures many West Siders expected. They also blocked river views enjoyed by thousands who lived to the east. Though attractive to those who bought and rented the units, the new community was resented by those who believed its cookie-cutter buildings blighted their neighborhood with shadows and traffic. Others just didn’t like Trump and recoiled at the idea that he might profit from the project. In fact, Trump’s financial gain was not nearly as great as it would have been if he had been able to proceed on his own. However, his success at Riverside South, which came to be known as Trump Place, was one of two projects that confirmed that he was back. The second involved the dramatic overhaul of the Gulf+Western Building, which had stood on Columbus Circle since 1969.
An unwieldy conglomerate best known for its Paramount motion picture division, Gulf+Western had made everything from aluminum to zinc. Beginning in the 1980s the company went through a long period of restructuring, and many of its divisions were sold. By the 1990s the smaller firm, which was operating as Paramount, was acquired by Viacom. As Paramount left the building on Columbus Circle, its owner, the General Electric Pension Trust, took control of the property. Forty-four stories high, the skyscraper had been designed and constructed to flex when buffeted by winds. Although it was perfectly safe, the movement could be unnerving to those who did business in the building or dined at its rooftop restaurant. The swaying caused problems for rental agents, but the building’s height was extremely valuable. Modern regulations would not permit such a large building on the site. However, if demolition crews could strip the building to its skeleton, and steelworkers could reinforce the steel to reduce the swaying, the structure could be turned into a profitable, high-end condominium.
In his weakened financial condition Trump could not buy the Gulf+Western tower and rebuild it on his own. But as he had shown at Riverside South, he could function well as a partner and a manager. At Columbus Circle he would be a minority partner with GE and a firm called Galbreath and Company in what became Trump International Hotel and Tower. Blessed with a desirable location and views, the building was popular with those who could afford the high prices. However its shiny black design, which evoked the Darth Vader character in Star Wars, left critics such as James Polshek of Columbia University dismayed. Dean of the school’s architecture program, Polshek said that Trump had taken a building that was “nothing” and turned it into “less than nothing.” On the West Side, added Polshek, Trump’s Riverside South was “grotesquely banal” and an architectural “embarrassment.” Writer Elizabeth Kolbert quoted another architect who described Trump’s collection of Manhattan buildings as a “trail of tears.” She also explained that the term Trumpification had come to represent urban developments that were “big, shiny and self-absorbed,” not unlike the man himself. “I can’t think of anything that he’s done that has any lasting urban or esthetic value,” said architecture critic Carter Wiseman.10
But where the aesthetically oriented found banality, Trump’s partners saw profits. When Japanese hotelier Hideki Yokoi purchased the Empire State Building for $42 million, his daughter brought Trump in as a partner. Everything about this deal was complicated. First, the skyscraper’s previous owner had refused to sell to Yokoi because he’d made his bid from prison, where he was serving a sentence as a result of a fire at his Tokyo hotel, which had killed thirty-three people. Yokoi then used a front man to purchase the skyscraper. He got it for an extraordinarily low price because it was burdened by an onerous lease, which gave Harry Helmsley and his partners the right to rent out the entire building in exchange for an annual payment of just $1.9 million. With tenants paying a combined $80 million annually, it was a good deal for the Helmsley-Spear management company, and it would only get better because it actually called for their rent to decrease over time. The contract, signed in 1961, would not expire until 2075.
After operating expenses, which included upkeep on the building, Helmsley-Spear still made far greater profits than whoever might own the property. For Yokoi and Trump, who had little say in how the place was run, the Empire State Building was a passive investment, like a savings bond paying less than 5 percent interest. To solve the problem of the lease, Trump turned to one of his favorite business tools—the lawsuit. In court he alleged that Helmsley-Spear had broken the terms of its contract in more than one hundred different ways. The litigation continued after Harry Helmsley died in 1997 and his interest was inherited by his wife, Leona. Trump carried on a public feud with Leona Helmsley, who had been imprisoned from 1992 to 1994 after her conviction on federal tax-evasion charges. He called her “vicious,” “horrible,” and “a living nightmare.” She called him “sick” and a “skunk” and declared, “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue was notarized.” After seven years and untold sums spent in legal costs, Trump and Yokoi gave up and sold the building to a group headed by local real estate investor Peter Malkin.11
How much did Trump earn from his effort and his interest in the Empire State Building? Speculation in the press ran as high as $6,250,000, but his arrangement with Hideki Yokoi was private. Whatever his profit may have been, it also included the bragging rights that came with having a stake in one of the best-known landmarks in the world. This allure had attracted Yokoi, and it surely motivated Donald Trump. Early in his partnership with Yokoi, Trump invited a journalist from the BBC to accompany him on a tour of his properties and noted that he owned the Empire State Building. Reporter Selina Scott was duly impressed, until she examined the claim more closely and discovered that he was just a part owner, and the property, minus the leasing rights, was not an impressive holding for a big-time real estate man.
