Little known facts about Melania Trump

Having devoted most of the pandemic years to reading about coronavirus and the politics surrounding it, I fell behind in my usual perusal of periodicals.

This explains why the article about Melania Trump that I reference below comes from the November 2020 issue of Tatler, the UK’s oldest society publication.

‘What’s her deal?’ by Ben Judah, a British author and journalist with a deep knowledge of world affairs, runs from pages 90 through 97. Mrs Trump also willingly answered questions via email.

It also includes modelling photos of a teenage and twenty-something Melania, including a dramatic Warholesque ad for Camel cigarettes from 1997 (page 94). The colourful advert was painted on the sides of two buildings at the corner of 6th Avenue and 42nd Street. On one building is painted the brand name in its original font and on the other is Melania sitting against a dark background, holding a lit Camel in one hand and a martini in the other. At eight and a half storeys high, it was huge — or should I say ‘yuge’? Above her sultry image are the words: ‘WORTH SMOKING FOR’.

One thing that has puzzled me about the former first lady are her eyes, the windows into the soul. They were not always the narrow ones we know from her time with Donald Trump. In fact, in her early years, including in the Camel advert, they were very much open and beautiful. They were her best asset. I wonder if she had ‘work done’, as it were. She should have left them alone.

Summaries and quotes from Ben Judah’s article follow, emphases mine.

Early years

By all accounts, Melanija Knavs spent a happy childhood with her parents and sister Ines in Sevnica, Yugoslavia, before it became part of Slovenia.

Page 92 has a photo of Melanija and Ines at a birthday party with seven other children. The kitchen table has a lovely damask tablecloth in a chequerboard weave and an elaborate two-layer cake with candles, rather surprising for the Communist era. Someone had Party connections.

We learn that:

Melania’s parents stood out in the small railway town of Sevnica, where she was brought up. ‘I grew up with a beautiful family and had a wonderful childhood’, Melania says. ‘My mother and father taught us the importance of education, hard work and family,’ Her father, Viktor (who bears a striking resemblance to Donald Trump), was a car mechanic and chauffeur at a time when such small-time entrepreneurs were treated with scorn. Her mother, Amalija, worked as a pattern-maker at the Jutranjka clothes factory and had a passion for design; friends would call her ‘Jackie Kennedy’ because she wore heels on the production line. She spent hours making clothes for Melania and her older sister, Ines, ensuring they were always immaculately turned out. Melania says it was while she was growing up that she first heard of this ‘amazing place called America’.

Her childhood friend Petra Sedej participated in Ben Judah’s article:

Petra Sedej now works in marketing for the Slovenian traffic agency — the kind of destiny that was more likely for Melania than the one she ended up securing. Back then, Sedej was one of the future First Lady’s closest friends; they’d gone to school together. ‘She was a quiet person,’ she recalls. ‘In all the pictures and on TV today, she’s a very serious person. But she can also make jokes and be funny.’ Presentation was very important to Melania — and to her family. No matter what was happening, Sedej remembers her friend always looked perfect, ‘with mascara and everything’ …

‘Her mother is the secret to understanding her,’ says Sedej. Melania’s parents did well: well enough to have a small flat in Ljubljana for Melania to live in when she moved to the city to study.

Sedej lived nearby:

On the bus to school, they would talk about boys, and after class Sedej would go round to Melania’s flat in the suburbs and the two would flick through the faraway world of Vogue together. We were not party girls and we did not go out very often,’ Sedej says, recalling that Melania was committed to her studies at the time. Yet she also loved modelling and hired a photographer to put a portfolio together for her. As Sedej notes, ‘This is not something you’d do for a hobby.’ Though they never talked about it, Sedej sensed Melania wanted to leave the country. ‘When you are friends with someone for a long time, you just feel there is something more. We both wanted to do something more with our lives.’

The photographer

It is unclear whether the photographer Melania first met was the one who put the portfolio together for her.

That said:

It all began in January 1987, in Ljubljana, back in what was then still Yugoslavia. Melanija Knavs was 16. The photographer Stane Jerko was leaving early from a fashion show at the city’s Festival Hall. ‘By the staircase at the entrance, I saw this girl,’ he says. Melania was leaning on a fence. It looked as if she w[ere] waiting for someone. ‘She was tall, slim, with long hair,’ says Jerko. ‘I told her who I was, what I did, and why I would photograph her.’ In the pre-Instagram age, this was how you found new faces.

