Is there not in this vast land of ours some kind-hearted, charitable, if perhaps masochistic community that will take in The Donald and Ivana Trump?
In The Donald`s present diminished circumstances, Chicago is probably too big a place for them to enjoy their accustomed life at ”the Top.” I can see Trumpy having to wait in line behind, say, local TV weathermen or Sugar Rautbord`s press agent for a ”quality” table at Bice. Even in her Brigitte Bardot makeover, Ivana nowadays is hardly a match in the glamor department for the gossipy divorcees who hang out in Cricket`s.
I thought of Cleveland, but that fair city is enjoying a renaissance these days, and I`d hate to think of The Donald getting in the way of that-especially if he tries to take up the waterfront with that gauche, debt-encumbered, football-field-long yacht of his.
I thought possibly of Indianapolis, but that town`s probably too big for The Diminished Donald, too. Perhaps South Bend. Ivana could manage a Ramada Inn or something, and, if he can scrape together enough cash, The Donald could put up ”the Tallest Building in West Central Northern Indiana!” Say, 10 stories, with a penthouse.
But it`s simply too, too unfair for poor, decrepit, down-to-its-last-pair-o f-Guccis New York to continue to have the no-longer-Golden Couple hanging about the place the way they are.
One bad Big Apple
I know most of you don`t give a Tibetan fig about New York, and would be just as happy if the Big Apple were devoured by gigantic radioactive worms from New Jersey, a fate which seems in prospect on days when the wind is blowing from the west.
But there are those of us jaded enough to harbor some fondness for Gotham. It is the city of my youth and, when I`m in a particularly decadent mood, my spiritual second home. I`m still able to survive monthly visits to the place for as long as two, even three days at a time.
I must confess I`m shedding no tears for the once grand ladies I see picking their way through piles of uncollected garbage and slumbering street people to hurry home in time to catch ”Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”
(which nowadays is all about Californians), an entertainment they`re reduced to because they no longer can afford the wherewithal for charity galas or, in some cases, even the meatloaf at not-so-ultra-chic-any-longer Mortimer`s.
But no one, not even a New Yorker, deserves a kick in the teeth when he`s down, and that`s just what The Donald has delivered in his latest devilishly clever scheme to cling to ”the Top,” like his pose as one of the world`s richest men, thanks to huge borrowings of other people`s money.
How could you, Donald?
I refer, of course, to his recently announced plans to convert the classic and great Plaza Hotel to, gag, condos.
New Yorkers are not a sentimental lot, as panhandlers even on Christmas Eve will attest. But if they cherish anything in their crumbling city-the way Chicagoans cherish their Water Tower or New Orleans does its French Quarter-it`s this Beaux Arts splendor of a hostelry overlooking Central Park from the prettiest corner in Manhattan.
People the world over, including South Bend, have their magic memories of this hotel.
Mine date to the `50s. (The beauty who posed for the fabled nude statue in the Plaza fountain was in old age the desk clerk in the seedy residential hotel that was my first New York address. I still blow her kisses when I pass.)
My wife and I, like absolutely zillions of other couples, weekended there in the blossom years of our marriage, and the memories are cherished still-even though the bathroom of our first stay resembled, and rather functioned like, the ruins of Pompeii.
Plaza of memories
Since then (especially since the Trumps took over) I`ve taken to staying at the classic and great Carlyle, the Surrey or that newest hideaway of the Smart Set, the Mark. But I still go back to the Plaza to dine or hang out, and in fact had lunch there the other day with a hometown girl now known as actress Ali MacGraw.
She told me she was welcomed at the door by The Donald himself.
”As he was greeting me, he kept staring over my shoulder to see who else might be around,” she said.
What can I say? My Friend Margaret the Smith Girl made her debut at the Plaza, and later joined me there in such frolics as crashing the Mayflower Ball. Mon Dieu, F. Scott and Zelda romped in the Plaza fountain. I mean, can you imagine Eloise living in a condo? Can you imagine Neil Simon writing a play called ”Plaza Condo?”
The Trumps paid (borrowed?) $400 million to buy the Plaza in 1988. Some in the gossipy Mortimer`s set suggested they did it just to advance themselves. The Donald, after all, did throw a big campaign party there for the Bushes (I think they stayed about as long as they would have in New York`s IRT subway) and tried to get Mikhail Gorbachev to take a tour (Gorby declined, not having much of an F. Scott Fitzgerald complex).
The Ivana invited the big designers to hold their fashion shows there, reigning over them like a Grand Patroness.
Send him to South Bend
But now $400 million has become ”serious money” to The Donald, and he wants to shut the hotel and jury-rig the rooms into condos. He did this to a decrepit old hotel nearby, boasting to me later that he`d gotten a Japanese businessman to pay $18 million for one of the units.
If ever they were, the Japanese are no longer rubes. Rather than pay $18 million for a Plaza bed-sitter with kitchenette, they can get a whole row of Upper East Side townhouses for that sum in these depressed times.
But even if they`d sit still for The Donald`s hustle, we New Yorkers
(spiritual or resident) damn well won`t. This is the ultimate last straw, as Churchill would say, up with which we shall not put. If Trump wants to, say, trash his wife by unveiling to the world his ”top” bimbo, c`est la vie. But we`re not going to let him trash the Grandest Dame of 5th Avenue.
With luck, Jackie O. will start another preservation movement to save the Plaza, the way she did Grand Central Terminal. If not, perhaps the ghosts of F. Scott and Zelda will come back and haunt The Donald out of the place all the way to South Bend.
Actually, F. Scott was from the Midwest and probably liked South Bend. Perhaps they can just haunt Trump back across the East River to his native borough of Queens, where I`m sure F. Scott never set foot-not to speak of Margaret the Smith Girl.
