“Oh, you’re going to have fun,” says everyone who’s ever worked with the iconic Polly Mellen when they learn I am planning a visit to her Kent, Connecticut, home. After 28 years as a fashion editor at Vogue and eight more as creative director of Allure, Mellen is now retired, but not retiring. At 84 and a trim size eight, she still downhill skis. She strength-trains daily. She studiously tends to her idyllic mountainside garden. “This weekend is simply jammed,” she says when I call to schedule my trip, and asks me to ring back in exactly ten minutes, which I do. “Oh, good girl!” she says with the commanding Connecticut Yankee tones that have made generations of fashion assistants jump. “Right on time!”
On one level, a visit to Polly Allen Mellen feels like a visit to your cool granny—if Granny were recently in a Gap ad and her golf skirts were by Comme des Garçons.
Gray since her 30s, she has an ageless look—a sharp bob she’s worn for decades (Garren cuts it now, although she explains that sometimes she has it touched up by “Patricia in New Milford,” who “follows what he’s done”), and strict, spare, yet by no means boring taste in clothes. “I like different things and to mix it up, and some things interest me and some don’t,” she says.
Mellen began her life in fashion as an editor under Diana Vreeland in the sixties, when women were supposed to stay home. She flourished in the era in which women fought to have it all, as well as in the years that followed, when most questioned whether that goal was even possible. She worked with photographers Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, and Arthur Elgort; she helped propel the careers of young models like Penelope Tree, Lauren Hutton, Patti Hansen, and Naomi Campbell. Mellen had—and has—it all. An illustrious career, an enduring, 44-year marriage. She has raised four children, five grandchildren, and generations of fashion editors. Vera Wang was one. And, like I said, she still skis. Secrets?
“I have a lot of energy,” she says over lunch in the kitchen of the converted early-19th-century apple barn she and her handsome husband, Henry, bought 35 years ago as a weekend house and now live in full-time.
Her enthusiasm during fashion shows is well documented—the signature over-the-head clap when she’d see something come down the runway she particularly liked. “Yes, I’ve heard about that,” she says. “The seal clap. ‘Throw Polly a fish!’ I don't remember clapping that way, but people tell me I did. I get emotional. I get caught up. After a show, the Saint Laurent people would ask, ‘Did we make you cry, Polly?’”
These days she remains just as enthusiastic—and just as busy—but since retiring in 2001, she now devotes the bulk of her energy to family. Weekends are busy with visits to and from children and their children. Her fitness regimen is more varied, rigorous, and disciplined than that of many women half her age. In the winter, the aforementioned downhill skiing (her husband prefers cross-country). In the summer, she swims. Mellen cites regular exercise as one of the best changes in women's lives. She began Pilates in the seventies, at Joseph Pilates’s studio on West 57th Street. She continued with a local Connecticut trainer, who introduced her to Gyrotronics.
I comment on her excellent posture. From Pilates? “No,” she says. “I won the posture prize at Miss Porter’s School.” She then explains that she and her sister both had large chests, and their father instructed them “not to hide” (she hunches forward in demonstration).
She leads me into the library alcove where she does floor work. “I put my mat down every day,” she says. “I set a timer.” Leg strengthening, rubber resistance bands, push-ups, and work on what she sees as a tummy problem constitute the daily routine. Her daughter, Leslie, feels she overcompensates. “But I care,” Mellen says honestly. “I like to look good; I like to get into my clothes.”
Today, a lot of those clothes are Prada, Marc Jacobs. She holds on to old pieces, too, “like Jil Sander—from when Jil was designing,” she adds pointedly. Her look is and always has been classic, gutsy, impeccable. “I don’t like fancy. I love glamour, but glamour in my estimation may not be someone else’s. I gravitate toward what I feel comfortable in and what looks good on me.
“I love fabrics, and I love well-made clothes,” she continues. “I want to wear something that's great. It's time well spent, and it costs more money.” Still, though, she speaks Gap. She's in fact wearing the Gap jeans from that Peter Lindbergh ad. She has a look at my own cream canvas jeans (“Let me see that waistband”), and we talk about creative director Patrick Robinson and how talented he is. We talk bathing suits, too: “A disaster, the dressing rooms.” She recently ordered a successful one-piece from L.L. Bean. “Always a black maillot. And I love a classic Speedo,” she says.
Part of living such a fit, spirited life naturally has to do with what, and how, she eats. “Polly was strict about her clothing and her diet,” remembers a former assistant who is now a major fashion editor in her own right. “Lunch was always cottage cheese and fruit.”
“Yes, I did do that,” says Mellen, nodding, when I bring it up, although now her lunch is usually “a good sharp Cheddar cheese wrapped in greens, no dressing. And soup.” This afternoon, she's made corn chowder.
“My husband cooks very good food,” she says. “We cook together, but he does most of it. All fresh, all organic. Last night was my night to cook: I made pasta with a sauce of olives, artichoke, sour cream, broth, and a lot of herbs.” Mellen doesn’t worry about the sour cream, she says, as she doesn't snack between meals. Her weakness, though, is late night. “All my cravings have to do with bread and butter. Bread, delicious bread. I don’t go in for sweets.”
Over the course of her more than 50 years in fashion, Mellen has observed her share of troubling diet and eating habits. “I’ve always been interested in good health, good skin, and bright eyes,” she says. Whenever she thought a model was getting too thin or too concerned with her weight, when she could detect “a certain energy zapped out,” if she felt her skin was losing that “certain luster,” she would talk to her. “But that also happens with age.” She gets reflective. “It’s a fighting battle, but I refuse to think of it as a losing battle. I’m a positive thinker. I don’t believe in failure.”
