Back in 1976, when Donald Trump first proposed to buy, gut, and then completely remodel New York's dilapidated Commodore Hotel on East 42nd Street, most dis-passionate observers, and some passionate ones, thought he should have his head examined. For the last six years of its life, the Commodore Hotel had lost $1.5 million per annum, and contributed not a penny to the city's tax coffers. The overall hotel-occupancy rate in New York had slipped to an abysmal 69 percent, and the city as a whole was teetering on its own financial tightrope. Donald's father, veteran real estate developer Fred C. Trump, recalls telling his son, "This is like trying to buy a ticket on the Titanic." But Donald, only 30 years old at the time, was not to be dissuaded from the project.
"Forty-Second Street back then was not looking so good," he admits in his carefully modulated tones. "The Chrysler Building had just defaulted on its mortgage; there was a flea market operating on the corner of Park Avenue. A lot of people were predicting that East 42nd Street was going to go the way of West 42nd Street. But one day I walked down to Grand Central Station, right next door to the block the Commodore sat on, and I watched the thousands of people streaming in and out, and I thought to myself, 'How can this be a bad deal?' And that turned out to be correct thinking, I guess."
Donald's "correct thinking" resulted in the showy, and hugely successful, Grand Hyatt Hotel, the largest new hotel to be built in New York since the Hilton, some twenty years before. But far from slaking his thirst for Manhattan real estate, that project merely whetted it, Since then Donald Trump has become more and more a mover and shaker on the Manhattan scene, throwing up apartment houses and office skyscrapers, renovating Grand Central Station and installing a tennis club inside it. He's president of the Trump Organization, which owns scores of other office buildings, shopping centers and some 42,000 housing units, spread over five states. And he's just erected on Fifth Avenue, right next door to Tiffany's, a glittering, sixty-eight-story skyscraper—Trump Tower—containing some of the most expensive shops, offices and condominium apartments anywhere in the world.
At 37, Donald Trump commands not only one of this country's most innovative and burgeoning real estate empires, but also—and therein lies many a story—one of its most controversial. In pursuing his life's ambition—to carve for himself a solid niche in New York's pantheon of legendary developers—he's also managed to cultivate a personal reputation (depending on whom you talk to) ranging from entrepreneurial genius to "corporate vandal." Though a lot of the talk probably just comes with the territory, Trump has never been one to pass up a good opportunity—or the fray that frequently ensues.
These days Trump runs operations from his brand-new corporate offices on the 26th floor of the Trump Tower. His private office with its beige, linen-upholstered walls, commands views of Central Park to the north and the Empire State building to the south. Trump himself, six foot two, with pale blue eyes and a somewhat unruly shock of sandy blond hair, works in a burgundy-colored, reclining leather chair, behind a burgundy lacquered desk roughly the size of a football field; its huge, flat expanse is dotted with stacks of paper, most of them sliding into imminent disarray. When he talks, other than on the white telephone console that sits at his elbow, he leans back in his chair to an almost horizontal plane and gazes out the windows.
"The first thing I did when I got out of college," he says, "was to analyze the current economic climate and think about just what business I wanted to go into. I mean, there are some businesses that are just bad businesses—retailing, for instance. If I was going to work hard, I wanted to be sure it was in a business where it would prove to be worthwhile. Oil, for example, would be in that category, or, of course, real estate.''
That he ultimately chose real estate should come as no surprise—he was born and bred to it. His brother Robert, the only one of four siblings who followed him into the family business, remembers Donald gathering up all the toy blocks when they were children—his own and his brother's—and then gluing them together into one giant skyscraper. His father, Fred, of hard-working Swedish Protestant stock, had begun buying and selling property before he was even legally old enough to sign the papers. (His widowed mother had to do it for him.) "Yes, I learned a lot about real estate just through osmosis from my father," says Donald, "but what really made it appeal to me as a career was the creativity involved."
