How does a shy ex-model make
her way from Slovenia to, just maybe, the White House? To Melania Trump—and to
the people who know her back home—her journey to marrying The Donald is like a
fairy tale, or a too-crazy-to-believe rom-com. It’s a story full of naked
ambition, stunning beauty, a shockingly Trump-like dad, and even some family
secrets. Maybe she’s made for Washington after all.
It wasn’t always this way. Once
upon a time, a man could marry his Slovenian sweetheart, invite Bill and
Hillary Clinton to the lavish wedding, and only the society pages would bother
with it. “It was completely different than it is now,” Melania Trump tells me,
recalling those bygone days of sanity, speaking in her now famous accent, a
kind of dreamy Transylvanian.
Back then, in 2005, it didn’t
seem odd that she and Donald Trump would mark their happy occasion with the
former president and First Lady, then a senator from New York. “When they went
to our wedding, we were private citizens,” Melania reminds me. Just two private
citizens getting hitched at the groom’s 126-room Florida palace. He in a tux;
she in a $100,000 Dior dress that laborers’ hands had toiled upon for a
legendary 550 hours, affixing 1,500 crystals—jewels fit for private citizens
like them. A pair of ordinary people, really, uniting in matrimony in the
presence of Rudy Giuliani and Kelly Ripa, as Billy Joel serenaded the couple
and guests slurped caviar and Cristal in the shadow of a five-foot-tall Grand
Marnier wedding cake.
Those were, in some ways,
simpler times. But things change quickly—which is perhaps the enduring fact of
Melania Trump’s entire improbable life—and when your husband works up a plan to
make America great again, the very same Clintons you once smiled with on your
wedding day can now become your family’s mortal enemies. And you can think, as
Melania Trump says she does, that it’s no huge deal, really. “This is it, what
it is,” Melania tells me. “It’s all business now; it’s nothing personal.”
Of course, Melania had the
foresight to imagine that politics would bring chaos. Donald’s first wife,
Ivana, may have wanted Trump to be president, but Melania, his third, was never
hot on the idea. “When we discussed about it, I said he really needs to make
sure he knows he really wants to do it, because life changes,” Melania says.
“I didn’t know much about
Donald Trump,” she says of being introduced. “I had my life, I had my world.”
We’re speaking on the phone,
though I have no idea where she’s calling from. Is she in her penthouse, a
gilded triplex in the Trump Tower? Perhaps somewhere out on the campaign trail?
While she’s a crowd-pleaser on the stump, she appears infrequently and only
when she deigns to. “Nobody controls me. I travel with my husband when I can,”
she says, “when I know that I can go, and I know that my son is okay alone for
a few days with the help.”
While Donald often says that
Melania would make a stellar First Lady, the former model offers little clue
about what a move to the White House would mean for her. She once said she
would be “traditional,” like Jackie Kennedy, and on the question of what causes
she might support, she has noted she is already involved in “many, many
charities.” She elaborated: “Many different charities involving children,
involving many different diseases.”
Matthew Peyton/Getty Images
In this respect, she is just
like her husband. She’s alluringly opaque. She makes meaningful eye contact and
emphatically repeats affirmative, folksy banalities—she “has a thick skin,” she
takes things “day by day,” she follows the news “from A to Z”—until the
interviewer either is transported into a supra-verbal understanding or decides
it’s pointless to press for specifics. But unlike her husband, Melania is
reserved, polite, and steady, say those close to her. “There is a peace in
her,” one old friend from Slovenia tells me. She is a homebody. She’s rich, but
not a socialite; she prefers family to the It set and retires early after
events.
EDITOR’S PICK
This image of a retiring
homebody, of course, is not the one that Trump’s enemies present when they
conjure her in the White House. Ahead of Utah’s primary, allies of Ted Cruz
posted a photo from a shoot for a 2000 issue of British GQ in which a
naked Melania is lying on her stomach on a white bearskin rug. “Meet Melania
Trump. Your next First Lady,” read the ad, aimed at conservative Mormon voters.
“Or, you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.”
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Trump shot back in a cryptic,
menacing message that he would “spill the beans” on Heidi Cruz and then
re-tweeted two photos, side by side: one, a mid-sentence Heidi, looking like a
gargoyle; another, a bronzed, blue-eyed Melania, looking like a fox. “The
images are worth a thousand words,” the caption read, though Trump’s tweet
itself was really communicating only four: “My wife is hotter.”
