Ivana Trump, the first wife of the former president and a partner in shaping his gilded and larger-than-life persona in 1980s New York City, has died at the age of 73.
Trump was born in the former Czechoslovakia, and became a competitive skier and model. In addition to raising the former president’s three older children, Donald Jr, Ivanka and Eric, she was an author, designer and executive who ran one of her husband’s Atlantic City casinos, the Trump Castle, and managed the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.
In a social media post on Thursday afternoon, Donald Trump said he was “very saddened” to share the news that Ivana had died at her home in New York City.
“She was a wonderful, beautiful and amazing woman who led a great and inspirational life,” he added.
Ivana Marie Zelníčková was born and raised in communist Czechoslovakia, the daughter of an electrical engineer. Accounts differ as to whether she actually served as an alternate on the country’s Olympic ski team in 1972. A marriage of convenience allowed her to obtain an Austrian passport. She then moved to Canada, where she worked as a ski instructor and model and improved her English.
According to an account in the former-president’s memoir, Trump: The Art of the Deal, the couple met at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal and married the following year in New York City. (Other accounts claim they met in New York City).
“I’d dated a lot of different women by then, but I’d never gotten seriously involved with any of them. Ivana wasn’t someone you dated casually,” Trump wrote, stating that his then-wife was “almost as competitive as I am”.
After they wed, Donald handed Ivana, a lover of pink marble, responsibility for the interior design of properties that his company, the Trump Organization, was developing. In addition to honing the Trump look, the ambitious Czech immigrant was also credited by People Magazine with engineering a determined social rise in Manhattan for her Queens-born husband.
The Trumps’ 14-year marriage blew up in spectacular fashion after Donald took up with the younger Marla Maples. Their divorce, finalised in 1991, became a tabloid fascination. Ivana was reported to have walked away with $14mn, as well as a home and an apartment.
Gossip columnist Liz Smith dubbed it “the biggest story I’ve ever seen that isn’t important — next to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton”.
In spite of the apparent acrimony, Donald hosted his ex-wife’s wedding to Italian actor Rossano Rubicondi at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2008. She returned the favour by supporting his presidential campaign.
In her post-Donald life, Ivana hawked jewellery and cosmetics on the Home Shopping Network and wrote best-selling books. In a 2017 memoir, Raising Trump, Ivana quipped: “My version of helicopter parenting was to bring the kids to work with me in the Trump chopper.”
In a recent recollection of her 1980s hotel days, posted on her daughter’s blog, Ivana eschewed her glamorous reputation to cast herself as a hard-working woman.
“As a beautiful, very wealthy woman, there was a stigma that I was supposed to be home, to dress up for visitors, go to lunches, support charities here and there,” she wrote, “but that was not all I was about.”
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