Daddy was content with owning New York City. Ivanka has her eyes on bigger things
Of course, all we want to know about when we first show up to meet The Ivanka are those two enormous new…Trump towers in Dubai. She intuits this, The Ivanka does, instantly whipping out photos and blueprints. “Hey, Darcy?“ she says to her secretary. “Could you bring in that one-pager on our projects?“ Darcy appears with a huge glossy poster. “These are just some of our projects,“ says Ivanka. “I have thirty-three projects under my direct control. All over the world. My first week here—I started the Tuesday after Labor Day, and I was on a plane the following Tuesday to Dubai, to negotiate a deal for our towers. We literally locked ourselves in a conference room for three days, and we negotiated a deal to build seventeen towers. It’s so exciting!“ There’s the Ivanka-led projects in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Hawaii. This one, a ninety-two-story one in Chicago, will be the tallest residential building in the world. “And this one,“ she says, “was actually slated to be 150 stories and the largest building in the world, but the commercial market in Chicago went to shit.“
She continues on like this. It’s nine in the morning, and she’s been at it since five thirty. (This is a woman who once scheduled a photo shoot for six in the morning so she wouldn’t be late for work.)
“People say we’re, like, the kings and queens of superlatives,“ she says. “But we do believe everything’s the Best and the Greatest and the Tallest and the Biggest.“ Well, definitely the biggest.
She is drop-dead gorgeous, even sitting at her desk in a short (but buttoned-up) gray shirt-dress that the designer Kay Unger sent her (“Now I’m getting all this stuff“) and that, on anyone else, might actually look buttoned-up. Much has been made of the rack—just Google “Ivanka Trump“ and “boobs“ to see what we mean—but the stems (she’s five eleven) are equally impressive. When she stands, her legs just go on and on and on…
As does The Ivanka. In our first ten minutes together, she produces sketches and photos for Trump properties all over the planet, her plan for global domination in the real estate market, and an unprompted defense of all things Trump. Her new job with her dad is vice president of development and acquisitions.
She is 25.
“You know, people sometimes call my father cocky or egomaniacal.“ (No. Your father? Get out!) “They use these sort of attributes, but I don’t know anyone who’s successful like him who isn’t cocky, who doesn’t have a big ego. To me, that’s negative only when you’re a braggart and you’ve got nothing to show for it. He has to believe every building he’s doing is the best building he’s ever done. That’s important to us. Like, that’s our vision as a company. If we didn’t view it as the best, we shouldn’t be building it. And that’s how we look at, you know, all the stuff we do.“
She takes a breath…then launches into a plan for the next phase of the Trump empire. Her father, she explains, doesn’t like to travel, never did. He was basically content dominating New York City. But the new generation of Trumps—Ivanka and her two brothers Donald Jr. and Eric—has no problem jetting off to places like Dubai. “With our branding as strong as it is, the only thing that limits what we can build is gravity and imagination.“ Another (very brief) pause. “Our mission is to take the brand international and global and really grow it, not only outside of New York but outside of America and really around the world…“ And so on. This mission is why she is starring in The Apprentice this season, she explains. “I’m not a clone, and I’m not a minion. But I really believe I have this incredible opportunity to take a brand that’s so strong—and it’s so strong because of him—and take it to the next level. That’s why I did The Apprentice. That has been, like, a great vehicle for us. But I have no interest in being a ‘television star.’ “ She utters the phrase with great disdain. “I’ve been asked to do all sorts of other shows—you know, stupid stuff—but ultimately they do nothing for the brand. They do nothing to advance my ultimate goal of becoming a great developer.“
This is perhaps not the best time to ask whether the boobs are real.
And anyway: Embrace it. This isn’t Paris Hilton or any of the other tabloid twits. This is an American heiress who does not “dance on tables without underwear,“ as Ivanka herself puts it. Who graduated summa cum laude from Wharton! Who actually works for a living!
“I look at my brothers and myself and I’m, like, really proud of the fact that nobody’s, like, totally fucked-up. Nobody’s a drug addict, nobody’s driving around chasing women, snorting coke. There’s something amazing about that. And you know, this isn’t to pat myself on the back, but I could be a lot worse.“
Ivanka also wants me to know that she only does interviews if she thinks it is going to “advance the brand.“ Much discussion ensues over what she will and won’t do for publicity. She doesn’t like “to be shadowed“ by a writer. She’s not “an entertainer.“ She’s doing Leno next week, but “that’s not really me.“ (It’s brand advancement.) What is her: presiding over real estate deals. But: “I hate having people sit in on meetings. And obviously I can’t have you in a deal negotiation, because then people will posture and make my life more difficult than it is. But we’ll figure it out,“ she coos, in that voice that is both sultry and ber-confident.
