Chapter Seven
Parallel Lines

When Freddy (in 1960) and Donald (in 1968) joined Trump Management, each had a similar expectation: to become his father's right-hand man and then succeed him. They had, at different times and in different ways, been groomed to fit the part, never lacking for funds to buy expensive clothes and luxury cars. The similarities ended there.

Freddy quickly found that his father was unwilling to make room for him or delegate him any but the most mundane tasks, a problem that came to a head at the height of the construction at Trump Village. Feeling trapped, unappreciated, and miserable, he left to find his success elsewhere. At age twenty-five, he was a professional pilot, flying 707s for TWA and supporting his young family. That would turn out to be the pinnacle of Freddy's personal and professional life. At twenty-six and back at Trump Management, the chimerical chance for rehabilitation ostensibly offered to him at Steeplechase evaporated, and his prospects were at an end.

By 1971, my dad had been working for my grandfather, with the exception of his ten months as a pilot, for eleven years. Nonetheless, Fred promoted Donald, then only twenty-four, to the position of president of Trump Management. He'd been on the job for only three years and had very little experience and even fewer qualifications, but Fred didn't seem to mind.

The truth was, Fred Trump didn't need either one of his sons at Trump Management. He promoted himself to CEO, but nothing about his job description changed: he was a landlord. Fred hadn't been a developer since the failure of Steeplechase six years earlier, so Donald's role as president remained amorphous. In the early 1970s, with New York City on the brink of economic collapse, the federal government was cutting back on the fHa (in large part because of the cost of the Vietnam War), so no more FHA funding was available to Fred. Mitchell-Lama, a New York State-sponsored program to provide affordable housing that funded Trump Village, also ground to a halt.

As a business move, promoting Donald was pointless. What exactly was he being promoted to do? My grandfather had no development projects, the political power structure he'd depended on for decades was unraveling, and New York City was in dire financial straits. The main purpose of the promotion was to punish and shame Freddy. It was the latest in a long line of such punishments, but it was almost certainly the worst, especially given the context in which it happened.

Fred was determined to find a role for Donald. He had begun to realize that although his middle son didn't have the temperament for the day-to-day attention to detail that was required to run his business, he had something more valuable: bold ideas and the chutzpah to realize them. Fred had long harbored aspirations to expand his empire across the river into Manhattan, the Holy Grail of New York City real estate developers. His early career had demonstrated that he had a knack for self-promotion, dissembling, and hyperbole. But as the first-generation son of German immigrants, Fred had English as his second language and he needed to improve his communication skills—he had taken the Dale Carnegie course for a reason, and it wasn't to boost his self-confidence. But the course had been a failure. And there was another obstacle, perhaps even more difficult to overcome: Fred's mother, as forward thinking as she had been in some ways, was generally very austere and traditional. It was okay for her son to be successful and rich. It was not okay for him to show off.

Donald had no such restraint. He hated Brooklyn as much as Freddy did but for very different reasons—the bleak working-class smallness of it, the lack of "potential." He couldn't get out of there fast enough. Trump Management was located on Avenue Z, right in the middle of Beach Haven in South Brooklyn, one of my grandfather's largest apartment complexes. He hadn't made many alterations. The narrow outer office was crammed with too many desks, and the small windows admitted little light. If Donald had thought of the surrounding buildings and complexes in terms of number of units, the value of the ground leases, and the sheer volume of income that poured into Trump Management every month, he would have recognized the huge opportunity. Instead, whenever he stood outside the office and surveyed the utilitarian sameness of Beach Haven, he must have felt suffocated by the sense that it was all beneath him. A future in Brooklyn wasn't what he wanted for himself, and he was determined to get out as quickly as possible.

Besides being driven around Manhattan by a chauffeur whose salary his father's company paid, in a Cadillac his father's company leased to "scope out properties," Donald's job description seems to have included lying about his "accomplishments" and allegedly refusing to rent apartments to black people (which would become the subject of a Justice Department lawsuit accusing my grandfather and Donald of discrimination).

