December 3, 2000

The House That Fred Built

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A real estate dynasty, from its humble origins in Germany to casinos in Atlantic City.

By DAVID MARGOLICK

THE TRUMPS Three Generations That Built an Empire. By Gwenda Blair. Illustrated. 591 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $30.

our days after Fred Trump died on June 25, 1999, family, friends and political cronies gathered in his honor at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. One after another, his descendants rose to extol the man who had come up from nothing to change the shape of Brooklyn and Queens with the homes and apartment buildings he built, and who left a $250 million estate to show for it. A daughter read what she called one of his favorite poems, ''Don't Quit.'' One grandson celebrated Trump's thrift, another praised his common touch. His youngest son recalled how he had always bounded up the stairs each night; ''When you do that,'' he had explained, ''the staircase is only half as high.''

But, characteristically, it was Fred Trump's second son who got in the last word. And when Donald Trump spoke, as Gwenda Blair recounts in her multigenerational history of the Trump family, the focus quickly shifted from the man in the coffin to the one at the lectern, and the tenor of the occasion changed from eulogistic to solipsistic. To Donald Trump, the single most praiseworthy thing about his father was that he had always believed in Donald, whether it was Trump Tower or Trump Plaza or Trump Castle or the Trump Taj Mahal he happened to be working on. ''At his own father's funeral, he did not stop patting himself on the back and promoting himself,'' Blair writes. ''The first person singular pronouns, the I and me and my, eclipsed the he and his. . . . There was to be no sorrow; there was only success.'' It was, she writes, an ''astonishing display of self-absorption.''

Appalling, perhaps. But astonishing? Astonishing to whom? Surely not to anyone who's followed the career of Donald Trump -- which is to say, virtually everyone. No one can doubt he has done remarkable things. But not content to let the facts speak for themselves, he has been breathtakingly, unabashedly, unceasingly immodest. Whether one credits all of his superlatives he spreads around -- the ''biggest'' and ''greatest'' this, the ''richest'' and ''sexiest'' that -- few would dispute his stranglehold on the one title he has never claimed: the most swollen swelled head on earth. He has plastered his name on everything: hotels, apartment buildings, casinos, an airline, a yacht, a quiz show, a bicycle race, golf courses and even a board game (lowest denomination, $10 million, and guess whose smiling face is on every bill). He is forever flaunting beautiful women on his arm, always with a smugness suggesting that they are his just deserts (or desserts).

Watching and listening to Trump, one always has to ask two questions: Could anyone ever really be so full of himself? Or is it all an act? To Blair, the author of ''Almost Golden: Jessica Savitch and the Selling of Television News,'' the answers are, essentially, ''Yes'' and ''No.'' True, Trump knows that his very name is as golden as the facades of his buildings and helped to save him from bankruptcy a decade ago. But that Trump's conceit has made and kept him wealthy makes it no less genuine; it is a matter of conviction, not tactics. A man who so loves himself does not have much room left for anything or anyone else, which is bad news for Blair. Someone so deeply shallow, so profoundly superficial, yet so painstakingly scrutinized for so long by so many reporters and gossipmongers is not a promising subject to write about -- unless, that is, she uncovers something everyone else has managed to miss.

Though Blair begins with Donald Trump (and the dubious claim that by 1989 he was ''the most famous man in America, if not the world'') she does not return to him for nearly half the book. Her efforts to show some kind of genetic link between the generations seems labored, though; struggling through the long sections on grandfather Friedrich and father Fred only confirms that the most familiar Trump is the Trump you really want to know more about.

The saga of the Trumps -- originally, and less euphoniously, the Drumpfs -- begins in Kallstadt, a small village in southwest Germany. (Many years later, when many of the customers, politicians and businessmen he dealt with were Jews, Fred Trump took to saying that the family was originally Swedish.) It was from there that Friedrich, fleeing army service and poverty, emigrated to the United States in 1885, settling first in New York, then in and around Seattle and then up in the Yukon Territory, supplying food (including horsemeat), liquor and women to prospectors. By 1908, married to a German woman and back in New York, he bought his first modest home -- the first acquisition in a real estate portfolio that would expand manyfold over the next century,'' Blair writes, in one of her periodic lapses into heavy-handed foreshadowing. Friedrich, by then Frederick, dies young, but the section on him still seems padded.

The story picks up speed and gravity with his eldest son. Indefatigable and enterprising, Fred Trump built his first home two years out of high school; he was still so young that his mother had to sign his checks. Soon he seemed to be subdividing all of Queens, then much of Brooklyn. The Great Depression, World War II and the baby boom, all of which prompted the federal government to force-feed the home-financing and construction business, made him a multimillionaire. Ruthless, savvy, pragmatic, cheap (he mixed his own cockroach spray and watered down paint to save a few bucks), self-promoting, deceptive, well-connected, Fred Trump was clearly father to The Donald, though personally he was actually quite reticent. But his story, too, could have been told much more quickly and with far fewer detours.

