President Trump's first wife, Ivana Trump, maintained a much lower profile than when the two were one of New York's "it'' couples. Photo / Rebecca Smeyne, The New York Times
This story originally ran in the New York Times on June 26, 2018.
There was an Ivana Trump sighting in Manhattan the other day and then, almost faster than you can say "surely she flew private," she was off to Saint-Tropez, a sun-washed playground in the French Riviera, for air-kissing among VIPs with security entourages close by and yachts in the distance.
She spends time in Europe, out of the spotlight. "By choice," said socialite Vivian Serota, one of her friends in New York.
But she can still draw the photographers when she wants to be seen. Shutters flapped like metallic wings recently at a diet-regimen promotion in Manhattan. When it came to talk of her ex-husband and how she has been affected by his becoming president, though, she said almost nothing. She deflected a question about how often she talks to him by saying, "I'm really not going to go into politics."
"But we speak," she added quickly.
There was a time, more than a generation ago, when Donald and Ivana Trump were an "it" couple in New York. They were mentioned in gossip columns. They danced the hours away in places like Studio 54 and dined in places like the 21 Club or were photographed at birthday parties for celebrities like Mike Wallace, the "60 Minutes" correspondent. They went to Broadway openings, navigating the red carpets as flashbulbs lit the night.
But now, during the first year and a half of her ex-husband's presidency, Ivana Trump has been on the periphery of the Trump universe that had once put the couple in a social whirl of the brightest lights and the biggest names. She attended his inauguration, but was not in the front row. (She has said she was shepherding her mother, who was in a wheelchair at the ceremony, and they watched from "off the platform.") And she edged a little more into the limelight last year with the publication of a memoir, Raising Trump.
So how close are two of the world's most famous exes? The high-end furrier Dennis Basso, another longtime friend of Ivana Trump, said he believed that she's closer to him than many divorcées are to their exes.
"It's a long time that they're divorced," he said, noting that the split became official 26 years ago. "There's a lot of water under that bridge. I think — I'm not an expert — but I think when people get divorced and things are fresh and new, it's always more difficult. I think when time passes, things seem to get better with age."
Another friend, former cable-television host and weight-loss guru Nikki Haskell, said Trump "has nothing but great things to say about Donald." Haskell — who said she texts her every day and talks with her on the phone almost as often — also said that Trump and the president are "still kindred spirits."
How Trump feels about the president's turbulent tenure could not be discerned. She did not return several calls to her Upper East Side town house, which she bought after her divorce from Donald Trump in 1992. "My home reflects my style perfectly," she wrote in Raising Trump, mentioning the marble staircase, the "white piano room" on the second floor and the "leopard sitting room" and gold-embossed fireplace on the third.
"Everyone wanted her to write a book," Serota said. "She was very quiet and happy and happy to be out of the spotlight." But publishers made overtures, Serota said. "They said, 'Ivana, write a book.'"
She did and then she promoted it. And then, on Good Morning America, she said she was "basically first Trump wife," adding, "I'm first lady, OK." That drew a rebuke from a spokeswoman for Donald Trump's third and current wife, Melania. But to some, it simply sounded like Ivana Trump getting crossed up with the English language. At times when Trump is talking, definite articles disappear or appear where they are not needed, as they did when she gave Donald Trump a nickname that New York never forgot, "the Donald."
"However it came out, that was fine, she sold more books," Serota said of the comment about the "first Trump lady." "She did not mean to insult Melania. She certainly did not."
Serota said the book might have whetted Ivana Trump's appetite for exposure and that might have figured in her decision to promote the diet, devised by an entrepreneur who once spent US$200,000 ($326,000) to recreate the Brooklyn disco where Saturday Night Fever was filmed.
"I think she wanted to be in public again after the book," Serota said, "and she's always watching people and how they eat."
Raising Trump made clear that Trump is proud of her three children — Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka. Which one is she closest to?
"Could be between Ivanka and Eric," Serota said. "Maybe Eric now, because Eric is here and Ivanka is in Washington."
As far as geography goes, Trump made clear at the diet event that she had a fondness for Europe. The low-calorie, low-carbohydrate plan is the creation of an Italian and she said she liked "Italian men, Italian food, Italian mountains, Italian sea, everything Italian."