It’s easy to think America has
changed a lot since Hillary Rodham Clinton was chastised in the early ’90s for
her ambition as First Lady—refusing to sit at home and make cookies. But our
conception of a presidential spouse hasn’t evolved much. Michelle Obama, a
Princeton graduate and legal hotshot who was once her husband’s law-school-era
mentor, has been mainly confined to dealing with soft issues: childhood
obesity, planting vegetables. Rather than Hillary or Michelle, it was Laura
Bush—a teacher who supported her husband’s turning from bottle to Bible—who
seemed most suited to Middle America’s idea (or at least a man’s idea) of a
First Lady. Of course, the paragon of them all is still Jackie Kennedy,
endlessly glamorous and endlessly tolerant of her husband’s philandering.
Those who know Melania say the
Jackie template isn’t a bad one for her to aspire to. “She’d be great at
picking out the china patterns; she’d be a classic First Lady,” says stylist
Phillip Bloch, who has worked with both of the Trumps and attended fashion
shows with Melania. But unlike Jackie, who met John Kennedy when he was already
a congressman, Melania wasn’t signing on to be a political spouse when she met
the notorious Donald Trump in 1998.
Melania had signed up for a
life of conspicuous conspicuousness, one she dutifully chronicled on Instagram
and Twitter up until about a year ago, when her social-media accounts—unlike
those of her husband—went silent with Trump’s entrance into the race. There was
Melania in a white robe, working with her “glam team” of stylists, perched on a
gilded throne, overlooking Central Park. Here she was, head to toe in white,
posing on the Trump jet. There she was, relaxing at “#home #NYC” on a Thursday
night, in a room that looked like a fevered baroque dream. In one of her last
posts—right before somebody deemed it advisable to slam shut this opulent
little window on her life—she snapped a parting selfie in a gold-mirrored
bathroom. “Bye! I’m off to my #summer residence.”
While Melania enjoys the
services of a chef and an assistant, there’s no nanny raising their son,
Barron. That’s the mother’s duty. “We know our roles,” Melania once told
Parenting.com, referring to the division of labor with her husband. “I didn’t
want him to change the diapers or put Barron to bed.” The boy she calls “little
Donald” wants one day to be a “businessman and golfer” and, as she told the
publication, almost always dresses in suits. “He’s not a sweatpants child,”
she’s said.
Melania is as fastidious a wife
as she is a mother, which Donald appreciates. Things come easy with her. “I
work very hard from early in the morning till late in the evening,” Donald told
Larry King in 2005. “I don’t want to go home and work at a relationship.” To
the twice-divorced Donald, Melania is terrific. He’s never heard her fart or
make doodie, as he once told Howard Stern. (Melania has said the key to the
success of her marriage is separate bathrooms.) He can trust her to take her
birth control every day, he boasted to Stern; she’s just amazing that way. She
has the perfect proportions—five feet eleven, 125 pounds—and great boobs, which
is no trivial matter. Stern once asked Trump what he would do if Melania were
in a terrible car accident, God forbid, and lost the use of her left arm,
developed an oozing red splotch near her eye, and mangled her left foot. Would
Donald stay with her?
“How do the breasts look?”
Trump asked.
“The breasts are okay,” Stern
replied. Then, yeah, of course Trump stays. “Because that’s important.” There
are other pluses. He appreciates Melania’s restraint when it comes to Shopping
While Trump. “She’s never taken advantage of that situation, okay, as many
women would have, frankly,” he has said. (“I prefer quality over quantity,”
Melania tells me.) Donald does his part to make things work, too. “He is a very
understanding husband,” Melania once told an interviewer. “If I say, ‘I need an
hour, I’m going to take a bath,’ or I’m having a massage, he doesn’t have
nothing against it. He’s very supportive in that way.” She lets him have his
space; she’s not “needy” or “nagging,” as she tells me.
As for passions beyond the
familial, there are a few. Melania dabbles in design. Her line of affordable
gem-spangled jewelry and watches, launched on QVC, reportedly sold out in 45
minutes during its initial broadcast. (Melania’s caviar-infused anti-aging
creams haven’t sold as well, though a federal judge ruled in her favor in a
lawsuit she filed against its promoters.)
