The Liar's Ball. Ward Vicky

Edward Durrell Stone. The brass letters ran around the creamy wall like a golden ticker tape, a constant reminder of the building's co-owner and manager. The sunlight had reflected off those letters so brightly that senior executives at CBS, whose morning show was shot in the building's ground-floor studios, successfully negotiated with Trump to tone them down. The glare was “blinding,” they said, and they were not in the business of “advertising Trump.”

      When he heard about the negotiations, Ira M. Millstein, a white-haired lawyer who works on the 32nd floor of the GM Building – at Weil Gotshal & Manges, the building's oldest extant tenant – had chuckled gently with his colleague, the well-known bankruptcy lawyer Harvey R. Miller. The two of them had tangled with Trump on other matters. They suspected the issue would irk him.

      Some of the GM tenants felt that Trump's initials marred not just the aesthetics but the spirit of their tower. The building wasn't just another ho-hum high-rise. No, this was the GM Building, a symbol of America at its finest.

      She had been commissioned in 1964 by General Motors, then the biggest company in the United States – and, therefore, in the world. GM had occupied 26 floors of the building, which took up an entire city block between Fifth and Madison Avenues and 58th and 59th Streets. Her location – where Central Park meets the heart of both commercial and residential New York – was, like her name, unbeatable. Unsurprisingly, the world's alpha dogs rented office space there. The blue-chip brands included Estée Lauder, Carl Icahn, the hedge fund Perry Capital, the talent-management firm IMG, and the Wall Street legend Sanford “Sandy” I. Weill.

      Trump didn't usually buy office buildings – but he viewed the GM Building as an exception; she was the fitting monument to his ambition. In 1998 he had finally found a way to buy her by partnering with the Indianapolis-based insurance giant Conseco, run by a friend of his, Stephen “Steve” C. Hilbert.

      Conseco put up most of the money, but Trump became the face of the building. He took out an ad in the New York Times that read “$700,000,000.. THE GM BUILDING.. A 50-story 2 million square foot office building.. Developer Donald J. Trump.” The ad ran two days in a row because initially someone forgot to insert Trump's middle initial, J., a detail he is most particular about.

      He instantly set to work “Trumpifying” the tower. The building's white lobby interior was replaced with a deep green marble. There were plaques on the wall that read “The General Motors Building at Trump International Plaza.” He tried to evict Houlihan's, the chain restaurant in the basement, because, it was said, he hated the smell of greasy food. He raised the sunken plaza to street level, and made it pristine and pleasant to sit in for the first time in 40 years.

      But he got stopped just as he was accelerating. In 2000, Hilbert left Conseco; he had made a disastrous bet on Green Tree Financial, which provided financing for low-income housing. Conseco went bankrupt. Trump negotiated to buy the building from his partner, but in the fall of 2001 those talks stalled; the partnership grew distinctly less friendly, and Trump entered into two years of intense legal battles. In the summer of 2003, Conseco won the building. An Illinois bankruptcy court awarded the insurance firm the right to retain a broker, Eastdil Realty, to sell her on the open market. To make the best deal possible, Conseco knew it was imperative that the world would know Trump was out. His name had to come off the building.

      The man tasked with making this happen was Charles “Chuck” H. Cremens, a plainspoken Bostonian.

      Cremens told Trump directly that the letters he'd put up now belonged to Conseco, and that as a courtesy, Trump could remove them himself, or Cremens would do it for him. The negotiations were described by a lawyer for Conseco, Reed S. Oslan, from the Chicago firm of Kirkland & Ellis, as resembling a “tennis match.” “Chuck's one of the best negotiators ever. So [Trump's side] made some offer. Chuck would say no. [This went on] for about four or five hours.”

      Cremens would later admit he underestimated the significance of those letters for Trump. Before the two sides reached a formal agreement, Trump had sent a team out into the darkness to remove them. “I wanted them to come off in a dignified way,” Trump said in an interview. “It was the right thing to do. I no longer owned the building.”

      Trump's team put up “big sheets” to obscure the dismantling – and then the letters were given to Cremens, who dispersed them; and it was this that, people speculated, must have angered him – though Trump says not so. “I was sad to lose the building, but not angry about the letters.”

      Over at Eastdil, Wayne Maggin, the executive in charge of the sales process, has the “M.” Reed Oslan has an “R.” Mary Anne Tighe, the CEO of CBRE, Inc., has the “T.”

      Cremens was baffled as to why it had been so easy to get the letters removed – why “we had accomplished so much.”

      A month later, that mystery was solved. Something new had come into Trump's life that he loved as much as – or even more than – the GM Building. He was shooting the first season of NBC's The Apprentice, the reality show in which contestants vie for a position in Trump's organization. The show would set Trump up as an international figurehead businessman who repeatedly got to say, “You're fired.”

      And just like that, Donald Trump was extricated, and the GM Building was once again on the auction block. Eastdil prepared to send out its offering book. They all felt this was going to be the priciest commercial real estate bidding war ever. Cremens noted that someone would undoubtedly pay an extraordinary price for something he called the ultimate bauble of “ego gratification.”

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      When Harry Macklowe heard that Donald Trump was out of the GM Building, he pounced. If this small, soft-spoken, slightly shambolic-looking, moon-faced man permanently attached to a Starbucks cup was ever going to vault himself out of the shallows of the New York real estate pool and into the spotlight, now was the time. He had waited 40 years for this moment. “I thought [the GM Building] was the best building in the world,” he'd say later. “I knew exactly what to do with it.”

      On June 6, 2003, he tried to muscle his way to the front of the line. He phoned Cremens and asked him what it would take to “pre-empt” the bidding on the building. Cremens brusquely shot him down; he told Macklowe that “we don't do pre-empt.” Eastdil would be running a sealed bid process. Macklowe would have to play by the same rules as everyone else.

      Macklowe had anticipated this. He had also anticipated that no one considered him a serious candidate to buy the most expensive and prestigious office building in the world. A deal for over $1 billion would require an enormous amount of leverage. Macklowe didn't have much money (in real estate terms), and, to make matters worse, he had limited options with most real estate lenders. Maggin knew there were “certain bankers, including Lehman Brothers, who were not prepared to do business with Harry.”

      Ben Lambert, Eastdil's tall founder and chairman, liked Macklowe but saw through his charm and affectations. Each time Macklowe pulled out his little black sketchbook filled with his riffs on architectural drawings, Lambert studied it politely, but remained skeptical. “I've often thought that there must be another book in which [Harry] wrote down what he really thought,” Lambert says. He would not be gulled into selling the building to anyone who couldn't come up with the right money and terms.

■ ■ ■

      Macklowe knew his reputation, but he also knew that some people – quite a few even – thought his charm and taste redeemed him. “He can be elegantly articulate in the way he draws out his vision on a napkin or talks about a building,” says Douglas “Doug” Harmon, Eastdil's most prolific broker.

      Macklowe has always deployed his charisma as skillfully as a wartime general deploying his artillery, treating laughter, tears, gentility, vulnerability, and jokes as different parts of his arsenal. “He is quite capable of bursting into tears if he thinks that will help him get what he wants,” says Harmon, smiling.

      An afternoon with Harry Macklowe is like spending time with the personification of Vanity Fair magazine: at one moment highbrow, the next low, always, always intriguing. Among the numerous topics he talks about: He'd love to buy the American rights to the Smart car. He imported a few for six months and lobbied hard, but Mercedes stopped him, “and then I thought I should