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.

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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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