Dropped Names (32 page)

It was there Liza remained with private doctors and full-time nurses continually available. And despite the doctor's gentle protestations that the damage was severe and there was no chance, Bunny never gave up the hope that Liza would recover.

“Frank, I know it,” she would say, “I just know it. She is coming back to us.” It was sadly ironic that Liza's outgoing phone message in her Greenwich Village apartment was: “Hi! I'm gone, but I'll be back!”

She spent eight years in that coma never to return; and died of pneumonia in 2008. “Caroline is my daughter now,” Bunny said, referring of course to Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg.

B
unny's eyesight has begun to fade during this past decade and she has often been in doctors' offices trying every method possible to stall the inevitable and fighting all sorts of old age ailments. But in our phone calls she is always cheerful, positive, and upbeat. “I've just got to get started. I want to build a new office for myself at the farm . . . I have to go up to Nantucket and work on the land . . . spring will be coming and I'm just not
ready
!”

I
n late June of 2009 she called. “Where are you spending the Fourth of July?”

“I'm going to Charleston, South Carolina, to stay with some friends for a few days.”

“Why don't you come to me for the day and then the plane can take you there.”

And as easily as another friend might drop me off in a taxi on their way home, early on the morning of the fourth, Bunny's car arrived to take me to Teterboro Airport; the plane waiting to transport me to Oak Spring.

We touched down on the private airstrip and once again the car drove me toward the house close to fifty years after I had first visited there. The land was gorgeously lush and green with miles and miles of perfect fences, horses in the fields, and the dairy farm pristine and calm. I remembered the long bike rides with Liza over the back country roads, the walks with Bunny and her beagle, Benjamin, every night at dusk. Most of all, the silence and peace of the place; the feeling of luxurious safety. Safety of a kind that only great wealth can assure and protect.

The car brought me up to the house, drove off, and I was left standing in the courtyard once again. A low stone wall surrounding a patio of irregular stones, weeds allowed to sprout at just the right height meandering between them, plants and flowers casually growing on the grounds. All placed there in a fashion as if to say: Mother Nature stopped by, did this, and left. I walked through the courtyard to the front door, finding it open, as always.

In the foyer, straw hats hung on hooks. Baskets under tables, a long wooden bench piled high with large books, the day's newspapers, and a folded brown blanket embroidered with the letters P.M.

“Paul and I wanted a cozy house,” she told me when I first visited. “We both grew up in big, cold houses, and hated it, so we built this.” And indeed, Oak Spring Farms is a civilized, understated, modest environment. Again, the kind of modest only great wealth can engender. And again, nothing designed to be noticed. Nothing that says, “Look at how I decorated this. Look at my statement.”

On a desk by the window in the large living room sat a picture of Jackie falling off a horse as it leapt over a fence. Next to it a photo of Caroline and John-John as children. On another table, a photograph of Paul and Bunny with the Queen Mother at the Epson Derby in 1972 when Paul's horse Mill Reef won the race. When that photograph was taken I was standing just a few feet off camera, thirty-four years old in a green, inappropriate-to-the-occasion Cerutti suit.

“Harry, is it really you?” came the familiar cultured voice from the bottom of the stairs. I went out to the hall to greet and embrace her.

“Hi Mertz.”

Sometime in the late sixties, I had nicknamed Bunny Myrtle and Liza Mabel one day when they returned from a shopping spree in New York, pretending to be a couple of secretaries. Bunny turned and said, “If I'm Myrtle and Liza's Mabel then you're Harry.” The nicknames stuck and we have called each other by those names ever since.

Nancy Collins, a tall, lovely young woman, Bunny's fulltime nurse, had accompanied her downstairs and we all moved slowly back into the living room. Maria, one of the kitchen staff, brought in her famous iced tea, which tasted as delicious as ever, and John, another of the staff, came in to announce luncheon. Nancy left us and we went into the dining room and sat down to a traditional Fourth of July meal at the Mellon farm: Salmon with dill sauce and parsley, peas, asparagus with hollandaise, and strawberry shortcake for dessert. At each of our settings a small silver dish with three After-Eight thin mints resting on them.

