On the evening of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Bunny Mellon arrived at the White House to console the first lady, one of her closest friends, who was too distraught to see her. Bunny had brought a “thing of flowers” for the chief usher “to put them by her bed.”
Within hours Bunny was busily attending to the floral arrangements for the president’s state funeral.
This was the modus operandi of Rachel Lowe Lambert Lloyd Mellon: to leave a little beauty wherever she went. “Nothing should be noticed,” she was fond of saying—but there is much to notice in her first full-length biography. Bunny’s life and times, author Meryl Gordon shows, were punctuated by headlines and by powerful figures who were as captivated by Bunny as they were by her way with flowers.
Born to great wealth in 1910, Bunny was from the cradle surrounded by the bold and the beautiful. But it’s her legacy of finding the sublime in the small and unadorned that sets her apart, especially in the gardens she designed.
Her father’s family made a fortune from Listerine, affording Bunny—nicknamed like many WASP kids—an upbringing of family mansions, country retreats, and elite private schools. Her love of horticulture was nurtured by her maternal grandfather; he took a shine to young Bunny, who felt eclipsed by her far prettier sister, Lily, and had a prickly relationship with her mother.
After Bunny graduated from the Foxcroft School, she acquiesced to her father’s wishes and skipped college, settling instead for her first “MRS degree” in 1932, marrying fellow patrician Stacy Lloyd. They settled at her family’s Carter Hall in Virginia and became part of the horsey social orbit of Paul Mellon, the scion of the Mellon dynasty, and his wife, Mary.
This is where Bunny’s story becomes a charming mélange of Downton Abbey and the British sitcom As Time Goes By. While Stacy and Paul did their part for the war effort, both allegedly taking mistresses while stationed in Europe, they returned to troubled marriages. Stacy and Bunny were at odds over money and slowly grew apart. In 1946, Paul’s wife died after a sudden illness, and Bunny was practically underfoot to help him grieve and run the households.
Bunny and Stacy divorced amicably in 1948 and Bunny pulled off the biggest coup of her life by quickly becoming Mrs. Paul Mellon, the “empress of Upperville.” The couple maintained homes in Antigua, New York, Cape Cod, and Paris, but their primary base was Rokeby Farm, a huge estate that Bunny spared no expense to conform to her idea of paradise.
“Look, that’s all wrong. The hill is in the wrong place,” she told her staff one day, surveying the view of the farm from her window. Within three months, the hill was moved.
Bunny loved doling out gems from Schlumberger and Tiffany, but the Tiffany blue box was too blasé for her, so she’d find the perfect seashells on the beach to put the jewelry in. Everyday people with these kinds of caprices may be called wacky divas, but Bunny was so imaginative and kind—not to mention rich—that, as Gordon puts it, people preferred to think of her as eccentric.
The most important non-family alliance in Bunny’s life was her friendship with a woman 19 years her junior: Jacqueline Kennedy, later Onassis. Bunny met Jackie in the 1950s when she was a young senator’s wife. They “both loved art and fashion and ballet and all things French,” Gordon writes. “They could tease each other and tell each other the truth.”
Jackie leaned on Bunny for advice on everything from home décor to marital infidelity. (In the mid-1960s, Paul Mellon took up with prominent Georgetown shop owner Dorcas Hardin, who was warm and caring, in contrast to the regal Bunny. In Gordon’s telling, Mellon was in love with Hardin; she became his longtime mistress, and although he and Bunny never divorced they thereafter largely led separate lives.)
Jackie asked Bunny to create the White House Rose Garden, a project of special interest to President Kennedy. Although Bunny had no formal training in garden design, she would continue to oversee the White House gardens, tending to them herself in her couture Balenciaga gardening clothes.
Bunny remained at her friend’s side until Jackie’s death in 1994 and even oversaw the flowers at JFK Jr.’s wedding two years later.
By the time of Paul Mellon’s death in 1999, his legacy was sealed with his longtime philanthropic devotion to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where the countless Impressionist paintings he and Bunny discovered together still hang in homage to their mutual pursuit of beauty.
Bunny spent her remaining years ensconced in her private world of elegance, but for one rather ugly episode. Despite her acute good taste, she had become enamored of John Edwards, the charismatic senator from North Carolina, funneling thousands of dollars into his campaign coffers. It later emerged that these funds were used by smarmy campaign aides to finance and hide Edwards’s mistress and love child. When Bunny died in 2014 at the ripe age of 103, Edwards showed up at her funeral, but her family relegated him to the back of the church.