Melania and Donald at
Cipriani’s in 1999/Getty Images
When she was getting her
jewelry plans off the ground, Melania sketched the designs for the collection
herself, relying on a talent for drawing that her childhood friends tell me she
flashed as a girl. “It’s not free; it’s precise,” Petra Sedej, one of Melania’s
high school classmates, says of her art. “She has a really good feeling for
this.” Another old friend whom I met in Slovenia, and who asked not to be
named, sums up Melania’s talents more generally: “People say she’s smart, she’s
well-educated like Jackie Kennedy, but…” The friend pauses to find the right
words. “She’s smart for the things she’s interested in, like jewelry. She’s not
stupid, she’s not a bimbo, but she’s not especially clever.”
To Melania’s traditional way of
thinking, Trump’s aspirations for the White House have little to do with her.
The same can be said for his more controversial positions, like his general
disdain for immigrants, even though his wife became an American only in 2006.
“I chose not to go into politics and policy,” she tells me. “Those policies are
my husband’s job.” She has opinions, she assures me, and shares them with
Trump. “Nobody knows and nobody will ever know,” she says of the advice she
provides him. “Because that’s between me and my husband.”
The approach is in keeping with
her view of her wifely functions. “She stays in her lane,” Bloch says. “When
asked, she gives her opinion, but otherwise she stays out of it.”
Vladimira Tomšič, who went to
the same school as Melania and is friendly with her parents, tells me that her
upbringing helps explain her marriage. “The secret of why he’s with her,” she
explains, “is her traditional values and the importance of family to her.” In
other words, that bearskin-rug photo is a red herring: Melania is the ideal
wife for the conservative base. She is, in fact, positively biblical—Trump’s
perfect “help meet,” his “suitable helper,” as the Bible’s description of Eve
would have it. Melania Trump is as tailored to The Donald as if a divine
plastic surgeon had sculpted her out of his rib.
When he first met Melania—at a
party during New York Fashion Week in the fall of 1998—Donald Trump was 52. He
was brash and brassy, fabulously wealthy, the stuff of New York legend. Melania
Knauss was 28, a tall, shy brunette whose face had yet to acquire the taut,
plasticine squint that makes it look as if cameras are forever catching her a
second before a sneeze. “I didn’t know much about Donald Trump,” she says of
that introduction. “I had my life, I had my world. I didn’t follow Donald Trump
and what kind of life he had.”
Years earlier, while modeling
in Milan and Paris, Melania had Germanized her last name from Knavs,
changing the v to a u and adding an extra s. She had done
very well in Europe, but not supermodel well, and hoped to advance her career
in the U.S. Paolo Zampolli, a wealthy Italian whose business interests in New
York are broad and vague, brought Melania over on a modeling contract and a
work visa. Sometimes, in order to promote his models, he would send a few girls
to an event and invite photographers, producers, and rich playboys. That night
in September 1998, Zampolli had invited Trump, who arrived with a date but was
immediately taken with Melania. He sent his companion to the bathroom so he
could have a few minutes to chat up the model he’d noticed. But Melania knew of
Trump’s reputation—which was immediately confirmed by the fact that he had come
to the party with a date and was now asking for her number.
She refused, and instead asked
Trump for his contact information. Unimpressed with merely catching the
eye of the famous billionaire, Melania was studying the situation as if testing
a coin with her teeth. “If I give him my number, I’m just one of the women he
calls,” she remembers. Melania was curious to see if he’d proffer a business
number. “I wanted to see what his intention is,” she explains. “It tells you a
lot from the man what kind of number he gives you. He gave me all of his
numbers.”
Perhaps Trump saw something
worth admiring in Melania’s willingness to walk away from the deal. Indeed, she
waited a week before calling him. “I’m not starstruck,” she explains. “We had a
great connection, we had great chemistry, but I was not starstruck. And maybe
he noticed that.”
Travis Dove/The New York
Times/Redux
Soon after Melania and Donald started dating, she apparently broke it off. “She had some trust issues with him at the beginning,” says Matthew Atanian, a photographer who had been Melania’s roommate at Zeckendorf Towers in Union Square when she first moved to New York. “She was telling me that she wouldn’t have it, he was back to his old ways. She kept her apartment to have her own space because of this.”
