In my absence over the summer, my grandfather had turned the breakfast room at the House, a secondary dining room between the kitchen and the library, into newspaper-clipping central. As soon as Donald’s Grand Hyatt project had gotten off the ground in the late 1970s, he started clipping articles from the two New York newspapers he had delivered every day: The New York Times and the Daily News. In the interim, he also subscribed to the New York Post, which seemed more favorable to Donald than the others.
Over the years, the only gift my mother gave my grandfather that he actually seemed to appreciate—other than a framed needlepoint embroidery of a Native American wearing a headdress—was a single-sheet cutter that made it easier to clip articles out of newspapers. Now he had several of them.
Donald had hired a clipping service, and whenever he came to the House, he brought my grandfather accordion folders full of interviews and profiles from other papers and magazines. Not only was three-quarters of the table now covered, but my grandfather put clippings on the shelves of the étagère by the bay window and on the seats of some of the dining chairs that he had pulled away from the table and lined up against the walls. There were only two chairs left unencumbered at the far end of the table, where, presumably, he and Gam had their meals.
Almost every time I went to the House, Donald and my grandfather stood there discussing the clippings, rearranging them.
One afternoon, Dad and I were in the library watching a Mets game. I was telling him about the sports facilities I’d seen on my tour of Walker’s when Donald came in holding up a clipping and said, “Hey, Freddy. Remember this?”
Donald’s smile was genuine enough to draw me and my father to get off the couch and walk over to him. Dad leaned in to take a closer look, then straightened up immediately. The headline of the New York Post article had the word “Steeplechase” in it. I would learn much later that Steeplechase Park, a much-loved Coney Island amusement park that was also the cornerstone of the local economy, had been the last project my father was involved in at Trump Management. It had also been an abject failure for my grandfather, one that had destroyed a Coney Island landmark and forcibly relocated hundreds of Black families, arguably ending his career as a developer. Trump Village, which had been completed three years before Steeplechase, was the last building project Fred ever completed. When it became clear that the obstacles in the way of Fred’s making Steeplechase a success were probably insurmountable, he made Freddy the face of the debacle and saddled him with the blame.
The picture accompanying the 1966 article showed Freddy and another man crouching down with a tiger—an actual tiger—lying on the ground in front of them.
“Hey, honeybunch,” Donald said to me. “Your dad was such a handsome guy, wasn’t he?”
I might have agreed with him, but since the formerly “handsome guy” was standing right next to me, I didn’t say anything. Dad looked at the floor. What struck me about the photograph—beyond the bizarre presence of the massive cat—was the expression on my father’s face.
The man next to Dad was holding some papers right in front of the tiger’s face. Dad had a pen, with which he was presumably going to sign the documents, but he was clearly calculating how to do that without having to get his hand too close to the tiger’s wide-open mouth. There’s a self-consciousness in that calculation, as if he’s aware he’s supposed to look cool and unfazed but can’t quite pull it off. His lips are drawn in a tight line and his entire body is tense. He can’t help but look afraid. It’s the only picture I’ve ever seen in which he looks like me.
“Seems like forever ago,” Dad said quietly.
“Really?” Donald laughed. “I remember it like it was yesterday.” Which made no sense at all because at the time, Donald was a nineteen-year-old college student in Philadelphia who had no involvement in the Steeplechase project.