HERE IS THE WOMAN DONALD TRUMP dumped: Looking like a billion in a canary-yellow Versace minidress, Ivana Trump, 43, glides through the West Palm Beach, Fla., airport on the arm of an elegant European businessman. He escorts her onto a Delta Air Lines jet for Chicago and into a first-class seat. "I'm going to miss you very much," he whispers in a Mediterranean accent.
Is this reality, or a romantic fantasy? With Ivana, whose palpitating first novel, For Love Alone, floods into bookstores this week, low art definitely imitates high life. The gentleman is Italian businessman Riccardo Mazzucchelli, 48, Ivana's beau of the past 10 months, with whom she has just spent three precious days at Donald Trump's palatial 118-room Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, which she is entitled to use one month each year as part of her divorce settlement.
She and Mazzucchelli nuzzle until the final boarding call is announced. Then Riccardo rises, blows her a kiss and murmurs, "Ciao." Sigh.
The glow of amore is still in Ivana's eyes that evening at the Chicago Hilton and Towers, where 1,600 middle-class fans have paid $20 a head to hear Ivana expound on the topic "Women Who Dare." "I want to speak with you women who dare to do, women who dare to take risks, women who dare to juggle all the pieces of themselves," she begins in that Czechoslovakian-based Zsa Zsa—speak in which "want" becomes "vant" and "women" are "vimmin." "We may not have the same lifestyle, but there are definitely parallels."
Flanking Ivana are two giant video screens flashing her image to listeners in the back of the auditorium. "I remember a lesson that my father taught me when I was a little girl," she says. "When I was 13 and doing poorly in school, he yanked me out and got me a job in a shoe factory. After three weeks I begged him to give me another chance at doing well in school. I learned that discipline is necessary to accomplish anything in life."
A little later she interrupts herself. "How am I doing?" she asks the crowd ingenuously. She gets her answer during the question period at the end when a woman stands up and declares, "Ivana, you're a beautiful, talented woman, and you have shown the entire world what the word lady means."
If living well is truly the best revenge, Ivana Trump has reason to celebrate. One year after her divorce became final, her ex-husband Donald has lost much of his aura of invincibility, while Ivana has just begun to come into her own. Even as Donald agreed to give lenders a 49 percent share of New York City's Plaza Hotel, she has bagged a reported $1 million contract to put her name on two novels, For Love Alone being the first. While Donald was being hooted from the public forum for proposing that ex-heavy-weight champ Mike Tyson be allowed to fight for charity instead of going to prison for rape, Ivana was drawing paying crowds on the lecture circuit in her newfound role as Everywoman's Champion. And back in December, while Donald had a shoe-throwing and ring-tossing fight with girlfriend Marla Maples in the lobby of Washington, D.C.'s Four Seasons hotel—all part of the nonstop tumult of their yo-yoing romance—Ivana accepted a 10-carat diamond friendship ring from Mazzucchelli, a man who even Donald concedes "seems like a nice guy—even if nobody knows who he is."
In fact Mazzucchelli, a consulting engineer who designs airports and highways in the Mideast and Africa, is a wealthy divorcé with a 26-year-old son, Fedele. He and Ivana met last June at a cocktail party at Ascot with England's horsey set. Following their first lunch date in the south of France, she says, "We would have a drink here and there." Only in this case here is Manhattan and there is Prague. By the third date, Mazzucchelli has said, he was hooked.
"Riccardo is very romantic," Ivana says. "We love to look at the moon and stars while we walk on the beach. Or we walk the streets in Rome. In Saint-Moritz we'll take a horse and carriage to the high country, up to the glaciers, where we'll have lunch and a bottle of wine."
Ivana wears Mazzucchelli's ring on the fourth finger of her left hand but says that she has rejected—for now—his proposals of marriage. "I still need a little time," she explains.
Back in Mar-a-Lago, where she is pondering the place settings for a dinner party for 15, Ivana reflects on her independence. "I really don't need man to start a family," she says. "I don't need man for career. I don't need man financially. What I need man for is friendship and companionship and love."
After the divorce she hung back for a while, stepping out with friends she calls "neutral people," such as jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane and fashion executive Boaz Mazor. "I was afraid I would fall in love with somebody I didn't want to fall in love with," she says, "so I took my time."
