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.”