Mellen takes me on a tour of her house, which is, in a way, a tour through her life. We begin downstairs. The powder room is hung floor to ceiling with YSL}s LOVE posters, which the designer sent each New Year. “Oh, how I loved Yves Saint Laurent,” she says. “He was so fragile.”
We move on to the living room, which is dotted with photos of her children and grandchildren, and punctuated by riotous textiles and cheerful, plush lounging sofas and chairs. “I’m a big needlepointer,” Mellen says, gesturing toward the wild rug at the heart of the room, based on the dress tartans of the British Isles. “I did it square by square on airplanes and on shoots, waiting for hair and makeup. You see that piece? It took the time of Way Bandy doing one eyebrow.” She tells how in the 1950s, her mother, Leslie Smith Allen, won first prize in the world needlepoint exhibition (“Queen Mary got honorable mention”). She points out a divine photograph of her mother, smiling in the tropics and wearing an exuberant floral print. “I miss her, and I will always miss her. She was my mother and my best friend.” Her style and innovation proved inspiration for her daughter. “Here she is,” says Mellen, “a woman 250 pounds, and when we were in the city, New York or Paris, she might wear navy blue or black, but otherwise she wore brilliant colors. She went to Chanel and had a pair of pajamas made, and she took them to be copied in the West Indies in fabulous fabrics from Scalamandré and others.”
Mellen points out a needlework by her mother—“It was a bag. I had it made into a pillow”—and many throw pillows that she made herself. They are stitched homages to Toulouse-Lautrec, Klimt, Matisse, and Klee, casually yet purposefully arranged on the couches and chairs. The stairs are lined with her daughter, Leslie's, pottery (plates and bowls from the Hewitt and Garrison Forest schools). Upstairs, in the master bedroom, portraits of Mellen by Scavullo, Avedon, and Newton hang among more family photos. She shows me a current embroidery project, a calla lily designed after Georgia O’Keeffe. Over sofa pillows of China Seas batik there’s a large painting of a bird by Gloria Vanderbilt, a wedding gift from Richard Avedon and his wife.
“He was my best friend in fashion,” says Mellen, who worked with Avedon for more than 30 years. It was with him that she shot Vogue’s 1981 image of Nastassja Kinski wearing only a boa constrictor and an ivory bracelet. (She always understood fashion is not just about clothes.)
“It's a very dapper family,” Mellen says as we walk from guest room to guest room, down a hall lined with still more photographs. Pictures of her parents’ house in Antigua mix with black-and-white portraits of Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, and Baryshnikov. There's Giorgio di Sant'Angelo, Christie Brinkley, Sophia Loren, Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Faye Dunaway. There’s Kate Moss on the beach by Mario Testino. She is topless, a long black skirt low on her hips. Her back is to the camera, but not her face. “It’s unpublished,” says Mellen. “Linda Wells [editor of Allure] thought it was too provocative. It’s not too provocative, it’s just a great picture.
“I think that the most important thing today is keeping my mind alert,” Mellen says, surrounded by her and Henry’s books in the library. “When I was working, I didn’t have a chance to read certain books. I took courses to keep my mind.” She found the courses she enrolled in after retirement “didn't go deep enough,” and now prefers reading on her own. “With reading, you are on your own path. For me, reading is essential.” She's just finished Updike’s Rabbit series and To Siberia, by Per Petterson. She’s on to Christopher Plummer’s autobiography. “I’m always fascinated by the Marquis de Sade,” she says, perusing the shelves.
She loves this house. It is surrounded by a 400-acre nature conservancy on three sides. Thirty years ago, though, she'd wanted a house that was “more completed,” less of a project, and didn't even get out of the car to see this one.
“The lovely woman showing the house must have thought, ‘Oh, that nice man is married to that bitch,’ and we went back to New York,” she remembers. Her husband reminded her that there wouldn't be a nickel to spend on curtains or anything else if they bought that other house, whereas with this one, they could make it exactly what they wanted. “‘Let's go back, get out of the car; I want you to see what I see,’ Henry said. I got out, and we did buy it. Woods were cleared, which opened up this view,” she says, pointing out a window. “An architect was found. The living room had a dirt floor when we bought it.”
We walk outside to see the leafy spaces to which she devotes so much of her time and energy, and from which she derives so much of her satisfaction. “I love a green garden,” she says. “Bushes and grasses and trees and a certain formality. I love English gardens and stone and walls, and I love shape. Certain shapes I've taken from other people, borrowed, shall we say, from other people, from lovely books.” Beyond a stone semicircle bloom all kinds of hostas. “I like a perennial garden; I can't afford annuals. It gives me such pleasure to get my hands in that soil. I get completely gratified by seeing all our tulips come up, and daffodils and narcissus, and they just keep coming up, bless their hearts.”
There is a Japanese cherry, a weeping birch, and a group of cone-shaped fir trees, once Christmas trees in the house. One tree bears white blossoms that smell like lemon verbena. “I wanted something that has a wonderful odor that oozes when you sit on the terrace at night. There are these three apple trees that give off wonderful apples; there is a man who comes and trims them back. You have to take care of your garden,” says Mellen. “It's very time-consuming and very expensive, but you have to take care of your garden.”