Finally, we get to Donald. The most famous Trump began life, his nursery schoolmistress tells Blair, as a ''beautiful little boy, very blond and buttery.'' He liked toy trucks and building things, annexing his baby brother's blocks one time, as he later liked to boast, and promptly gluing them together so that they could never be reclaimed. In school he was the class clown, fooling friends with plastic vomit and hot pepper gum. Emerging from a military academy and college, he entered real estate, where his goal was to outdo the person whose name, money and clout gave him the only credibility he had -- his father. He set about doing so by entering Manhattan, the moneymaking borough where Fred Trump had always feared to tread. Donald Trump once said he expected to be dead before 40, but wanted to be bigger than Harry Helmsley before he checked out.

Trump began by landing the rights to develop the old Penn Central yards on the West Side, then, with the help of a tax abatement, turned the decrepit Commodore Hotel into the shiny new Grand Hyatt. Trump grumbled that the name ''Hyatt'' covered what he called ''my building,'' settling for a restaurant called ''Trumpets'' instead. But he fixed that slight with Trump Tower, the glitzy peach-colored Fifth Avenue confection where, as his architect joked, Trump's name was large enough for passengers flying into New York to see. Later, Trump tried, unsuccessfully, to erect the tallest building in the world. But concluding that the real money was in gambling, he moved his sights to Atlantic City. Asked what sort of research led him there, Trump pointed to his nose. ''That's all the study I need,'' he said. And so it was, at least for a time.

Blair neatly captures Trump's uncanny business instincts, as well as his competitiveness, chutzpah, cruelty, vulgarity and hucksterism. And she catches him in his lies, or what Trump himself calls ''truthful hyperbole'' -- inflating the number of floors in his buildings to give each more cachet; hiring bulldozers to go back and forth uselessly outside a casino site to give potential partners the illusion of activity; boasting of paying cash -- $8 million of it -- for his Palm Beach pleasure dome, Mar-a-Lago, when he'd actually put down only $2,811 of his own money. She also reintroduces us to Ivana Winklmayr, the beauty from Czechoslovakia whom Trump married in 1977. It was Ivana who gave Trump his first three children and his most enduring nickname -- The Donald -- only to be traded in, a dozen years later, for a younger and more pliable model named Marla Maples.

Feeling quite invincible and omniscient, Trump spiraled out of control in the late 1980's, spending profligately and unwisely to feed his voracious ego. In 1990, The Wall Street Journal disclosed that he was $2 billion in debt, $800 million of which he had personally guaranteed. His net worth was said to be minus $300 million. To stave off imminent default at one of his son's casinos, Fred Trump sent in his lawyer one day to buy $3 million in chips. Panicky creditors hacked away at his empire, seizing half of Grand Hyatt, half of his casinos, most of the Plaza Hotel and some of the condominiums he owned in Trump Tower.

All this might have crushed someone less in love with himself. But the unflappable Trump never doubted his idol, and he toughed it out. Normally hardhearted bankers, realizing that the bad bets they had placed on Trump were worse bets without him, cut him some slack. And investors, sensing that the star power of the Trump logo was undiminished, offered him lavish new deals requiring nothing more from him than his famous name. Enter a whole new set of listings in the Manhattan business directory: the Trump Hotel, the Trump Building, Trump World Tower, Trump International Plaza. Soon, he also had a new listing: he had clawed his way back into the Forbes 400.

The odyssey of Donald Trump conjures up the story of another man who changed the face of New York, Robert Moses. But while Moses dreamed large dreams with enormous consequences, good and bad, Donald Trump has built mostly fripperies. With rare exception, there has been no larger purpose to his projects. His altruism has been rare and invariably small in scale -- like cleaning up Grand Central Terminal or fixing the Wollman Rink in Central Park -- and highly visible, with his flag always planted firmly in the foreground. (Trump has never skated at the Wollman Rink himself; too many people, he wisely realizes, would love to see him fall.)

To be fair, Trump has never pretended to be all of the things biographers love, like complex or sensitive or introspective or tortured or regretful. In fact, he has always savored his philistinism. He relished throwing out the elegant details on the old Bonwit Teller building (torn down to make room for Trump Tower), which he had promised to donate to the Metropolitan Museum. He called one of his fancy lawyers ''Harvard.'' He presumably loved riling Walter Cronkite, whose view was threatened by one of his high-rises. Trump is the type who, when there is no woman to impress or politician or banker or journalist to lobby, would just as soon be at home in his triplex atop Trump Tower, complete with its waterfall and frescoed ceilings, watching a sitcom over a bowl of Spaghetti-Os and a diet soda.

Blair has researched prodigiously and writes with authority. Her descriptions of intricate deals are cogent. While she repeatedly unmasks Trump, her tone is, for the most part, far less gloating or caustic than it could have been. But for all the new, live ammunition she provides to legions of the man's detractors, the Donald Trump she depicts is the Donald Trump we already know. And it could not be otherwise, for there is apparently nothing more. What this conscientious but too-long book boils down to is that Donald Trump is like one of his typical buildings: lots of glitter on the outside but nothing profound below.

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David Margolick, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is working on a book about the heavyweight fights between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling.

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