Flashy Symbol of an Acquisitive Age

By OTTO FRIEDRICH /

"Who has done as much as I have? No one has done more in New York than me."

-- Donald Trump

"I love to have enemies. I fight my enemies. I like beating my enemies to the ground."

-- Donald Trump

"My style of dealmaking is quite simple and straightforward. I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I'm after."

-- Donald Trump

"Those who dislike me don't know me, and have never met me. My guess is that they dislike me out of jealousy."

-- Donald Trump

"I like thinking big. If you're going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big."

-- Donald Trump

"Nobody pushes me around, you understand? I don't want to do it ((litigation)), but nobody is going to push me around."

-- Donald Trump

"A little more moderation would be good. Of course, my life hasn't exactly been one of moderation."

-- Donald Trump

Zvoo-o-o-o-o-o-o-OOOOP!!! Donald Trump's helicopter has just taken a sickening dip to one side several hundred feet over the outflowing sludge of New York harbor. When the wind is 30 m.p.h., death suddenly seems like something on which one of Trump's Atlantic City casinos might offer unpleasant odds.

"Is this thing safe?" asks a reporter who has been assigned to find out what makes the billionaire wheeler-dealer the way he is.

"When the Queen of England is over in this country," says Trump, illustrating once again the way he is, "they call my office to find out if they can use the helicopter because it's the safest helicopter."

It is, in fact, a ten-seat French Puma, which Trump bought for $2 million and which he claims is worth $10 million. ("I love the bargain," he says. "I love quality, but I don't believe in paying top price for quality.") It has TRUMP painted in large white letters on its black fuselage, and the entrepreneur uses it to commute at least once a week between New York and Atlantic City.

"But don't you ever get scared?"

"No, I'm a fatalist. I don't think anything scares me. There's no great way to die. My general attitude is to attack life, and you can't attack if you're frightened. Besides, my pilots are the best, and I pay whatever it takes. When it comes to pilots, doctors, accountants, I don't chisel."

"Have you ever thought about psychotherapy?"

"No," says Trump, a little surprised. "I've never felt even close to needing it. I haven't ever felt that I was out of control. I keep busy. I don't have time to think about my problems."

And of course the helicopter duly rights itself and whirs on. It takes only about 40 minutes to reach Atlantic City and land atop Trump's Castle. Trump strides across red carpeting, shaking hands, smiling, very much at home in his castle, one of his many castles.

At 6 ft. 2 in., real estate tycoon Donald J. (for John) Trump does not really loom colossus-high above the horizon of New York and New Jersey. He has created no great work of art or ideas, and even as a maker or possessor of money he does not rank among the top ten, or even 50. Yet at 42 he has seized a large fistful of that contemporary coin known as celebrity. There has been artfully hyped talk about his having political ambitions, worrying about nuclear proliferation, even someday running for President. No matter how farfetched that may be, something about his combination of blue-eyed swagger and success has caught the public fancy and made him in many ways a symbol of an acquisitive and mercenary age.

Gossip columnist Liz Smith summed it up when she wrote, "Even if Trump is the truest, most flamboyant child of Mammon yet produced at this waning moment of the 20th century, I like his style." New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger took a graver view: "He has yet to commission a really serious work of architecture. If he has a style, it is flashiness. It's a malady of the age. Trump just represents it the most." Characteristically, Trump responded by sneering that Goldberger was unqualified to judge his buildings because he wore cheap suits.

Now that a new year has dawned, observers of the Trump empire can rather easily imagine some of the emperor's resolutions for 1989: to make more money than ever, to buy more expensive gewgaws than ever, to get more publicity than ever -- and if Mikhail Gorbachev passed up a chance to visit Trump Tower during his visit to New York last month, well, there's always next time. Failure plays no large part in Trump's resolutions. On the contrary, he can tot up enough acquisitions for several lifetimes. Among them:

-- All those Manhattan skyscrapers, notably Trump Tower, "the ultimate piece of property," a Fifth Avenue glitzshop-and-condo palace, with an 80-ft. waterfall splashing down the pink marble walls of the atrium, that cost $200 million to build in 1982; Trump Plaza, a 37-story East 61 Street castle that has housed, among others, Dick Clark and Martina Navratilova; and Trump Parc, a 37-story caravansary that was once the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel, overlooking Central Park.

