I would say that I have never been given the credit that I’m due.
—DONALD TRUMP
This much was certain; her first name was Ivana. After this, the facts become hazy. She was born in postwar Communist Czechoslovakia, or maybe Austria. When she got married in New York, in April 1977, her last name was recorded as Winklmayr, which she had acquired in a sham marriage to an Austrian who had agreed to it so she could get a passport. But she had also gone by her maiden name—Zelnickova—and then a Montreal newspaper article said Ivana had another husband, a Czech named George Syrovatka, who had defected during a ski meet in the West.
In addition to those about her birthplace and name, the other mysteries about the woman who, with the ministerial services of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, married Donald Trump at the Marble Collegiate Church were numerous. She was either a member of the Czech team sent to the 1972 Winter Olympics, or an alternate, or a good skier who had had nothing to do with the games in Sapporo. In Montreal she had been the most sought-after fashion model in the city or one of many young women who occasionally walked a runway, modeled in manufacturers’ showrooms, and sometimes posed for newspaper layouts. It all depended on who was telling the tale.
The facts of Ivana Trump’s early life would prove elusive to the many journalists who sought to determine them. (Among the land mines they had to avoid was the story of an auto accident in which a boyfriend was killed. The part about his death in a crash was true. The story Ivana had told about being in the car and suffering a broken back was not.) However, the self that she presented to the world—beautiful, successful, and most of all desired—would remain consistent. From the very first time she was quoted in the press (Montreal Gazette, 1975), Ivana offered an image of a multifaceted and accomplished woman. Modeling was just one element of her life, and one that was not so important. It was “a job to me, not a career,” she said, as if she wanted to avoid the perception that she cared about her work. “I have my social life, my husband, and my home.” The husband she referenced was Syrovatka, who wasn’t really her husband but her live-in boyfriend. But in heavily Catholic Montreal circa 1975, it was easier and less complicated to say “husband,” and besides, she had felt sort of married, until she met Donald.
It was 1976, probably. Ivana was working at a New York fashion show organized to promote the upcoming summer Olympic Games. Donald may have met her at the fashion show. He definitely saw her later, in the evening, waiting with some friends for a table at a restaurant/bar called Maxwell’s Plum, which was owned by Warner LeRoy, whose grandfather Harry Warner had been one of the founders of the Warner Bros. movie studio. His father, Mervyn LeRoy, had produced The Wizard of Oz. Warner LeRoy liked to say that he learned the magic of showbiz illusion at age four when he visited a soundstage and skipped along the yellow brick road and right into a wall.1
Riotously decorated with Tiffany lamps, ceramic animals, and a stained-glass ceiling, Maxwell’s Plum set a standard for décor that eventually migrated all the way to down-market national restaurant chains such as TGI Fridays. It was also a magnet for celebrities, including Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand and for the so-called swinging singles (writer Susan Jacoby called them “swingles”), who made Maxwell’s Plum so popular that even fashion models had to wait to be seated. LeRoy called his restaurant “living theater.” It was the kind of place where pop stars mingled with gangsters and cocaine was consumed by so many guests that it should have been on the menu.
When he saw her at the door, Donald Trump tapped Ivana on the shoulder, which she found quite annoying, and offered to help her group jump the line. “I’m very friendly with the owner,” he said. She went to report to her friends: “I have good news and bad news. The good news is we are going to get a table right away. Bad news is the guy is going to sit with us.” Donald departed before the end of the meal, but he vanished with a dramatic purpose in mind. The women were delighted when the waiter told them their bill had been paid. Then, outside the restaurant, they discovered Trump behind the wheel of his Cadillac. “He took us to our hotel,” recalled Ivana years later. “The next day I got three dozens of roses. And we had dinner, and we had lunch at 21 Club, and I went back to Montreal. Donald said he would come and see me on the fashion shows, which he did.”
The ensuing courtship, which Donald conducted despite Ivana’s relationship with George Syrovatka, led to more time in Montreal for him and a trip to New York for her, to meet Donald’s parents. “He asked me to go for Christmas somewhere, so I told him that I spend Christmas on the mountains of Austria and stuff like that. I have a chalet in Slovakia. And so we went to Aspen. Donald rented [an] incredible chalet, you know, with the mirrors on the top and stuff like that. So he said, ‘Can you ski?’ I said, ‘Yes, I can ski.’ He said, ‘You are good?’ I said, ‘I’m good.’”
On the mountain, Trump skied with the careful purpose of a novice. Ivana surprised him with a few expert moves and then whooshed past him. Long after the day became a memory she could recall every aspect of his reaction: “I disappeared. Donald was so angry, he took off his skis, his ski boots, and walked up to the restaurant. So we find his skis down the mountain with the instructor. He went foot bare up to the restaurant and said, ‘I’m not going to do this shit for anybody, including Ivana.’ He could not take it, that I could do something better than he did.”2
Trump’s bruised ego healed quickly. He proposed marriage on New Year’s Eve. Ivana accepted. Later he gave her a three-carat diamond ring, which he had purchased at Tiffany’s. In the months between the proposal and the April 9 wedding, Ivana wavered a bit, then broke up with Syrovatka and affirmed her commitment to Donald. Then he asked her to sign a prenuptial agreement.
The prenup was Roy Cohn’s idea, which he raised after failing to persuade his client that marriage was not in his interest. Agreements covering the disposition of property in the event of a divorce had been illegal for most of American history. Under a legal concept called coverture, which was part of English common law, wives lost their individual rights to sign contracts and hold property when they married. State legislators and judges began to reconsider the issue in the 1960s, and by the end of that decade the prenup signed by Jacqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis was widely reported in the press.
