Tales From the Trump : Part Two of The Donald’s Autobiography Reveals Some of His Tribulations but Proves He Still Revels in His ‘Tough Guy’ Image

NEW YORK —  Maybe you thought the time had come for Donald the midlife philosopher, the contemplative loner struggling heroically to bring a simple perspective to his highly chronicled life.

Well, as they say in New York, fawgetaboutit.

Just as his marriage, his business and that most cherished of his possessions, his name, appear to be in various stages of spectacular destruction, Donald Trump has provided a breathless nation with the second volume of his autobiography, “Trump: Surviving at the Top,” written with Newsweek senior writer Charles Leerhsen.

The book, published by Random House, which was rushing 500,000 copies to stores on Wednesday, delivers the same sophisticated evaluation of life’s trials, temptations and rewards as the wildly best-selling first volume, “The Art of the Deal.” And in a chapter heartwarmingly titled “Trump vs. Trump, Undoing the Deal,” it also delivers Ivana (“My marriage, it seemed, was the only area of my life in which I was willing to accept something less than perfection”) and Marla (“The beautiful young actress who bore the brunt of the hysterical publicity, is a terrific person, but my relationship with her was not the cause of the trouble between Ivana and me”).

The Donald writes that he is in pain over the end of his marriage. He racked his formidable brains trying to find a way to salvage this particular deal. “This was by no means a snap judgment. I’ve discussed the situation with many people. I even thought, briefly, about approaching Ivana with the idea of an ‘open marriage.’ But I realized there was something hypocritical and tawdry about such an arrangement that neither of us could live with--especially Ivana. She’s too much of a lady.”

For a book that could properly be devoted to Chapter 11, the real one, which would be titled “The Art of Filing for Bankruptcy,” The Donald sure does have a rosy way of looking at what others view as his economic troubles.

“The last three years have been a time of extraordinary challenges--success and setbacks,” Trump writes at the outset, describing what he calls the foundation of “Phase Two,” of his life. “I bought and restored to greatness the Plaza Hotel, a New York landmark. I acquired the run-down Eastern Shuttle and made it, as the Trump Shuttle, the best airline of its kind. I erected the magnificent Taj Mahal, one of the largest casino-hotels in the world--and a project that many experts predicted could never be completed.”

All true. Yet there are other truths left unexplored in these pages. Most hotel experts and financiers were astonished at how much Trump paid for the Plaza, which has been hemorrhaging money so fast that advisers have urged Trump to unload the debt-laden property. He has been desperately beating the bushes for somebody to take the money-losing shuttle off his hands. And then there is the Taj.

Trump’s most remarkable monument to himself, with its 3,000 slot machines and 167 gaming tables, implanted in a gaudily splendid Eurocash setting, has boosted the casino capacity of Atlantic City by 20% since it opened, stealing clients from his other casinos and teetering mightily in the Northeast’s failing economic climate.

Just Tuesday, The Donald agreed to take on Stephen F. Bollenbach, a nationally known expert in bailing out troubled companies, as chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. Not the move of a man clutching the scepter of power with both hands.

But Trump is still tough. He is appalled by America’s decline, and he has bad words for the Japanese (he describes with relish an incident in which he threw a rude Japanese businessman out of his office). In a prescient bit of analysis written long before the current crisis, he calls it “brilliant” that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, “countries in which many people live in mansions,” stand by and allow us to police the Persian Gulf for them.

Germans have treated us worse than anyone else, according to Trump. “For two generations American troops have provided security for West Germany against the Soviets, but if an American tried to sell a pencil on the street in Germany, the authorities would practically throw him in jail.”

Trump also has a lot to say about celebrities he has encountered. Frank Sinatra horrified Ivana and Donald at a dinner one night in Monte Carlo by being boorishly rude to his wife and then treating his fans as if they were scum.

Since you can’t libel a dead man, Trump really goes to town on Malcolm Forbes. He says they never had a good relationship, in part he thinks because his “more luxurious 282-foot yacht,” the Trump Princess, came along and stole the spotlight from Forbes’s formerly legendary 150-foot mini-vessel. But it is Forbes’s way of life that eventually got under Trump’s skin.

“I gradually came to see him as a hypocrite who favored those who advertised in his magazine and tried, with surprising viciousness, to punish those who didn’t. I also saw a double standard in the way he lived openly as a homosexual--which he had every right to do--but expected the media and his famous friends to cover for him.”

Imagine that, a double standard.

But The Donald that emerges from this memoir is a man caught in pursuit of an unreachable goal. Pleasure eludes him, relaxation is inconceivable. He says people mistakenly call him greedy because of the way he has amassed real estate, companies, helicopters, planes and yachts during the past few years.

“But what those critics don’t know is that the same assets that excite me in the chase often, once they are acquired, leave me bored. I probably visited Mar-a-Lago, my 118-room house in Palm Beach, no more than two dozen times in the years I’ve owned it. As for my yacht, the Trump Princess, it is a dazzling trophy and a terrific business tool, but it never really became part of my personal life.”

We may be seeing a whole new Trump for Volume 3. He says celebrity takes its toll on a man, and points to Howard Hughes, a wealthy man who led a slightly less public life than Trump has so far.

“The Howard Hughes story is fascinating to me because it shows that it’s possible to fall very far very fast. As time goes on, I find myself thinking more and more about (Hughes) and even, to some degree, identifying with him.”

So one of these days maybe The Donald will decide to slip into a suite at the Plaza and just stay there, another celebrity running from the crowd that adores him.