When she met Trump, Scott was one of Britain’s most-recognized TV journalists. She had cohosted the BBC’s morning show for more than a decade and had worked for several British networks. Her piece on Trump was to be aired as part of a series on prominent people around the world. She began her research believing “he was a regular guy, obviously good at making money,” but came to regard him as a man who had “gotten his own way by treating people appallingly.” Scott was especially put off by Trump’s behavior with women.12
With blond hair and blue eyes, Scott was the sort of beautiful woman who seemed to catch Trump’s eye. (She was once voted the sexiest woman on television in Great Britain.) Her producer Ted Brocklebank would recall that she was charming, especially with powerful men. “She came over as very innocent and flickered her eyelashes,” he said. With Trump the flickering came with some banter about eligible men in America. During a flight to Palm Beach on Trump’s jet, he flirted back. When they then sat for a formal interview, Scott asked tough questions about Trump’s comments about Barbara Walters and others. She also pressed him about his true wealth. She later discovered a camera problem had left her with no usable tape. To her amazement, Trump agreed to another session. However, he did not provide Scott and her crew with a plane ride back to New York.
Scott returned to Great Britain persuaded of Trump’s abilities. “He can be effusive,” she eventually concluded. “He’s been trained to turn on the charm.” But she and Brocklebank were both disturbed by the aggressive, hypercompetitive elements of the man’s personality and struggled to explain them. They had visited with Trump’s mother, who had been born in 1912, hoping to detect the source of his ambition and attention-seeking. She relaxed enough with them to marvel at the fate that had brought her from a poor Scottish household to a life that found her making the rounds of her husband’s developments, in a Rolls-Royce, to collect the coins tenants used to pay for washing and drying their clothes.
Scott concluded that as a mother who had known true hardship in her childhood Mrs Trump had spoiled her son. “He was Mummy’s boy,” said Scott, “and terribly spoiled as a child. He had everything he wanted and never had much taken away from him.” Trump reminded Scott of bullies she had known in her school days: “I came across embryonic Donald Trumps. Usually people lose that trait of saying, ‘I want it. You give it to me, or I will smash you.’” Trump, she said, had not lost that trait.
When Scott and Brocklebank assembled their film, they made biting use of the song “It Ain’t Necessarily So” from the opera Porgy and Bess. The program was peppered “from beginning to end with assertions on his part that didn’t stand up,” said Brocklebank. Trump responded quite angrily after the report was aired. In letters to Scott, which she made public, he described her as “very sleazy,” “unattractive,” “obnoxious,” and “boring.” He also wrote, “Selina, you have little talent and, from what I have seen, even fewer viewers. You are no longer ‘hot’; perhaps that is the curse of dishonesty. You would, obviously, go to any lengths to try to restore your faded image, but guess what—the public is aware and apparently much brighter than you. They aren’t tuning in! I hope you are able to solve your problems before it is too late.”13
The public conflict led executives at Scott’s network, ITV, to shelve the film after it was aired just once. Plans to distribute it for broadcast in other countries were also scrapped. Scott continued working in television full-time for a few more years, but then cut back her broadcasting work to start a textile business. She would report that Trump continued sending her occasional angry letters for a decade. She also said that after her broadcast, Princess Diana, whom she considered a friend, phoned to ask her about Trump because he had sent Diana many bouquets of flowers. (Diana’s unhappiness in her marriage was widely known, but she was not yet officially divorced.) Scott recalled that in her conversation with the princess “I told her to just bin the lot.”