Though hardly routine, prenuptial contracts became fairly common among the richest Americans, and those who expected to one day be rich. Film stars in Hollywood sometimes used them, but outside these rarefied circles few marriages began with a contract governing a future possible divorce. In early 1977 the famous New York divorce lawyer Raoul L. Felder called prenups “a cold-blooded way to enter marriage” and said that under the pressure of contract negotiations many marriages are destroyed before they commence.
Felder’s comments were made on the very day—March 18—when Ivana Winklmayr and Donald Trump met with Roy Cohn to discuss their prenuptial agreement. Ivana was represented by lawyer Lawrence Levner, whom Cohn had recommended. (Levner had worked with Cohn on previous cases.) As the little group worked its way through Cohn’s draft agreement, discussing lawyerly terms in plainer English, Ivana came to understand that in a divorce she would be required to return any gift she had received from Donald. In the argument that ensued, Ivana countered with a demand for a fund of $150,000, to be deposited in an account under her name, which she would use in the event of a breakup.
With Ivana’s request for cash, Donald faced a demand that he prove his public claims of great wealth—a $200 million fortune and $14 million in recent profits—with a display of real liquidity. According to documents later made public, Donald’s taxable income at the time was less than $2,200 per week. He controlled a small interest in one of his father’s many companies and received regular but modest payments from family-related trusts. Clearly, putting his hands on $150,000 in a matter of weeks would pose a challenge. Thus, the discussion over Ivana’s demand grew so heated that she left the meeting and only returned after Donald chased her to the sidewalk and persuaded her to keep talking. However, nothing was settled.
The second negotiating session took place at Roy Cohn’s town house, which housed both his residence and his place of business. As Harry Hurt III would recount in his book The Lost Tycoon, Cohn greeted the parties dressed in nothing but a robe. Calculating as he was, Cohn’s choice of wardrobe was undoubtedly intended to send a message. Like Lyndon Johnson, who famously invited reporters into the lavatory to continue conversations as he relieved himself, Cohn was demonstrating both his confidence and his power. He was so confident that he didn’t need to put on pants and a shirt to conduct business. He was so powerful that no one would dare say something like “Roy, why don’t you put on some clothes?” And he was so eager for attention that he would welcome any gossip or newspaper item that would result from conducting legal work while requiring the various parties to prepare themselves for a glimpse of whatever lurked beneath the robe.
Prior to the meeting, Cohn had excised the provisions in the prenup that would have required Ivana to return Donald’s gifts. This concession was apparently enough to move Ivana to reduce her rainy-day-fund demand by one-third, to $100,000. A final bargain was eventually struck on March 22. It required that if the couple divorced, Donald would make annual payments to Ivana. The amount would depend on the length of their union, with a ceiling of $90,000 per year after thirty years of marriage. Although this sum would seem paltry in years to come, the package was far better than the deal offered in the original contract and showed Ivana to be a capable negotiator who understood the pressure Donald would feel as the wedding date approached. Given the truth of Donald’s financial condition, and her own lawyer’s connection to Cohn, it was likely the best deal she could have achieved.
On April 9 more than two hundred guests arrived for the wedding at Marble Collegiate Church. It was the Saturday before Easter, a day many Christians regard with such solemnity that flowers are removed from churches in remembrance of Christ’s entombment. At Marble Collegiate, where cheerful optimism was practically the Eleventh Commandment, the sanctuary was filled with white lilies, and the festive crowd included Abe Beame, lesser politicians, and a variety of lawyers who had served the assorted Trump entities. A few of Ivana’s friends came from Montreal. Her father, Milos, attended as the sole representative of her family in Czechoslovakia; the airfare was just too high for her mother to come. Afterward, comedian Joey Adams, whose wife, Cindy, was the main gossip columnist at the Post, entertained at the wedding reception.
By all indications, young Mr. and Mrs. Trump were happy. After she gave birth to their first child, Donald Jr., on December 31—Robert Utsey chauffeured mother and child from the hospital—the young family moved into an eight-room Fifth Avenue apartment. The apartment was not just a home, but also a venue for publicity seeking as the Trumps often invited the press to have a look around. A reporter welcomed for a tour noted the Austrian-accented English spoken by her hostess, who had never lived in Austria. (The Olympic ski team was again an element in her biography, only this time she represented Austria and not Czechoslovakia.) Brand conscious before the term was even coined, the Trumps answered questions about the provenance of the furnishings and their own wardrobes. She favored Galanos and Valentino. His suits came from Pierre Cardin, Yves Saint Laurent, and Bill Blass. Donald noted that Ivana, who had lived in Montreal for about four years, had been the city’s “number one” model for eight. Like him, she had “flair.” She would give him the nickname The Donald, which would accompany him throughout the rest of his life.3
To his credit, Trump had demonstrated that he possessed, in addition to flair, the ingenuity and determination to transform the nearly derelict Commodore into an attractive, profitable, modern hotel. He had also begun the pursuit of the enormous and enormously ambitious project that would make his name known even to New Yorkers who never read the gossip columns.
* * *
According to Donald Trump, the best spot for a building in any city of note was the “Tiffany location.” As he told The New York Times in 1980, “If you go to Paris, if you go to Duluth, the best location is called ‘the Tiffany location.’ That is a standard real estate phrase.”
If anyone actually used the phrase Tiffany location before Donald Trump, the evidence of it is stubbornly elusive. The jeweler didn’t occupy its spot at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street until 1940 and didn’t achieve its place in popular culture until the 1950s, when Marilyn Monroe (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s) made the store iconic. Even then it would have been hard to imagine that a real estate broker would describe an attractive parcel in Duluth, or even Paris, as a “Tiffany location.” Nevertheless, the phrase sounded convincing and Trump began using it as he set his sights on the building next door to Tiffany’s, which was occupied by the Bonwit Teller department store.
