by Kate Bennett
Marla was also not as good as Melania at building Trump up, and she’d often treat him like a dolt whom she got to acquiesce to her needs. Maples was all, “Look at me; pay attention to me,” while Melania’s message was quite the opposite: “Look at him; pay attention to him.” Marla and Trump also fought—a lot. They would break up and date other people in the hopes of making the other jealous enough to come back, which took its toll, but also worked. Trump would famously crow that during one of their fights, when he left Marla (“not only that, I left her like a dog,” he told Vanity Fair), the singer Michael Bolton tries to swoop in, wooing her with promises of love and romance. Trump finds out, gets jealous, and wins her back. “I do a Trump number on her.… She drops him and comes back to me.” It was common for Marla and Trump to duke it out in the tabloids, hanging their dirty laundry for everyone to see. He was cruel to her; she belittled him; rinse and repeat.
Maples, at the peak of their romance, said that Trump was “adorable, with a little-boy quality—I mean, he knows when he’s being too cute and he laughs at himself about it.” Melania would not have described him this way, ever, especially in print. She knew it would drive him crazy, and not in a good way. It was a difference between wife number 2 and wife number 3 that Trump was especially tuned in to, and turned on by.
Melania also had none of the societal aspirations of Trump’s first wife, Ivana. New York socialites would often snicker behind Ivana’s back in the 1980s at the way she swanned about as though she was European royalty. She wasn’t. Trump wasn’t crazy about Ivana’s need to be out every night, hitting the party and charity circuit, especially when he could be home working or watching television. Ivana was over-the-top in her desire to drip wealth and create a legacy. “I want nothing social that you aspire to!” Donald had once apparently yelled at her. “If that is what makes you happy, get another husband!”
Melania, though born in a communist country like Ivana, had none of Ivana’s social fixation. Parties and people tripping over themselves to be invited to them—not Melania’s thing. Grateful for that, Trump was ready to reward her for not being like his two exes. “That’s the rock,” Trump said of Melania.
It was April 26, 2004, the night of the Met Gala, the Costume Institute’s glitzy celebration, its guest list orchestrated by Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue. It’s basically fashion’s annual Super Bowl, and Melania Knauss, who had never been, really wanted to go. Trump decided he would take her. Most retellings of the couple’s engagement say he proposed to Melania there, at the gala. Or associate the proposal with him or her wanting to show off new bling on fashion’s biggest night. They are wrong.
In fact, the engagement didn’t really have anything to do with the gala, except that it fell on the same date as Melania’s birthday. She turned thirty-four on April 26. Before the couple left Trump Tower for the black-tie evening, the theme of which that year happened to be “Dangerous Liaisons,” Trump asked Melania to be his wife.
“It was a great surprise,” Melania said of the proposal, which was likely true. Friends say that while she was hopeful that one day the two would marry and start a family, she didn’t make it a deal breaker. She also knew that the less she nagged him about it, the more likely it was that, someday, he would come around to getting engaged. “She didn’t pressure me at all,” Trump would say.
In contrast, Marla Maples had pressured Trump so intensely to marry her, she reportedly gave him an ultimatum shortly after their daughter, Tiffany, was born. In a 1990 interview with Vanity Fair, when Maples was able to go public as Trump’s girlfriend following the scandal and demise of his marriage to Ivana, Marla was asked whether, if she does marry Trump, she would take his name. “That could become a bit of a point of argumentation. But, you know, I always promised my daddy I’d keep my name. Because I’m an only child and he never had a son. I said, ‘Daddy, don’t you worry,’” said Maples. “So I don’t know. Maybe Marla Maples Trump.” She talked like this a lot. But Marla needed to be extra public about getting the coveted title of “Mrs.” because she hoped it would erase the smear of “mistress.”
