My father wrote to celebrities. He liked to give them advice. He’d enclose a hundred dollar check along with his handwritten, multi page missive discussing his and their own health, marriage problems or whatever scandal might have made the news that day.
He would say a check, unlike cash, would demand immediate attention. He would imagine aloud that a secretary opening a letter would find the check and have to shout into the celebrity’s office, “Mr. X, someone sent me a letter with a hundred dollar check in it. What should I do with the check?” My father would insist that the celeb would think, “What kind of crazy bastard would send me a check for ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS?” and would then immediately insist on seeing both the letter and the check. This was in the early ’90s when a hundred dollars was still kind of a big deal. In dad’s world, money talked and his check was going to do the talking for him. It would get his proverbial foot in the door.
Aside from a letter to Jackie Kennedy Onassis when they were both struggling with the same form of cancer (he asked me to mail it from his Sloane Kettering hospital bed. I did – she returned the check), the other letter I remember well was his letter to Donald Trump.
The headlines in the NYC dailies at the time shouted about Trump’s cheating, Trump’s money troubles and his impending breakup with first wife Ivana. It was salacious, it was tawdry and it sold headlines. To my father, who was experiencing his own marriage fidelity issues while trying to keep his own company’s head above water while being the father of 4 children, could relate, albeit without the tabloid headlines. So out came his blue safety checks and a nondescript writing pad (unlined white paper – the type of pad on which a housewife might keep her grocery list) and he wrote his next celebrity letter in blue ink using his blue capped Bic pen. The letter follows. The emphasis are his.
To Mr. Trump From: Mr. Patrick ____ (Just an average person trying to give you some reasonable advice) on saving your marriage (triple underlined)
Look Mr. Trump we don’t know each other and have not had any previous contact. I hope you save your marriage and that is why I am writing you this letter. You have a little girl – you are aFamily man – you are an intelligent couple that should be trying to pull together, at least on your side, if you can’t get Mrs. Trump (at this time) to also see the value of staying together. Mr. Trump, money is always a problem – too much or too little – time away from each other because of your career is also a problem. False friends that would like to see your family break up again – remember misery loves company – now for some additional stuff if you are still reading this . God in your life is important. (Note: I am not a religious person, just an average person) so this is just a letter I hope will be to you and your wife’s best advantage, Your wife should be your best friend . Can’t you work at this and not go for the split up? Down the line you will benefit and your family will benefit and especially your child – get some time – without anyone else around to work this situation out – OR it would happen time and time again and it will never end. You will be adding to the problems of overall life. Take a week and go to Pennsylvania Dutch Country, enjoy each other and the food and countryside. Understand the people. As a family. Come back as a family. Your wife must become your best friend and you hers. At the end you will need each other more than you know. Good luck and God Bless. (Author’s note: The following is a separate sheet of paper on the last page): Mr & Mrs. Trump: Here is $100 for some of your time to read this letter. I would like to SAVE YOUR MARRIAGE and I hope you read this – if you don’t I will have at least tried. Please give it to charity if that comes to that. Thank you.
And then he signed his name.
He gave the letter to me and I did not mail it. Back then my father’s eccentricities embarrassed me. I can’t tell you what I did with the letter at the time but what I did with it doesn’t matter as much as the fact that in January 2017, I pulled a small white envelope out of the back of a stuffed dresser drawer, opened it up for the first time since he had handed it to me in the early 1990s and found both the folded sheets of the letter and the $100 check, uncashed and unsent. It was just a few weeks after the 2016 election.
My father died in 1996 of his cancer, two years after Jackie died of hers. I read the letter nearly 20 years after his death and it helps me understand more about my father and what he was looking for in his own life. His own marriage to my mother was impossibly difficult and he really was looking and wanting a best friend, which she wouldn’t and couldn’t be to him. He was a New York City guy, but took solace in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country and the simplicity of the Amish. He often took us there as kids. He would talk about family while we drove through the countryside, past the farms. To him, family was the end and the beginning, though his own failures and troubled beginnings prevented him from knowing how to implement a successful plan for both marriage and family simultaneously.
There’s a melancholy to this letter that takes my breath away. What he writes as advice to Trump is advice he seemed to wish he could take himself but couldn’t. In an ideal world he would take my mother and spend some time among the Amish and rebuild his marriage and their friendship and spend time with their children, but in the real world he could only take his not-so-secret girlfriend or his children on the weekends…and of course, never both at once.
My father was not a crazy man. He was a man who cared and who struggled and he was a man who thought his own perceived attempt at triumph over tragedy might somehow be of use to others who struggled, even when those others were the famous and sometimes infamous. It entertains me to think of a younger, yellow-haired Trump shouting back at his secretary, “Who the hell sent me a check?”, reading the letter, taking the advice, reconciling with Ivana and setting the Trump family on a completely different, somewhat more scandal free – at the time – course.
But I decided not to mail that letter. Much like a flap of Lorenz’s butterfly wings might ultimately result in a destructive tornado blowing over the land thousands of miles away, perhaps had I chosen otherwise, I (and my father) might have prevented one. One can only dream.
Geneiveve Kaufman Writes 