She had been paid a visit by an ambitious politician named John Edwards, who had been introduced to her by the decorator Ryan Huffman. Senator Edwards and his wife were anxious to be the next President and First Lady. “He came to see me when he was running. And I decided to contribute to his campaign. I thought he was very real and very bright. What’s all the fuss about?”
She was, of course, referring to the firestorm that ensued over John Edwards’s sex life, illegitimate child, ultimate separation from his wife, and four-hundred-dollar haircuts. Her financial support of Senator Edwards dragged her into the limelight in a way she had rarely experienced.
“Well, I suppose it’s my own damn fault,” she told me, “he was so attractive. White shirt, white pants, sleeves rolled up. And you know I’m weak on good looks.”
There is not much else Bunny Mellon is weak on; and her greatest strength, her most profound gift, is loyalty. I have counted on it unconditionally throughout my adult life.
Just as I have counted on the fact that when I visited her, she would always leave a book at my bedside table she thought might interest me or send me a handmade quilt from Nantucket or a scarf from Paris. Easy for the rich to do such things. See it. Buy it. Write a note. A driver delivers it or an assistant mails it. But Bunny meant it.
Raised to have impeccable manners and treat all human beings with respect and consideration, she is a model of decency, kindness, forbearance, and compassion, but by no means a pushover or a head-in-the-sand socialite. Selective in her close friendships, clever in her dealings with the press, brilliant during her fifty-year marriage to Paul, and flawless in her discretion during her friendship with Jackie Kennedy; she is a woman who, it seems to me, has done just about everything right.
It was a hot sunny afternoon in the summer of 1961 when I first met her behind the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts. I was apprenticing at this legendary theater, learning to build sets, shop for props, and anything else assigned to me while taking acting workshops and playing roles in afternoon children’s theater. At night, I worked backstage for the touring productions passing through with stars of the era.
I was stenciling a flat in a fleur-de-lis pattern in the back parking lot, sweating profusely and covered in paint, when a female voice said: “Excuse me, I wonder if you could help me, I’m looking for my daughter, Eliza?”
“I think she’s in the costume shop,” I said, not looking up.
“Am I allowed to go inside the theater?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll go get her if you’d like.”
“Oh thank you, that’s very kind of you.”
I put down my paintbrush, looked up and my twenty-three-year-old eyes saw a woman the likes of whom I’d never encountered before. She was dressed in a deep blue, heavy linen skirt, white boatneck pullover, with a blue sailor hat on her head and espadrilles on her feet, and she appeared to me a visitor from another planet. Face free of makeup, hair soft and easy, with a picnic basket in her hand, she gave the impression of having just been sketched on an artist’s pad and brought to life for a summer’s afternoon; tall, elegant, and extraordinarily soft-spoken. Not a beauty, but a woman with the power to make you feel she was.
Liza came bounding out of the costume shop. Not yet twenty, awkward and shy, she was the antithesis of her mother; a tomboy with a great horse laugh and a devilish sense of humor.
“Hi Mummy. You’ve met my friend Frank.”
“Yes, he’s a painter.”
Came the guffaw and Liza said, looking at me: “Oh sure he is, and I’m Madame Chanel, didn’t you know?!”
“Liza, you’ve got to go and wash your hands.”
“Be right back,” she said breezily and took off for the slop sink.
For the next ten minutes, Bunny asked me where I was born, did I have brothers or sisters, did I want to be an actor, and wove a seductive web in which I willingly became entangled. A woman beautifully schooled in the art of direct and specific interest in another at first meeting.
Liza returned and off they went to have a picnic nearby; no doubt under a tree in the shade with cloth napkins and chilled white wine.