Through it all, Trump truly disliked the drama of his relationship with Marla; it was never pleasing to him, the roller-coaster romance. It was too much effort. With Melania, none of that existed. “What Melania is so good at, we just have this natural relationship,” Trump would explain shortly after he married Melania. “It’s like, my mother and father were married sixty-three years. I’ve always heard you have to work at a good relationship. My father didn’t work at a good relationship. He went home. He had dinner. He went to bed. He took it easy. He watched television. My mother, the same thing, she cooked him dinner. And it was just one of those things. It wasn’t work, but I always heard you have to work, work, work.” He liked that being with Melania was more like what his parents had and less like what he had with Marla, or Ivana for that matter. “I work very hard from early in the morning til late in the evening,” Trump said. “I don’t want to go home and work at a relationship. A relationship where you have to work at it, in my opinion, doesn’t work.”
Trump felt Melania truly deserved his largesse, which for him was making an honest woman out of her; bestowing the Trump name was his highest compliment.
To seal the deal, he gave her a massive 12-carat, emerald-cut diamond ring with two tapered baguette diamonds on either side of the solitaire, all set in platinum. It was, as the saying about big diamonds goes, enough ice to skate on. “I picked it,” Trump would later say, “but she and I have similar tastes. It’s amazing. We just have similar tastes.” As though there would be a woman out there who wouldn’t like a gigantic diamond ring, but whatever.
The ring was reportedly priced at $1.5 million, but, as Trump later bragged, Graff, the esteemed luxury jewelry house, shaved one million dollars off the price, an exchange that all but guaranteed Trump would publicly speak well of the ring and the jeweler. In a later episode of The Apprentice, the contestants pay a visit to the store on camera.
“Only a fool would say, ‘No thank you, I want to pay a million dollars more for a diamond,’” said Trump in The New York Times story, which was about how celebrities barter publicity for discounts. He told Larry King that he “negotiated hard” for the sparkler. Graff has since denied it offered a discount to Trump.
If Melania cared that the resulting story of the marriage proposal had little to do with romance and love and his utter devotion and more to do with whether her betrothed got a good deal on the rock, she didn’t let on. These early signs of whatever it is in her that allows for complete and total keeping of her cool, at least in public, are harbingers of how she will handle life’s strangest curveball, still to come.
The couple arrived at the Met Gala red carpet that night arm in arm, Melania in a black satin gown with sheer black lattice corset detail. Her hair at the time was dyed jet-black, and she wore it half up in a voluminous bouffant. From her ears hung massive diamond chandelier sparklers, almost long enough to graze her shoulders. On her wrist were three chunky diamond bangles, one stacked atop the other. And on her left ring finger, her new engagement ring. It was the only piece of jewelry that evening that she could say was hers and not on loan.
Trump and Melania had a few minutes to pose in front of a phalanx of photographers on the steps of the Met. Soon, however, Ivanka Trump, also on the red carpet, hopped in their frame, joining her father and soon-to-be stepmother. Melania doesn’t appear to mind, but she’s nowhere near as delighted as Trump, who laughs and grabs at his daughter with his right arm, pulling her by the waist into him as tightly as he has Melania enclosed in his left. Trump makes a kissy face in Melania’s direction, puckering, but at the last moment, still in kiss mode, turns his head to Ivanka’s face, kissing her firmly on the cheek. In the photograph, Melania is smiling, but the three of them together in one frame would not be all smiles in years to come.
Melania fairly quickly embarked on wedding planning, telling people she wanted a simpl
e and intimate affair, not a lot of people, but in a world of Trumpian proportions, that was out of the question. If it was to be simple, it would be simple on steroids.
They decided on Mar-a-Lago for a location, and January 22, 2005, for the date—leaving Melania about eight months to get the entire event together.
But first, like most everyone who did a deal with Donald Trump, Melania had to sign on the dotted line.
