I have always gotten much more publicity than anybody else.
—DONALD TRUMP
Surrounded by stacked file folders and piles of three-ring binders, Wayne Barrett was lost in concentration as he sat at the table in a small government conference room and pored over memos and documents. The jangling sound of the phone he had pushed to the edge of the table startled him almost as much as the explanation shouted out by a secretary in a nearby office: “It’s for you!” Barrett, who hadn’t told anyone he was going to be working at the offices of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, reached for the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Wayne, it’s Donald.” The tone was eager, familiar, and arrogant. The caller didn’t say his last name—Trump—which Barrett found strange since he had never encountered the man until this moment. “I hear you’ve been going around town asking a lot of negative questions about me. When are you going to talk to me?”
“I’m circling,” said Barrett. Then he agreed to get together with Donald Trump in a month’s time. It would be the first of three interviews with Trump that Barrett would recall quite vividly after more than forty years of interviewing people as a journalist and an author.1
In late 1978, when this call took place, Barrett was five years into a career at the alternative weekly The Village Voice, where he would become a fixture of New York journalism. A skeptic when it came to the powerful, he lived in the impoverished and rough-edged Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where he had worked as a teacher and as an advocate for tenants who lived in slum housing. His devotion to their cause came with a convert’s level of enthusiasm because he had begun life in a conservative family in conservative Lynchburg, Virginia, where he had been a cochair of his state’s Youth for Goldwater group during the Arizona senator’s losing campaign for the presidency.
Although his views began to change during his college years in Philadelphia, Barrett became a lifelong liberal after attending the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and covering Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Kennedy’s concern for the poor and his commitment to civil rights would inspire Barrett’s journalism as he focused on election campaigns, government affairs, and other aspects of civic life. He had turned his attention to Trump as the young developer demonstrated his ability to convert his political connections into profit.
One of Barrett’s interviews with Trump occurred at the office on Avenue Z in Brooklyn, where Fred still managed his apartment buildings. The other two were done at Olympic Tower, where Donald and Ivana were living at the time. Barrett didn’t own a suit, but he did add a necktie to his wardrobe for these visits. His wife, who window-shopped on Fifth Avenue during one of these sessions, quizzed him about the furnishings, but Barrett didn’t have much to report. He was so concerned with getting answers to his questions that he had made little note of the art on the walls or the furniture in the rooms. Other writers would report on the dark-colored marble Ivana had chosen for the floor, the tables covered in goatskin, and the hammock hung hear a window overlooking the city.2
At their first encounter, Trump made sure that Barrett understood that he was friendly with officials at the top of the company that owned The Village Voice. Somehow, without Barrett’s telling him, Trump knew that the reporter lived in Brownsville, which he called “an awfully tough neighborhood.” He volunteered to help Barrett relocate to an apartment in a less tough place. Barrett declined, explaining that he had lived in Brownsville for a decade and was committed to the neighborhood and its improvement. “So we do the same thing,” replied Trump. “We’re both rebuilding neighborhoods.”
In his time with Trump, Barrett sought answers to many vexing questions. He wanted to know about the Trump family’s thirty-year relationship with Abe Beame and the Democratic Party establishment in Brooklyn. He asked if Donald Trump knew why the attorney representing Penn Central’s creditors had suddenly dropped his objections to the Commodore Hotel sale. And how, asked Barrett, did Trump square his claim that the Trump Organization owned as many as twenty-two thousand apartments with legal documents that put the number at twelve thousand? Barrett also pressed for details on the racial-discrimination complaints made against the Trump Organization, which Trump had contested in the press and in the countersuit filed by Roy Cohn.
Trump had questions of his own for Barrett: “What do people say about me? Do they say I’m loyal? Do they say I work hard?” When Trump felt less happy about Barrett’s project, he asked if the reporter was aware of his willingness to sue journalists: “I’ve sued twice for libel. Roy Cohn’s been my attorney both times. I’ve won once and the other case is pending. It’s cost me one hundred thousand dollars, but it’s worth it. I’ve broken one writer. You and I’ve been friends and all, but if your story damages my reputation, I’ll sue.”
