Free, Melania

by Kate Bennett

  In Trump’s mind, the most romantic thing he could do for his girlfriend was boost her image. It was how he expressed his affection, how he showed he cared. And as with most of the things that inspired him, building a brand also helped his own. When he was with Maples, Trump pushed for her to do a Playboy spread, going so far as to personally negotiate what she would be paid. He got them up to a million bucks, but Marla ultimately decided she wouldn’t do full nude, and the deal was off. She did, however, with the help of Trump and her personal publicist, get $600,000 for a No Excuses jeans advertisement, an incredibly gauche decision considering she was the most notorious “other woman” of the era. She didn’t care, and neither did Trump.

  The GQ story featured hot shots of Melania, but the words beside them were as much about his political aspirations as about how she looked in underwear: “‘I’m going to do everything I can do to see that regular Americans can fly as high as their wings will take them,’ says Trump. He’s got our vote.” This is how the story about a lady spy and sex at thirty thousand feet ends.

  Melania also declares how seriously she would take the job of first lady, somewhat hard to swallow coming from a woman dressed in a bikini and pretending to hijack a plane in knee-high black boots. “I will put all my effort into it,” she tells readers, “and I will support my man.”

  Of course, the cover image from this GQ story will come back to haunt Trump’s campaign. It featured Melania fully nude, lying on a fur rug and draped in diamonds, her backside and part of her nipple exposed. The image, again, wasn’t a big deal for a men’s magazine: in the early 2000s, models and celebrities were often shot naked.

  But the image was saucy enough—and unprecedented for a candidate’s spouse—to grab attention more than fifteen years later. The photograph resurfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign during a March social media blitz from a super PAC supporting Ted Cruz, one of Trump’s chief competitors, as the Utah caucus neared. “Meet Melania Trump, Your Next First Lady,” said the ad, which was basically just a huge copy of the naked Melania photo, with her making bedroom eyes at the camera. It was aimed at conservative voters, primarily in Mormon communities. The stunt launched one of the dirtier tit-for-tats in an already nasty campaign.

  Trump went to bat for Melania, but he did so in his signature style: bruising, laced with a threat.

  “Lyin’ Ted Cruz just used a picture of Melania from a G.Q. shoot in his ad. Be careful, Lyin’ Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!” tweeted Trump. Cruz responded trying to distance himself from the ad, tweeting, “Pic of your wife not from us. Donald, if you attack Heidi (Cruz), you’re more of a coward than I thought. #classless,” as though that would make Trump stand down, even where wives were concerned. Not so much.

  The following morning, Trump used Cruz’s tweet against him as proof of his own dishonesty. “Lyin’ Ted Cruz denied that he had anything to do with the G.Q. model photo post of Melania. That’s why we call him Lyin’ Ted!” Roger Stone, an adviser to Trump, waded in, too, tweeting, “Melania HOT, Heidi NOT.” Trump retweeted a tweet comparing the two women’s faces that read, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” The photo of Mrs. Cruz is less than flattering beside a polished shot of Melania. The media went bananas. The Washington Post wrote that Trump’s inability to stop saying mean things about women could cost him (it didn’t), and Cruz himself, fired up by the whole thing, told CNN, “Donald Trump will not be the nominee. I’m going to beat him.” (He didn’t.) Within two months, Cruz had dropped out of the race altogether.

  The incident served to spark a campaign scandal—Trump ultimately lost the Republican caucus in Utah to Cruz, not that it mattered in the long run—but it didn’t do anything to keep Melania’s naked bum out of the headlines. The GQ shoot found fresh momentum and earned her a new kind of notoriety, albeit unneeded and sixteen years later.

  Fun fact: when Melania’s official biography first went up on the White House Web site, after her husband won the election, the GQ cover was listed among her professional achievements: “She has graced the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, British GQ, Ocean Drive, Avenue, InStyle and New York Magazine.” That portion has since been removed, replaced with a less specific graph about her work: “At age 16, she began what would soon become a highly successful modeling career, appearing in many high-profile ad campaigns and working with some of the best photographers in the fashion industry.” However, despite the edit, Melania has never implied that she regrets her decision to pose for the shoot or that she is embarrassed by its contents or the contents of any others she had done.