* * *
Trump had learned the hard way with Ivana that divorce without a good prenuptial agreement was a painful, and painfully expensive, endeavor. By the time he married Marla Maples, he’d learned a thing or two about hanging on to his assets. Marla told the New York Daily News in 1997, when the couple was starting the process of divorcing, that she had signed the prenup under duress: “backed against the wall, I really felt at the time that I had no choice.” Marla pleaded in the press for Trump to be generous with child support for Tiffany. “I’m praying that he’s fair where she’s concerned. She’s a famous child,” she said. “I want to give her a secure home in a good, safe neighborhood, in a good school district. That’s all I want.” Marla would raise Tiffany predominantly in the posh Los Angeles suburb of Calabasas, California, made more famous in recent years as the hometown of the Kardashian clan.
Ivana, too, had tried desperately to contest her prenuptial agreement with Trump. They had signed one before getting married in 1977, and Trump reportedly tweaked the nuptial agreement through the years, adjusting for the births of children and his mounting millions. At the end of it all, despite Ivana’s pleas to get more, the courts ultimately sided with Trump to keep it intact. But the judge who granted their divorce did so by citing cruel and inhuman treatment by Trump to his wife of thirteen years, in large part because of his very public infidelity with Marla Maples.
Trump had technically “won,” but his finances, already in jeopardy because of business issues, took a major hit. Even more annoying to him, so had his reputation. Ivana was the publicly jilted spouse, and he was the jerk who left her for a bimbo. “When a man leaves a woman,” Trump once opined to Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner, “especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass—a good one!—there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left.” Trump, for all his bluster, didn’t like being seen as a bad guy—unless it helped him make a deal.
Ivana, who truly believed she was entitled to half of Trump’s assets, would ultimately walk away with $14 million in cash; the couple’s vast 45-room estate in Greenwich, Connecticut; a huge apartment in Trump Plaza; and access to use Mar-a-Lago for one month of the year. Trump would also pay out $650,000 annually in child support for their three kids, it was reported at the time by The New York Times. In 1991, when their divorce was finalized, Trump was financially in dire straits—the settlement all but wiped him out. “I’m very happy that this is behind me,” said Trump, who was allowed to keep his fifty-room triplex in Trump Tower, even though that had been where Ivana, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric had actually been living since Trump left Ivana for Marla. The divorce agreement basically allowed him to kick out his children’s mom and move Marla in.
At the end of their union, Marla didn’t get as much as Ivana did. As her marriage with Trump deteriorated and rumors swirled that she’d been caught in a flirty clinch with one of her Palm Beach bodyguards, she had very little in the way of negotiating power. In the end, it was reported to be about $2 million in settlement cash for her and a generous chunk in child support for Tiffany.
When it was Melania’s turn to sign a prenup, Trump made it sound like getting the thing done was better than couples’ counseling. He was so happy he didn’t have to twist her arm like the last two, he raved that her going along with his demand helped their relationship—a confounding philosophy, but he said after the wedding that the prenup made his marriage to Melania stronger. “It’s a hard, painful, ugly tool. Believe me, there’s nothing fun about it,” he said. “But there comes a time when you have to say, ‘Darling, I think you’re magnificent, and I care for you deeply’”—again, no mention of the word, “love”—“‘but if things don’t work out, this is what you’re going to get.’” This is presumably the speech Melania was on the receiving end of before she took pen in hand.
Of course, Melania never imagined she would one day be first lady of the United States, with the burdens and exposure that carries. Bill and Hillary Clinton might not have had a legal prenuptial agreement, but they were inextricably tied together by their ambition to conquer the political world. If you go, I go, was the theme to their marriage, a bond some could argue was much more intense than a prenup. Each supported the other’s foundation. Michelle and Barack Obama also did not have a prenup and were similarly entwined, though for years there were rumors that Michelle was so miserable hanging up her powerful corporate career to fulfill Barack’s presidential dreams that she was planning to leave him when the White House years were over. Instead, they signed a joint book deal worth $65 million. The ties that bind.
