Born Trump

by Emily Jane Fox

  Friends remembered that he could not have been more thrilled to have his girlfriend looking the way she did in a photo shoot in a major magazine. “It was his dream come true, to have her looking like that, getting more and more famous,” one friend remembered. This was a man who constantly boasted about his ability to make stars out of both Ivana and Marla, even if the attention was often of the negative variety. Even still, the pair broke up around the time the issue hit newsstands. On January 11, 2000, the Post ran a story under the headline “Trump Knixes Knauss.” As the tabloid reported, Donald thought Melania was great, but the same little fear monster that had reared its head once he divorced Ivana for Marla appeared again. “Donald has to be free for a while. He didn’t want to get hooked,” a source told the Post. “He was still reeling from his split from Marla, and he needed companionship, and then Melania came along and she was beautiful and available.” As the paper told it, she was also now completely and utterly heartsick. Two days later, Donald posed for cameras at One 51, a club in Midtown at which he was throwing a party for his Miss USA pageant. Asked about the split, he told reporters, “Melania is an amazing women, a terrific woman, a great woman, and she will be missed.”

  Melania’s friends told the story of their breakup differently. She, like Marla, didn’t trust him. He was up to his old ways, and she wasn’t going to have it. She got over it soon enough, and he did not miss her for long, because the pair got back together a few months later.

  Melania retreated further into his world, away from her friends and deeper into the sinkhole that can swallow anyone close to Trump. She had not been back to visit her parents until the summer of 2002, when, after a stop in London, Donald and Melania took his plane to Slovenia, where a pair of black Mercedes and both of her parents awaited their arrival. They landed in time for a late dinner, for which they drove a half hour from the airport to the Grand Hotel Toplice, where they were seated at a table overlooking Lake Bled. Melania had to translate everything; Donald, of course, did not speak Slovenian, and her parents did not speak English well (Melania, on the other hand, spoke five languages). The whole trip lasted only a few hours. It was enough for Donald. They boarded the plane back out of town a few hours after they’d touched down. “I was there about 15 minutes,” he told Larry King of the visit a few years later, laughing at the abrupt nature of it. “A beautiful country,” he added. “I landed, said: hi mom, hi dad. Bye!”

  In the winter and spring of 2004, The Apprentice premiered on NBC. Donald often showed off his girlfriend—when he brought contestants up to tour his triplex; when winners of a contest got to dine with the couple at his father’s table at the 21 Club; in the finale, when they took a helicopter to the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City (a contestant mispronounced her name, and in the entirety of the hour-long episode, she said six words: “It’s so cute. It’s really cute”).

  Two weeks after the finale aired, to record ratings, at the end of April, Donald proposed to Melania. It was five and a half years after they first met at the Kit Kat Club and his third official proposal. By that point, he knew what he was doing. He surprised Melania before he left to attend the annual Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the coveted event attended by megawatt stars and fashion insiders that takes place the first Monday in May each year. It was the first time Melania had scored an invitation, and she would arrive with a fifteen-carat emerald-cut stone with tapered diamond baguettes on each side, all set in platinum. When she showed up to the event, the ring sparkled against the black strapless corseted dress she chose to go along with that year’s theme—aptly, “Dangerous Liaisons”—as she posed with her soon-to-be stepdaughter Ivanka, who wore a peach silk-and-lace slip dress, on the carpet. No one much noticed at the gala. The next day, they shared the news with the Post. “How Trump ‘Iced’ the Deal—$2 Million Sparkler for His Fiancée,” the headline read. “It was a great surprise,” Melania told the tabloid. “We are very happy together.” Donald later told Larry King that they “were together for five years” and “literally never had an argument. I said, ‘you know what? It’s time. It’s time.’”

  The Post headline got something slightly off. Donald later told the Times that the truth was, he paid half as much. Graff Diamonds—Oprah Winfrey’s jeweler, he reminded King—had offered him a steep discount. “Only a fool would say, ‘No thank you. I want to pay a million dollars more for a diamond.’” The deal paid off for the London-based jeweler, which noted an uptick in its stores from all the publicity Melania’s ring received when news of their engagement broke. (In early 2018, Graff’s chairman told Forbes that Donald was given no such “favors.”)