Within six months, Atanian
says, they were back together. Either she set Donald straight—he has insisted
that his fidelity to Melania is absolute—or she made her peace with the
immutable character of The Donald, telling every interviewer who asks that she
doesn’t seek to change him. What she has found in Trump—despite the age
difference and behavior that would make most women run—is apparently what she
was always looking for. “It’s about all that power and protection,” one of
Melania’s old friends from Ljubljana tells me. “I think she needed a strong
man, a father figure.”
In Slovenia these days, there
is a certain sense of resentment that Melania has forgotten her roots; there is
talk that she refuses to speak Slovenian, that Donald visited the country only
once and only long enough to have dinner. There’s a sneaking suspicion that she
thinks Slovenia is not good enough for her, and that she might be right. But in
interviews, Melania doesn’t shy away from her Slovenian life; she’s not
embarrassed by it. “I love my childhood,” she tells me. “It was a beautiful
childhood.” Her son speaks Slovenian fluently—he uses it to speak with his
grandparents, who have immigrated to New York and live near them in Trump
Tower—but for Melania, Slovenia represents a relatively short and distant
period of her past that she quickly outgrew.
Sevnica, the small railroad
town where she was born Melanija Knavs in 1970, is about an hour’s drive from
the Slovenian capital. In contrast to the privations that so many suffered in
Communist times, the Knavses lived well. Melania’s mother, Amalija Ulčnik,
worked developing patterns at a factory that manufactured children’s clothing.
She had met Viktor Knavs in 1966 while he was the chauffeur for a nearby town’s
mayor.
Even in those days, when
Slovenia was part of Communist Yugoslavia and times were lean, Amalija was
always impeccably dressed and perfectly coiffed. “She was very pretty,” says
Tomšič, who now runs a local hospital to which Melania donated $25,000 after
marrying Donald. “She was always very fancy.” Amalija spent evenings after work
sewing clothing for herself and her two daughters, Ines and Melania. Once she
learned to draw, Melania sketched her own designs, and her mother or sister
sewed them. Melania also made her own jewelry. “Melania never wore anything from
the store,” recalls one friend.
The family struck a worldly
image, too, vacationing in France, Italy, and Germany. Every room of their
apartment in Sevnica was painted a deep, lush color—blue in the living room,
red in the kitchen, yellow in Melania’s room. Amalija, who got to travel to
France and Germany for work, returned with colorful paints for the home, a
rarity in Yugoslavia. She also came back from business trips with Western
fashion magazines, which Melania’s friends watched her flip through constantly.
“They had more than the others,” remembers Melania’s childhood friend Mirjana
Jelančič. (She is now the principal of the school she attended with Melania,
where there is talk of installing a permanent exhibit on Mrs. Trump, the
school’s most famous graduate.)
Jelančič remembers Melania’s
father, Viktor, spending every Saturday lovingly washing his antique Mercedes,
another rarity. “It was like a ritual,” Jelančič tells me. After leaving his
job working for the mayor of Hrastnik, Viktor, then a member of the Slovenian
Communist Party, became a salesman at a state-owned car company. Police files
from the time indicate Viktor aroused suspicion for illicit trade and tax
evasion in 1976. (He was charged with a tax offense, though his record was
later cleared on account of Slovenia’s statute of limitations, a process the
courts described to me as “legal rehabilitations.”) Melania blocked my efforts
to speak to Viktor, and she denies that any such investigation took place. “He
was never under any investigation, he was never in trouble,” she snaps. “We
have a clean past. I don’t have nothing to hide.”
While working for the car
company in Ljubljana, Viktor had an apartment there, in one of the city’s first
residential high-rises. It was a prestigious address and provided the girls a
place to stay in the capital so that they could attend design school—another
luxury. Meanwhile, in Sevnica, a place where most people still lived in drab
apartments doled out to them by their factories, Viktor managed to build a house
situated in what was considered the toniest part of town.
“Trump reminds me of Viktor,”
Viktor’s friend and neighbor Tomaž Jeraj tells me. “He’s a salesman. He has
business in his veins.” It’s a sentiment unanimous in Sevnica, where Viktor and
Amalija still own their house and visit two or three times a year.
