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When the 2016 Miss USA pageant—which NBC had “dumped” due to Donald Trump’s campaign comments about Mexico sending us its “rapists,” causing the candidate to sell off his ownership along with MissUniverse—was held this past June, eventual first runner-up Chelsea Hardin was asked whom she’d support.
“It doesn’t matter what gender,” Miss Hawaii hedged, “we need a president to push for what is right and what America really needs.” Namely, no “fat” beauty queens.
Things really got heavy in this unprecedented election season when a pageant winner from two decades ago took center stage at the first presidential debate: “He loves beauty contests,” Democrat Hillary Clinton closed her comments about GOPponent Trump, “supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman ‘Miss Piggy.’ Then he called her ‘Miss Housekeeping’ because she was Latina.”
As The Donald made faces reminiscent of Chevy Chase mocking interviewees on Saturday Night Live in the ’70s and interrupted: “Where did you find her?” Clinton continued: “Donald, she has a name. Her name is Alicia Machado” …
… “and she has become a U.S. citizen and you can bet she’s going to vote this November.” She already has our vote!
“For 20 years,” summarized the New York Times, “Alicia Machado has lived with the agony of what Donald J. Trump did to her after she won the Miss Universe title: “Shame her, over and over, for gaining weight. On Monday night, Hillary Clinton turned Ms. Machado’s pain into a potent political weapon on the biggest stage.”
“Her name is becoming ubiquitous,” the Times followed up. “In 48 hours, Ms. Machado has been written about in more than 150 print articles, referred to on TV more than 6,023 times and mentioned on Twitter nearly 200,000 times.” Mostly by Donald J. Trump:
Yet the mud-slinging didn’t stick to her …
… as much as to him. Senator Elizabeth Warren posted a mocking response after “the Republican nominee called Machado ‘disgusting’ and a ‘con’ and raised questions about her past in a series of tweets fired off between 3 a.m. and 5:30 a.m.” Friday morning.
Earlier … in the campaign … Warren had hinted that Trump’s obsession with hand size—repeatedly referring to Sen. Rubio of Florida as “Little Marco”—might indicate insecurity in another area:
Indeed, at last week’s debate, Hillary’s hands seemed to dwarf Donald’s digits.
So let’s put ourfinger on where all this started.
“Donald Trump insisted that he’s always had a great relationship with women,” Conan O’Brien presciently quipped nearly 14 months ago. “Trump said, ‘I believe a woman can be anything she wants to be, whether that’s Miss USA or Miss Universe.’” Holy Guacamole, that’s Miss Venezuela—full name Yoseph Alicia Machado Fajardo—in native costume for the Parade of Nations opening the 1996 Miss Universe pageant!
Looking not that much different than she does today, the 18-year-old greeted the Las Vegas crowd …
… shades of her sash•aying in the desert at 39 (above right)—though she had a bit of trouble back then adjusting the ribbon reflecting her reign:
But once the crown was firmly atop her head, the surprise winner was ready to celebrate!
In truth, the outcome was never in doubt: Sleuth has gone back to check the scoring … and Alicia aced allaspects of the competition—tallying scores in the stratosphere for the personality, swimsuit and evening gown portions (the highest in each) while charming host Bob Goen of Entertainment Tonight fame.
Machado scored particularly high with sportscaster Jim Nantz—lead announcer of PGA Golf and all major sports—but her biggest booster was judge Teri Ann Linn, a former Miss Hawaii and fourth runner-up to Miss USA in 1981 …
… who rated Alicia an astounding 9.99 out of 10 in each segment! At Punahou High School in Honolulu, Linn graduated alongside Barack Obama in 1979—she’s attending the 25th reunion of their class above right!
It was type-casting when Teri Ann snagged a role as a beauty contestant on Magnum, P.I. (above left) and did her only nude scene (above right) as a wanton waitress in the heist movie Pure Danger in 1996—mere months before she deemed Machado so deserving!
And deserving she was … considering the competition she conquered. Including Alicia, there were no less than five contestants who went on to lasting fame (even stardom) as actresses in their home countries—perhaps the most ever to emerge from the global event!
Best known here was Miss USA and future face of Doritos, Ali Landry, who finished sixth: “I grew up in a little town called Breaux Bridge,” Ali announced afterwards. “In high school, my girlfriends and I went skinny-dipping in a pond near one of their houses. In the summer in Louisiana, getting into cool water with no clothes on feels so good.” Even with clothes, Miss USA sheerly looked as good!