In the summer of 1961 Eliza Lloyd was a vibrant, fragile young girl and I a high-strung, sensitive young man. We instantly formed a strong bond. It was through my initial relationship with her and my subsequent friendship with Bunny that I found myself sleeping in the beds of their staggering residences in Virginia, Antigua in the British West Indies, Cape Cod, Paris, Washington, D.C, New York, and Nantucket. I entered their lives with very little life experience of my own; if not exactly wet behind the ears then certainly very, very damp. Bunny chose to adopt me. And she had a willing pupil, anxious to better himself, learn the world, and understand how to behave in it. I was invited to their Cape house often that first summer and was dubbed “Liza’s friend from the playhouse” for the rest of it. Bunny reached out her hand to me, took mine, and vastly improved my gait. And she did it mostly by example.
One afternoon, sitting down by the dock with a group of Liza’s young friends from school, Bunny asked me to read aloud a couple of paragraphs in a book of philosophy. When I came to the name of the French philosopher René Descartes, totally unfamiliar to me, I spoke it as I saw it. Dess-Cart-Tees. My pronunciation was greeted with derisive laughter and dismissive comments. I wasn’t sure why, but continued reading and later, as the afternoon wore on with swimming and sailing, which I watched from the shore because I was neither a good swimmer nor a good sailor, Bunny said, “Frank, would you read me that passage again? It was so interesting, particularly the part that refers to Descartes.” And she pronounced it properly as in: Daycart.
She had found a way to correct my ignorance and preserve my dignity as casually as if she were opening a packet of sugar. What she had done, of course, was open my mind. And into it, she began to pour generous granules of knowledge in all the arenas I needed it most.
When I asked her how to handle myself at a cocktail party with people I didn’t know, she said: “It’s very simple. Just repeat the last few words of whatever has just been said to you in the form of a question and you’ll have no trouble. For instance, if someone says to you ‘I just went to an art show and saw the most fascinating painting’ you then say: ‘Oh really, the most fascinating painting?’ And you’ll be off and running.” And this:
“Be careful of people who come toward you with their arms flung wide to embrace you. It’s a trap.”
Not that I ever found her to be trapped by anyone for long. She has chosen her friends carefully throughout her life and sometimes they reward her loyalty in the most astonishing ways. Perhaps the most astonishing to me came from the French clothing designer Hubert de Givenchy.
At a small birthday lunch for Bunny one summer; just me, Jackie O., and Eliza, the doorbell rang at the Cape house precisely the moment we sat down to lunch. Buds, the family butler, told Bunny that a gentleman had arrived from Msr. Givenchy and needed to deliver a package directly to her. Bunny clasped her hands in delight and in came a man in a dark suit and tie, holding a small, beautifully ribboned box. He placed it before Bunny and said, “De la part de Monsieur Givenchy,” and stepped back. “Oh how pritty,” Bunny said as she undid the ribbon and lifted the top of the box. Inside was a small glass case and inside that was a pound of sweet butter.
“Hubert knows how much I love this butter,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s from his cows on his farm.” The man smiled and left.
“Do you suppose he flew all the way from France, got a car, and drove all the way out here?” I said.
“Sure,” Jackie said. “It’s Bunny’s birthday.”
And we ate what I calculated to be an approximately $20,000 bar of butter.
Not much compared to a little bauble given to her by her good friend, the Tiffany jeweler Johnny Schlumberger on another birthday. We were sitting on her Syrie Maugham couch in
the Cape house when she felt something buried in its cushions.
“Oh that’s where that went,” she said, pulling out an enormous brooch worth somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter million dollars, “I thought I’d lost it.”
On New Year’s Eve of 1968 I was spending the holiday and my birthday, as usual during that period, with Eliza and the family. After everyone had gone to bed Bunny put on some music for herself and began to dance around the small pond in the open garden of the Antigua house. Being a bit more than just tipsy, she fell backward over a potted plant and broke her ankle. I was summoned to her room at 3 a.m. to find her lying on her bed, leg up on a pillow, and her ankle bound tightly with a Balenciaga scarf. Paul was sitting on a chair beside the bed looking extremely relieved to see me come in. He instantly got up and said:
“Bun, I’m going to bed. Frank will keep you company.”
“Gosh, Paul, it hurts very badly.”
