Big Apple Is Fascinated by the Big Fall
As tycoon Donald J. Trump’s financial troubles deepened this week, the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Manhattan set up a special display of Trump’s “Art of the Deal” with a tin cup and a sign: “Brother, can you spare a dime?”
The cup quickly filled up with coins and the store with “laughs and snickering,” said Felice Rose, manager of the Upper West Side landmark.
The reaction was typical. New Yorkers don’t like to see a man down, you understand. But when Queens’ own sultan of swagger is getting his comeuppance, maybe it’s inevitable that there’s some ill-concealed delight mixed with the sympathy.
Among the 60-odd Midtown Manhattan tenants who battled Trump in the courts for five years over his plan to evict them, “reactions have varied from glee to concern that this was going to stain New York’s image,” said Richard Fischbein, the lawyer who represented them.
Other real estate developers in town “feel the man pretty much had it coming,” said one important local real estate investor, who asked to remain unidentified.
Wrote Gail Collins, a columnist in the New York Daily News: “We are about to have one of those magic New York moments where people of all creeds, races and economic backgrounds join together in a single thought:
“Hehehehehehe.”
“Everyone’s having a real good time casting stones. It’s universal,” said Liz Smith, the Daily News gossip columnist, a one-time Trump friend who’s had frigid relations with him since she seemed to take wife Ivana’s side in their marital dispute. “This is the perfect end-of-the-’80s story of the mighty falling, and the man in the street can’t help but enjoy it.
“Donald Trump has conducted his affairs, and everything else, with so much publicity for so long,” she said. “He’s lived by the sword, and now he’s dying by it.”
It’s a curious measure of New Yorkers’ admiration for Trump that many believe The Donald (as Ivana called him in happier times) has stirred up the publicity in a tactic to avoid paying her a large divorce settlement.
In dozens of interviews Thursday in front of the Trump Tower and Trump’s Plaza Hotel, few thought the magnate was actually in deep trouble. Many--especially women--insisted that the reports of financial distress were just aimed at keeping Ivana from her fair share of the dough.
“I don’t believe it,” said Susanne Gyuro, who was window shopping at Trump Tower with a daughter from California. “He’s just saying it so his wife doesn’t get more money.”
“It’s all a big scam,” said Joe Picard, an IBM employee who was sitting beneath the Pulitzer Fountain, across the street from the Plaza. “He’s the kind of person who loves the attention and who loves to put people on.”
Picard also thought that Trump might be just seeking advantage in divorce court.
Many New Yorkers came to admire this son of a Swedish immigrant as Trump accumulated hotels, office towers, casinos and airlines, and gave each his name. But he’s also been making his share of enemies in this town--and elsewhere--for a long time.
When the Central Park South tenants group defeated Trump’s attempt to replace their building with a hotel, Trump sued lawyer Fischbein and his firm on federal racketeering charges. (He lost.) Trump once sued a Chicago Tribune architecture critic for criticizing one of his buildings; he recently tried to have columnist Smith fired.
He apparently succeeded in arranging the firing of a Philadelphia stock analyst who was not sufficiently enthusiastic about Trump’s casino properties.
Last year, Trump was delicate enough to tell the press that the wife of rival developer Leonard Stern was calling him up for dates. And he ignited a battle with former New York Mayor Ed Koch by calling for Koch to quit because Trump believed him unfit for the job.
“If people screw me, I screw back in spades,” Trump was once quoted as saying.
But some New Yorkers have concluded that Trump’s fabled aggressive powers won’t help him now. A cartoon Wednesday in the New York Post showed a dazed Trump on Skid Row, peering from a cardboard box labeled “Trump Carton.”
Yet Trump is also hearing expressions of sympathy from some unexpected quarters.
Spy magazine, based in New York, has made Trump and his wife the butt of its satire for years. Now, “we’re gloating, yes, but we also feel some glimmer of sympathy for the guy,” said Kurt Andersen, Spy’s editor. “And we’re afraid that if he disappears too fast, we’ll lack for a large, entertaining subject.”
Government officials and editorialists have warned that the area’s stagnant economy and city’s depleted treasury can’t afford the loss of any of the 30,000 jobs that are directly or indirectly dependent on his empire.
And some New Yorkers consider Trump a hometown hero at a time when they’re in short supply.
Outside the Plaza, in the line of horse-drawn carriages waiting to take hotel guests on trips through Central Park, carriage driver Thomas Moran said he’d hate to see Trump fall.
“The Japanese are buying everything,” Moran said. “Trump is the only American who seems to be able to buy property in New York.”
Liz Smith said that, in her interviews with Trump this week, he sounds anything but chastened. Yet she has lots of sympathy for him and believes that his bankruptcy would be “terrible for the city.”
“I think he’ll sell a few things and regroup, and we’ll see more of him,” she said. Will the new Trump be a wiser Trump? “I’m not sure he’ll ever be restrained; it’s just not in his temperament,” Smith said.
