I wrote the following about two decades ago, before the two wed, and don't think it ever ran. Just found it, so I thought I'd put it here, for anyone who cares. My favorite moment? When Melania sees a pair of mating dragonflies and says, "Oh, my god -- they're fucking!" I remember liking the both of them.
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Donald Trump, the former presidential candidate and well-known real-estate tycoon, has seen grown men weep in envy of him. This happens most frequently when he walks into restaurants with Melania Knauss on his arm. Up come the eyes and out leak (or so he says) the tears. These men don’t envy him his vast fortune, which has been estimated by Forbes to be around $1.6 billion, but rather his good fortune, at the age of 53, to be going out with a young woman like Melania Knauss. She is 26 and really something else, a quite tall, quite slender fashion model from Slovenia who favors dresses that are often both shy in length and bold at the bustline, entirely the dish Donald says she is. But, as it happens, she is also much more. She is coy, deflective, amusing, pleasant, stern, optimistic, discreet, and not one to take offense when Donald calls her ``my supermodel.’’ And she can be earthy.
Earlier this month, for instance, Donald and Melania attended a Cubs game at Wrigley field, where at one point two dragonflies appeared over Donald’s head, with Donald oblivious beneath them. The dragonflies hovered there, going about their business with considerable gusto. And Melania soon took notice of what that business was. ``Oh my God,’’ she was heard to exclaim. ``They’re fucking!’’
She is a lot, then, Melania, and those weeping men who covet her only know the half of it, what you get when you get Melania.
*
On a Monday not long ago, she awoke in her one-bedroom apartment, to a rainy, chilly New York City day. Rising from the two pillows that cushioned her head, she brushed her teeth, showered, slipped into black leather pants and a cozy black turtleneck, drank coffee, flossed, brushed her teeth again (``I hate the smell of coffee’’), spoke on the phone to her agent about the day’s modeling jobs, called her parents back in Slovenia (just to say hello), and rang up Donald, who she did not sleep next to that night, though often she does.
``Good morning, darling,’’ she said.
``Hello, baby,’’ the former presidential candidate said.
A while later, looking as soft and supple as moist chamois, she arrived at her modeling agency, T Management (a Trump-owned company), and said, amusingly, ``We are not using our names that often, no. It’s not Donald or something like that but Love or Baby or Honey. I’m calling him Baby most often. Baby or Love.’’
She smiled, rearranged some ash-blonde hair, and went on to give a brief accounting of life with Donald, who in fact strongly disputes Forbes’ estimate of his worth, placing it roughly $3.4 billion higher, at around $5 billion. All things considered, it’s a pretty good life. They spent the previous weekend at Mar-A-Lago, which is Donald’s Palm Beach estate and where ``most of the time we stay in the house, because it’s a big house, 180 rooms.’’ They returned to New York on Donald’s private Boeing 727 jet, watched an old Cary Grant movie on the way, and last night gussied themselves up for the opening of a Broadway play. Tonight they planned to go to another Broadway opening and tomorrow night to the premiere of a new Kim Bassinger movie. Sometime within the next month, they would take Donald’s helicopter -- ``It’s a big helicopter’’ -- to Donald’s casino in Atlantic City, where she wouldn’t gamble, because she doesn’t gamble. Musing on the nature of Atlantic City, she said, ``It’s a different world. It’s a different energy. It’s a lot of different people, and everybody goes to win -- to win and have a good time.’’ And then she laughed, her eyes crinkling warmly, her melodic Eastern European accent floating in the air, appearing to be having a good time herself.
She didn’t say anything more about Atlantic City, though. She didn’t go on to say what happens next to all those people who go there to win. What happens next, of course, is that they lose and have a real bad time; maybe they lose so big they don’t have enough money even for the Greyhound back to Rahway; maybe they sag toward the mirror in the Trump Casino washroom, thinking to end it all. Maybe Melania knows this, as Donald surely does, since it’s what has helped him make his fortune. But she would never talk about such things, for how unpleasant that would be.