Barrett never learned the names of the writers Trump had supposedly sued, nor did he find any press coverage of libel actions the developer had initiated. But a threat, backed up with a done-it-before claim, could give a reporter pause. Barrett may have paused, but he was not deterred. In early January 1979 he published a series of articles that showed Trump’s political connections and revealed him to be a clever young man who was surpassing the example set by his father. Nothing Barrett described would count as illegal, but his articles established Donald Trump’s ambition as so enormous that it left little room for other traits. Barrett wrote:
After getting to know him, I realized that his deals are his life. He once told me, “I won’t make a deal just to make a profit. It has to have its own excitement. Its own flair.” Another Manhattan developer said it differently. “Trump won’t do a deal unless there’s something extra—a kind of moral larceny—in it. He’s not satisfied with a profit. He has to take something more. Otherwise there’s no thrill.”3
As the first full accounting of the Trump phenomenon, Barrett’s articles would become touchstones for many who followed him in the effort to explain Donald’s success. Trump was unhappy with the pieces and would eventually describe Barrett’s work as “vicious” and claim, despite all their meetings having been recorded on tape, that “every quote had been changed or taken wildly out of context.” Trump did not sue, however.
If reporters made mistakes as they dealt with Trump, it may have been because whenever Trump spoke to the press, he addressed so many old and new claims that even the best fact-checker would have been hard-pressed to sort them all out. In one interview Donald revised his defense of the destruction of the Bonwit artwork, saying that it would have cost him not $32,000, but $500,000 to save it. The $32,000 figure had been offered by his alter ego John Baron, which meant that, as far as the public was concerned, Trump wasn’t contradicting himself. In 1983, press estimates of Fred Trump’s fortune would shrink it from the $200 million reported in 1976, to just $40 million, which made Donald’s accomplishments seem far more impressive. A year later, as The Times caught up with Fred Trump, he was credited with controlling $1 billion in assets and the family remained Swedish, and not German. (In this article The Times demoted Ivana from Olympic team member to “alternate.”)4
Any effort made to resolve the confusion over Trump’s public image would be overwhelmed by the volume of the publicity that attended the man’s movements. A perfect example of this dynamic arose around the critic Ada Louise Huxtable’s assessment of Trump Tower. When she saw the drawings for the yet-to-be-constructed building, she said that Der Scutt had envisioned a “dramatically handsome” design. When it was actually built, however, Huxtable was obviously disappointed by the execution. She pronounced Trump Tower “a monumentally undistinguished” structure that was marred by a “dull and ordinary exterior.” Its interior, clad in the rosy marble so carefully selected in Italy, evoked “posh ladies’ powder-room décor.”
No one who had paid close attention to Huxtable’s views could be confused about her opinion of the finished Trump Tower, which was consistent with her long-term concern over the ultratall buildings that had begun to crowd the sky in New York. As she observed, lawyers and developers had exploited the bonuses made possible in the zoning rules to produce a type of building that “romanticizes power and the urban condition and celebrates leverage and cash flow. Its less romantic side effects are greed and chaos writ monstrously large.” A prime example could be seen in Midtown where, she noted, “Der Scutt has created the gigantic Trump Tower, a soaring, faceted form that is also guaranteed to destroy the scale and ambience of Fifth Avenue.” But even as the nation’s most respected architecture critic inveighed against his creation, Trump sought to exploit her credentials. To her dismay, the phrase “dramatically handsome design,” which she wrote to describe Der Scutt’s drawings of the building, were put on display in the Trump Tower atrium. Neither she, nor her publisher, granted permission for this use, but nothing in copyright law prevented it.5
From the moment it opened, the public space in Trump Tower was populated, in great measure, by tourists and curiosity seekers who wanted to see what all the fuss was about. As they entered the building, they were met by attendants who were dressed like British grenadiers, with scarlet coats and tall, fur-covered busby hats. Visitors to the public lobby heard live music played on a grand piano and saw streams of water cascading down a marble wall. The polished red-and-pink stone that stretched in every direction was not so much welcoming as intimidating, and the brass fixtures, which Trump hoped would shine like the buckle on his NYMA uniform, seemed industrial in scale. Escalators carried shoppers to the high-price retailers on the upper levels of the lobby. The owners of these shops, who paid some of the highest rents in the world, often struggled to make a profit. Within a decade, exclusive stores such as Buccellati, Lina Lee, Martha, and Charles Jourdan would be gone. In their place would come modest retailers such as Tower Records and Dooney & Bourke. The gawkers who passed through the spinning doors were far more likely to spend $50 at Nike than $500 at Galeries Lafayette.
