Rachel Lambert Mellon, known as Bunny Mellon, spent 103 years perfecting a philosophy she once described in four words: “Nothing should be noticed. ” Yet at the end of her life, the woman who built her entire existence around discretion became the unlikely center of one of the most public political scandals of its era. She was born into fortune and married into even greater wealth. Her grandfather invented Listerine mouthwash, and her husband, Paul Mellon, inherited one of America’s largest banking and industrial empires.
That combined fortune allowed her to amass a private collection so vast that auction house specialists needed 3,000 feet of bubble wrap and more than 500 packing boxes to catalog the contents of 20 buildings on her Virginia estate. As she lay dying in 2014, she received a phone call from the politician who had become the source of that scandal. She took the call. Bunny Mellon was born Rachel Lowe Lambert in New York City on August 9, 1910.
She was the eldest daughter of Gerard Barnes Lambert and Rachel Parkhill Lowe. Her mother gave her the nickname “Bunny,” which stayed with her for the rest of her life. Her family’s wealth had a distinctly unglamorous origin: mouthwash. Her grandfather, chemist Jordan Wheat Lambert, invented Listerine in the 1880s as a multi-purpose antiseptic.
But it was her father, Gerard, who turned it into a commercial powerhouse through one of the most successful advertising campaigns in American history. He took the obscure medical term “halitosis” and marketed ordinary bad breath as a condition requiring daily treatment with his product. Gerard served as president of Lambert Pharmacal, which later became a founding part of Warner-Lambert. He also served as president of Gillette.
That money bought Bunny a childhood of mansions, private tutors, and access to professionally designed gardens. The family estate in Princeton, known as Albemarle, employed the Olmsted landscape firm, heirs to Frederick Law Olmsted’s design practice. As a young girl, she followed the professional gardeners, and a lifelong obsession began. She started her own garden at age seven.
By ten, she was building a personal library of gardening books that would eventually grow into one of the world’s most important private collections of botanical literature. She studied the work of André Le Nôtre, who designed the gardens at Versailles, and Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, who created the kitchen garden of Louis XIV. Decades later, she would personally help restore the king’s actual garden at Versailles. Her formal education was deliberately limited.
She attended Miss Fine’s School in Princeton, then Foxcroft School near Middleburg, Virginia. College was never an option because her father did not believe a young woman of her generation deserved to attend. At her death, she was buried not in the Givenchy and Balenciaga gowns that filled her closets, but in the simple academic robe she wore when she received an honorary degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. At 23, she designed a garden for fashion designer Hattie Carnegie in exchange for a coat and a custom dress.
Her parents divorced in 1933, exposing her early to the flexible nature of high-society marriage, a lesson that would repeat throughout her life. On November 25, 1932, at Trinity Church in Princeton, she married Stacy Barcroft Lloyd Jr. , a socially acceptable but modestly wealthy young man working in journalism. They had two children, Stacy Barcroft Lloyd III and Eliza Winn Lloyd.
Stacy Lloyd served in the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the CIA, during World War II. During this marriage, the Lloyds became close friends and neighbors with Paul Mellon and his first wife, Mary Conover Mellon, in the hunting country of Virginia outside Middleburg. Mary Mellon, educated at Vassar, Columbia, and the Sorbonne, had co-founded the influential Bollingen Foundation with Paul. Both had undergone analysis with Carl Jung himself.
Mary Mellon died suddenly of an asthma attack in 1946 at age 42. Paul was devastated and drinking heavily. Bunny, then 36 and watching her own marriage fall apart, moved decisively. She recognized that Paul Mellon, the widower and heir to one of America’s greatest fortunes, was the most important match in her entire social world.
She and Stacy Lloyd divorced, with sources citing 1946 or 1948. On May 1, 1948, she married Paul Mellon, uniting two great fortunes and two families of children. The marriage lasted until Paul’s death in 1999, a 51-year period that included the building of one of America’s greatest art collections, the design of the Rose Garden, and the slow accumulation of properties, horses, and books that took Sotheby’s nine days to sell. Through this marriage, she became stepmother to Paul’s children from Mary: Timothy Mellon, who later became a reclusive billionaire and major political donor, and Catherine Conover Mellon, who married U.
