Dish (35 page)

Trump had expected his divorce to be big news, but not quite this big. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he declared. “Nelson Mandela’s probably calling up ‘Who is this guy? He blew me off
the front page.’ … It’s been great for business. Business is hotter than ever.” The
Post
headlines were making him out to be a superstud: Don Juan, they called him. Another declared that Donald gave Maria “The Best Sex I Ever Had.” Ivana, according to the
Post,
was greedy. “Gimme the Plaza,” one headline blared. They dug up a story on her first marriage and an old picture of her with brunette hair and ran the headline: “Ivana’s Past as Dark as Her Natural Hair Color.” But some of Donald’s cronies didn’t have his skill in dealing with the press. Trump’s lawyer bragged to Cindy Adams: “I’m a killer. I can rip skin off a body…. I can cause pain. [I once made an opponent] collapse on the witness stand.” He was playing it too hard.

Ivana’s side seized the opportunity to play the victim. “Mrs. Trump emigrated to America from a repressive police state where violence was commonplace,” said John Scanlon, Ivana’s P.R. guy. “She did not expect that she and her children would ever be threatened again, particularly by her husband’s lawyer.”

The whole episode was beginning to turn into a public relations disaster for Trump. Liz Smith was a very effective advocate for Ivana. The press and the public, which had always seemed to adore him, began turning on him. According to a
Daily News
poll, 82 percent of the readers sided with Ivana. John Cardinal O’Connor consoled and counseled Ivana for forty-five minutes. Trump didn’t want to be seen in public with Maria, so Garry Trudeau made fun of his “Bimbo Limbo.” Trump began blasting the coverage as a “media circus.” Cindy, who took to calling him “P. T. Barnum Trump,” didn’t always help his case. “Well, he just has too much juice or too many chromosomes, whatever it is God gave him,” Cindy declared in Trump’s defense. “He’s got lots of aggression and he’s just not going to lose. He has not made a great many friends on the way up but it’s because that’s the way he is. He’s a killer and he knows it.”

Trump demanded that Liz Smith be fired: “Liz Smith is being used, she was played like a fiddle.” He accused Liz of making up quotes and writing “whatever comes into her head.” He declared, “Liz Smith used to kiss my ass so much it was embarrassing.” She had, he said, “disgraced the industry.” There were rumors he might buy the
Daily News
and fire her.

Then he played his Trump card. Maria Maples, the Georgia Peach who hadn’t spoken a word publicly, was going to be unveiled at the April 5 grand opening of the Taj Mahal—Trump’s massive Atlantic City casino gamble. On March 1, Trump gave Cindy Adams the scoop. When Adams asked Donald whether he was unveiling Maples as a “devoted lover” or “savvy businessman” he replied, “Use your imagination.”

Liz Smith was outraged. “It’s just about the most tasteless thing I could imagine,” she said. “It is the absolute nadir, after all his denials [that they were involved] and his saying he’s worried about his children and his wife is a nice woman and blaming the press. It would just be the ultimate exploitation of this girl.”

“So what if it’s tacky?” Cindy shot back. “Calm yourself. We’re talking about crap tables and slot machines, baby. We’re talking about the quintessential hype. The Garden State Parkway will be a parking lot from New York to Atlantic City that day. This is a guy who is very savvy, and he will turn a negative stream of publicity into a positive one. He had her lying—laying—low for a purpose.”

“That’s like using her as a dishrag to wipe up some mess,” said Liz. “I think he’s finished in New York if he does something like this. I can’t see really nice people wanting anything to do with someone who does something like that.”

In mid-March, Maria got uninvited.

By late March, stories started appearing in Cindy Adams’s column distancing Donald from Maria. Cindy assured her readers that Trump had no intention of marrying Maria. She began referring to Maria as “the future Miss Maples.” The
Post
ran a story that Trump had dumped Maria, and that she “sobbed uncontrollably” during the “it’s been real” phone conversation and “begged him not to leave her.” Maria’s spokesman Chuck Jones
*
angrily denied the reports and accused the media of sloppy and irresponsible reporting. If there was any mystery about who was behind the leaks, it was solved during a peculiar interview that Donald Trump gave
People
magazine reporter Sue Carswell.

When Carswell called Trump’s office to ask about the reported split with Maples, Trump wasn’t sure he could trust her. He’d barely spoken with her and didn’t have the relationship with her that he had with so many other reporters in town. Trump returned Carswell’s call and said that his name was John Miller. “I’m sort of new here,” Miller said. “I’m handling P.R. because Trump gets so much of it.” He confirmed the sordid details of the split with Maria, and said it had never been that serious between them. “He’s somebody who has a lot of options and frankly he gets called by everybody—everybody in the book in terms of women…. A lot of the people that you write about—and you do a great job by the way—but a lot of those people you write about, they call to see if they can go out with him,” this “John Miller” told Carswell.

Donald Trump had a new woman in his life, he said, “Her name is Carla Bruni Fredesh. I don’t know how to spell the last name…. She was having a very big thing with Eric Clapton and Eric Clapton introduced her to Mick Jagger and Mick Jagger started calling her and she ended up going with Mick Jagger and then she dropped Mick Jagger for Donald and that’s where it is right now, and again, he’s not making any commitments to Carla just so you understand.” Madonna had called wanting to go out, too. Kim Basinger was also after Trump, said Miller. “She wanted to come up and discuss a real estate transaction. And you know, she wanted to go out with him. That was the reason she came up. Competitively, it’s tough. It was for Maria and it will be for Carla.” But, said Miller, Donald Trump wasn’t in the marrying mode right now. “When he makes the decision, then that will be a very lucky woman.”