As the landlord, Donald Trump wasn’t much concerned about turnover among the retailers in the vertical shopping mall, as long as the rent was paid. As of 1986 Trump said that the office and retail floors generated $17 million per year. All of the business done in these spaces was hidden from the view of Trump Tower residents, who came and went via a doorway and small lobby space on Fifty-sixth Street. With no piano player, fountain wall, or grenadiers, the residential lobby was so dimly lit that on sunny days residents would have to pause to let their eyes adjust to the darkness once they stepped inside.
The sale of the tower condominiums, which reportedly brought $277 million, paid off the $190 million cost of the building, with plenty left over for Trump and his partner, Equitable. Trump also sought a tax abatement similar to the one granted to Aristotle Onassis under the state law intended to aid the development of residences on underutilized properties. But the Olympic Tower arrangement was approved under a different mayor, at a time when New York City was in economic distress. Trump sought his abatement at a time when New York had rebounded and the feisty Ed Koch occupied the mayor’s office. Dozens of new skyscrapers were begun in Manhattan during the early Koch years, and the city’s credit rating improved steadily. Under these conditions, the mayor didn’t feel the need to cater to developers.6
Koch was one of the few figures in New York whose personality and ambition could rival Donald Trump’s. Aggressive and egocentric, he presented himself as the embodiment of a certain kind of New Yorker, one who, not unlike Trump, often spoke without thinking and pushed himself to the front of every line. He saw the developer’s bid for a tax break as a self-interested attempt to add to the already outsize profit he had realized by manipulating the zoning regulations to maximize the size of his tower. To then seek multi-million-dollar reductions in taxes for a building that would house some of the wealthiest people in the world seemed outrageous. Besides, in the year when Bonwit Teller ceased operating on Fifth Avenue, the store generated revenues of $30 million. In Koch’s view, this showed that the site did not qualify as underutilized and therefore eligible for subsidy.
Trump’s lawyers presented evidence that in the 1970s, Bonwit had sometimes used just 60 percent of its floor space. This record persuaded the state’s highest court that Trump could not be denied the abatement. But while he netted roughly $50 million in tax reductions, Trump also acquired an enemy in Mayor Koch. Given Trump’s involvement in businesses that brought him into regular contact with city government, alienating the mayor was not a good idea.
Rich with profits from the sale of condos in his new tower, Trump found himself on the wrong side of the political game when he invested in the local franchise—the New Jersey Generals—of the upstart United States Football League. By most measures, the team was a perfect fit for someone with his competitive drive and hunger for public attention. More than any other form of entertainment, sports, especially football, benefited from a torrent of free publicity. Every daily paper in the country, save for The Wall Street Journal, devoted pages of newsprint—not to mention reporters’ salaries and expenses—to sports. Local TV newscasts always came with a sports report, and games were a staple for the major networks. In 1979 a fledgling all-sports network called ESPN began operating from a base in Connecticut. Radio stations beamed sports-talk shows across the country, and soon some, including WNBC in New York, would adopt an all-sports format. (WNBC became WFAN.)
With the mass media devoted to sports, even team owners could become celebrities, if they so chose. Donald Trump’s friend George Steinbrenner, who owned the Yankees and frequented Le Club, was a prime example. He used the press to make himself so recognized that a beer company put him in a commercial.