“Well you brought it on yourself, dear.”
So I got a blanket, and spent that particular New Year’s Eve asleep on the floor next to the bed; waking every few hours to give her painkillers until they ran out.
The next morning we were accompanied to the Mellon plane, which would take us to New York, by the local doctor, who bound her leg tightly in some sheet-like material, put large pieces of white tape over it, strapped it to the inside wall of the plane, and left. Shortly after we were airborne, Bunny turned to me and said: “Frank, would you please go to the back and find me a wide short glass of some kind?”
“Do you want something to drink?” I asked.
“No, just the glass.”
I got one, returned with it, and sat down.
“I wonder if you’d mind leaving me alone for just a few moments?”
I did and in a short while, her voice rang out in the most charming, lilting manner: “You can come back now.” When I returned, she had draped the Balenciaga scarf over the glass, handed it to me and asked if I would be good enough to empty it into the toilet in the rear of the plane. I carried the glass, the scarf, and its warm contents there as I was asked, returned to my seat, and handed her back the scarf.
“Thank you,” she said. “I suppose now we can consider ourselves very good friends.”
I knew she was in great pain, had no strong medication left, and was enduring the bumpy ride home with some difficulty but she never for a moment looked as if she were anywhere but at a lovely soothing concert in Carnegie Hall.
The next morning her broken ankle was repaired, and after her operation, I walked home from the hospital, passed by my agent’s office, and went in as a surprise. “What are you doing in town?” he said.
“Oh a friend of mine broke her ankle and we had to come back to get her an operation, so I’m back a week early.”
“Well Frank and Eleanor Perry are looking for someone to play the third lead in their new movie. Here’s the script, sit here and read it and I’ll call over to see if they’ll meet you.”
I did. It was a great part and I wanted to play it. The next morning I went in, read, and got it. Had Bunny not broken her ankle two nights earlier I would have still been in Antigua, swimming in the Caribbean, unemployed and nearly broke. Happenstance had intervened. The film, The Diary of a Mad Housewife, was an enormous success in 1970 and launched my movie career.
Liza and I moved on to other partners, marriages, and divorces, but retained our friendship. Tragically she was hit by a truck in Greenwich Village in 2000, and sent into a coma. Bunny set up a room for her at Oak Spring Farms, in Upperville, Virginia, the Mellon home base. It sits among 4,000 magnificent acres with its own private one-mile airstrip and personal jet.
It was there Liza remained with private doctors and full-time nurses continually available. And despite the doctor’s gentle protestations that the damage was severe and there was no chance, Bunny never gave up the hope that Liza would recover.
“Frank, I know it,” she would say, “I just know it. She is coming back to us.” It was sadly ironic that Liza’s outgoing phone message in her Greenwich Village apartment was: “Hi! I’m gone, but I’ll be back!”
She spent eight years in that coma never to return; and died of pneumonia in 2008. “Caroline is my daughter now,” Bunny said, referring of course to Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg.
Bunny’s eyesight has begun to fade during this past decade and she has often been in doctors’ offices trying every method possible to stall the inevitable and fighting all sorts of old age ailments. But in our phone calls she is always cheerful, positive, and upbeat. “I’ve just got to get started. I want to build a new office for myself at the farm . . . I have to go up to Nantucket and work on the land . . . spring will be coming and I’m just not ready!”
In late June of 2009 she called. “Where are you spending the Fourth of July?”
“I’m going to Charleston, South Carolina, to stay with some friends for a few days.”
“Why don’t you come to me for the day and then the plane can take you there.”
And as easily as another friend might drop me off in a taxi on their way home, early on the morning of the fourth, Bunny’s car arrived to take me to Teterboro Airport; the plane waiting to transport me to Oak Spring.
We touched down on the private airstrip and once again the car drove me toward the house close to fifty years after I had first visited there. The land was gorgeously lush and green with miles and miles of perfect fences, horses in the fields, and the dairy farm pristine and calm. I remembered the long bike rides with Liza over the back country roads, the walks with Bunny and her beagle, Benjamin, every night at dusk. Most of all, the silence and peace of the place; the feeling of luxurious safety. Safety of a kind that only great wealth can assure and protect.