Well, okay, I can go to her next meeting, only because Darcy already promised, but that really isn’t what she’s about, either. She is meeting with six women and a man named Moshe to plan the launch of the Ivanka Trump line of diamond jewelry. (The studs in her ears, the ice around her neck, the diamond bracelet? All part of the collection.) At the meeting, she seems distracted by her BlackBerry and a little bored—picking out the right shade of coral for the gift bos doesn’t compare to building skyscrapers in Dubai. “I have to sort of approve all of the designs, and I want to make sure it’s consistent with my aesthetic, but, you know, the reason why I’m doing it is, I see an opportunity from an entrepreneurial standpoint.“
In the next week, she will go on Leno in a dress that will leave nothing to the imagination, gravity-wise, and she will go on Jimmy Kimmel, where the other guest, Andy Dick, will get thrown off the stage, midshow, for pawing her. (Kimmel: “Donald Trump will kill both of us!“) The Ivanka does what she has to do to keep the good Trump brand intact.
“We have this ability,“ she says, crossing and uncrossing her legs, “that other developers don’t have, to generate an incredible amount of media, which translates into enormous amounts of promotion for each of our projects. Just by the celebrity aspect. Like, last weekend in Florida, I shot the cover of Atlanta Peach Magazine. Why did I do it?“
Yes, why did you do it?
“Because we’re building a building, two residential towers, in Atlanta. So, I said, ‘Yes, BUT: under the condition that you also run renderings of the building.’ You can’t buy that kind of coverage.“
Darcy interrupts. There is breaking news on a gossip Web site: Ivanka has come in second as “the best person to date.“
“Wow,“ says Ivanka. “Uh, who’s number one?“
That would be Mandy Moore.
Ivanka raises an eyebrow. “Darcy, don’t I give you anything to do? Why are you playing on the Internet?“
“I’m doing research for you!“ says Darcy.
“Ah, okay,“ says Ivanka. “I guess I’m the number two person to date.“
She thinks about this.
“Wait a minute. Trumps aren’t second.“
It was inevitable, really. Of course The Ivanka would end up in the family business—poised to run the whole freakin’ empire someday. “I’ve known since I was born what I wanted to do,“ she says. Since you were born? “Pretty close. I can’t remember ever wanting to do anything else. Ever. Not even as a little kid. I feel like somehow I’m genetically programmed.“
Her father, of course, has his own take on this. “Look, she was born into a very good situation,“ says The Donald. “She was fortunate to be very pretty. That, you have to be a little bit lucky with. But I think she always had in mind that she wanted to prove she could really do something very special in life, as opposed to just sitting back and relaxing. Which she could have done.“
It’s not hype that Donald has given his daughter an enormous amount of responsibility at a very tender age. Yes, she’s his kid, but as anyone who’s ever dealt with Trump knows, if she weren’t up to the job, he’d cut her off at the knees. “For years, I do my own deals,“ says The Donald. “And they work out, always. But then I found myself, about a year ago, all of a sudden, as deals come in that are very important, I’m saying, ‘Let Don and Ivanka handle it.’ I never did that before,“ he says, somewhat amazed that he’s actually doing it now. “I’m letting them do things. I’m watching, but I’m letting them do things. I mean, I knew my children were competent. I just never knew that they were this competent.“
One of Trump the father’s greatest joys is when one of his business associates underestimates his smokin’ daughter. “I think they do that a lot because of her age and because of her looks. When you look like that and you’re young, you know, I could see some of my killer friends just licking their chops, right? But the fact is, they come back later and they say, ‘Man, that was a lot different than I thought.’ “
People who know the Trumps—and like the Trumps—will tell you that Ivanka got the best of both parents. From her father, she got the drive, the bluster, the pathological ambition, the balls. From her mother, Ivana: the drive, the bluster, the pathological ambition, the balls (plus the ability to do it all in stilettos). “My parents are shockingly similar,“ Ivanka says. As a little girl, she’d tag along with her dad as he went to his construction sites—punch-listing items and barking orders. “There was nothing like it,“ says Ivanka. “It was awesome!“ But her mother was equally impressive. Ivanka remembers a day when she was 6 or 7 years old and she took the helicopter with Mom down to Atlantic City, when her mother was running the Trump Castle Casino. “I remember this so clearly. We had just gotten off the helicopter, and we were walking into the lobby, and there was this sort of—well, the whole ceiling was just this continuous chandelier, basically. I mean, thousands and thousands of lights. And she walked in, and I swear, she didn’t even look up. She just points to the general manager and goes, ‘There’s a lightbulb missing.’ “ Ivanka smiles. “I was in awe.“
