A Portrait of the Donor

By Gerald Clarke

For a connoisseur, living well can also be a work of art

Just before Christmas, Paul Mellon always sits down and names the foals that are scheduled to be born after New Year's at his Virginia estate. It is a larger task than it sounds: there are usually a score or so, and Mellon is not likely to give them naglike names -Dobbin, or Betsy or Mary Sue. Nor, being the aristocrat he is, is he likely to call them anything that sounds vulgar or, God forbid, flashy. No A.J.'s Poppa or Nudie will ever bear the gray and yellow silks of Rokeby Stables. Instead, Mellon chooses names that are close to heart, and a list of his horses shows the dimensions of the man.

There are Long Wharf, Hillhouse High, Arts and Letters, and Quadrangle, all of which stand for New Haven and Yale, from which he graduated in 1929 and to which he has given more than $40 million in cash. Then there are Christopher Wren, Debrett, King's Parade, Land's End, Tower of London. They represent England and the dignified 18th century values treasured most by Mellon, who was made an honorary Knight of the British Empire in 1974. Literature, another Mellon love, gallops as Knight's Tale, Winter's Tale, Canterbury Tale and Love for Love; and geography, the places Mellon owns, shows up in horses like the famous Mill Reef, named for a landmark near the Mellon house on Antigua in the West Indies. There is even a touch of the Mellon humor and a possible title to this inadvertent autobiography in a stallion named Key to the Mint. Because if anybody has it -the key to the mint, that is -it is Paul Mellon.

There are richer men in the U.S., but Mellon's wealth is nonetheless so vast as to be scarcely understandable in ordinary terms. The value of his stocks, bonds and other measurable holdings -particularly in family-dominated companies such as Gulf Oil, Alcoa and Koppers -is probably well over $400 million. But there is no way of putting a figure on his other possessions: the 4,000-acre estate in Virginia, the retreats on Antigua and Cape Cod, the town houses in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., the stables of racing horses in the U.S. and Britain or the hundreds of English and French art masterpieces that he has yet to give away.

Like two other names now carved in marble, Carnegie and Frick, the Mellons began their rise amid the soot and grime of Pittsburgh. Born on a farm in Ireland, Paul's grandfather, Thomas, broke away from both the homeland and the land itself to become a lawyer, judge, banker and father of eight children. In the post-Civil War era the Mellons gained control of most of what was worth owning in Pittsburgh, which was a fair part of what was worth owning in industrial America.*

Andrew, or A.W. as he was referred to, was the shrewdest of Thomas' sons. Dry and reserved, with no interests outside his business, he lived with his parents until he was 45. Only in middle age did he wake to the joys of life in the comely person of Nora McMullen, the high-spirited 20-year-old daughter of an English brewer, whom he married in 1900.

The marriage started badly, however, and Nora, whose eyes were accustomed to the gentle green of Hertfordshire, blinked hard when the honeymoon train stopped at Pittsburgh. "We don't get off here, do we?" she asked plaintively. She was equally unimpressed with the dark, gloomy house on Forbes Avenue where their first child, Ailsa, was born the following summer; Paul followed six years later. In 1909 Nora, still unhappy, sued for divorce. The contest was long and bitter, but Nora eventually won her terms, and Paul and Ailsa divided their time between mother and father.

Although he was the more dutiful of the parents, Andrew was as unsuited to being a father as he was to being a husband; his chief instrument of affection was a gift of money. An august, powerful figure who served as Secretary of the Treasury under three Presidents (1921-32), he became ever more remote. Paul Mellon once talked about his father's "ice-water smile," and in his senior year wrote a story for the Yale Literary Magazine about a businessman father who cannot understand the artistic aspirations of his son. "'You'll soon forget these fantasies floating in the back of your mind . . . and come down to earth,' the old man says kindly. 'You'll be living from now on, not studying, or scribbling, or dabbling in paints.' "

Paul never did come down to earth, not at least in the way his father hoped. After his father died in 1937, Paul retreated from active involvement in the family businesses, which were now among the largest in the country. He moved away from Pittsburgh and hired managers to oversee his interests there. "I never really could get my teeth into [business]," he told TIME Senior Correspondent Ruth Galvin. "There were so many different kinds of problems in each company that it would have taken a lifetime to get to the bottom of them. And the fact is that it just didn't interest me."

His first wife Mary, who was "about as enchanting a person as you could imagine," says Family Friend John Barrett, encouraged his search for another way of life. Afflicted with asthma, which she thought had a psychological origin, she persuaded Paul to take her to Switzerland and to Psychiatrist Carl Jung. "I think that Jung was more of a philosopher than a physician," says Mellon. "I have always felt that his ideas were very intellectual and a little bit separated from life." Although Jung did not permanently cure Mary's asthma, Paul was nevertheless impressed enough to name a foundation after Bollingen, Jung's retreat at the Lake of Zurich. The foundation subsidized the publication of Jung's books and other scholarly works.

