How Ivana Trump became the queen of the 1980s
Ivana Trump’s life reads like the plot of a particularly colourful Jackie Collins novel. Who could be a better protagonist for an Eighties bonkbuster than a beautiful, big-haired champion skier with a difficult background? Particularly one who catches the eye of a billionaire New York playboy and inspires him to change his ways and settle down.
Although in this case, it is the not-so-happily-ever-after marriage to Donald Trump that has fascinated the world rather than the relatively short courtship.
In death, as in life, Ivana’s public persona is inextricably linked to her ex-husband – the news she had died of cardiac arrest aged 73 was broken to the world on Thursday by the former President who, banned from Twitter and Facebook, posted it on his own social media platform, Truth Social. In true Donald Trump fashion, there were even reports that he had added a link for donations to his campaign in the subsequent email sent out in remembrance of her.
While the focus on the Trumps has never been more frenzied than during Donald’s time in the White House, the bouffant-haired, shoulder-padded, no-nonsense Ivana will always be associated with hedonistic 1980s’ Manhattan. She never became First Lady, but made a point of calling herself the “first Trump lady.” Married to Donald from 1977 to 1992 and mother to his three eldest children, Donald Jr, Ivanka, and Eric, Ivana and her husband soon became a byword for success in money-obsessed New York.
During their 15-year marriage, Ivana played a pivotal role in cultivating the myth around the Trump empire. More than any of his other wives, Ivana embodied the brand: dominant, attention-hungry and increasingly powerful, she clearly enjoyed the spotlight – “Donald calls me his twin as a woman,” she told Vanity Fair in a 1988 interview. Photographs from this period rarely show the couple without either a glass of champagne in their hands, or a gold statue, a helicopter or a limousine somewhere in the vicinity.
Ivana’s over-the-top clothes played into this: a regular on the front row of New York Fashion Week, she hosted parties for major players such as Valentino and dressed in head-to-toe designer gear. Her scarlet suits, saucer-sized earrings, wafting pastel caftans, three-string diamond necklaces and ice-cream coloured turbans perfectly encapsulated the ‘bigger is better’ ethos that drove this uninhibited era.
Much of the hype around Donald and Ivana’s relationship was based on the idea that she was his partner in more than just marriage. Determined to succeed in her own right, she took charge of interior design at the Grand Hyatt right after their marriage, returning to work just two days after the birth of Don Jr. By 1988, she was CEO of the Trump’s Castle casino in Atlantic City, and had become somewhat respected in what was still a very male-dominated world. The details though, are delicious: instead of a car, she commuted to and from the casino in a black helicopter with the word ‘Ivana’ printed in white across the door, while her briefcases were monogrammed Louis Vuitton and carried by an assistant employed to walk a few steps behind her.
Of course, New York old money dismissed her as tacky (the gold bathrooms; the heavy make-up; the relentless focus on success) but she was never trying to be a refined lady who lunched – and the key to understanding why lies in her childhood.
Born Ivana Zelníčková in 1949 in Zlin in the now Czech Republic, her father was an electrical engineer and her mother a telephone operator and both refused to join the Communist party – something that made life difficult for the family in the then USSR. They lived a few hours drive from the Czech ski resorts, and noting his daughter’s aptitude on the slopes, Ivana’s father encouraged her to practise as a way of travelling beyond Soviet borders.
It worked, and while there is some dispute as to whether she was part of the selected team for the 1972 Winter Olympics (there are claims that she was but no records to this effect), her aptitude in the sport allowed her to meet and marry an Austrian ski instructor and obtain European citizenship.
A year later they were divorced, but her new passport and international contacts precipitated a career as a model and a move to Canada, and in 1976, she met Donald on a modelling trip to New York – he offered to find her and her friends a table at a fully booked Manhattan restaurant, and when he did, insisted on joining them. The next morning, he sent flowers, which didn’t particularly impress her. “I was 27 and had been hit on by countless men since the age of 14,” she wrote in her 2017 memoir, Raising Trump.
Clearly some part of his charm offensive worked, as six months after that first meeting they were engaged; at their wedding, there were 600 guests of whom Ivana knew six.
But by 1992, she and Donald were divorced – the marriage ruined by his affair with the woman who would become his second wife, Marla Maples (a scandal that was front-page news for weeks, not least because of the propensity of all three protagonists to speak to the media). During the legal wranglings, some particularly unpleasant accusations emerged, including one about Donald violently raping her in a fit of anger over a botched “scalp reduction” procedure. Ivana later retracted it.
In true Trump fashion, even their divorce became a way of making money and raising their profiles. In 1995, Donald and Ivana co-starred in an television advert for Pizza Hut that saw them both eating pizza while trussed up in black-tie splendour; at one point, Ivana asks, "May I have the last slice?" and Donald replies "Actually, you're only entitled to half" – a line she allegedly objected to but which he insisted remained in the final cut. Perhaps as a way of getting her own back, she starred in a cameo in the 1996 film The First Wives Club and famously said, “Don’t get mad; get everything.”
Once the divorce was finalised, Ivana remained a fixture on the New York scene, launching fashion and fragrance line House of Ivana, starting a magazine and making regular media appearances, although post-divorce she never quite attained the heady society heights she had known in the 1980s.
Even though they had long since gone their separate ways, when Donald Trump’s extraordinary march to presidential power began, Ivana was once again embroiled in his story – publicly, she supported him, even though at that point, he was married to a different Eastern European former-model. What she thought about her successor is largely unknown. Did she envy her or feel sorry for her? Possibly a bit of both – in her book, she wrote “I wouldn’t want to be in Melania’s Louboutins right now,” but she also allegedly criticised Melania’s public-speaking abilities as First Lady in private.
Towards the end of Trump’s term, Ivana seemed somewhat less enthused by it all, saying that she hoped her children could return to their normal lives rather than continue to be embroiled in Washington politics. Of those three children, she is widely regarded as being the most like Ivanka - a woman the New Yorker describes as having “inherited her mother’s canniness but [with an] added thick coat of subtlety.”
Ivana believed it was Ivanka who would be the next President Trump: if that is indeed true, her legacy will certainly live on…
