My Bizarre Dinner Party with Donald Trump, Roy Cohn and Estee Lauder
By Peter Manso
Roy Cohn’s weekend house wasn’t large, maybe two bedrooms, a brown shingle lovely that stood over a burbling brook at the end of a long, wooded driveway in north Greenwich, Connecticut. It had once been the guest house on the John P. Marquand estate and was no more than an hour’s drive from midtown Manhattan, which made its privacy all the more special. From the start I couldn’t shake the idea that the place should have been occupied by a writer or painter, not a lawyer like Cohn. There was even a waterwheel there, which would give off a homey creaking sound whenever the brook surged or ran strong.
The dinner party in question was indeed memorable for its guest list, which included Estee and Joe Lauder, the well-known royals of the cosmetics industry; the widow of Hearst columnist Bob Considine; the Cullen oil fortune’s Baron and Baroness Ricardo “Ricky” di Portanova who’d flown in from Houston in their Lear; and, yes, Donald and first wife Ivana Trump. It was 1981, springtime, and how it was I’d come to be part of this uber-rich, right-wing group is explained by the fact that I’d started interviewing Cohn for Playboy only the day before, and Cohn, always the cultivator of the press ever since his McCarthy years when he’d hooked up with gossip columnist Walter Winchell and reactionary foreign correspondent George Sokolsky, insisted that I come.
Undoubtedly, he wanted me there for his own ends, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious. It was to be a very, very strange evening.
Before we all sat down to eat, drinks were served outside on the deck, newly constructed of two by fours, which is important because one of the evening’s many bizarre moments occurred when Estee Lauder, beluga canape in one hand and champagne flute in the other, let out a loud “Fuck!” as she got one of her three-inch heels caught in the space between the wood planking. Instead of handling things calmly, however, she yanked. She came free, the heel didn’t. Cohn sprang forth, offering a pair of bedroom slippers. Lauder simply kicked off the undamaged shoe to walk around all evening in stockinged feet.
So far I hadn’t engaged, really, hanging back as I usually would do early on in a reporting assignment, but that changed when we all sat down to eat. Cohn had put me beside Trump. Back then he was years away from becoming The Donald, but he was already the boyish-faced real estate mogul, habitué of Le Cirque and staple of Page Six. In the weeks that followed this dinner, I would learn more and more about his unusually close relationship with Cohn—a relationship crucial to understanding each of them.
The two met in 1973 when Trump, then 27, and his father were being sued by the Justice Department for housing discrimination. Cohn counter-attacked, accusing the federal prosecutors of using “Gestapo-like tactics.” Later, Cohn secured for Trump massive tax abatement deals from the city for Trump Tower and even introduced Trump to Roger Stone, Richard Nixon’s dirty trickster who’s currently The Donald’s in and out chief braintruster. Cohn was legally indispensable but socially indispensable, too, introducing Trump to nightclub owners, media heavyweights and underworld figures. And, of course, there were the politicos, which included most of the city’s major elected officials and a handful of New York City judges who were said to be at Cohn’s beck and call 24/7. His win-at-any-cost style, brashness and love for the spotlight made an impact on the younger Trump.
Trump was sitting to my left, Ivana opposite us, beside Cohn, the others seated around the table, and all of them, I gathered, friends for years. Di Portanova (a.k.a. “Ricky the Playboy” if you read the tabs) was a Cohn client as well.
Things got off to a happy start with the perennially tanned Cohn playing toastmaster: There was a toast to Ronald Reagan, the still very new president, and another to Alfonse D’Amato, the rookie senator from New York. Then Cohn introduced me as “the Playboy man in our midst,” which obliged me to rise and take a bow. When he finally sat down, the food was served by two of Cohn’s office boys who, I’d already heard through the grapevine, were, as a group, Cohn’s lovers; one of whom our genial host openly addressed as “Saboo.” Why Saboo? Because, as I later found out from Roy himself, the dark skinned Filipino fit “the profile.”
Was Cohn a racist? Of course. Roy Cohn was an anti-Semite, a homophobe, a woman hater and of course an anti-Communist. He harbored a bundle of thinly concealed prejudices that he’d trot out whenever one or more of them worked for him, whenever they were useful. What else is new?
Now, as Saboo placed my salad plate in front of me he came within a hair’s breadth of dumping Trump’s salad, which had been balanced in the crook of the server’s arm, in the developer’s lap. The Donald reacted swiftly, pushing himself away from the table. Saboo nodded an apology and quickly moved on.
Back in his seat, The Donald rolled his eyes. “That’s all I need, right?”
“But, tell me,” he went on, “Roy says you live on the Cape, and that you’re writing a book about Norman Mailer.”
“Correct.”
“Norman’s smart but a little crazy, right?”
I nodded, trying to come up with a serviceable answer to this surpassingly dull question but before I could do so, Trump went on: “Playboy’s called me about doing the interview with them. Should I do it, you think?”
He was looking at me with a kind of hauteur, the way big guys often look at small guys which is what I am—a small guy—and I nodded.
“As a rule they’re very thorough,” I said, referring to Playboy’s interviewers. “The magazine gives its writers as much time as they need and they don’t nickel and dime you on expenses.”
“How much time would it take, do you think?”
I explained that it varies from one subject to the next. He nodded back, not quite looking at me. His hair wasn’t as sculpted as it is now but the balding was obvious, as were his moves to hide it.