  Also in January 2000, another sexy spread of Melania hit newsstands, this time in Talk magazine, Tina Brown’s now-defunct glossy, a wannabe Vanity Fair that for a time was incredibly popular. “A Model First Lady: Melania Knauss Gets Ready for the White House,” reads the headline. Printed horizontally across two pages is Melania, lying down on a rug (again), though this time a navy-colored one with a gold presidential seal in the middle, a version of the real deal in the Oval Office. She’s wearing strappy gold high heels and a red bikini, her bust almost indecently squeezed out of the top. Her face looks beautiful; her hair perfect—she’s the first lady of fantasyland. “I would be very traditional” is the pull quote from Melania at the top of the left-hand page. In the bottom right is a small shot of Trump talking on a red phone in front of an American flag. The text says, in part, “She’s 26, a model, and lives in a one-bedroom apartment. For now, at any rate. Donald Trump’s girlfriend Melania Knauss is getting ready for the White House.” Again, she was almost thirty, not twenty-six.

  Ironically, around the time both the magazines came out, Melania and Trump broke up, again. Her friends say that she didn’t want to be part of his political ambitions. She wasn’t sure that the life Trump wanted in the White House, picked apart at every moment by the press, by his enemies, was what she wanted. She was fiercely and deeply private, even back then. Her business was her business. And while that might sound like a glaring oxymoron, considering she had no trouble showing the world her practically naked body in magazines, there is an important distinction. She was very aware of the line between a public persona and a private one. Her boyfriend was not. For Trump, there was no line. Private, public—it was all one Donald Trump.

  His side of the breakup—which of course was available in the tabloids—implied that while he liked Melania an awful lot, he was trying to be serious about this Reform Party presidency thing. The New York Daily News did a “Trump Dumps Latest Model” story on the split, writing, “Vetoed by the billionaire developer was leggy lingerie model Melania Knauss, the 27-year-old Slovenian who until this week was thinking she would model herself after Jackie Onassis if she became first lady.” (Guys, again, she’s not twenty-seven!)

  The New York Post’s headline was similar, if not cleverer: “Trump Knixes Knauss: Donald-Dumped Supermodel Is Heartbroken.” In the Post, Melania had shaved two years off her age in the Daily News; they listed her as twenty-five.

  The tabloids painted her as despondent over the breakup, which sounded more like a plant from Trump’s camp than the truth—if Melania was upset, she didn’t show it to friends. She kept to her own routine and to her own apartment, which she had since upgraded to a one-bedroom by herself, no longer needing a roommate. She decorated with furniture she bought from Crate and Barrel. “The rent was $2,500 a month,” she said. “I picked it out, everything on my own. I still remember, I went to shop for a TV and an air conditioner.”

  Clearly, the version of the end of the romance that Trump was pushing was that Melania was a “great girl,” according to a friend who is quoted (who was probably Trump himself; he liked to call the media on his own or under an alias as a fake spokesperson from the Trump Organization), but “he didn’t want to get hooked. He decided to cool it.” Eventually, Trump himself confirmed the breakup in a quick interview with The New York Times, talking about Melania as if she had disappeared on a fishing trip, never to be seen agai
n. “Melania is an amazing woman, a terrific woman, a great woman, and she will be missed.”

  The split didn’t stick. They kept in regular contact, Trump proclaiming in their private phone conversations how much he missed her, until eventually they were a couple again. Melania would later say, “We were apart for a few months, not long. We got back together.” That’s Melania speak for it’s none of your business. Whether or not she got dumped, she’s clear that it didn’t bother her or send her into a tailspin. Again, as one of Melania’s former Slovenian high school classmates told me, revealing emotional hardship or being dramatic simply isn’t something Slovenes do. The joy of being Slovenian is hiding your feelings.