The car brought me up to the house, drove off, and I was left standing in the courtyard once again. A low stone wall surrounding a patio of irregular stones, weeds allowed to sprout at just the right height meandering between them, plants and flowers casually growing on the grounds. All placed there in a fashion as if to say: Mother Nature stopped by, did this, and left. I walked through the courtyard to the front door, finding it open, as always.
In the foyer, straw hats hung on hooks. Baskets under tables, a long wooden bench piled high with large books, the day’s newspapers, and a folded brown blanket embroidered with the letters P.M.
“Paul and I wanted a cozy house,” she told me when I first visited. “We both grew up in big, cold houses, and hated it, so we built this.” And indeed, Oak Spring Farms is a civilized, understated, modest environment. Again, the kind of modest only great wealth can engender. And again, nothing designed to be noticed. Nothing that says, “Look at how I decorated this. Look at my statement.”
On a desk by the window in the large living room sat a picture of Jackie falling off a horse as it leapt over a fence. Next to it a photo of Caroline and John-John as children. On another table, a photograph of Paul and Bunny with the Queen Mother at the Epson Derby in 1972 when Paul’s horse Mill Reef won the race. When that photograph was taken I was standing just a few feet off camera, thirty-four years old in a green, inappropriate-to-the-occasion Cerutti suit.
“Harry, is it really you?” came the familiar cultured voice from the bottom of the stairs. I went out to the hall to greet and embrace her.
“Hi Mertz.”
Sometime in the late sixties, I had nicknamed Bunny Myrtle and Liza Mabel one day when they returned from a shopping spree in New York, pretending to be a couple of secretaries. Bunny turned and said, “If I’m Myrtle and Liza’s Mabel then you’re Harry.” The nicknames stuck and we have called each other by those names ever since.
Nancy Collins, a tall, lovely young woman, Bunny’s fulltime nurse, had accompanied her downstairs and we all moved slowly back into the living room. Maria, one of the kitchen staff, brought in her famous iced tea, which tasted as delici
ous as ever, and John, another of the staff, came in to announce luncheon. Nancy left us and we went into the dining room and sat down to a traditional Fourth of July meal at the Mellon farm: Salmon with dill sauce and parsley, peas, asparagus with hollandaise, and strawberry shortcake for dessert. At each of our settings a small silver dish with three After-Eight thin mints resting on them.
As has become our habit in the last year or so, we began to reminisce. “Remember the day I found you and Jackie sitting on the floor at the Cape house with all that jewelry?” I said.
“Oh yes! Jackie was trying to decide whether or not to marry Ari. If she hadn’t, she’d have sent it all back. It didn’t much mean anything to her anyway. She was a good girl. You know how we became friends? She called me when Jack was a senator and said: ‘Will you help me, Mrs. Mellon? I don’t know a lot.’ And that was it. We never had a cross word till the day she died. One afternoon she rang and said: ‘I have awful news. Jack is going to run for president.’ She knew all about the women, of course, but she stuck, and decided she was going to do a good job. I thought she did. She was a wonderful First Lady. I remember one day at the White House when I was redesigning the Rose Garden for Jackie and the President, we were waiting for an elevator. When it came, I stepped back to let her go in first.
“ ‘What are you doing?’ she said.
“ ‘Well, you’re the First Lady.’
“ ‘Stop that nonsense! Get in!’ ”
We moved into the living room for coffee and she fell silent. After a while, she said: “Harry, I’ve been such a lump lately. I’ve got to get started. Let’s go for a ride and then to my library.” I got up from the couch, and took her hand. As she stood up, she said, “I’m feeling a little weird, I think maybe I got up too fast.” She sat back down and said, “Would you ask Nancy to come in here, please? Oh, and why don’t you go into the kitchen and say hello to everybody. They’ll be happy to see you.”
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