Like many other New York retailers, including Tiffany, Bonwit Teller had been founded on “the Ladies Mile” of Lower Manhattan in the nineteenth century and moved north as developers built more fashionable residences in Midtown. Long profitable as a high-end retailer, Bonwit thrived in the 1940s and 1950s, opening branches in the Northeast and seasonal shops in Florida. However as the company changed hands, eventually coming to lodge inside a conglomerate called Genesco, profits became losses. The chain lost ground to competitors such as Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, and bargain hunters began circling its real estate holdings.
The developers’ template for the Bonwit site had been cut by Aristotle Onassis, with the aid of the city’s able real estate lawyers, at a Fifth Avenue address a few blocks south of Tiffany and right next to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. That location had been home to the clothier Best & Co., which began in business catering to children under the name Lilliputian Bazaar. The Best store was an elegant structure covered in white marble that boasted a loyal clientele. However, it missed the youth-culture boom of the 1960s, choosing instead to cater to younger children and older women. By the time Best executives added departments for teens, younger women, and men, it was too late. The Fifth Avenue store was closed in October 1970. The Lindsay administration approved plans for Olympic Tower in the summer of 1971. Demolition began in October.
Onassis’s project depended on his purchases of the “air rights” from sites next to his. Air rights govern the ultimate height that any building may reach under city zoning codes. On lots where structures squat well below these limits, owners may transfer these rights to a neighbor, allowing for the construction of a building that would otherwise far exceed the regulations. In this way, empty space would be preserved on one plot but exploited next door. Onassis purchased the air rights controlled by, among others, Cartier jewelers. Thus, with the help of Tiffany’s rival, he was able to construct hundreds of condominium apartments, nineteen floors of office space, and retail shops on the ground floor. The finished building, clad in reflective glass, rose fifty-one stories, or 620 feet, above the sidewalk.
Although air-rights purchases were essential to the Olympic Tower project, Onassis also took advantage of city regulations that allowed him to build higher in exchange for creating a building that mixed retail space, offices, and residences with a public arcade on the ground floor, which included a waterfall. Architects shielded the residents of the tower from the general public by providing them with a separate entrance and special elevators. It was the least they could do, considering prices for the condominiums would reach $650,000 ($2.7 million in 2015).
The “multiuse” plan for Olympic Tower had been encouraged by city officials, who were hoping that Fifth Avenue would retain its mix of residential and commercial spaces. Onassis also took advantage of a state tax-abatement program designed to encourage redevelopment of obsolete or underutilized real estate. The question of whether the Best & Co. site was obsolete or underutilized became moot when the store was demolished. Onassis got the tax break, which would last for ten years, and his tower site became the most densely developed piece of land in Manhattan and, quite likely, the world. At least one city official deemed it an undertaxed “monster” created by the exploitation of government policies adopted without adequate consideration of the possibility that someone might use them all at once, in the same place.
Where some saw a monster, ambitious real estate people saw a beautiful creature that generated vast profits for a man who was already one of the richest people in the world. Onassis owned fifty oil tankers, an airline, the Ionian island of Scorpios, and real estate scattered across the globe. His marriage to President John F. Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, had been front-page news around the world. But the Olympic Tower, or, rather, his manipulations to wring the most profit out of the tower site, was what most impressed certain businesspeople in New York. Among them was Donald Trump, who had actually lived in the Onassis building for a short time and thus understood it from the inside out. Determined to copy the formula, he began by looking for a downward-spiraling retailer on Fifth Avenue. One of his political connections, a political fund-raiser with the unlikely name of Louise Sunshine, introduced him to a major stockholder in the firm that owned Bonwit Teller’s Fifth Avenue store. Trump learned that Bonwit was in trouble and began working to acquire its site. At the same time he stalked the air rights held by the Tiffany store and considered the moves he would have to make with the new regime at City Hall.
Mayor Ed Koch’s development officials had encountered Trump, and his convoluted ways, almost immediately after they moved into City Hall as they completed the city’s acquisition of the Penn Central Railroad’s Thirty-fourth Street yard. At the start of their discussions Trump had informed them that the option contract he had worked out with Palmieri’s firm required the city to pay him a commission of $4.4 million, but he would gladly forgo it if the new facility was named the Fred C. Trump Convention Center. With the city hard-pressed to pay police officers and firefighters, $4.4 million was enough to give Koch officials pause. But then, as Deputy Mayor Peter J. Solomon later recalled, “somebody finally read the terms of the original Penn Central contract with Trump.” The agreement required he be paid not $4.4 million, but rather $500,000, plus just under $90,000 for expenses. Although Solomon was impressed by Trump’s chutzpah, his offer was declined.
The episode prompted questions about just why a major city landmark would be named for an outer-borough apartment developer who, except for some incidents that had cast him in a less than perfect light, wasn’t a significant public figure. Donald answered that his family deserved the honor because “if it was not for me, there would be no convention center in this city.” It was an impossible claim to prove, but a Trump critic agreed that he had been instrumental in the selection of the Thirty-fourth Street site, to his own benefit. “Donald Trump runs with the same clique that continues to manipulate things behind the scenes in this city,” city councilman Henry J. Stern told The New York Times. “He had ties through his father to the Brooklyn Democratic machine that produced Hugh Carey. Roy Cohn is his lawyer. He throws around a lot of money in political campaigns.”
