by Kate Bennett
Marla also complained about their marriage, a lot, claiming that he wasn’t the kind of husband who would come home on time at the end of the day and snuggle with his wife and baby. Trump wasn’t that guy. He wasn’t even in the same galaxy as that guy. In 1999, after their divorce, Marla told the New York Post, “I thought that I could change him. But he won’t change.”
Melania, however, didn’t want to change him, and she wanted to sign the prenuptial agreement. By signing it and being happy to do so, she smartly eliminates any concern he might have that she wants to try to do to him what Ivana did (make him feel less powerful) or what Marla did (make him feel like a failure as a husband and father). She immediately elevates herself above her predecessors simply by nonchalantly going along with the one thing most brides to be fight tooth and nail against. And somewhere in the back of her mind, she must know that should the worst happen and she and Trump divorce, she would have a pretty sound legal case for being granted more than the prenup she signed. (Public humiliation by her husband’s alleged infidelities with a porn star and a Playboy model? That’s got to be worth something.) Melania has almost always, even back then, maneuvered two steps ahead of her betrothed. “I think the mistake some people make is they try to change the man they love after they get married. You cannot change a person,” she said. It was music to Trump’s ears.
8
The Wedding of the Century
“To be married to my husband, to someone as successful as he is, he needs somebody who will tell him the truth.”
—MELANIA TRUMP
It’s funny to look back on Melania and Donald Trump’s wedding and realize who was on the guest list: Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barbara Walters, Rudy Giuliani, Anna Wintour, P. Diddy, Katie Couric, Gayle King, Matt Lauer, Billy Joel, Les Moonves, Shaquille O’Neal, Jeff Zucker, Chris Christie, Chris Matthews, and Steve Wynn. The list of celebrities is as long as it is weird. Because of course today, while a handful remain Trump allies (Giuliani, Wynn, sort of Christie, maybe Shaq), most are vocal opponents. Anna Wintour won’t even put Melania Trump in the pages of her magazine; Hillary Clinton is still seething over her lost election; Chris Matthews spends most weekday evenings skewering Trump; Billy Joel, who wrote a special song to sing at the wedding, wouldn’t be caught dead performing at the White House during the Trump administration.
Fast-forward a decade after the “wedding of the century,” as the tabloids called it, and a lot of the guests won’t be on speaking terms with the bride and groom.
But at the time Melania had no idea how the future would unfold. So she hired a planner and got started on the business of becoming Mrs. Donald Trump (the third). Like most society brides, Melania set her sights on Preston Bailey, then the most well-known, high-end celebrity party designer in the country.
Bailey said that while the time frame to plan the Trumps’ wedding was tight at three months out, he was not about to turn down the opportunity. The timing was narrower than most weddings of this size and notoriety because the first planner she had hired didn’t work out. Bailey happily stepped in. “I remember we would fly on the private plane many times, planning while we were in the air,” says Bailey, who, like Melania, was based in New York. “She usually flew out with her sister, Ines, her parents, or with close friends.” Bailey says Melania wasn’t an obsessive bridezilla, but she was decisive. “She wasn’t fuzzy about what she wanted. She was very clear in her taste level.”
Bailey tells me he still recalls how well Melania treated his staff, getting to know everyone’s name and displaying warmth that most onlookers now have no way of seeing. “Way before any of this happened, she ending up as first lady, what I remember about her is the way she came into my office when my staff was there, how at ease she made everyone feel,” says Bailey. “I remember her so clearly being that way, and she treated every one of them the same—she gave them attention. She was so impressive. Even my assistants, she made sure that she spoke to them and she connected to them.”
The couple registered at Bergdorf Goodman, Frette for linens, and, naturally, Tiffany. It’s somewhat odd, and etiquette experts might say uncouth, for a groom on his third wedding and a thirty-four-year-old bride to be who crows about her independence and is marrying a millionaire to register for gifts. The tradition of a registry really began to help young couples get on their feet with gifts like towels and small appliances, candlesticks, and napkin rings. But Trump insisted, so Melania picked out glassware from Royal Copenhagen, crystal from Lalique, and silver from Tiffany, where a five-piece set of her English King flatware cost $2,000. Her china service was the Palladium pattern, also from Tiffany and not superornate, considering the decor of the homes she and Trump would live in; a set of twelve pieces cost $1,135.
