NEW YORK POST:
A former architect says he acted as President Trump’s “beard” decades ago when he was dating Marla Maples in Atlantic City, while still married.
“The only time we had any personal stuff was when he was going out with Marla Maples … he was still married to Ivana and I was, as they say, ‘the beard,’” Alan Lapidus said in the forthcoming A&E series “Biography: The Trump Dynasty,” which begins airing Feb. 25.
Lapidus, the architect for the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, recalled being asked by Trump to take Maples out, as she was a frequent guest at his Atlantic City casinos in the late 1980s.
“We called it the beard, so that it would look like this individual was with Marla and not Donald,” recalled Jack O’Donnell, who was the president and COO of Trump Plaza Casino at the time.
“Donald used a lot of us that way. We wound up comping all of her services and stays and food, whatever it might be.”
On one particular occasion, Lapidus recalled that Trump sent a limo for him and Maples.
“I picked her up and we went out to dinner,” Lapidus said. “I love the fact that when we went into the restaurant, all the women looked at her like they would want to chop her up into little pieces and have all the pieces burned,” the architect recalled.