No one quoted by the paper contested Stern’s analysis. Given the $135,000 the Trumps gave to Carey (equivalent to $550,000 in 2015), Stern was right about the political money. And the ever-controversial Cohn was Trump’s attorney. Indeed, Cohn was so important to Trump that he kept a photo of Cohn in a shadowy mobster’s pose—bloodshot eyes, scarred skin, soulless expression—just to show others whom he wanted to intimidate. (When he pulled it out of a drawer for engineer Barbara Res, it reminded her of an image of Satan himself.) Cohn, in response to a call from a Times reporter, confirmed that Trump money flowed freely into political campaigns, but only because “it’s part of the game,” played by all big developers. This was easy for any reader to believe. Not so credible was Cohn’s claim that his client “doesn’t try to get anything for it.” In the long history of American politics, few major donors, and Donald Trump was a major donor, have given money to candidates without expecting something in return from those who were elected. At the least, they expected access to the people they helped put in office, just in case a meeting with, say, the mayor of New York could help smooth the way for a real estate deal.
Cohn would have had the public believe that as a rule developers showered politicians with cash and without this watering nothing would ever be built. In fact, while men such as Donald Trump played the old-fashioned and theatrical game that Cohn described, it was hardly a requirement for those who sought building permits and zoning approvals. No political donations were associated with Olympic Tower, for example, and when Boston Properties put up a massive tower at Fifty-second Street and Lexington Avenue, the out-of-town firm had no real connections to the city’s political establishment. In these and other projects, what mattered were the actual rules and regulations governing development and not personal or political favors. In the post-Watergate era of campaign-finance reform and greater public access to government records, Plunkitt-style chumminess mattered less and less each year.
Trump’s success at the Commodore site gave him some credibility as he pursued his grand dream for a Fifth Avenue building. Equitable Life Insurance, one of his lenders for the Hyatt project, owned the land beneath Bonwit Teller, and when he approached company officials, they agreed to make the firm his partner in a new building on the site. By November 1978 Trump had completed talks with executives at Bonwit’s parent firm to obtain a free option to buy out their lease on the land for $25 million. This arrangement gave him a six-month opportunity to negotiate, charm, and otherwise manipulate his way toward his goal. If he failed, he wouldn’t be out a cent. If he succeeded, he could change the Manhattan skyline.
While his partners at Equitable watched and waited, Trump enlisted Der Scutt so as to influence the mind and heart of Tiffany’s octogenarian chairman, Walter Hoving. For many years Tiffany’s success had depended on Hoving’s snobbery, which helped to assure customers that they were receiving the finest goods from the most reputable of merchants. (Hoving possessed such an air of superiority that a client might even feel grateful for the chance to give him his or her money.) Determined to play on the vain old man’s commitment to tradition and refined elegance, Trump had Scutt sketch a hideous version of a building for the Bonwit site and presented it to Hoving to illustrate the design he might use to get the most out of the land.
Scutt’s drawing allowed Trump to practice a bit of gamesmanship that would become a regular part of his repertoire. By proposing something that might seem threatening or outrageous, he staked out a position that would allow him to seem flexible and reasonable as he negotiated his way to his actual goal. In his exchange with Hoving, Trump offered a vision of an ugly building and then explained that he could build a far more beautiful structure, one more appropriate to its surroundings, if Hoving sold him Tiffany’s air rights. Hoving soon gave Trump what he sought, receiving on his company’s behalf the promise of $5 million and the assurance that his store would not be devalued by an ugly next-door neighbor.
The more artfully imagined skyscraper that Scutt drew for the Fifth Avenue site depended on a zigzag design that gave every residential unit views of the city in two directions. This creative approach would make the building more expensive to construct than a simple box, such as Olympic Tower, but with the views the apartments could sell at higher prices. And it would establish the building as a kind of landmark. From a distance the upper floors would look like a saw blade fashioned out of black glass. (As reported by Barrett, Scutt would eventually say that Trump had told him one of the apartments should be reserved for his personal use in the event that his marriage, which was just a few years old, ended in divorce.)4
Although it would look slender from afar, pedestrians would see a massive base rising from the sidewalk and the words TRUMP TOWER in gold-colored, capital letters above the entrance. Inside, on the lobby level, visitors would find a soaring atrium, an upscale shopping arcade, and water cascading down a fountain wall. Done in glossy, rose-colored marble and polished brass, the public space would suggest both solidity and glitz, something like a casino blended with a bank.
The zoning laws that would allow Trump to build a sixty-two-story tower had also permitted IBM and AT&T to build on a similar scale in the same neighborhood. All three of these massive structures would cast shadows on their neighbors and add substantially to the population in an already-crowded part of Manhattan. A mild-mannered opposition group called the New York Committee for a Balanced Building Boom pointed out these problems as it criticized the hyperdevelopment of the area. Led by a prominent stockbroker and an investment banker, the committee never generated much support. The neighborhood they sought to protect was rich and exclusive and devoid of the kind of everyman character that might attract public sympathy. Why would the average New Yorker, who rode the subway and lived in the outer boroughs, care if one millionaire cast shadows on another? Some might even appreciate new development projects that produced construction jobs while they vexed the powerful and the privileged who lived nearby.
As the tallest, and most cleverly designed, of the new giant buildings, Trump Tower promised the developing partners great returns on their investments. Nevertheless, the son whose father carefully picked up the nails dropped by his carpenters often approached the $100 million project with a penny-wise attitude. After Bonwit Teller managers ran a going-out-of-business sale and handed Trump the keys, he invited the public into the building to buy the few furnishings left behind, including venetian blinds, light bulbs, and mirrors that had been screwed into walls. When asked about the sale, Trump was able to say how much it netted—$5,000—and termed the figure “a nice little surprise.”