Posing with Ali prior to the 1996 Universe finals (below left) was Miss Mexico, Vanessa Guzmán, who finished one spot ahead of her, in fifth place. Formerly Miss Chihuahua, Vanessa was—in Trumpspeak—no “dog”—and more than held her own in becoming one of Mexico’s top telenovela soap stars.
Miss Italy 1995, Anna Valle, also emerged from the ’96 Universe pageant pool to become a top actress … then emerged from a pool with a top that captivates her country today.
Alas, Miss Belgium 1996 Véronique De Kock didn’t make the final 15, much to the chagrin of the beauty pageant forum, Missosology Info, which named her the No. 2 Miss Belgium beauty of all time: “If they had placed her,” they predicted, “she would have swept the floor with all of them! She was spectacular.” Still is!
Yet despite this “quality” quintet, the most famous participant in the pageant, and the first to congratulate Alicia Machado on her victory, was—irony of ironies—the telecast’s co-host, Marla Maples Trump! (below left). Besides being Donald’s second wife, Marla’s qualifications for the job included having been chosen Miss HawaiianTropic International in Panama City, Florida in 1985.
A distant cousin of T.J. Hooker hottie Heather Locklear, former Miss Resaca Beach Marla had been picked by Hawaiian Tropic founder Ron Rice due to “her ability to fill a swimsuit” (looking in the pink, below).
Donald Trump “would come to our pageants because he enjoyed being around the girls,” Rice recalls. “He was kind of a regular with us.” That same year (1985) he bought Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach estate where he’d throw lavish, lusty parties: “He’d call me up and say, ‘I’m having a big party. Bring your girls in,” the Hawaiian Tropic honcho reveals. “So I’d bring in a bunch of models.” One of whom was Marla Maples.
Like the Miss Venezuela she’d later crown Miss Universe, Marla knew how to ‘eat a weiner’ with relish …
… and was soon installed as the married mogul’s mistress. Trump was “really proud of her,” confides a close friend. “He loves leggy, busty blondes {like Alicia?—perhaps the source of his scorn}. He’s a meat and potatoes kind of guy. He doesn’t like any variations on the theme—he likes the theme.”
“She was the local girl who made good,” reporter Steve Johnson wrote, “the Georgia Peach who stole one from the Big Apple. But before she was Mrs. Donald Trump, Marla Maples was The Donald’s mistress, a blond beauty who had a tawdry affair, sometimes staying in a hotel room a floor below Trump and his wife to make an assignation easier. When Ivana Trump finally discovered what was happening, Maples was named as the other woman in their divorce.”
And this is the guy who's now vowing to make the Clintons' marriage a "major issue" in the second of the three debates?!
And speaking of three …
“Ivana apparently knew nothing of Marla,” Vanity Fair reported back in November 1990 {so it isn’t a “political attack”}. ‘It’s true, the wife is always the last to know,’ said a Trump Plaza employee who reported that Trump had been keeping Marla there off and on {indeed!} for two years. Although columnist Liz Smith says she had been asking Trump for nine months to comment on the other woman in his life, as well as the state of his marriage, he would never respond. Events came to a head last Christmas.”
Even the right-wing Daily Mail admits: “Ivana Trump learned of The Donald’s affair with Maples when she picked up a phone in a luxury hotel in Aspen, Colorado in December 1989 and heard ‘a male voice on the call noting, in the crudest terms, that ‘Marla’ was ‘sexy.’ Two days later, the women ran into each other at a slope-side restaurant. ‘You, bitch, leave my husband alone!’ Ivana was quoted telling her, in People magazine. The Donald tried escaping down the mountain on skis but onlookers told the magazine they saw Ivana, an excellent skier {who’d falsely claimed to have been “an alternate” on the 1972 Czech Winter Olympic team} ski backwards down the slope shaking her finger in her husband’s face.”
The divorce cost Donald a reported $25 million {probably a tax write-off} and soon Marla was quoted as telling confidantes she was enjoying “The Best Sex I’ve Ever Had” (below left). We’re pretty confident the confidante was Trump himself—since Marla has always “refused to confirm the New York Post headline” and the mogul was known to call the papers posing “as his own media spokesman named John Miller” at that time.
Though Post Page Six shill Richard Johnson brought it up again last year when Trump decided to run, asking former Penthouse Pet Sandi Korn—who changed her name to Sandra Taylor on Donald’s advice when they “went on three dates decades ago” days before his divorce from Ivana—if Trump was a good lover. “Omigosh, he was great!” she enthused in August 2015. “I think he’d be a terrific president.” And cunning linguist?