As has become our habit in the last year or so, we began to reminisce. “Remember the day I found you and Jackie sitting on the floor at the Cape house with all that jewelry?” I said.

“Oh yes! Jackie was trying to decide whether or not to marry Ari. If she hadn't, she'd have sent it all back. It didn't much mean anything to her anyway. She was a good girl. You know how we became friends? She called me when Jack was a senator and said: ‘Will you help me, Mrs. Mellon? I don't know a lot.' And that was it. We never had a cross word till the day she died. One afternoon she rang and said: ‘I have awful news. Jack is going to run for president.' She knew all about the women, of course, but she stuck, and decided she was going to do a good job. I thought she did. She was a wonderful First Lady. I remember one day at the White House when I was redesigning the Rose Garden for Jackie and the President, we were waiting for an elevator. When it came, I stepped back to let her go in first.

“ ‘What are you doing?' she said.

“ ‘Well, you're the First Lady.'

“ ‘Stop that nonsense! Get in!' ”

We moved into the living room for coffee and she fell silent. After a while, she said: “Harry, I've been such a lump lately. I've got to get
started
. Let's go for a ride and then to my library.” I got up from the couch, and took her hand. As she stood up, she said, “I'm feeling a little weird, I think maybe I got up too fast.” She sat back down and said, “Would you ask Nancy to come in here, please? Oh, and why don't you go into the kitchen and say hello to everybody. They'll be happy to see you.”

I knew she wanted to recover from her dizzy spell privately, so I left and found Nancy, who went in to sit with her. When I walked back into the kitchen, there were Maria and John and Stanley and all the others. Three generations of black families who had worked for the Mellon family most of their lives, some since childhood, smiling and laughing and embracing me as they talked of their families, their children, and their great-grandchildren. And their love and respect for Bunny was palpable.

“Mrs. Mellon paid to fix all the teeth of the children at the village in Antigua.”

“Mrs. Mellon built the Trinity Church here in Upperville, where everyone can worship.”

“Mrs. Mellon gave the dock and the land around it at the Cape house to Eddie Crosby, who's been looking after the boats all these years.”

I left them, collected Bunny, and we went out to the courtyard.

“The keys should be in the ignition,” she said, “let's go for a ride.”

The two of us moved through her world slowly, stopping by the dairy, lingering at the pool, ending up at the private library she had built on the property, where I unlocked the door and stepped into a magical kingdom. Her library is an extraordinary testament to all things horticultural. “I'm a gardener, Frank,” she said, “that's what I do.” And her gardens are indeed breathtaking places to be. Even the bees and the butterflies who inhabit them seem bigger, better, and happier.

I sat her down on a large white couch beneath a giant yellow Mark Rothko painting.

“That may be the biggest Rothko I've ever seen,” I said.

“Maybe it is. It was lying on the floor with lots of others in a studio in New York. I'd just been to the doctor's and I went over to have a look. I called Paul and told him we had to have them; that we could get thirteen of them all for under five hundred thousand dollars. ‘That's cheap,' he said. And it was in 1971, so we bought them. Have a look around, Harry, I'm going to close my eyes for a few moments.”

I walked through the library opening shutters and drawers and looking on the walls. From every window were views of Bunny's glorious handiwork. On every surface magnificent, priceless, ancient books on botany and horticulture, and on the walls still more beautiful paintings. It would soon be time for me to take the plane on to South Carolina so I went over and sat next to her on the couch. As she slept, her head lolling back on a small soft pillow, I watched her breathing; something she needed to keep on doing only a scant thirty-five days more in order to wake up alive on her one-hundredth birthday.

I put my hand on her shoulder.

“Mertz?”

She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Oh, Harry. Isn't it peaceful here?”

“Yes. Thanks to you.”

“Oh no! Thanks to great artists and Mother Nature. I just appreciate.”

I closed the shutters, turned off the lights, locked the door, and we drove back to the main house. As we got out of the car, I said, “Let's take a picture.”

We stood by the front door and as she leaned in against my shoulder I held the camera at arm's length and snapped us.

“Oh I didn't fix my hair,” she said, neatening and tidying it as she spoke. “Take another one.”

I did, then turned and embraced her. As I kissed her good-bye she said:

“What do you look like these days?”