A few nights after I meet Ivanka in her office, she invites me to her apartment on Park Avenue—in a building that is, of course, called Trump Park Avenue. “I choose to live in a Trump building,“ says Ivanka. She’s still a little testy about the New York Post item that her $1.5 million apartment was a “gift“ from her father. “First of all, my father’s a businessman. I mean, he’s not gifting me anything. He’d have to pay a gift tax, which would be a third of the property’s value.“ So how does it work? “I have a mortgage!“ Like, duh. Payable to the bank of Donald Trump, but still. Did she also negotiate the price with him? “Of course. He’d be disappointed if I didn’t.“
Ivanka’s pad is tasteful, a little quirky, unpretentious. She’s into blue—Tiffany blue in the den, robin’s egg in the bedroom, a blue-glass chandelier that she picked up at a consignment shop in Greenwich—with an occasional splash of red, and a coral bathroom that matches the stationery from the Ivanka Diamond collection. Her bed is a big white canopy from which a dozen black dresses and a sweatshirt hang. “I made this piece,“ she says, pointing to the nightstand. “It’s literally plywood that I covered with fabric. Really cheap.“ Underneath her bed is her wheelie-luggage, which she kicked under there when the doorbell rang.
She has been awake for two days straight. Flew in on the red-eye from L.A. this morning after taking meetings and doing Leno, landed at five, came home, showered, went straight to the office to meet “with partners who had flown in from all over the world,“ and has to be back in L.A. tomorrow “to announce a new deal out on the West Coast.“ She left some of her stuff back at the Beverly Hills Hotel but still has to pack all over again. “I can’t even think about it,“ she says. “It’s causing me severe anxiety. I’m always packing or unpacking. I’m very meticulous in the way I do things, so I use layers of tissue paper. You can’t tell that I’m, like, very anal?“
She pours a couple of glasses of water and sits, barefoot, with her legs curled up on the couch in the den. There is a table that unfolds to play bridge, an old Dell laptop (“I’m pretty basic“), and dozens of framed photographs of her friends, her brothers, and her parents. She is wearing pencil-thin pants and a low-cut charcoal blouse, tight at the waist, showing plenty of boob. Even with no sleep, she looks exquisite. You want to stab her. The porcelain skin, the blond hair upswept in the kind of ponytail that looks deliberately nondeliberate. (Mercifully, she inherited her mother’s hair, not The Donald’s.)
It is time to talk about chick stuff. Let’s start with dating.
“I’m worried that this is gonna sound arrogant,“ says Ivanka, “but I love flirting right now.“ (She doesn’t mean right now.) “I’ve never been at a place in my life where I’ve felt, quite frankly, sexier and more comfortable with my body. And sort of more in touch with myself. Generally, my self-esteem on every level is probably at a peak. So in a dating situation, I found out I’m a pretty good flirt.“ She giggles. Yes, she does. “That I know how to do it rather well. I just went from one really long relationship to another really long relationship,“ and when you’re in those long relationships, says Ivanka, “you don’t, like, flex those sort of feline muscles.“
What does The Ivanka look for in a man?
“I like very strong guys. Successful guys. Not necessarily financially. But that said, I’m not one of those people who would be with somebody who didn’t have their finances in order, because that’s not a way to live. I’m just not interested in that. I’m not interested in paying for anyone. Honestly, I have a tendency to date dorks. Which means that a lot of times, I date guys that no one else would deem to be a hunk.“
Her cell phone rings. “Sorry.“ Deal closing in God-knows-where.
But as she was saying. She’s had two really long relationships. Both lasted almost four years. The most recent was with the socialite Bingo Gubelmann.
Bingo?
“Well, James.“
Did you call him Bingo?
“Everyone called him Bingo. That was his name, sort of.“
And the one before that?
“Greg.“
What did Greg do?
“Nothing. We were in college. It was actually a little before college.“
Are you still friends with them?
“Um, I am. It’s difficult being friends with an ex. I marvel at how people do it so seamlessly.“
Who? We discuss whether there are degrees between violent death and friendship.