After the Bonwit building was picked over, the demolition was done by Kaszycki & Sons of Herkimer, New York, the lowest bidder among twelve who had sought the job. It would not be an easy task. The location ruled out the use of wrecking balls or explosives. Instead the building would have to be taken apart from the inside out, with crews starting on the top floor and dumping debris down the elevator shafts. The work would be further complicated by the decorations on the Fifth Avenue side of the building—an elaborate, solid-nickel grillwork and two art deco friezes depicting half-nude women—which were artistically significant.
A Fifth Avenue art dealer judged the Bonwit sculptures to be as important as the architectural artwork at nearby Rockefeller Center and compared their value to a pair of Lalique doors that had recently sold for $200,000. Der Scutt had considered them so beautiful he wanted to include them in his design of the big public space on the ground floor of the new building. Trump had his heart set on a much more modern look and told Scutt he didn’t want the Bonwit pieces to be used in his lobby. But after learning of their value, he promised to save them and donate them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This promise saved City Planning officials from the chore of negotiating with Trump to preserve the works.
Thomas Macari, who worked for the Trump Organization, said the grillwork would be relatively easy to remove. Set into the stone above the store entrance, it was accessible and was held together by simple bolts. The friezes were another matter. They had been carved out of the limestone fixed to the front of the building, more than fifty feet above the sidewalk. Nevertheless, Macari he was sure they could be cut away from the wall, rested on a specially built wooden platform, and lowered to the street by a crane. William Kaszycki, the Polish-immigrant founder of the demolition company, wasn’t so sure. When asked whether he could pull it off, he shrugged and said, “We’ll see.”
Kaszycki had based his rock-bottom bid for the job on the revenue he could generate from scrap sales and his planned use of hundreds of undocumented Polish laborers who would be overseen by roughly two dozen skilled men from the House Wreckers Union Local 95. (The union local was controlled by organized-crime boss Vincent “Chin” Gigante. In 1984, two Local 95 officers would be convicted of racketeering and extortion.) The Polish Brigade, as the men were called, began dismantling the Bonwit Building even before Kaszycki received a demolition permit. Laboring without the usual precautions such as hard hats, they ripped out walls and flooring until all that was left was steel, concrete, and stone.
The men of the brigade labored seven days per week, and as many as eighteen hours a day, to meet the boss’s schedule. When not working, they rested in overcrowded housing supplied by Kaszycki, or on the floors of the Bonwit building itself. Their pay, which fell far below the union rate, was issued sporadically. Sometimes they were offered vodka instead of money. Complaints were answered with threats of deportation. When the city was hit by a transit strike, many of the men walked everyday from Brooklyn to Midtown Manhattan just to get to their jobs. Those who quit were replaced immediately by one of the dozens of Polish men who appeared at the job site every day looking for work.
Exhausted, and ill treated, the Polish workers were denied the pay, benefits, and other protections covering union workers. Eventually, a judge in a civil suit would find that this exploitation was aided by a “tacit agreement” between the Trump Organization and the House Wreckers Local 95, and the parties ultimately settled the case. But at the time, the Polish laborers were working at a breakneck pace while taking pains to salvage brass, copper, and steel to be sold to recyclers at pennies per pound. That Kaszycki was depending on the receipts from these sales for much of his profit indicated just how much pressure he must have felt to cut costs. He told the New York Times that the preservation of the artwork on the front of the building would cost at least $2,500 in extra labor, or half the amount netted by the sale of Bonwit’s lightbulbs and mirrors. However, the key decision was not made by Kaszycki, but by Trump, who chose to save a little time and expense and demolish the artwork.
On Wednesday, June 4, 1980, Peter Warner looked out his Fifth Avenue office window and saw that workers armed with power tools had slashed through one of the stone friezes and begun to cut through the other. A research associate for an architectural firm, Warner had often gazed at the artwork from his twelfth-floor perch and had read that the new owner of the Bonwit site was going to save them. He was astonished as Kaszycki’s men quickly cut through both panels and them pushed them off the side of the building. Warner, who felt the pieces were important artifacts of the city’s history, later told The Times that when he saw what was happening “I really couldn’t believe my eyes.”
The destruction of the Bonwit friezes would never have become an issue if Trump hadn’t promised to preserve them. But he had made this pledge, and when the sculptures disappeared, the press began asking questions. Calls to Donald Trump went unanswered, but a man named John Baron, who identified himself as a vice president of the Trump Organization, did speak to reporters. He explained that three different appraisers had agreed that the works were “without artistic merit” and would, if sold, fetch less than $9,000. Careful removal, crating, and transport of the panels would have cost $32,000 and delayed the demolition project at a price of $500,000 in additional expenses and lost revenues. Considering the money involved, he concluded, “The merit of these stones was not great enough to justify the effort to save them.”
Ashton Hawkins of the Metropolitan Museum challenged Baron’s assessment of the friezes and noted, “Their monetary value was not what we were interested in. The department of twentieth-century art was interested in having them because of their artistic merit.” With the pieces reduced to rubble, the true value of the art was moot. But if Ashton Hawkins had wanted to meet with John Baron for a conversation about his appreciation of modern art, Hawkins would have encountered significant obstacles. The most challenging among them was that John Baron, at least the John Baron who spoke on behalf of the Trump Organization, did not exist.
Although he appeared from time to time in the press, John Baron (sometimes spelled Barron) was a name that Trump and at least one of his employees hid behind when they didn’t want their identities attached to a statement. John Baron called a lawyer and threatened to bring a lawsuit against him in retaliation for claims made against Trump on behalf of members of the House Wreckers Union. Baron also responded to a rumor by saying that though “Mr. Trump enjoyed eating at the 21 Club, he has absolutely no interest in buying it.” And John Baron said, “We don’t know what happened to it,” when reporters called to ask about the Bonwit’s grillwork, which was also supposed to be preserved. In its report The Times noted that “repeated efforts to contact Mr. Trump over the last three days have been unsuccessful.”
