The elusive, reclusive Melania Trump
Sightings of the first lady a rare thing amid reports she is practically a shut-in
The paparazzi no longer stake her out at her son’s private school or search for her on the streets surrounding the black tower that her husband, the president of the United States, named for himself.
Like legions of New Yorkers who hibernate in their apartments, Melania Trump is a virtual shut-in, her refuge 58 storeys above Manhattan’s hoi polloi and laden with enough gold to embarrass a Saudi prince.
“She’s the great white whale,” said Miles Diggs, a paparazzo, as he and his partner hunted celebrities in Soho on a recent afternoon in a Chevy Suburban equipped with cameras and a laptop. They were searching for the actress Emma Watson, who, unlike Melania Trump, they were confident they could find.
“When it comes to getting people, I don’t miss,” Diggs said. “But Melania has just been so elusive.”
Two months after her husband’s swearing-in, the new first lady of the United States approaches her role with a discernible reticence, her paucity of public appearances — each defined by tight smiles and spare verbiage — overshadowed by a vanishing act that stretches days on end.
Yet by retreating to her midtown triplex, where she is said to tend to Barron, the Trumps’ 11-year-old son, the first lady guarantees herself even more attention. An ever-clamorous chorus of gossipmongers, pundits, historians and even body-language experts dissect her every move, fashion choice and facial expression to unearth a true State of Melania. Good luck with that. Melania Trump is a Rorschach test in Louboutins, inspiring praise from those who see in her inscrutable gaze an elegant, dutiful mother charting a new role for the first lady; compassion from those imagining her as the president’s unhappy captive, her penthouse-turned-prison costing taxpayers ungodly sums to secure; and contempt from those rendering her as her husband’s chief enabler, abiding his sexist and anti-immigrant bluster, and echoing at one time his baseless questioning of president Barack Obama’s citizenship.
“Melania Trump is as ugly on the inside as she is pretty on the outside” was how Dan Savage, the sex columnist and gay activist, put it in a recent podcast.
He flayed “folks on the left” who “view her as some sort of sympathetic figure — the pretty princess in the tower locked up by the orange ogre with the bad comb-over.”
The hashtag #FreeMelania is now a pillar of Twitter-speak, while questions about the Trumps’ marriage inspire headlines such as “Melania’s Struggle,” a Us Weekly yarn that claimed that the 46-year-old first lady is “secretly miserable.” The arti- cle included an interview with a “family friend” who later acknowledged that his insights may be compromised by not having spoken to her in several years. Her handful of appearances have yielded few clues, her smile fixed whether attending her husband’s address to Congress, greeting the Netanyahus at the White House, or popping up at a Republican fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend while the president remained in Washington.
Among the rare moments the first lady has spoken publicly was while reading Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! this month to children at a Manhattan hospital, her Slovenian accent as obvious as her large diamond ring and sky-high stilettos.
“You’ll be as famous as famous can be, with the whole world watching you win on TV,” she recited from the book.
She smiled and seemed receptive when Tara McKelvey, a BBC reporter, approached with a question. “But the aides came in and swooped her away and had her pose for a picture,” McKelvey said. “She wanted to answer. She was trying to answer.”
The first lady has yet to hire her own spokesperson.
Louise Sunshine, a former Trump Organization executive, has spoken with the first lady a half-dozen times since the election. She described her as “circumspect” and “very composed and very reserved” as she absorbs her new duties and learns to deal with the president and his advisers, a circle Sunshine compared to a “den of wolves.”
“There are a lot of forces there competing for attention,” Sunshine said. “She’s trying to assess the best way and the best place for her as the first lady and as the wife of a very impulsive, compulsive, erratic president. Let’s say erratic, accomplished president.”
An exception to that rule occurred a month after the inauguration, when the president and the first lady shared a stage. She introduced her husband at a Florida rally, removing her sunglasses as she stepped to the microphone and, apropos of nothing, defended herself against unspecified attacks.
“I will always stay true to myself and be truthful to you,” the first lady promised, “no matter what the opposition is saying about me.”
Over the years, Melania Trump’s Facebook posts have suggested solitude. Her photos are often devoid of people and shot through glass, either a car window or from her apartment, as if her perspective is from inside a luxurious fishbowl.
Downtown, as they hunted for celebrities in Soho in mid-March, Diggs and his partner, Cesar Pena, tallied up a day’s work: They shot Malia Obama as she walked into a Tribeca office building, Robert De Niro as he left a restaurant and the actor Michael Colter as he bought odor-eaters at a Duane Reed drugstore.
They stopped trying to get the first lady last fall after striking out at Barron’s school. But, in their self-interested view, they think that she could help endear herself to the public with an unscripted foray every now and then.
“A photo of her coming out of Barneys with a bunch of shopping bags,” Diggs said, envisioning the headline: “First Lady Shops Till She Drops.”
“Can you imagine how that would sell?” he asked.
Yet it’s uncertain whether Melania Trump wants anyone to see beyond her practised smile.
On the night before the swearingin, she joined her husband at the Lincoln Memorial for a concert. In a backstage tent beforehand, the president-elect bantered for 20 minutes with his advisers, a campaign volunteer who had travelled to Washington for the festivities, and a reporter.
All the while, the first lady sat in a folding chair alongside her husband, as still and silent as a mannequin, as if oblivious to the chatter around her.
“The aides came in and swooped her away and had her pose for a picture . . . She wanted to answer. She was trying to answer.” TARA MCKELVEY BBC REPORTER