Donald dedicated a significant portion of his time to crafting an image for himself among the Manhattan circles he was desperate to join. Having grown up a member of the first television generation, he had spent hours watching the medium, the episodic nature of which appealed to him. That helped shape the slick, superficial image he would come to both represent and embody. His comfort with portraying that image, along with his father's favor and the material security his father's wealth afforded him, gave him the unearned confidence to pull off what even at the beginning was a charade: selling himself not just as a rich playboy but as a brilliant, self-made businessman.

In those early days, that expensive endeavor was being enthusiastically, if clandestinely, funded by my grandfather. Fred didn't immediately realize the scope of Donald's limitations and had no idea that he was essentially promoting a fiction, but Donald was happy to spend his father's money either way. For his part, Fred was determined to keep money pouring into his son's pocket. In the late 1960s, for example, Fred developed a high-rise for the elderly in New Jersey, a project that was in part an exercise in how to get government subsidies (Fred received a $7.8 million, practically interest-free loan to cover 90 percent of the cost of the project's construction) and in part an example of how far he was willing to go to enrich his second son. Although Donald put no money toward the development costs of the building, he received consulting fees, and he was paid to manage the property, a job for which there were already full-time employees on site. That one project alone netted Donald tens of thousands of dollars a year despite his having done essentially nothing and having risked nothing to develop, advance, or manage it.

In a similar sleight of hand, Fred bought Swifton Gardens, an FHA project originally costing $10 million to build, at auction for $5.6 million. In addition, he secured a $5.7 million mortgage, which also covered the cost of upgrades and repairs, essentially paying zero dollars for the buildings. When he later sold the property for $6.75 million, Donald got all of the credit and took most of the profits.

My dad's dream of flying had been taken away from him, and he had now lost his birthright. He was no longer a husband; he barely saw his kids. He had no idea what was left for him or what he was going to do next. He did know that the only way for him to retain any self-respect was to walk away from Trump Management, this time for good.

Dad's first apartment after he moved out of the Highlander was a studio in the basement of a brick row house on a quiet, shady street in Sunnyside, Queens. He was thirty-two years old and had never lived on his own.

The first thing we saw when we walked through the door was a tank holding two garter snakes and a terrarium with a ball python.

Another tank stocked with goldfish, and another with a few mice scrambling around in the straw, were set up on stands to the left of the snakes. I knew what the mice were for.

In addition to a fold-out couch, a small kitchen table with a couple of cheap chairs, and the TV, there were two more terrariums housing an iguana and a tortoise. We called them Tomato and Izzy.

Dad seemed proud of his new place, and he kept adding to the menagerie. On one visit, he took us down to the boiler room and led us to a cardboard box with six ducklings inside. The landlord had let him set up some heat lamps, creating a makeshift incubator. They were so tiny that we had to feed them with an eyedropper.

"Just give it a quarter of a turn on the mental carburetor," my grandfather said to my father, as if that were all it would take for his son to stop drinking. As if it were just a matter of willpower. They were in the library, but for once they sat across from each other—not equals exactly, never equals—but as two people who had a problem to solve, even though they might never agree on the solution. Although the medical view of alcoholism and addiction had changed drastically in the previous few decades, public perception hadn't evolved much. Despite treatment programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, which had been around since 1935, the stigma attached to addicts and addiction persisted.

"Just make up your mind, Fred," my grandfather said, offering a useless platitude that Norman Vincent Peale would have approved of. The closest thing Fred had to a philosophy was the prosperity gospel, which he used like a blunt instrument and an escape hatch, and it had never harmed any of his children more than it did right then.

"That's like telling me to make up my mind to give up cancer," Dad said. He was right, but my grandfather wholeheartedly embraced the "blame the victim" mentality that was still pervasive and couldn't make that leap.

"I need to beat this, Dad. I don't think I can do it by myself. I know I can't."

Instead of asking "What can I do for you?" Fred said, "What do you want from me?"

Freddy had no idea where to start.

My grandfather had never been sick a day in his life; he had never missed a day of work; he had never been sidelined by depression or anxiety or heartbreak, not even when his wife was near death. He appeared to have no vulnerabilities at all and therefore couldn't recognize or sanction them in other people.

He had never handled Gam's injuries and illnesses well. Whenever Gam was suffering, my grandfather would say something like "Everything's great. Right, Toots? You just have to think positive," and then leave the room as quickly as possible, leaving her alone to deal with her pain.