In 1997, eight weeks after Diana’s death in a car crash, Trump would tell interviewer Stone Phillips and a national TV audience in America that he regretted that he had never asked the princess for a date. When Phillips asked Trump if he thought he would have received a yes, he answered, “I think so, yeah. I always have a shot.”14
As he mused about missing the opportunity to date a recently deceased mother of two young boys, the unseemly quality of Trump’s remarks was moderated, a bit, by his being almost single again. Early in the year he and Marla had confirmed they were going to divorce. When she spoke to the press, Maples sounded more sad than angry. She described her husband as a man obsessed with business to such a degree that he was emotionally detached from loved ones, including his four children. “I absolutely wish he could have been more present in all of their lives,” Maples said. “I would have loved to have seen him be the kind of dad that would take us all to Disney World and sit around the dinner table without having to have the financial news on. My big argument was ‘At this table is what’s going on in the world. It’s about your family. It’s about the people who love you. That’s what’s going on in the world.’”15
The other side of the story emerged in the pages of Donald Trump’s third book, Trump: The Art of the Comeback, which included separate chapters on the women in his life and “The Art of the Prenup.” In these pages, Trump depicted women as sexually voracious “killers” who traded on their beauty to dominate men. In one passage he puzzled over his track record: “I don’t know why, but I seem to bring out either the best or the worst in women.” In another he offered a possible answer: “Part of the problem I’ve had with women has been in comparing them with my incredible mother, Mary Trump.” Prenups were, he wrote, an unfortunate necessity for people of great wealth, and if Marla hadn’t read the one she signed, he recalled, it was reviewed by her attorney. He also declared that if he ever fell in love again, he hoped it would be with a “no-maintenance” woman.
The end of Donald Trump’s second marriage did not produce the same drama as the public saw in the divorce of Donald and Ivana. Nevertheless, Marla did challenge the prenup, which provided for a onetime payment of $2 million and ongoing support. Before a judge, and the court of public opinion, she argued that her husband had promised her more, although he didn’t put it in writing. But after eighteen months of legal maneuvers, and the start of a new romance with writer Norman Mailer’s son Michael, she accepted the original deal. Donald withheld $1.5 million for a few days when Marla told a British paper she would divulge “what he’s really like” if he pursued a campaign for president. Lawyers intervened. Trump concluded that Marla was just angling for attention and the check was delivered.
* * *
Although the Trump/Maples marriage didn’t work out, they maintained a shared interest in their daughter and would occasionally come together to deal with echoes of the past. One that continued to reverberate for years involved a bizarre criminal case involving the publicity agent Chuck Jones.
In the mid-1990s Jones was arrested on charges of stealing various personal items, including more than forty shoes, from Maples’s apartment. (When investigators found he possessed an unlicensed firearm, he was also charged with this crime.) In his defense Jones made much of the fact that he was often permitted to enter the apartment when his client was not present and for a time it seemed the charges would be dropped. Maples actually participated in talks to head the case off before it went to court. However, the agreement that would have saved Jones from trial eventually fell apart and he was subjected to prosecution.
In the annals of New York crime, Chuck Jones would become the object of much ridicule as he was convicted of stealing from Maples to satisfy a fetish. However the conviction was overturned on a technicality and Jones was released after serving just a few months of a term that could have run for nearly five years. Despite his good luck, Jones couldn’t stay out of trouble. When he sent out photos purportedly showing Maples and Trump in intimate circumstances and was promptly arrested for aggravated harassment.
In 1999, after Trump and Maples were no longer married, Jones was tried again on the original burglary charges. It was a sign of his poor judgment that he represented himself in court. The picture of Jones that emerged during the proceedings was of a man who was obsessed with his client and unable to leave her alone. Some of the evidence made it seem that he could even be dangerous. He was convicted and this time there would be no technicalities to save him from prison.
Remarkably, Jones’s obsession was so powerful that even a federal prison term couldn’t squelch it. As late as 2012 he would send her harassing e-mails and land in court again. This time a plea deal would net him a six months’ sentence. Jones would forever be remembered as the publicist who stalked—and terrified—a client. Those who knew him to be a charming and intelligent man could only wonder at his fate. Those who knew him only from what they learned from the press would consider him a sad if not pathetic figure.16