TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=90TT0535> <link 90TT3454> <title> Feb. 26, 1990: Two For The Money </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990 Feb. 26, 1990 Predator's Fall </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> PEOPLE, Page 64 Two for The Money </hdr> <body> Awash in power and glitz, Donald and Ivana Trump carry everything to excess, even their split By Emily Mitchell--Reported by Wendy Cole/New York They were the golden couple, shiny as newly minted coins. Everything they touched seemed to turn to glitz. Buildings that reached the clouds, a yacht that matched royalty's, myriad businesses from casinos to an airline--all mirroring a fortune estimated to be $1.7 billion. Donald and Ivana Trump scythed their way through New York society, a pair of posturing peacocks before an adoring press. It seemed there was nothing their money could not buy--until last week. When the glittering Trump marriage collapsed, the ground fairly rumbled beneath the streets of Manhattan. To think of New York City's boy builder, invariably referred to as "the Donald" by Ivana, carrying on life without his Czechmate and social partner was to imagine the city without beggars, bagels without cream cheese, sex without passion. During their 13 years of marriage, Donald, 43, had acquired most of his wealth with Ivana, 41, loyally at his side. In the process he became a man for whom everything had to be the biggest and flashiest--and then be gilded by his name as well. TRUMP: the letters proclaimed power, gleaming on the casinos and hotels, the tower, the shuttle, the yacht, the helicopters; sprinkled over household and countinghouse like the SPQRs on the public works of ancient Rome. In the world according to Donald Trump, more--not less--is more. His marriage became a pageant of celebrity appearances surpassing even the vulgarities on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. And so it was no great surprise that their dispute was played out like a public event, an oversize, grandiose and gaudy display of domestic discord. The imminent breakup between Donald and a "devastated" Ivana was first announced in the New York Daily News by the savviest, most influential of gossip columnists, Liz Smith. After his departure from the couple's spectacular three-story, 50-room penthouse atop Trump Tower, new and old friends, lawyers and public relations minions began lining up on one side or the other, telephones and fax machines primed as deadly weapons. Tabloids and TV seized on the separation like sharks thrown into a frenzy by the smell of such privileged blood. GIMME THE PLAZA! blared the New York Post, seeking to keep Ivana at the helm of the hotel Donald had given her to run. IVANA BETTER DEAL, screamed the Daily News, taking up arms against a prenuptial agreement that would seemingly award her a pittance of the Trump holdings. Ordinary citizens took sides, too, divvying up the Trump family fortune as if it were theirs to dispense, passing out millions according to their sympathies. Amid all the foofaraw, it may have been that the only ones who had not heard about the separation were their three children: two boys and a girl. It was said that when eight-year-old daughter Ivanka learned the news in school, she began to cry. One report had Donald complaining that Ivana's "level of arrogance has grown steadily worse in recent years. The bottom line is I don't want to create another Leona Helmsley." It was an ungentlemanly reference to the self-promoting hotel queen who was recently sentenced to a four-year prison term for income-tax evasion, fraud and conspiracy. (Donald denied making the comparison.) Other stories impugned Ivana's managerial skills as president of the Trump-owned Plaza Hotel, suggesting that she was merely a figurehead. These stopped when her lawyer threatened to sue Donald's p.r. firm. On the other hand, Ivana's partisans got in their shots as news accounts blossomed with rumors of Donald's infidelities. Donald protested his innocence: "I don't believe in cheating. But if I look at somebody or somebody looks at me, immediately they do Don Juan stories." The most persistently mentioned of his sometime public companions, and the one about whom he made the most cautious denial ("She's a friend; a very, very nice girl"), was a peachy actress-model from Georgia named Marla Maples, 26. SIMPLY MARLA-VOUS a tabloid promptly said of her and then quoted Donald as rating her as "better than a 10." She in turn reportedly confided to friends that he had given her the "best sex I've ever had." Strategy sessions held by the couple's respective allies and advisers focused on the prenuptial agreement. Signed shortly before they said I do in 1977, it has been updated three times, most recently two years ago. At present it would grant Ivana only a small portion from the Trump treasury: $20 million and their 47-room Greenwich, Conn., mansion, which is worth about $10 million. Matrimonial lawyers cautioned that such