Behind the facade of communism, the city was fizzing with punk, fashion and nationalist pampleteers. Rebellion was in the air. Melania, a student at a specialist high school for industrial design and photography, took a chance. Her plan had been to study to be an architect, but now she was going to pose for a shoot. Already her most defining features were visible to Jerko: she had a face that gave nothing away. ‘She was shy and reserved at first,’ he says. ‘Not wanting to open herself up.’ But she quickly got into it and began asking questions: ‘Why are you constantly moving the light? Is this how I should be holding myself?’

‘Still, I didn’t have the impression she was ambitions,’ says Jerko. ‘She was timid.’ The pictures he developed looked great. ‘So I called her back to do a shoot for the Slovenian magazine Model.’ Her career had launched, though Jerko noticed there was still something closed off about her.

Two of those photos are on page 90 and 93, showing an open-eyed, budding young woman.

The boyfriend

Amazingly, Ben Judah managed to track down one of Melania’s boyfriends (page 93):

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down; months later, Yugoslavia began to implode. In 1990, Slovenia voted for independence and the following year, the Yugoslav forces withdrew after a 10-day war. Everyday life was filled with talk of this drama. Slovenian businessman Jure Zorcic was one of Melania’s boyfriends, having met her when they were in their early 20s. ‘She was very classy, very peaceful, very focused,’ remembers Zorcic. ‘Very close to her parents and sister.’ She was always carefully dressed, which, given the state of the Yugoslavian economy at the time, he recalls, was nothing short of ‘a miracle’. It was a moment in Eastern Europe, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, when anything felt possible.

‘We talked about everything,’ says Zorcic. ‘About Yugoslavia, our future.’ Together, they whiled away the summer with friends in the beach towns of Croatia. ‘We would laugh a lot and have fun.’ Melania would tell him how ‘she wanted to go abroad and catch the fashion world of Italy and France as a model’. But it still came as a shock when she actually left; their relationship was over. As central Europe began to make the jump from communism towards Nato and the EU, Melania made her own jump to Milan and then to New York. She had her sights on America and all her life experiences had led her to one conclusion: ‘I can tell you that I believe in free market capitalism,’ she says.

Milan and the name change

Melania changed her name in Milan (page 94):

When Melania first landed in Milan in 1992, she signed with an agency and first began using a different name — ditching the Slavic Melanija Knavs for the more Germanic Melania Knaus. (The extra ‘s’s came later: Melania Knauss, as if to stress an Western lineage.) And in what now looks like a piece of visionary surrealism, one of her biggest shoots was for a Slovenian advert in which she played the first female US president, complete with mock Air Force One and motorcade.

From Paris to New York

Melania was getting older, which hindered in some ways but helped in others:

She moved to Paris in her mid-20s. Here, she was scouted again, this time by Paolo Zampolli, a New York-based Italian playboy and model manager, who urged her to move to Manhattan, where he would put her up and represent her. She took the gamble, arriving in New York in 1996 to live in a shared apartment off Gramercy Park that Zampolli arranged. The bedroom — if you could even call it that — was behind a Styrofoam wall, with just enough space for a futuon. It was very much a gamble: at 26, she was already much older than the average aspiring model hoping to make it in one of Manhattan’s cruellest industries. But the word most used about Melania from her fashion days is ‘determined’.

