Introduction
My first encounter with Bunny Mellon was in the 1950s; she was the mother of a school friend. At the time Mrs. Mellon was not yet famous, as she would later become, for her art and book collections, for her gardens and homes, for her uncanny ability to stage a social or political extravaganza yet remain out of the spotlight. Even so, she did make an impression. After all, how many other mothers invited their daughter’s classmates to line their driveway and wave when the queen of England rolled in for tea? Over the years I remained friends with her daughter, Eliza. Then, in the 1990s, Bunny asked me to help her write her memoirs—she knew her life was the stuff of legend, but she also knew she needed assistance—and in the process I began to learn about her in a new way. Our project was interrupted in 1999 when Eliza suffered a terrible accident. She was hit by a truck while crossing a street in Manhattan and suffered a severe brain injury. Left quadriplegic and unable to speak, my school friend would spend her final years sequestered under her mother’s anxious, hopeful watch. During that time, although I was unsuccessful in prompting Bunny to complete her memoirs herself, she and I became close.
As a friend, Bunny was not a legend but a person. Still, as an icon of style, Bunny was one of the last examples of something that doesn’t really exist anymore. She falls into a category, deserved or not, of rich and outrageous American women of the twentieth century, one that included the renowned—such as the tobacco scion Doris Duke and the Baroness Pauline de Rothschild (née Potter)—and the less so, such as “Gertie” Legendre, the big-game hunter and adventurer. Bunny was contained, careful, polite, and grand, but not heedlessly so. Her vast wealth meant that she could afford the great gesture, psychologically as well as monetarily.
However, any comprehensive examination of Bunny Mellon’s life and sorrows—including this book—must also take into account a certain zaniness. I fell on this example in Sag Harbor, New York, far from Bunny’s usual haunts and more than half a century after we first met. To this day there are hundreds of similar tales rolling around like loose pearls on the streets of commerce and high society. This single anecdote mirrors dozens of others in which she, like a Charles Perrault character, transforms herself into a fairy godmother.
One wet and windy winter day in 1995, Bunny, then in her eighties, headed to the shop of the antiques dealer J. Garvin Mecking on East Eleventh Street. There she was waited on by the antiquarian Paris Fields, who was minding the store.
“It was raining and snowing,” Fields told me. “A woman came into the shop, soaked, running with water. She said she was waiting to meet a friend. I helped her take off her coat and shoes. I thought she was a homeless person until I saw that her raincoat was lined with sable. My mother once said, ‘No one must know that your coat is lined with mink.’
“I said to my visitor, ‘I see your coat is lined with sable!’ and I asked her name.
“‘Call me Bunny,’ she said.
“‘I can’t call you Bunny,’ I protested to the elderly woman.
“‘Why not? Everybody else does.’
“She picked out a few things to buy, and then announced, ‘I have no money.’
“And so I gave her a cup.
“She asked, ‘What is the cup for?’
“I jokingly replied that she should go out in the street and find some change.
“She replied, ‘Whenever someone gives you something, you must always give something back.’
“She took two bracelets out of her pocketbook and handed them to me. ‘Try them on,’ she urged. So I put on the red one. Then she insisted that I put on the green one, too.
“‘It’s Christmas,’ I said.
“‘That’s better,’ she said.
“I went into the back of the shop to make some coffee for us. My partner took a look at the bracelets and hissed, ‘Those are real; you can’t keep them.’
“I hadn’t realized they were authentic Schlumberger pieces.
“When I returned with our coffee, Bunny said, ‘He’s having a show in Paris, you know; I’ll fly you over.’
“This ‘show’ was a retrospective of the famous jewelry designer Jean Schlumberger’s work at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. I said, ‘You’ll fly me over?’
“‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘I have a plane; we could fly over and you could see the show; I can have you back here in a day or two.’
“I marveled, ‘You have a plane?’”
“At that moment a gorgeous but very upset blond guy came into the shop,” said Fields, who recognized him as Akko van Acker, a fellow antiques dealer working in Paris.
“I couldn’t find a place to park,” grumbled van Acker, clearly unhappy that Bunny and Fields were apparently becoming fast friends.
Fields replied, “I don’t know who she is! She has no money and only says her name is Bunny.”
“You can’t call her that!” van Acker snapped. “She is Madame Mellon.”
Oh!
