Ivana Trump's funeral is Wednesday on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Reading that the 73-year-old businesswoman died from tumbling down the stairs of her nearby Manhattan townhouse, I flashed to the famous 1986 photo of her in a red dress and lipstick, sitting at the bottom of the spiral stairs of a different East Side apartment, with Donald and their young kids Ivanka, Eric and Donald Jr. She was 36, at the height of her happiness and power. It was hard to miss her very public rise and fall.
At 22, Ivana Marie Zelničková married an Austrian ski instructor friend to escape Soviet-era Czechoslovakia. As a 26-year-old divorced part-time model, she met Trump at the New York hangout Maxwell's Plum. He was three years older. Of 600 people at their 1977 church wedding, she said she'd only invited six.