“The beautiful thing is, she agrees with it,” Trump told gossip columnist Liz Smith about his fiancée’s complacency over the prenup. And really, is there anything more beautiful than a woman who signs a document stating that if her marriage hits the shitter, she won’t have any recourse to get funds from the man from whom she is parting? “She knows I have to have that,” Trump told Smith.
Melania was also incredibly pragmatic. She was under zero illusion that at least some aspect of her relationship was transactional, no matter how much she loved him or how much he loved her. Part of their “fairy tale” was not a fairy tale but the ages-old story of a rich, older man who bolsters his vitality and ego by marrying a young, beautiful woman/model. He gets the babe; she gets the cash. And although Melania in no way thought about her relationship in this manner, she was smart enough to be aware that in some small way, there was a deal to be upheld. She would maintain her looks, her support, her youth and sex appeal while she was with him, and he would maintain his wealth and power. At her core, Melania is a realist, a girl from a communist country who understands that materialism, for all its allure, isn’t wrapped up in romance.
In 2005, before the wedding, Melania was invited to speak to a class at New York University’s business school, presumably because by extension she understood the Trumpian way of how to build something profitable. Or they just couldn’t get Donald. Either way, during the class she was asked by one particularly ballsy person if she would be with Trump if he weren’t rich. Without missing a beat, Melania fixed her cool blue eyes on the student and said, “If I weren’t beautiful, do you think he’d be with me?” In other words, don’t fuck with Melania. She knows exactly what is up.
It’s this sort of complete, 360-degree understanding that elevates Melania beyond the stereotype. Clearly, the student was trying to be snide or even essentially call her a gold digger to her face. Would she be with him if he weren’t rich? In her answer, she’s basically saying no, she wouldn’t be—but if she were some average Jane, he wouldn’t be with her either. Again, her recognition of the business side of their arrangement adds a layer of complexity to Melania. And the degree to which she acknowledges that component as a valid and anticipated—and accepted—part of her marriage is not to be overlooked. It signals an insider’s savvy that she will demonstrate, even rely on, when she ultimately becomes the most enigmatic first lady in modern history.
In his book Trump: The Art of the Comeback, which was released a year before he met Melania, Trump clearly has unresolved issues about women who don’t sign prenups or, worse, in his opinion, have the gall to mouth off after they do. “The most difficult aspect of the prenuptial agreement is informing your future wife (or husband): ‘I love you very much, but just in case things don’t work out, this is what you will get in the divorce.’ There are basically three types of women and reactions. One is the good woman who very much loves her future husband, solely for himself, but refuses to sign the agre
ement on principle. I fully understand this,” Trump writes. “But the man should take a pass anyway and find someone else.” Translation: screw love if she’s not signing. “The other,” he goes on, “is the calculating woman who refuses to sign the prenuptial agreement because she is expecting to take advantage of the poor, unsuspecting sucker she’s got in her grasp. There is also the woman who will openly and quickly sign a prenuptial agreement in order to make a quick hit and take the money given to her.” Those are the three categories in which Trump views women. Oh, and he also thinks they shouldn’t gripe and bitch—key to the crux of marital advice he gives pals. Again, from The Art of the Comeback: “Often, I will tell friends whose wives are constantly nagging them about this or that that they’re better off leaving and cutting their losses. I’m not a great believer in always trying to work things out,” writes Trump, just before this gem of a sexist zinger: “For a man to be successful he needs support at home, just like my father had from my mother, not someone who is always griping and bitching. When a man has to endure a woman who is not supportive and complains constantly about not being home enough or not being attentive enough, he will not be very successful unless he is able to cut the cord.” Ivana would, years after her marriage was over, write that she became a businesswoman in part because she adopted an “if you can’t beat him, join him” attitude. She felt that if Trump was always going to work and never be home, she might as well grab a briefcase and do the same. It ultimately led to the end of their union. “My big mistake with Ivana was taking her out of the role of wife and allowing her to run one of my casinos in Atlantic City, then the Plaza hotel.… I will never again give a wife responsibility within my business,” he said.