Sometimes Gam forced herself to say, "Yes, Fred." Usually she said nothing, clenched her jaw, and struggled to keep from crying. My grandfather's relentless insistence that everything was "great" left no room for any other feelings.

We were told that Dad was sick and would be in the hospital for a few weeks. We were also told that he had to give up his apartment—apparently the landlord wanted to rent the place to somebody else. Fritz and I went to pack up clothes, games, and other odds and ends we'd left behind, and when we arrived, the place was almost completely empty. The tanks were gone, the snakes were gone. I never found out what happened to them.

When Dad returned from wherever he had been—the hospital or rehab—he moved into my grandparents' attic. It was a temporary arrangement, and no effort was made to turn it into a proper living space. All of the storage boxes and old toys—including the vintage fire engine, crane, and dump truck my grandmother had hidden there all those years ago—had simply been pushed to one end of the attic and a cot set up in the cleared space at the other. Dad put his portable six-inch black-and-white television on his old National Guard trunk beneath the dormered window.

When Fritz and I visited him, we camped out on the floor next to his cot, and the three of us watched an endless stream of old movies such as Tora! Tora! Tora! and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. When he was well enough to come downstairs, Dad joined us on Sundays for the weekly Abbott and Costello movie on WPIX.

After a month or two, my grandfather told Dad there was a vacancy in Sunnyside Towers, a building my grandfather had bought in 1968—a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor.

As Dad was preparing to move to Sunnyside, Maryanne, with the help of a $600 loan, was getting ready to start her studies at Hofstra Law School. Although not her first choice, Hofstra was only a ten-minute drive from Jamaica Estates—close enough that she could still take my cousin David to school in the morning and pick him up in the afternoon. Going back to school was a long-deferred dream. She also hoped that becoming a lawyer would give her the financial wherewithal to leave her husband someday. Their situation had become increasingly dire over the years. The parking lot attendant job that his father-in-law had given him was a humiliation from which he hadn't recovered. Over the years, David had lashed out at his wife from time to time, particularly when he was drunk.

Maryanne's move toward independence sent her husband even further over the edge, and after she returned home from her first day at law school, her husband, in a fit of rage, threw their thirteen-year-old son out of the apartment. Maryanne took him to the House, and they spent the night there. David Desmond, Sr., cleaned out their meager joint savings account and left town.

When the whole family was together, we spent most of our time in the library, a room without books until Donald's ghostwritten The Art of the Deal was published in 1987. The bookshelves were used instead to display wedding photos and portraits. The wall across from the bay window overlooking the backyard was dominated by a studio portrait of the five siblings taken when they were adults that had replaced an earlier version of the five in similar poses taken when Freddy was fourteen. The only nonstudio photographs in the room were a black-and-white shot of my grandmother, looking regal and condescending in her hat and fur stole as she and my aunts, young girls at the time, descended the air stairs to the tarmac in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, where Gam had been born, and one of Donald in his New York Military Academy dress uniform leading the school contingent in the New York City Columbus Day Parade. There were two love seats upholstered in dark-blue-and-green vinyl against the walls and one large chair in front of the TV, a spot the kids fought over regularly. My grandfather, dressed in his three-piece suit and tie, sat on the love seat nearest the heavy pine phone table by the door, his feet planted squarely on the ground.

Every Saturday, if we weren't in Sunnyside with Dad, Fritz and I rode our bikes down Highland Avenue and along the back streets of Jamaica Estates to the House to hang out with our cousin David—or rather, Fritz and David hung out and I followed them around, trying to keep up.

Gam sat with Maryanne and Elizabeth whenever they visited at a small sky blue Formica table with stainless steel edging that looked as though it came straight out of a 1950s malt shop. Just past it, there was a dark pantry the size of a walk-in closet with a little desk where Gam kept her shopping lists, receipts, and bills. Marie, the long-suffering housekeeper, often hid there, listening to her portable radio, and on rainy or cold days when David, Fritz, and I were confined to the House, we drove her crazy. On the other side of the pantry, a swinging door led to the dining room. We used the loop that ran from the back door hallway past the kitchen, through the foyer, around to the dining room, through the pantry, and back to the kitchen as our personal racetrack, chasing one another, wiping out, screaming, gaining speed, one of us invariably banging into a piece of furniture. Between the refrigerator and the pantry doorway, Gam generally gave us free rein, but when she was in the kitchen, she would lose her patience and yell at us to stop. She threatened us with the wooden spoon if we ignored her—the sound of the drawer opening was enough to give us pause. But if we were stupid enough to keep running around her and making a racket, the spoon came out, and whoever was closest at hand got whacked. Liz did her part to slow us down by grabbing our hair as we passed by.

