30 new york | august 5–18, 2019D
to break with tradition; she’d gone with a straight arrow for a mate
instead of a wild man. And they knew much more about Ivanka and
her family than that, as well as the true nature of her relationship
with her father, which hasn’t been as well understood as it should be
despite being a constant source of curiosity and horror, and the
nature of her upbringing—which is that she was raised on her own.
Like everyone, the Ivanka of the present can be understood only
in the context of the person she was in the past. I know, in part,
because I was there, growing up in the party world of New York
in the 1990s and 2000s too. Ivanka declined to speak with New
York other than off the record, which we declined; this story is
based on 60 interviews with her friends and colleagues, which
also form the basis of a narrative podcast series I have been report-
ing for six months.The Weymouth crowd might have looked down on pre-
presidency Donald for a long time, but back when Ivanka was a kid
in the Reagan ’80s, the Trumps were a golden family in New York,
the epitome of the new nouveau riche even if Donald’s pockets were
filled with his father’s money. They were too Kardashian for most,
establishing their fiefdom of Trump hotels, the Trump Shuttle air-
line, Trump casinos, the Trump Princess yacht, but no one I talked
to says Ivanka was a brat as a kid. Ivana ran a tight ship (well, she
didn’t exactly run it: “Of course she had women for the shopping and
the meals and the baths,” a friend says huskily). As a child, Ivanka
had painting, singing, swimming, and piano classes. “You have to
keep kids busy, busy, busy, busy, busy so that they don’t have time to
get in trouble,” says Ivana, calling me from her home in Miami. She
says Ivanka “hated piano,” but she doesn’t have much else to say
about her daughter that I haven’t heard before, nor anything that
might give insight into the depths of her psyche. “You cannot really
show the vulnerability,” she tells me, speaking about herself, though
it seems she could be speaking about the rest of the family, too. “Be-
cause people take advantage of it; the press take advantage of it. So
you cannot show the weakness even if you have some.”
From Ivanka’s birth, Donald was absent—never changed a diaper,
didn’t do bottles, dishes, naps. In their 66th-through-68th-floor tri-
plex castle in Trump Tower (they actually lived on the 56th, 57th,
and 58th floors, but he’d added ten fake floors to the official count to
make the building sound taller), he and Ivana lived on an entirely
different floor from their children. He left before they arose, waiting
for the nannies to transport the kids to his 26th-floor office on their
way to school. He was the great Oz behind an oak desk, the golden-
haloed god in his Brioni suit—and in Ivanka’s dreams, this may still
be the man she sees.
Stories about Ivanka and her brothers’ childhood often seem to
pay fealty to her father, like the one Ivanka used to tell about gluing
a bunch of Legos together to make a building, after which everyone
just knew she was going to go into construction; the same story has
been told by Eric and Don Jr. with each as the child Lego-gluer
fated to run a real-estate empire. Family lore also tends to reinforce
Donald’s belief that Trumps are hardier, better, than New York soci-
ety aristos. And unlike members of the “Lucky Sperm Club,” as
Donald called the beneficiaries of inherited wealth, which includes
him, his kids would work for everything they had. Whether in ser-
vice of this or because he didn’t want to share his wealth with any-
one, Donald didn’t spoil Ivanka with presents and wads of cash. She
didn’t even have a credit card. She had to ask him for his, an elabo-
rate pantomime that still often ended with the card clasped in her
little hot hand.
Ivanka became a real-life Eloise when Donald bought the Plaza,
the grand hotel on Central Park, and Ivana managed it as the equal
to her man—even if her man had publicly announced he was paying
her only “one dollar a year and all the dresses she can buy” for her
services. Remaking herself as Zsa Zsa in a power suit, Ivana went toballs each night, performing her ablutions while Ivanka, idolizing
her professional mother, watched intently from her seat on the lip
of the tub—the daubing of perfume, the red lipstick, the hair brushed
to the ceiling. But behind the scenes, Donald was a cheater. One-
night stands with brassy showgirls and spokesmodels were his thing,
according to an old friend, and he was none too discreet. On the
annual Trump-family vacation to Aspen in 1989, he surreptitiously
flew in Marla Maples, Miss Hawaiian Tropic 1985, stashing her in a
penthouse. This was a brash maneuver even for him, and it backfired
spectacularly. One day on the slopes, as Ivana waited for lunch in a
powder-pink onesie, Ivanka and her brothers trailing behind,
Maples appeared. “I’m Marla, and I love your husband—do you?”
she asked. Ivana shrieked, “Get lost!” and the sound traveled from
Aspen to the gossip pages in New York faster than the Concorde.
The “divorce of the decade” was big business. A tale “bigger than
Dynasty, badder than Dallas, and spicier than General Hospital,”
said Geraldo Rivera on one TV special, squealing, “She busted him
on the slopes!” This crucible formed Ivanka’s personality, leading her
to be on guard with the press at all times and to cover up her private
life and thoughts from all but an innermost circle. Though Ivanka
has in recent years said her parents told her about the divorce on her
own, she said in a rare unguarded interview that she’d learned about
it in the papers: “I was going to school one day and I saw in one of
the news boxes a huge picture of, um, both of my parents. And there
was a rip down the center of the picture. And this was before I had
officially been told that they were getting a divorce.”
