The young Paul Mellon wanted for nothing. The child of one of America’s
richest industrialists, he rode his own pony, attended the best private
schools, and his every whim was indulged by a retinue of servants. In the
booming 19th-century steel town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his
father, Andrew, was making his millions, he led a charmed life. On Sundays,
his hair neatly parted and slicked down, he wore a sailor suit and was
driven to church with his mother and sister in a carriage and four. God was
in his heaven, the fabulously wealthy Mellons dominated polite society, and
life was good. What, in this blessed existence, could ever go wrong?
At night, however, as he heard the warring words of his parents and witnessed
the disintegration of their doomed relationship, the young Mellon would pull
up the covers over his head and will himself into oblivion. It was then, as
the reality of his parents’ miserable marriage hit home, that he realised
his protected, privileged life was far from idyllic. Later, when he came to
write his memoirs, he revealed that as a child he believed that the term
“millionaire”, as spat out by his mother at his father, referred to some
unspeakable perversion.
The story of the Mellons and their millions is a bittersweet one of love and
betrayal, rivalry and reconciliation. It made regular column inches for
newspapers – just as the antics of their descendants, the hugely wealthy and
newly divorced Matthew and Tamara Mellon, do today. In the early years of
the last century the divorce of Paul’s parents was the most acrimonious of
the day. His father, Andrew, was a remote, dour figure who regarded his son
as something of a dilettante and a disappointment. The result of that
Oedipal drama, as played out against a backdrop of hundreds of millions of
dollars, was an enthralling family saga worthy of the pen of Henry James or
Edith Wharton. The American public lapped it up, following it like a strip
cartoon. The story would run and run for decades.
Despite his best efforts to spend his father’s fortune, Paul Mellon was born
rich and died rich. Between his birth in June 1907 and his death, at the age
of 91, in 1999, his life was one long supermarket sweep. He belonged to a
generation of plutocrats such as the Carnegies, the Gettys and the Fricks,
who were dubbed the “robber barons”. Along with Westinghouse and Heinz,
these families helped make the United States into the greatest
wealth-generating economy in the world during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Making their money from steel, oil and coal among other heavy
industries, these coke-and-smoke dynasties amassed huge fortunes. Paul,
whose mother was English, turned his back on his grimy home town and became
what he called a “galloping Anglophile”. He used his wealth to indulge the
two enduring passions of his life, painting and England, creating one of the
largest collections of British art in the world. In the second half of the
20th century, as he acquired books by Chaucer and Blake and paintings by
Reynolds and Turner, he became the greatest art collector in the world.
For Paul, collecting was much more than a passion. It brought him solace,
sanity and a sense of purpose. As Coco Chanel once said of the very rich,
“Wealth on this scale is not a privilege, it is a catastrophe.” An advocate
of psychoanalysis, Paul befriended Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, later
spending many years in Jungian therapy. We cannot know what demons were
discharged during those sessions, but we do know that he came to regard art
as his salvation. Today, at least in California, the children of tycoons can
attend “wealth counselling” workshops, learning how to cope with the
psychological burden of billions. But Mellon Jr had no such help and, like
Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth’s heiress, and Randolph Hearst, the publishing
heir, he had to grow up as part of a dynasty, bearing the full weight of his
father’s expectations on his shoulders. And when he could not meet them,
life became increasingly fraught. Art became the only way in which he could
forge his own identity; it redeemed him. So, along with Henry Clay Frick,
who left the city of New York his collection, and John Paul Getty, who
endowed museums in California, Paul Mellon became the last of the big
spenders. Today’s tycoons – Bill Gates, Roman Abramovich and Lakshmi Mittal,
for instance – do not collect art on such a scale.
Yet Paul Mellon thought his own efforts in the saleroom were modest. “I think
I can truthfully say that I have not collected in order to hoard,” he once
wrote. Was he delusional? When this modern-day Medici died, he left no fewer
than 1,900 paintings, 250 pieces of sculpture, 50,000 prints and drawings
and 35,000 books to his alma mater, Yale. These masterpieces, the greatest
hits of Britain, now form the largest collection of British art outside
Europe. Not only that: he endowed the Yale Center for British Art in New
Haven, Connecticut, where his collection is housed, with funds to keep on
buying. To commemorate the centenary of his birth, the greatest hits of the
greatest hits – some 150 exhibits – are now on show at the Royal Academy in
London. Many of the treasures will not have been seen in Britain for
decades. There will be a map that Sir Francis Drake used to circumnavigate
the globe which dates from 1587 and an early edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales printed by Caxton. There will be 18th- century pin-ups, those
desirable actresses painted by Reynolds, and just as desirable racehorses by
Stubbs. There will be Turner’s marine masterpiece, Dordrecht, not seen in
Britain since 1953, and Constable’s cloud studies, painted quickly on
Hampstead Heath while his wife lay dying of tuberculosis in the house on the
hill he was renting for her health. Nobody will be the least surprised if
the queues for the exhibition snake around the block.
