Flashy Symbol of an Acquisitive Age: DONALD TRUMP

Young, handsome and ridiculously rich, DONALD TRUMP loves making deals and money, loathes losing and has an ego as big as the Ritz -- er, Plaza

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-- The world's spiffiest private yacht, the 282-ft. Trump Princess, "the finest piece of art on water," which once belonged to fallen fellow dealmaker Adnan Khashoggi. Cost: $29 million. The yacht contains gold-plated bathroom fixtures, a rotating sun bed and the one thing every hot yachtsman needs: a waterfall. Khashoggi, who had named the ship after his daughter Nabila, shaved $1 million off the asking price to guarantee that Trump would rename it something else; Trump, who has his own ideas about names, probably would have obliged him for nothing.

-- His ghostwritten book, Trump: The Art of the Deal, which has been on the best-seller lists for almost a year (partly because of Trump's own purchases). Trump says he will donate his estimated $1.5 million in royalties to United Cerebral Palsy, the American Cancer Society and AIDS research (his overall donations to charity run about $4 million a year). The success of the book has inspired Random House to offer a reported $3 million for a sequel.

-- And a miscellany of bits and pieces like Manhattan's Plaza Hotel ($400 million), "one of the great diamonds of the world." And the 76-acre plot along the Hudson that may or may not become Trump City. And Mar-a-Lago, the $7 million, 118-room Palm Beach, Fla., hideaway originally built by Marjorie Merriweather Post, with its elaborate Moorish arches, its private golf course and its 400 ft. of beach. (Mrs. Post originally bequeathed the place to the U.S. Government for visiting chiefs of state, but it was rejected as too expensive.) And the 47-room weekend cottage in Greenwich, Conn., that Trump bought for $2 million. And the Boeing 727 jetliner and six helicopters. And much, much more. And whenever Trump wants to see his name in print, there is always some new prizefight to sponsor, or next spring's bicycle race that will roam from Trump Tower in Manhattan to Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and will be called -- what else? -- the Tour de Trump.

And what does all that add up to, in coin of the realm? Published estimates range from less than $1 billion to more than $3 billion. When the question is asked directly of Trump, there is a long pause. Then he grins and says, "Who the f knows? I mean, really, who knows how much the Japs will pay for Manhattan property these days?"

But what is mere money when one has become a figure of legend, a figure immortalized, if that is the word, in Judith Krantz's I'll Take Manhattan? "Donald Trump, the brilliant, ambitious young real estate man whom even his enemies had to admit was disarmingly unaffected," Krantz wrote with her endearing uncertainty about personal pronouns, "rose to meet Maxi."

" 'Hey you, pretty girl,' " he said with his disarming unaffectedness, " 'what's the problem?' "

Trump played a cameo appearance as himself in the TV version of Krantz's epic in 1987, and now he is heading for greater things, playing a tycoon named "Mr. Spectacular" in a film by John and Bo Derek, Ghosts Can't Do It. Partly filmed in the Trump Tower, of course, it is due out in October. And Ted Turner is producing a $3 million Donald Trump Story, to be broadcast later this year. "It's part of the game I have to play," Trump likes to say. "It's all a game, really."

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