Ivana Trump dies at 73: What you don’t know about former President Donald Trump’s first wife

Update: Ivana Trump, businesswoman and ex-wife of former President Donald Trump has died. She was 73.

Editor's note: The story below was originally published in 2016.

In October 1987, Ivana Trump sat at her mahogany desk at the Trump’s Castle Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City where she commuted each day from New York by helicopter and mused about the possibility of being married to a presidential contender.

Ivana Trump: Former President Donald Trump's ex-wife, dies at 73

“I wouldn’t like it. I treasure the family privacy too much,” the Czech-born former model told a Palm Beach Post reporter visiting her elegant office, “but he makes the decisions.”

“He” being Ivana’s then-husband of 10 years, Donald, who years later said his current run for the presidency had its roots that fall in a GOP activist’s Draft Trump movement.

At the time, Ivana was also restoring Mar-a-Lago, the last 1920s ocean-to-lake estate left in Palm Beach, which the couple had purchased two years earlier.

A look inside Mar-a-Lago: Archive photos give peek inside Trump's estate in Palm Beach

“I never say never,” Ivana said about her husband’s political aspirations. “He is 41 now. Who can say in 10 years what he will do?”

It took 28 years, not 10, for Trump to decide to run. By then, worrying about her family’s loss of privacy was left to Trump’s third wife, Melania.

In the meantime, the ever-buoyant Ivana, now 67 and a grandmother of eight, has reinvented herself many times personally, professionally and, due to a series of plastic surgeries, even physically.

The 1992 divorce from Trump over his public dalliances with actress Marla Maples, who would become Trump’s second wife and mother of their daughter, Tiffany, became a vicious public circus. In a deposition, Ivana claimed Trump raped her during an argument, a claim she later denied.

The battle would have sent a lesser woman slinking off to obscurity.

But Ivana, a former competitive skier, went for the gold.

And got it, in a settlement estimated at $14 million to $20 million plus custody of the couples’ three children: Donald Jr., now 38; Eric, 32; and Ivanka Trump Kushner, 34.

Suddenly, Ivana didn’t have to answer to her ex-husband.

She had shepherded Mar-a-Lago back to cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post’s original grandeur (before Trump turned it into the private Mar-a-Lago Club) and wasn’t going to let divorce boot her off fantasy island, where she palled around with the likes of Estee Lauder, Dame Celia Lipton Farris and Kathleen Ford, widow of Henry Ford II.

Ivana bought a $4.4 million Addison Mizner mansion a few blocks north of Mar-a-Lago in 1994. Concha Marina became her Palm Beach base for more than two decades. (Twenty years later, she sold the house on Jungle Road for $16.6 million.)

Represented by the William Morris Agency, Ivana began a dizzying series of media appearances and business deals, her buttercream blonde bouffant appearing in ads for Coors Light, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Milk Campaign.

In 1992, she published a racy roman à clef about a Czech-born beauty and her wealthy hotelier husband called “For Love Alone,” although critics dubbed it “For Revenge Alone.” She also wrote a divorce guide, in which she urged spurned women to “take his wallet to the cleaners.”

She even appeared as herself in “The First Wives’ Club” movie with Goldie Hawn, telling divorced women “don’t get mad, get everything.” (Although Ivana was actually a second wife, having been married in the early 1970s to Austrian skier Alfred Wiklmayr.)

Ivana, now a bona fide businesswoman, became one of the first “sellebrities,” selling her high fashion and jewelry lines on TV home shopping networks. She owns property in St. Tropez, Miami, New York and London.

A 1995 rebound marriage to Italian businessman Riccardo Mazzucchelli lasted two years, then Ivana seemed to follow in Trump’s footsteps by dating younger partners.

As always, she was in on the joke.

She starred in a 2006 dating show called “Ivana Young Man.”

“I’m very energetic. I don’t want to worry about a bad back and bad knees,” she told Oprah Winfrey. “Younger guy gives you a little bit of the edge because it’s just more of the energy, which I definitely need.”

In 2008, Ivana, then 59, tied the knot with 35-year-old Italian model-actor Rossano Rubicondi in a Mar-a-Lago ceremony that reportedly cost $3 million in front of 23 bridesmaids, 300 guests — and her now-friendly ex-husband.

The Palm Beach Daily News reported that the groom entered to the theme from “Rocky.” During the ring ceremony, he repeated in accented English the phrase “but a small token” as “a small butt token.” After which, the wedding party retreated into a reception room named for the bride’s second husband.

Perhaps it surprised no one when the marriage ended four months later.

Even into her 7th decade, Ivana has continued to seek the spotlight.

At age 60, she stripped down to her underwear on UK television for “Celebrity Big Brother,” seeming to affirm that if you believe you’re a beautiful and glamorous older woman, so will everyone else. Or that with enough confidence, you can delude yourself into thinking it.

But who are we to argue with an almost-70-year-old woman who says her three boyfriends keep her busy?

Since Trump launched his presidential campaign, Ivana has seemed to wobble on her stilettos.

In January, she was reportedly scolded by the Trump campaign for questioning Melania Trump’s ability to be first lady.

She was excoriated earlier this month after discussing immigration with the New York Post, a subject with which she, as an Eastern European immigrant, is familiar.

“As long as you come here legally and get a proper job … we need immigrants,” she said. “Who’s going to vacuum our living rooms and clean up after us? Americans don’t like to do that.”

And to the inevitable question, she confirmed that her former husband has no problems with the size of his, er, hands.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Ivana Trump dead: What you don’t know about Donald Trump’s first wife