“Of course, I gave her back the bracelets,” Fields said, “but a few days later a drawing arrived … seventeenth century, of a garden, in a Lowy frame.”
It was the start of a long epistolary friendship accompanied by a sporadic stream of gifts.
Paris Fields’s story concentrates much of the Bunny I knew as a friend and came to know even better as my subject. The spontaneous kindness, the faith in what she had been taught as a child—you must always give something back—resulting in a gift no one else could give. The naked speed of entry into intimacy, friendship. But also the woman still uncertain of herself, even at eighty-five, who needed to impress. Imperiousness. Excess. Loneliness. A need for solitude that she both rejected and embraced—why was she flying to Paris alone? A display flashed only occasionally, like the sable lining. A breeziness that comes from an utter confidence in what wealth can—and should—provide. The sound of her voice. Robert Isabell, the florist and event planner who was her last great passion, said in astonishment, “You talk like Noël Coward.” The playwright’s brittle, funny chat, the epitome of performance, often came naturally to Bunny; Coward, like Adele and Fred Astaire, was her old friend.
What Fields’s story doesn’t convey is Bunny’s belief in beauty as a practical, working construct, a vehicle to another world, whether it was into a magical private event such as her daughter’s 1961 debut or at JFK’s grave site in Arlington National Cemetery, where, at his widow’s request, she transformed a handsome public tribute into an inward, thoughtful reflection of the man himself, conjured up by an assemblage of worn-looking Cape Cod granite set in a nest of flowering trees.
Rachel Lambert (Lloyd) Mellon is now chiefly famed for her style, for making a religion of domestic understatement, a rigorous simplicity of a very expensive and beautiful kind. Over more than half a century she created a hushed and extremely private domestic universe at eight different houses staffed by as many as 350 employees. Within those creations she wanted to alter mundane reality not just for herself but for those who would share it. Perhaps without ever understanding how or why, her circle of family and intimates felt sheltered within a witty, elegant, and yet seemingly casual world that hadn’t changed much since the eighteenth century.
Bunny Mellon elevated “the decoration of houses”—the phrase Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr., used—to the level of a Zen koan. Was she a person who, in another era, could have run a nation instead of making a fetish of home decor and the history and practice of gardening? How much of her restraint was constraint—and was she herself aware of it? This book explores both her achievements and her limits.
For her time Bunny Mellon did breathtakingly well by all her advantages—intelligence, talent, energy, health, and great wealth—almost always, and intentionally so, without public fanfare. Her husband Paul Mellon’s millions (and her own very substantial inheritance) gave her considerable freedom to do what she wanted. She chose to remain an amateur, but she performed at a professional level in whatever she undertook, and she was honored on two continents for her work. The world-famous architect I. M. Pei once told the award-winning fashion designer Bill Blass that, in his opinion, “she’s the greatest landscape gardener and architect in this country. She knows flowers, gardens, buildings, decoration, and pictures. It [her knowledge] is absolutely complete.”
Best known are her accomplishments as a gardener and the designer of the White House Rose Garden for the Kennedys in 1961; less known are her abilities as the designer of a score of private gardens that remain to be documented. The relationship between Bunny’s design abilities and her book collecting culminated in a celebrated garden library in Virginia, an assemblage that currently holds more than nineteen thousand objects: artworks as well as rare books and incunabula. Because she celebrated intellectual and artistic connections that few others observed at the time that she began collecting, in the late fifties, and because she was able to follow her own omnivorous habit, her holdings extend to botany, natural history, travel, architecture, the decorative arts, and the classics, as well as garden and landscape.
She also had an enormous effect on her second husband’s deservedly famous art collection. She first gravitated to the French Impressionists in the 1950s, finding that the clarity and complications of their take on the natural world mirrored her own. Among the thousand-plus paintings and sculptures the two of them gave to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., are hundreds of Impressionist works, great and small. Bunny also kicked off the Gallery’s acquisition of modern paintings with a private opening dinner in 1973 at the Gallery, where she hung two of her own Rothkos as if to say, “See, these belong here too.” Her second trove of art is a collection of jewels that she donated to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. These impossibly refined works by Jean Schlumberger portray infinitely small and precious aspects of the natural world.