After that Fritz, David, and I usually ran to the basement —adults passed through only on their way to the laundry room or the garage, so we were free to be loud and to kick around the soccer ball or take turns riding up and down on (or fighting over) Gam's electric stair lift. We spent most of our time in the open space at the far end with all the lights on. With the exception of my grandfather's life-sized wooden Indian chief statues that were lined up against the far wall like sarcophagi, it was a pretty typical basement: drop ceiling with fluorescent lighting, white-and-black linoleum tile, and an old upright piano that stood largely ignored because it was so badly out of tune it wasn't even worth playing. Donald's marching hat with the huge plume that he had worn during color guard at NYMA sat on top of it. Sometimes I put it on, though it slid down to the bridge of my nose, and fastened the strap beneath my chin.

When I was down there by myself, the basement—half illuminated, the wooden Indians standing sentinel in the shadows—became a weirdly exotic space. Across from the stairs, a huge mahogany bar, fully stocked with barstools, dusty glasses, and a working sink but no alcohol, had been built in the corner—an anomaly in a house built by a man who didn't drink. A large oil painting of a black singer with beautiful, full lips and generous, swaying hips hung on the wall behind it. Wearing a curve-hugging gold-and-yellow dress with ruffles, she stood at the microphone, mouth open, hand extended. A jazz band made up entirely of black men dressed in white dinner jackets and black bow ties played behind her. The brasses glowed, the woodwinds glistened. The clarinetist, a sparkle in his eyes, looked straight out at me. I would stand behind the bar, towel slung over my shoulder, whipping up drinks for my imaginary customers. Or I would sit on one of the barstools, the only patron, dreaming myself inside that painting.

Our uncle Rob, who wasn't that much older than we were and seemed more like a sibling than an uncle, played soccer with us in the backyard whenever he came out from the city. We played hard and on hot days made frequent trips to the kitchen for a can of Coke or a grape juice. Rob would often grab a block of Philadelphia cream cheese; leaning against the refrigerator, he'd peel back the foil and eat the cream cheese as if it were a candy bar, then wash it down with soda.

Rob was a very good soccer player, and I tried to keep up with the boys, but it sometimes felt as though he used me for target practice.

When Donald was at the House, we mostly threw a baseball or football around. He had played baseball at New York Military Academy and was even less likely to pull his punches than Rob; he saw no reason to throw the ball any more gently just because his niece and nephews were six or nine or eleven. When I did manage to catch the ball he threw at me, the report of it against my leather glove reverberated off the brick retaining wall like a shot. Even with little kids, Donald had to be the winner.

Only the most dedicated optimist could have lived in Sunnyside Towers without losing hope. There was no doorman, and the plastic plants and flowers that filled the two large planters on either side of the plexiglass front door were perpetually coated in a thin film of dust. Our sixth-floor hallway reeked of stale cigarette smoke. The dank carpet was a soulless shade of seal grey. The indifferent overhead lighting hid nothing.

The height of my father's lifestyle had been when he and my mom had lived in their one-bedroom near Sutton Place right after they were married. During that year, they had spent their evenings going to the Copacabana with friends and flying to Bimini on weekends. It had been all downhill from there, a trajectory that mirrored that of Donald, whose own lifestyle became more extravagant as the years passed. Donald had already been living in Manhattan when he married Ivana. After the wedding, they lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Fifth Avenue, then in an eight-bedroom apartment also on Fifth Avenue. Within five years they were living in the $10 million penthouse triplex in Trump Tower, all while Donald was still effectively on my grandfather's payroll.

