Page 131 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

documents that might be useful, and on occasion he’d put some file folders on my desk that he thought might help. The problem was that I didn’t really know what the book was supposed to be about beyond its broad theme, which I cleverly deduced from its working title, The Art of the Comeback.
I hadn’t read either of Donald’s other two books, but I knew a bit about them. The Art of the Deal, as far as I understood it, had been meant to present Donald as a serious real estate developer. The book’s ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, had done a good job—which he has long since regretted— of making his subject sound coherent, as if Donald had actually espoused a fully realized business philosophy that he understood and lived by.
After the embarrassment of the poorly timed publication of Surviving at the Top, I assumed that Donald wanted a return to the relative seriousness of its predecessor. I set about trying to explain how, under the most adverse circumstances, he had emerged from the depths, victorious and more successful than he had ever been. There wasn’t much evidence to support that narrative—he was about to experience his fourth bankruptcy filing with the Plaza Hotel—but I had to try.
Every morning on the way to my desk, I stopped by to see Donald in the hope that he’d have time to sit down with me for an interview. I figured that would be the best way to find out what he had done and how he had done it. His perspective was everything, and I needed the stories in his own words. He was usually on a call, which he’d put on speaker as soon as I sat down. The calls, as far as I could tell, were almost never about business. The person on the other end, who had no idea he or she was on speaker, was looking for gossip or for Donald’s opinion about women or a new club that had opened. Sometimes he was being asked for a favor. Often the conversation was about golf. Whenever anything outrageously sycophantic, salacious, or stupid was said, Donald smirked and pointed to the speakerphone as if to say, “What an idiot.”
When he wasn’t on a call, I’d find him going through the newspaper clippings that were collected for him daily. Every article was about him or at least mentioned him. He showed them to me, something he did with most visitors. Depending on the content of the article, he sometimes wrote on it with a blue Flair felt-tip marker, just like the one my grandfather used, and sent it back to the reporter. After he finished writing, he’d hold up the clipping and ask for my opinion of what he considered his witty remarks. That did not help me with my research.