But this biography is meant to be less a catalogue of Bunny Mellon’s collections of treasure (or her wardrobe, sometimes admirable, sometimes perilously close to dowdy) and more of an inquiry into how and why she became the woman she was. Of course I follow the signposts of her parentage and her childhood, her education, marriages, children, scandals (there were two), and the friendships made and frequently lost. Being dropped by Bunny Mellon was like being felled by a velvet-covered brick.
Along with the details of her correspondence with hundreds of people, letters now also housed in the Oak Spring Garden Library in Upperville, Virginia, the best insights into Bunny’s life and emotions are, perhaps, her own, found in her private journals, complete with cross-outs, misspellings, hesitations, and revisions.
Like many celebrities, Bunny was acquainted with or known to countless people who considered her to be a friend or whom she merely met, or who saw her at public events, or who were sparingly granted interviews. The curtain wall fronting the Mellons’ home on East Seventieth Street in Manhattan can stand as a metaphor for their insistence on personal privacy. Paul Mellon, philanthropist and co-heir to one of America’s greatest business fortunes, set down their feelings on the matter when he wrote, “Privacy is the most valuable asset that money can buy.”
Bunny dedicated the second of her four descriptive library catalogues to her husband of fifty-one years. The first honored her grandfather, Arthur Houghton Lowe; the third, her “dear and loyal friend” Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis; and the last, her daughter, Eliza Winn Lloyd Moore. Each name represents a chapter or chapters in Bunny Mellon’s life.
She pushed far past her high school education, armed with a keen and judicious eye, an intense curiosity, and a practicality that had begun with her growing plants from seed when she was eight. Decades later, she would closet herself for hours with John Fowler, the principal decorator of the famous interior design firm Colefax & Fowler, in order to learn exactly how to make a silk-and-satin curtain tassel. It may sound absurd to hear that a woman whose properties were cared for by hundreds of skilled employees could and did do any gardening on her own, but to watch Bunny Mellon shaping a boxwood with her garden shears (or with nail scissors, as I saw her do) was to glimpse her firsthand expertise. Her many bold architectural sketches, dashed off in a letter or on the back of an envelope, light up how design seldom left her mind.
The kind of freehanded spending that would allow Bunny Mellon to give away two Schlumberger bracelets on the spur of the moment was balanced by an intense, almost puritanical desire to engage her own creativity directly, even in the smallest details. It is as if she valued her ability to do things herself as a counterweight to her status as an heiress. In contrast, Bunny once dismissed the discerning eye of the New York philanthropist and eminent collector of French decorative arts Jayne Wrightsman by saying, “Everything she does she’s read how to do it, or had someone tell her how it should be done.”
Bunny Mellon’s long life stretches back to what we call the Gilded Age of America’s youth before World War I or the enactment of a federal income tax law, an era of excess in almost every arena. Yet Bunny would prize simplicity in all fields of design, in the garden and out.
In 1932, when Bunny was a young woman on the brink of her first marriage, Edith Wharton wrote about how Henry James had conjured up the past, summoning his vanished New Yorkers in all their “old follies, old failures,” as well as their “old lovelinesses … a long train of ghosts flung with his enchanter’s wand across the wide stage of the summer night … wavering and indistinct at first … and then, suddenly, by some miracle of shifted lights and accumulated strokes, there they stood before us as they lived, drawn with a million filament-like lines…” that manage to be both sharp and dense. Bunny Mellon deserves such a portrait.
On the eve of her marriage to Paul Mellon in 1948, she saved and marked with the date a poem by Gloria Kommi, “Time Shall Be Ended,” and she kept it all her life. The last lines are:
Did you expect too little or too much?
Now you are wise with flight: all this you know.
1
Becoming Bunny
“I was born 92 years ago in N.Y.C. at the corner of 66th St. & Madison Ave.,” wrote Bunny Mellon about August 9, 1910, her birthday, not forgetting to mention that the address, 777 Madison Avenue, was, even then, “considered an important architectural achievement.” The ten-story red-and-white French Gothic building remains one of the most eye-catching and sought-after residences in the city today, where the antique-jewelry dealer Fred Leighton’s vintage pieces glitter in the curved ground-floor windows. When Bunny began to write about her life, she started with this building where she was born.