an agreement is close to being ironclad. It was rumored that she was asking for more, and one story had her demanding that Donald hand over $150 million, the Plaza and the Boeing 727 jet. Not at all, said Ivana's spokesman John Scanlon. She wants "nothing more than a fair and equitable share." What she would really like, she has confessed to intimates, is a reconciliation with the Donald. Sudden as the separation seemed, whispers of trouble in Trumparadise had been heard for at least two years. In the fashionable circles frequented by the Trumps, a wife often tolerates excursions off the marital preserve, keeping her man on a long tether while she maintains an unassailable place as wife-in-residence. But Donald apparently snapped his leash after meeting Maples. A bit player in two films (The Secret of My Success and Maximum Overdrive), Maples has posed for ads and other promotional campaigns. After she met Donald, the two allegedly worshiped each other "fairly regularly" at Sunday services in Fifth Avenue's Marble Collegiate Church, the site of Donald's marriage to Ivana. Last year Maples was rumored to have been installed for two months in the pricey St. Moritz Hotel, less than half a dozen blocks from the Tower. (Maples' publicist says he booked his client into the hotel himself for a commercial.) By some accounts, Marla and Ivana, who is said to have called her rival "Moolah" (as in money), had an impromptu summit confrontation at an Aspen, Colo., restaurant around Christmastime. In one version, Marla asked, "Are you in love with your husband? Because I am." The two Trumps were later seen publicly arguing in Aspen. As Donald's attention wandered, say friends, Ivana went to great lengths to compete with the beautiful (and younger) women who constantly crossed his path. She endured several rounds of plastic surgery last year to smooth her face, enhance her lips and improve her cleavage. She replaced the hardened movie-queen makeup and lacquered hairstyle with a softer, more youthful look. The stakes were high: quite apart from her feelings for her husband, she loved being Mrs. Donald Trump. An avid skier from Czechoslovakia, Ivana was modeling in Montreal when she met Donald. "She had done things in a half-baked way," says an observer. "Ivana was never a top skier, a top model. She always wanted to be really good at something." It was a mixed marriage: pleasure was combined with business. Aglitter in sequins, Ivana smiled through charity benefits and banquets, adding a veneer of glamour for her up-from-the-boroughs husband. Even more to her liking, Donald made her CEO of Trump's Castle Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, where she presided over a staff of 4,000 with alternating infusions of charm and callousness. She adopted the Ronald Reagan style of management, dismissing details that were boring or too complicated. However, in Trump: The Art of the Deal, Donald lauded her as being "incredibly good at anything she's ever done, a natural manager." But what Donald gives, he can also take away. He removed her from the Atlantic City post in 1988, softening the blow by putting her in charge of the Plaza. Her fee, he joked, would be $1 a year and "all the dresses she wants." She has conceived of no less a goal than transforming the fading Plaza into, as she has said, "the world's greatest hotel." Having acquired her husband's name, she had taken on his hyperbole as well. In an interview last week, Donald maintained again that Ivana had done "a good job" at the Plaza. And if she wants to stay on, he said, "it's something that I think I would honor. She likes running the hotel. It gives her something to do." Donald has wasted no tears over the breakup, but he did his best to Trump up a wistful attitude: "We just grew apart. I think Ivana is a fabulous woman, but sometimes people change and go on different paths." With Donald, of course, a deal is a deal is a deal. He insisted that the prenuptial contract is "a sacred document," an agreement that is "bound in stone." But, should he choose to be generous and "go a step further because I happen to love Ivana, that's a decision that I will make." In fact, there were reports that he was considering a settlement of $100 million. Rich or poor, an abandoned wife usually has little trouble gaining sympathy. Donald's mother, two sisters and sister-in-law joined Barbara Walters and, of course, Liz Smith to rally around the tearful Ivana last week, toasting her at a previously planned birthday party in a chichi Manhattan restaurant. Ivana's spirits were further brightened by the arrival of a celebratory cake, compliments of onetime billionaire Adnan Khashoggi. For a time, Ivana can count on the support of her society sisters, who will clasp her to their bony bosoms. But unless there is a private settlement or reconciliation, the court will have the last word about the division of spoils. Until then, welcome to the noisiest, gaudiest show in town--Trump: the Divorce. </body> </article> </text>