The Pennsylvanians and the Virginians rarely meet. Matthew Mellon, a younger brother of Christopher, was until recently the highest-profile Mellon, given his flashy lifestyle with his first wife, Jimmy Choo cofounder Tamara Yeardye, his cryptocurrency advocacy, and his battles with drug use. Nobody recognized him when he appeared at the funeral service for Eliza, Tim’s stepsister, in 2008. “He just showed up. He wasn’t invited,” a Virginia Mellon recounts. “He comes up to me, ‘Hey! It’s so great to be here for the family.’ I’m like, ‘Who are you?’ ” Matthew died in Cancún in 2018.
In the early 1980s, following his divorce from Sue, Tim married Louise Whitney, an Upperville, Virginia, native who had been a childhood friend. After she and Tim divorced in the early 1990s, Tim married Patricia Trenary Freeman, who was recently divorced from Charles “Chas” Freeman Jr., a classmate of Tim’s at Milton and Yale as well as best man at his first wedding. Chas, a diplomat, gave an interview around 1995 in which he said, “I had quite a happy marriage of 30 years with her, which broke up in the summer of 1992, in a very nasty way.” Tim and Patricia (who had three children with Chas), later divorced and then remarried. In an email to me, Ambassador Freeman commented, “Tim Mellon’s callous betrayal of our friendship was almost as hurtful as my then wife’s abandonment of me for reasons she declined to explain.”
In 1998 Tim purchased brand rights to Pan Am Airways after it filed for bankruptcy; he rebranded his rail company Pan Am Railways. In June 2022 CSX announced it had completed the acquisition of Pan Am Railways. Terms were not disclosed.
While the London Times has reported that Tim has a net worth of $1 billion, Warner IV says, “I’ve read that he’s worth $4.2 billion.” He further says the combined worth of the Mellon clan today is more like $25 billion. “[These families] don’t want the public to know what they’re worth.”
Given his uncle’s wealth, his political donations are not huge outlays. “It’s pocket change for him,” says Warner IV.
He must have spent a bundle on a most unusual project on his estate in Lyme, Connecticut, a bucolic area where Colonial-era saltbox houses are the norm. Tim’s property encompasses hundreds of acres, but passersby on a small road have been astonished to see an exact replica of a Norwegian stave church dating to the 12th or 13th century.
Toward the end of the Viking period, when Norway became a Christian country, numerous stave churches were built. The wooden structures feature a series of roofs, each one offset and becoming smaller as the church reaches toward the sky. Marvels of engineering, they require an intricate system of beams and pillars.
Tim decided he wanted a full-scale replica of the stave church in Borgund, Norway—which is considered the finest of the genre—erected on his property. After many reconnaissance trips to Norway, a team of skilled workmen spent years painstakingly re-creating it in Lyme.
“It was an obsession of his. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” I was told by one of the apparently very few people who has seen it up close. “He doesn’t want anyone to see it.”
Former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy visits Paris with Bunny in the late 1960s.MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES.
“I know people who have gone down that road to look at it and he’s chased them out of there,” a local told me.
In the majestic but sparsely populated south of Wyoming, where Tim bought a vast ranch in 2005, he suffers no interlopers. “I can think of no place on earth more quiet and peaceful and conducive to easy concentration,” he writes in panam.captain.
In his golden years Tim has the wherewithal to finance passion projects. In 2012 he donated stock valued at more than $1 million to the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, to help finance their search for the remains of Amelia Earhart’s plane. After the expedition failed to find the wreckage, Tim located video footage that he said revealed the debris. Claiming that the organization did not act on this evidence, he sued it for fraud and other claims. The suit, which dragged on for two years, was eventually dismissed.
A happier outcome seems to be on the horizon in Winchester, Virginia, where in 2016 Tim donated property to develop a park adjacent to the home of Patsy Cline, now a museum. The project is slated for completion this year.
Relatives and Mellon family friends I spoke to are puzzled as well as disturbed by how far to the right Tim has lurched. “He’s always been a contrarian—that’s the only thing I can think of that might have gotten him in this direction, [which] does not reflect our values,” says a cousin.
“He’s always just been one of those guys who’s gone to the beat of his own drum and operated very quietly,” says a member of the younger generation. Paul, this person said, would be aghast at the Trumpification of the Republican Party and his son’s support for it: “He’d be appalled. I think Paul would be vocally upset at Tim.”
“I remember him being a lovely, nice man,” a friend of Bunny’s says about Tim. “I just don’t know how he got involved with such kooky extremism, because he wasn’t brought up in that kind of environment.… I don’t know who he listens to, but he should be smarter. Even for him, this is outrageous. Bunny would be very appalled.”