  Shortly after Trump and Melania reunited, things got even more serious. If he was testing to see if she would do any of the on-again, off-again shenanigans that he went through with Marla when they would fight, Melania passed.

  They now went almost everywhere together, popping up at concerts, movie premieres, dinners at Cipriani, the US Open. In 2001 the couple attended their first White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., Melania in a tight, strapless black-and-white dress. Also that year, Trump took her to the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, where Melania showed off her breasts in a sexy white sequined gown with a neckline that plunged to just above her navel. In 2001, Trump played himself in Zoolander, entering the film’s faux runway show, the climax of the movie. In the scene, he’s on the red carpet being interviewed and next to him, of course, is Melania, looking adoringly at Trump. Photos around this time period show a much more smiley Melania, before she perfected her squinty, icy camera face. She appears happy and engaged, practically the bright-eyed ingenue. Her eyes are wider, her grin ear-to-ear.

  Melania was different for Trump; she had something his past wives didn’t. Ivana was a conquest, power hungry and focused on success. Marla was flighty, a small-town girl who wielded sexuality to get what she wanted—after a few months of being with Trump, she told friends his Palm Beach estate was now called “Marla Lago.” Not in a million years would Melania have spoken like that or demanded that kind of attention. Her aloof independence might have been an act to lure him in, but friends of hers will tell you that Melania has never really needed anyone. Companionship, romance, love—those things were never at the top of her list of aspirations. And if she was a gold digger, as she’s often portrayed, or if she indeed worked Manhattan, on the prowl for wealthy men, as many young international models certainly do, she sure as hell didn’t leave a trace.

  Fine with being a silent witness to the events that swirled around her, Melania eased into her new life, making subtle upgrades to her clothing, shifting from nondescript black cocktail dresses to designer labels, eventually better bags and shoes, furs and (borrowed) diamonds. On one of her trips with Trump to Mar-a-Lago at the private club’s annual New Year’s Eve gala, Melania was asked about her resolution. “I’m going to eat three square meals a day,” she said, sounding very much like the old Melania. “I’m not going to prepare them, of course, but I will eat them,” she added, in the tone of the new.

  Around 2002, she moved into Trump’s palatial apartment in Trump Tower, a very far cry from the bleak communist apartment building she had lived in as a child. Trump’s place overlooked Central Park; Melania’s old apartment in Sevnica overlooked an asphalt parking lot. Trump has valued the apartment at $200 million; in 2017, Forbes put a $64 million price tag on it.

  The triplex had been Trump’s signature piece of real estate for almost twenty years at that point. He was often photographed there for magazine stories, and he used it as a backdrop during television profiles. He secured the triplex when Trump Tower first opened in 1983 but added onto it, grabbing up two adjacent apartments and expanding to about eleven thousand square feet of living space.

  A creature of habit who notoriously dislikes changes to his routine, Trump hardly ever changed a thing about the place, even to this day. The apartment had cycled through two wives already by the time Melania arrived. Trump kept all the decor; redoing it was not an option for the women who lived there with him through the years, whether they liked it or not. It was to remain as gold and ostentatious as it always had been. The mural-painted gold leaf ceilings, the curved white couch in the living room, the low-hanging chandeliers, the cold marble slabs of the fireplace mantels, the Louis XIV imperial French–style furniture all stays the same, even the master bedroom with its bed and twenty-four-karat gold headboard with matching canopy drapes: immovable—only the women change.

  Melania didn’t mind; she had long been aware that she was in love with a man who stuck to his habits. Trying to change him, as she would often state matter-of-factly, was a fruitless endeavor. “He is who he is” was a common refrain. That’s not to say that shoving every bit of gold furniture that could possibly fit into one room was her aesthetic. Quite the opposite, actually. Her preferred style is more minimalist, white, sparse, and slightly modern. But, with most things Trump, she learned to live with what he wanted, even if she didn’t.

  But Trump kept her in the girlfriend zone for a long time. While she never worried that she would go the way of other Trump girlfriends—or wives, for that matter—Melania was getting antsy for permanence. The life he was affording her as his live-in love felt very much like having the whole package, yet there was something else on her mind. Melania had a ticking biological clock; she wanted a baby.