  Donald’s previous marriages had been all about money in their own ways. Ivana had threatened to bleed him dry by fighting their premarital agreement, though at the time he had no blood to give; Marla was around while he made something of a fortune back, but fought him for years for a larger portion of it than she’d agreed to in their prenuptial agreement. As for the ceremony and receptions themselves, Donald had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars—if not more—to entertain guests who didn’t truly care for the newlyweds or the idea of watching them say their vows or cut their cakes under canopies of imported white flowers.

  In his third go-around, Donald of course again demanded a prenuptial agreement, but this time, he figured out a way to make the wedding about money coming in to him, rather than flowing out. After he said he took the special price from Graff, and Graff, in turn, made it back so quickly, other wedding vendors raced to cash in on the latest Trump nuptial spectacular. Once the couple had decided to wed in Palm Beach, the offers started rolling in. Donald told the Times that he’d turned down offers from a handful of high-end florists who offered to flood the Versailles-like ballroom in Mar-a-Lago with a cascade of whatever flowers the couple envisioned for their day. A half dozen top chefs raised their hands to prepare the dinner that evening. One private jet company agreed to hand glasses of champagne to those arriving at the airport for the wedding, and another company said they would be more than happy to provide a grand fireworks display—gratis—during the reception. Lest he risk turning into Star Jones—the former host of The View who’d turned her wedding into a freebie wonderland and earned herself the moniker Bridezilla—Donald turned down the fireworks, and Melania nixed the idea of having the whole thing filmed and televised for all the world to see. “Literally anything you can imagine from photos to flowers to food to jets to airports to diamonds,” Mr. Trump told the paper. “And for every item, there’s five people who want to do it. In all cases they don’t want anything, but they want recognition.”

  Initially, both Donald and Melania contended, at least publicly, that they wanted the wedding to be small and simple. “Who needs a big hoopla? I get enough of it,” Donald said to Us Weekly. “I like private and intimate,” Melania told People. This was Donald’s third, after all, and the first two had been such big to-dos, with hundreds of people, and thousands of flashbulbs, honking big wedding cakes, elaborate gowns, crystals and caviar and critics nastily gossiping about the couple barely out of their earshot. But it was Melania’s first wedding, and so many things were going to be free this go-around. His kids would be there this time, too. “I’m so excited for my dad,” Ivanka told the Palm Beach Post about the upcoming wedding. “When he’s happy, I’m happy,” she said to Chaunce Hayden.

  Donald also had a show to promote. He was now a national household name, as opposed to just a tabloid regular. This wedding, if he did it right, wouldn’t be just a gossip rag sensation like the last two; it could be an American royal wedding, on the cover of the most regarded magazines and talked about the world over. It would feed his ego, sure, but it would also line his pockets. You can’t pay for that kind of publicity, particularly one that branded him as fifty-eight-year-old landing a stunning model twenty-four years his junior in a lavish affair fit for a king. As soon as that thought dawned on him, small and simple dissolved in an instant. Big hoopla it w
ould be.

  This time around, Donald had time to send out proper invitations—engraved, from Tiffany’s. They requested the honor of the presence of hundreds of famous friends and acquaintances and anyone with a name fit for a public guest list they’d ever come across at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea, where they would participate in a traditional wedding ceremony, and a reception to follow at Mar-a-Lago on January 22, 2006. While in his first wedding, Donald and his assistants planned the whole thing while Ivana got her footing in New York, now Melania had a hand in every detail. On the night of the wedding, in fact, a New Yorker reporter overheard Donald in a men’s room during the reception telling someone that it was time to make an honest woman out of Melania, and this night was her night, not his.

