The death of Ivana Trump is a shock and a surprise to everyone who knew her.
Friends say Ivana was packing to leave for the South of France. She was getting ready to leave for St. Tropez for the first time in at least three years.
Not that she was a recluse. Ivana, like all of us, had been prevented from traveling by COVID.
But the third week in July is the big one in St. Tropez. That’s when all the jet setters arrive and party. Ivana was a veteran of this crowd, which would include Europeans, South Americans, and all the beautiful people of wealth. At 73, she was still part of the in crowd. If Ivana had shown up, it was like royalty. Her death will cast a pall over the fun (although my guess is it will go on in her memory).
The bigger question is why was she alone in her townhouse? She had no aide present. “That’s the way she wanted it.,” says a friend. A coroner’s report will shed some light on why she fell down her magnificent staircase, whether it was a heart attack or if she tripped. It doesn’t really matter, what’s done is done.
But Ivana was fragile the last few weeks. She’d been photographed outside with an aide. Yesterday she was alone in a house that writer Phoebe Eaton described on Facebook as the magnificent kind from a romance novel. With three children and all those grandchildren, Ivana died alone. That’s a little hard to understand.
And Donald Trump’s carefully worded statement of grief? Don’t buy a word of it. He cheated on her like crazy until he had an affair — with Marla Maples — that was exposed. He tried to humiliate Ivana in front of the world. It was Donald who planted the “best sex I ever had” headline at the New York Post, not Marla. Let’s not forget that.
