I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise by Mac Griswold

Author:Mac Griswold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

A gale force! Bunny in 1960 at the Cape with the journalist Joseph Alsop and young David S. Bruce, son of Evangeline Bruce and Ambassador David K. E. Bruce

On a hot summer day in 1995, Eliza and I drove from her house in Little Compton, Rhode Island, to Osterville, where we found a deeply shaded courtyard set in the bleached shoreline expanse of sandy land, its trees and grasses shaped by the constant winds. The smells, the sounds, and the sights were completely different from those at Oak Spring.

But as Bunny wrote in one of her garden journals, “There is always a mark or repetition in the work of each gardener,” and the same is true of her architecture. The plan that she and Page Cross worked out for a summer playground in New England and a winter escape on Antigua was a system marked by beauty, efficiency, privacy, and attention to detail. Serenity—or at least the appearance of it—was the goal.

The architecture critic Martin Filler, who became friends with Paul Mellon, once asked him how his life had changed over the years. Paul gave a characteristically distant answer, which seems hilarious once you know even a few of the details of Paul’s complicated emotional and business life. He pondered a bit, said Filler, and then disarmingly said, “Well, the nineties have been rather like the eighties…,” paused and continued, “and the eighties were rather like the seventies…,” and so forth.

Bunny was no stranger to New England. Its waterborne landscape had truly come into focus for her when her father chartered a two-masted schooner, the Sonica, and organized a family cruise from New York Harbor up the coast to Christmas Cove in Maine. They entered the tiny circular harbor under full sail, and the captain “rounded up into the wind sharply, slowly coming to a stop,” wrote Gerard B. “Down went the anchor, and only then did the crew lower the sails.” Not long after, in the fall of 1927, he bought the famous three-masted schooner Atlantic.

Sailors mostly enter a harbor under engine power and with one sail up, often just a jib. This particular flourish made a huge impression on Gerard B., who later brought a huge J/Boat into crowded Newport Harbor under full sail in a fog in the same way. Though Bunny wasn’t one for such showy risk-taking, she did pick up her father’s ability to make quick decisions, as well as his delight in presentation and effect.

Her New Hampshire grandparents had summered on the Cape, and Bunny’s mother, Ray, after the divorce from Bunny’s father and her marriage to her former brother-in-law Mal Clopton, also summered there. Ray continued to spend time there as a widow in the 1950s. Bunny and Paul first rented various “cottages” (what we would consider huge homes) on Cape Cod and then in the early 1950s bought twenty-six acres in Oyster Harbors, as the Osterville Grand Island resort community founded in 1929 was dubbed. A sleepy country club for New England’s well-heeled, by 1960 its original membership, mostly Boston Brahmins, had died off.

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