  7

  The Business of Becoming Mrs. Donald Trump

  “I’m strong. I’m standing on my two feet very strong.”

  —MELANIA TRUMP

  In April 2004, Melania made her first appearance on The Apprentice, Trump’s hit NBC reality show, wherein he assigned tasks to a group of willing cast members, each vying to be “hired” by the mogul. The contestants from the female-only team are taking a tour of Trump’s gilded penthouse when Melania Knauss enters the living room. There are oohs and aahs and one of the contestants says, “This is, like, rich. Like really, really rich.”

  “How do you clean a house like this?” asks another, to which Melania responds, smiling, “Well, you have people to clean.”

  “You’re very, very lucky,” says one of the women. At that, Melania first laughs and nods in agreement, but then she pauses and quite seriously retorts, “And he’s not lucky?” The exchange offers a flash of the smartness of Melania, who is by no means vapid arm candy, even if it’s often assumed she is indeed just that. She knows her worth, and highly values it. The art of the deal works both ways—sure, she gets to live in a sweet penthouse with help, but he gets to have a beautiful, savvy, patient, and committed woman who isn’t as demanding as his first wife or as wacky as his second.

  Later, a different group of contestants comes over, and this time Melania, in a halter-neck silver evening gown, walks in and greets them, shaking hands. In a side interview, one of the contestants describes Melania as “a fantastic hostess. She to me is how a royal person would act. She is the epitome of a gracious woman.”

  Her television debut a success and her ascension to mistress of the house complete, Trump decides, after six years, it’s time to pop the question.

  Oddly, whenever publicly asked why he got married again after two very public divorces, Trump has never once mentioned the word “love,” never called Melania his soul mate, and never made it sound as if their union is anything more than a transaction—or, worse, something she has earned. Trump has admitted that one reason is that Melania didn’t pressure him to get married. Her lack of caring whether he put a ring on it ultimately led him to do just that—because he thought he owed it to her for not nagging about the whole thing.

  “I felt it was the right thing to do, number one, and I think she’s special. If I didn’t think she was special, I wouldn’t have gotten married.” Again, nothing about love. Not, “I fell deeply in love” or “I loved her so much” or “I love her in a way I knew I couldn’t live without her.” Nope. It was the right thing to do, and she is special.
On Larry King Live, Trump said of his decision to marry Melania, “We get along. And I just said, ‘You know what? It’s time.’ It wasn’t a big deal.”

  Melania, seated right next to him, didn’t bat an eye.

  Trump used the relationship as a barometer for his business success. “We’re together five years, and these five years for whatever reasons have been my most successful. I have to imagine she had something to do with that.” Again, not the stuff of romance novels, even bad ones.

  While his statement is completely devoid of deep sentiment or, quite frankly, true love, Trump had a point. Melania made him virile, powerful, a man worthy of standing by and supporting, but only when he needed her to, because in his mind he was strong enough to do so on his own. She, in turn, had to believe he was strong, to put that vibe out, and be stronger—so strong that his bravado, his past, his reputation couldn’t make a dent in her armor. The exterior had to match what was beneath the surface for the whole thing to look and feel convincing. Melania had succeeded at this herculean task, and she was getting rewarded for it.

  She could also take small comfort in knowing that his rationale for marrying her was slightly better than his explanation for why he married Marla: because she got pregnant with Tiffany. In 1994 he told Vanity Fair, “We’ve been together six years,” eerily similar to what he’ll later say about Melania, except for the next part. “If she wanted to do that—get me by getting pregnant—she could have done it a lot sooner. We had just gotten back together, and she wasn’t using the pill, and I knew it. I don’t feel as though I was trapped. Trapped would have been not to tell me she wasn’t on the pill. I’m not the kind of guy who has babies out of wedlock and doesn’t get married and give the baby a name. And for me, I’m not a believer in abortion.” Maples gave birth to Tiffany in October 1993; Trump married her three months later.