Steinbrenner had come along as professional teams were becoming vastly more valuable, thanks to the money paid for the rights to broadcast their games. Organized to appeal to television programmers, the USFL began playing in 1983 with a dozen teams with owners who were wealthy enough to lose money while the league developed. Trump bought the Generals prior to the 1984 season for $9 million and soon began agitating for a stadium to be built for his team with the aid of the City and the State of New York. Mayor Koch opposed him, and the idea died along with the league in 1985. Their relationship warmed a bit as Trump’s father donated $25,000 to the mayor’s 1985 reelection campaign. But eventually Koch and Donald Trump descended into the kind of name-calling nastiness more common to a playground than the corridors of power.7
The nadir was reached when Trump sought yet another tax abatement for a development on the West Side of Manhattan. It would have included a new home for the NBC television network, which was contemplating a move from Rockefeller Center to nearby New Jersey. In New York, and many other locales, big companies often threatened to leave for cheaper pastures in order to get some sort of accommodation from a landlord or local authorities. In NBC’s case, however, a move from the center of media, culture, and finance seemed unlikely. Nevertheless, Trump seized upon the notion to promote a vast complex of commercial and residential buildings between Fifty-ninth and Seventy-second Streets—he called it Television City—with NBC its centerpiece. Koch responded by offering the network financial incentives to stay in the city no matter where it located its facilities. The network could even remain at Rockefeller Center and use the money to renovate.
“The city under Ed Koch is a disaster,” Trump said as Koch announced his decision.
“If Donald Trump is squealing like a stuck pig,” replied Koch, “I must have done something right.” Trump called the mayor a “moron,” and Koch taunted him with “Piggy, piggy, piggy.”
The Koch-Trump feud was encouraged by the local press, especially the tabloid Post, which had previously given both men ample attention. Koch had been supported by the Post in the past, but in this battle the paper generally sided with Trump. Eventually the mayor’s administration was swept by scandals, including the exposure of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Bess Myerson’s attempt to bribe a judge, and a flurry of indictments and resignations immobilized City Hall.
New York magazine noted that Trump was included in some conversations about the next man or woman who might occupy Gracie Mansion once the current mayor’s term ended, but no Trump-for-mayor bandwagon ever got rolling. However, his merely being mentioned in the same breath as potential aspirants such as future mayors David Dinkins and Rudolph Giuliani showed that he had become a significant figure. He was neither a politician, like Dinkins, nor a public official like Giuliani, who was US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and therefore the federal government’s chief prosecutor in Manhattan. Trump wasn’t even the most successful builder in the city. However, he was one of the most famous rich men in America, and this made him worthy of consideration.
Trump had become remarkably famous thanks to new kinds of mass media that seemed all but invented to lavish attention on men like him as they expanded the ranks and the very definition of celebrity. On television, this so-called celebrity journalism was pioneered by the program called Entertainment Tonight, which debuted in 1981. Designed to look like an evening news show, Entertainment Tonight functioned mainly as a window on the lives of the famous and those who would be famous. One of this show’s original presenters, the British-born Robin Leach, developed a variation on the form, which he called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Leach, who left school short of college to become a Fleet Street reporter, believed, “The audience demand for this kind of program is insatiable.” In an accent that surely led many viewers to consider him both worldly and sophisticated, Leach talked of “champagne wishes and caviar dreams” and dressed in blue-blazer chic. His producers promised that he was America’s foremost show-business reporter, who “travels the world nonstop in the circles of the elite.”
