THE PRESS, SOCIETY, and KEEPING AN OPEN SECRET - DORCAS HARDIN and PAUL MELLON

Page 343  Like all of JFK's sexual affairs, Paul Mellon and Dorcas Hardin's arrangement was never covered by the press, although it seems that everyone in D.C. knew about it.  "Dorcas was fun!  Easy.  IT was a very open relationship," recalled Janet Bruce, David and Evangeline Bruce's daughter-in-law, who had been one of a party of four women, including Dorcas and Polly Wisner Fritchcie, who went on a shopping tour together in New York.  Jim, the Mellon's chauffeur, had driven them around.

Katherine Graham reportedly threatened her reporters to ensure a kind of official privacy for Paul's affair, saying, "If a single line appears in (the) paper about this, that reporter will be out of a job before the ink is dry on the page." Graham had publically acknowledged her friendship with Bunny only by noting its breach, calling her "mu then-friend Bunny Mellon" in print without saying what had happened.  Graham protected Paul and Dorcas, which thus in a sidelong sense protected Bunny as well...

Who were Bunny's real friends in D.C.?  Jackie Kennedy topped the list even before she became First Lady; after she moved to New York in 1964 she remained Bunny's closest confidante until her death thirty years later.  Evangeline Bruce was an ally and a closemouthed one.  Bunny did talk to her family and friends about Dorcas, but when she did so she cast the affair mostly as a tiresome joke...

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A note that Katherine Graham was the owner of several publications but most noteworthy the Washington Post.

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ORB

 

THE DEATH OF O.J. SIMPSON BRINGS RENEWED INTEREST IN MY NICOLE BROWN SIMPSON POSTS

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Mistress of O.J.Simpson - Wife of O.J. and Most Famous Unsolved Murder Victim

A young, beautiful waitress when they met, he an older and famous and married man, the love story of Nicole and O.J. ended in tragedy when she was found murdered.

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HOW DID BUNNY MELLON COPE WITH HER HUSBAND's LONG INVOLVEMENT WITH MISTRESS DORCAS HARDIN?

Page 127  Bunny wanted each "romance" to go further, be deeper.  She wanted a flirtation, a frisson of sensuality, often heightened with the muskier tones of sexual flirtation.

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Missy here : It's not known if Bunny ever had sex with anyone ever again after Paul exited the marriage for Dorcas.  These relationships are explained bu author Mac Griswold as...

Page 308  While Bunny was shielding herself with her "families," and platonic but romantic partners, Paul found plenty of room in his life for Dorcas Hardin.  The affair that had begun in 1959 or 1960 lasted until his death in 1999.  Due to Dorcas's deafness, Paul had to shout on the phone to make himself heard.  Like anyone else who knew Bunny, of course I had heard the gossip about those phone calls between lovers.

I had also heard some of those phone calls myself.  The airy, open floor plan of the Antigua house meant that even though Paul had a separate bedroom and office suite, hearing his side of some of his conversations with Dorcas was unavoidable..

Page 316  Until I understood how hard it was for Bunny to continually face down the knowledge of Paul's affair with Dorcas Hardin, I didn't understand how much she needed a place unconnected with him.  The residences on - and the differing atmospheres of - the farm, Antigua, Cape Cod, and New York were designed and executed not just for the pleasure of creating them to be just the way she wanted but also with Paul's collaboration to foster the "true, real, and simple happiness" of the life she wanted the two of them to share with guests and family.  Bunny, the chatelaine of houses but and perfectly maintained with Paul's money, was constantly the impresario.  Sometimes she wanted to get away from it all. She once said that Nantucket for her was a "Vacation from a vacation," meaning a place to escape from Cape Cod.

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ADORE

 

DORCAS HARDING's AFFAIR WITH PAUL MELLON WAS KNOWN TO SOCIETY

Page 112 : ... "All the fancy people came in, and Dorcas was one of them.  In the fifties she dressed them for all the charity balls, the embassy affairs in the beautiful French and  British embassies, and for the art openings.  So there she was at the start of the party that was the sixties.

***

Bunny's daughter Eliza was told that her father was having an affair.  But Dorcas was not an affair, she was a mistress, one who had an outstanding business of her own.