Viktor and Amalija Knavs in
Aberdeen, Scotland in 2011./Donald Stewart, PacificCoastNews.com
Indeed, if you look at photos
of Viktor Knavs and Donald Trump side by side, you wouldn’t be surprised at the
comparison. Donald is just five years younger than his father-in-law. Both are
tall, portly men with blond hair and sharp suits; they’re brash men who like
the finer things in life. “He likes quality,” says Melania. “Viki”—as Viktor is
known to his friends here—“likes good food,” Jeraj tells me. “He loves cars.”
He was one of the many people who would tell me about Viktor’s extensive
collection of Mercedes. “You’ll never see him in another car.”
Those who know the Knavses say
that Viktor is boisterous and strong-willed. “Jokes come naturally to him,” Ana
Jelančič, a neighbor and friend of the Knavses’, tells me. “If he goes into a
bar, people pay attention.” Viktor sucks the air out of a room, she says. “He
is the strong one in the relationship. Amalija supports him. She is a wonderful
mother and wife.”
Plenty of acquaintances hold
the Knavses in high esteem. “They are the typical Slovenian family,” says
Tomšič, the hospital director. “They are traditional, their family ties are
very strong.” And friends of Viktor’s speak admiringly of his reputed business
acumen. Another friend of Viktor’s tells me, “He’s a salesman. He follows the
market.”
Far from objecting to the
comparison that’s made between her husband and her father, Melania agrees
they’re a lot alike. “They’re both hardworking,” she says. “They’re both very
smart and very capable. They grew up in totally different environments, but
they have the same values, they have the same tradition. I myself am similar to
my husband. Do you understand what I mean? So is my dad; he is a family man, he
has tradition, he was hardworking. So is my husband.”
Like Donald Trump, Viktor Knavs
is not just a hard-charging businessman with a penchant for real estate; he is
also viciously litigious when it comes to the women in his life. Back when
Viktor was a driver, before he married Melania’s mother, he met a young woman
in town named Marija Cigelnjak. They dated for a while, and in September 1964,
she told Viktor she was pregnant. According to Cigelnjak’s testimony in a
lengthy court record, Viktor offered to marry her, but quickly changed his
mind, demanding that she have an abortion. This, Viktor said, was because the
child was not his. A son was born in May 1965, and three months later, Marija
sued Viktor for child support. Viktor continued to deny paternity—going into
detail for the court about when he had sex with Marija and the rhythms of her
menstrual cycle—prompting the court to order a blood test. Based on its
results, the court determined that Viktor was, in fact, the boy’s biological
father. Viktor fought the order to pay child support all the way to Slovenia’s
highest appellate court. The courts always ruled in Cigelnjak’s favor. (The
court record indicates that Viktor filed his appeal late—and lied brazenly and
unconvincingly about the nature of the delay.)
Viktor has never acknowledged
his son, Denis Cigelnjak, who is now 50. The existence of Melania’s half
brother has never been reported, and although he had never spoken to the media,
he told me his story and then gave me permission to retrieve the relevant court
documents from the Slovenian archives.
He lives in a tiny apartment in
Hrastnik, the town where his mother, who passed away several years ago, once
worked at the glass factory. She never married or had more children, and Denis
says he has no memory of ever meeting his father. Viktor paid child support
until the boy was 18 but never reached out. “I missed being able to say, ‘Hey,
Dad, let’s go for a coffee,’ ” Denis told me as we sat in his living room this
spring. Periodically, Denis would hear stories about his father, but he said he
was afraid to initiate contact and disturb the Knavs family. Now he feels it’s
too late. He didn’t seek attention and says he wants nothing from his father or
the Trumps. He wouldn’t mind meeting his half sisters, Ines and Melania, who,
he’s fairly certain, don’t even know he exists. (When I asked Melania about
this over the phone, she denied that it was true. Later, after I’d sent her
documents from the Slovenian court, she wrote to me claiming she hadn’t
understood what I’d asked, explaining, “I’ve known about this for years.” She
added: “My father is a private individual. Please respect his privacy.”)
