I knew she wanted to recover from her dizzy spell privately, so I left and found Nancy, who went in to sit with her. When I walked back into the kitchen, there were Maria and John and Stanley and all the others. Three generations of black families who had worked for the Mellon family most of their lives, some since childhood, smiling and laughing and embracing me as they talked of their families, their children, and their great-grandchildren. And their love and respect for Bunny was palpable.
“Mrs. Mellon paid to fix all the teeth of the children at the village in Antigua.”
“Mrs. Mellon built the Trinity Church here in Upperville, where everyone can worship.”
“Mrs. Mellon gave the dock and the land around it at the Cape house to Eddie Crosby, who’s been looking after the boats all these years.”
I left them, collected Bunny, and we went out to the courtyard.
“The keys should be in the ignition,” she said, “let’s go for a ride.”
The two of us moved through her world slowly, stopping by the dairy, lingering at the pool, ending up at the private library she had built on the property, where I unlocked the door and stepped into a magical kingdom. Her library is an extraordinary testament to all things horticultural. “I’m a gardener, Frank,” she said, “that’s what I do.” And her gardens are indeed breathtaking places to be. Even the bees and the butterflies who inhabit them seem bigger, better, and happier.
I sat her down on a large white couch beneath a giant yellow Mark Rothko painting.
“That may be the biggest Rothko I’ve ever seen,” I said.
“Maybe it is. It was lying on the floor with lots of others in a studio in New York. I’d just been to the doctor’s and I went over to have a look. I called Paul and told him we had to have them; that we could get thirteen of them all for under five hundred thousand dollars. ‘That’s cheap,’ he said. And it was in 1971, so we bought them. Have a look around, Harry, I’m going to close my eyes for a few moments.”
I walked through the library opening shutters and drawers and looking on the walls. From every window were views of Bunny’s glorious handiwork. On every surface magnificent, priceless, ancient books on botany and horticulture, and on the walls still more beautiful paintings. It would soon be time for me to take the plane on to South Carolina so I went over and sat next to her on the couch. As she slept, her head lolling back on a small soft pillow, I watched her breathing; something she needed to keep on doing only a scant thirty-five days more in order to wake up alive on her one-hundredth birthday.
I put my hand on her shoulder.
“Mertz?”
She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Oh, Harry. Isn’t it peaceful here?”
“Yes. Thanks to you.”
“Oh no! Thanks to great artists and Mother Nature. I just appreciate.”
I closed the shutters, turned off the lights, locked the door, and we drove back to the main house. As we got out of the car, I said, “Let’s take a picture.”
We stood by the front door and as she leaned in against my shoulder I held the camera at arm’s length and snapped us.
“Oh I didn’t fix my hair,” she said, neatening and tidying it as she spoke. “Take another one.”
I did, then turned and embraced her. As I kissed her good-bye she said:
“What do you look like these days?”
“Oh, I’m still six-foot-three and still have a full head of dark brown hair, weigh about 180 pounds, can run as fast as I ever could, and get just about anyone I want into bed.”
She laughed and said:
“Well, I’m ninety-nine years old now, Harry, and that’s it. Next birthday, ninety-eight.”
Nancy came out to help her back to the house, but Bunny wanted to see me off and stood waving good-bye until the car was down the driveway. And staring from the back window I watched her, nearly blind, continue to wave good-bye to a guest she could not see.
Jackie Onassis, Bunny’s best friend, died in 1994. Paul Mellon, her husband of fifty-one years, followed in 1999. Liza, her only daughter, left her in 2008, and Robert Isabell, a high-end party planner who had become her constant and devoted friend in her later years, passed away only four days after our Fourth of July visit in 2009. He is buried near the Mellon farm in a tiny Civil War cemetery. Paul and Liza rest in the private family plot at Trinity Church in Upperville, where Bunny has allocated a spot next to them.
For my sake, I hope this extraordinary woman stays on the planet for as long as she can bear to. When she does finally leave us, she will do it surrounded by the people she most loves, and who most deeply love her. And she will, I’m certain, pass away in the manner in which she preferred to live her life, calling little attention to herself and steadfastly adhering to her maxim: “Nothing should be noticed.”
It would be impossible to relate here all the many lessons Bunny Mellon taught me during the fifty years I have known her, but perhaps most prescient, as relates to the subjects of this book, including myself, is a piece of advice she gave me when, at twenty-four years old, I asked her:
“What should I do when I meet a famous person?”
“Oh Frank,” she said, “don’t think too much about famous people. They already think too much about themselves.”
AFTERWORD
Walking up Madison Avenue one afternoon in 1980, passing by Frank Campbell’s funeral home on the northwest corner of 81st Street, I saw coming out of the door my old friend Peter Witt, a theatrical agent, blowing his nose.
“Hello, Peter.”
“Hello, Frank, “ he said, wiping his eyes. “We lost another one.”
“Who died?”
He told me the name of a renowned Broadway star whom he had represented for many years.
“He was such a wonderful actor,” I said.
“Yes, he was. Wonderful!”
“I’m so sorry I never met him.”
“Ach!” he said. “You didn’t miss much.”
So before the next name to drop is mine, and the reviews start coming in, I’d like to take back Center Stage for a moment. A position closer to my nature than the supporting role I have elected to play here.
A good deal of my actor’s life has consisted of packing and unpacking suitcases, playing house in hotel rooms around the world, joining happy and unhappy families for finite periods, serially embracing temporary partners, and indulging passions that flared and fizzled with predictable frequency.
Representatives came and went; as did my successes, missteps, miscalculations, and outright failures. Concurrently, I dropped anchor after anchor along the way: marriages, children, multiple residences, mortgages, family obligations, and close circles of friends. All entered into with fierce commitment.
Racing for that bus to New York in 1953 was not only my adolescent effort to escape a geographical prison, nor was it to answer the call first sounded by happenstance in the wings of my grammar school auditorium. It was, unknown to me at the time, to quiet a panic soundlessly pounding inside an unsettled baby, arms up, yearning to be held, crying out for recognition and validation. I embarked on that maiden voyage anxious to stay in flight as long as I could. And the wilderness in which I wandered as a young boy, believing myself forever lost, never to reach a destination, I have now come to feel is precisely the place to be. There is no lasting comfort, it seems to me, in the safe landing. Better to stay in flight, take the next bus, relinquish control, trust in happenstance, and embrace impermanence.
If fame is indeed fleeting, then so are titles, awards, wealth, position, youth, beauty, and sexual pleasure. So are contentment and happiness. So are pain and suffering.
The finish line, after all, is inevitable. Like the subjects of this book, each of us will live on only in memory. With that in mind, perhaps the best way to navigate the split-second start-to-finish race might be to heed the words of George Bernard Sha
w (the last name dropped herein) who wrote:
Life has a way of slipping through your fingers.
But, if you stick to your soul, it will stick to you.
Not a bad piece of advice. And you don’t even have to be famous to follow it.
FL
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FRANK LANGELLA has been a professional actor for over five decades and hopes to carry on for several more. He began performing as a boy in his hometown of Bayonne, New Jersey, and currently resides in New York City. This is his first book.
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CREDITS
Cover design by Archie Ferguson
COPYRIGHT
DROPPED NAMES. Copyright © 2012 by Frank Langella. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition APRIL 2012 ISBN: 9780062094483
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN: 978-0-06-20947-6 (Hardcover)
12 13 14 15 16 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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