“Yeah, there definitely are. But…I’ve never cheated on anyone. And nobody—to the best of my knowledge, but I’m pretty confident in that—has cheated on me. There’s never been, you know, name slinging, hatred. It’s more, ‘That’s it, we’re done.’ I think both relationships ran their course. They just got to a point where we weren’t making each other happy any longer. I believe in fighting for a relationship. But you know what? It shouldn’t be that difficult at this age. If you can’t be happy at this age, when you’re young and in love, you’re not gonna be happy in twenty years. I definitely believe in, like, cutting losses, moving on.“ She smiles. “That said, I’m a romantic. Like, I can’t wait to get married and have a bunch of little brats.“
Ivanka was only 9 when her family became tabloid fodder, when the world found out that her father was cheating on her mother, Ivana, with Marla Maples. She would go to elementary school, and the paparazzi would be waiting for her outside. Her father and his mistress were on the cover of the New York Post almost every morning. “You know, the media is vicious, they’re brutal—present company excluded.“ She smiles. “But I would go to school and have hordes of photographers standing outside my classrooms when I’d be leaving, asking me, ‘So is it true that Marla said that your father was the best sex she’d ever had?’ And I’d be like, ‘Marla? Who? What?’ So you build up a certain callousness, and that’s good. If I didn’t have that lesson, I don’t know that I’d be tough. It taught me not to trust anyone. You can never let your guard down, and I never really have since that time.“
So how does she really feel about the wives that came after her mother?
“Well, Melania’s been around for a long time,“ she says of the third Mrs. Trump, whose photographs—with Donald, looking like a tricked-out Princess Di—are plastered all over the building that Ivanka works in. “I sort of first met Melania when I was a sophomore in boarding school. It’s been that many years. They’ve been married a short period of time, but they were dating for maybe six years before they got married. I think any of the ill will I had towards the females in my father’s life… Well, there were multiple events.“
She is making a decision about whether she wants to go there. She does.
“You know, the situation with Marla was very tricky. I mean, I will never totally forgive her. I think she’s a fine person, and I love my little sister [Tiffany]—I get along with her tremendously well. I think she looks up to me, and I shower her with love. I just love her. But you know, it’s not an easy situation.“ A pause. “Like, I will never—I would feel like, if I didn’t harbor some iota of, I don’t want to say ill will, but if I fully embraced Marla, I’d almost feel like I’d be being disloyal to my mother. So I can never let that go. I’ll always know what the situation was. But that said, Marla was also very kind to us. Melania didn’t do anything to my family. She didn’t affect our family unit. Her presence wasn’t the reason why my mother and father weren’t together. You know? So it was much easier for me to accept her.“
It’s getting late, and Ivanka has to pack for L.A.
But there was just one other thing…or two.
I wuss out asking her flat out about the boobs. Because the truth is, she has this ability—which no doubt serves her well at the negotiating table—to command respect, to intimidate the shit out of you, to make you feel like an idiot to bring up anything so frivolous as whether she had her boobs done.
Instead, I ask if she reads all the blogs about herself.
Not anymore, says Ivanka. “It’s somewhat masochistic to do that. Like, there is a surround of anonymity now where people are sooo brutal. And it’s not even the bloggers; it’s the people who comment. It’s just, like, crazy. But they’re so—they can be so mean, so I don’t read it anymore. I just can’t. I’m in a place where I feel very good about myself. And you read that, and it’s hard not to feel bad about yourself. They say terrible things.“
Here’s my opening: “They’re obsessed about your breasts.“
“Yeah,“ says Ivanka. “This is, like, the recent obsession.“
What’s up with that?
“I don’t even want to talk about it,“ says Ivanka. “I think it’s absurd. I’ve always had a chest.“ She laughs. “I heard something that I went to Mexico. First of all, who the hell goes to Mexico to do that?“ (Especially if you live on Park Avenue.) “That’s very strange. The only thing I’m doing in Mexico is building buildings. We just announced a new project there…“
Okay, forget the Mexico thing. But is a boob job something—
“It’s just, like, it’s crazy. It’s stupid to me. Like, I’m a curvy person. I always have been. No, that’s not true. When I was like 15, I was really wiry. But I have hips, I have a body. I’m a woman, you know?“
But even if you did?
“You know what? I have no problem with that kind of stuff. I think people should do exactly what they want. And you know, I would have no problem owning up to it. It’s just—it just seems, like, beneath me to talk about it. It’s absurd. It’s just ugly. It’s just a subject I think is silly.
“I like my form. I have a little waist, I have hips, I have a chest. I feel like I have a body that’s more of a female figure, how the female form is supposed to look. And frankly? I’ve never had more interest from the opposite sex. But now I’m gonna have to throw you out,“ says Ivanka. She has to pack, has to go make deals, has to take over the universe.
And she will.
