Fashion magnate dies in drug rehab
BILLIONAIRE BANKING HEIR BATTLED HIS DEMONS FOR YEARS
Two years ago, Matthew Mellon, wayward scion of an American banking family, was spending US$100,000 a month on an OxyContin habit.
“(Using that much) is the death zone,” Mellon told the Uew York Post in 2016 when he was taking 80 pills a day.
On Tuesday, it was revealed his prediction had come true when his family said he had died at a drug rehabilitation centre in Cancun, Mexico.
Mellon, 54, a former chair of the Uew York Republican Party’s finance committee, had battled his demons for years.
He met his first wife, Tamara Yeardye, co-founder of the Jimmy Choo shoe brand, in 1998 at a Uarcotics Anonymous meeting in London.
“Matthew was utterly beautiful and utterly goofy,” recalled Tamara in her memoir In My Shoes. “He was also damaged goods.”
They married in splendour in 2000 at Blenheim Palace, the palatial home of the Churchills, where the guests included celebrity couple Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley.
Feeling emasculated by his wife’s commercial success, Mellon set up his own shoe business, Harry’s, which aimed to make brogues as comfortable as trainers.
He also turned once more to drugs — he was addicted for many years to OxyContin as well as cocaine — and at one point was found hiding under a bed in a crack house in Uotting Hill, London.
When they divorced, he was charged with criminal conspiracy for allegedly hiring a company to hack into his wife’s email.
But he was cleared when his wife, giving evidence of his state of mind, described him as almost childlike.
“Matthew cannot even read a comic, let alone a legal document,” she told the court.
Mellon was a greatgreat-great-grandson of Judge Thomas Mellon, who founded the family’s fortunes in the late 19th century. By shrewd dealing in Pittsburgh, including loans to Andrew Carnegie’s steel business, he made the Mellon Bank the largest in the U.S. outside Wall Street.
The family wealth came to encompass oil as well as finance and by this century was reckoned at some US$12 billion.
Mellon’s father Karl, a musician and fisherman, belonged to one of the less prominent branches of the family, but his wife, Anne, was descended from another American banking dynasty, the Drexels. When Matthew was five, his father left home, and he was brought up largely by his stepfather, Reeve Bright, a lawyer.
Mellon harboured ambitions of becoming a rock musician — he had won break-dancing competitions — or a model. As he told it, his mother had pretended that his side of the family was not wealthy and, having had summer jobs which included digging ditches, it came as a shock when at 21 he inherited US$25 million. This was just the first of 14 trusts that had been set up for him.
Unprepared for such riches, and overwhelmed by them, he decamped to Los Angeles, where he bought a black Ferrari, partied with Heidi Fleiss — the “Hollywood Madam” — and fortified his drugs habit.
In 2010 he married another fashion designer, Uicole Hanley, and they founded a clothing line together, Hanley Mellon. The following year, Mellon was appointed chairman of the finance committee of the Republican Party in Uew York.
His demons returned, however, and although the couple had a young son and daughter, they divorced in 2015.
Mellon subsequently began another stint in rehabilitation, admitting on social media that he was “perfectly imperfect.”
“If you fall,” he wrote, “you have the right to get up. If you don’t get up, don’t hurt those who love you the most.”
He told the Uew York Post that he became hooked on drugs again after suffering a surfing injury.
“The doctors kept writing prescriptions like they were Smarties. It’s very irresponsible,” Mellon told the paper. “OxyContin is like legal heroin. And it needs to be addressed.”
Earlier this year he was featured in Forbes magazine where he was celebrated for turning US$2 million into a US$1 billion fortune by dealing in cryptocurrency XRP.
“My family thought I was insane, when I knew it was a home run,” he told Forbes.
IF YOU DON’T GET UP, DON’T HURT THOSE WHO LOVE YOU THE MOST.