(It’s worth noting that while Leach’s audience understood without thinking that his program would focus on the consumption habits of the rich and famous—their homes, possessions, travels, hobbies, etc.—the word lifestyle was actually quite new. When first used by psychologist Alfred Adler in 1929, lifestyle referred to strategies people used to avoid dealing with problems or uncomfortable situations. The word was repurposed in the 1960s to mean something akin to “way of living.” In 1967 a new magazine called Avant Garde promised to explore the “life-style” of the “mad mod scene,” and the journalist Gloria Steinem used the hyphenated version of the word in an article for The New York Times.8 Within a decade, advertisers and consumers understood the term as a catchall that suggested social class, taste, and apparent wealth. This last factor loomed largest, and the appearance of wealth rather its actuality mattered most. No one knew if your expensive car came with a big monthly loan payment or if your fancy house was rented. Far more important was the impression one made driving around town, or stepping out of the front door.)
In 1983 millions of people tuned in to see the first episodes of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which were presented as two-hour specials. Among those Leach selected to reveal in these first shows were Princess Diana, the actress/singing star Cher, the romance writer Barbara Cartland, and a single businessperson, Donald Trump. Cher displayed her shoe collection. Trump showed off his weekend-retreat estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, and didn’t correct Leach when the host said it was worth three times the $3.7 million Trump had recently paid for it. Leach would book him for a return engagement.
While Robin Leach represented the lowest common denominator in the media, Trump also attracted attention from the higher end too. A big profile in the Sunday magazine of The New York Times permitted him to brag at length—“I have credibility”—and allowed his father to declare his son’s success was his birthright. Ivana described her husband as boyishly charming, which he could be, and business associates praised his judgment. The praise was balanced by a few reflections on Trump’s huckster qualities, but the overall picture was of a brilliant, exuberant, successful young man. The most telling note came from Trump himself, who reflected on his accomplishments and acquisitions and mused, “… but what does it mean?” The reflection lasted but a moment, and then Trump was on to another topic.9
A month after his appearance in the Times magazine, Trump landed on the cover of GQ, which selected his face for an issue devoted to the theme “success.” For the first time, thanks to writer Graydon Carter, Ivana was denied the title of “Olympian” as her athletic exploits were reported to have been accomplished as a member of an unspecified “Czech ski team.” Carter was also probably the first to suggest, in a national publication, that “a lot of people just don’t like Donald Trump very much.”
As he spoke about owning this and that, Trump could seem like a gleeful kid shuffling deeds and pastel-colored currency while plotting his triumph in a game of Monopoly. Carter noted that Trump had reneged on his promise to save the Bonwit artwork and described the aggressive tactics he used to clear tenants out of a building he’d bought on Central Park South. Frustrated that under rent-control laws the tenants paid below-market prices for their apartments, Trump did what he could to make them feel uncomfortable. He threatened to offer vacant apartments to the homeless and gave the building an ominous appearance by covering the windows of vacant spaces with metal sheeting. The GQ writer also let Trump express himself at his most grandiose. In one of these moments Trump claimed to own an entire block on Central Park South, which he didn’t, and in another he proposed to build both the tallest skyscraper on the planet and a domed football stadium in the Bronx.
The supertower and stadium were fantasies that would never materialize, but his enthusiasm was a little infectious. During a ride with Carter in Trump’s chauffeur-driven stretch limo, Trump’s exuberance was so great that a reader could readily imagine a little boy who is desperate for approval and has never been told that bragging is obnoxious. “A coach maker did this for me,” he said of the car. “It’s wild, isn’t it? We have the wet bar, the whole thing. The whole caboodle. Look, it’s got a TV and a radio.” He told Carter that Trump Tower “glows” at night because he insisted on using “real bronze” on the exterior. “I’m a first-class sort of person,” Trump added. “I only go first-class.”10