“We ended up in my place,” Sandra says of their 1991 erotic encounter. “He was very sweet. I was sad when it ended.” This X-rated romp then-Sandi posed for with a Donald doppelgänger gives a taste of what went down.
And before he and Marla went down the aisle the next year, Trump was back on the phone with the New York Post—telling gossip guru Cindy Adams that he’d dumped Maples for Italian model Carla Bruni: “All I can say about this is, this is the new one.”
Which wasn’t new to saucy Cindy, now 86—who posed provocatively for Bettie Page’s favorite fetish fotog Irving Klaw in the early ’50s and even signed a shot from those sessions for Sleuth! {Klaw's "CH" notation stands for Cindy Heller, her maiden name.}
“Considering that we all knew he and Marla were playing games other than Nintendo long before Ivana found out,” Adams’ article assured us, “considering we all knew that he and this Carla Bruni were into Monopoly longbefore Marla found out, was the Marla breakup over the Carla touchdown?” Cindy asked the real estate romeo.
“It’s not that Marla ‘found out’ anything” about Bruni and him, Donald told her. It was that “Marla was becoming too obsessive … it was becoming too much.”
Which, apparently, was too much for Carla: “Trump is obviously a lunatic,” the supermodel steamed. “It’s so untrue and I’m deeply embarrassed by it all. I’ve only ever met him once, about a year ago, at a big charity party in New York. And I haven’t seen him since, of that I am sure.”
Which sure didn’t stop Donald from going on the Stern Show just before Bruni wed French president NicolasSarkozy and cutting her down to size: “Very flat-chested, not your kind of woman, Howard,” Trump informed the horny host. Asked directly if he’d ‘had’ her, Trump refused to answer, but hinted: “As a great diplomat for his country, Howard, let me just say no comment. I don’t want to be criticizing the first lady of France.”
Then he did: “There are better by large margins,” the future candidate continued. When Stern asked why he would ever stop ‘banging’ Bruni, Donald declared: “You stop when you meet someone better”—prompting Howard to inquire: “Was she bad in bed?” Boasted the billionaire: “I know her well, but I can’t comment on that ’cause I want to have good relations with the wonderful country of France.”
Causing Stern to interject, “She probably laid there like a fish.”
“I can’t comment,” The Donald demurred.
While Wonkette blog summarized Trump’s assessment of Bruni as “Bad hooters, no boners,” just today comes word from London’s Daily Mail of a new book by one of the former French president’s top advisors, Patrick Buisson, that claims “Sarkozy bragged about his wife Carla Bruni’s impressive cleavage.”
And the Daily Telegraph confirms: “He ecstatically praised her breasts during a cabinet meeting and invited ministers to do likewise. Many voters were put off by what they saw as ‘phallic triumphalism … exulting in the power of having a trophy wife on his arm.’” As the Mail sums up: “Mr. Buisson brands the Sarkozy-Bruni marriage as immature, undignified and infantile.” Sound familiar?
“Marla is a good girl, and I had a good marriage with her, but it’s just that I get fuckin’ bored,” Trump told highly respected fashion fixture Michael Gross in an interview for his book My Generation. “One of those little things.” Though Marla’s big things were still on Donald’s mind when he analyzed their split after less than 4 years:
And speaking of ‘little things,’ the mogul couldn’t contain himself when speaking of their infant daughter Tiffany, born two months before he and Marla married in Dec. 1993. “It may be the grossest thing Donald Trump has ever said,” headlined Hollywood Life in April 2016, “because the GOP presidential candidate once gushed over Tiffany Trump’s breasts—when she was only a baby! The Daily Show found this awkward clip.”
“When asked how Tiffany looked like her parents” on Lifestyles of the Rich Famous in 1994, “Donald’s response was stomach churning: ‘I think she’s got a lot of Marla. She’s got Marla’s legs. We don’t know whether or not she’s got this part yet,’ he said, making a gesture over his chest, ‘but time will tell.’”
Which caused Daily Show host Trevor Noah to tell his audience: “We know for sure there’s no female too small for Trump to reduce to her body parts. To him, every woman is just a pair of legs connected to a pair of breasts.” While Noah acknowledged “that this evidence wouldn’t change the mind of a Trump voter” during the campaign, he added: “The next time you’re about to hand him your baby, maybe reconsider.”
And maybe consider this: As he told Cindy Adams while discussing Marla vs. Carla a quarter century ago, “Nobody knew these {women’s} names until they ended up in the headlines with me. I make stars of everyone. I’m a P.T. Barnum.”
Barnum being the infamous impresario of the 1800s credited with coining the phrase, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Stay tuned for “Alicia Machado, Part 2: The Shaming” …