A handy fiction, Baron was a character out of Fred Trump’s book. In his day Fred had used the name Mr. Green to hide his identity when he called certain people. The ruse was so familiar to members of the extended family that a lawyer/brother-in-law often told Donald that he wondered how soon after being issued a subpoena John Baron would take sick and die.
Outside the family, and the organization, John Baron was quoted in the press as if he were as real as the concrete structure that began to rise on Fifth Avenue soon after the last bits of the Bonwit building were trucked away. That job was overseen by an engineer named Barbara Res, who had been a key supervisor at the Commodore/Hyatt project, where she was one of just three women on the job and the only one who ever left an office to actually walk the site. In this intensely macho environment, where workers used structural columns as urinals and plastered the elevators with centerfolds, Res was subject to almost constant sexual harassment. She had performed so well, wrangling union laborers and multiple subcontractors, that Trump hired her to run the construction of the Fifth Avenue tower though she was barely thirty-one years old. This made her roughly Trump’s age, which might help explain his readiness to hire her despite her lack of experience.
Built almost entirely of concrete, which meant that design changes could be incorporated more or less on the fly, Trump Tower began rising from its foundation even before the engineers’ drawings for upper floors were drafted. With just two years to complete the job, Res was pressured by the schedule and Trump’s competing agendas. According to Res, Trump wanted to promote his building as the finest anywhere, while also saving money wherever possible. In her 2013 book, Res wrote that Trump outfitted some of the apartments with materials and fixtures that she considered too ordinary.
Although Res was forced to scrimp on some apartment interiors, the public spaces at Trump Tower were built to impress. An unusual reddish Breccia Pernice marble became the building’s signature element. Res and Ivana Trump traveled to Italy to visit the quarry and shops that would produce the stone. They made a side trip to Monte Carlo, where they visited with Ivana’s jet-setter friend Verina Hixon. Although included in social outings, Res never felt completely part of the crowd she met on the Riviera. She noticed the difference most keenly while riding in the back of a Rolls-Royce that moved slowly through crowded streets. The driver noted the crowds of “pests” who didn’t belong in Monte Carlo because they were not suitably rich and mused about killing them with a rifle to clear the way. As Res would later write in a self-published memoir, these comments frightened her and forced her to accept “there are people in this world who truly believe they are better.”
The unpleasant, even disorienting feelings Res occasionally experienced as she visited the world inhabited by the Trumps would be shared by others who worked for them. Although flights across the Atlantic on the Concorde and meetings with the rich and famous came with Res’s job, these intoxicants were not truly hers. They were conditioned upon her performance, and this included her ability to get along with Ivana, Donald, and his father. By 1980, Fred Trump was seventy-five years old, and almost fifteen years had passed since he’d last built something himself. He did his best to present himself as active and in command. He dyed his gray hair and mustache a reddish brown, pushed his way into meetings, and attempted to boss people around. Fred Trump was especially forceful when it came to the contract for concrete work at Trump Tower, which he steered toward a company that had worked for him in the past, Dic-Underhill Concrete.
The price of concrete was higher in Manhattan than it was in any other city in the country. Much of the difference, which ranged as high as 70 percent, was caused by organized crime’s dominance of every aspect of the business, which, due to geography, was surprisingly easy to control. Concrete must be delivered and poured less than two hours after its manufacture. This technical requirement, combined with Manhattan’s congested streets, meant that the only reliable suppliers were the handful located within the borough or in nearby Queens.
These few operators belonged to a mob-dominated cartel that rigged bidding by dividing the work among themselves. The unions that supplied concrete workers and cement-truck drivers were also under the influence of various crime bosses. Builders who resisted the cartel suffered from arson attacks, theft of equipment and materials, and work stoppages. It was safer and ultimately cheaper to play along.5
Although it wasn’t, as Trump claimed, the largest concrete building in the world, Trump Tower would require ninety thousand tons of the stuff at a cost of $22 million ($63 million in 2015). When he intervened in the contract decision, Fred Trump may not have known whether the cartel intended the work to go to Dic-Underhill. In fact, the mob had not controlled the concrete trade in the same way now as when Fred was still doing business. However, Res did take note of two apparent arsons on the site that suggested that someone was unhappy. The first destroyed a valuable electrical generator but didn’t set back construction in any significant way. The second blaze, which occurred on January 29, 1982, was more serious.
As Res would recall, she was awakened that morning by a five-thirty call from Ivana Trump, who told her, “The building is on fire.” By the time Res had picked her way around barricades and past emergency vehicles, the fire was extinguished. A crane operator who had gone up to his cab to prepare for the day’s work had been trapped as the flames consumed concrete forms near the base of the crane. As Res watched, rescue workers helped him descend safely.
One floor of the building was severely damaged by the fire. Others were affected by the water used to put it out. The incident set back construction by two months.
Although the fire brought negative publicity, Trump’s arson problems and the intrigue around the concrete work was routine for New York builders in the 1980s. More unusual was a convoluted and ultimately troublesome arrangement Trump made to sell apartments to Verina Hixon, who had given Barbara Res and Ivana the grand tour of Monte Carlo. With the help of mortgages arranged by Trump himself, Hixon bought several units and began construction of elaborate interiors, including an indoor swimming pool. As this work was done, Hixon was often seen with the top man in the city’s construction unions, John Cody, who gave her $500,000 to help acquire the Trump apartments.
