A new biography of Bunny Mellon, the style icon and American aristocrat who designed the White House Rose Garden for her friend JFK and served as a living witness to 20th Century American history
Bunny Mellon: The Life of an American Style Legend, by Meryl Gordon, is an astute and intriguing portrait of a celebrity who wasn’t famous outside her own milieu. Mellon was a gifted gardener with princely means and infallible taste: Her close friend Jacqueline Kennedy asked her to redesign the White House Rose Garden. This well-bred heiress was both shockingly extravagant and studiously understated … Mellon is possibly remembered less for what she did than for what was done to her in her dotage … Bunny Mellon was written with the Mellon family’s cooperation, so it’s not steaming with leering conjecture. Mostly, the biography documents unsettling contradictions.
Initially, it wasn’t clear to me why Mellon merited a biography of 460 pages with a copious index. Certainly, Bunny Mellon had good taste, but the striking thing about Mellon, cruel as it sounds, is that she wasn’t particularly interesting...In a sense, that became her story, and ultimately, if the tale is valuable, it is as a quietly devastating portrait of women’s roles in the midcentury United States … Like many magazine writers, Gordon eschews big ideas. Instead, she relies on the novelist’s technique of the revealing detail. She notes that Mellon, despite a jewelry collection worth millions, chose to be buried wearing a ring from her first husband, the one she married for love and often saw in later years. I have to wonder if this tells the reader more about Gordon’s heart than Mellon’s.
Ms. Gordon interviewed scores of relatives, friends, tradespeople and servants for this biography, and by their testimony Bunny Mellon—despite bursts of generosity and social consciousness—was not a nice person. It isn’t that they tell nasty stories; rather, they admit to such sycophantic behavior as relishing her luxurious presents and then whining at being dropped without explanation (which happened to most of them) and begging in vain to be taken back into favor … Ms. Gordon accounts for all this rudeness and cruelty by making frequent use of the all-purpose excuse that Bunny Mellon ‘felt insecure.’