S. Senator John Warner. She had traded a man who worked in journalism for one of the five richest men in America. The Mellon lineage traced back to Archibald Mellon, who emigrated from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland to Pennsylvania in 1816.
The fortune began with the Bank of Mellon, founded in Pittsburgh in 1869 by Archibald’s grandson, Judge Thomas Mellon. His son, Andrew William Mellon, turned a regional bank into one of the largest privately owned industrial empires in American history. The family became the principal investor and largest owner of Gulf Oil, which later merged into Chevron, and Alcoa, along with large stakes in Westinghouse Electric, H. J.
Heinz, U. S. Steel, General Motors, and Newsweek. Andrew Mellon served as U.
S. Treasury Secretary for 11 years under three presidents, from 1921 to 1932. His greatest legacy was the National Gallery of Art. In 1936, he offered to donate his personal art collection and fund the construction of a museum on the National Mall.
Congress approved in 1937, and the gallery opened on March 17, 1941, a date that would coincidentally be the same calendar date of Bunny Mellon’s death 73 years later. Paul Mellon presented the museum to President Roosevelt on behalf of his father. In 1967, Paul and his sister Ailsa Mellon Bruce funded the East Building designed by I. M.
Pei. Paul and Bunny together donated more than 1,000 works of art to the National Gallery and jointly founded the Yale Center for British Art, a museum built specifically to house Paul’s collection. Bunny shared Paul’s passion for thoroughbred horse racing through his Rokeby Stables. Their horse Mill Reef won both the Epsom Derby and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in 1971.
In 1993, their colt Sea Hero won the Kentucky Derby at 13-1 odds, making Paul Mellon the only owner in history to win the Kentucky Derby, Epsom Derby, and Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. The couple’s marriage operated on the emotional structure particular to old-money unions: affectionate correspondence paired with real distance. They lived largely separate lives but exchanged warm letters. When Paul allegedly fell in love with another woman and asked Bunny for a divorce, she refused.
The couple eventually settled into a cordial arrangement, and Paul spoke of her with respect for the rest of his life. After Paul died in 1999 at age 91, tragedy struck the family. In May 2000, Bunny’s daughter Eliza Lloyd Moore was hit by a truck while crossing a street in Manhattan, suffering severe brain damage that left her paralyzed and unable to speak. Eliza spent the last eight years of her life under round-the-clock care at Oak Spring Farms.
Bunny’s reaction defied her reputation for emotional detachment. She refused to give up on her daughter, bringing Eliza in a wheelchair to meals and often telling her, “Mama loves you. ” Biographers noted the painful irony that the accident occurred just as mother and daughter were beginning to finally grow closer after years of relative distance. This loss left Bunny increasingly isolated.
She was a widow, her daughter had lost the power of speech, and her world had contracted to the walls of a sickroom and the 4,000 acres surrounding it. Biographer Meryl Gordon connected this period of grief directly to what happened next. Bunny fell in love with John Edwards’ message about “two Americas. ” She was caring for a brain-damaged daughter.
Her life had narrowed, and she saw in him a new John Kennedy. Eliza’s funeral in 2008 drew Caroline Kennedy, Jackie’s daughter, who sat beside Bunny through the entire service, closing a circle of friendship spanning half a century, back to that first visit to Oak Spring in 1958. Bunny’s home at Oak Spring was the crown jewel of her properties. The 4,000-acre estate in the Virginia hunting country employed more than 100 people, including 15 arborists alone.
The grounds included a working dairy farm, a building for storing apples grown on the property, a carpentry workshop, and a private fire station with a 1950s fire truck named “Oak Spring 1. ” The estate also had a private mile-long airstrip to accommodate Bunny’s Falcon 2000 jet. Paul gave Bunny what might be considered the most personal gift of their marriage: a library built specifically to hold her growing collection of rare gardening books, designed by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes in 1981. The four-volume published catalog of its contents, compiled by scholars and published by Yale University Press, documents centuries of botanical literature.