-- All those Atlantic City gambling casinos, notably Trump Plaza and Trump's Castle. It is not true that Trump owns India's Taj Mahal, but he does own Atlantic City's version, which will be three times the size of the puny original. Trump acquired this toy after much bargaining with TV entertainer Merv Griffin over the purchase of troubled Resorts International, which ended with Trump's getting the unfinished Taj Mahal and Griffin's getting everything else. This will make Trump the biggest dealer in Las Vegas East. (Estimated operating profits this year: $100 million.)

-- The newly acquired Eastern Air Shuttle ($365 million), "the single greatest franchise in the world," soon to be renamed the Trump Shuttle, and probably expanded to carry gamblers from New York to Atlantic City so they can get their money to Trump's casinos all the faster.

-- The world's spiffiest private yacht, the 282-ft. Trump Princess, "the finest piece of art on water," which once belonged to fallen fellow dealmaker Adnan Khashoggi. Cost: $29 million. The yacht contains gold-plated bathroom fixtures, a rotating sun bed and the one thing every hot yachtsman needs: a waterfall. Khashoggi, who had named the ship after his daughter Nabila, shaved $1 million off the asking price to guarantee that Trump would rename it something else; Trump, who has his own ideas about names, probably would have obliged him for nothing.

-- His ghostwritten book, Trump: The Art of the Deal, which has been on the best-seller lists for almost a year (partly because of Trump's own purchases). Trump says he will donate his estimated $1.5 million in royalties to United Cerebral Palsy, the American Cancer Society and AIDS research (his overall donations to charity run about $4 million a year). The success of the book has inspired Random House to offer a reported $3 million for a sequel.

-- And a miscellany of bits and pieces like Manhattan's Plaza Hotel ($400 million), "one of the great diamonds of the world." And the 76-acre plot along the Hudson that may or may not become Trump City. And Mar-a-Lago, the $7 million, 118-room Palm Beach, Fla., hideaway originally built by Marjorie Merriweather Post, with its elaborate Moorish arches, its private golf course and its 400 ft. of beach. (Mrs. Post originally bequeathed the place to the U.S. Government for visiting chiefs of state, but it was rejected as too expensive.) And the 47-room weekend cottage in Greenwich, Conn., that Trump bought for $2 million. And the Boeing 727 jetliner and six helicopters. And much, much more. And whenever Trump wants to see his name in print, there is always some new prizefight to sponsor, or next spring's bicycle race that will roam from Trump Tower in Manhattan to Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and will be called -- what else? -- the Tour de Trump.

And what does all that add up to, in coin of the realm? Published estimates range from less than $1 billion to more than $3 billion. When the question is asked directly of Trump, there is a long pause. Then he grins and says, "Who the f knows? I mean, really, who knows how much the Japs will pay for Manhattan property these days?"

But what is mere money when one has become a figure of legend, a figure immortalized, if that is the word, in Judith Krantz's I'll Take Manhattan? "Donald Trump, the brilliant, ambitious young real estate man whom even his enemies had to admit was disarmingly unaffected," Krantz wrote with her endearing uncertainty about personal pronouns, "rose to meet Maxi."

" 'Hey you, pretty girl,' " he said with his disarming unaffectedness, " 'what's the problem?' "

Trump played a cameo appearance as himself in the TV version of Krantz's epic in 1987, and now he is heading for greater things, playing a tycoon named "Mr. Spectacular" in a film by John and Bo Derek, Ghosts Can't Do It. Partly filmed in the Trump Tower, of course, it is due out in October. And Ted Turner is producing a $3 million Donald Trump Story, to be broadcast later this year. "It's part of the game I have to play," Trump likes to say. "It's all a game, really."