“Oh, I'm still six-foot-three and still have a full head of dark brown hair, weigh about 180 pounds, can run as fast as I ever could, and get just about anyone I want into bed.”

She laughed and said:

“Well, I'm ninety-nine years old now, Harry, and that's
it
. Next birthday, ninety-
eight
.”

Nancy came out to help her back to the house, but Bunny wanted to see me off and stood waving good-bye until the car was down the driveway. And staring from the back window I watched her, nearly blind, continue to wave good-bye to a guest she could not see.

J
ackie Onassis, Bunny's best friend, died in 1994. Paul Mellon, her husband of fifty-one years, followed in 1999. Liza, her only daughter, left her in 2008, and Robert Isabell, a high-end party planner who had become her constant and devoted friend in her later years, passed away only four days after our Fourth of July visit in 2009. He is buried near the Mellon farm in a tiny Civil War cemetery. Paul and Liza rest in the private family plot at Trinity Church in Upperville, where Bunny has allocated a spot next to them.

For my sake, I hope this extraordinary woman stays on the planet for as long as she can bear to. When she does finally leave us, she will do it surrounded by the people she most loves, and who most deeply love her. And she will, I'm certain, pass away in the manner in which she preferred to live her life, calling little attention to herself and steadfastly adhering to her maxim: “Nothing should be noticed.”

I
t would be impossible to relate here all the many lessons Bunny Mellon taught me during the fifty years I have known her, but perhaps most prescient, as relates to the subjects of this book, including myself, is a piece of advice she gave me when, at twenty-four years old, I asked her:

“What should I do when I meet a famous person?”

“Oh Frank,” she said, “don't think too much about famous people. They already think too much about themselves.”

AFTERWORD

W
alking up Madison Avenue one afternoon in 1980, passing by Frank Campbell's funeral home on the northwest corner of 81st Street, I saw coming out of the door my old friend Peter Witt, a theatrical agent, blowing his nose.

“Hello, Peter.”

“Hello, Frank, “ he said, wiping his eyes. “We lost another one.”

“Who died?”

He told me the name of a renowned Broadway star whom he had represented for many years.

“He was such a wonderful actor,” I said.

“Yes, he was. Wonderful!”

“I'm so sorry I never met him.”

“Ach!” he said. “You didn't miss much.”

S
o before the next name to drop is mine, and the reviews start coming in, I'd like to take back Center Stage for a moment. A position closer to my nature than the supporting role I have elected to play here.

A good deal of my actor's life has consisted of packing and unpacking suitcases, playing house in hotel rooms around the world, joining happy and unhappy families for finite periods, serially embracing temporary partners, and indulging passions that flared and fizzled with predictable frequency.

Representatives came and went; as did my successes, missteps, miscalculations, and outright failures. Concurrently, I dropped anchor after anchor along the way: marriages, children, multiple residences, mortgages, family obligations, and close circles of friends. All entered into with fierce commitment.

Racing for that bus to New York in 1953 was not only my adolescent effort to escape a geographical prison, nor was it to answer the call first sounded by happenstance in the wings of my grammar school auditorium. It was, unknown to me at the time, to quiet a panic soundlessly pounding inside an unsettled baby, arms up, yearning to be held, crying out for recognition and validation. I embarked on that maiden voyage anxious to stay in flight as long as I could. And the wilderness in which I wandered as a young boy, believing myself forever lost, never to reach a destination, I have now come to feel is precisely the place to be. There is no lasting comfort, it seems to me, in the safe landing. Better to stay in flight, take the next bus, relinquish control, trust in happenstance, and embrace impermanence.

If fame is indeed fleeting, then so are titles, awards, wealth, position, youth, beauty, and sexual pleasure. So are contentment and happiness. So are pain and suffering.

The finish line, after all, is inevitable. Like the subjects of this book, each of us will live on only in memory. With that in mind, perhaps the best way to navigate the split-second start-to-finish race might be to heed the words of George Bernard Shaw (the last name dropped herein) who wrote:

Life has a way of slipping through your fingers.

But, if you stick to your soul, it will stick to you.

Not a bad piece of advice. And you don't even have to be famous to follow it.

FL