In Cape Cod, the family built a compound on a bluff overlooking Nantucket Sound in Osterville, with houses deliberately painted to look weathered, security cameras hidden inside antique birdhouses, and imported sand used to create rolling dunes along the slope. Bunny’s creative headquarters was a separate building called “Dune House,” with sweeping views of Dead Neck Island and Nantucket Sound. Jackie Kennedy spent time there in the years following her departure from the White House. In Antigua, within the exclusive Mill Reef Club, she owned a 27-acre property called “King’s Leap,” with gardens Bunny designed herself.
She listed it for sale at age 101 for $14. 5 million. She also kept a home on East 71st Street in Manhattan and two apartments in Paris. In her final years, she designed another building at Oak Spring: “Memory House,” a private family archive holding favorite objects gathered from her homes around the world.
There was also a building on the property dedicated entirely to her collection of baskets: Shaker baskets, Native American baskets, flower shop baskets, artifacts from around the world. It embodied Bunny’s instinct to see aesthetic value in things most people would overlook. Her closest friendship was with Jacqueline Kennedy. A mutual friend brought young Jackie to Oak Spring for tea in 1958, and Jackie fell in love with the house and its gardens.
They became twin souls, biographers said. As First Lady, Jackie wrote to Bunny, “You hate the spotlight. I was so afraid you would fade away. ” It was a revealing comment, showing Jackie’s vulnerability despite holding the most visible office in the world.
In 1961, President Kennedy personally asked Bunny to redesign the White House Rose Garden. She was initially reluctant, having no formal training. She produced a design that turned a flat stretch of ordinary grass into a functional central space with French-style borders, capable of holding 1,000 people for public ceremonies. She sent Kennedy watercolor renderings on January 24, 1962.
Her design removed existing hedges and introduced American plants, wild apple trees, tulips, primrose, and hyacinth, making the lawn look like a framed painting. Moving magnolia trees into the garden required challenging established institutions. When the National Park Service balked, head gardener Irvin Williams simply moved the trees from the Tidal Basin without permission and brought them to the White House. Jackie Kennedy described Bunny as a genius of visual vision.
After President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, Bunny personally arranged the funeral flowers at Jackie’s request. Lady Bird Johnson asked her to complete the East Garden, later renamed the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. In 1964, Jackie appointed Bunny as her personal representative in designing John Kennedy’s permanent grave at Arlington National Cemetery. Bunny added a softness to the design by architect Jack Warnecke around the eternal flame.
She and jewelry designer Jean Schlumberger secretly created a commemorative sculpture for the gravesite, a wreath-shaped piece inspired by the spontaneous gesture of the honor guard placing their military caps around the eternal flame during the 1963 burial. Robert Kennedy was said to have been so moved that he said the caps should remain until they turned to dust. The sculpture was manufactured but never installed. It disappeared for more than 50 years before being rediscovered in 2024 inside boxes belonging to the Kennedy Library, still bearing traces of what researchers believed was bird droppings from a brief exposure to the air at Oak Spring decades earlier.
Bunny’s design relationship with the Kennedy family continued long after Jackie left the White House. She designed gardens for Jackie’s home in Martha’s Vineyard, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and River Farm, headquarters of the American Horticultural Society. She oversaw details of major Kennedy family ceremonies, including Caroline Kennedy’s wedding in 1986.
The friendship lasted until Jackie’s death in 1994. Bunny’s philosophy, the one she expressed in that rare 1969 New York Times interview, defined her garden design and her entire life. She said nothing should be noticed. The comment was specifically about garden design, about how a well-designed space should look natural and uncontrived.
But journalists, biographers, and friends cited it throughout her life as the truest expression of her worldview. Her close relationships outside Jackie included fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy, who commissioned Bunny to design the gardens of his French château, Manoir de Jonchet. Actor Frank Langella gave her eulogy and wrote about their friendship in his memoir, describing himself as a rough kid from Jersey whom Bunny taught how to listen, how to dress, never to be vulgar, to respect all people, to be modest, to avoid vanity, to write thank-you notes, never to show off, to be curious, and above all, to be loyal. Her perfectionism was domestic and total.