The rules of the game were learned long ago in Queens, N.Y., where Trump's grandfather, a hard-drinking Swedish immigrant, left his son Fred an orphan at eleven. Fred soon began building middle-class houses, and eventually he put up some 24,000 apartments in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, including a 23- room spread where he and Mary Trump raised their five children. Young Donald was no more than five when Fred began taking him to inspect building sites, and at 13 he was driving a bulldozer. "I learned a lot from him," says ( Trump. "I learned about toughness in a very tough business." He also learned, as an adolescent rent collector, that he didn't much like that kind of work. "It's much easier," he says now, "to sell an apartment to Johnny Carson or Steven Spielberg for $4 million than it is to collect a couple of dollars of rent in Brooklyn."

His older brother, Fred Trump Jr., rebelled against carrying on the family business. He became an airline pilot, took to drink and died of alcoholism in 1981 at the age of 43. "He was a really wonderful guy who didn't particularly like this business," says Trump. "It was a sad thing. It is something I have never been able to figure out. It was one of the most difficult things I've had to deal with."

Young Donald was, in his own words, so "rambunctious" and "aggressive" that his father sent him to the New York Military Academy, where he became captain of cadets in his senior year. After two years at Fordham, he got his degree from the Wharton School, then returned to the New York real estate wars.

His first major coup came in 1976, when he persuaded the bankrupt Penn Central Railroad to sell him for $10 million the dilapidated Commodore Hotel adjoining Grand Central Station. It was typical of the kind of deal that Trump now calls "my favorite art form." An unknown and unwealthy hustler of 30, he had to persuade some bankers to lend him $80 million (he did) and some politicians to give him a $120 million tax abatement (he did). It did not hurt that Fred Trump was a regular contributor to the Brooklyn Democratic machine, or that Governor Hugh Carey and Mayor Abe Beame both happened to be Brooklyn Democrats, or that Trump put Carey's chief fund raiser on his payroll. Young Trump also had to find an architect to build a reflecting glass sheath over the decaying hotel (and he did: Der Scutt of Gruzen & Partners) and to find somebody who knew how to run a hotel (and he did: Hyatt).

It all took four years, but the glittering Grand Hyatt Hotel that opened in 1980 established Trump as a man who could get things done. It also brings in, he says happily, an annual profit of $30 million. Most of Trump's other projects are essentially more of the same -- more bargaining, more building, more bucks.

Sometimes Trump shows an absolute genius for combining profits with publicity and doing good deeds in the process. Consider the Wollman ice- skating rink in Central Park, which city authorities had closed down in 1980 for a $9 million refurbishing. Somehow they managed to spend $12 million on preliminary maneuvering without anything whatever to show for it. Looking down at the mess from his skyscraper windows, Trump was displeased. Offering to do the job himself on the original budget within three months, he completed it for $750,000 less -- and now operates the rink at an annual profit of $500,000 (for charity). When authorities tried to honor him by planting a delicate Japanese pine in his name, though, Trump balked. "He went wild because he felt the tree was wrong, a hunchback," recalls Parks Commissioner Henry Stern. "He wanted it pulled out. He wanted something like a sequoia."

Though Trump likes to talk of his triumphs, there have inevitably been controversies and defeats. One of the most striking was the five-year battle over 100 Central Park South, a dignified prewar apartment building that Trump decided in 1981 to demolish and replace. To do that, he had to get rid of tenants who clung to 50 rent-controlled apartments that cost them as little as $300 a month. Trump brought in a new management company renowned for its ferocity. Out went the lobby furniture, unrepaired went the broken elevator, unpainted and uncleaned the halls and stairways. Eviction notices proliferated. The tenants hired legal help, charging harassment. Trump retaliated by offering to house some of the city's homeless in a few of the luxury building's vacant apartments.