In Trump's eyes, that creativity is exercised as much in making the business deal as it is in choosing the architect and design. It's in juggling the figures, the costs, the tax rates, the mortgage terms—in figuring out what kind of profit can be made on the deal. It's a process that even he describes as "simple, and yet very complex, because to me it seems so second nature by now. The zoning laws, for instance, are always lousy, so I know I'm going to have to ask for a zoning change. I get it, or I don't get it, but so far at least I've been very successful at that, Then I look at what I can build on the property, I look at the market conditions, I look at a whole vast array of things."
For Donald Trump, real estate isn't just a business; it's an art form. "The way I look at it, it's a form of canvas, it really is: putting together a really great project ["great" is Donald's favorite encomium], seeing a building going up, that to me is what creativity is all about."
While Trump applies the word "great" liberally, he works hard at giving the term credibility. This time around (with the Trump Tower), he's built a monument of his own smack-dab on what is known in real estate circles all over the world as "the Tiffany location"—the block of Fifth Avenue between 57th and 56th Streets where Tiffany & Co. has been doing business for forty-three years. Like every other real estate mogul, Trump had long had his eye on the prime site, and when Genesco, the company that owned the Bonwit Teller store right next door, acquired a new chairman of the board in 1979, Trump called to ask again, for the umpteenth time, if Genesco would consider selling the site. But this time around, much to his surprise and delight, the answer was yes.
"It was crazy," recalls Trump, with elation. "Nobody would have thought you could buy that plot for any price." But faster than you can say "chance of a lifetime," Trump had lined up credit with the Chase Manhattan Bank, and a "roughly 50-50" partnership with the Equitable Life Assurance Society; by Valentine's Day, 1979, he owned the leasehold on Bonwit Teller's Fifth Avenue store for $10 million. For a further investment of $5 million, he acquired the air rights to Tiffany's, allowing him to build a larger structure on the site than city zoning laws would otherwise have permitted. And to design his new luxury high-rise, he turned to architect Der Scutt, who had mastered his transformation of the Commodore.
Then, he stepped into the hornet's nest—and not just once, but twice. The first controversy was a result of his application for a partial tax abatement on the thirty-eight floors of condominium apartments planned for the building. Under Section 421A of the city's Real Property Law, a developer building on the site of "underutilized" or "functionally obsolete" property can earn a significant tax break. But as city Housing Commissioner Anthony B. Gliedman argued, the purpose of the law had been to encourage the construction of middle- and lower-income housing, not "tax relief for the rich." The renowned "Tiffany location," Gliedman further contended, was not "underutilized"—and he won the first round in court.
But Trump, represented by attorney Roy Cohn, took the case to the state Supreme Court Appellate Division, lost again, and then, finally, to the state's Court of Appeals, where the justices ruled that Gliedman had misinterpreted the purpose of the law, adding in their decision that the Bonwit Teller building, built in 1930, was "plainly outdated." Trump was awarded a $50 million tax abatement, to be spread over a ten-year period, and he issued a triumphant statement: "We have tried to be innovative in the interests of the city and come in and do things when other people wouldn't take the risks. A decision like this, which gives us the equal benefit of the law, obviously makes us very happy." Sometime later, at the Trump Tower's topping-off party (a kind of public christening), Mayor Koch, who had opposed the abatement, conceded, "This is not your low-income housing project, which we need, but we need this kind of building as well." He added, "There's nothing wrong with being rich."
There is something wrong with destroying valuable works of art, however—and that is what got Trump into his second major fracas involving the Trump Tower. When his demolition crews moved onto Fifth Avenue to level the Bonwit Teller building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art urgently requested him to spare and salvage two Art Deco bas-relief sculptures mounted on the front of the store. Whether the museum also volunteered to pay for the sculptures and their removal is unclear; what is irrefutable is the fact that a few days after the request, and after apparently agreeing to it, Trump impulsively told his waiting crew to go ahead and jack-hammer the pieces, and get on with the job at hand. They did, and the howl that went up from the museum, the Landmarks Commission, and a host of other civic-minded organizations no doubt exceeded even Trump's wildest expectations.
An editorial in the New York Times declared that the demolition "was a memorable version of cash-flow calculations outweighing public sensibilities." The City Club wrote that "developers erect structures worth hundreds of millions and, with a single contemptuously arrogant act, risk assuring them-elves a place in history as barbarians rather than builders." Laurie Beckelman, executive director of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, noted Trump was "not one of the more enlightened developers."
