Rachel ‘Bunny’ Mellon, Heiress Who Paid For John Edwards Mistress, Dies At 103

Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, who married into the Mellon family banking fortune though she was already heiress to a mouthwash fortune of her own, passed away Monday at the age of 103, her friend and attorney Alexander Forger announced. Born Rachel Lowe Lambert, her wealth came from her grandfather, a chemist, who invented Listerine — and her father, a marketing genius who persuaded Americans that they needed the product to treat their chronically bad breath.

Though she befriended many of the high and mighty, perhaps most notably becoming close to the Kennedy family, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in particular, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon for most of her life devoted herself to the principle of avoiding publicity at all costs.

She was close friends with actor Frank Langella, who wrote of her in his own memoir, “Bunny’s life is privileged beyond the imagination of most people. The wealth enormous and perks extraordinary. But despite that, she lives by this simple maxim: ‘Nothing should be noticed.'”

But Bunny Mellon got noticed in a big way when she was 96 years old and it was discovered that she had personally passed $750,000 to Senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, mainly to support his mistress, Rielle Hunter.

The “Bunny money” as it was known within Edwards circles became the focus of Edwards’ trial in 2012 for misusing campaign funds. Though Rachel “Bunny” Mellon was never required to testify at the trial and was never accused of wrongdoing, the sudden spotlight thrown her way was exactly what she spent her entire life trying to avoid.

Mellon would write checks to Edwards, who had secretly fathered a child by Hunter, then hide them in boxes of candy delivered by another of her close friends, interior designer Bryan Huffman, who today called Mellon, “the last standing true American aristocrat.”

She received the nickname “Bunny” from her mother in childhood and kept it for the remainder of her 103 years.

Other than the Edwards scandal, Rachel “Bunny” Mellon was best known as a horticulturalist, who once redesigned the White House Rose Garden when John F. Kennedy was president.

Though Rachel “Bunny” Mellon was one of the country’s wealthiest women and her husband Paul Mellon was said to be the world’s richest man at the time of their marriage in 1948, she supported Edwards because she agreed with his populist politics.

“She liked what he said about the ‘Two Americas,'” her friend Huffman said. “She believed deeply in what he was saying.”

Rachel “Bunny” Mellon is survived by a son, a stepson and stepdaughter, two grandchildren, three step-grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Her husband Paul Mellon died in 1999.