Trump didn’t know that Carswell had taped the twenty-minute conversation. When she played the tape for some other
People
reporters, they burst out laughing. “That’s Donald Trump,” one said. He had talked to Trump often enough to recognize his voice. Carswell didn’t know whether to believe it. She played the tape for Ivana. That’s him, Ivana confirmed. Maria Maples also recognized the voice, and was devastated. Trump was horrified. Trump the trickster, Trump the great media manipulator had been
caught. The curtain had been thrown back to reveal the Great Wizard of Trump at the controls. The jig was up.

Over at
Forbes
magazine, the editors were eager to get an angle on the hot Trump story. A former cop named John Connolly was trying to pitch an article on casino operator Merv Griffin. Executive Editor Jim Michaels wasn’t interested in Griffin. After years of running the magazine, Michaels was being eased out. He needed to make a big splash to keep his job. Years earlier, he had made headlines by running an exposé on the finances of William Zeckendorf, the high-flying real estate developer who was the Donald Trump of the 1960s. “I don’t want Merv Griffin,” Michaels told Connolly. “Get me Donald Trump. I want Donald Trump.” Trump claimed that Malcolm Forbes was out to get him because he had kicked Forbes and some underage male friends out of the Plaza. The magazine hit the newsstands in May 1990, saying that the tycoon was worth considerably less than he claimed—Trump put his wealth at $5 billion;
Forbes
said $500 million would be a “generous” estimate. The spooked creditors came knocking, and that summer, Trump filed for bankruptcy.

Cindy Adams said the bad publicity over Trump’s messy split directly led to his financial problems. “You cannot urinate on a long-term marriage and not have the white glare of spotlight publicity come down on you,” she said. “And the bankers are a very conservative lot.”

Says another Trump defender: “It was because he was so high flying that he became such a target.”

Jim Michaels kept his job.

Ivana prospered. She got $25 million in the divorce settlement—what the pre-nup had called for—but, more important, she won over public favor. Ivana came out with her own line of clothing, a fragrance called Ivana, a newspaper advice column for the lovelorn, a line of jewelry that she hawked on television, and a novel about an immigrant socialite who bounced back after being cheated on by her tycoon husband. She denied that it was based on her life. She also denied that a wicked, smart-mouthed
gossip columnist named Sabrina who sided with the husband was modeled after Cindy.

Liz Smith also prospered. On February 1, 1991, a year after the Trump story broke and while bankruptcy was looming over the
Daily News, Liz
Smith was snatched away by
Newsday,
at a salary that was reported to be as high as $1 million a year. The deal solidified her position as the highest paid print journalist in the country and, perhaps, the most powerful.

Donald Trump knew that. In June 1991, Liz Smith got a letter from her former foe, Donald Trump. “Liz, you crucified me for a whole year,” Trump wrote. “But you’re terrific.”

“How can you do this to me, Jessica?” Steve Dunleavy shouted through the door. It was April 27, 1987, and Dunleavy, the senior correspondent for Rupert Murdoch’s television program,
A Current Affair,
was standing outside the Massapequa, Long Island, apartment of Jessica Hahn, the curvaceous, big-haired former secretary who earlier that month had revealed that she had had an affair with the televangelist Reverend Jim Bakker. Dunleavy had been trying for weeks to get an interview with Hahn; he had offered her money, he said he would make her famous. He and Peter Brennan, one of the show’s producers, had even stood under the window of her apartment serenading her at 4
A.M
. But Hahn had so far resisted his importunities, and earlier that evening, while
Current Affair’s
host Maury Povich was watching the
ABC Evening News
at a bar with Dunleavy, he saw Ted Koppel appear in a teaser and announce, “Tonight, our guest will be Jessica Hahn, in her first interview since the scandal broke.”

“I yelled out to Dunleavy, who had been promising he would get the first interview with Jessica,” said Povich.

Dunleavy rushed off to the secretary’s apartment. Through
the door, Hahn made apologies. The
Nightline
appearance, she explained, had been set up by the agent she had just been forced to hire. The agent thought Hahn needed to establish her credibility and that the best way to do this would be through one of the serious network news shows. Dunleavy was undeterred. As he stood out on the middle-class Long Island street contemplating his next move, the limousine that ABC had hired to drive Hahn to its New York studio arrived. And that was when Dunleavy, who is nothing if not resourceful, realized what he had to do. Identifying himself as a friend of Hahn’s, he told the driver that the young woman had become sick and needed to go to the hospital. The limousine driver accepted this story, turned around and drove back to New York without his designated passenger. Dunleavy, meanwhile, summoned an ambulance and escorted Hahn out to the vehicle when it arrived. Meanwhile, at home in his New York apartment, Maury Povich turned on
Nightline.
“First, a schedule change,” Koppel said when the show began. “Earlier this evening, Jessica Hahn, who was going to join us later in the program, went briefly to a hospital. She was seen by a doctor, treated, and is now back at home. I spoke to her a short time ago, and she’ll be joining us another time.”

But before that could happen, she gave her first exclusive, a few days later, to Steve Dunleavy.

Dunleavy, whom
Time
magazine once called “America’s most renowned and reviled tabloid journalist,” had been a central figure in the tabloidization of the American media since the mid-seventies. A native Australian who grew up in Sydney, Dunleavy was the head of a youth gang called the Blackhawks. When he was fourteen, Dunleavy quit school to work as a copyboy at the
Sydney Sun.
His father, a well-known news photographer, also worked at the
Sun.
“He taught me a few tricks in skullduggery,” Dunleavy said. To escape charges of nepotism, Dunleavy went to work for the rival
Daily Mirror
at the age of fifteen. This put him into direct competition with his father, and according to one story, he slashed the tires of his father’s car in order to beat him to a story. “I did not know at the time it was my father,” he once said. “But
after I did slash his tires, I snickered and he looked blankly at me and said, ‘Son, wonderful. Dirty and wonderful.’ ”