Word: mellons
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...Mellon's English collection had swollen to the point where not even he had seen it all together; it was time to consider a public home for it. As president of the museum his father built, Mellon recounts: "It would have pleased me to give them to the National Gallery; the trouble was, it could never have hung more than an infinitesimal part of this very comprehensive collection, so the vast majority would have been in storage. I didn't like the idea of that." Yale, however, was pre-eminent in English 18th and 19th century literary studies...
Just before Christmas, Paul Mellon always sits down and names the foals that are scheduled to be born after New Year's at his Virginia estate. It is a larger task than it sounds: there are usually a score or so, and Mellon is not likely to give them naglike names−Dobbin, or Betsy or Mary Sue. Nor, being the aristocrat he is, is he likely to call them anything that sounds vulgar or, God forbid, flashy. No A.J.'s Poppa or Nudie will ever bear the gray and yellow silks of Rokeby Stables. Instead, Mellon chooses...
...Yale, from which he graduated in 1929 and to which he has given more than $40 million in cash. Then there are Christopher Wren, Debrett, King's Parade, Land's End, Tower of London. They represent England and the dignified 18th century values treasured most by Mellon, who was made an honorary Knight of the British Empire in 1974. Literature, another Mellon love, gallops as Knight's Tale, Winter's Tale, Canterbury Tale and Love for Love; and geography, the places Mellon owns, shows up in horses like the famous Mill Reef, named for a landmark...
There are richer men in the U.S., but Mellon's wealth is nonetheless so vast as to be scarcely understandable in ordinary terms. The value of his stocks, bonds and other measurable holdings−particularly in family-dominated companies such as Gulf Oil, Alcoa and Koppers−is probably well over $400 million. But there is no way of putting a figure on his other possessions: the 4,000-acre estate in Virginia, the retreats on Antigua and Cape Cod, the town houses in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., the stables of racing horses in the U.S. and Britain...
...months before Pearl Harbor, Mellon enlisted in the Army as a private. Combining his love of horses with an almost storybook romanticism, he joined the cavalry; but instead of charging, sword drawn, into the jaws of death, he found himself teaching riding to recruits. Eventually he landed in the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, and, elevated to major, directed the dropping of agents all over Europe. He was later awarded four Bronze Stars. In 1945 he came home to Mary, their two children, Catherine, 9, and Timothy, 3, and a relaxed life of horses and pleasant conversation. After...