  For all the A-listers who’d turned down an invite to Donald’s wedding to Marla in New York, they sure did file into Palm Beach to bear witness to lucky number three. Just around 7:00 p.m. on January 22, they made their way into the pews at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea, breathing in the gardenias and roses that dozens of refrigerated trucks had driven from New York to Florida for the affair. There were politicians—Hillary and Bill Clinton, Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, Steve Wynn. There were those from the sports world—Derek Jeter, Shaquille O’Neal, Don King. There were those in the music universe—Billy Joel, P. Diddy, Paul Anka, Usher, Simon Cowell. And there were media heavy hitters—Jeff Zucker, Barbara Walters, Katie Couric, Matt Lauer, Kelly Ripa, Chris Matthews, Kathie Lee Gifford, Les Moonves. “If someone had dropped a bomb on that place, it would have wiped out an entire generation of famous Americans,” the bandleader’s wife told a reporter.

  Tiffany had handed out all of her programs before she took a seat beside her half sister. Don Jr. and Eric took their places at the altar. A soloist from the Metropolitan Opera—in fact, the same soloist who had performed at Donald’s second wedding—began singing “Ave Maria” after Donald joined his sons at the front of the Gothic-looking church, lit by gleaming lanterns hanging from the pointed ceiling. The doors at the back of the church swung open, and Melania walked through. Or, she tried to walk through. She hadn’t practiced moving around in her gown, which likely weighed more than half as much as she did. It would have taken her down in front of all those famous guests staring directly at her, had it not been for a few quick-on-their feet minders, who steadied the bride and sent her on down the aisle. She didn’t stop when a guest’s cell phone rang from the pews. She fixed her eyes on her soon-to-be husband, who looked almost humbled—if not by the woman he was about to marry, then by all the genuine stars who had turned up to watch the woman he was about to marry say her first “I dos.” Melania carried a set of rosaries that had long belonged to her family, and as part of the traditional ceremony, the couple lit a candle she asked her mother to bring from Slovenia. She’d lit it only once before—at her baptism, decades earlier. Ivanka read from the Bible, Donald and Melania exchanged their vows, and their guests broke into a round of applause and rowdy cheers, throwing white rose petals in the air. Whereas Donald had only offered Marla a peck on the cheek at the conclusion of their ceremony, he kissed his newest wife a hearty three times in a row. “It was quick but beautiful and perfect,” Cowell told a reporter afterward. “I give it a nine.”

  About a hundred limousine drivers were on hand to transport guests back to Mar-a-Lago for the reception, where forty-five chefs were at work preparing mountains of caviar and hors d’oeuvres covered in edible gold leaf.

  Both Eric and Don Jr. offered toasts to their father and new stepmother. “I know this is the last time I’ll ever have to stand up here,” Eric said. “I look forward to spending many years annoying both of you,” Donny joked. Donald gave a toast of his own, telling the crowd that his years with Melania had “been the best six years of my life in every way.” Unquestionably, one of those ways was that they happened to be the years in which he had become a figure of enviable outward success and status. Billy Joel, Paul Anka, and Tony Bennett serenaded the crowd before the couple cut into their cake after midnight. It was a seventy-inch, seven-tiered gold and white classic yellow sponge cake flavored with sprinkled zest, soaked with Grand Marnier, filled with buttercream, and covered with two thousand sugar flowers. The whole thing weighed two hundred pounds and was held together inside all that butter, sugar, flour by an intricate construction of hidden internal wires—so intricate, in fact, that it couldn’t actually be cut into enough to serve to the hundreds of guests. They baked a bunch of backup cakes to serve instead, and Mar-a-Lago staffers dug into the real cake after the party was over.

  The party itself went well into the evening. Melania changed into a second dress—a far lighter Vera Wang ruched silk tulle gown with a slit well up her knees, the whole thing hugging close to her body. A DJ played by the pool for guests to dance, until Donald carried his third wife into his suite in his club at around four o’clock in the morning.

  The couple stayed at Mar-a-Lago for their honeymoon. “Why are we going to leave our beautiful house and venture out to some tropical island where things aren’t clean?” he explained to Larry King a few months after the wedding.