To understand something of who Paul Mellon was and why he felt the way he did,
particularly about his father, Andrew, we must take a look at his immediate
family. So painful was Andrew’s personal life that his biographer, Professor
David Cannadine, likes to call it a “Gothic horror show”. Famously stern and
reserved, Andrew was descended from Scots-Irish farmers who had left Ulster
in the early 19th century and settled in Pennsylvania. His father, Thomas, a
His father, Thomas, a lawyer, started up the bank in Pittsburgh, and Andrew
went to work in it along with his brothers in 1873. Solitary and shrewd, he
invested wisely in coal, steel and petrochemicals and became a venture
capitalist, turning what was a small country bank into a huge financial
success. He worked all the time, rising early to go to the bank and leaving
late at night. Cannadine, who spent more than a decade researching the
Mellons, says that he showed little evidence of any inner life. “If Andrew
Mellon had got religion, he wouldn’t have even told God about it,” he says.
The graft paid off. By 1914, when he was 59 years old, Andrew was worth $100m
and the richest man in America. By 1930 he was worth 140m, eventually
peaking at an estimated $400m.
The whole of Pittsburgh believed that he would remain a bachelor all his life.
But at the age of 49, he became engaged to an English girl half his age,
Nora McMullen, whom he had met on the boat to Europe. On their marriage in
1900 it soon became apparent how ill-suited they were. She was extrovert,
pretty, vivacious and not yet 20. Nora, who had grown up in rural
Hertfordshire riding to hounds, loathed Pittsburgh on sight. “You don’t mean
we’re going to live here?” she blurted out when she first saw its belching
chimneys. The house the new Mrs Mellon moved into looked like something
Herman Munster would have lived in, and the air was so dirty that she could
not bear to open the windows. Not for nothing was the city known as “Hell
with the lid taken off”. Cannadine describes it as a “nexus of soot, wealth
and Presbyterian primness”. Her new in-laws weren’t any better. They were
once described
as a family with “a grim imperative to acquire”. Nora was determined to get out
of this hell, despite the appearance of a daughter, Ailsa. Within 12 months
of the marriage she had met an Englishman, Alfred Curphey, almost certainly
during a voyage back home. He came to Pittsburgh, where she quickly fell
under his spell. Mellon, busy with books and balance sheets, took a long
time to find out about this infidelity. He was now miserable and a cuckold
to boot. But Curphey, a man on the make and a character straight out of a
Victorian melodrama, was more interested in the Mellon moolah than in Nora.
He blackmailed Andrew, managing to extract an astonishing £20,000 from him,
with the promise that he would start a new life elsewhere. He kept his word
and did disappear – for a while. “Andrew could judge men and business, but
not women and love,” adds Cannadine.
Paul was the product of Andrew and Nora’s brief reconciliation. It did not
last. Curphey came back on the scene and the marriage collapsed. The Mellon
divorce, on the grounds of her desertion, was the talk of society. Nora gave
an interview to a local newspaper, portraying her husband as an insensitive
brute, a moneymaking automaton. Andrew was awarded custody of the two
children for most of the year. The divorce proceedings alone cost him more
than £2m in today’s money. And what it cost him – and his children – in
emotional terms is ncalculable. His one attempt at intimacy had ended in
failure. The only women who would now be faithful to him were the ones he
could buy on canvas. Over the next few years he began collecting, acquiring
Old Masters and full-length portraits of society beauties painted by artists
such as Lawrence and Reynolds.
Paul grew up to be shy and lonely, self-conscious and insecure. Both he and
Ailsa were uncertain and distrustful of their parents. As one of Mellon’s
associates put it, the divorce “was a source of great mental distress and
bitterness” within the shattered family. For the public, who read about it
in the scandal sheets of the day, it was sensational, opening up another
world of clandestine trysts in country houses, grand hotels and ocean
liners. It lifted the lid on love, jealousy and betrayal among the upper
classes, and the East Coast was agog. “The story was like a pantomime,” says
Cannadine, “with a flawed millionaire and a predatory villain.” If only it
hadn’t been for real.
