At the time, what kept most of us from seeing the dowdiness was the luster of glamour conveyed by Jackies trim, big-shouldered, athletic figure and then, in rapid hindsight, the burnished armor of tragedy. She had political and social power but not financial power. Although Jackies friendship with Bunny ran deeper than access to Mellon money, once Jackie was no longer in the White House, she became aware of the ease that assets like Bunnys offeredsuch as the peace and privacy of the Mellons house on Antigua, where they retreated in the first traumatic days of January 1964. The doyenne of high society is the widow of Paul Mellon, a billionaire art patron and racehorse breeder. The Kennedys were aghast at her unwillingness to cultivate her myth as JFKs widow and even more upset that she would marry a Greek shipping magnate, Bunny told me. From Tuxedo Park to Virginia to the White House, Griswold escorts us through Mellons life as we meet icons of culture, fashion, and politics: Queen Elizabeth and Jackie Kennedy, Givenchy and Balenciaga, JFK and I.M. . The guest list entailed flying in many of the D.C. and New York regulars who had danced at Elizas coming-out party; the band played foxtrots from the Great American Songbook before moving on to rock and roll; and the food was deliciousstriped bass, lamb, string beans, salad, peaches. [7][36] Her funeral was held at Trinity Episcopal Church in Upperville, which the Mellons had gifted to the community in 1960. Mellon also was known for her exquisite taste both in fashion and in decorating. At the age of 95, however, Bunnys secret support for John Edwardss mistress and child would bring her a certain notorietyand a visit from the FBI that she would quite enjoy. She'd long since given up being upset. She was forced to give up gardening by 2011, although she continued to swim, do Pilates, and give the rare interview. She turned to her husband, a lifelong Republican, who said he certainly wasnt going to lend her his pen! Settling in Virginia, they had a circle that included Paul Mellon, the wealthy son of Herbert Hoover's Treasury secretary. A Cape Cod estate formerlyowned by socialite Rachel Bunny Lambert Mellon has been sold for $19 million. As Jackie Kennedy's closest confidante, she helped decorate the White House, redesigned the Rose Garden, presided over the floral arrangements for JFK's bier, and remained an intimate to the first lady until Jackie's death. [11] Her work was strongly influenced by French gardeners Andr Le Ntre and Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie. "I think it's awful." After their divorce, she married his friend Paul Mellon at the time, reportedly, the worlds richest man. What extravagance, breathed Jackie, or so the story goes. [10] By this marriage, she became the stepmother of Timothy Mellon and Catherine Conover Mellon (later Mrs. John Warner and now known as Catherine Conover). Shortly thereafter, in May 2000, her daughter Eliza was hit by a truck while crossing a Manhattan street, causing a severe brain injury and full-body paralysis. Her interests in gardening were first cultivated while watching Olmsted Brothers gardeners tend her family's New Jersey home. According to Crocker, Lloyd was thrilled the buyers were interested in preserving the home as it is. .css-1du65oy{color:#323232;display:block;font-family:NewParis,Georgia,Times,serif;font-weight:normal;margin-bottom:0.3125rem;margin-top:0;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;-webkit-font-smoothing:auto;}@media (any-hover: hover){.css-1du65oy:hover{color:link-hover;}}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-1du65oy{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-1du65oy{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1du65oy{font-size:1.3125rem;line-height:1.2;}}Jackie Kennedy and Queen Elizabeth's Relationship, Julianne Moore's Kennedy-Inspired Met Gala Gown, See a Vintage Photo of Jackie and the Queen, Lee Radziwill's Doomed Dreams of Movie Stardom, JFK & Jackie Kennedy's Wedding Day, in Photos, Meet Jackie Kennedy's Unexpected Honeymoon Guest, Inside The Home Where Jackie O First Rode Horses, Jackie Kennedy's Role in Barbra Streisand's Memoir, Jackie Kennedy's Visit to the Nixon White House. [13], Mellon was long known for her maximal discretion and minimal public exposure; she offered only a handful of interviews to journalists in her lifetime. Trescherwith Bunny in her special role as collaborator/directorhad orchestrated Caroline Kennedys wedding in 1985. Even now she is making improvements. Her friend Bette Midler performed her hit song The Rose. [17] Mellon amassed a large collection of horticultural books and was regarded as an authority on American horticulture. Astor Regrets. In it she wrote: Bunnyon your birthday. [2][3] Her paternal grandfather, chemist Jordan Lambert, was the inventor of Listerine, which was later marketed by her father. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. I don't mind being 100, I can cope with that, but not seeing is very scary." [17] In France, Mellon created a landscape design for the home of Hubert de Givenchy and assisted with a restoration of the potager du Roi in Versailles. Ill Build a Stairway to Paradise spans the full 103 years of Bunny Mellons life. ", The centenarian's friends view her tolerant attitude to John Edwards's affair as an outgrowth of her own marital experiences. Bunny tolerated his paramours, even inviting one mistress to join them at their Antigua estate. Bunny told me that a Black voter just leaving the polls handed her his pen and said with a wink, Here, missus, use this. This was Bunnys adult baptism into the importance of her vote. But there was more to the story: her gardens were an escape. One weekend in June, she beamed as her 3-year-old great-granddaughter, Fiona, put stickers all over her arms. One day these gems may turn up, but my take is that the fantastical yet practical Bunny might just as likely have given Jackie a solid gold Schlumberger box of real paints. Ill Build a Stairway to Paradise by Mac Griswold (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is available online and in stores now. A giver of parties and designer of landscapes brimming with imagination and magic, she herself tended to the expressionless and forbidding, a society figure with an almost pathological dislike for publicity, who loved coming home from galas to water the plants at night. Zenas Crocker of Robet Paul Properties held the listing. For Jackie, too, white was the most ceremonial color; her strapless inaugural ball gown was white, with a small white ribbon cockade at the waisthomage to the France she loved. Her grandfather, Jordan W. Lambert, created Listerine. He gave her a life of infinite luxuryThe Washington Post once pronounced Bunny the "Most Envied Hostess in the Country Today"but at a cost. Ironically, Bunnys own interiors and her landscapes, public as well as private, were purposefully designed not to draw attention to themselves. that are necessary and important for his campaign please send the bills to me It is a way to help our friend without government restrictions.. With love and inexpressible gratitude for all the joy and help you have always given me. In May 2000, Bunny's daughter from her first marriage, Eliza Lloyd, was crossing the street in Manhattan when she was hit by a truck, suffering a severe brain injury. Ever since she married Paul Mellon in 1948, she has been consumed by turning his Virginia farm into a magnificent showcase. She classed her deception as fun, and with a Why not? air she dismissed Edwardss infidelity to a dying wife as the sort of thing one might expect from an attractive man like him. Even before she married Paul Mellon a philanthropist, She's a classic, the epitome of a society that is no longer with us.". They would talk about flowers for hours, mesmerized by one another's company. Bunny and Jackie dined at Johnnys small clapboard house on East 92nd Street before heading to the gala, the proceeds of which would support the preservation of Newport, Rhode Islands trove of 18th- and 19th-century architecture. Then her daughter was fatally hit in a car accident, and she threw herself even deeper into her career. Forger, then at the white- shoe law firm of Milbank, Tweed, eventually worked exclusively for Bunny, who set up an elegant office for him and his staff on West 57th Street in New York City. In going through her papers in the months after her death, I found that she had wrapped many important keepsakes, such as gifts from her Grandpa Lowe, in white paper and tied them up with a blue ribbon, using the two colors as signals to show how precious the things were to her. In 2004 in the opening essay for the Metropolitan Museums exhibition Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who was Jackies friend and ally, wrote that underneath a veil of lovely inconsequence she developed a cool assessment of people and an ironical slant on life. "I have lived for 99 years and I've never been interviewed by the FBI before!". (The Kennedy biographer Sally Bedell Smith quotes Jackie as saying to Ted Kennedys wife, Joan, All Kennedy men are like that . As her lawyer Alex Forger puts it, "She's well off, but her assets are not liquid. She was born into a well-to-do Princeton family. In particular, feds were interested in the $700,000 in funds Mellon allegedly made out to Edwards' campaign in the form of blank checks annotated "furniture," the Daily Beast said. Mellon, now blind, lives in luxurious seclusion on her 2,000-acre Virginia farm, cosseted by a staff of 120 loyal retainers. Through it all, she never sought publicity. You cant let it get to you, because you shouldnt take it personally.), Bunny, 19 years older than Jackie, could take on the role of teacher and exemplar at one moment and then shift to become the cozy, sympathetic friend to whom Jackie poured out her heart. She was involved in the business of nature and beauty, design and implementation, Forger said. Rachel Lambert "Bunny" Mellon, who died at age 103 on March 17 of this year, was renowned as a style icon, an influential garden designer (she helped plan the White "I may not be here a year from now," she tells me. She minded her own life and she felt deeply . Like Bunny Mellons daughter, I spent much of my life estranged from my mother. Mrs. Mellon had exquisite taste, and what Jackie admired most of all was the way she taught other people.". Every item on this page was chosen by a townandcountrymag editor. The True Story of Jackie & Bunny's Friendship, Randall Hagadorn / Courtesy of Gerard B. Lambert III, Mark Shaw Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis Personal Papers John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images, Jackie Kennedy and Queen Elizabeth's Relationship, Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. Huffman, who introduced Mellon to Edwards, said the former presidential candidate reminded her of John Kennedy. Mellons family and her longtime personal attorney said she died of natural causes at her beloved 4,000-acre Oak Spring Farms in Virginias horse country, where she entertained royalty, stars and politicians but from which she rarely ventured. She had endured worse, including the 2008 death of her daughter Eliza, who had been left quadriplegic when hit by a car years earlier. [19][20] Mellon completed her work on the garden in close collaboration with Irvin Williams who, among other responsibilities, she