“Bunny Mellon’s Majestically Contradictory Style”
— Rachel Tashjian, fashion news director for Harper’s Bazaar
The story of Bunny Mellon, the great landscape and interior designer, becomes a revelatory exploration of extreme wealth in the American century.
In I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Mac Griswold—who knew Bunny Mellon personally—delves into her subject’s closely-guarded personal archives to construct an unrivaled portrait of a woman as complex and multifaceted as the gardens and homes on which she left her mark. This book explores the tension between Mellon’s idea of herself as a “poor little rich girl” and her own enterprising spirit. Mellon tested the anodyne 1950s model of woman-as-wife-as-mother by getting a divorce, admitting candidly to her first husband that she wanted a richer one. She imperiously traded old friends for new, and ultimately used her reputation, her connections, and above all her money to help fund John Edwards’s short-lived presidential campaign. She led an American version of a royal court that, over the years, included Jackie Kennedy, Hubert de Givenchy, and I.M. Pei.
How Mellon’s character, style, and taste developed together to produce her greatest accomplishments—private and public—is the real subject of this biography.
