Inventing Ivana

Ivana Marie Zelníčková Trump escaped from behind the Iron Curtain to storm New York Cityand help define its "greed is good" era. From her heyday presiding over her husband's properties to her decadent postDonald denouement selling costume jewelry and cavorting with a series of "freaky" Italian lovers, it was Ivana, all along, who gilded the Trump name

- By Mark Seal

ACT I: THE STAIRCASE

She is alone in her seven-story East 64th Street town house, atop the steep, spiraling stairs that friends and family have warned could kill her. Tomorrow, July 15, 2022, she is scheduled to fly to St.-Tropez, her first flight since the isolation of COVID. No one knows when she takes her final step, but some will find comfort when her body is reportedly found in pajamas, with a coffee cup, instead of a Champagne flute, nearby. They hope she fell in the early morning hours instead of the darkness of night.

It's been nine months since she buried her fourth husband, the handsome Italian playboy Rossano Rubicondi. Rossano might have been financially needy, and more than two decades her junior, but he made her feel young again.

Now 73, or so they say, Ivana has more memories behind her than ahead. But her Louis Vuitton suitcases are filled with her famous shoes, and she is ready to dance on the French Riviera once again. Those shoes, Christian Louboutins and Manolos and Jimmy Choos, became part of her legend when she was the first wife of Donald J. Trump, whom she, in her Czech-inflected English, famously called "The Donald." By the time he became president, they had both remarried a couple of times. But in 2017, Ivana told ABC News, "I'm basically first Trump wife. I'm first lady, okay?" her stoic, smiling façade reflecting her pride but hiding her terror.

Her true feelings would come pouring out in the New York atelier of her longtime fashion designer Marc Bouwer, to whom she had come for a fitting on January 11, 2017, nine days before Trump's inauguration.