When it was all over, Trump had to give in, leave the tenants in peace and even pay some of their legal costs, but he characteristically describes this as "one of the greatest blessings in disguise." His reasoning: had he been able to expel the tenants, he would have sold their apartments for a fraction of what soaring prices make them worth now.

Similar conflicts have plagued the many middle-income apartments the Trump family operates with minimum publicity in Brooklyn and Queens. In 1973, when the Federal Government charged racial discrimination, Trump hired the notorious Roy Cohn to defend him, then eventually signed a consent decree. No less vexing was the 1983 controversy at the 1,400-apartment Shore Haven Apartments in Brooklyn, where the Trump organization started charging new tenants $40 to $60 a month for garage fees regardless of whether they had cars. One tenant, Viola Salomone, actually acquired a car and parked it in the unlocked and unattended garage, then found it vandalized. She refused to pay any more. The Trumps cracked down. Said Salomone: "I'll die first before I give you another penny for garage space." Said a civil court judge of the Trumps' operation: "Unconscionable."

Out in the happier world of glitz and gossip columns, Trump attracted a lot of attention when he bought the New Jersey Generals football team in 1983 for a reported $8 million (Trump says he paid only $4 million) and tried to spur the fledgling U.S. Football League into full competition with the powerful National Football League. Trump not only invested heavily in college stars like Herschel Walker and Doug Flutie (who cost him $5 million or more) but also persuaded the league to sue the N.F.L. for antitrust violations. One league member recalls Trump saying that "everything he had been involved with had been successful, and he would be damned if the U.S.F.L. was going to be his first failure." Trump's league sued the N.F.L. for $1.7 billion, won the verdict but received only a symbolic $3 in damages. Trump called that a moral victory even as the "victorious" league disintegrated.

Litigation is an important part of the Trump style. He has ten different legal firms tending his affairs. His attorneys include his brother-in-law, John Barry, whose wife, Trump's elder sister Maryanne, is a federal judge in Newark. (Trump's only surviving brother, Robert, works for him as an executive vice president. His other sister, Elizabeth, is an administrative assistant for Chase Manhattan Bank.)

Trump filed a libel suit in 1985 against the Chicago Tribune's architecture critic, Paul Gapp, for having written that his plan to build the world's highest building portended "an atrocious, ugly monstrosity, one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city." The judge ruled for the critic. Trump even sued Eddie and Julius Trump, two South Africans unrelated to him, who had run a small conglomerate for 20 years before expanding into the U.S. in the 1970s. "They're trying to use my name," said Donald, who lost a preliminary suit. Another is pending.

Architect Richard Hayden of Swanke Hayden Connell, one of the designers of Trump Tower, calls Trump "a wonderful guy to work for," but he found himself sued for various Trump dissatisfactions and spent more than two years trying to collect his fees. "That's the way he finishes his jobs," says Hayden. Trump has even less decorous ways of being difficult. Architect Scutt recalls & that when Trump Tower once fell 15 days behind schedule, Trump kicked a chair all the way across a conference room. "He ruined a new pair of Gucci loafers," says Scutt. "He always has to have his way."

Trump's latest and biggest and most complicated controversy centers on Manhattan's largest remaining piece of undeveloped land, the 76-acre principality bordering the Hudson River from 59 Street to 72 Street. Once a Penn Central railroad yard, it is now mostly weeds and debris. Trump, who bought it for $90 million in 1984, touts it as a $5 billion Trump City, "a concept that is going to be spectacular." It would feature a 150-story building, the world's tallest ("The city of New York should have the world's tallest building"), plus 7,600 luxury apartments in a dozen skyscrapers, a huge shopping mall, a 9,000-car underground-parking garage, a nine-acre riverfront park and various odds and ends.

Troubles have been unending. After much maneuvering to get NBC to move its headquarters into what Trump originally called Television City, the network decided to stay in Rockefeller Center. Mayor Ed Koch rejected Trump's demands for a 20-year tax abatement, mocking the builder as "piggy, piggy, piggy." Trump in turn called Koch "incompetent" and "a moron," and threatens to help anyone who can unseat him in next fall's election. Citizens' groups on the West Side mounted major opposition, charging that the project would cast a deep shadow over a large area.