She directed her staff to rearrange fallen apples on the lawn and to remove any broken potato chips when serving at outdoor parties. If she could not control what happened outside her gates, she would control the world inside them. She was a lifelong Democrat, a fact that often put her at odds with her more conservative husband and the broader expectations of her social class. She was sharp-tongued about political figures she disliked, referring to Hillary Clinton dismissively as “the old rag.
” In 1966, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall presented Bunny with a conservation service award, telling her the nation would remain grateful for the talent she gave to the Rose Garden and the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. In 2004, Bunny’s political engagement with John Edwards began when she was drawn to him because he reminded her of President Kennedy. She called his campaign office to offer help, but no one recognized her name and her call was not returned. By 2007, that had changed.
She became one of the largest financiers of Edwards’ second presidential run, committing $1 million initially and ultimately contributing more than $3. 5 million to organizations supporting his candidacy. Biographer Meryl Gordon connected this timeline directly to Bunny’s grief. She fell in love with his message about two Americas.
She was caring for her brain-damaged daughter. Her life had contracted, and she saw in him a new John Kennedy. She was a lonely, isolated, fabulously wealthy woman in her late nineties who found genuine emotional purpose in the political ambition of an attractive younger man at the moment her world had narrowed to the confines of a sickroom. The scandal began with a story about vanity: a news report that Edwards had spent $400 on a single haircut.
At the request of campaign aide Andrew Young, Bunny’s financial commitment shifted from campaign contributions to direct coverage of Edwards’ personal expenses. She wrote to Young, “From now on, all haircuts and anything else necessary and important to his campaign, please send the bills to me. It’s a way to help our friend without government restrictions. ”
Over 8 months beginning in May 2007, she transferred more than $725,000 to accounts benefiting Edwards personally, using checks disguised as furniture and antique purchases to hide their true purpose from her own lawyers.
The money was used to support Rielle Hunter, a video producer with whom Edwards was having an affair and by whom he had a child. Andrew Young, who later became the prosecution’s key witness, testified in detail about the mechanics. Bunny wrote checks in the name of her decorator, one for $100,000, with a note saying the amount was for an antique table. The decorator would endorse the checks to Young’s wife, who deposited them in a personal account under her maiden name.
Edwards instructed Young to describe the payments as non-campaign expenses, which suited his interests, adding that he should not know anything about them in case he took the oath as a prosecutor. When Young first told Edwards that Hunter was pregnant, Edwards called her a crazy whore and claimed the chance he was the father was only one in three. He begged Young to falsely claim paternity, a request Young agreed to, later testifying, “I wanted my friend to become president. ”
Young summarized his discomfort with the arrangement he was facilitating.
“It seemed fishy and not right, but we finally decided he knew the law better than we did. ” The woman who designed the Rose Garden was now funding a cover-up that would end in a federal courtroom. Federal investigators interviewed Bunny twice at Oak Spring in 2010. Federal agents descended on the same estate that had once hosted Jackie Kennedy for tea.
John Edwards was formally indicted on June 3, 2011, on six counts related to campaign finance laws, facing a potential sentence of up to 30 years in prison. Edwards visited Bunny in Upperville just one week before his indictment, after which the presiding judge explicitly barred further contact with potential witnesses. The trial began in April 2012 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Andrew Young was the prosecution’s star witness, testifying over several days about the mechanics of the scheme after receiving immunity in exchange for his cooperation.
Bunny, then 101, did not testify. One legal commentator noted that Young’s testimony showed Bunny wanted nothing in return for her generosity, clarifying that this was not a typical quid pro quo corruption case. In late May 2012, a North Carolina jury acquitted Edwards on one count and deadlocked on the remaining five, prompting the judge to declare a mistrial. In June, the Justice Department announced it would not seek a retrial.
Bunny’s private reaction, once she learned the money had been used to support Edwards’ mistress, was characteristic. Gordon reported, “She never got angry about the money. She enjoyed it. She wanted to elect a liberal progressive Democrat, and she was not at all shocked by Edwards’ affair, which seemed completely natural to her.
” She had been deceived by a politician, and yet she forgave him. She called him on her deathbed. Biographer Gordon drew the sharpest conclusion from her research. “Bunny never got angry about the money.
