In death, as in life, her famous ex-husband loomed over Ivana Trump’s story.
On Wednesday afternoon, as a funeral was held for Mrs. Trump at a Catholic church on the Upper East Side, former President Donald J. Trump, along with his current wife, Melania, were there, sitting in the front row across from their three children: Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr.
The Trump Organization handled the funeral arrangements and the casket is a gold hue. The Secret Service stayed away.
Outside the church of Saint Vincent Ferrer, photographers and about 100 onlookers stood behind barricades. Perhaps the only sign anyone held up read, “PRAYERS AND CONDOLENCES TO THE TRUMP FAMILY. GOD BLESS AND PROTECT YOU.”
Inside, the church was less than half full. There were many Hermès bags, but few names in bold from the gilded part of Manhattan society the couple had inhabited in the 1980s and 1990s.
Most of the speeches about Mrs. Trump, who died last week at the age of 73 in her New York apartment, focused on her tireless drive, shaped by growing up in Czechoslovakia behind the Iron Curtain. Those who praised her also spoke of the friendship that Mrs. Trump and her ex-husband were able to build despite the bitter divorce in the tabloids. (Ms. Trump was briefly married then widowed before her marriage to Mr. Trump, and the two husbands who followed him predeceased her.)
Her children offered a loving insight into her pushy parenting style.
In a speech, her son Eric, 38, described his mother as the embodiment of the American dream, something of a cross between Joan Rivers and Claudia Schiffer, he said.
“She had brains, beauty and guts,” he said, going on to claim that she had won “the hearts and minds of every single person in the U.S. on the Home Shopping Network and QVC.”
He added: “She still holds all the sales records. People adored Ivana.”
As a parent, he said, she “rules with an iron fist and a heart of gold.”
Those two things were the subject of much of Donald Trump Jr.’s speech that followed soon after.
“In the tumultuous times of the last few years, with all the attacks that we’ve faced,” said Mr. Trump, 44, “she was the first person to call and see if maybe I wanted or maybe I needed to come back back with her. That call was both the sweetest and most emasculating thing ever. And she could do that with the best of them, and it was usually on purpose.
When he was a small child, Mr. Trump said, he went with his family to the Hamptons. While there, he operated at Gosman’s (Montauk’s most famous seafood joint) in a way that “pushed the limits” of everyone’s patience. His mother, he said, took him to the bathroom and showed him “what Eastern European discipline really is.”
When it was over, he said, she told him, “And if you cry, we’re going to come back here and do this again.”
The younger Mr Trump – whose fiancee, the former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle, sat across from him – told another story about his sister Ivanka destroying a very expensive chandelier while playing in the house with a beach ball. “Ivanka was able to quickly convince my mother that it was me,” he said.
This time the “cure,” as he put it, was a “wooden spoon,” and what made his mother even angrier as she spanked him was his ardent denial that he had played any part in the misbehavior. “Not only had I broken the chandelier, but now I was also lying to her,” he said.
But by the time she realized he was telling the truth, Mr. Trump said, she was “too tired to deal with Ivanka.”
40-year-old Ivanka Trump also spoke. Her mother “hated funerals,” she said, breaking down in tears as she spoke of the “pioneer admired by men and women alike” for her “grace and beauty” but also for her business prowess and relentless work ethic .
She was also one of those mothers who teased her daughter for leaving a party in St. Tropez at 1 a.m. (“She stayed until 4”) and scolded her for wearing too modest clothes. “My panties weren’t mini enough,” she said. (Mrs. Trump wore a black dress and pearls to her mother’s funeral.) Ivana’s motto, her daughter said, was “fail ’em while you got ’em.”
“She taught me to study hard, work hard, carry myself with dignity and good manners and never, ever marry a man with a bad back,” Mrs. Trump said. “It took me years to figure out that last one.” (On her daughter’s marriage to Jared Kushner, Mrs. Trump said her mother said that “Ivanka has to really love him if she’s willing to give up lobster .”)
“Now she’s looking down on us, telling us to dry our eyes, have a good time and dance to one more song for her,” Mrs Trump said. “Mom, I love you today, every day.”
The crowd was on Park Avenue and adjacent to the fashion industry, although Whitney Robinson, a former Elle Decor editor who had befriended the older Mrs Trump in recent years, was in the back and said she had “no idea” who most of the people there were.
But they included Paolo Zampoli, the former modeling agent whom Mr. Trump appointed to the board of trustees at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; Dennis Basso, the fashion designer whose highly styled fur designs Mrs. Trump favored; Currie Hay, the publicist and gossip journalist; and Jeanine Pirro, the right-wing news anchor.
Near the lectern was a poster board of Mrs. Trump on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1992 above the headline “Ivana Be a Star.” One of the speakers would later name all the other magazines she had graced the covers of, including Town & Country and Vogue. But Mrs. Trump has led an increasingly solitary life in her later years, according to Mark Bauer, a designer who dressed her for many years and who also sat further back, wearing a black suit, shirtless and glittering a jeweled necklace that he thinks Mrs. Trump would like; she was an adamant proponent of pairing fake jewelry with super expensive clothes.
“She was isolated,” Mr. Bower continued in a brief interview at the church. “There was a lot of pain, a lot of sadness,” he said, before declining to elaborate.
Dorothy Curry, the former nanny for Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric, was perhaps the most notable speaker. In her two-minute speech, she hinted at that isolation, talking about how she had been close to Mrs Trump during the spring and summer of her life, followed by autumn and an “inevitable winter” of “dying roses” as she her former employer’s dreams became a “sinking swamp” of “parasites” who kept her “afloat” with “illegal dreams and schemes.”
“Ivana, we’ve reached out to you many, many times, but apparently we haven’t gone far enough,” she said. “We all let ourselves go and let God, and now you are entirely in God’s hands.”
Instead, Mr. Basso described the good years. He recalled meeting Mrs. Trump in September 1983 when she showed her first collection at the Regency Hotel and then she went backstage to meet him.
“She’s standing there in a chocolate brown Gucci,” he said, “and she’s like, ‘I like you.’ You are cute. You’re chubby, but we can fix that.”
The next day, he said, she arrived at his showroom for an appointment and walked out with an order for seven, along with an order to “send the bill to Donald.”
Mr. Basso and others said she was a businesswoman who was instrumental in decorating the hotels and apartment buildings her ex-husband worked on, including Trump Tower, the Plaza Hotel and the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. And when he ran for president, she supported him wholeheartedly.
Mrs. Trump shared her ex-husband’s hunger for attention, and it wasn’t easy, others said in interviews, as her celebrity faded and his rose again, first with the TV show “The Apprentice” and then when he became a successful presidential candidate . The grown children she had largely raised had become appendages to him.
Nearly two hours after the funeral began, pallbearers carried the casket outside to an evening performance by Christopher Macchio, who also sang at the Republican National Convention as the former president accepted his party’s 2020 nomination. Mr. Trump and his current wife, Melania , dragged behind the body, followed by Ivanka, Eric and Don Jr.
The casket was placed in a black hearse bearing the name of the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, the near-resting place for many members of New York’s elite. It was directed to her ex-husband’s golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, where the ground was consecrated so that Mrs Trump could have a traditional Catholic burial.
In a way, this was the former couple’s last real estate deal together.
Add Comment