‘I didn’t get mad, I got everything’ - CHARLOTTE EAGAR shares how Ivana Trump revealed the rules for life that took her from communist Czechoslovakia to US high society

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I sat next to Ivana Trump at Cannes Film Festival in 2010 and was struck by her good manners. We were at a gala dinner, packed with stars and starlets, money men and courtiers – the delusional and desperate who mainline on the heroin of Cannes. 

I don’t think I was the placement Ivana was expecting: ‘Has it come to this? Stuck on the media table with Charlotte Eagar?’ she must have thought. For back then, her ex-husband Donald Trump hadn’t become president of the US, and Ivana was – in Cannes-world – just the ageing ex-wife of a (possibly) dodgy property developer/reality TV star. I was an aspiring filmmaker and journalist whose first film had, to my amazement, got into the Cannes Short Film Corner, but I hadn’t achieved wealth or fame. 

For me, having spent the first half of the 80s in a pre-internet boarding school, where Dynasty and the Daily Mail – a constant chronicler of Ivana’s soap opera – were rare windows on to the world, I was fascinated to meet this real-life Alexis Carrington Colby. Ivana was charming, obviously clever, still fabulous at 61, with her signature blonde dome and international skier’s body. 

Charlotte Eagar sat next to Ivana Trump (pictured in 1991) at Cannes Film Festival in 2010. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1949, Ivana made her way to the of US high society

As we talked over dinner, and later on the phone, Ivana gave me her Guide to Life, old-fashioned Mitteleuropa meets the grit of the American dream made good. It probably helped that I had lived in Eastern Europe, so understood the grey communist boot camp Ivana had managed to escape. 

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1949, Ivana defected in 1974, like a Bond Girl skiing out from behind the Iron Curtain. In Ivana’s case, however, not on a cello case, arms wrapped round Timothy Dalton, but on tour with the Czech National Team in Geneva. 

These are the rules for life Ivana told me she lived by…

YOU NEED A PLAN 

‘I wasn’t afraid when I defected from Czechoslovakia. I had a plan. We were under police security all the time in Geneva, but I just walked out of our hotel, and I was gone!’ Ivana told me. In fact, her plan was more complicated: in 1971, she had gone through a marriage of convenience to a skier and friend, Alfred Winklmayr, a citizen of communist Czechoslovakia’s neighbour Austria. That gave Ivana an Austrian passport with the right to travel in the West but also to stay in Czechoslovakia. 

How miraculous that passport must have seemed – Ivana’s ticket out of the Soviet world, hidden away, perhaps, from the Czech secret police, who would have regarded anyone with Western documents with suspicion – but one Ivana wasn’t ready to use. For at the time, she was in love with a Czech playwright and songwriter, George Staidl, but he was killed in a car crash in 1973. After his death, Ivana used her Austrian passport to travel from Geneva to Canada, where she had an uncle and aunt in Toronto (by then she had divorced Winklmayr). ‘Sport and art were the way to the West, if you had the talent. But I was very sad to lose touch with my parents. It was for their own safety. They were still living in Czechoslovakia under police surveillance. 

Ivana with Donald in 1988. She revealed that she used to run our casinos [when married to Trump] – she had 24,000 employees and a payroll of $1.2 million [£1 million] a week

FIND A GLAMOROUS JOB

‘Jobs are a good way to meet people. You don’t meet people sitting in a closet. A lot of my housekeepers are from the Czech Republic. They are such hard workers. If you have the qualities to have a glamorous job, that’s the best way.’ No housekeeping – or closets – for Ivana: she taught skiing, started modelling and made it to New York. 

DRESS AS BEAUTIFULLY AS YOU CAN

‘Then go to the most expensive hotel, restaurant or bar and have a very long, leisurely drink or soda. Sit and watch, and if you’re gorgeous, the men will notice you,’ she told me. So, one night in 1976, Ivana went with a group of other models to a bar called Maxwell’s Plum. ‘It was then New York’s hottest bar/ restaurant,’ she said. ‘No tables, no reservations, just a long wait. This handsome blue-eyed man offered to get us a table.’ It was Trump. ‘It wasn’t love at first sight. It wasn’t lust at first sight – perhaps it was convenience at first sight? Of course, with Donald it was done with a bargaining chip. If he got us a table quickly, he’d sit with us.’ She married him and became the co-star of his blockbuster life 

LOOK FOR A MAN WHO'S GOOD FOR YOU

‘There are good ones in every bunch, and there are some mediocre ones, and if I sense one is bad, then he’s gone. Men in the West are a lot easier than men in the East, possibly because they have had easier lives, less stress, less strain, less repression.’ 

DO SOMETHING YOU REALLY LIKE 

‘We are all good at something. I am good at business. I have five companies,’ she said. ‘I used to run our casinos [when married to Trump] – I had 24,000 employees and a payroll of $1.2 million [£1 million] a week. I used to fly to Atlantic City every morning, 45 minutes, and stay in the office till 6pm.’ I was surprised because in the 80s Ivana had seemed the ultimate lady who lunched. But here she was talking spreadsheets and long hours like a business mogul. ‘I’d come home, have supper with the kids, then go out to dinner.’

DON'T GET MAD, GET EVERYTHING 

The couple had three children and were married for 15 years until their marriage collapsed in 1992, after Trump’s affair with Marla Maples, who Ivana famously dismissed as a ‘showgirl’. The divorce caught the public imagination in America, and she used to be mobbed by crowds shouting, ‘Go for the money, Ivana!’ She even had a cameo in the iconic 90s film The First Wives Club, uttering the immortal line: ‘Don’t get mad, get everything.’ Certainly, Ivana got enough from Trump – in the region of $14 million (£11.5 million) plus several properties – to set her up for the next acts of her life. Trump married Maples in 1993, only for that to end a few years later, before he married Melania Knauss 

BE MORE THAN JUST A PRETTY FACE

‘Pretty faces disappear over time. Fine minds only get stronger and more interesting,’ she said. ‘But exercise is as vital to me as breathing.’ 

NEVER GIVE UP

Always keep moving forward, and that’s where you’ll get. Ahead!’ Ivana went on to have two more husbands, she also had her children, businesses, TV shows and several books, including the self-help book The Best is Yet to Come: Coping With Divorce and Enjoying Life Again and Raising Trump, a memoir of bringing up her and Trump’s children. 

BE DISCERNING ABOUT WHAT YOU AGREE TO

It was clear, by the time Trump became president, that the couple were back on good terms. He apparently even offered Ivana the ambassadorship to the Czech Republic – something she turned down because she said she didn’t want to spend four years in Prague. 

‘After all these years on the triple A-list, I get up to 20 invitations every day,’ she told me. ‘But nowadays I spend more time with my family and friends. It’s still glamorous and glittering, but just more relaxing. 

NEVER FLY A PRIVATE JET ACROSS THE SEA

‘It’s a waste of money! All that fuel!’ 

Ivana’s decision to defect from that hotel in Geneva with a plan led to an extraordinary life: surviving alpha males, America and the Red Army and making it to the age of 73. 

We talked on the phone a few weeks after Cannes, and she summed up her life tips…

• Love, honour and stay in close touch with your parents – they are your real strength.
• Believe in yourself. The world will knock you down; be ready to get right back up.
• Make your own life and then share it with people you love.
• Stay away from toxic people – the ones who bring you down. 
• Make your own money – it gives you real freedom. 

As Ivana ended our telephone conversation, I suddenly found myself back in my 80s boarding school – Dynasty mashed with the Daily Mail – as she told me she was off to have lunch mar with Joan Collins.