We did chitchat for a couple of minutes more, filling the space. At one point, Ivana asked where on Cape Cod I lived. The salad gave way to the main course, which had been brought in from a local restaurant then reheated—it was a pasta and lobster mélange, expensive, but hardly Chez Panisse—and then, out of nowhere, The Donald resumed, saying ever so brightly, “Hey, here’s an idea. I want the hippest, the brightest people living there. You’d fit right in.”
I looked at him quizzically. “’There?’”
Then he did it, I kid you not. He tried to sell me a condo.
“Trump Towers, which is gonna be just spectacular.”
“Huh?”
Was he joking? I let him go on.
“Bruce Willis is signing up, all kinds of people. People in the arts, political figures. You’d fit right in.”
I grinned. Years before I’d learned that the proper response to rich people who don’t, or won’t, appreciate that your situation isn’t the same as theirs is to explode the fiction right off since there’s always the possibility that what they’re doing stems not from ignorance so much as they’re trying to make you feel small and uncomfortable. It’s a form of bullying.
It’s also crass. Here Trump was at his pal lawyer’s dinner table in this lovely house, sitting with at least two other couples who could have bought and sold him several times over yet he’s desperately vying for top-dog status, flexing muscle by trying to sell a free-lance writer real estate. It was the same smarmy narcissism that you find in used car salesmen and which, plainly, these past 35 years has fueled Trump’s biz dealings, his TV forays, his penchant for compliant blonds and, now, his quest for the presidency.
Anything and everything becomes an excuse for stepping on-stage, positioning himself for the close-up. That was the man’s core, the need for the close-up—never mind the unfeasibility of building walls along the Mexican border or the impossibility of kicking out all Muslims, or for that matter, successfully selling me a condo. The real thing here was being up on-stage, which is what I am afraid is what underlies, to a degree we have never before seen in a candidate, his quest for the White House.
But to come back.
I explained that I didn’t have the money to buy a Trump Towers condo, hoping to put an end to this nonsense. He nodded as if he already knew that.
“We’ll work it out, no problem,” he countered, waving his hand dismissively. “We’ve ordered Breccia Pernice which is this rare pink, white-veined marble for the lobby,” he said. “It’s gorgeous stuff. And there’s going to be an atrium with a waterfall. Cafes. Even a pedestrian bridge.”
This was of course the salesman in The Donald, son of Fred Trump. Once past the pedestrian bridge, he went on, enumerating how the building’s block-long arcade was going to have a Gucci boutique, all kinds of merchandise kiosks and a number of fine restaurants. When he got through his list he added, “You’d never have to leave the building. Say you were on-deadline, the weather’s lousy—“
“Donald,” I interrupted, using his given name for the first time, “do you have any idea what Playboy pays me for one of these interviews? Fifteen grand, plus expenses. And these pieces take two months. I’m not Bruce Willis, not some Arab sheikh. So enough, huh?”
He stopped himself in a way that wasn’t a stop since he pulled a business card out of the breast pocket of his blazer that he placed on the table between us—not in front of me but to the side a somewhat, as if, to say, If you want it you’re going to have to reach a little.
“Think about it. You call me, we’ll have lunch.”
Then he got up, excusing himself as he went off to the john.
***
My Cohn profile was published and I saw Roy, whose wit and seemingly unlimited capacity for evil came to fascinate me, a number of times before he died in 1986 after contracting AIDS and his relationship with Trump, reportedly, soured.
In the meantime, Trump’s public profile grew. He completed Trump Towers to great public fanfare and finished up the stalled Wollman Rink renovation in Central Park that allowed him to thumb his nose at archenemy Ed Koch. He acquired what became the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, put up what seemed like an uncountable number of new structures including the 72-story Trump World Tower and Trump Place on the Hudson. He created a string of golf courses here and abroad, just as he produced a run of ghost-written best-sellers with huckster titles like The Art of the Deal and How to Get Rich, “branded” an assortment of consumer products including steaks, vodka, a cologne and a line of men’s fashions and bought up several beauty contests. But he also got himself sued for $40 million for allegedly swindling thousands of subscribers to his Trump University business course, just as he was forced to declare four Chapter 11 bankruptcies between 1991 and 2009 in connection with his casinos and resorts.
He bounced back, however, like the Icarus who wouldn’t die. His grandiosity, narcissism and competitiveness all allowed him to become The Donald—always on-stage, always recreating the world in his own self-image.
***
I was to see Trump one more time, about three years ago when I went to his office to interview him in connection with a book I was thinking of writing. He was behind his desk, pictures of himself famously covering the walls, and as soon as I sat down he slid two or three sheets of paper at me. They were the first and several of the last pages of his corporate tax return. “Look at the last page,” he said.
There, at the bottom of the page was a figure of many, many zeroes that took me a moment or two to assimilate—7 billion and a fraction, which represented the developer’s (purported) book net worth, here listed in connection with his deductions and depreciations. I was supposed to be impressed. But this time, unlike when he had tried to sell me a condo, I laughed.
I passed the sheets back across to him. It was the same deal, the same showing off.
“This is a joke,” I said, chuckling, “I can’t relate to this, and frankly, I don’t know anyone who could.”
Peter Manso is the author of the standard bios of Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando. He lives in Berkeley and on Cape Cod.
