Bunny Mellon by Meryl Gordon

Author:Meryl Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2017-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

The arrangements were perfect. With Bunny, every party was always seamlessly organized. But as morning dawned on the wedding day, May 14, a last-minute and very unexpected problem developed.

Eliza did not want to go ahead with the ceremony.

She told her mother that she was having second thoughts. As the sky clouded over and a rainstorm swept in, Eliza voiced her doubts. A young woman who loved her mother deeply but rebelled at Bunny’s controlling persona, Eliza yearned for a way out of what she believed would be a mistake. She begged her mother to call it off.

Bunny did not want to hear these words. She was convinced that Eliza was just having the jitters. Later in life, Bunny told her friend Bryan Huffman that she deeply regretted insisting that Eliza go ahead with the ceremony. “She’d get this faraway look in her eye and say, ‘Really, it was a mistake. But there were all those people out there, hundreds of guests.’” Huffman added, “Bunny wasn’t coaxing Eliza, it was, ‘You will go through it, there’s no backing out.’”

The bride arrived ten minutes late to her own 4 p.m. wedding, and twelve minutes later, the deed was done. Newspapers carried glowing accounts of the fairy-tale wedding. CEREMONY IS LIKE A GAINSBOROUGH PORTRAIT, gushed the Washington Post, noting that Paul Mellon was rumored to have given the bride a $2 million wedding gift.

“Millionaire sportsman Paul Mellon, who possesses one of the finest collections of British art in this country, added a new British portrait to his family gallery when he married his step-daughter, Eliza Lloyd, to Henry Dermot, Viscount Moore,” the Post reported, noting that young John Kennedy Jr. was clad in white knickers, white shoes and stockings, and a bolero jacket for the ceremony.

Eliza gave her marriage a try. She and Derry spent time in Paris and then Los Angeles, but called it quits after three years. Paul Mellon’s lawyers handled the financial negotiations. Once the divorce came through, Paul wrote an epitaph to his earlier wedding eve poem, lamenting the expense incurred by the breakup. He wrote that the British viscount had seemed “nice,” but that his love had come at a “fancy price.”

Bunny continued to address her letters to “Lady Moore” as if she could not get over the loss of the title, much to Eliza’s chagrin.

For Eliza, the divorce represented freedom from the life that had been expected of her and that she had discovered she didn’t want. Her desires went in a different direction. She was gay. Now she could pursue romantic relationships with women. But it would be a long time before she was ready to introduce a female companion to her mother.

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