One Superpower to Another

By MARGARET CARLSON

It won't just be diplomats having "full and frank discussions" during this week's demi-summit. Like a monk touring Las Vegas to understand what the fuss over sin is about, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev will travel to the mountaintop of conspicuous consumption and wretched excess: Trump Tower.

While the Soviet schedulers drew up the standard list of New York City tourist attractions -- the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the World Trade Center, Broadway -- Gorbachev also accepted an earlier invitation: to visit the brass- and-glass high-rise office-and-apartment complex and atrial shopping mecca on Fifth Avenue, and enjoy a private dinner with megabuilder Donald Trump and his wife Ivana. Does private mean just the Trumps and the Gorbachevs? Trump, who was called directly by a Soviet official, says, "It seems that way."

Not a bad idea for a buddy movie: Capitalist and Communist Do Manhattan. In Moscow on the Hudson, the Sequel, Gorbachev confers on Trump, who already lives like royalty, the head-of-state status he has been seeking since he publicly implied in 1985 that his premier dealmaking skills were what the strategic arms reduction talks were missing. For his part, Gorbachev gets a view of capitalism run amuck: Trump owns one of the city's biggest apartments (a $10 million, 20,000-sq.-ft. triplex), a palatial country house (Marjorie Merriweather Post's 118-room villa, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla.), a floating island for a yacht (once owned by Adnan Khashoggi), a giant helicopter (a 44-seat double rotor, under construction), the world's biggest gambling casino (the 120,000-sq.-ft. Taj Mahal in Atlantic City), and the biggest ego (see his memoir, Trump: The Art of the Deal).

Trump has been telling anyone who would listen that his tower is much more than a building; it "has become the biggest attraction in New York City." He wants Gorbachev to see the "whole concept of Trump Tower," which features standard Trump touches like imported breccia perniche marble, a cascading waterfall, bronze plaques with the letter T emblazoned on every surface where the name Trump is not, and celebrity residents paying some of the highest prices in Manhattan. After walking through the atrium lobby, decorated with an oversize poster of Trump's book, Gorbachev is scheduled to get a tour of Trump's 26th-floor office: its wall of magazine covers, its panoramic view of Central Park, and its reflection of Trump himself in the gold mirror tile ceiling. Then, if time and security permit, it's on to the private quarters on the top three floors of the building: a sprawling 7,000-sq.-ft. living area with a 12-ft. waterfall and hand-painted ceiling he compares unblushingly to the Sistine Chapel's, a dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides, and a library with hand-carved ivory panels. All is beige.

Trump took his version of perestroika to Moscow last year with the possibility in mind of putting his marble-and-onyx stamp on Red Square. Glasnost or no, he found the city fathers tougher than Mayor Ed Koch, who calls the real estate mogul "piggy, piggy, piggy" but lets him rule huge swaths of the city anyway. "The system there is so different," Trump said. "I didn't find the incentive to build as far as my time and money were concerned."

Will Trump use his audience with Gorbachev to revive the deal? Trump, who does not discourage talk of his presidential ambitions and who buys newspaper ads laying out his plans for world nuclear disarmament, has more on his mind these days than slapping his name on another pile of bricks and mortar, even if the pile of bricks is in Mother Russia. He wants to talk one superpower to another. "I'm not looking to do anything but let him know that these two great countries can and should get along together."

It was always Ronald Reagan's wish to take Gorbachev on a helicopter tour and show off the American dream by counting swimming pools in the backyards of factory workers. Gorbachev will have to settle for the Trump version of that dream. "I'm a representative of the American people," says Trump. "I want to let him know the American people are pretty good people."

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/New York