I met with all the presidents of the casinos. Not surprisingly, a lot of their answers were canned, and I realized that they weren’t going to give me dirt on what was happening in their boss’s business at the height of the chaos and dysfunction. The trips weren’t a total waste of time; I’d never been down there before, and at least I got a sense of the place.
My meeting with John Barry was even less productive than the trips to Atlantic City.
“What can you tell me?” I asked him.
He rolled his eyes.
Finally Donald told me his editor wanted to meet with me. A lunch was set up, and I arrived at the restaurant thinking he and I were going to be discussing next steps. It was an expensive “in” place in Midtown, and we were seated at a small, cramped table near the kitchen.
With very little preliminary conversation, the editor told me that Random House wanted Donald to hire someone with more experience.
“I’ve been working on this for a while,” I said, “and I think I’ve made some progress. The problem is, I can’t get Donald to sit down with me for an interview.”
“You can’t expect to play a Mozart concerto the first time you sit down at a piano,” the editor said, as if I’d just learned the alphabet the day before.
“Donald told me he likes what I’ve done so far,” I said.
The editor looked at me as if I’d just proved his point for him. “Donald hasn’t read any of it,” he said.
I stopped at the office the next day to clear out my desk and hand over anything that might be useful to my eventual replacement. I wasn’t upset. I didn’t even mind that Donald had had somebody else fire me. The project had hit a wall. Besides, after all of the time I had spent in his office, I still had no idea what he actually did.
C
HAPTER
T
EN
Nightfall Does Not Come at Once
We were sitting at the same table at Mar-a-Lago where I’d had lunch with Donald and Marla a couple of years earlier. The family had started going there for Easter. My grandfather turned to my grandmother, pointed to me, smiled, and asked, “Who is this nice lady?”
He turned to me. “Aren’t you a nice lady.”
“Thank you, Grandpa,” I said.
Gam seemed upset. I told her not to worry. I’d already seen people my grandfather had known for decades erased from his memory: his youngest grandchildren, his driver. His new nickname for me stuck, and he called me “nice lady” until his final illness. He said it gently and with apparent kindness; he was very sweet to me after he’d forgotten who I was.
“Come on, Pop.” Rob took a step, but my grandfather didn’t move. He looked around at the crowds of people at a gala thrown in my grandparents’ honor, and his eyes glazed over with a look of sheer panic, as if he suddenly had no idea who anybody was or what he was doing there. Up until then, I had only seen my grandfather look contemptuous, annoyed, angry, amused, and self-satisfied. The look of fear was new and alarming. The only other time I had seen my grandfather look unsettled at all was on the one occasion Donald had taken him to play golf—a hobby that Donald spent an inordinate amount of time on but that Fred, who had no use for pastimes, never complained about. I was at the House when they came back from the course, and I almost didn’t recognize him. They were both wearing golf clothes—my grandfather in light blue pants, a white cardigan, and matching white shoes. It was the first time I’d ever seen my grandfather wearing something other than a suit. I’d never seen him look so uncomfortable and self-conscious before.
Soon he’d go from habitually misplacing things and forgetting a word or a conversation here and there to forgetting familiar faces. You could measure your worth in my grandfather’s eyes by how long he remembered you. I don’t know if he remembered Dad, because I never once heard him mention my father in the years after his death.
Maryanne made sure my cousin David, by then a clinical psychologist, accompanied my grandfather to all of his appointments for checkups and neurological exams in a concerted effort to cement him in my grandfather’s memory, but it didn’t take long before my grandfather simply referred to David as “the doctor.”
I was standing with Maryanne and my grandfather by the pool at Mar-a-Lago when he pointed to me and said to his daughter, “Isn’t she a nice lady?” A year or so had passed since he’d first given me the sobriquet.
“Yes, Dad,” Maryanne said. She smiled wearily.
He looked at her carefully and, almost as an afterthought, asked, “Who are you?”
Her eyes watered as if somebody had slapped her. “Dad,” she said gently, “it’s Maryanne.”
“Okay, Maryanne.” He smiled, but the name didn’t mean anything to him anymore.
He never forgot Donald.
Rob, who’d left his position as president of Trump’s Castle (of the infamous $3.15 million chip bailout) under a cloud, had sat in for my grandfather at Trump Management during his 1991 hospitalization and never left. It was a good gig for Robert. In addition to the millions of dollars a year he got simply by virtue of the fact that he was one of Fred’s living children, he was also paid half a million dollars a year to do a job that required little skill or effort. It was the position for which Freddy and then Donald had been groomed—and had rejected, each in his own way.
Fred still went to the office every day and sat behind his desk until it was time to go home, but Rob was actually, if not nominally,
