Everything you need to know about the time I cheered Ivanka up at Trump Tower.
Aside from tending bar at a 1950's themed club near where I grew up, my first job after graduating from Vassar was as Assistant to producer Billy Kimball at Comedy Central on a program called Everything You Need To Know. It was a humorous take on current events which grew out of the network's pretty groundbreaking coverage of the previous year's election with Al Franken's Indecision '92, which itself owed a debt to HBO's Not Necessarily The News and a sort of precursor to Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.
Possibly the best thing about the pilot episode was the fabulous opening credits designed by Michael Bierut for Pentagram. The original EYNTK featured a very, very dry (and possibly drunk) Christopher Hitchens monologuing over visuals assembled from CONUS video feeds from news networks across the country. It was a valiant effort for a network still becoming itself and which would have greater success with the concurrent freshman season of Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect.
By the time I arrived in the Fall of 1993, EYNTK's format was short interstitial bits covering current events via those assembled news feeds and a voice over narration. The sorts of things the internet and "going viral" eat up nowadays, but this was before the world wide web became world wide or regular email use was a thing or people had cell phones even. So, the dark ages according to my children. EYNTK doesn't get mentioned in AV Club's ode to Comedy Central, there are no clips available and no one involved is included on the brief IMDB entry. I'd lay claim if I could. I'm always looking for extra credit.
At that point in my life, idealistic, full of youthful vigor and armed only with an Art History / Film degree and an exciting internship I'd had at CNN on STYLE with Elsa Klensch, I was determined to work in TV. Ah, back when CNN actually meant something. In an case, although I dreamed of being an MTV VJ, having graduated into what then was one of the worst economic landscapes in quite some time and aching to get out of the suburbs I was thrilled to get a job in some approximation of my chosen career field. It lasted a few exciting months, during which time I was privileged to work with writer / producers Francis Gasparini and Roger Ross Williams and got to know New York's media landscape and nightlife. EYNTK was a very lean operation; we multi-tasked and covered all sorts of things from the inaugural "7th on 6th" New York Fashion Week to the Joey Buttafuoco trial to Fabio's debut as an author, which is why I got to go to Trump Tower.
Fabio, he of Romance-novel cover ab-baring fame had written a novel and we were to accompany Bob Morris, then writing a lovely column called THE NIGHT for the Sunday New York Times, to cover an event being held in his honor by Ivana Trump at her apartment in Trump Tower. I had never been in the building and it promised a view into a world I had absolutely no personal experience of so I was eager to go. Plus: free drinks and hors d'oeuvres which was how any of us managed to survived on what we were paid.
It was awful. The apartment was even more outrageously tacky than I had expected. Stultifyingly covered in gold and marble, but simultaneously cheap looking. A Baroque nightmare with a Rococo hangover. Having been to Trump Taj Mahal whilst spending a summer in NJ, I was shocked at the similarities between an Atlantic City Casino and a deluxe apartment in the sky . . um, I mean on Fifth Avenue. It was a suffocating atmosphere and as Bob noted in his column (which was published the day River Phoenix died), despite being a party was a very sad affair (I am the woman with the novels in the elevator.)
I do not recall the party being well-attended and I was pretty certain there would be no way to "cover it," but I did get to chat with Fabio, who was actually very charming and asked for my number. He never called, though, but I ran into him a few years later at a Japanese restaurant in Beverly Hills and he remembered our meeting which was very sweet.
The former Mrs. Trump was frenetically doing her best to be light and charming but it got very strange when her very unhappy children were paraded out - gray little specimens in contrast with all of the gold. In retrospect, forced to be there as some sort of display that the kids were alright, maybe?
But they weren't. Not Ivanka at least.
I wasn't familiar with what had happened with her parents. I just knew they were divorced and it had not been a great look for her dad. At one point during the party, I ended up near Ivanka and her nanny who was attempting to console the crying girl. As she was about my younger sister's age at the time (she was and seemed so down, I asked what was wrong. As it turned out her birthday was approaching (10/30/1981) and she was very worried that her dad wouldn't spend time with her as her new younger sister had been born within the past few weeks (10/13/1993.) I had no experience with this sort of thing and I recall giving her a strange little hug and saying that I'm sure her dad would make time for her on her birthday. And I thought, wow, her dad is a jerk. I still do. My closest personal encounter with the man I refer to only as orange (no capitalization) was once when taking my then 2 year-old-son to Niketown, which shares an entrance atrium with Trump Tower and is its tenant. The entrance was blocked until orange could exit the building and enter his car which I was told could take several minutes, maybe even a half hour. The reasoning from security? He was always in a rush and didn't like it when tourists got in his way entering or exiting the building. We were not tourists. I later found out it's a public space. We went around the block and I have never entered Niketown via that atrium again.
Fast forward 23 years, and the picture is all a lot different now and much more disturbing. For me the political is inherently personal and you cannot truly separate one's public and private faces. When I started seeing her on The Apprentice (a program whose hostility towards humanity I felt ushered in a new low for TV) or along these months on the campaign trail, it's always rung so false for me, her devotion to her dad, especially based on this brief encounter. It's simplistic but she seems like a child desperately seeking - competing for in fact - paternal affection, willing to do or say anything to obtain it and never lose it or her wealth again, humanity be damned. In the documentary Born Rich, she comes off as entirely removed from reality, yet not quite as awful as the rest, much like she still is today. Yes, she is very polished and “successful,” but also the ne plus ultra of privilege and advantage. With education, long legs, steady income and available staff much is possible and as the daughter of a working mother (who I always suspected “had” to work during the lean years,) she had a built-in role model. Were she not doing so much to push back women’s rights with her sham feminism I might have given her a pass. But those days are over; she is as complicit in her father’s personal enrichment end game as anyone. The fact that she turned her convention speech into a shop-able moment (for clothing made possible via policies she would see no other “designer” benefit from) sort of says it all, what it’s about for her. In the film, there’s a telling scene when she discusses her dad’s bankruptcy and the then and the now of Ivanka start to make sense; she was a sad, clueless child who has turned into a hungry adult - like Scarlett O’Hara wandering around the ruins of Tara, spotting that carrot and vowing to never be hungry or needy again.
Greed, no matter how gilded, is never good.
