A Glimpse into the Young Ivana Zelníčková

A loss of innocence and the beginning of a great fake

I have odd tea to spill. I just read Ivana Trump died.

I was once privy to a glimpse of her secretive young life.

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First, I must say, I have a feeling Ivana’s death, at 73, will affect Donald Trump physically and mentally, more than his banal announcements portray. It is the occasion of her passing. In his press releases, he was briefly sentimental, and then asked for money.

He doesn’t understand that the death of one’s spouse, is a traumatic event. One turns white.

None of Donald’s other wives were close to him, not like Ivana.

Old-timers are recalling Ivana’s peak public life in the 1980s, her backstory. I guess I’m one of them. I stumbled upon a piece of Ivana’s life myself, about thirty years ago, quite unexpectedly.

At the time, I was friendly with a group of language teachers, who taught French, Italian, Spanish, German. We loved to cook and drink and talk.

One of them, “Marie,” lamented to me that although her French accent was flawless, she’d learned English too late in life to get rid of her native Czech accent.

I was delighted to find out she was Czech. As a joke, I said, “I don’t suppose you know Ivana, do you?” The Trumps were probably in the newspaper headlines that day, for their antics in lavish bad taste.

Marie went white at my remark. She go so upset, and so emotional; it was quite unexpected. Yes, she did know Ivana Zelníčková, as she was once known! Marie hated her guts, from their years together on the Czech Junior ski team!

Whoa.

She said, yes, Ivana was tall, blonde, busty, a decent skier, and possessed of a Communist-Party-sanctioned family who’d been able to make about as much money as a middle manager could in a Soviet country at the time. They had cash. Her father was involved in electricity, electronics… I’m not sure. You know how it is, when you’re talking in two languages to someone!

Like many ambitious families dying to get out of the USSR during the Cold War, Ivana’s family decided their sexually-appealing, athletic daughter was their sure-fire ticket out of the country, to the West.

Everyone in the USSR knew that only athletes and ballerinas were allowed to travel outside Soviet borders. If you got a berth on a “ski team” you’d be able to get out of the country for competitions.

Ivana’s mother and father told her, in essence, “You ski your ass off and we’ll grease the team’s coffers. We’ll pay them to make sure you’re on the team, even if you’re not the best. Once you get over the border, your job is to find a husband for a transactional marriage. The marital match is what you need to be the best at, and you cannot let us down. You must succeed.”

Marie had tears in her eyes, telling me about girls who were passed over for the ski team, far better skiers, because Ivana’s family paid the coach off. For Marie, who’d never seen this corruption in action, it was devasting. A loss of innocence. She was a young teenager who thought your final times on the slopes were all that mattered.

So off the team goes, to Austria. That’s where Ivana would meet her first groom.

The Austrian guy Ivana married… had a fancy family name, (maybe aristocratic background?) but his family was out of money. All flash, no cash.

Plus, he himself was gay, and his family wanted him to look straight.

He was not “Ivana’s friend” as the newspapers would later describe their union. They weren’t intimate at all. He didn’t marry her to “be a pal.”

Her family paid his family. He got his mother and father off his back about marriage to a woman, his family got a lot of cash, and Ivana got the necessary paperwork to begin immigrating, in her case, to Canada.

She wanted to be in the US from the beginning, but it wasn’t possible. She thought Canada was a good start, and then, she’d keep making chess moves to get into the US.

Now this whole business about her being a “model”— if you ever thought that was bizarre!— well, it was. Ivana had a voluptuous athletic figure, but not a professional model’s coat-hanger figure, not for fashion, not a model’s face. I say that, in the industry “craft” sense. The camera was not kind to her angles, as we know. She and Donald didn’t marry each other because they were convinced of their physical superiority. They knew each other had balls.

Ivana was an athlete. She grasped the corporate sports world, in its flagrant corruption. She liked to speak in public, she had confidence, and her family never stopped pushing. She was going to save them all, right?

Ivana the Czech arriviste, would appear as a TV-ready blonde ski athlete in Canada, in apres-ski ready-to-wear to promote Montreal’s competitions, and so on. This was not about haute fashion or doing runways! The sports social world is how she became introduced to Donald, that was his social world. She saw he was insecure and needed coaching. The young DJT was amazed at what Ivana achieved by hook or by crook. They were both in love with faking it until you make it, and the exteriors one creates to hide one’s lack of social status, true accomplishment, and intelligence.

My recollection of this story is anecdotal, of course. Some of you may know contradicting facts, deeper biographies. Don’t worry, I’m not entering a reporting race! I found Marie’s tears a moving picture of the Cold War period. I am sure the emotional story is correct, if nothing else. She had no reason to lie about her perception.

My teacher friend only had this little moment to share with me, a blip on Ivana’s timeline. It was poignant. Marie herself would not leave Prague until the USSR collapsed, many years later. Her descriptions of the havoc, poverty, totalitarianism, were as you might expect. She felt lucky to find herself in a better place, as the decades went by. But this one moment, of her 15-year-old self, seeing how “those who are promoted are hollow” was a big one. I thought of it today.

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