Everyone who remembers Melania
from her youth in Slovenia recalls how striking she was. “She was a special
kind of beauty, not the classic type,” a friend from Ljubljana told me. “She
had eyes that were kind of psychedelic. You look in those eyes and it was like
looking in the eyes of an animal.”
Stane Jerko, the photographer
credited with spotting Melania and producing her first real photo shoot back in
1987, saw something similar. He had glimpsed her waiting for her friend after a
fashion show in Ljubljana. She was lanky and shy, with long hair and sparkling
eyes. Jerko, who preferred to find his models in public places rather than
through casting calls, had suggested she come by his studio. She wasn’t
interested, he recalls. “School was the most important thing for her.” But a
week later, she arrived, hair in a teenybopper ponytail, with a bushel of her
own clothes: leggings, leotards, high-waisted acid-washed jeans, and a
sleeveless sweater that looked like a wicker basket. She was reserved and tense
but followed Jerko’s instructions and quickly figured out how to pose. He could
see she had a future in front of the camera. A couple of weeks later, she
returned, and Jerko snapped a series of black-and-white photos of a 16-year-old
Melanija Knavs in some catalog clothes, barefoot in each image. It wasn’t a
stylistic choice. “I didn’t have shoes for her because she had very big feet,”
Jerko says of Melania, who wore the equivalent of a size 9 shoe. “The other
models had smaller feet.” (You know what they say in Slovenia about people with
big feet? Jerko asks, chuckling. “When you live on big feet, you live big.”)
In those days, Melania wasn’t
thinking about a career as a model. Like her sister, Ines, her goal was to
become a designer, and she applied to the school of architecture at the local
university, successfully passing the notoriously difficult entrance exams. In
those years in Ljubljana, she was focused on school. She didn’t drink, didn’t
party, didn’t smoke. Even after she met Jerko and began dabbling in modeling,
she preferred to go home after work, to be with her equally quiet and reserved
sister. “She kept to herself, she was a loner. After a shoot or a catwalk, she
went home, not out. She didn’t want to waste time partying,” Jerko remembers.
“Boys at that time liked more
party girls, and we were not this,” Petra Sedej, Melania’s classmate in those
days, tells me. Instead, they would gather in Melania’s or Petra’s apartment,
“drink juice and talk.” Another old friend from Ljubljana recalls that Melania
“was a bit special that way. She was really happy with those two, three, four
people she was with. She didn’t need more.”
Melania scoffs when I ask if
she had had a breast augmentation. “I didn’t make any changes,” she says.
Those who remember Melania also
say she seemed somehow on a plane above her peers, her gaze always focused on a
point above and beyond them. At an age when her classmates were pimply, casual
high schoolers, Melania was always perfectly made up, recalls Sedej.
Foundation, mascara, blush, lip gloss, all in just the right, subtle amount.
“Even in summertime,” she says, “she was always perfect, every day.” In
college, Melania dated a fellow model, a sought-after guy studying physical
education. But she was unsatisfied with his lack of seriousness. He was a
good-looking, sporty 20-year-old; she was a beautiful young woman who wanted
something more than a hummingbird college romance. That this boy couldn’t
provide what she sought disappointed Melania, Sedej says. “She was very
sensitive. She wanted more.” Recalls another friend from those days, “We were
all 20, but she was much more mature.”
By 1992—the year Melania won
second place in a Slovenian Look of the Year modeling contest—she seemed to
have outgrown not just Ljubljana but all of newly independent Slovenia. The
large media market of Yugoslavia—with some 24 million people—had been chopped
up. Staying in her tiny new country of 2 million would mean the end of her
modeling career. To have a shot at something bigger, at a real future in
modeling, she had to move. “She was sure that there was nothing for her in
Slovenia,” says the friend from Ljubljana. “She wanted to leave.”
Melania decamped to Milan after
her first year of college, effectively dropping out. Her connections to home
grew faint. Sedej saw her for the occasional coffee on the rare occasions she visited
Ljubljana, but has lost track of her since. She and her classmates wrote to
Melania about their 20th high school reunion a few years ago. They e-mailed
Melania’s representatives, they wrote to her on Facebook. There was no
response. “She cut the line behind her,” says the friend from Ljubljana. “She
started to live another life, and all this is behind her.”
