Is bunny mellon still living
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The Incredible Life Of 101-Year-Old Banking Heiress Bunny Mellon
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At 101, Rachel Lowe Lambert Mellon, better known as Bunny Mellon, has lived most of her life outside the spotlight.
That's pretty impressive for the widow of banking legend Paul Mellon, whose net worth is an estimated $400 million.
But Mellon has been forced into the spotlight in recent years, not for her philanthropic work but in connection with two headline-making scandals.
In 2011 she lost an estimated $5.75 million in Kenneth Starr's $59 million Ponzi scheme. And she's become a figure in the ongoing John Edwards trial over a $725,000 campaign donation that he allegedly used to pay off his mistress, Rielle Hunter.
The New York Times' Guy Trebay had a fascinating profile of Mellon in last weekend'sNew York Times. The whole piece is worth a read, but we've pulled some of the more fascinating facts about the he
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Throughout the biography, you ascribe a variety of dictums or defining statements to Bunny. If you had to pick just one to capture her approach to life and design, what would it be and why?
Two spring to mind: “Never look back”—this from the least self-analytical woman ever—and “I know what I want to get done,” something that allowed her to cut through the mass of choices life gave her, for good and for bad.
Bunny’s “Three Musketeers” were far more dashing than those that Dumas wrote about. Can you talk about the relationship she had with Cristóbal Balenciaga, Hubert de Givenchy, and Jean Schlumberger?
Her relationship with Balenciaga was reverential; with Schlumberger, romantic; with Givenchy, she wavered between wanting more of the man’s heart, soul, and body and taking him as what he truly was: her best friend.
Because of her extreme modesty, a lot of people don’t know about Bunny’s contributions to interior and horticultural design. What do you want people to take away from this book?
Bunny was hampered by being born in 1910, when women of her class, for the most pa
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Rachel Lambert Mellon
Known as Bunny and born to a wealthy family, Mellon attended Miss Fine’s School in Princeton, New Jersey, and Foxcroft School (a girls’ preparatory school) in Middleburg, Virginia. Although she received no formal training in horticulture, it proved a lifelong avocation. Inspired by the work of Andre Le Nôtre and modern artists such as Piet Mondrian, the hallmark of Mellon’s gardens was her eye for detail, both in the plantings and the construction. At the request of Jacqueline Kennedy (to whom she was a confidant), and working with landscape architect Perry Wheeler, she redesigned the White House Rose Garden in 1961, and also worked on the White House East Garden (dedicated as the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden in 1965). She designed plantings for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, collaborating with the firm Kiley, Tyndall, Walker, and architect I.M. Pei. Her planting design can also be seen at the President John F. Kennedy Gravesite. One of her most significant designs was that for her own private garden at her 4000-acre estate, O
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