Bunny Mellon

Rachel "Bunny" Lambert Mellon was born around August 9, 1910, the eldest child of Gerard Barnes Lambert, president of the Gillette Safety Razor Company and a co-founder of Warner–Lambert, and Rachel Parkhill Lambert. Her paternal grandfather, Jordan Lambert, invented Listerine, which her father later marketed. She married Stacy Barcroft Lloyd, Jr. in 1932, and they had two children, Stacy Barcroft Lloyd III and Eliza Winn Lloyd. This marriage concluded in divorce in 1948. During this period, she and her husband became close friends with banking heir and art collector Paul Mellon and his first wife, Mary Conover. Following her divorce, Bunny Lambert married Paul Mellon on May 1, 1948, becoming stepmother to Timothy and Catherine Mellon. Together, the couple amassed and donated over a thousand works of art, primarily eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European paintings, to the National Gallery of Art, and established the Yale Center for British Art. They also bred and raced thoroughbred horses, including Sea Hero, the 1993 Kentucky Derby winner. Mellon, whose wealth was largely held in trusts, experienced a loss of $5.75 million to investment adviser Kenneth I. Starr in 2010. Despite a battle with cancer and macular degeneration, she remained active into her later years, ceasing gardening by 2011 but continuing other activities. Bunny Mellon died of natural causes at her Upperville, Virginia, home on March 17, 2014, at the age of 103.