“I was completely in every, every detail,” Melania said of her wedding planning. “I did everything and I wanted to be along to do it because more people have it to tell you, ‘Oh, maybe you should do it that way, maybe you should do that.’ You know you get confused. And I know what I want.”
Later, as first lady, she would say the same thing when it came to how she envisioned events at the White House. Mood boards, fabric samples, test runs with flower arrangements and tastings from the chef—she knows what she wants.
What Melania wanted for her wedding day was elegance, she said—white and gold everything—and tons and tons of flowers.
In fact, that’s the only thing Bailey recalls Trump got in a tizzy about: the flowers. One day, Trump had come by the newly reconstructed $45 million ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, where the reception was to be held. Bailey says it wasn’t unusual for Trump to stop by and check on things. “He was very much involved. He wanted to see everything,” says Bailey of the weeks leading up to the big day. “I remember Mr. Trump as being this very accessible man. You know, one time, I remember him serving us something from the kitchen, just very hospitable. You know, he was very, very, very accessible.” But this particular day, he had an issue: the floral candelabras were just too goddamn big. “I do remember clearly that moment of him coming in when we were setting up the design and him being like, “Get those things off the table!”
“I had this idea of creating huge white candelabras at each table, covered in flowers. And Mr. Trump came in and he was like, ‘Oh my God. That is too much,’” says Bailey. “But, of course, Melania already knew about the candelabras and how big they would be, and what I remember is she took him to the side and very calmly said, ‘This is something that we had already planned,’ and ‘just wait until you see them when it’s all finished.’” Bailey says she talked Trump off the ledge. Friends note that, in general, this is what Melania is especially good at in their relationship: being composed when he goes off the rails. Pamela Gross, a former producer at CNN who is a close friend of Melania’s and has been for many years, said, “When he is spinning and thinking and blazing forward, she brings this quality of calm and serenity to him. That calming influence is a really important thing about her character. She is not a frantic person.”
“When it all came together, and she explained everything, he loved it,” says Bailey.
In the end, the candelabras were quite literally a huge hit, and two graced each of the twenty-one tables. Eight feet tall and gold, they were swathed in white roses, amaryllis, and hydrangeas, dripping with Dendrobium orchids, woven to look like hanging wisteria. At the top of each were long tapered candles. It took two people three hours to arrange just one of them. All of the wedding flowers, more than ten thousand in total, were either flown in to Florida or driven down from New York via specially made refrigerated trucks to keep them from wilting. Bailey insisted the ballroom temperature be sustained at a chilly 50 degrees up until the last minute before guests entered, in order to preserve the freshness of the blooms.
“She wanted something that felt like in a way was a statement, but not too overstated,” explains Bailey of Melania’s wedding goals. “Two weeks after we first met to discuss her vision, she came back to
my office and we set up the tables and everything else and she walked in and she loved it. She really, really loved it. From that moment on, I think somehow we had gained her trust and the communication was very open.”
So, apparently, was the budget, which most wedding experts have put at well over one million dollars. Bailey wouldn’t confirm that number, but he didn’t dispute it either. He did say there were “very few” questions or issues with money being spent on the affair, adding Trump would regularly review the numbers, but he ultimately wanted everything to be what Melania expected, money not an issue. “He wasn’t like, ‘let’s save,’” says Bailey.
