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Books: The strange career of Donald Trump
Minette Marrin enters the world of greed and sleaze created by 'The Donald'
The Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump by Harry Hurt III Orion, pounds 18.99
'YOU'VE got to do something to keep life interesting while you're waiting to die.' This is something Donald Trump has often said and one can only assume from the extraordinary story of his life so far that he is very easily bored. Indeed, according to one of his former senior executives, he has an attention span of only 26 seconds.
The Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump is an account of how this dazzlingly unpleasant property developer has been trying to amuse himself.
At the height of his power, at the end of the Eighties and still in his early forties, Donald Trump had made his mark all over the New York skyline, with Trump Tower, Trump Plaza, Trump Palace, Trump Parc, not to mention the famous Plaza Hotel. In Atlantic City there were three big casinos and there was more, more, more, including an airline, Adnan Khashoggi's famous yacht and Mar a Lago, the sumptuous Florida estate of the breakfast cereal heiress, Marjorie Merri weather Post.
Trump also had a remarkable, arriviste Czech wife, Ivana, a new-age mistress Marla Maples - the celebrated Georgia Peach - and a mountain of debts.
The Lost Tycoon gives a very detailed account of all this and certainly captures the atmosphere of greed and manic self-delusion in which 'The Donald' did his 'scheming and beaming', as his wife put it in her broken English. It is a world of extravagant sleaze, inhabited by bent lawyers, venal politicians, fawning journalists, compliant bankers and turncoat advisers: this story is not so much a fairy-tale as an American bestiary.
Clearly Harry Hurt III has done a great deal of work in preparing this book, but it does not entirely inspire confidence. 'Donald J. Trump', starts the first page, 'wakes up in the middle of a bad dream and sees a band of baby angels hovering over his head. It's 6 am on Tuesday, October 10, 1989.
Donald has just spent another fitful night . . . still dressed in a T-shirt and undershorts Donald tosses off the covers and stares at the winged cherubs painted on the ceiling over the bed.'
If this is supposed to be a work of factual journalism, it is a curious way to begin. The continuous present tense has the feel of fiction, and in any case how could the author know such tiny details? It is possible that Trump told him about staring at cherubs but it all seems a bit implausible.
This lack of confidence is increased by the bad production of the book. Page 55 excitingly describes The Donald, driven mad by the pain of his liposuction and cosmetic scalp surgery, brutally tearing Ivana's bottle-blonde hair and raping her on their sumptuous bed, according to her.
But as the page turns, her formal account of this is suddenly interrupted; unaccountably page 56 begins mid-sentence on a construction site, with Donald about to cradle Marla in his arms.
Pages 60 and 61 are in an even worse mess, with one long section printed twice: The Donald and Marla strap their seat belts for their notorious trip to Aspen, Colorado twice in 18 lines.
Harry Hurt's style is often unattractive, with expressions such as 'braggadocian' and 'crapping out'. And despite his attempted intrusion into their private thoughts, his characters remain two-dimensional. What he is best at is straight business reporting: he has unravelled Trump's extremely tangled web of leverage and cronyism into a clear narrative thread. He makes it easy to understand what Trump did, how he rose and why he fell. He also makes it depressingly clear why no one stopped The Donald on the way up.
Goebbels was right about the size of the lie.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, September 05, 1993
