Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 19
Because Linda’s mother was confined to a wheelchair due to her advanced rheumatoid arthritis, they decided to have the wedding in Florida. A simple cocktail reception would take place at Pier Sixty-Six Hotel & Marina on the Inland Waterway in Fort Lauderdale after the church ceremony. Fred and Mary weren’t pleased, but since they didn’t offer to help financially, they had little say. Neither Elizabeth, who was at college in Virginia, nor Donald, who was still at NYMA, attended. The Trumps settled for hosting a reception in New York after the couple returned from their honeymoon.
Trump Village in Coney Island—the largest Trump Management project to date—was slated to break ground in 1963, and Freddy would be assisting in the preparations. Fred expected him to take an apartment in one of his Brooklyn buildings so he could be close at hand to manage any problems that cropped up, but Freddy and Linda moved instead into a one-bedroom in the city on East 56th Street between First Avenue and Sutton Place. They bought a poodle, the first pet Freddy had ever had, and a few months later Linda was pregnant.
That November, Frederick Crist Trump, III, was born. A month later, Freddy bought his first plane—a Piper Comanche 180. He and Linda flew it down to Fort Lauderdale right after Christmas to show it—and their new son—off to Linda’s parents. Her father, Mike, who often parked near the runway of the Fort Lauderdale Airport to watch planes take off and land, couldn’t have been more impressed.
During one of the weekly dinners Freddy and Linda had with Maryanne and her husband, David Desmond, whom she had married in 1960, Freddy told them about the plane, adding “Don’t tell Dad. He wouldn’t get it.”
In September 1963, they moved into the Highlander, one of Fred’s Jamaica buildings, down the block from where Linda had lived when she had first moved to town three years earlier—a stepping-stone to a house on Long Island. The Highlander was typical of Fred’s buildings, having a grand entrance to distract from the substandard rental units. The lobby had a large sunken space with a formal sitting area blocked off by velvet ropes and stanchions on one side and on the other a huge display of oversized tropical plants. Between them, large floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows looked out onto a wide expanse of flagstones and brick steps on either side curving up to the sidewalk. On either side of the steps was more extravagant foliage, towering oak trees and exotic plants with enormous dark green leaves—another Fred Trump touch. The building stood at the top of a hill on Highland Avenue, essentially the dividing line that ran through Jamaica: the north side had a more suburban feel and was predominantly white; the south side was urban and predominantly black. The front and back doors of the building gave onto two different worlds. Freddy and Linda took a two-bedroom apartment on the southeast corner of the ninth and top floor overlooking the park and Jamaica High School in the distance on one side and south Jamaica on the other.
Freddy worried at first that being the landlord’s on-site son, as well as an employee of the company that owned the building, would give people an open invitation to bother him at all hours. But the building was less than fifteen years old, and the superintendent made sure the other tenants left him alone.
Not long after the move, Freddy told Linda he wanted to become a professional pilot. After three years at Trump Management he found the work a grind. Almost from the beginning, his father had frozen him out of the day-to-day operations of the Trump Village development; instead he’d been relegated to handling tenants’ complaints and overseeing maintenance projects.
Being a pilot would give him a chance to do something he loved while making a good living. Before the dawn of the jet age in the early 1960s, there had been a seven-year hiring freeze on commercial pilots. With the introduction of the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 into airline fleets, however, air travel exploded. Pan Am launched overseas flights in 1958 and loaned its jets to National for domestic routes. The following year, TWA, American, Delta, and United were all using jets, which, larger, more powerful, and safer to fly than their turboprop predecessors, could carry more passengers greater distances.
With the expansion in air service came a demand for qualified pilots who already had the skills necessary to train quickly on the new jets. TWA was the last airline to embrace the 707, and it was under a lot of pressure to catch up. At Idlewild and at MacArthur Airport, where Freddy kept his Comanche, the walls were plastered with notices about the need for fresh blood in commercial cockpits.
Linda said no. Having been a stewardess, she knew what pilots got up to during their layovers. For the time being, Freddy agreed to shelve the idea and make the best of life at Trump Management.
But the situation with his father deteriorated. When Freddy approached him with ideas for innovations, Fred shot him down. When he asked for more responsibility, Fred brushed him off.
Trying to prove he could make executive decisions, Freddy placed a window order for one of the older buildings. When Fred found out, he was furious. “You should have slapped a goddamn coat of paint on them instead of wasting my money!” he shouted while the employees looked on. “Donald is worth ten of you. He never would have done anything so stupid.” Donald was still in high school at the time.
It was one thing for his father to humiliate him in front of his siblings, but the people in that office weren’t Freddy’s peers. Someday, presumably, he would be their boss. For his