tasked with finding and introducing magnolia trees to the garden. Eliza spent the remaining eight years of her life under round-the-clock care at Oak Spring Farms, and died in 2008. Bunny answered him, writing so was she [Jackie]we saw life like that, going on to add that no matter how self-importantly people took themselves or their doing, we could see the simpler side, and wondered why the fuss?, Bunny contrived not to understand why it was difficult for serious people to grasp what the simpler side was for her and her friend two women who, by birth, wealth, and their grasp of power, were essentially living on another planet. The two women took to one another at once. No better armor than a watchful friend: Bunny Mellon quietly walks with Jackie Kennedy from Martin Luther King, Jr.s funeral at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, 1968. Susan Zakin was born in New York City, where she attended the Brearley School and Columbia Universitys Graduate School of Journalism. They often painted together on Cape Cod: in the Garden Library at the bottom of stairs to Bunnys study hangs a summery watercolor of a pale blue hydrangea in a pot. I want to come back. Another note from Jackie that Bunny inserted into one of her little blue daily datebooks went the other way, with Jackie comforting her friend about some problem and telling her, Dont worry, we will just beat the world back again., When in 1989 Jackie looked back at their years as friends, she wrote, Ever since Ive known you (33 years ago this spring) you have meant as much to me as any person in my life. Thanking Bunny for her love and care, her wise and strong support, and for all she had meant to the Kennedy children, Jackie closed with, I want you to be as happy as you make me.. Cristofaro Munari, attrib. Mellon lived a closely guarded life dominated by the arts, fashion, horses, rare books and extraordinary gardens. Together, the couple collected and donated more than a thousand works of art, mostly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings, to the National Gallery of Art and established the Yale Center for British Art. Mellon comes across as a woman with her faculties fully intact. Stepping up to the polls with Paul, Bunny said, she found she didnt have anything to write with. After his death in 1975, it was probably no accident that Jackie turned to Bunnys lawyer, Alexander Forger, to secure $200 million, far more than Onassis had decided to settle on his wife. Mellon was a legend in design and gardening circles who had a low-key style that was eloquent but unpretentious, Huffman said. After Gerard B.s death in 1967, they prospected on Nantucket, where Bunny bought two hundred acres of coastal heathland and old pasture with the money her father had left her. Yet when Sam Kasten of Nantucket Looms, a company that wove custom fabrics for her, wrote her that his visit to the Garden Library at Oak Spring was a life-changing event, she called him in tears. Rendered a paraplegic and unable to speak, Eliza was transported to her mother's farm for round-the-clock care, surviving for eight years. Be kind. Copyright 2022 by Mac Griswold. women hell-bent on making their daughters marriageable. Repeatedly in her letters over the years, Jackie apologized for the attention that being her friend brought Bunny. Two women sitting close together overlooking Gloucester Harbor while one sketches and the other looks on admiringly became Jackie and I on the Dock. Or, to say it more simply, Bunny enjoyed the thought of their friendship when she looked at the painting. [15], Described as a resilient centenarian, a bout with cancer[35] and ongoing macular degeneration nonetheless slowed her activity. While Mellon is leaving bequests to her family, the bulk of her estate will go to a foundation, financing a library and school for arborists. Indeed. She often developed her garden designs on paper, with particular attention to scale. Mellons attorney said she had no idea the money was going to hide a mistress. Mellon sent checks to Huffman inside boxes of chocolate, and Huffman would direct them to the campaign, Young wrote. Letitia Baldrige, Jackie's White House social secretary, recalls, "They were very close. [21], After Jacqueline Kennedy left the White House, Mellon was asked to design landscapes for Kennedy's home in Martha's Vineyard, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and River Farm, the headquarters of the American Horticultural Society. Paul Mellon once told The Washington Post, "The thing I envy about Bunny is that from the age of 5 or 6, her whole life has been occupied by horticulture, by one consuming thing." Mac Griswold is the author of The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island, Washington's Gardens at Mount Vernon, and The Golden Age of American Gardens. As far as we know, their intention is to keep it as the historic property it is and has always been, Crocker told the Cape Cod Times. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Thanks for contacting us. Jackie found a parent who suited her better than her own mother, the socialite Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, while Bunny gained a daughter very different from Eliza. Copyright 2009-2018, DNAinfo. Write it nice, friendly, nongossipy. The two women often celebrated their summer birthdays together. All-Star and perfect game pitcher dead at 62 UPPERVILLE, Va. Rachel Bunny Mellon, a wealthy arts and fashion patron, friend of first lady Jacqueline Kennedy 1533before 1588) A Young Daughter of the Picts, ca. She was loyal beyond anything and we gave each other space. 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc. 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