“My mother, caught by surprise on her way to East Hampton, went through the unexpected ordeal—at 2 A.M.” It was no doubt seen as a great inconvenience for her mother, having to stop for the birth when she was on her way to the Hamptons. Later, Bunny said she was told that she was born on the kitchen table and that she was nicknamed “Bunny” by her nurse, who said she looked like one. Her birth certificate doesn’t give her weight but does offer the occupation of her father (the business mogul and Renaissance man Gerard B. Lambert) as “architect.” Bunny would follow in those footsteps: her second husband, Paul Mellon, in one of his bursts of light verse, would call her “Building Bunny,” and she herself saw architecture and garden design as her best means of personal expression. (She also apparently inherited her father’s extravagance, along with his inventive practicality.) While she would determinedly remain an “amateur,” her skills and drive would lead her to design not only her own gardens and properties, but also the White House’s Rose and East Gardens and dozens of lovingly detailed private gardens for friends.
Bunny adored handsome, dashing men, starting with her father and ending with Robert Isabell, king of New York’s event planners. The exceptions were her “Grandpa” Lowe and her husband of fifty-one years, Paul Mellon—both good-looking, powerful men, yes, but both less showy than many of her other male friends or companions. Both men also had a keen eye for the absurd and a sense of whimsy, qualities she prized in anyone, friend or lover, male or female.
Gerard Barnes Lambert, born in 1886, never had to worry about money. In his memoir, All Out of Step, published when he was seventy, he describes how he and his five siblings, all born in St. Louis, thought of “the mysterious institution known to us children as ‘the Lambert Estate.’ This, like a horn of plenty, spewed forth the money for every need. I recall no discussions at any time of economies.”
Gerard B. married the nineteen-year-old redhead Rachel Parkhill Lowe, from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in 1908, the year he graduated from Princeton University. The couple took an extended European honeymoon, and on their return to the United States, he headed to the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University for a brief two years. He then fled architecture’s heavy math and engineering requirements and went to New York Law School, another short-lived venture. He enlisted in the military in 1917 (when Bunny was seven), eager to go overseas again, leaving behind both a huge unfinished house in New Jersey and an undercapitalized foray into timber and cotton in Arkansas. As he himself admitted, “Up to this time I had, of course, no business experience whatsoever, nor did I know anything about lumbering or cotton.”
After the war, however, Gerard B. turned out to be very good at making money—once he found someone else to run the Arkansas project. To trim expenses, he moved his wife and children (now including a brother and a sister as well as Bunny) from Princeton, New Jersey, back to his hometown of St. Louis for a year in 1922, where he took the family business, Lambert Pharmacal Company, in hand. He discovered he was an advertising genius, transforming Listerine, a surgical antiseptic—the Lamberts’ solid but lackluster pharmaceutical performer—into a bestselling mouthwash. (Sir Joseph Lister, the British pioneer of antiseptic surgery, had developed an effective but corrosive carbolic; Bunny’s grandfather Jordan Wheat Lambert had earlier bought the use of Lister’s name to use it for his own, milder, disinfectant compound.) In 1921, Gerard B., a Mad Men prototype, created a striking campaign to popularize the then-arcane term “halitosis.” Through his in-house advertising agency of Lambert & Feasley, he pitched his mouthwash sales to single women (and a few wretched men) who were frantic to get married and unable to find a mate, presumably because of bad breath. It was Lambert who coined the phrase “Often a bridesmaid, never a bride.” In just seven years annual profits rose from $115,000 to more than $8 million. Bunny was often called “the Listerine heiress” in print but sailed on past that without much comment; her sister, Lily, on the other hand, was dubbed the “halitosis heiress” by none other than the gossip columnist “Cholly Knickerbocker,” and it rankled.
Although he left Listerine behind in 1928, selling his shares of Lambert Pharmacal, Gerard B.’s luck, judgment, and intuition continued to hold: he sold out of the stock market in early 1929 and suffered no losses. By 1931 he was president of the Gillette Safety Razor Company, and had turned the troubled firm around with the famous “Blue Blade,” a razor blade coated in an instantly recognizable blue lacquer.
Following the birth of Bunny’s brother, the Lamberts’ made-much-of Gerard Barnes “Sonny” Lambert, Jr., in 1912, had come sister Lily, born at the Plaza Hotel in 1914. (Until the Lamberts took up residence in Princeton at the house they were slowly building, they had lived in multiple rental houses on Long Island and rented apartments in New York City.) Lily “was a very beautiful baby, and the doctor remarked to me, at two in the morning, that we would have to build a Chinese wall around her someday,” wrote Gerard B.
Copyright © 2022 by Mac Griswold