Trump, in his own defense, offered a variety of explanations, ranging from the difficulty and expense of removing the sculptures intact, to the danger that doing so might have caused to passing pedestrians. But he also claimed, in what might only be called his "overly direct" fashion, that the pieces were "junk" and that nobody had ever been much interested in them until they had been destroyed. In actuality, though those reasons may indeed have played a part in his decision, the sculptures probably fell prey, more than anything else, to impatience—impatience with outside interference, and impatience with delay. Show Trump an obstacle and he's ready in an instant to hurdle it; give him a "no" and he'll rack his brain to find a way to get a "yes." Even in normal conversation, he will frequently interrupt the other person with an "Okay, I understand" as soon as he's grasped the gist of what he or she is saying, and then move briskly on to the next topic. The sculptures, to Trump's way of thinking, were wasting his time.
If there's anything to help expunge the memory of this unfortunate episode, it's the handsome building now standing on Fifth Avenue. At sixty-eight stories, the Trump Tower is the tallest and most expensive reinforced concrete structure in New York, and its silhouette is both novel and unmistakable; designed to complement the five-sided IBM building that rises behind it on Madison Avenue, the Trump Tower presents a saw-toothed profile, full of set-backs and zig-zags, cascading in an odd way, upward, in a steady stream of gleaming, bronzed glass. Equally unusual, in view of its size and location, is its multi-use design, with the first six floors devoted to a retail atrium, the next thirteen to corporate offices, and the remainder to luxurious condominium apartments.
His most noteworthy achievement to date, the Trump Tower is also, in an interesting way, almost a reflection of Donald Trump himself—tall, tapered, very contemporary in its taste, blond in its general coloration; even the bold architectural statement the building makes—the slight bow to monolithic IBM, but no concessions at all to such old limestone neighbors as Tiffany's and Bergdorf's—is typically, defiantly, Trump. "He knows exactly who he is, and what he wants," says interior designer Angelo Donghia, who was commissioned to do the tower's residential lobby, and the Trumps' private triplex on top. "He has very quick judgment and a very definite attitude about what he likes. With Donald, you don't spend a lot of time wondering whether something is right or wrong—it's (a) or it's (b) and that's that. And everything you do for him," says Donghia, with a smile, "has to be done great," stressing Trump's favorite word.
Even exigent New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger has been pleasantly surprised by the Tower. "It has not been difficult to presume that the Trump Tower would be silly, pretentious and not a little vulgar. After all, what New York building has been surrounded by so much hoopla?" he observed recently. The building, he says, has "exceeded expectations"—this despite the off-putting avalanche of publicity and such indeed silly touches as doormen dressed in livery that would look overdone even at Buckingham Palace and brass podiums for flowers that are shaped in double "T's" for Trump Tower.
Goldberger's greatest praise goes to the Trump Tower's atrium, which he says "may well be the most pleasant indoor public space to be completed in New York in some years." He finds the space "warm, luxurious and even exhilarating." He gives more mixed reviews to the Tower's slick exterior. While he likes the "pleasant, cascading quality" of the building as seen looking north on Fifth Avenue, he finds the zigs and zags "a bit too nervous, almost hyperactive." The building's greatest weakness, he feels, is its failure to relate to Tiffany's. He concedes that the busy, irregular facade does create interesting living space. It's never easy, he points out, to achieve a compromise between a building's public and private presence. In the case of the Trump Tower, the private presence is the one that dominates.
The design of the 100-foot-high atrium that Goldberger applauds bears the strong imprint of Trump's Viennese-born wife Ivana in everything from the color schemes to its selection of retail stores. "The Trump Tower," declares Donald, "is going to be one of the great buildings of the world, and Ivana's been a terrific help to us in planning the lobbies, the interiors, the color schemes. She's got a wonderful design sense, and she works very hard on all sorts of problems."
