Most of the staff, however, were not a permanent part of Mar-a-Lago; they were local caterers and car parks, hired for the evening. In addition to the dining-room ceiling, Ivana had left Mrs. Post’s shabby fringed sofas and Moroccan suites totally in place, giving the impression that she was trying on Mrs. Post’s persona too. One of the few signs of the new owners’ taste was the dozens of silver frames on the many end tables. The frames did not contain family pictures, but magazine covers. Each cover featured the face of Donald Trump.

Ivana remained upstairs in the family triplex with its beige onyx floors and low-ceilinged living room painted with murals in the style of Michelangelo. The murals had occasioned one of their frequent fights: Ivana wanted cherubs, Donald preferred warriors. The warriors won. “If this were on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it would be very much in place in terms of quality,” Trump once said of the work. That April, Ivana began to tell her friends that she was worried about Donald’s state of mind.

He had just completed the Grand Hyatt, on East Forty-second Street, and was considered a comer. He had put together the Fifth Avenue parcel that would become Trump Tower and had enraged the city establishment with his demolition of the cherished Art Deco friezes that had decorated the Bonwit Teller building. Even then, Trump’s style was to turn on his audience.

“What do you think? Do you think blowing up the sculptures has hurt me?” he asked me that day at “21.”

“Yes.”

“Who cares?” he said. “Let’s say that I had given that junk to the Met. They would have just put them in their basement. I’ll never have the goodwill of the Establishment, the tastemakers of New York. Do you think, if I failed, these guys in New York would be unhappy? They would be thrilled! Because they have never tried anything on the scale that I am trying things in this city. I don’t care about their goodwill.”

Donald was like an overgrown kid, all rough edges and inflated ego.