Page 73 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

his one year with TWA, he’d been working for his father for almost six years. He was still an executive at Trump Management, which brought in tens of millions of dollars a year free and clear. In 1967, the company was worth approximately $100 million. Freddy made a decent living, he didn’t have many expenses, and there was a trust fund and a (fast dwindling) stock portfolio. The most plausible explanation was that Fred, still burned by what he considered his son’s betrayal and reeling from the failure of Steeplechase, had intervened in some way to prevent the transaction. My grandfather had prominent contacts and enormous accounts at Chase, Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust, and the other biggest banks in the city, so not only could he guarantee that Freddy would get a mortgage, he could just as easily make sure he didn’t. Our family was effectively trapped in that run-down apartment in Jamaica.
When June rolled around, my father was more than ready to spend the summer in Montauk again. My parents rented the same cottage, and with funds he raised by selling some of his blue-chip stocks, Dad bought a Chrisovich 33, which, with its sixteen-foot tuna tower, was much more suited to handle the kind of deep-sea fishing he loved. He also bought another plane, this time a Cessna 206 Stationair, which had a more powerful engine and a larger seating capacity than the Piper Comanche.
But the new toys weren’t just for recreation. Dad had a plan. After Steeplechase, he had been increasingly sidelined at Trump Management, so he came up with the idea of chartering both the boat and the plane to create another source of income. If it worked out, he might be able to free himself from Trump Management after all. He hired a full-time captain to run the boat charters, but on the weekends, when doing so would have been the most lucrative, he had the captain drive him and his friends around instead.
When Linda joined them on the boat, she noticed that Freddy always drank more than everybody else, just as he had in Marblehead, which spurred increasingly intense fights between them. The increasing frequency with which Freddy flew under the influence was alarming, and as the summer of 1967 proceeded, Linda became reluctant to get onto the plane with him. The unraveling continued. By September, Dad realized that his plan wasn’t going to work. He sold the boat, and when Fred found out about the plane, he got rid of that, too.
At twenty-nine years old, my father was running out of things to lose.