She enjoyed it. She wanted to elect a liberal progressive Democrat, and she was not at all shocked by Edwards’ folly, which seemed completely natural to her, because she grew up in a world where men had affairs and women adjusted. ”
The woman who insisted on living in obscurity ended her life as tabloid fodder. The scandal’s aftermath followed her to the auction house, because the name that was once synonymous with privacy, gardens, and high fashion had now become, in the public eye, associated with a disgraced politician and a $400 haircut.
The art collection she had amassed over seven decades, which had nothing to do with John Edwards and everything to do with the taste she had refined since childhood, was about to prove that creativity outlasts scandal. The Sotheby’s catalog, when finally assembled, contained more than 1,200 pieces across multiple sessions. Total proceeds, public and private combined, were expected to approach half a billion dollars. While Paul Mellon’s taste leaned toward 18th and 19th-century European and British art, Bunny developed her own distinctive modern taste.
She became an early and serious collector of Mark Rothko, buying works directly from the artist’s New York studio during the 1950s. In a 2010 interview, she said she personally bought 13 Rothkos over her lifetime, including No. 20 “Yellow Expanse,” measuring 10 by 15 feet, one of the largest Rothkos ever in private hands. When she sold three Rothkos to French billionaire François Pinault in 2002 for about $25 million, she imposed a contractual condition requiring them to be displayed permanently in a planned foundation on Île Seguin in Paris.
When Pinault’s plans changed and he resold one of the three paintings for more than double what he had paid for all of them, Bunny felt betrayed. Her grudge against Christie’s, which Pinault owned, helped direct the sale of her estate to Sotheby’s instead. More than 140 pieces from her Schlumberger jewelry collection were donated to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts rather than sold. Her acquisition philosophy was precise and deeply personal.
She wrote, “My book collection, gathered over the years since my childhood, was selected one by one for their unique qualities. ” The same instinct guided her approach to paintings, furniture, and decorative objects. The full scale of what she had collected was not understood until after her death. She kept almost everything and displayed almost nothing.
Sotheby’s specialists cataloging the estate needed 3,000 feet of bubble wrap and more than 500 packing boxes just to process decorative objects and books, working in more than 20 buildings and documenting nearly 4,000 individual pieces. Participants described the experience as discovering a museum no one knew existed. The Van Gogh still life hanging above her bathtub was just one of dozens of discoveries suggesting that Bunny treated her collection as a living domestic environment rather than a display. A Pissarro hung over the living room fireplace without a frame, leaning against the wall like a flea market find.
Antique ceramic vegetables, from cabbages to asparagus to artichokes, covered every surface. A Joseph Cornell assemblage was discovered inside a bathroom cabinet only after her death. A Magritte watercolor appeared in a rarely used bedroom. Her estate lawyer said, “She never threw anything away.
All of her correspondence is here. ” Sotheby’s vice chairman Elise Wittemer described the cataloging process: every book had to be shaken to make sure no drawing or love letter was hidden inside. Separately, she lost $5. 75 million to investment advisor Kenneth “Fine” Starr, who was later convicted of running a Ponzi scheme.
It was a predator who recognized that a woman of Bunny’s age and isolation was the perfect target. In her final years, Bunny was surrounded by people who recognized her wealth and isolation and exploited one to deepen the other. A woman worth hundreds of millions lived alone on a 4,000-acre estate with a hundred employees, her daughter paralyzed upstairs, her husband dead a decade, her closest friend dead 15 years. She was writing checks to a politician who reminded her of a president she had known when the world still made sense to her.
Bunny Mellon died on March 17, 2014, at Oak Spring Farms at age 103. Because she was intensely private and rarely opened her home to visitors, no one knew the full extent of what she left behind. Sotheby’s specialists discovered thousands of pieces in more than 20 buildings. Before the public auction began, the estate quietly sold several of the most valuable paintings, including two Rothkos and a Richard Diebenkorn, in private deals totaling an estimated $250 to $300 million.
