The Last, Lonely Days of Ivana Trump

After Donald, she became the QVC shopper’s idea of a jet-setter with a yearslong, on-and-off relationship with a rakish young Italian, known to her friends as the “snake.” She never imagined she’d outlive him.

- By Nina Burleigh

Ivana trump’s house at 10 East 64th Street, which she purchased for $2.5 million in 1992 after her divorce from Donald Trump, is modest compared with the former mansions of Gianni Versace and David Geffen on the same block. Twenty feet wide with a 1920s limestone-column-and-pediment façade, it could pass for a small nation’s consulate or a mausoleum. Inside, it was all Ivana: red carpeting, gilded paneling, and animal prints. She was especially proud of the grand curving staircase with a mural, she once told People magazine, “painted on so it looks like it’s a balcony, looking into French-Roman gardens”—the backdrop for countless regal publicity moments with her posing in ball gowns, peddling a relentlessly queenly idea of herself almost to the very end, even as her realm had shrunk.

Her children and remaining friends (not everyone stayed loyal to her after her ex-husband became the kind of president he became) hated those stairs. Old skiing accidents and a more recent hip injury— she fell at one of her go-to restaurants, Avra Madison Estiatorio—had rendered “Glam-ma,” as she liked her grandchildren to call her, increasingly wobbly. She ignored her friends’ and family’s pleas to sell the townhouse and move into a hotel suite. They feared she would slip and fall down those stairs and hurt herself. At some point in the past few years, her kids bought her one of those emergency “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” devices, but she refused to wear it.