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The Last Empress
Rachel (Bunny) Lambert Mellon, the widow of the banking heir and philanthropist Paul Mellon.
By GUY TREBAY
Published: May 11, 2012
SHE almost squeaked through unscathed. A product of a generation of patrician Americans who lived by the dictum that a woman's name ought to appear in print only at birth, marriage and death, Rachel (Bunny) Lambert Mellon, the widow of the banking heir and philanthropist Paul Mellon, made it almost to her centenary little known outside her rarefied sphere.
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To those familiar with a woman who is invariably, although not quite accurately, described as reclusive, few things could be more surprising than the fact that she should suddenly, at 101, find herself thrust into an unwelcome limelight, sharing tabloid space with John Travolta and his reported massage-table antics.
Unwittingly drawn in 2010 into a $59 million Ponzi scheme orchestrated by Kenneth I. Starr, a New York investment adviser, (who also bilked Mike Nichols, Uma Thurman and Jacob Arabo, better known as Jacob the Jeweler), Mrs. Mellon is now a central figure in the trial of John Edwards, who is accused of illegally using $725,000 she gave him to hide his mistress at the height of the 2008 presidential campaign.
Of all the things money can buy, Mrs. Mellon's late husband once remarked, privacy "is the most valuable asset." The decorum Mrs. Mellon prized and preserved came to be emblematized by a phrase from a 1969 interview she gave to The New York Times: "Nothing should be noticed."
Never mind that Mrs. Mellon, an avid gardener, was talking about landscape effects. The observation was interpreted as a personal credo.
In reality, Mrs. Mellon has long been an object of fascinated notice. Born into a moneyed Social Register background (her father was president of the Gillette Safety Razor Company; her grandfather, a chemist who invented Listerine), she, with her second marriage to Paul Mellon, married into wealth even greater than her own.
Listerine was marketed as a cure for social embarrassment, and that, as it turned out, was something Mrs. Mellon avoided throughout her long life. Because she was less socially invisible than impeccable in her refinement, the trial testimony about her friendship with an ambitious political comer struck a weirdly dissonant note. Among the subtle surprises that trial testimony revealed was that, though keen to cultivate Mrs. Mellon's patronage and affection, Mr. Edwards had missed some of the basic lessons of the social climber: never bothering, for instance, to learn her children's names. Mrs. Mellon, it should be noted, is accused of nothing in the case. She even paid gift tax on the money she gave Mr. Edwards.
For decades, the Mellons were not merely noticeable but cynosures in the upper levels of American society, important political patrons and, as philanthropists, vastly generous. They enjoyed a range of acquaintances wider and more catholic than is typical for those in their milieu (among Mrs. Mellon's friends — J. Carter Brown, the aristocratic head of the National Gallery; Robert Isabell, the party planner; Bette Midler, and Whoopi Goldberg) and employed hundreds of workers at the residences the couple maintained in New York, Paris (recently sold), Antigua (on the market for $14.5 million), Cape Cod (for sale for $28.7 million), Nantucket and on a 4,000-acre farm in Fauquier County in Virginia, where Mrs. Mellon built a library to house her collection of over 10,000 rare botanical volumes.
"People have this idea of her as a recluse, but she's had a full life," said James Reginato, a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, who was invited by Mrs. Mellon to write about her Virginia gardens in 2010. "She hasn't been out and about as much as you might expect a socialite to be, but she's done exactly what she wanted. She never wanted to bother with a lot of boring people, and when you have your own airport, it helps."
Mr. Reginato was referring to the airstrip at Oak Springs Farm, where the Mellons came and went by private jet and where she occasionally received Mr. Edwards, a man who, as the actor Frank Langella wrote in a recently published memoir, "Dropped Names," was "so attractive" in his white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and white trousers, that he somehow slipped past her reserve.
"You know I'm weak on good looks," Mrs. Mellon told Mr. Langella, who first made her acquaintance on Cape Cod in the 1960s and who has remained a friend. Like many Mellon intimates, Mr. Langella protects her privacy with fanatical fervor. Reached in a trailer on a film set, he declined to add to the account in his book, whose chapters on her family Mrs. Mellon vetted and personally approved.
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