  Melania took to the role of being the third Mrs. Trump immediately. By April, she chaired the Martha Graham Dance Company’s season-opening fund-raising gala at Tavern on the Green, to which she showed up in a strapless cream Dior gown, embroidered with little pastel flowers and cut on an empire waist. It was an uncharacteristically flowy silhouette for the model, which immediately sent the gossip mill churning out rumors that she’d chosen the looser dress to cover up what could be a growing baby bump. She was not pregnant, at the time. But by the summer, a little more than half a year after their wedding, Melania had news to share with her new husband. “He came home one day in August and I told him he’d be a daddy,” she told People months afterward. Of course, he was already a daddy four times over. All three of his children with Ivana were into their twenties, and Tiffany was a preteen. His reaction, as Melania described it, was about at the excitement level you’d expect for a fifth-time father who would be nearing his sixtieth birthday by the time the new addition came into the world. “At first, he needed to take it in,” she said. “It was a real surprise, and then, he was very happy.” Donald interrupted her, saying that the news didn’t totally take him by surprise. “I expected we were going to have children, but I was surprised by the speed of it. It happened very quickly.”

  They announced the news to the Post at the end of September. “Baby Trump,” the headline ran. “A baby Donald is due in the spring.” In the meantime, Melania started waking up at seven o’clock each morning to oversee construction of the nursery they would build in the Trump Tower triplex. Donald didn’t do much to help his wife prepare, which was just fine with Melania. She’d already hired a nanny by the beginning of 2006, months before the baby would arrive (she later denied in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar that she ever had a nanny—a notion that Donald later corrected in an interview of his own, conceding that they did indeed have someone to help with their child). She knew what to expect of her husband as a father, since she’d seen him with his four older children. “I don’t expect him to walk down Fifth Avenue with a stroller,” she said. As for the birth, Donald would revert back to the role Ivana put him in—outside the delivery room. Seeing Tiffany’s birth in Marla’s hospital séance scene had been enough. “I think it’s easier for Melania if I’m not there,” he told People.

  He did turn up for a sonogram to find out whether they were having a little boy or a little girl—the one thing they kept hidden from the press in those nine months. And he made it to the baby shower as well. In February the couple reserved the famed Fifth Avenue toy store FAO Schwarz to celebrate the new baby Trump. Ivana’s friends commissioned a cake with “Trumpette” scrawled across it in frosting while combing through the store’s many aisles and floors—all the towering stuffed animals, the bright pink Barbie wing, the Lego section, through the art pr
ojects and board games and dress-up costumes. Donald and Melania already had everything they needed for their little one on the way—all the gifts guests chose in the store that day would be donated to children at the nearby New York Presbyterian Hospital. Melania, in a gender-neutral yellow sleeveless dress, said that her husband “loves the baby” already and is “very excited” by the whole thing.

  What seemed to excite Donald as much as the baby itself was the fact that NBC had recently signed him for two more seasons of The Apprentice. What the pregnancy was doing to his wife’s figure wasn’t so bad, either. In December, he described to Howard Stern on his radio show how Melania had changed since she’d found out she was expecting. “You know, they just blow up, right?” he said on air. “Like a blimp, in all the right places.” In her case, he qualified, it was in all the right places. Later in the show, he said he no longer found model Heidi Klum, who’d been a guest at his wedding to Melania, attractive since she gave birth to her two kids. “I looked at her the other day and it’s off,” he said of Klum.

  But Melania was different, special. “I mean she really has become a monster, in all the right places.” Catching himself, he explained that he meant “monster in the most positive way.” He continued to dig: “She has gotten very, very large, in all the right places.” The whole world got to judge for itself a few months later. A seven-month pregnant Melania posed for a photo shoot by Annie Leibovitz for the April Vogue, wearing only gold body paint drawn on in the shape of a string bikini and towering gold pumps. She stood on the stairs of an airplane parked on a tarmac, her body tilted just so, giving a profile view of her belly, which, even at that stage in her pregnancy, was hardly blimp-like. Donald was off to the side of the frame, sitting inside the silver $600,000 Mercedes SLR McLarren he’d given his wife a year earlier. “I think it’s very sexy for a woman to be pregnant,” she told the magazine, which came out close to her due date. “I think it’s beautiful, carrying a baby inside.” As for how she planned to discipline her child, she thought she would be the sort of mother who was “strict, but not too strict, and I think grounded. Very grounded.”