For a girl raised around aristocratic families, this was quite an
education in tabloid values. The divorce also gave Ivanka a compli-
cated perspective on being a professional woman. Donald said Ivana
had to go because of her corporate aspirations: “Putting a wife to
work is a very dangerous thing,” he remarked at the time. “There was
a great softness to Ivana, and she still has that softness, but during
this period of time she became an executive, not a wife.” He fought
her over every penny, and the big reveal was that he had to—the
golden empire was leveraged beyond anyone’s dreams. And though
the city’s sympathies were with Ivana, the other big reveal was that,
over time, Ivanka took her father’s side. A friend compares this to
the way Zoë Kravitz spent her teenage years hanging out with her
dad, Lenny, instead of her mom, Lisa Bonet. It’s much more fun to
run with a celebrity father than a complicated mother; or perhaps,
as in many families with patriarchal narcissists, Ivanka’s father drove
a wedge between daughter and mother. The other thing Ivanka
learned from this period of time, with her father’s fortune dwindling,
was that she would need to work to make her own.Donald barely paid attention to his daughter after the di-
vorce. “She was ‘poor little rich girl’ and very neglected,” says a friend,
describing Ivanka constantly asking to sleep over. “Her childhood
friends became her family because her real family wasn’t fucking
there for her,” says another. Even surrounded by these confidants,
however, Ivanka rarely spoke of her feelings about the divorce. She
said what truly affected her, the trauma she carried, was her Irish
nanny Bridget Carroll’s sudden death in the basement of her parents’
country home. Her friends were flummoxed by this and thought it
was a smoke screen of some kind. But perhaps if Ivanka thought too
hard about her parents’ divorce, she would have to blame her father
for the split, and that was not a path she was willing to tread.
Ivanka was always a good student, but she was no kind of good
girl. For her birthday party in junior high, she invited about 20 girls
from Chapin, her Upper East Side all-girls school, to the Taj Mahal
in Atlantic City, all of them crammed into stretch limos without
chaperones, which other parents would never have allowed had
Donald actually told them about this plan. The girls acted crazy:
flashing people out the windows, whipping off bras and putting
them on the limos’ antennae. In the hotel suite, they rented porn andTRANSMITTED________ COPY ___ DD ___ AD ___ PD ___ EICTRANSMITTED1619FEA_Ivanka_lay [Print]_35541681.indd 30 8/2/19 5:51 PM30 new york | august 5–18, 2019
to break with tradition; she’d gone with a straight arrow for a mate
instead of a wild man. And they knew much more about Ivanka and
her family than that, as well as the true nature of her relationship
with her father, which hasn’t been as well understood as it should be
despite being a constant source of curiosity and horror, and the
nature of her upbringing—which is that she was raised on her own.
Like everyone, the Ivanka of the present can be understood only
in the context of the person she was in the past. I know, in part,
because I was there, growing up in the party world of New York
in the 1990s and 2000s too. Ivanka declined to speak with New
York other than off the record, which we declined; this story is
based on 60 interviews with her friends and colleagues, which
also form the basis of a narrative podcast series I have been report-
ing for six months.
The Weymouth crowd might have looked downon pre-
presidency Donald for a long time, but back when Ivanka was a kid
in the Reagan ’80s, the Trumps were a golden family in New York,
the epitome of the new nouveau riche even if Donald’s pockets were
filled with his father’s money. They were too Kardashian for most,
establishing their fiefdom of Trump hotels, the Trump Shuttle air-
line, Trump casinos, the Trump Princess yacht, but no oneI talked
to says Ivanka was a brat as a kid. Ivana ran a tight ship (well, she
didn’t exactly run it: “Of course she had women for the shopping and
the meals and the baths,” a friend says huskily). As a child, Ivanka
had painting, singing, swimming, and piano classes. “You have to
keep kids busy, busy, busy, busy, busy so that they don’t have time to
get in trouble,” says Ivana, calling me from her home in Miami. She
says Ivanka “hated piano,” but she doesn’t have much else to say
about her daughter that I haven’t heard before, nor anything that
might give insight into the depths of her psyche. “You cannot really
show the vulnerability,” she tells me, speaking about herself, though
it seems she could be speaking about the rest of the family, too. “Be-
cause people take advantage of it; the press take advantage of it. So
you cannot show the weakness even if you have some.”
From Ivanka’s birth, Donald was absent—never changeda diaper,
didn’t do bottles, dishes, naps. In their 66th-through-68th-floor tri-
plex castle in Trump Tower (they actually lived on the 56th, 57th,
and 58th floors, but he’d added ten fake floors to the officialcount to
make the building sound taller), he and Ivana lived on anentirely
different floor from their children. He left before they arose, waiting
for the nannies to transport the kids to his 26th-floor officeon their
way to school. He was the great Oz behind an oak desk, the golden-
haloed god in his Brioni suit—and in Ivanka’s dreams, this may still
be the man she sees.