Later, of course, Trump would brag to The New York Times about the vendors tripping over themselves to offer their services for free or steeply discounted. “Literally, anything you can imagine from photos to flowers to food to jets to airports to diamonds,” Trump told the paper in a story that ran ten days before the nuptials. “There’s five people who want to do it. In all cases they don’t want anything, but they want recognition.” Bailey makes it clear he was not one of those people, and Trump paid full price for his services. Trump told the Times that famed chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten was doing the food—lobster rolls, crab cakes, and steamed shrimp salad for appetizers, filet mignon with potato-horseradish galettes for entrée—but for free. Vongerichten brought four chefs from his restaurants in New York with him to Mar-a-Lago to prep the meal. He also packed $18,000 worth of beluga caviar, flown in a cooler on Trump’s private jet, to use for “beggar’s purses,” the most luxe of the hors d’oeuvres, with crème fraîche and caviar tucked into tiny blinis tied with a chive bow. The Trump touch came when the chef’s assistants brushed each “purse” with a streak of gold leaf to finish them off. The four hundred–plus guests sipped 1983 Louis Roederer Cristal brut champagne, which retails for about five hundred dollars a bottle.
Trump found a jet company willing to supply red carpet treatment and likely less pricey champagne for guests arriving at the private aviation terminal in West Palm Beach—again, at no cost. The kicker was the one thing Trump didn’t outsource as a freebie: his wedding coif. “I’ll do my own hair.” Trump should have been grateful that was all he had to manage, because Slovenian wedding tradition often includes a ritual wherein the groom must perform what’s called a sragna, demonstrating physical strength by sawing a log. Melania let him off the hook with that one.
Her wedding-day hair would be a huge updo sticking out from the back of her head like a beehive, with detailed loops of perfectly combed and curled sections pinned high enough to form the perfect setting for the hood of her gigantic tulle veil, which Melania herself took a needle and thread to just before the ceremony to secure a section that wasn’t cooperating as she wanted it to.
As for the dress, Melania had traveled to Paris for the haute couture shows months before, invited by Vogue’s Anna Wintour and André Leon Talley, who served as her guides. While Wintour today wouldn’t be caught dead in her Prada dress and sunglasses shopping with Melania Trump, back then the wedding was really a point of pop culture discussion, and Melania even had the mysterious allure of being a relatively unknown, younger, and strikingly beautiful woman marrying Donald Trump. The wedding was strange and epic and intriguing all at the same time.
The trio, Melania, Wintour, and Talley, was looking for a designer who could dream up a gown important enough to feature on the cover of Vogue and fit the bride’s aesthetic. Melania settled on John Galliano, at the time the designer for the house of Dior. Later that year, after the wedding, Melania would call on Galliano again for a custom gown, this time a white, strapless, beaded couture creation for a charity event she was chairing in New York for the Martha Graham Dance Company. Later in an interview, Melania would praise Galliano for the detail and craftsmanship of his work.
“We went to Paris for one week to the shows,” Melania would recall of shopping for her wedding dress. The resulting wedding gown was a strapless creation with a fit-and-flare silhouette (tight on top, flowing outward just below the hips at her upper thigh) and more than one hundred yards of shiny ivory duchesse satin. The dress was massive, tucked up in spots to add design details, ruched in the middle of the bodice and pleated along the sides and the hem, and had a whopping thirteen-foot train—the gown weighed sixty pounds.
“And then they have crystals and crystals,” said Melania of the thousands of tiny embroidered stones that caught the light on the neckline and skirt. “They were working 550 hours just to put the crystals on.” The gown, all told, was said to cost in the neighborhood of $300,000, but each haute couture creation is one-of-a-kind and almost always considered priceless. She had trouble walking in it and would later say the couple’s first dance, to Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma,” wasn’t some ridiculously choreographed thing, mostly because she couldn’t move all that much. Trump did dip her, though. And later she changed into a more movement-friendly Vera Wang Grecian-style dress.
A few days before the wedding, Melania reached the pinnacle every model dreams of: the cover of Vogue magazine. “Exclusive: Donald Trump’s New Bride. The Ring, the Dress, the Wedding, the Jet, the Party,” read the cover. Melania was posed, stiffly, as those who criticize her modeling skills often say is her way, leaning against a wall, one hand on her hip, the other by her side, wearing her couture Dior gown and full veil. She is smiling, a real showing-teeth smile—a happy grin that she doesn’t normally use for photographs. You can see her diamond engagement ring clearly, as well as the Edwardian-style bib diamond necklace on loan from Fred Leighton jewelers, which she also wore on her wedding day. The Vogue cover and the photos that accompanied the story inside were shot by Mario Testino, possibly the most famous fashion photographer of this generation—known for taking portraits of Princess Diana. In October 2012, Melania tweeted a photo of her Vogue magazine cover. “My favorite photographer #MarioTestino Happy Birthday! #flashback @voguemagazine 2005.”