"I wanted to do something different with it," comments Ivana. "So many other buildings—their lobbies, their public areas—they all look alike. I don't know if the designers don't have the courage to do something a little different, or if they just don't have the ideas. Travertine, which is the cheapest, or white Carrara marble; that's what they all use, over and over again. This atrium is chiefly designed for women to shop in, and that's why I wanted it to be gay and colorful and warm." To that end, she imported 2,500 tons of rosy Breccia Perniche marble for the walls and floor, accented the stone with polished brass banisters and railings, and planted ficus trees and hanging plants around an eighty-foot-high tumbling waterfall. An enormous glass and brass skylight fills the six shopping floors with a warm, subtly diffused light.
The space is both pretty and flashy. It has a Rodeo Drive showbiz aura that makes New York's old limestone shopping establishments look, by comparison, nicely dowdy. "The atrium is a little too glitzy for my taste," one resident retailer observes, "but it feels like it's supposed to; it's supposed to smell rich, feel rich and look rich, and it does."
The stores themselves, ranging from Asprey's of London to Buccellati, also include such personal favorites of lvana's as Lina Lee, Charles Jourdan and a new, slightly amended Bonwit Teller. Kenneth J. Lane, the jewelry designer, will also open a shop, his first retail enterprise, in the space. Rents in Trump Tower reflect the exclusivity of the site, starting at $150 a square foot and going as high as $500. Buccellati, for example, pays $400 a square foot, plus 10 percent of sales, for its street-level shop. Loewe, the Spanish leather goods shop, pays $1 million a year for its prime location. Neal Fox, Loewe's U.S. president, says his company scouted for several years for the right high-visibility site for its New York debut. Then the Trump Tower came along, offering he says, "a formidable position"—a glass and marble triplex that presides over the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street. Fox is confident that the Tower will become "the heartbeat of the whole Fifth Avenue shopping area. It's an up-market, pricey shopping center that gives us access to the condominium residents, transient shoppers and foreign travelers," he says. So far, with the scaffolding still up and several stores as yet unopened, Fox is amazed at the crowds the building is drawing. "I shake my head in disbelief," he says of the 50,000 people who traipsed past the red-liveried guards one recent Saturday. Some came to shop, but most to gawk. Fox is optimistic that the ratio of shoppers to gawkers will improve once the condominium residents, whom he sees as a captive audience, move in: "We'll all have a better sense of the reality in the fall, when this place is pumping on all eight cylinders. Now we're still moving on five-and-a-half."
Though prices in the atrium's shops may be high for casual tourists, the Trump Tower's residents should have little trouble meeting them. Prices start at $550,000 for a one-bedroom condominium apartment. For $2.25 million one can acquire a top-of-the-line two-bedroom apartment, and for a million more, a choice three-bedroom unit. The building's highest priced space is the $10 million triplex penthouse, which commands views of the East River, the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty. Buying into the Trump Tower is just the beginning. Then, "virtually everyone starts all over again," according to Louise Sunshine, the Trump Organization's executive vice-president. Residents are pulling out kitchens, bathrooms and even floors. Some are spending as much as $3 to $4 million above the purchase price to create an apartment of their dreams. "Money is no object to these people," says Mrs. Sunshine.
With 90 percent of the apartments sold, the roster of residents reads like an international Who's Who. Slightly more than half are Americans. The rest are mostly Europeans with a scattering of South Americans. Only 15 percent, roughly, will callthe Trump Tower their primary residence, and almost everyone, according to Mrs. Sunshine, has at least three or four other homes. The Trump Organization is reluctant to reveal the names of the owners. And since many of the buyers have
purchased their apartments in corporate names, their identities are often masked. The list appears to include Mr. and Mrs. John Bookis (he is a Greek investment banker); the Count and Countess de Odiel of Spain; Wanda Jablonski, publisher of an influential petroleum newsletter and prominent figure in international oil circles; and a number of well-known show business figures including Sophia Loren, David Merrick, Johnny Carson, Paul Anka and Steven Spielberg. "The Trump Tower is going to be one of the greatest residential addresses in the world," declares Trump.
"We've got the great tenants, the great space, the great location and we're doing incredible business." Trump just couldn't be happier with his signature building on Fifth Avenue.