Stories about Ivanka and her brothers’ childhood oftenseem to
pay fealty to her father, like the one Ivanka used to tell about gluing
a bunch of Legos together to make a building, after which everyone
just knew she was going to go into construction; the same story has
been told by Eric and Don Jr. with each as the child Lego-gluer
fated to run a real-estate empire. Family lore also tends to reinforce
Donald’s belief that Trumps are hardier, better, than New York soci-
ety aristos. And unlike members of the “Lucky Sperm Club,” as
Donald called the beneficiaries of inherited wealth, which includes
him, his kids would work for everything they had. Whether in ser-
vice of this or because he didn’t want to share his wealth with any-
one, Donald didn’t spoil Ivanka with presents and wads of cash. She
didn’t even have a credit card. She had to ask him for his, an elabo-
rate pantomime that still often ended with the card clasped in her
little hot hand.
Ivanka became a real-life Eloise when Donald bought the Plaza,
the grand hotel on Central Park, and Ivana managed it as the equal
to her man—even if her man had publicly announced he was paying
her only “one dollar a year and all the dresses she can buy” for her
services. Remaking herself as Zsa Zsa in a power suit, Ivana went to
balls each night, performing her ablutions while Ivanka, idolizing
her professional mother, watched intently from her seat on the lip
of the tub—the daubing of perfume, the red lipstick, the hair brushed
to the ceiling. But behind the scenes, Donald was a cheater. One-
night stands with brassy showgirls and spokesmodels were his thing,
according to an old friend, and he was none too discreet. On the
annual Trump-family vacation to Aspen in 1989, he surreptitiously
flew in Marla Maples, Miss Hawaiian Tropic 1985, stashing her in a
penthouse. This was a brash maneuver even for him, and it backfired
spectacularly. One day on the slopes, as Ivana waited for lunch in a
powder-pink onesie, Ivanka and her brothers trailing behind,
Maples appeared. “I’m Marla, and I love your husband—do you?”
she asked. Ivana shrieked, “Get lost!” and the sound traveled from
Aspen to the gossip pages in New York faster than the Concorde.
The “divorce of the decade” was big business. A tale “bigger than
Dynasty, badder than Dallas, and spicier than General Hospital,”
said Geraldo Rivera on one TV special, squealing, “She busted him
on the slopes!” This crucible formed Ivanka’s personality, leading her
to be on guard with the press at all times and to cover up her private
life and thoughts from all but an innermost circle. Though Ivanka
has in recent years said her parents told her about the divorce on her
own, she said in a rare unguarded interview that she’d learned about
it in the papers: “I was going to school one day and I saw in one of
the news boxes a huge picture of, um, both of my parents. And there
was a rip down the center of the picture. And this was before I had
officially been told that they were getting a divorce.”
For a girl raised around aristocratic families, this was quite an
education in tabloid values. The divorce also gave Ivanka a compli-
cated perspective on being a professional woman. Donald said Ivana
had to go because of her corporate aspirations: “Putting a wife to
work is a very dangerous thing,” he remarked at the time. “There was
a great softness to Ivana, and she still has that softness, but during
this period of time she became an executive, not a wife.” He fought
her over every penny, and the big reveal was that he had to—the
golden empire was leveraged beyond anyone’s dreams. And though
the city’s sympathies were with Ivana, the other big reveal was that,
over time, Ivanka took her father’s side. A friend compares this to
the way Zoë Kravitz spent her teenage years hanging out with her
dad, Lenny, instead of her mom, Lisa Bonet. It’s much more fun to
run with a celebrity father than a complicated mother; or perhaps,
as in many families with patriarchal narcissists, Ivanka’s father drove
a wedge between daughter and mother. The other thing Ivanka
learned from this period of time, with her father’s fortune dwindling,
was that she would need to work to make her own.Donald barely paid attention to his daughter after the di-
vorce. “She was ‘poor little rich girl’ and very neglected,” says a friend,
describing Ivanka constantly asking to sleep over. “Her childhood
friends became her family because her real family wasn’t fucking
there for her,” says another. Even surrounded by these confidants,
however, Ivanka rarely spoke of her feelings about the divorce. She
said what truly affected her, the trauma she carried, was her Irish
nanny Bridget Carroll’s sudden death in the basement of her parents’
country home. Her friends were flummoxed by this and thought it
was a smoke screen of some kind. But perhaps if Ivanka thought too
hard about her parents’ divorce, she would have to blame her father
for the split, and that was not a path she was willing to tread.
Ivanka was always a good student, but she was no kind of good
girl. For her birthday party in junior high, she invited about 20 girls
from Chapin, her Upper East Side all-girls school, to the Taj Mahal
in Atlantic City, all of them crammed into stretch limos without
chaperones, which other parents would never have allowed had
Donald actually told them about this plan. The girls acted crazy:
flashing people out the windows, whipping off bras and putting
them on the limos’ antennae. In the hotel suite, they rented porn and