I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise: A Life of Bunny Mellon
(By Mac Griswold)
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| Author | Mac Griswold |
Bunny Mellon, whose life was marked by astonishing good fortune as well as tragedy and scandal, remains a singular figure in the annals of American design. The wife of Paul Mellon, one of the wealthiest men of his era, she traveled in the most rarefied circles. A close friend of the Kennedy family, she made the White House Rose Garden into the internationally famous backdrop it is today, and was later called upon to landscape the John F. Kennedy gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. Her Virginia estate, Oak Spring Farm, remains one of the triumphs of American horticulture and the fullest flowering of Mellon’s creative vision—boasting acre after acre of gardens bearing her distinctive imprint, as well as thousands of books testifying to her lifelong passion for plants. As an interior designer, she spread her breathtaking elegance across eight different homes, staffed by as many as 350 employees. A daring and visionary art collector, she donated hundreds of impressionist paintings to the National Gallery of Art while also championing the likes of Mark Rothko, from whose studio she snapped up numerous works before he was known. She also championed John Edwards in his bid for vice president, but that is a story tainted with scandal.
Behind Mellon’s larger-than-life—but unfailingly reserved—persona, however, was the individual known only to her closest companions, among them Jackie Kennedy, Hubert de Givenchy, and Cristóbal Balenciaga. She was a woman defined not only by an aura of loneliness and imperiousness but also by the startling speed with which she could enter into friendships or drop them. I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise is the most detailed treatment yet of Mellon’s extraordinary life and legacy, and establishes her as a critical link between the traditions of the past and the evolution of American sensibilities during the latter half of the twentieth century. With this book, Mac Griswold—a close friend of Mellon’s for many years—sheds new light on a figure as mesmerizing as the gardens and homes on which she left her mark.”