Melania Knavs (Knauss) married Donald Trump in a wedding ceremony held at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea, even though it would later be revealed that Melania is Catholic. In 2017, as first lady, she visited the Vatican with President Trump and had a brief audience with Pope Francis. During their tête-à-tête, Melania held out her hand, extending her rosary beads, which the pope then blessed, placing his hand atop hers and making the sign of the cross. It was a brief moment, maybe ten seconds, but it was significant; there has not been a Catholic first lady in the White House since Jackie Kennedy. Trump is Presbyterian. It’s unclear why the couple chose Bethesda-by-the-Sea for their ceremony, besides that it was pretty and convenient to Mar-a-Lago. A team of Bailey’s floral designers decorated the archway of the giant doors of the church with hundreds and hundreds of white hydrangeas, peonies, and roses.
The ceremony itself held a lot of significance for Melania; it was way more personal for her than the reception. This might have been Trump’s third trip up the aisle, but it was her first, and she sincerely hoped it would be her last. She told friends that she had zero doubts about marrying Trump. Whether that was true or not, it was certainly a line she stuck to in interviews. “No, I didn’t have any concerns,” she would tell Barbara Walters years later when asked if she was worried that Trump’s previous marriages were signs this one too wouldn’t make it. She replied, “You have to know who you are” to be with him, something she is fond of saying.
As for Trump, he gave at least minimal acknowledgment of his past marital failures and described his plan for his nuptials with Melania: “I’m gonna show up, I’m gonna say, ‘I do,’ and I’m gonna be a very good husband for a change,” said Trump in an interview right before the big day.
During the service, the Metropolitan Opera soprano Camellia Johnson sang “Ave Maria” as Melania walked toward her groom—carefully. The giant dress almost toppled her, but she found her footing before taking a tumble. Her maid of honor and only attendant was her older sister, Ines. For the wedding, Ines was outfitted in a strapless white, c
ustom-made Vera Wang gown with a beige satin belt. She wore an ornate white pearl choker that looked Victorian in era.
Trump’s two sons, Don Jr. and Eric, were his best men. Ivanka Trump did a Bible reading during the service, and reality show producer Mark Burnett’s eldest son, nine-year-old Cameron, served as a page, dressed in a Dior pageboy ensemble with white silk shorts and white knee-high socks. Tiffany’s job was less high-profile: she was asked to hand out wedding programs before the service began. It’s still unclear why Tiffany’s role was so minimal in the wedding, but as with most things Tiffany Trump, there’s a sad footnote of afterthought.
The church’s pastor, the Reverend Ralph R. Warren, performed a traditional Episcopalian ceremony at the altar, which was decorated on either side with white flowers. After the couple read their vows, Trump holding the hand of his bride the entire time, the two lit Melania’s own baptismal candle. “I was baptized on Donald’s birthday, so I think it has a meaning to me and to the family, and I kept it,” said Melania of the candle, which her mother brought specially to Palm Beach from Slovenia for the wedding. “Then I will keep it for baby, so I will baptize my baby and the candle will be there.” After lighting the candle, Trump and Melania both knelt at the altar and prayed. They maintained eye contact. “We had a little smile, but we were serious, because they are serious words,” Melania said of the vows.
When it was time for the groom to kiss the bride, Trump, dressed in a black tuxedo with a large white silk bow tie and matching white silk cummerbund, dutifully did so, planting one on her for a good few seconds, and guests applauded. The couple exited the church as they had entered it, only now showered with white rose petals, Melania still clutching in one hand her diamond cross and rosary, embellished with tiny tea roses. She had eschewed a big bridal bouquet, opting for the holy symbol of Catholic prayer instead. It was more significant, she said to friends.