After GQ, Trump’s face also appeared on the covers of Time, Newsweek, Business Week, Fortune, Manhattan Inc., and New York. (He had many of these covers framed and displayed on a brag wall in his office.) The blizzard of publicity made his name synonymous with wealth and ambition, and it became common for people to refer to an especially assertive or braggadocious man as “the Donald Trump of” one thing or another. When these references to Trump-like men appeared in the press, the real Trump was sure to find out. The pile of clippings Trump reviewed every morning was so substantial that he could only glance at most of them. Nevertheless, he wanted to keep tabs. This effort was aided by his executive assistant, Norma Foerderer, who would serve Trump for decades as his charming but forbidding guardian and a gatekeeper. She screened every call from an enthusiast with a business proposition and every request from a journalist seeking an interview. Foerderer would also soothe the boss’s ego when it was bruised and rein it in when it was careening out of control. A much a nanny as a corporate functionary, Foerderer was not so different from other assistants who served executives, celebrities, and public officials by keeping their schedules, monitoring their moods, and even managing their personal bank accounts. These indispensable women (almost all were female) handled more intimate matters in their employers’ lives than their physicians and seemed to provide the gravity that kept them from spinning out of control.11
Press appearances were apparently a form of ego sustenance for Donald, and Foerderer kept a store of videotapes—each depicting a Trump milestone—on hand for his instant gratification. She also managed the supply of new material that poured in from around the world. The most valuable of these trophies were mentions in People magazine, which enjoyed the largest readership of any glossy weekly in America and was the most important arbiter of celebrity in the world. Brief and breezy, People articles necessarily deployed stereotype and caricature, but the magazine’s early judgments about a person’s essential traits often turned out to be accurate. Strong leaders acted decisively. Temperamental actors behaved abysmally. In some cases a kind of confirmation bias was at work, as observers noticed what they were expected to see. In other instances the anointed celebrity might have unconsciously lived up (or down) to his billing. Either way, the words in People were often confirmed later by a subject’s behavior in ways that made them seem accurate.
In the fall of 1981 People declared Donald Trump a billionaire even before he claimed the title for himself. The magazine amplified the rumor that he had started about Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s buying a Trump Tower condo to suggest they were considering “a 24-room, $5 million spread.” People also reported that, according to one close friend, Trump hoped to head up his own TV network. To the magazine’s credit, its hagiography was balanced by references to Trump’s self-promotional excesses and to his destruction of the Bonwit artwork. Writer Lee Wohlfert-Wihlborg made efficient use of Trump’s own words to provide her readers with a fleeting glimpse of his psyche. “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat,” he told her. “You just can’t let people make a sucker out of you.”
As Trump spoke of life as a series of conflicts, waged by vicious creatures, he was offering, in his vernacular, a view that the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes had ominously described as the “war of all against all.” Hobbes saw, in legally organized human communities, a way to avoid the chaos of constant and universal conflict among men. Trump saw, in his world, no moral agreement but, rather, vicious combatants engaged in a struggle without end.12
People did not note the echoes of Hobbes in Trump’s statement. Missing too from the article was any reference to a life-shaping event that had occurred inside the Trump family less than two months prior. On September 26, 1981, Donald’s older brother, Fred, died of a sudden and massive heart attack. Just forty-three years old, Freddy was the divorced father of a son and daughter. Having washed out as a pilot and then as a fishing-boat captain, he had moved into his parents’ home and worked on a maintenance crew for Trump apartment buildings. Physically wasted by the effects of alcohol, his drinking had contributed so substantially to his death that Donald considered it the real cause. “Fred Trump” was listed among the names of the dead reported in The Times on September 29, and three notes of condolence were published by friends and business associates of the family. No formal obituary appeared in the paper. Freddy was buried in a family plot in a Lutheran cemetery in Queens.
In time Donald Trump would count his brother’s death as a formative and even defining episode in his life. On one level it was puzzling because Fred was a Trump man, with many of the gifts that should have made him a success of the sort the family prized. “He was such an amazing guy,” said Donald many years later. “The best personality and the best-looking guy you’ll ever see.”
What was the cause of Fred’s addiction? Most experts would credit both nature—a genetic predisposition—and the type of nurture Fred experienced as a child. In Donald’s view, “Our family environment, the competitiveness, was a negative for Fred.” However, Donald also seemed to blame his brother for letting others take advantage of him. He was, in other words, a sucker. “Freddy just wasn’t a killer,” said Donald, and he didn’t defend himself, which was “a fatal mistake.” Fred’s death had taught Donald “to keep my guard up, one hundred percent.”13