
Ivylise Simones
Until the election, we’re bringing you “The Trump Files,” a daily dose of telling episodes, strange but true stories, or curious scenes from the life of GOP nominee Donald Trump.
Donald Trump’s 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, helped secure his public image as a real estate genius and an ultimate symbol of the filthy rich. But that didn’t stop him from trying to charge the man who actually wrote the book for him, former magazine writer Tony Schwartz, hundreds of thousands of dollars after Trump threw a book party filled with “nine hundred second-rate celebrities” in December 1987.
Schwartz had just spent a year and a half shadowing Trump for the book, a process that, he told The New Yorker, was “draining” and “deadening.” But now his book was on the New York Times bestseller list, and Trump was throwing an over-the-top party to match. “Klieg lights lit a red carpet outside the building,” The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer writes. “Inside, nearly a thousand guests, in black tie, were served champagne and fed slices of a giant cake replica of Trump Tower, which was wheeled in by a parade of women waving red sparklers. The boxing promoter Don King greeted the crowd in a floor-length mink coat, and the comedian Jackie Mason introduced Donald and Ivana with the words ‘Here comes the king and queen!'”
But the next day, Trump called Schwartz and told him to pay up. “After chatting briefly about the party, Trump informed Schwartz that, as his ghostwriter, he owed him for half the event’s cost, which was in the six figures,” Mayer writes.
Instead, Schwartz used Trump’s own evasive tactics on the mogul. “He drastically negotiated down the amount that he agreed to pay, to a few thousand dollars, and then wrote Trump a letter promising to write a check not to Trump but to a charity of Schwartz’s choosing,” Mayer writes. “It was a page out of Trump’s playbook. In the past seven years, Trump has promised to give millions of dollars to charity, but reporters for the Washington Post found that they could document only ten thousand dollars in donations—and they uncovered no direct evidence that Trump made charitable contributions from money earned by ‘The Art of the Deal.'”
Schwartz may have escaped being nickel and dimed by the billionaire—and he earned half of the book’s substantial royalties—but he doesn’t look back fondly on The Art of the Deal. “I put lipstick on a pig,” he told Mayer. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.”
Read the rest of “The Trump Files”:
- Trump Files #1: The Time Andrew Dice Clay Thanked Donald for the Hookers
- Trump Files #2: When Donald Tried to Stop Charlie Sheen’s Marriage to Brooke Mueller
- Trump Files #3: The Brief Life of the “Trump Chateau for the Indigent”
- Trump Files #4: Donald Thinks Asbestos Fears Are a Mob Conspiracy
- Trump Files #5: Donald’s Nuclear Negotiating Fantasy
- Trump Files #6: Donald Wants a Powerball for Spies
- Trump Files #7: Donald Gets An Allowance
- Trump Files #8: The Time He Went Bananas on a Water Cooler
- Trump Files #9: The Great Geico Boycott
- Trump Files #10: Donald Trump, Tax-Hike Crusader
- Trump Files #11: Watch Donald Trump Say He Would Have Done Better as a Black Man
- Trump Files #12: Donald Can’t Multiply 16 and 7
- Trump Files #13: Watch Donald Sing the “Green Acres” Theme Song in Overalls
- Trump Files #14: The Time Donald Trump Pulled Over His Limo to Stop a Beating
- Trump Files #15: When Donald Wanted to Help the Clintons Buy Their House
- Trump Files #16: He Once Forced a Small Business to Pay Him Royalties for Using the Word “Trump”
- Trump Files #17: He Dumped Wine on an “Unattractive Reporter”
- Trump Files #18: Behold the Hideous Statue He Wanted to Erect In Manhattan
- Trump Files #19: When Donald Was “Principal for a Day” and Confronted by a Fifth-Grader
- Trump Files #20: In 2012, Trump Begged GOP Presidential Candidates to Be Civil
- Trump Files #21: When Donald Couldn’t Tell the Difference Between Gorbachev and an Impersonator
- Trump Files #22: His Football Team Treated Its Cheerleaders “Like Hookers”
- Trump Files #23: Donald Tried to Shut Down a Bike Race Named “Rump”
- Trump Files #24: When Donald Called Out Pat Buchanan for Bigotry
- Trump Files #25: Donald’s Most Ridiculous Appearance on Howard Stern’s Show
- Trump Files #26: How Donald Tricked New York Into Giving Him His First Huge Deal
- Trump Files #27: Donald Told Congress the Reagan Tax Cuts Were Terrible
- Trump Files #28: When Donald Destroyed Historic Art to Build Trump Tower
- Trump Files #29: Donald Wanted to Build an Insane Castle on Madison Avenue
- Trump Files #30: Donald’s Near-Death Experience (That He Invented)
- Trump Files #31: When Donald Struck Oil on the Upper West Side
- Trump Files #32: When Donald Massacred Trees in the Trump Tower Lobby
- Trump Files #32: When Donald Demanded Other People Pay for His Overpriced Quarterback
- Trump Files #33: The Time Donald Sued Someone Who Made Fun of Him for $500 Million