Her age helped her to get the aforementioned Camel advert (pp 94-95):

Too old to hit the big time in conventional campaigns, Melania had her lucky break as a cigarette model, thanks to a law that barred younger models from promoting tobacco. In the summer of 1997, her face towered over Times Square for Camel Lights. ‘I wouldn’t say she reached supermodel height,’ says Irene Marie, who later represented Melania. ‘She wasn’t the most expensive model, but she was a high-end model.’ In Melania, Marie saw a refined and composed young woman. ‘What I particularly liked about Melania was that she wasn’t part of the nightlife scene, where all you had to do was open different magazines to see whech clubs your models were at. It was the era of cocaine, drugs and clubs, and you had to watch out for your models.’ Melania, though, had a reputation for being serious and focused … 

Meeting Donald Trump

It was Paolo Zampolli who introduced her to her future husband (page 95):

… in 1998, he introduced her to his friend and fellow staple of the New York gossip columns, Donald Trump, who had recently separated from his second wife, Marla Maples. Melania met Trump at the Kit Kat Club during New York Fashion Week. Trump later claimed he had been there to see someone else: ‘They said, “Look, there’s so-and-so.” I said, “Forget about her. Who is the one on the left?” It was Melania’ …

Trump and Melania married in Palm Beach in 2005, surrounded by 10,000 flowers. It was Trump’s third wedding. Bill and Hillary Clinton were guests, as was Benjamin Netanyahu. Almost nobody from Melania’s life before Trump was there — it was as though she didn’t have a past.

Frankly, that’s what happens when one emigrates and marries. The spouse’s friends and family become one’s primary relationships. How could they not?

Melania gave birth the following year:

Barron was born in 2006, around the time Trump allegedly had affairs with the pornographic actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal: both would come back to haunt him.

Melania’s mysterious delay in moving to the White House

In 2017, it took five months for Melania to move from Trump Tower in Manhattan to the White House.

In Mary Jordan’s unauthorised biography, The Art of Her Deal, where you can see an early modelling photo of Melania, it is asserted that the First Lady was incensed by the womanising stories from the past that came out on the 2016 campaign trail (page 94):

According to Jordan, Melania leveraged the infamous ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ tape and the Stormy Daniels affair to force a renegotiation of her prenup, securing a better financial deal for herself and her son, Barron. Jordan claims it was because of these negotiations, rather than Brron’s schooling, that she delayed moving to Washington and stayed in New York after the election. ‘I was worried about Trump,’ says one source, ‘and so were a lot of folks in the White House, as she makes him less unbalanced.’ It took her until five months after the inauguration to finally relocate, better prenup in hand, to Washington — a move worthy of her husband’s book The Art of the Deal. Popular as it is, the myth that Melania is a prisoner in the White House misses the real power she has. And yet for all the intensity of interest in her, Melania is still mostly an enigma — Stephanie Grisham, her chief of staff, discmissed Jordan’s biography as ‘fiction’.

Trouble with Ivanka

Melania allegedly found a rival in Trump’s daughter, Ivanka:

… ‘The Portrait’ is how Ivanka is said to refer to Melania, in light of how little her stepmother speaks.

There is supposedly little love lost between them. Melania’s former friend and adviser Stephanie Winston Wolkoff describes Ivana’s dogged attempts to sideline her stepmother in her new memoir Melania and Me, alleging that the competition between the two Trump women became so fierce that Melania and Wolkoff launched ‘Operation Block Ivanka’ to stop her dominating footage of the searing-in. ‘Ivanka was relentless and determined to be the First Daughter and to usurp office space out from under Melania.’ Wolkoff writes.

Conclusion

It is a shame that no fashion magazine ever profiled the First Lady. It seems that Tatler did so only as a last hurrah in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Melania Trump’s life story is a fascinating one, particularly given her transformation from a little girl growing up in a Communist nation to becoming First Lady of the United States. It is a truly remarkable journey.

On page 97, Ben Judah says:

It has been 24 years since Melania first arrived in New York, on the cusp of what has been one of the most astonishing American success stories ever told: the Slovenian model and the gossip-pages-obsessed mogul who ended up in the Whte House. And it’s easy to forget that from Melania’s perspective she is the real winner here. How many people have come from somewhere so small and yet made it so big? Very few.

The former First Lady told Tatler via email (page 92):

Every step in my life had a different turning point. Growing up in Slovenia, living in both Milan and Paris at a young age, then moving to the United States and living in New York City in my 20s — all of that has led to my serving our great nation as First Lady.

Melania Trump might well be in the spotlight once again for the 2024 elections. Whether she is or not, at least we know a bit more about her. It is a pity that the universally anti-Trump media ignored her and her life’s achievements when they could have published them as an inspiration for young women around the world.

Moral of the story: never let go of your dreams.