My grandfather created Midland Associates in the 1960s to benefit his children, each of whom was given 15 percent ownership in eight buildings, one of which was Sunnyside Towers. The express purpose of this apparently quasi-legal, if not outright fraudulent, transfer of wealth was to avoid paying the lion's share of the gift taxes that would have been assessed if it had been an aboveboard transaction. I don't know if Dad knew that he owned part of the building he now lived in, but in 1973 his share of it would have been worth about $380,000, or $2.2 million in today's dollars. He seemed to have no apparent access to any of the money— his boats and planes were gone; his Mustang and Jaguar were gone. He still had his FCT vanity plates, but now they were attached to a beat-up Ford LTD. Whatever wealth my father had was by then entirely theoretical. Either his access to his trust funds had been blocked, or he had stopped thinking he had any right to his own money. Thwarted one way or the other, he was at his father's mercy.

Dad and I were watching a Mets game on television when the intercom buzzed. Dad looked surprised and went to answer. I didn't hear who was calling from the lobby, but I heard my father say "Shit" under his breath. We'd been having a laid-back afternoon, but Dad seemed tense now. "Donald's coming up for a couple of minutes," he told me.

"Why?"

"No idea." He seemed annoyed, which was unusual for him.

Dad tucked his shirt in and opened the door as soon as the bell rang. He took a couple of steps back to let his brother pass. Donald was wearing a three-piece suit and shiny shoes and carrying a thick manila envelope wrapped with several wide rubber bands. He walked into the living room. "Hi, Honeybunch," he said when he saw me.

I waved at him.

Donald turned back to my dad and said, "Jesus, Freddy," as he looked around disdainfully. My father let it slide. Donald tossed the envelope onto the coffee table and said, "Dad needs you to sign these and then bring them to Brooklyn."

"Today?"

"Yeah. Why? You busy?"

"You take it to him."

"I can't. I'm on my way to the city to look at some properties that are in foreclosure. It's a fantastic time to take advantage of losers who bought at the height of the market."

Freddy never would have dared develop his own projects outside of Brooklyn. A few years earlier on a weekend trip to the Poconos, as he and Linda had driven past row after row of condemned buildings on either side of the Cross Bronx Expressway, she'd pointed out that he could start his own business and renovate buildings in the Bronx.

"No way I could go against Dad," Freddy had said. "It's all about Brooklyn for him. He'd never go for it."

Now Donald looked out the window and said, "Dad's going to need somebody in Brooklyn. You should go back."

"And do what, exactly?" Dad scoffed.

"I don't know. Whatever you used to do."

"I had your job."

In the uncomfortable silence, Donald looked at his watch. "My driver's waiting downstairs. Get this to Dad by four o'clock, okay?"

After Donald left, Dad sat on the couch next to me and lit a cigarette. "So, kiddo," he said, "want to take a ride to Brooklyn?"

When we visited the office, Dad made the rounds on his way to Amy Luerssen, my grandfather's secretary and gatekeeper (and also my godmother), whose desk stood right outside of her boss's door. Aunt Amy clearly adored the man she called "my Freddy."

My grandfather's private office was a square room with low lighting, its walls covered with plaques and framed certificates, a lot of wooden busts of Indian chiefs in full headdress scattered about. I sat behind his desk and chose from what seemed an endless supply of blue Flair markers and the same thick pads of cheap scratch paper he had at the House, writing notes and drawing until it was time to go to lunch. When I was left alone, I spun wildly in his chair.

My grandfather always took us to eat at Gargiulo's, a formal restaurant with crisp cloth napkins and tablecloths where he went almost every day. The deferential waiters knew him, always called him "Mr. Trump," pulled out his chair, and generally fussed over him throughout the meal. It was better when Aunt Amy or somebody else from the office joined us because it took the pressure off Dad; he and my grandfather had little left to say to each other. It didn't happen often that Donald was at the office at the same time we were, but it was much worse when we crossed paths. He acted as though he owned the place, which my grandfather seemed not only to encourage but to enjoy. My grandfather was transformed in Donald's presence.