Last month she was on the Italian version of Dancing with the Stars with her fourth ex-husband, Rossano Rubicondi, who was born in Rome. (They married in 2008 and divorced the following year.)
"I had to dance two-minute waltz," she told the crowd at the diet event. Never mind that just last year, after Marla Maples, the second Mrs. Trump, appeared on Dancing with the Stars, Ivana Trump wrote, "What a disgrace that was! No class!" She said she had said no to repeated offers to be a contestant.
But, about what happened after she said yes in Italy. "Now, I had a two-hour rehearsal and then I went live in front of 10 million Italians. And you had to remember the steps, and long dress and long hair and makeup and high heels." She called it "one of the hardest things I'd ever done."
She said this as she glided through the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, a New York icon that, as she noted, she used to preside over. (Donald Trump bought it in 1988 and was forced to sell it, along with other holdings, in 1995.) "I used to be Eloise of the Plaza," she said, "running through the corridors, through the kitchens, through the ballrooms, through the meeting rooms."
But the Oak Room had the slightly dusty atmosphere of a relic. It is open these days only for private events — weddings or special gatherings. You cannot just walk in and belly up to the famous bar or follow the maître d'hôtel to a banquette. After a condominium conversion a dozen years ago, what was left of the Plaza's hotel operation was centred on the other side of the building. That left the Oak Room less public.
Trump, too, seems less public. One of her telephone numbers is still answered "Ivana Incorporated," but she is not the fixture on cable television she was in the 1990s and early 2000s when People magazine said the House of Ivana clothing did US$50 million in sales a year. She herself wrote that live television was hard but lucrative work. She wrote that she had sold 5,000 bottles of perfume in an evening. "My sales record was US$675,000 in one hour," she wrote. "If I didn't sell US$200,000 an hour, it was a disappointment."
Irena McLean, whose late husband was a shipping-container magnate, said she knew Trump from Saint-Tropez and remembered being surprised when she heard that Trump was starting a clothing line.
"I was overwhelmed — this woman is selling clothes?" she said. "But she is good at anything she put her mind to."
Serota said Trump's popularity from television has endured, especially among women. "She had a very exciting life and then she had her heart broken," she said. "Women relate to that. It's nothing to do with Donald." Women, she said, "come up to her and say, 'Ivana, Ivana, you have such wonderful children, how do you do it?'"
Serota talked about going to a recent matinee of Summer: The Donna Summer Musical with Trump. Someone recognised her and said, "It's you, it's really you,'" Serota recalled.
"Ivana was so gracious," she added. "Then somebody else came up. They started going, 'Ivana, we love you, you're great, your children are great.' Not that I'm a bodyguard, but I said, 'OK, ladies, pull back, you can take her picture, then we're going to go."
Dinner with Trump can also be interrupted by people who have recognised her and want to say something, Serota said. But there is a difference.
"The women want to talk to her," she said. "The men want to get a message to Donald. If he was not president, women would still come up to her."
And one woman, Serota said, asked the difficult question — after the woman's husband had approached Trump's table a couple of times, seeking a conduit to the president.
His wife "leans in and says, 'How do you feel, she's in the White House?'" Serota recalled, adding that Trump smiled and replied, "Oh, no, she's lovely, I wish her good luck."
Does Trump believe that? "Of course she does," Serota said. (Trump wrote in Raising Trump that she had "no problems" with Melania Trump — "Why should I?" Trump wrote. "She didn't break up my marriage." (One of the many headline-making moments from the very public unravelling of the Trumps' marriage came when Marla Maples confronted Ivana Trump on the slopes in Aspen, Colorado, in December 1989. "I'm Marla and I love your husband," Maples said to Trump, according to Raising Trump. "Do you?" )
Trump was a model when she met Donald Trump in the late 1970s and a skier before that — she was an alternate on the 1972 Olympic ski team from what was then Czechoslovakia. At the diet event she said that she had had a gym installed in her town house.
"And guess what, I take elevator to gym," she said, leaving out a "the."
"But I have every machine there," she said. "I usually do about 40, 45 minutes. I watch the morning news."
She did not say whether her television was tuned to Fox & Friends, the three-hour morning programme on Fox News that counts her ex-husband as its No. 1 fan.
Written by: James Barron
Photographs by: Rebecca Smeyne
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
The nomination was controversial owing to allegations by the House Ethics Committee.