The strange feminism of Ivana Trump

For a woman whose life was all about ascent, there is a cruel irony to the fact that Ivana Trump was found dead at the age of 73 at the bottom of the stairs of her Upper East Side apartment last Thursday. Born in 1949 in Communist Czechoslovakia, the girl whose father was an electrical engineer made her name on the basis of dizzying verticals: first as a professional skier and then as billionaire’s wife and manager of her second husband Donald Trump’s eye-bending skyscrapers in New York and Atlantic City. After her acrimonious tabloid divorce from Donald in 1991 following his affair with chorus-girl Marla Maples, Ivana made her name from surviving – and exposing – the indignities of her marriage’s collapse.

Writing two thinly veiled fictional accounts For Love Alone and Free To Love, followed by her bestselling self-help book,The Best is Yet To Come: Coping With Divorce and Enjoying Life Again, the First Mrs Trump rose to become an unlikely feminist icon: canonised as the Patron Saint of Scorned Women and later immortalized in a cameo in the blockbuster film First Wives’ Club starring Diane Keaton and Bette Middler.