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Page 113 :  That night at Eliza's party, all the Hardins were invited, and Dorcas was there, according to the society columns, although her name isn't checked off the main gate guest list.  Society's delighted whispers about the affair and the reports of occasional sightings of the lovers together in public were Bunny's to deal with for more than thirty years.

A sense of society's complicity comes with just one story.  At the shop Dorcas had a desk in an alcove off the main salesroom in the front.  Behind were dressing rooms, storage, and lingerie.  The back wall of the lingerie area was sheathed in mirrors; one concealed a nearly invisible door into a closet that held only a phone. Usually it was closed. "One day, when too many mammoth clothes boxes arrived from New York, we needed the space, so the door was open." one young summer employee remembers, "and all of a sudden, the closet phone rang.  I went in to answer it, just as someone else pulled me away and called out urgently, "The phone is ringing - the phone is ringing!"  Dorcas sprinted into the back closed, closed the door, and did not emerge for some time.  No one said a word about it, and we continued chatting and unpacking as though nothing at all had happened.  I was totally mystified.  Some days later a fellow employee told me that phone was the one on which Paul Mellon called her.  No one was to discuss it or the affair."

But this affair was a very public one.  Paul and Dorcas were seen together in D.C. and New York hotels.  He also had family dinners that included her; he introduced her to his bosom friend the English art historian John Baskett, who liked Dorcas very much.  Bunny told me that 'even though everyone in Washington at the big dinners and receptions that I arranged said, "Oh you;ll win,' I felt very alone.

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PAUL MELLON HAD DORCAS HARDIN - BUNNY MELLON HAD A CAVALCADE OF GAY COMPANIONS

 

Page 98 ...

In Dorcas Hardin he (Paul Mellon) had rediscovered that laughter, sex, coziness, and empathy.  Dorcas seems to have released in Paul the certain knowledge of who he wanted to be, the man he felt he truly was.

Page 99 ... 

For Paul, being "Careful to allow each other to develop our own interests" meant Dorcas. For Bunny,, it meat a long cavalcade of interesting ad talented men - almost all gay, except, perhaps, for Jean Schlumberger, the jewelry designer who, by all reports, occasionally slept with women who, like most of the others, had a male life partner, Luc Bouchage.

***

It would seem that Bunny had a series of unrequited crushes.  

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FOR NOW

 

HOW PAUL AND BUNNY MELLON DECIDED TO LIVE SEPARATE LIVES : BUNNY SAYS SHE "FOUND A GIRL FOR HIM" HIS LIFELONG MISTRESS DORCAS HARDIN

Paul Mellon and Rachael Lambert Lloyd,  called Bunny, married when she was thirty-eight and he was forty-two.  It was a second marriage for both of them and they each brought two children into the marriage. However the family never actually blended. It was the 1950's.  by 1955, their marriage was severely strained. Page 93: The fifties were still a world where expensive wives, however diplomatically ad insincerely, almost always deferred to their well-heeled husbands. As for therapy the general run of marriage counselling in the fifties basically involved telling the wife it was all her fault ad treating her for depression, anxiety, and "frigidity" with one of the psychopharmaceuticals new to the market ...

Paul's Freudian therapist told him to stop having sex with Bunny.  She asked him if he wanted a divorce and he said no.  He wanted her to be his wife, care for the children, and she could have all the money she needed. As Queen Elizabeth had the year earlier when her husband, Prince Phillip, was up to high-jinx with women,  Bunny decided to go forward with this agreement in 1957.

***

In this book Bunny Mellon told the author she "found a girl for him" meaning Dorcas Hardin. Page 92.  Dorcas became Paul's lifelong mistress. "If  Bunny's memory can be believed, she didn't have to look very far. Dorcas's brother-in-law, Taylor Scott Hardin, was a member of Virginia's horsey set.  Diana, Dorcas's daughter, also went to Foxcroft (Bunny's school), graduating a year ahead of Eliza (Bunny's daughter by her first husband) and me in 1959."  In other words Dorcas was a member of society and from a world similar to that of Bunny. "Dorcas owned a fashionable clothing boutique in Georgetown." Which is near Washington, D.C.

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Missy here:  I would love more details on how exactly Bunny found Dorcas.  Did she herself go to Dorcas and ask her to be her husband Paul's mistress?