Melania thrived in Milan and
Paris, and in 1996, having fallen in with Zampolli, the agent who brokered her
visa and American modeling contract, she moved to New York with visions of
truly making it big. But Melania, still only 26, would confront the perils of
growing older as a model. “It was a frustrating age for models, the late 20s.
It’s not a friendly industry to models of that age,” says Atanian, the former
roommate. Zampolli’s agency paid Melania’s share of the rent as part of their
contract. “She aired frustration over the work issue,” Atanian recalls. She
wondered often why this or that photographer picked someone else over her,
often someone younger. “She wasn’t working every day,” he added. “She was going
to castings every day and not succeeding every day. She said things were very
different in Europe, that she had been more successful.” Melania was having a
hard time supporting herself, worried that her best years were behind her.
(“Pictures tell for itself,” Melania says firmly when I ask her about Atanian’s
characterization of this supposed tough patch. “My portfolio says what I did,”
including “the best catalogs.”)
In an increasingly unfriendly
market, Melania looked for advantages. She went on casting calls for alcohol
and tobacco ads, which her under-age competitors couldn’t be hired for. Once,
she landed a Camel ad, a billboard in Times Square. She sought an edge in other
ways. “She went away for a two-week vacation, then came back, and was
more…buxom,” Atanian says, groping for the right but least offensive word. “She
admitted it to me. She just said it needed to be done to get more lingerie
jobs.”
Again, Melania scoffs when I
ask if she had had a breast augmentation. “I didn’t make any changes,” she
says. “A lot of people say I am using all the procedures for my face. I didn’t
do anything. I live a healthy life, I take care of my skin and my body. I’m
against Botox, I’m against injections; I think it’s damaging your face,
damaging your nerves. It’s all me. I will age gracefully, as my mom does.”
In New York, Melania lived a
quiet, homebound life, taking assiduous care of her body: walks with ankle
weights, seven pieces of fruit every day, diligently moisturizing her skin. She
rarely partied, never brought anyone back to the apartment, and was always home
early. “She didn’t go out to dance clubs; she’d go to Cipriani for dinner at
ten and be home by one,” Atanian recalls. “Men she would go out with tended to
be wealthier, the industrious, European type. They were Italians, playboys. But
they’d go out for dinner and she’d be home before I was.”
It was Zampolli, again, who
rescued her in 1998—with that invitation to the party at the Kit Kat Club,
unwittingly putting her on a charmed trajectory toward a certain playboy’s
phone number and, who knows, maybe even the White House.
Though she had appeared
wordlessly behind her husband on plenty of stages throughout the long, weird
winter of Trump’s primary march, Melania’s debut as a campaigner came on a
snowy April night in Wisconsin. I was there for the unveiling and watched as
her husband warmly ushered her to the podium. “She’s an incredible mother, she
loves her son, Barron, so much,” he said. “And I have to say, she will make an
unbelievable First Lady.” The crowd went wild. “I’d like to introduce my wife.
Melania,” he said. “Come.”
Obediently, she teetered out
onto the stage on vertiginous Louboutins, a long-legged doll in a summery dress
the color of sea foam. She was unseasonably tan, clearly comfortable in this
role: being admired as a specimen of physical beauty. She began by reading from
the remarks waiting for her at the podium, a list she’d compiled of her
husband’s attributes. “He’s a hard worker. He’s kind. He has a great heart.
He’s tough. He’s smart. He’s a great communicator. He’s a great negotiator.
He’s telling the truth. He’s a great leader. He’s fair.”
The speech—all short,
declarative sentences—sounded like it had been written by her son as a homework
assignment but quickly got to what sounded like recess talk. “As you may know
by now, when you attack him, he will punch back ten times harder,” she said
loudly, firmly, and to wild applause. “No matter who you are, a man or a woman.
He treats everyone equal.”
To Melania’s right, the
presidential aspirant, the equal-opportunity puncher, nodded approvingly. Maybe
Melania hadn’t wanted any of this a year ago—hadn’t wanted her husband to run,
hadn’t wanted all the prying scrutiny, hadn’t wanted to become a politician’s
wife. But here she was, taking the strangeness of life in her long, tan stride.
She smiled, tautly, like a sphinx and beheld the throng before her. She was
proud of her husband. He had a great heart.
Julia Ioffe is
a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. This is her first
article for GQ.
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