A celebrated urban-affairs expert who requests anonymity says of the whole idea, "This will be one of the great disasters in New York history. It will be a disaster of historic proportion because it will shape the look of New York for generations. It's not just that it will blot out sunlight, it will blot out values." And, argues Marshal Berman, a political-science professor at the City University of New York, it will substitute the values of "Dallas and Dynasty, people wearing diamonds and furs and being driven around in limos. The vision is of New York as an international center for wealth, where anyone with capital feels at home, and anyone without capital has no place." So after years of wrangling, the $5 billion project is still no more than the proverbial gleam in Trump's eye.

It has often been observed that men who make a great deal of money generally have very limited ideas about what to do with it. Trump's biggest personal expenditures have been on extravagantly luxurious residences. The builder of Trump Tower, whose first Manhattan apartment was a dingy single room overlooking a water tower, originally reserved for himself a $10 million triplex penthouse, but when he first saw yachtsman Khashoggi's pad in the nearby Olympic Tower, which was approximately the size of a Persian Gulf sheikdom, he naturally wanted one just as big or bigger. So he went back to Trump Tower and awarded himself an adjoining triplex, and then started tearing out walls.

The resulting 50-room, $10 million confection takes up all of the 68th and most of the 66th and 67th floors of the tower. The building actually has only 58 floors, but Trump felt that wasn't sufficiently impressive, so he skipped some floor numbers to give his tenants a psychic boost. "He would have loved to build another ten floors," says architect Scutt, "but he couldn't because of zoning rules, so he changed the numbers."

"If it turns out the way I think it will, there will be nothing like it," Trump said as he took a reporter on a tour of the possibilities about a year ago. The sun streamed in on a scene of chaos. The walls were bare plasterboard. Plaster dust powdered the new bronze window frames. Wires dangling from the ceiling barely hinted at the chandeliers that Trump envisioned. But Trump sounded rapturous about the workmanship on a newly installed door. He gently shut it and opened it again. "Look how it fits," he said.

Trump was captivated by onyx and used it liberally. He had onyx baseboards installed along the walls. His own bathtub was of lilac onyx (with gold-plated faucets, of course). "Onyx is like a precious jewel," he said, "many grades above marble."

But much remained unfinished. Trump described the library as "very rich and traditional," but the shelves were still empty. "We have to buy a lot of books," he said. "I really respect books." And of the bare walls: "We have great art too."

Now, with the apartment only weeks away from completion -- the main thing still missing is the park to be built on the roof -- Trump is pleased with his creation. "You will not believe this," he says as he leads the same reporter through the door. And it is true: even Judith Krantz would find it a little hard to believe. Even Liberace. If anyone would like a living room 80 ft. long, Trump now has one. With bronze-edged floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Central Park. And a 12-ft. waterfall set against a backdrop of translucent onyx.

"There has never been anything like this built in 400 years," says Trump (he is thinking of the Vatican, ignoring, say, the Palace of Versailles) as he points to the hand-carved marble columns and the walls lined in Italian gold onyx and the ceiling moldings of 23-karat gold. When his eyes rise to that ceiling, where various mythological heroes have been painted "in the Michelangelo style," Trump feels himself a Medici. "If this were on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel," he says, "it would be very much in place in terms of quality. This is really what you call talent, more talent than the schmucks who go around throwing paint on the canvas."

Sharing in all this domestic magnificence is Trump's wife Ivana, 38, a svelte and highly polished blond who runs the Plaza Hotel for what Trump has described as "a salary of $1 a year and all the dresses she wants." Ivana was raised in Czechoslovakia, the child of an electrical engineer, and she liked to engage in ski races. "Sports gave me the competitiveness and discipline that have been important for my success," she says. After graduating from Charles University in Prague, she moved to Canada and became a model.