In 1973, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division sued Donald and my grandfather for violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent to die Schwarze, as my grandfather put it. It was one of the largest federal housing discrimination suits ever brought, and the notorious attorney Roy Cohn offered to help. Donald and Cohn had crossed paths at Le Club, a swanky members-only restaurant and disco on East 55th Street that was frequented by Vanderbilts and Kennedys, an array of international celebrities, and minor royalty. Cohn was more than a decade removed from his disastrous involvement in Joseph McCarthy's failed anti-Communist crusade. He'd been forced to resign from his position as the senator's chief counsel, but not until he'd wrecked the lives and careers of dozens of men because of their alleged homosexuality and/or ties to communism.

Like many men of his vicious temperament and with his influential connections, Cohn was subject to no rules. Embraced by a certain segment of the New York elite and hired by a diverse pool of clients such as Rupert Murdoch, John Gotti, Alan Dershowitz, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, Cohn entered private practice back in New York City, where he'd grown up. Over the ensuing years, he became very rich, very successful, and very powerful.

Though Cohn was flashy where Fred was conservative and loud where Fred was taciturn, the differences between them were really of degree, not kind. Cohn's cruelty and hypocrisy were more public, but Fred had, in the intimate context of his family, also mastered those arts. Fred had also primed Donald to be drawn to men such as Cohn, as he would later be drawn to authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un or anyone else, really, with a willingness to flatter and the power to enrich him.

Cohn recommended that Trump Management file a countersuit against the Justice Department for $100 million over what he alleged were the government's false and misleading statements about his clients. The maneuver was simultaneously absurd, flashy, and effective, at least in terms of the publicity it garnered; it was the first time that Donald, at twenty-seven, had landed on a newspaper's front page. And although the countersuit would be tossed out of court, Trump Management settled the case. There was no admission of wrongdoing, but they did have to change their rental practices to avoid discrimination. Even so, both Cohn and Donald considered it a win because of all the press coverage.

When Donald hitched his fortunes to the likes of Roy Cohn, the only things he had going for him were Fred's largesse and a carefully cultivated but delusional belief in his own brilliance and superiority. Ironically, the defenses he had developed as a young child to protect himself against the indifference, fear, and neglect that had defined his early years, along with his being forced to watch the abuse of Freddy, primed him to develop what his older brother clearly lacked: the ability to be the "killer" and proxy his father required.

There's no way to know precisely when Fred started to notice Donald, but I suspect it was after he shipped his son off to military school. Donald seemed amenable to his father's exhortations to be tough, a "killer," and he proved his worth by bragging about the random beatings he received from the upperclassmen or pretending not to care about his exile from home. Fred's growing confidence in Donald created a bond between them and an unshakable self-confidence in Donald. After all, the most important person in the family, the only one whose opinion mattered,

was finally showing him favor. And unlike Freddy, the attention Donald received from his father was positive.

After college, when Donald was finally out in the world using his father's connections to make more connections and using his father's money to create his image as a burgeoning Master of the Universe, Fred knew that anything his son got credit for would redound to his own benefit. After all, if Donald was embraced as an up-and-coming dealmaker, that was entirely to the credit of Fred Trump—even if Fred was the only person who knew it.

In interviews in the early 1980s, Fred claimed that Donald's success had far exceeded his own. "I gave Donald free rein," he said. "He has great visions, and everything he touches seems to turn to gold. Donald is the smartest person I know." None of that was true, and Fred must have known that a decade before he said it.

After Steeplechase, Fred had lost a lot of ground. If he wanted to expand the reach of his empire, he would need a new playing field and a surrogate. He needed Donald to go out in the world and create the brand. It hadn't taken Fred long to realize that his profligate middle son wasn't suited to the unglamorous, tightly budgeted, and highly regimented routine of running rental properties. But with his father's backing, maybe he could use his hubris and shamelessness to make the push into Manhattan. Fred wasn't living vicariously; he was intimately involved in all aspects of Donald's early forays into the Manhattan market, getting things done behind the scenes while Donald played to the crowd up front. Fred made it possible for Donald to play a role that fulfilled his own desire for recognition while allowing his son to garner the reputation as a Manhattan developer that Fred had always aspired to. Fred would never get the public recognition, but it was enough for him to know that the opportunities Donald had to make his mark and promote himself would never have materialized without him. The success and the acclaim were due to Fred and his vast wealth. Any story about Donald was really a story about Fred. Fred also knew that if that secret was uncovered, the ruse would fall apart. In retrospect, Fred was the puppeteer, but he couldn't be seen to be pulling his son's strings. It's not that Fred was overlooking Donald's incompetence as a businessman; he knew he had more than enough talent in that arena for both of them. Fred was willing to stake millions of dollars on his son because he believed he could leverage the skills Donald did have—as a savant of self-promotion, shameless liar, marketer, and builder of brands—to achieve the one thing that had always eluded him: a level of fame that matched his ego and satisfied his ambition in a way money alone never could.

