Trumped up Ivana

Finally, an hour after we arrive, Ivana descends the staircase. She apologises for being late and thanks us graciously for coming. For a terrible moment, I fear she might do a Michael Jackson and squeal, “I love you!” Thankfully, she leans wordlessly against the piano, turning her head this way and that at the photographers’ requests.

Ivana, who turned 50 last week, has clearly had some plastic surgery, but it is exceptionally good work. Her mouth is pouty, her eyes kittenish. She has one of the few nose jobs that isn’t piggy. She looks how Brigitte Bardot might have looked at this age if she’d kept out of the sun. Like Cher, she is a camp icon for whom one feels affection rather than pity. Close up, Ivana’s hair is as mercilessly teased as the kid in the playground. It is canary yellow, with dark roots. For someone so rich, she has poor person’s hair which, though her backers won’t say it, is one reason they can be sure the lifestyle magazine she is promoting will reachits desired market.

Trailer-trash hair plus Thierry Mugler suit equals National Enquirer. In fact, Ivana’s Living in Style is backed by the same company that owns one of the Enquirer‘s main rivals. The Globe is a tabloid so trashy it makes the National Enquirer look like The New Yorker. Ivana does an advice column for it called “Ivana’s Advice for the ’90s”. If you have a question about love, money, fashion or fitness, she has the answer.

She speaks softly in a heavy accent, stumbling over certain words; she is appealing and quite intelligent. She is keen to point out that, as a champion athlete, she was famous in her country by the age of 17. “Thankfully, I was not bad looking. I made quite a bit of money as a model, so I could ski — a very expensive sport. You have to travel and sleep in hotels. So I supported myself and also made enough to pay for an education,” she says.

She has three children from her marriage to Trump: sons Donald Jr, 19, and Eric,13, and the long-legged Ivanka, 16, who has recently started modelling. “I don’t worry about my daughter,” Ivana says, “because she was brought up with my values. Don’t steal, cheat or lie, or take drugs or alcohol. She is a straight-A student. She wants to be a lawyer. She does modelling only because it amuses her, but her life will be built on education.”

Her first marriage was to Freddie Winklmayr, an Austrian industrialist, in 1972. She married Trump in 1977 and divorced him 14 years later. Her settlement was $40 million. Her most recent marriage, to Richard Mazzuchelli, lasted just 18 months. Now she is seeing ex-boxer Roffredo Gaetani, an Italian count. I ask if it feels strange that, to the West, she only began to exist when she got married.

“That is not true.” She smiles sweetly. “I only existed when I got divorced.” Is that hurtful? She holds the smile, like the former beauty queen she is. “No, it does not hurt. I know what I have done.” She first did what she had to do when she arrivedin America aged 24. Ivana continues to visit her mother, who still lives in the same area in what is now the Czech Republic. “But I don’t want to live there and I don’t want to do business there. It took me 24 years to get out of that country,” she says.Get out she well and truly did. I just have time to ask what she feels has been the most surreal moment in her life. She stops smiling. “There have been no surreal moments. Because everything I have done in my life, I have worked for,” she says. “It didn’t just happen with a fortune in my lap. There were no surprises. I never have one deal on the table, always 10. Some work and some don’t. America is immigrant country. All the most successful people, all the most important, are immigrants.” I had not allowed for the possibility that Ivana might be smart, but I should have. For a start, she lived with Donald Trump and managed not to kill him.

The Observer News Service