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.
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.”
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.
The wall of discretion that surrounds the heiress amounts to a kind of omertà . Contacted at his country place outside Paris, the couturier Hubert de Givenchy (he dressed Mrs. Mellon for decades and even designed uniforms for her staff) declined through a relative to comment. Socialite friends in New York and Cape Cod also refused to speak publicly about a woman who, Mr. Langella writes, was “selective in her friendships, clever in her dealings with the press.”
Raleigh News & Observer/MCT, via Getty Images
The Mellons in 1987.
Teresa Zabala/The New York Times
In 1978, Bunny Mellon, next to her husband, Paul, with J. Carter Brown (far left in photo), Jimmy Carter and I.M. Pei, right.
Associated Press
NOTICED Bunny and Paul Mellon (at right in photo) greeting Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and his wife in 1975.
CAUGHT UP John Edwards, who is accused of using Mellon donations to hide his mistress, Rielle Hunter, center, with their daughter. A former campaign aide, Andrew Young, and his wife, Cheri, who testified at the trial.
What news media attention Mrs. Mellon did attract over the years tended to focus on the superficial, often missing the dedication this talented amateur brought to her gardens (she was instrumental in the restoration of Louis XIV’s potager du roi at Versailles), art collections (she personally acquired from the artist what were long considered the finest Mark Rothko pictures in existence), her role as a mentor to Jacqueline Kennedy and to a manner of living so low key, its simplicity was almost a form of ostentation.
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