For a woman whose life was all about ascent, there is a cruel irony to the fact that Ivana Trump was found dead at the age of seventy-three at the bottom of the stairs of her Upper East Side apartment last Thursday. Born in 1949 in communist Czechoslovakia, the girl whose father was an electrical engineer made her name on the basis of dizzying verticals: first as a professional skier and then as billionaire’s wife and manager of her second husband Donald Trump’s eye-bending skyscrapers in New York and Atlantic City.