With the Trump Tower, in the very heart of Manhattan, Donald has come a good long way from the end of Avenue Z in Brooklyn, not far from Coney Island, where he began his career. Fresh out of the Wharton School (where he graduated first in his class in 1968), he joined the firm started by his father over fifty years before. The company had mushroomed from one small, heavily mortgaged apartment house into hundreds of buildings, containing thousands of offices and apartment units, most of them scattered throughout the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. Donald spent his first few years at the company "buying tremendous numbers of well-financed, well-located apartment buildings in Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey, which turned out to be excellent investments. Unexciting, but excellent investments."
The excitement, for Donald, was and always had been in Manhattan. While his father felt most at home living and doing business in outlying boroughs, Donald hankered after a piece of Manhattan itself: the famous turf on which Zeckendorf himself had made, and lost, his fortune: the soil—extremely limited in quantity—on which to-day Harry Helmsley rules as undisputed king. Donald wanted to make a splash in the media capital of the world, and he embarked on a hunting expedition for New York properties.
His quarry turned up in an unexpected guise—the bankrupt Penn Central railroad. In 1975, the railroad was looking to sell two of its major Manhattan properties—the 59-year-old Commodore Hotel on the corner of Lexington and 42nd Street, and the vast 34th Street rail yards on the city's West Side. At a time when many businessmen, and developers in particular, were less than sanguine about the future of New York, Trump was downright bullish. He raced to negotiate options on both properties, and then convinced the Hyatt Corporation to join him in the Commodore conversion. That, however, was just half the battle.
With his backing and property in place, Trump went to work on the city, then under the administration of Mayor Abraham Beame, to secure the necessary tax incentives and abatements that would make the hotel project economically worthwhile. With the city in its own financial pickle, there was a good deal of resistance just then to awarding any lucrative tax breaks to a big-time developer; the city needed every cent it could get in tax revenues. But it also needed one thing even more—it needed clear proof that New York was not slipping into irreversible decline; it needed committed dollars, and high-visibility projects, to counter all the bad press and predictions of doom.
With adroit and unrelenting politicking, aided not a little by the rampant fears that the whole Commodore neighborhood was in danger of precipitous decay, Trump managed to arrange what real estate experts commonly concede to be one of the most complicated and intricate tax deals (the exact details of which the Trump Organization does not advertise) in New York history. Involving both the state Urban Development Corporation and the city itself, the deal amounted in the end to a forty-year tax moratorium on the prospective Grand Hyatt: Bjorn Hanson, hotel expert for the accounting firm of Laventhol & Horwath, estimated in the Wall Street Journal that the abatement amounted to roughly $45 million, and Henry Stern, a city councilman who had been one of the abatement's most strenuous opponents, claimed that Trump "got the tax deal of the century. It was the deal that made him." Even Preston Robert Tisch, who as president of the Loews Corporation owned several rival hotels in Manhattan, graciously conceded at the time that Trump was "a very bright, capable real estate man."
Determined to make his official New York debut a success, Trump enlisted the services of Der Scutt, the noted architect with the firm of Swanke, Hayden, Connell and Partners. But he enlisted him in his typically quick, and not always diplomatic fashion. Introduced through friends, Trump invited Der Scutt over to the penthouse bachelor pad he was occupying at the time, and then asked him how the chrome and velvet-upholstered furniture in the living room area ought to be rearranged. After repositioning the few pieces he approved of, Der Scutt simply shoved the rest of it out into the hall. "And the next thing Donald said to me," he recalls, "was, `Now I'd like you to take a look at my plans for the Commodore Hotel.' That Donald," Der Scutt is fond of saying, with bemused admiration, "he could sell sand to the Arabs and refrigerators to the Eskimos."
