‘ MELANIA WAS UNBREAKABLE, UNSHAKEABLE’
There’s a group of Upper East Side women who are powered 24/7 by the repressed rage they feel for their husbands. All the energy they need to socialise, spend and spin seven times a week at Soulcycle comes from that simmering fury – a fury they stoke with furtive glances across the breakfast table every morning. God knows they haven’t shared a bedroom in years.
When I met Melania in 2013, she wasn’t yet a fully paid-up member of the Angry Wives’ Club. We were at a book launch at Manhattan’s Carlyle Hotel. At 43, Melania was by far the most beautiful woman in the room, and when she shook my hand it felt like a statement of intent rather than a greeting. She was clear on the part she was to play – part trophy, part Stepford wife – and knew she played it faultlessly, nodding and smiling at precisely the right times. But this daughter of a car dealership manager from communist Yugoslavia had extra steel.
Like Trump, she wasn’t drinking (according to friends from her modelling days, Melania has never touched alcohol, tobacco or drugs), she smelled good (expensive) and spoke in the hushed, husky tones of someone used to having men lean in to catch every word. This woman, I thought as we exchanged a few niceties, is unbreakable, unshakeable.
Five years on, those qualities have been sorely tested. The White House denies Michael Wolff ’s assertion that Melania ‘was in tears’ when Trump’s win was announced (‘and not of joy’), but I can believe it. She seemed content with the life she’d built for herself. It may have been a gilded prison, but it was a private one that allowed her to devote her days to her son and sister-cumbestie, artist Ines Knauss (Melania has always kept her friendship circle small). There was little pretence involved in her marriage, and no one was interested in finding out ‘who the real Melania is’ – a question she has almost certainly never asked herself.
Back then she wasn’t required to learn how to curtsey to the Queen. She married a billionaire, not the future President, and being paraded around to be admired is very different to being paraded around to be criticised, which is how she must feel now (particularly on her visit to hostile Britain). That is the only possible explanation for ‘Jacketgate’. Because when Melania chose to wear that jacket last month with the words ‘I really don’t care, do u?’ on the back during a visit to immigrant children detained in Texas, she was making it clear that she wasn’t now just an angry wife but an angry First Lady. And there seemed a threat implicit: ‘I will be poised and professional, but keep poking and that rage may not stay suppressed much longer.’