``I like to see things positive,’’ she continued. ``You have up and down days, sure. But after rain always comes sun.’’ She then said she could see nothing on her own horizon to worry about. ``Do I have to worry about something? Like what? I don’t worry. I would worry because of what? Some people they worry about death. But when you’re born, you know that you will die, so why worry? Because if you worry, then you’re afraid to live. I don’t think it’s good to worry, to worry and be nervous. You just need to go with the flow and do the best.’’
*
Outside, the streets were still slick with rain. Well prepared, Melania hoisted her umbrella, and soon enough a cab arrived to take her downtown, to an ad agency where she had an appointment. Along the way, she said that she loves Italian food, chicken, potatoes, and deserts but detests garlic, onions, pepper, and red meat. She also mentioned that, unlike most supermodels, she has no upsetting, possibly irritating vices or habits. She does not smoke, does not drink, does not use curse words, and does not pick her finger nails. And she will not give her phone number out to just anybody.
She first met Donald a year ago at a party. (``There were a lot of very beautiful people there, some of the top supermodels of the world, and then I spotted her,’’ Donald once said. ``She stood out by a mile. It wasn’t even close.’’) They chatted for a while, then Donald, knowing a good thing when he saw it, asked for her number. She surprised him, maybe even shocked him, by refusing. But she also said, ``Give me your number, I will call you.’’
Donald made her promise that she would, and, being of good character, she did. They soon found they shared a fondness for many things: for Lionel Richie, Michael Bolton, James Brown, Andrea Bochelli (``the blind opera singer from Italy’’) and the occasional song by the Artist Formerly Known as Prince; for Diet Coke; for the infrequent meal from McDonalds; for types of architecture; for old movies; for each other. She thought him ``very handsome, intelligent, and strong,’’ and before long they were in love in a way that Melania could not find the words to express. ``It’s just … chemistry. It’s a chemistry and energy. You can’t describe that. You need to feel that. Maybe you’ve never experienced it before that way, but when you see it in life, you really see it and feel how strong it is.’’
Although they had much in common, however, they are not entirely alike, as Donald proved during a man-to-man phone chat with Howard Stern on Howard’s radio show.
Howard: ``Which is better, like being alone with [Melania] and bangin’ her, or is it better to like just put her in a bikini and put her out on a beach somewhere and sit next to her?’’
Donald: ``I think all of the above.’’
Who knows what words passed between Donald and Melania after this, but in public Melania took the high road. ``It’s the man thing,’’ she said discreetly. ``That’s how the man talks.’’
Nor did she rise to public anger at some of the potshots leveled her way for simply dating the Donald, for whom much enmity seems to exist. Indeed, one Donald-hating writer went so far as to label her ``a courtier besotted by the opportunity to watch the workings of power at close quarters, [to] feel fame’s glow by doing no more than lolling about in another’s life.’’ It was disgusting, chiseling, repellent stuff, but she shrugged it off. ``People who talk like this,’’ she said, ``they don’t know me.’’
And yet it’s also true that Melania doesn’t make herself easy to know. She was born of well-to-do Slovenian parents, her father the manager of a chain of automobile dealerships, her mother a one-time fashion designer; she has an older sister; she walked her first catwalk at the age of 5; she graduated from the Academy of Design and Architecture in Ljubljana, where she studied graphic and industrial design; she was discovered walking the streets of Milan by a photographer; she moved to Manhattan fours years ago; she has posed for Concord watches and L’Oreal shampoo and showed up in the pages of Vogue, Glamour, and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, as well as on the cover of British GQ. That much she will allow. But not much more.
When someone recently asked her about her past boyfriends, for instance, she only said, sternly, ``I think that’s my private life, and I don’t want to talk about the past. I don’t think it’s important.’’ It was also not important that anyone know what she and Donald wore to bed, nor even the full extent of the gifts she had given him. ``Shall I say those things?’’ she murmured, coyly. ``I think they are very private. I can’t buy him a helicopter, he has one. But I have given him chocolates. Ties, maybe. Those kinds of things, yes. But there are other things I can’t say. They are very -- oh, I can’t say!’’