She also carefully chose her For Love Alone collaborator, Camille Marchetta, a former writer for Dallas and Dynasty. Marchetta took hours of Ivana's tape-recorded musings and molded them into the 532-page roman à clef about Czech ski champion Katrinka Kovar who marries American tycoon Adam Graham. "It's a vunderful, vunderful book!" Ivana says. "To my surprise, I find out I have a great imagination."
Readers and critics will have to judge for themselves how great—especially when they compare Donald with Ivana's description of Adam: "He was just over six feet, with broad shoulders, slender hips and the physical assurance of an athlete." Donald says he hasn't yet read For Love Alone. "I hope it isn't in violation of [the divorce] agreement," he says. The pact forbids either from discussing the other, "including," he points out, "the writing of books, fictionalized or not." But sight unseen, he approves of her work—in his own fashion. "As you know," he says, "I've had two No. 1 best-sellers on The New York Times list. I hope her book is a great success."
Still, Donald wants to set the fictional record straight on one point. In the book Adam Graham leaves Katrinka and then begs her to take him back. "The real Adam," Donald declares, "doesn't want to go back!"
And the real Katrinka wouldn't have him. Ivana has come a long way in the two years since her fabled confrontation with Maples in front of Bonnie's mid-mountain restaurant in Aspen. Her most important legacy from her 13-year marriage, she says, are the couple's three children: Donald Jr., 13, Ivanka, 10, and Eric, 8. In her 1991 settlement with the man she now rather stiffly refers to as Donald Trump, Ivana received full custody of the kids, a $10 million certified check plus $4 million more when she vacates their 50-room Manhattan triplex in Trump Tower by next March. She also gets $300,000 annually in child support and $350,000 a year in alimony, as well as their $3.7 million Greenwich, Conn., mansion (which she has quietly put on the market for $18 million).
Despite the done deal, Ivana remembers the sting of the tabloid headlines that chronicled her separation. "The articles were censored by my staff and my family," she says, "and if they were too painful, I didn't read them." Even therapy didn't help. "I did myself go to doctor," she says. "But I couldn't find answers."
Ivana's close friend, Houston socialite Joan Schnitzer, recalls Ivana's self-pity. "I tried to tell her when she was devastated and crying and she thought her life was over, 'Ivana, it hasn't even started yet,' " Schnitzer says. "We talked about it the other day, and I said, 'Ivana, just look where you are now!'"
In fact the once distraught divorcée is a budding mogul: Ivana Inc. She has linked up with various manufacturers to market the Ivana Collection of hand-painted silk clothes, in stores now, plus Ivana face creams, body lotions, bath oils, accessories and jewelry.
"I'm not struggling, by no means," Ivana admits. "I'm not on a budget. I can buy as many clothes as I want to buy. I can go on any vacation. My children can go to any school that they want." (Donny is in boarding school in Pennsylvania, while the younger two attend private school in Manhattan.) "At a certain point with money, how many steaks and cars can you buy? There are only just so many steaks you can eat."
And places to eat them. Ivana spends Christmas and New Year's skiing in Aspen, February skiing in Saint-Moritz, and March snorkeling in Palm Beach. She summers in Czechoslovakia, London and the south of France and divides the rest of her time between Connecticut and New York City. Her relationship with her former husband continues only through her children. Donald sees Ivanka and Eric briefly every morning at 7:30, when they take the elevator down to his Trump Tower apartment to kiss him goodbye on their way to school. (A nanny cares for them when Ivana is away.) In the afternoon Ivana keeps in touch with her family via fax machine. Ivanka will send a message, "Can I go home with Susie today?" And Ivana will fax back, "Is your homework done?"
As Ivana prepares to welcome her guests at Mar-a-Lago, she sighs contentedly. "I feel very happy," she says. "I feel loved. I feel feminine, and I feel that I'm doing things for me. Life is great!"
And does she have any words for her ex-husband? "I wish Donald Trump well," she says. "I wish that he would get married and have more children."
ELIZABETH SPORKIN
SUE CARSWELL at Mar-a-Lago and in Chicago
- Contributors:
- Sue Carswell.
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