When things turned south in the late 1980s, Fred could no longer separate himself from his son's brutal ineptitude; the father had no choice but to stay invested. His monster had been set free. All he could do was mitigate the damage, keep the cash flowing, and find somebody else to blame.

Over the next two years, Dad became more taciturn, more grim, and, if possible, thinner. The apartment in Sunnyside Towers was grey—grey because of the northwest exposure, grey from the unending clouds of cigarette smoke, grey because of his terrible moods. There were mornings when he barely managed to get out of bed, let alone spend a whole day with us. Sometimes he was hungover; sometimes it was his depression, which grew heavier. If we didn't have anything scheduled, Dad often made an excuse to leave us alone, saying he had to work or run an errand for Gam.

Once Dad told us he had a job managing paperboys. I'd briefly had a paper route, and as far as I could tell that meant he was the guy who handed out the papers to the delivery kids from the trunk of his car, then collected the cash from them when they'd finished their routes. He told me once that he made $100 a day, which seemed like an enormous sum to me.

One evening, we were at the apartment having dinner with Dad's girlfriend, Johanna. I preferred it when she wasn't there; something about her was off-putting. She didn't connect—or even try to—with me and Fritz. It was bad enough that she said things such as "Freddy, light me a fag," considering she wasn't British, but Dad started saying them, too.

We'd just finished eating when I started to recount the adventures I'd had with my mother at the bank that afternoon. While she had waited in the very long line, I had stood at one of the counters and filled out deposit slips with all sorts of aliases and wild sums of money I planned to withdraw in order to fund various schemes. I could barely contain how funny I thought the whole thing was. But as I told them about the secret identities, the secret withdrawals of cash, and my fiendish plots to disperse them, Dad got a wary look in his eyes.

"Does Mr. Tosti know about this?" he asked.

If I'd been paying closer attention, I might have known to stop, but I thought he was kidding, so I kept telling my story.

Dad got increasingly agitated, leaned forward, and pointed his finger at me. "What did you do?" As moody as my father could be, I'd rarely seen him so angry, and I'd almost never heard him raise his voice. I was confused and tried to retrace my narrative back to the point where he had started to think I'd done something wrong. But there was no such point, and my explanation about what had really happened only agitated him further.

"If Mr. Tosti finds out about this, I'm going to be in trouble with your grandfather."

Johanna put her hand on Dad's arm, as if to draw his attention away from me. "Freddy," she said, "it's nothing."

"What do you mean 'nothing'? This is really goddamn serious."

I flinched at the curse word.

At that point both Johanna and I knew there was no talking him down. He was drunk and trapped in some old narrative. I tried to explain it to him, to steady him, but he was too far gone. And I was only eight.

In the summer of 1975, Donald gave a press conference during which he presented a rendering of the architect's plans for the Grand Hyatt, as if he'd already won the contract to replace the old Commodore Hotel next door to Grand Central Terminal on 42nd Street. The media printed his claims as fact.

That same summer, just before Fritz and I were scheduled to leave for camp, Dad had told Mom that he had some news. She invited him to dinner. I answered the door when Dad rang the bell. He was wearing what he almost always wore—black slacks and a white dress shirt—but his clothes were crisp and his hair was slicked back. I had never seen him look so handsome.

While Mom tossed the salad, Dad grilled the steak on our small terrace. When the food was ready, we sat at the small table next to the terrace, propping the door open so the mild summer breeze could blow in. We drank water and iced tea.

"I'm moving to West Palm Beach at the end of the summer," he told us. "I found a great apartment on the Intracoastal with a dock in the back." He already had a boat picked out, and when we visited, he'd take us fishing and waterskiing. As he spoke, he seemed happy and confident—and relieved. All of us knew it was the right decision; for the first time in a very long time, we felt hope.