Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 20
When he got home that night, he told Linda how trapped he felt and confessed that he’d never been happy working for his father. It wasn’t at all what he had expected, and for the first time it occurred to him that Trump Management might be a dead end for him. “I’m applying to TWA, Linda. I have to.” He wasn’t asking anymore. Fred might cut him off, but Freddy was willing to risk losing his inheritance. Pilots, especially pilots working for TWA, had good benefits and job security. He would be able to support his young family on his own, and he would be his own man.
When Freddy told his father that he was leaving Trump Management to become a commercial pilot, Fred was stunned. It was a betrayal, and he had no intention of letting his oldest son forget it.
C
HAPTER
F
OUR
Expecting to Fly
Only the best pilots were assigned to fly the coveted Boston–Los Angeles route. And in May 1964, Freddy was on his first official flight as a professional pilot from Boston’s Logan Airport to LAX—less than six months after he’d applied for a spot in that year’s first training class.
What Freddy achieved in the cockpit made him unique in the Trump family. None of Fred’s other children would accomplish so much entirely on their own. Maryanne came closest, putting herself through law school in the early 1970s and, over the course of nine years, compiling a solid record as a prosecutor. Her eventual appointment to the federal appeals court, however, was possible because Donald used his connections to do her a favor. For decades Elizabeth worked in the same job at Chase Manhattan Bank that Fred had arranged for her. Donald was enabled from the beginning, every one of his projects funded and supported by Fred and then by myriad other enablers right up to the present. Other than a brief stint at a New York securities firm after graduating from college, Robert worked for Donald and then his father. Even Fred was not entirely self-made, since his mother had started the business that would become Trump Management.
Freddy had put himself through flight school in college, defied his father (which he would spend the rest of his life paying for), and had no support from, as well as the active contempt of, his family. Obstacles aside, he had been determined to apply to TWA as many times as necessary. He made it on the first try.
In the 1950s and ’60s, the vast majority of incoming pilots had received their training in the military; a typical training class had twenty students: four from the air force, four from the navy, four from the army, four from the marines, and four civilians. At twenty-five years old, Freddy was one of twelve men accepted into the airline’s first 1964 pilots’ class. Ten of them had received their training in the military. When you consider that there were no flight simulators and all the training was done in the air, the achievement was all the more staggering. Freddy was finally reaping the rewards of all of those hours he’d logged at the airfield while his fraternity brothers were partying.
In those days, air travel was at the height of its glamour, and at the forefront of that trend was Howard Hughes’s Trans World Airlines, the favorite of the Hollywood glitterati. TWA provided limousines to the gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons to ferry them to and from the airport; the resulting publicity made everyone want to fly TWA. One of the largest carriers in the world, TWA flew both domestically and internationally. The captain was God and treated accordingly, and thanks to Hughes’s penchant for beautiful women, the stewardesses all looked like movie stars.
The reactions pilots got from passengers as they walked through the terminal, the admiring stares, the requests for autographs, were all new to Freddy and a welcome change from Trump Management, where he had struggled and failed to gain respect. The gleaming airports stood in stark contrast to the dark, unwelcoming office and dirty construction sites he’d left behind in New York. In place of bulldozers and backhoes, rows of 707s and DC-8s glimmered on the tarmac. Instead of having all of his decisions second-guessed and criticized by his father, on the flight deck Freddy had the controls.
Freddy moved his young family to Marblehead, a small harbor town forty minutes northeast of Boston’s Logan Airport on the Massachusetts coast. They rented a ramshackle cottage set among an eclectic mix of houses that circled the village green not far from the sprawling harbor, where Freddy kept his “yacht,” a beat-up Boston Whaler.
May in Marblehead was idyllic. Freddy loved the flying. There was a lot of socializing, with barbecues and deep-sea fishing excursions. Almost every weekend, friends came up from New York to visit them. After a month, though, Freddy started to struggle with the schedule. He was often at loose ends when he wasn’t in the cockpit. Linda noticed that he started drinking more than everyone else—something that had never been a problem before.
Her husband didn’t confide in Linda anymore, wanting perhaps to shield her, so she wasn’t privy to the details of the conversation he’d had with Fred back in December. Linda didn’t know about the constant barrage of abuse Freddy was receiving from his father in New York through letters and phone calls. But his friends knew. Freddy told them, with a note of disbelief in his voice, that the old man was embarrassed to have a “bus driver in the sky” for a son. It didn’t take much for his father to convince him that choosing to leave Trump Management meant choosing failure. The most crucial thing that Linda didn’t fully grasp—and to be fair, Freddy probably didn’t grasp it, either—was how much Fred Trump’s opinion mattered to his son.
One night, after returning from