• May 11, 1998
• Vol. 49
• No. 18

Blaine Trump: Socialite

• 

From PEOPLE Magazine

Growing up blonde and porcelain-skinned, Blaine Trump was an American ideal—but she stuck out like a tall poppy in Yokohama, Japan, where her father, Joe, worked as an executive with IBM World Trade in the late 1960s. Taking the commuter train to school, Blaine, who reached her full height of 5'9" by age 12, would "hear people say, 'Look at her eyes. They're round. Look at the color of that hair,' " she recalls. "I used to pray I would wake up two inches shorter. And once I had my hair dyed black so I would fit in. I walked in the door, and my mother started crying."

These days, Trump, 41, conforms to the standards of New York City society. "She has everything," says former sister-in-law Ivana. "She's in good shape, she has nice proportions and a very good heart."

Trump, who dropped out of the University of Tokyo for a marriage that lasted briefly, has now been wed for 14 years to The Donald's younger brother, real estate executive Robert Trump. "I literally saw her across the room at a fund-raiser and made a beeline to find out who she was," remembers her husband, who adopted her son, Christopher, 19.

Though she spends many nights in Mizrahi and Dior gowns, Trump puts the merrymaking to good cause: She received the prestigious Marietta Tree Award for public service from the citizen's committee for New York City in February. As a stalwart fund-raiser for the American Ballet Theatre, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and God's Love We Deliver, a Manhattan-based nonprofit group that sends 2,400 meals a day to needy AIDS patients, she says what she needs most is a good night's sleep. If she doesn't get one, she resorts to aromatherapy and such homeopathic remedies as Bach flower for an energy boost. Normally, though, "If I have a big evening ahead, I try and take a nap for a beauty pick-me-up," she says. "Then I can go all hours." And keep her "energy and glow—and that twinkle in her eye," says Kay Mitchell, director of development at God's Love. "She has a Grace Kelly kind of look"