Der Scutt stripped the old Commodore down to its steel-beam skeleton and then sheathed the thirty-story exterior with a smooth, silver skin of mirrored glass. In-side, he created a vast, central atrium, four stories high, decorated with towering plants and low-slung sofas and chairs, focused from above by a dramatic hanging sculpture of intricate bronze meshwork. But the architect's piece de resistance was the Sun Garden, a glass-enclosed cocktail lounge cantilevered out over the hotel's 42nd Street entrance and affording its patrons a comfortable view up and down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
In Trump's view, however, the job wasn't finished until a suitably attractive setting had been created for his new jewel; he won from the city the commission to clean up the massive exterior of his neighbor, Grand Central Station, to strip away from its once creamy granite walls over sixty years of accumulated soot and grime. And to announce to the world just who was responsible for restoring Grand Central to its former glory, he draped from the scaffolding a large banner emblazoned with only one word: "Trump." Not "A cooperative venture of the City of New York and the Trump Development Corporation." Not "A renovation undertaken by . ." Just the one word—Trump. Some of his critics and competitors felt the free billboarding was a bit too much, and Trump himself remembers that some unaware city administrators, spotting the banner and scaffolds, flew into a frenzy, and called his office to make sure he wasn't planning to tear down Grand Central Station. Trump was merely amused by the whole incident.
As Der Scutt has said of him, "If it's not impossible, Donald doesn't want to do it." He thrives on challenges and, to a certain extent, controversy. For his entire career in real estate, he has been a young man in an older man's game, the young Turk wielding (at least at the beginning) his father's money and clout to cut big deals and, according to his detractors, generate a lot of personal publicity, ruffling feathers in the process. "Donald is driven. He's so consumed with what he believes and feels that he has a tendency not to listen well," says a business acquaintance who also respects Trump's achievements. "He's a good merchant. He knows how to sell himself and his property." Back in 1975, real estate baron Samuel Lefrak remarked, "The kid only knows how to talk, not to build." This was before any of Trump's proposed Manhattan projects had materialized. He was brash, impetuous, and his personal lifestyle didn't help any either: being chauffeured around town from one chic nightspot to another in the back of a silver Cadillac limousine, dating an assortment of glamorous young women, retreating to the slick bachelor aerie where Der Scutt first found him. Being young, eligible, rich and handsome is no way to win friends, particularly in the staid and publicity-shy business world.
Looking back now on his man-about-town days, which weren't so very long ago, Trump concedes, in a matter-of-fact- tone, that yes, he had enjoyed himself. "It was a good time. But all things considered," he adds, "I'd have to say that being married—to the right person—is better." Donald Trump is not one to wax poetic or sentimental; he's clearly not comfortable discussing his personal life, and deflects most such inquiries. But innocent bystanders, who happened to be present at the New York party where he was first introduced to the woman who would later become his wife, claim that his cool, business-like demeanor dissolved on the spot, and like any other mortal, he tumbled head over heels in love. After meeting Mrs. Trump, it's easy to see why.
A svelte, blonde beauty, Ivana Trump—"Ivaska" is the pet name her husband calls her by—was born in Vienna and grew up in Prague, where her father worked as an electrical engineer. In his spare time, he taught his daughter to ski—well enough, in fact, that by the age of 6 she was winning junior competitions. In 1972, she competed in the Olympics as a member of the Czechoslovakian team, and later raced professionally for the Austrians. Her skiing eventually brought her to Montreal, where, while staying with an aunt and uncle, a new career as a fashion model suddenly opened up to her. "Mostly in magazines, and in fashion shows," she says, her English bearing only a slight Eastern European lilt and accent. "My English then was not good enough for television commercials." But in print ads, and on the runways at the top designers' shows, she quickly became one of the most sought-after and highly paid models in Canada. It was on one of her business junkets to New York that she wound up at the party where she first met Donald.
After their initial encounter, Ivana shuttled back and forth for a year or so between Montreal and New York; like her husband, she is reluctant to discuss the intimate, or even not so intimate, details of their courtship. Suffice it to say they were quietly married in New York by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, for many years the Trump family's minister, and today they have two children—Donald Jr., 6, and Ivanka, 2 ("Very original names, huh," says their father with a shrug)—and one standard black poodle with the very original name of Tlapka. "In Czech, that means 'paw,' " Ivana explains. "When I got her thirteen years ago, she was just a puppy, and she'd hurt one foot somehow. Donald," she confides, with a mischievous smile, "he just tolerates her."
