When Shnayerson asked Ivana about it, and about her own ambitions to be First Lady, she replied that it was out of the question - at least for a decade. “I would send over one of my executives, or more often my wife, just to see how things were going,” he wrote in his autobiography “Trump: The Art of the Deal.”Ĭhatter of Trump as a potential White House occupant had already begun to bubble up. Their personalities and their drive and their determination were equally matched.” Louise Sunshine, former new development head, Trump Organizationĭonald saw things at the Commodore, which became the Grand Hyatt, a little differently. “Ivana and Donald were made of the same sperm. “The numbers are money, and the money is big.” “She thinks and talks numbers like a platinum-blond computer,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Michael Shnayerson in the article, headlined “Power Blonde,” an account of her post-wedding rise and her time managing Trump’s Castle, a casino in Atlantic City. She spent 10 hours a day at the Commodore site, according to an account she gave Vanity Fair in 1988, touching base with electricians and contractors, calling the shots on “every pillow, every table and chair, and every brass column.” At the Trump Organization, real estate is very much a family business, and Ivana threw herself in. Having secured Hyatt as a partner, he began redeveloping the hotel. Her husband had recently acquired the Commodore Hotel at 109 East 42nd Street, near Grand Central Terminal, by means of a controversial tax abatement (in 2020, ProPublica reported that the abatement had cost the city $410 million). Ivana, a competitive skier and model, met Trump in 1976 and married him in 1977. Ivana Trump (Illustration by The Real Deal with Getty Images) “I was sort of like, ‘what business?'” Bagli said.
Bagli noted that when his former newspaper, the New York Times, gave Ivana’s death the front-page treatment, describing her as a “businesswoman,” he was taken aback. “She was part of Trump’s Potemkin village,” said Charles Bagli, New York’s longest-serving real estate reporter. In many cases, the idea of Ivana was more important than her material contributions. “I could have been in his office, three, four days a week. “I was there a lot,” said one real estate veteran who helped shepherd Trump through his troubles with lenders in the 1980s and 1990s. Several people familiar with the company during the Ivana era said that although she played a key role in one of the company’s flagship projects, the Plaza Hotel, on other projects she was little more than window dressing and a press magnet. Though news outlets in the wake of her death credited her as an important player in the Trump Organization, the extent of her role remains a matter of debate. Ivana died last week at the age of 73, after what medical examiners said was a fall in her Upper East Side home. “Their personalities and their drive and their determination were equally matched.” “Ivana and Donald were made of the same sperm,” said Louise Sunshine, the longtime new development chief for the Trump Organization in Manhattan. She epitomized the Fifth Avenue lifestyle the Trump Organization marketed to prospective buyers. Back when Trump was a real builder, putting up showstopping projects across Manhattan and transforming the public’s perception of what a developer could be, Ivana was right there with him. Less heralded are the Czech American’s contributions to Donald Trump’s real estate empire, and by extension, the New York skyline. Ivana was, in her heyday, such a tabloid darling and celebrity magnet that a biopic of her life may well have been called “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Ivana Trump with Trump Tower and the Plaza Hotel (Getty, Jorge Láscar from Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, Paweł Marynowski / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)Ĭlose your eyes and think of Ivana Trump, and you will likely conjure up an image of the quintessential 1980s Manhattan socialite: glamorous, loud, filthy rich and possessed of an insatiable energy emblematic of the era.
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