A few minutes later, however, she did seem to think it all right to talk about her favorite possession. ``My favorite thing,’’ she said, musingly. ``Skin. I don’t know why, but it’s just special. But it needs to be the skin of somebody you love, with the chemistry and the energy. And then it’s the skin everywhere, because each place has feelings.’’
She laughed lightly, a kind of splashing-stream gurgle, her eyes flashing in the dim light of the cab.
Then she leaned forward. The cabby had pulled up behind a line of parked cars. She was nowhere near her destination. And the cabby was just sitting there, idly, as if lost in thought about what it would be like to be with a girl like Melania, that rarest of creatures, a low-maintenance supermodel, and what secret pleasures of the skin would be yours.
``Could we move?’’ Melania said. ``I don’t understand. What are you doing? Do you know where you are going?’’ Leaning back in the seat, she said, ``Aye, aye, aye,’’ in good-natured dismay.
*
The next night, a limo fetched Melania from her apartment and picked up Donald near his place at Trump Tower. Dressed in a nice dark suit with a red tie, Donald scooted in next to Melania, folded his hands in his lap and said, ``I had a pretty good day. The stock market was up quite a bit, even more today than yesterday. The NASDAQ’s almost got back what it lost on Friday. That’s positive. But we’ll see. It’s still very fragile.’’
For a while, in January, it looked like Donald and Melania were done as a couple. Depending on which gossip rag you read, either he left her because she was distracting him from his presidential campaign, or else she left him because he was cheating on her. In any case, shortly after the split, Melania told an interviewer from George magazine, ``I’m not going to stay at home and cry. Other girls would do that, but not me.’’ Within a month, however, just as sun follows rain, the two had patched up their differences.
Donald turned to Melania now and said, ``How’s our favorite person? Isn’t she terrific?’’
The limo was travelling up Central Park East, and Donald suddenly shifted his gaze to the passing sights. ``I own this building, and I own that building, and I own that one called the General Motors Building,’’ he said, with no prompting whatsoever, and then he refocused on his girl. ``I always say, `She’s as beautiful inside as she is out.’ And that’s a big statement, and I can’t necessarily say that about women, especially about very beautiful women. One word I use to describe her is calm. She’s very calm, with a lot of peace within herself. In fact, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.’’
Melania tilted her head and smiled, seeming to know this.
After the premiere of the Kim Bassinger movie -- Donald and Melania both pronounced it ``very good!’’ -- the couple returned to the limo, which took them through the evening gloom to the after-movie party at Tavern on the Green. Inside, Melania noticed that Donald had gotten some movie-snack chocolate on his tie, and she began dabbing at it with a napkin. ``Very uncool, chocolate on the tie,’’ Donald said.
Melania dabbed.
``What other supermodel would do this?’’ Donald said out loud, humorously. ``I ask you. What other supermodel would do this?’’
A short while later, after Melania had wandered off, one of Donald’s ex’s put in an appearance. It wasn’t Kara, Irene, Rowanne, Sandra, Kylie, Celina, Marla, or any of the others. Rather, it was his shrewish-looking and formidable first wife, Ivana. At one point, she stood right behind him. He was sitting with a plate of food, not touching it, scowling, their history together having been long and very ugly toward the end. A tablemate leaned in his direction and whispered, ``I’ve been married for 15 years, and that’s why I’ve never gotten divorced: I’d never want to run into my ex- at a party like this.’’ Donald’s scowl deepened into a grimace, and he said, ``No, there’s nothing fun about it. It makes me extremely uncomfortable.’’
Eventually, Ivana marched off, and Melania quietly returned from making grown men weep at the buffet line. She sat next to Donald. He pointed out some faces in the crowd, and she touched the skin on his hand. Soon, he was all smiles again and big laughter, with Melania by his side, just going with the flow and doing her best to give him the kind of peace that not even his billions could buy.
-- end --