Though if they chose to, the Trumps could pick up and join the jet set tomorrow, they choose instead to lead a fairly quiet life. When they go out for dinner, it's usually with just one or two friends, and they go to a handful of restaurants they always enjoy: Le Cirque, La Grenouille, Primavera and Vasata "for their wonderful chicken paprika," says Ivana. "And do you know a place called the Duck Joint?" she asks, referring to a casual, Upper East Side restaurant known, at least in part, for the generosity of its portions. "Oh, I love that place. It's where you can go when you really want to . ." She fumbles for the English expression, then exclaims, laughing and clapping her hands together, "pig-out! Yes!"
Weekends are often spent at their country house in southwestern Connecticut, where Donald can enjoy a round of golf—"he's a very good golfer, with only a three handicap," announces Ivana—and Ivana can garden and get in some outdoor exercise of her own. "I like to be active," she says, "to move around in the fresh air. I can't sit still for two hours at a time, playing bridge or whatever," and illustrates the point by bouncing up and down in place on the sofa. "In the country, or even in the evening at home, we can relax, enjoy each other's company, dress more casually. With Donald," she confesses, "who is very formal, I like to joke that he wears a 16-piece suit all the time."
Monday morning at 6:30, however, always finds them both up and about, ready to go back to work again. As of this writing, the Trumps are living in a spacious apartment overlooking Central Park, just a few blocks away from the Trump Tower where, by the fall of this year, they plan to be installed in their Donghia-designed apartment. In the meantime, they are both devoting the lion's share of their long and busy working days to putting the finishing touches on their brand-new, Fifth Avenue landmark. "I'd have been happy just to work on a little brownstone somewhere," notes Ivana, "but with Donald, you get such incredible, wonderful projects."
If there's anything about the Trump Tower that bothers Donald, it's wondering what he'll do to top it. And with the Trump Tower nearly done, he can now turn his attention to the other development projects already underway—the forty-story coop, Trump Plaza, now rising on East 61st Street, one block from Bloomingdale's; the $230 million hotel-casino, Harrah's Boardwalk at Trump Plaza, under construction in Atlantic City; and the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel in New York, which occupies the block bordered by the Avenue of the Americas and Central Park South. Trump owns the entire block, though he won't say what he plans to do with it.
One persistent rumor is that Trump plans to build a new hotel on the choice Central Park South site. He is already trying to empty the rent-controlled tenants from the building adjacent to the Barbizon, efforts which came to public attention recently when he offered to create a shelter for the homeless in the building's fourteen vacant apartments. The residents of 100 Central Park South were not impressed with Trump's humanitarian gesture. "It was just intended to intimidate some of our clients," says Richard Fischbein, the lawyer who has been representing the tenants. The City turned down the offer, and Trump expressed his dismay. The apartments, he pointed out, are not only heated, but command some of "the best views in the City." Trump does say he's planning to replace the lackluster old hotel with "something very exciting and very dramatic." It would pretty much have to be, just to keep his spirits up.
The extraordinary success he's achieved, at such an early age, seems to have taken some of the fun out of the game for Trump. "I'm spoiled," he admits. "People come to me now with property to sell, and even at very good prices, but unless it's something really great, I don't want it. Unless I can do something really terrific with the deal, I'm not all that interested. I only want to do the best." He's even begun to look into other businesses, making an unsuccessful $20 million bid for the New York Mets, casting a covetous eye on the burgeoning cable-television industry. "I do have some other specific things in mind, other plans, but I just haven't moved to make them public yet.
"But when you've done as much building as I have," he adds, "probably as much as anybody has ever done by my age, it is possible to get a little tired of it after a while." The burbling of the telephone console at his elbow breaks the meditative calm; Trump swivels in his chair to pick it up and is instantly transformed, all traces of weariness or ennui banished as if forever, leaning forward, jotting down figures, asking short questions in an eager, alert voice: "What address on Sixth? The whole parcel? What do they want for it? Would they take one point-two? What's the total square footage we're talking about?"
A betting man would have to wager that Donald Trump hasn't yet finished with the Manhattan real estate game. Not by a long shot. Not so long as there are still great deals to be made, great projects to put together, and even the occasional great fracas to stir up. For Donald Trump, it's the only way to keep the blood circulating.