As her executor explained, “We have to pay estate taxes in December. ” The executor was Alexander Forger, Bunny’s friend and personal lawyer, who also served as executor for the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. He selected Sotheby’s for that auction too, making him the man who managed the afterlives of the most private and most famous women in American society. The public auction included more than 400 paintings and drawings, including works by Picasso, Seurat, Homer, and Hopper, along with decorative arts, furniture, and jewelry, including Dior handbags with clasps designed by Schlumberger in gold and lapis.
The public auction totaled $158. 7 million, with one Rothko selling for $39. 9 million and another for $36. 5 million.
For comparison, the Sotheby’s auction of Jackie Onassis’ estate in 1996, a highly anticipated event that drew lines of people waiting for hours to glimpse JFK’s golf clubs and Jackie’s 40-carat diamond ring from Aristotle Onassis, brought $34. 4 million, six times its pre-sale estimates. Bunny’s auction surpassed even Jackie’s by nearly five times, and the executor who managed both estates was the same man, Alexander Forger. Family members were allowed to select sentimental pieces before the auction: a Pissarro from her bedroom, her gardening hats from Givenchy, furniture she had designed herself, and a Schlumberger picture frame containing family photographs.
Even the simplest pieces reflected the same refined taste. A set of 27 garden tools, including a wooden pitchfork, watering cans, pruning shears, and a bamboo walking stick concealing a saw, was estimated at $600. A cast metal rabbit figurine was estimated between $1,000 and $1,500. Family survivors included her son, Stacy Barcroft Lloyd III, whose sons, including grandsons Thomas Lloyd and Stacy Lloyd IV, who remembered her as “Grand Bunny,” became key figures in settling her estate.
Her brother Gerard Barnes Lambert Jr. had died in a plane crash in 1947 at age 35. Her sister Lily had died after marrying twice. By her final decade, Bunny had outlived almost everyone in her generation.
She was living almost alone on a 4,000-acre estate in her mid-nineties. As a widow for more than a decade, with her daughter paralyzed upstairs and her closest friend gone 15 years, the hundred staff members caring for the property were the primary humans she encountered daily. Oak Spring Farms was listed for sale at $70 million. The 700-acre core of the estate became the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, which Bunny established to open her library, gardens, and archives to researchers, artists, and the public after her death.
The foundation runs residency programs, including the Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence, named after her late daughter, and collaborates with institutions such as Yale University on environmental journalism. The proceeds were directed to the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation, which Bunny established in memory of her father, the man who decided she was not worth sending to college, and whose advertising wealth funded the life that proved him wrong. Trinity Episcopal Church in Upperville, which the Mellon family gave to the community in 1960, was the site of Bunny’s funeral, and Mellon family members were buried in its cemetery.
At her funeral, singer Bette Midler performed “The Rose,” a fitting echo of the Rose Garden that made Bunny famous. The service was held at Trinity Episcopal Church in Upperville. She was buried wearing the simple academic gown from her honorary degree. The woman who spent 103 years perfecting the art of being invisible left behind a legacy that took years to distribute and whose impact on American cultural philanthropy will last for generations.
The National Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Rose Garden, the Kennedy memorial, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation library, and a foundation bearing her daughter’s name. She never held a job, never ran for office, never sought a public platform. The most famous thing she ever designed, the garden where presidents make their most important public statements, was the work of an amateur who never received a day of formal training. She left no memoirs, gave almost no interviews, and the closest she came to a public philosophy was four words she said once in 1969 to a reporter who caught her in a rare moment of candor.
“Nothing should be noticed,” she said. She meant it about gardens, but she lived by it in everything. The Listerine fortune paid for the gardens, the banking fortune paid for the art, and the woman who arranged both spent a century making sure no one saw her do it. Her father thought she was not worth sending to college, so she spent the next 80 years proving him wrong through gardens, homes, friendships, and a collection of rare books scholars will consult for centuries.
Her husband wanted a divorce, and she refused. A politician reminded her of President Kennedy, so she gave him $3. 5 million. The scandal that followed was the only loud thing she ever did in her life.
She lived to 103, and the garden she designed for the White House has stood for more than 60 years. Every president who stood before it to deliver a televised statement was standing inside the work of a woman who never had a single day of formal training, and most Americans would not recognize her name if they heard it.