A few years later, at Spy magazine, we were trying to develop a house style of writing. In the end it grew half out of the blithe filleting dished out by Private Eye, the British satirical fortnightly, and half out of Henry Luce’s Time-ese—the writing style from earlier days at the newsweekly that relied on, among other devices, dense, adjective-heavy epithets. We did the same and hoped they might stick. Recalling the size of Trump’s hands, we came up with “short-fingered vulgarian,” which, as I have written before, gave him absolute fits.
Not surprisingly, it being the 80s, Trump was a recurring fixture in the pages of Spy. We ridiculed not just his fingers but also his business judgment, his jaw-dropping pronouncements, his inflated wealth, his hair, and his marital situations. There was a threatened lawsuit, resulting in a lot of back-and-forth legal letters between him and me. And we printed all of those. At one point we sent checks for $1.11 out to 58 of the “well-known” and “well-heeled” to see who would take the time to endorse and deposit the checks from a firm we called the National Refund Clearinghouse. The ones who deposited the $1.11 checks were sent 64-cent checks, and the ones who deposited those were sent checks for 13 cents. This being in the days before electronic deposits and such, the exercise took the better part of a year. At the end, only two 13-cent checks were signed—and we couldn’t believe our good fortune. One was signed by arms trader Adnan Khashoggi. The other was deposited by Donald Trump.
When I came to Vanity Fair, the transactional salesman in Trump presumably figured there was no future in maintaining hostilities. He invited me to two of his weddings—I went to the Marla Maples one. It was held in the ballroom of the Plaza hotel on a weekday evening and seemed more like a product launch than anything else. He sent me a couple of Trump ties. They were a basic blue and a basic red, and they were as stiff as a child’s sword. He sent me Trump vodka, which I passed along to Mike Hogan, here at the magazine. When I bumped into Trump in Palm Beach, he invited me to join him for dinner at Mar-a-Lago. We went and had surf and turf—a dish I hadn’t eaten in 20 years.
Dinner with Trump is generally a one-sided affair. He talks so much and with such velocity that it can make your hair flutter. Whatever wife he has at the time tends to say nothing. Which made his criticism of the silence of Ghazala Khan—the mother of the fallen soldier about whom her husband, Khizr, spoke at the Democratic National Convention—seem even more curious. Family dinners at the Trumps are no different, I’m told. And as a general rule, they are over in 45 minutes. Why just 45 minutes? “Because,” a family member told a friend, “that’s how long it takes Donald to eat.”
In the early 90s, we photographed Trump and his soon-to-be wife, Marla, in Palm Beach. At one point, Marina Schiano, our style director, decided that the Loro Piana cashmere sweater she had given Trump to wear wasn’t right and asked him to take it off. Trump refused to pull it up over his head, not wanting to muss his confection of hair. So one of the assistants on the shoot had to get scissors and cut the sweater up the back.
The Full Story (published online: October 4, 2016, magazine print date: November 2016)
No comments:
Post a Comment