In 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, Mellon enlisted in the Army as a private. Combining his love of horses with an almost storybook romanticism, he joined the cavalry; but instead of charging, sword drawn, into the jaws of death, he found himself teaching riding to recruits. Eventually he landed in the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, and, elevated to major, directed the dropping of agents all over Europe. He was later awarded four Bronze Stars. In 1945 he came home to Mary, their two children, Catherine, 9, and Timothy, 3, and a relaxed life of horses and pleasant conversation. After one fox hunt in the fall of 1946, however, Mary, who was in fact allergic to horses, suffered a violent asthmatic attack. Her heart strained beyond endurance, she died before nightfall.

During the war Paul had shared a flat in London with Stacy Lloyd, one of his Virginia neighbors, and Lloyd's wife, Rachel, had been a friend of Mary's. After Mary's death, Rachel, who goes by the nickname Bunny, divorced Lloyd and in 1948 married Paul. He has since settled trust funds on her two children and given them chunks of his Virginia acreage. His son, Timothy, a computer expert and small businessman, has chosen to live simply in Guilford, Conn. His daughter, Cathy Carrithers, who was divorced from John Warner, now Elizabeth Taylor's husband, lives with her second husband on a ranch in Colorado.

Described as "a serious Billie Burke" by one of her friends, Author Truman Capote, Bunny is a woman of great, if somewhat eccentric style and a brilliant landscapist. At the request of another friend, Jacqueline Kennedy, Bunny redesigned the White House gardens; her own gardens in Virginia look like an impressionist painting.

Bunny is the one who makes everything in the Mellon domestic world seem so effortlessly perfect. "The job that Paul has given me is to set the stage for the life he moves in," she says. But for fear that perfection would itself be an imperfection, Bunny carries with her a pair of scissors, notes Capote. "When things are looking a little too neat, she takes a little snip out of a chair or something so that it will have that lived-in look."

Like many other couples of unlimited means, the Mellons are apart as often as they are together. Bunny spends much of her time in Paris. When Paul inexplicably refused to buy her an apartment there, she bought it herself. When he goes to Paris, he stays at a hotel. There are other hints that the Mellon marriage falls short of the middle-class ideal of togetherness. "If I were describing him in a nutshell," she says, "I would say that he is very sensitive -and totally insensitive. He says things sometimes that are really extraordinarily touching. But you could not describe him as a highly sensitive, emotional man. He stays very remote." She adds, somewhat enigmatically, that Paul is "a Jekyll and Hyde."

Though Bunny will not say precisely what constitutes Paul's Hyde-like side, she will say that whatever she does not like about him she attributes to the influence of Stoddard Stevens, an 86-year-old Wall Street lawyer who is still Paul's chief financial adviser. "Stoddard Stevens took away a good deal of the poetry from my husband's life," Bunny says. "He came along when my husband needed a father figure, and that's what he got."

Outspoken as Bunny is, there is no indication that their marriage, on its own terms, is anything less than happy. "Paul and I both share a way of life," she says. "People think that if you have lots of money, you miss all the good things. But I guess we've got our cake, and eat it too." Paul calls Virginia home, and on weekends he rides as much as he can. Last month, riding on a mount called Christmas Goose, he won, for the fourth year, Virginia's famous 100-mile ride, a three-day exercise that is meant to test the endurance of the horse as much as the ability of the rider. As a result of all his exercise, Paul, at 5 ft. 10 in., is still fit and slim at 70.

In the winter he spends a short time in Antigua, and in the summer he takes a month or so on Cape Cod. The rest of the time is divided between his homes in Manhattan and Washington, where he works at being president of the National Gallery. He employs three pilots to fly his Gulfstream jet so that one will always be available. During the summer he will often swim at Cape Cod in the morning, fly to Saratoga to watch the races and have lunch, and be back on the Cape for another swim in the late afternoon. What nature has not provided, money has. Perfect in every other respect, the Cape Cod house at Oyster Harbors was lacking in scenic sand dunes. The solution? Import 2,000 tons of sand. Everything, however, is done with a lack of ostentation. In Virginia Paul has provided his horse breeder with a house that looks more impressive than his own.

"One of the main things money provides is privacy," Paul says, and everyone talks, as Bunny does, of his imperial remoteness. "The people who are fond of Paul are much fonder of him than he is of them," says one of his closest friends sadly. A poem he wrote 50 years ago in the Yale Lit offers perhaps the best clue to his character:

I built a temple in my inmost mind

Of pure white marble, its stern

symmetry

Became the symbol of tranquility

How calm it was, and peace, and

no wind

Ever disturbed its stillness ...

His goal has been a search for that tranquil temple. He seems to have found it. "Bernard Berenson spoke of 'living life as a work of art,'" says director of the National Gallery. "Paul Mellon comes as close as anyone I've ever known to doing that."

* Two new books recount the family history: The Mellon Family by Burton Hersh (Morrow) and The Mellons by David E. Koskoff (Crowell).

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