SAGE-APPROPRIATE SEX
BETWEEN HIS FIRST and third marriages, Trump evolved from the brash, rich, yuppie family man with a “wife-twin” to a too-big-to-fail businessman who dragged down banks and shareholders with his $900 million midlife debt crisis. His consort during this very costly transformation was Marla Maples.
Maples was born in Cohutta, Georgia, in 1963, an overachiever in high school who earned trophies for everything from basketball to swimming to clarinet and was almost Miss Georgia Teen. (She lost to a clogger with a better community service record.) She tried college for a while, held on to her high school boyfriend too long, got pregnant, had an abortion that was decidedly against her religion, then moved to New York City, where she got a few modeling jobs—a Delta Air Lines billboard—and a small part in a Stephen King movie. (She played a woman crushed to death by watermelons.)
Trump first took up with Maples after a party he threw himself to celebrate the publication of The Art of the Deal in 1987. Their eyes locked in a receiving line studded with celebs like Michael Douglas and Cheryl Tiegs, politicos and socialites. “You could see the fireworks go off the second Donald and Marla set eyes on each other,” Maples’s walker that night, an EX-NYPD cop named Tom Fitzsimmons, told Trump biographer Hurt. “I’ll never forget the way he kept winking and staring at her even though Ivana was so close to them she couldn’t help seeing the whole thing.”
Maples was a Baptist by birth, but by the time she met Trump, she was a disciple of New Age theories, doggedly trying to channel the wisdom of ancient sages. “I just think the first moment I met him, I had a sense like I had known him before,” she told Access Hollywood last year. “It was much deeper than just whatever you might feel. We had a sense of like, if you believe in past lives or you don’t, it was as if we had known each other.”
Even though he had a wife and three kids, Trump wooed Maples hard, bombarding her with news clips about himself and declaring publicly that their time in bed was the best sex he’d ever had. She returned the compliment—in the New York Post— but also reported that he would never let her see him naked: He made her leave the room while he got undressed and would be under the covers when she came back.
Even before Ivana was out, Donald was loaning money to Maples’s father and inviting him up to Atlantic City to attend prizefights. Trump also agreed to help Maples get modeling and acting gigs, but according to Hurt, he made her sign a contract in which she agreed to pay him a percentage of every job she got.
They wed in December 1993, three months after she’d given birth to Trump’s fourth child, Tiffany. Maples wore an off-the-shoulder Carolina Herrera gown and a tiara studded with 325 diamonds. Guests noshed from a groaning board piled with $60,000 worth of caviar, sushi, smoked fish, lamb, turkey, beef, plus six vertical feet of vanilla-cream wedding cake.
Trump’s three children from his first marriage didn’t show.
“I HAVE TO HAVE A STRONG MAN…. THIS IS WHY MOST FEMINISTS AREN’T MARRIED AND HAVE NO CHILDREN.”
In Maples, Trump no longer had a wife-twin, but she was a demanding young woman and their bliss didn’t last long. In 1999, he let Maples know that he was divorcing her by first telling a few reporters at the New York Post. The National Enquirer reported that she got ticketed for frolicking on a Florida beach at 4 a.m., a few miles south of Mar-a-Lago, with one of her security guards. Marla denied any hanky-panky, but after that, she didn’t have much leverage to renegotiate her prenup, so she settled for just $2 million—coincidentally, the cost of her wedding tiara—and moved with Tiffany to Southern California to “find a quieter, more spiritual existence.” Her agents proposed a tell-all book, All That Glitters Is Not Gold. Harpercollins bought it, describing it in its 2001 catalog as “this remarkably candid memoir”—but never published it.
Donald and Marla have remained friends, possibly because that remarkably candid book was never published. A few days after the election, she slipped into Trump Tower for a 45-minute audience with the president-elect. She flashed her famous sweet smile at reporters on the way out without saying a word, but her publicist let it be known that she was angling for her dream job, U.N. ambassador of goodwill to poor African nations. The only problem, journalists snickered, is that U.S. presidents don’t appoint U.N. ambassadors to Africa.
In a New York Times profile of Tiffany shortly before the election, Maples wielded the Southern shiv of faint praise: “I had the blessing of raising her pretty much on my own,” adding that Tiffany “would like to get to know her father better and spend time with him like his other children did, by going to his office and watching him work. Only now, he’s not in the office anymore. He’s on the campaign trail.”
But long before the presidential campaign, Tiffany was destined to be the forgotten Trump child. The Lion in Winter had moved on.