"We met at the Montreal Summer Olympic Games in 1976," Trump recalls. "I'd dated a lot of different women by then, but I'd never gotten seriously involved with any of them. Ivana wasn't someone you dated casually. Ten months later, in April 1977, we were married." They were married, incidentally, by Norman Vincent Peale, the prophet of Positive Thinking, and then Trump put his bride right to work supervising the interior decor for all his projects. (There are also three children, Donald Jr., 11, Ivanka, 7, and Eric, 5.)

Some of Ivana's ideas of decoration were a little odd, like sending to London for fur hats to bring a touch of Buckingham Palace to the doormen at Trump Tower. But she worked hard, and the Donald, as she sometimes calls him, kept giving her new responsibilities. When she ran his Atlantic City casinos, she was the boss of 4,000 people. "I run my operations like a family business," she says. "I sign every check, every receipt. I'm not tough, but I'm strong. You can't be a pussycat." This was, in a way, a necessity. "If Donald was married to a lady who didn't work and make certain contributions," Ivana says, "he would be gone." And as an afterthought: "Show me success without ego."

For all the wealth, their life is an austere one in some ways. Ivana goes on skiing vacations once or twice a year, but although Trump joined her at Aspen over the Christmas holidays, he generally doesn't like vacations. "I like to do business," he says. "Work is the pleasure of my life."

He goes out to dinners and parties four or five nights a week, sometimes with Ivana and sometimes without, but these are mostly official or charity affairs. "Donald is au courant about everything," says real estate dealer Alice Mason, who often encounters him on such occasions. Others can be warm in their praises. "As a friend, he's a real softy and very sweet," says opera star Beverly Sills. But Trump admits that he doesn't much enjoy the party life. "I hate going out on Sundays," he says. "I don't like going out on Monday nights either. I'm not sure I like going out any night." When Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of Trump's memoirs, quoted him as saying "I hate small talk," Trump changed it to read, "I absolutely hate small talk."

Asked what he would prefer as an evening's entertainment, Trump bluntly says, "Staying home." To curl up with a good book? Well, he did read Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, which deals with a lot of rich New Yorkers who pursue such vanities as charity dinners at Trumpian apartments. Trump reports that he also recently read Gorbachev's Perestroika. "It was not the most exciting book I ever read, and I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I felt I had an obligation to read it," he recalls. He does not believe, though, that he needs many such exercises to get on in the world. "I can sit down with the most sophisticated people in the arts in New York and get along fabulously with them," he says. "If I want to, I can convince them that I know as much about something as they do, and I don't." How does he do that? "It's a feeling, an aura that you create."

If this seems a little strange, it is all part of the Trump grand strategy, which he does not want examined too closely by himself or anyone else. "I have an absolute strategy, but it's an innate strategy and not definable," he says. "When you start studying yourself too deeply, you start seeing things that maybe you don't want to see. And if there's a rhyme and reason, people can figure you out, and once they can figure you out, you're in big trouble."

One man who knows Trump well does see a rhyme and reason. Trump is a brilliant dealmaker with almost no sense of his own emotions or his own ( identity, this man says. He is a kind of black hole in space, which cannot be filled no matter what Trump does. Looking toward the future, this associate foresees Trump building bigger and bigger projects in his attempts to fill the hole but finally ending, like Howard Hughes, a multibillionaire living all alone in one room.

"Hey, life is life," says Donald Trump, whose coiffed blond hair is just beginning to gray at the temples. "We're here for a short time. When we're gone, most people don't care, and in some cases they're quite happy about it."

And now there is another meeting to go to in Atlantic City, and a limousine is waiting at the door to race to the gleaming black helicopter waiting at the pier, and another reporter wants a ride to take a look at the Trump empire, and that will create more publicity about the emperor's grand plans and grander dreams, and so once again it's up, up and away, out over the choppy waves of the vast harbor, and up into the windy sky that seems to promise so much.

With reporting by JEANNE McDOWELL