Mob-connected and notoriously aggressive, Cody had the power to ruin a builder’s project by slowing down concrete deliveries and disrupting work on any part of a job. If he was unhappy with a plumbing contractor, lift operators might refuse to carry pipes and fixtures to upper floors. A flooring specialist who bent the rules that benefited union carpenters could discover that power tools and lumber walked off the job when he wasn’t looking. Cody, who had been arrested eight times and found guilty three times, counted Roy Cohn as a friend and legal adviser. Cody claimed that Trump preferred to use Cohn as an intermediary for their meetings. Trump would one day describe Cody as “one psychopathic, crazy bastard … real scum.” But when necessary, Trump cooperated with the man and indulged his girlfriend Hixon. Trump’s working relationship with Cody came in handy for Trump when Cody gave him months of advance notice before a strike crippled building projects across the city in the summer of 1982.6
Cody often appeared at Trump Tower to help Verina Hixon with problems that arose during the extensive outfitting of her apartments. Among the special items she added was the swimming pool, the only one in the building, which required that extra concrete be poured. Hixon’s ever-changing plans brought her into frequent conflicts with Trump’s people, but with Cody’s aid she generally got what she wanted. (According to Hixon, Trump said, “Anything for you, John,” when she and Cody asked that space reserved for a hallway be added to one of her units.) All the special treatment ended in December 1982 after Cody was convicted and imprisoned on racketeering charges. Hixon and Trump would then wage legal battles against each other for the better part of a decade. After falling behind in her maintenance payments to the tune of $300,000, Hixon went bankrupt and lost the apartments to her lenders.7
European by birth and seemingly moneyed, Hixon had been the kind of buyer Donald Trump hoped to bring to Trump Tower. He had imagined the building as a magnet for the superwealthy, including those who lived in residences scattered around the world. The rich had always sought luxury and comfort, but for the most part they had pursued these rewards with a bit of reserve, if only to appear solidly genteel. This habit prevailed in the decades immediately following World War II, as the gap between the rich and the rest was narrowed, and discussion of one’s paycheck or bank account was considered bad manners. In the 1970s, as the postwar boom ended and the rich began to accumulate an ever-greater share of the world’s wealth, their lifestyles and behaviors became an object of public fascination. Television gave Americans a slew of programs—Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest—that dwelled on the operatic lives of wealthy characters, and Madison Avenue removed the working class from advertisements. From a high of 25 percent in 1970, the proportion of ads depicting working-class Americans slid to 11 percent in 1980. Blue-collar Americans became so rare on TV that the series Roseanne, which depicted a working-class family in the Midwest, would appear as a revelation when it debuted in 1988.
As a former actor who leased his swanky California mansion from the rich friends who owned it, President Ronald Reagan epitomized the style-over-substance ethos of the age, which the writer Kevin Phillips described as an “ostentatious celebration of wealth.” In the 1950s Richard Nixon’s wife, Pat, famously wore what he called a “good Republican cloth coat,” but in the 1980s Nancy Reagan wore fur. Reagan’s inaugural celebrations were lavish, especially when compared with the down-home style of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, and Reagan’s advisers and friends hailed from the upper reaches of the economy. In these ways, and many others, the Reagan style put an end to the 1950s notion, created in magazines such as Photoplay, that celebrities were like ordinary people. By the 1980s, enormous wealth, or at least a lifestyle that suggested the same, became the hallmark of real success and even moral character. President Carter, who criticized materialism as “self-indulgence and consumption,” was seen as a scold who was wrong about the economy. In the Reagan formula, people could relax and allow tax cuts, increased defense spending, and big reductions in aid to the poor to magically restore the middle class. When legions of economists said the administration couldn’t pull off this trick, the president offered not cogent arguments but words that made him sound like an actor delivering lines from a script. “Yes, we can,” he said with great confidence, “and, yes, we will.”8
Reagan was only loosely devoted to the truth. He continued to claim that he wrote his own speeches, even after it was shown that he did not, and he habitually offered apocrypha alongside facts, daring the listener to separate them. In time, this way of speaking would be labeled “truthiness” by the satirist Stephen Colbert. (It comes “from the gut, not from books,” he would explain.) In Reagan’s day it was described by journalist James Reston as a style of speaking devised “to evade the facts.” With exasperation, Chief of Staff Donald Regan compared the task of answering questions about the president’s statements with serving in “a shovel brigade that follows a parade” of elephants.9
While he produced much to shovel, the president’s methods were so effective that despite his record-breaking deficits, he built a nearly unassailable reputation as a fiscal conservative. By the end of his presidency total federal debt would triple. Hourly wages fell steadily in the Reagan years as high-paying factory jobs disappeared, and laid-off workers discovered that new service jobs, when they were available, paid substantially less. Under these conditions, workingmen could not support families in the way their fathers did in the 1950s and ’60s. The difference was made up, in part, by the earnings of wives and mothers who entered the workforce in greater numbers every year. Also, people borrowed more to sustain their standard of living. After a dip caused by the 1981–83 recession, credit-card debt began a rise that would continue almost uninterrupted until 2000.10
With all this hard work and borrowing, Americans reported feeling extraordinary stress. Yet the dream of sudden wealth, achieved in a clever way, maintained its allure. Government-run lotteries, formerly found only in New Hampshire and Puerto Rico, spread quickly across the country. For those who wanted better odds, TV pitchmen offered courses in real estate speculation, urging viewers to use OPM—other people’s money—to leverage meager personal investments in properties. In 1984, one of the bestselling books in America was Nothing Down: How to Buy Real Estate with Little or No Money Down. Practically a clone of infomercial star Albert Lowry, author Robert G. Allen claimed that he had taught two individuals he picked out of a queue at an unemployment office enough to earn $5,000 each in ninety days. In 1987 he would admit to having his own financial problems after federal authorities placed liens on his property to recover $412,000 in unpaid taxes and penalties.11
