Sweet Southern belle comes up trumps

'IN THIS PLAZA, I thee wed,' or some such tacky variation of the standard text, was what people expected to hear from Donald Trump when he finally married the actress-model Marla Maples in the Grand Ballroom of his New York Plaza hotel last night. (That's the Central Park hotel once managed by his former wife, Ivana, who spent 18 hours a day dutifully renovating it in the last years of her marriage to the symbol of Eighties excess).

One thousand five hundred guests, including Liza Minnelli and the outgoing mayor of New York, David Dinkins were invited to the climax of the tumultuous affair that began four years ago on the Colorado ski slopes when Marla told Ivana she loved the middle-aged Mr Trump.

The intervening years have been filled with bust-ups, bankruptcies, big buildings, casinos and the birth of Tiffany, their daughter. In the final moments before the knot was to be tied, the Southern belle agreed, joyously, to be called Marla Maples Trump. 'It's such an honour. It's an honour for him and an honour to me,' gushed the barely 30 Georgian who, in trying to shake off Mr Trump's description of her as 'one of the great bodies of the world,' would like to be known for 'a talent, for a sweetness, for a belief in God'.

Unabashed by the rocky road to the altar - perhaps because of it - the bride used Ivana's designer, Carolina Herrera, to make her white wedding dress, and Mr Trump, 47, leveraged, but not necessarily paid for, a dollars 2m (pounds 1.3m), 326-diamond tiara to crown his wife's locks. At the wedding rehearsal the tiny Trumpette was decked out in a short-sleeved custom-made gown with inlaid pearls. Although no one had a preview, there were said to be 19 interlocking butter-cream cakes standing five-tiers tall topped with roses. The couple spent dollars 66,800 on a caviar appetiser.

Television stations were treating the occasion like a royal event, vying for pole positions not just for the news but also for tittle-tattle on the tabloid news shows, which have names like Inside Edition, A Current Affair and Hard Copy. The honeymooners can be assured of maximum in-depth coverage over the frivolous holiday season which, of course, is what they really want for Christmas.

A Trump empire press release gave its own spin: 'The wedding of the year . . . Mr Trump takes another gamble.'

(Photograph omitted)