What movie did Donald Trump watch the night Fred Trump, Jr. died?
By Richard von Busack
Under the expert grilling of George Stephanopolous, Mary Trump, author of the memoir Too Much and Not Enough, said that she did not know what movie Donald Trump went to Sept 26, 1981. This was the night his brother — Mary’s father — died alone in the Queens Medical Center.
“What movie did he go see?” ‘Steph’ asked.
“I wish I knew,” said the traumatized Ph.d.
This is what my professors used to call ‘a historical problem.’
The night Fred Trump, Jr., died at age 42 of alcoholism-related heart disease was warm for fall, 59 degrees, after an unusually hot September. I expect Fred Jr. must have been a smoker, because the drink alone rarely carries out a man that age, especially a high functioning overdrinker who flies jets for TWA.
Fred’s stronger brother Donald is 35 when Fred Junior dies alone. Next year Donald buys an Connecticut estate, as many a wealthy 35 year old New Yorker would and will. But lets assume that he’s still living in New York. What is showing in NYC that Saturday night? The New York Times’ Time Machine search engine shows us.
It’s a banquet, painful for the movie-lover to contemplate in a nation full of closed theaters.
Let’s start with the revival theaters, the odds and ends: John Schlesinger‘s berserk Honky Tonk Freeway is at the Ziegfeld. The cult film Cutter’s Way is at the Cinema Studios 3. Scorsese’s flop New York, New York is in revival for those who want to give it a reassessment. A double bill of The Great Dictator/To Be Or Not To Be plays at the Regency. Unmissable, prophetic, not Trump’s style.
Two Fassbinders at different locations, Lili Marlene and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kamp. Also not Trump’s kind of thing. Somehow one can’t see him buying a ticket to Pixote, a grisly expose of Brazilian prisons. Subtitles all around.
In second run is Stripes, Arthur — about a drunken millionaire, a subject perhaps too close to home — American Werewolf in London and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Our media-savvy Trump probably saw them all already. But maybe he went back for seconds.
I’d give small odds that he went to see So Fine, a farce about a clothing designer who invents assless pants. Jack Warden, also in Carbon Copy (below) is an actor I cherish, up there with William Demerest as one of the cinema’s great slow-burn artists. (Would Warden remind Donald of his father Fred Senior? There’s a strong resemblance.) But So Fine is ending its run, and it’s hard to imagine Trump at a second run theater.
Rich and Famous, George Cukor’s last movie, just debuted. Would the title alone have drawn Trump like a magnet? Would he have gone to see Jacqueline Bisset, a leading siren of the times? For that matter, did he have a thing for Sylvia “Emmanuelle” Kristel that would cause him to check out the smoky Private Lessons? (“Fun and Suspense” says the NY Posts’s Archer Winston with Boris Badanov moose and squirrel diction.) How about Neil Simon’s Only When I Laugh? Marsha Mason, a middle-aged woman, is in the ad. Besides, there’s the matter of the title. Laughter is either for the weak or to be used against the weak. Hard pass. Mommie Dearest and Kramer vs Kramer also can be dismissed with little argument. Trump hasn’t yet called Meryl Streep an overrated actress, though.
The prestige hit of the year, Chariots of Fire just opened and it will win the Best Picture Oscar next winter. It is a movie about winners, and we know Trump’s opinion of winners. Would he want to see a movie about British runners overcoming ethnic discrimination, though?
The comedy Carbon Copy has an ad for the ages: the underrated George Segal, jacketless with loosened tie, is turned toward the viewer, popeyed: “I lost my job, my house, my Rolls-Royce…my family left me. What else can possibly go wrong?” Black kid (a young Denzel Washington) next to him: “Hi, Dad!” The filmmakers aren’t responsible for the ad copy, but ouch ouch ouch. The subject of a well-off man suddenly getting an illegitimate kid might draw Trump in — it’s relatable, as they say. We can judge that the disaffected Segal will learn from his new son’s street smarts and get his groove back. But we have consider The Donald’s notorious id. The black face on the poster — no matter how handsome, appealing and unthreatening — would likely be a deal breaker.
We know Trump’s tastes. The Jean Claude Van Damme movie Bloodsport is one of his all time favorites. Give the man a film with a nut shot, and he’s happy. But the cinema of 1981 is short on fight movies. Several years later, it’ll be different when Cannon Films starts churning out bruise-operas, for a Reagan-era audience thirsting to see foreigners get what’s coming to them.
The roughest movie in town that night — at least the roughest movie you can advertise in the Times, which ignores the Times Square fight and fright fodder— is Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort. It’s a Louisiana swamp vigilante movie with Brion James as the heavy.
It’s been many years since I saw it, but it was tough as barbed wire back then. The burly James is Leon in Blade Runner, the replicant who flunks the Voight-Kampff test. (It’d be interesting to see if Trump could ace that one. “You’re in the desert. You see a tortoise on its back.” “We’ve done more for tortoises than any previous administration…”) In my opinion, Southern Comfort is one of the three best possibilities for the movie he watched that night.
Body Heat is the second strong possibility. Neo-noir with a succulent Kathleen Turner, set in Trump’s beloved Palm Beach, Florida: “Body Heat is Hot Stuff!” screams a blurb that might have been crafted to lure Trump in.
Could Trump resist a title like Prince of the City? It’s Sidney Lumet’s lengthy tale of police corruption and a narc (Treat Williams) who turned informant. It has New York-centric subject matter. In those days, it’s possible Trump had the attention span to make it through a 167 minute movie. But perhaps not.
No one will ask Trump the question, “What movie did you see on the night your brother died.” Even if he remembered, would he answer? A specific question sometimes opens a cobwebbed, dusty door in a decaying brain. Ask Trump if he remembers the final shot in Southern Comfort, with Brion James glowering balefully at the escaping hunters. Ask him what he thinks of Kathleen Turner in her most famous role. Wasn’t she tempting? Ask him if he ever saw Prince of the City. Maybe we can place him in a specific theater, sitting, watching, wearing that frozen sad clown frown the whole world knows, temporarily tuning out the mad circus of dysfunction he grew up with.