While the poor and middle class labored to make it in America, Reagan’s policies helped the top 1 percent notch a 74 percent increase in income during his presidency. Much of this came in the form of capital gains from investments which, thanks to Reagan reforms, were subject to much lower tax rates. The number of people with net wealth in excess of $100 million doubled in the Reagan years, and the number of billionaires tripled. These were the people who could and would plunk down $1 million or more for an apartment in Trump Tower. (Although some were priced lower, more than ninety of the apartments in the building were valued at $1 million or more.)12
The money that wealthy outsiders brought to New York would be essential as the city’s economy moved steadily toward the business of finance and the service sector. Indeed, like all of the major cities of the Northern Rust Belt, New York was losing manufacturing jobs at a rapid rate. Under these conditions, rich people represented something like a natural resource that could be mined to support shop clerks, chauffeurs, doormen, and hairstylists. These service employees earned far less than their counterparts in manufacturing, but the trend was inexorable. Well-paying middle-class jobs were disappearing as wealth and income were being concentrated in the upper reaches of society. Under these conditions it was far better to live and work in New York, where the rich crowded the table and many more crumbs fell to the floor.13
In the more Darwinian economy, Donald Trump’s eager pursuit of those who could afford to spend huge sums on part-time residences was a wise business strategy. The sale of a $2 million apartment involved roughly the same amount of time and effort as the sale of a $100,000 one. In fact, high-end sales might require less work because the buyers often just wrote checks to complete a purchase. But wealth didn’t necessarily make Trump’s customers sophisticated and worldly. Many still responded to marketing pitches that appealed to their vanity or insecurities. With this in mind, Trump circulated the rumor that Charles, the Prince of Wales, and his wife, Diana, were weighing a purchase at Trump Tower. Since Buckingham Palace refused comment on rumors about the couple, no one in authority would refute it. Trump flattered his would-be customers by saying Trump Tower was built for “the best people in the world,” and he rarely missed a chance to borrow credibility in his marketing efforts. Visitors to the office that sold Trump Tower apartments were treated to a slide show—images of the building and its environs—accompanied by a recording of Frank Sinatra singing.
The sales brochure for the apartments promised that Trump Tower (not 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) was “the world’s most prestigious address” and encouraged readers to “imagine life within” a bronze colored skyscraper that was securely isolated from the outside world. After reminding would-be buyers that Astors, Whitneys, and Vanderbilts once haunted the neighborhood, the pitch noted that residents would enter Trump Tower from a doorway that was “totally inaccessible to the public” and would be greeted by an attentive staff. Every residence, the copywriter concluded, was “a diamond in the sky.” According to Trump, the building was sixty-eight stories tall. However, the American Institute of Architects, which judged Trump Tower to be one of the ten ugliest buildings in New York, also reported it was just fifty-eight stories tall.14
Barbara Res would estimate that roughly half of the apartments in the tower were bought by foreigners. Many others were purchased by corporations, pop stars, and Hollywood celebrities. Among them were Michael Jackson, Steven Spielberg, and Johnny Carson, whom Trump had once admired but came to dislike. Carson was, Trump would recall, an imperious and impatient man who could be “a very mean, very nasty guy.” These qualities came into stark relief when Carson, who had recently taken possession of his apartment, called Trump on the phone. According to Trump, Carson said, “Donald, you have two fucking men who work in the building who stole my coat.”15
The garment was an expensive topcoat made out of the hair of a camel-like Andean animal called a vicuña. Produced in minute quantities, vicuña wool was so rare that, but for a political scandal of the 1950s, most Americans would never have heard of it. However, when President Eisenhower’s chief of staff was forced to resign after accepting a vicuña coat as a gift, just about everyone came to associate the words vicuña coat with extravagance.
Carson’s vicuña coat had, he insisted, disappeared after two maintenance men worked in his apartment, and he wanted Trump to do something about it. Trump tracked down the men and listened to their denials. He called Carson and said the workers, two fellows from Queens, “don’t wear vicuña coats” and “they’d be run out of their neighborhoods if they ever did.” Not satisfied, Carson demanded the men be fired. As he would later explain, Trump concluded that he “had no choice” because an important man had issued an ultimatum. Trump summoned the men back to his office and said, “Fellas, he said you stole it, you’re fired.” The workers left the building severed from their jobs. Months later Carson would discover the coat in the back of a closet. He telephoned Trump to report the find with chagrin, if not regret, for his demand that the workers be dismissed. “But I fired two fuckin’ guys for you” was Trump’s reply.
That he fired two workers on the basis of a celebrity’s false accusation remained fresh in Donald’s mind almost twenty years later. But when he spoke of it, he seemed certain that he had done the right thing; it would have been a mistake to stand up to Carson and defend his workers. Celebrities were worth the trouble because their presence drew buyers who willingly paid, in the case of Trump Tower, as much as $10 million for their homes. However, these buyers didn’t always profit from the deals they made. Carson complained loudly to his accountant when he lost money on the sale of his apartment in 1989.
Trump, on the other hand, gained immeasurably from his associations with Carson, Spielberg, and a host of other famous people, including the King of Pop, who bought apartments at Trump Tower. Besides their money, he also basked in their reflected glow. After Trump Tower was sold-out, he would start claiming that his name, attached to any project, instantly made it more valuable. (Sometimes he quantified this “Trump effect,” saying it added 25 percent, 50 percent, or even 100 percent to the overall worth of a development.) With the power of fame ever present in his mind, he also redoubled his commitment to cultivating it.