Banking, steel, oil, cocaine … Matthew Mellon is heir to a fortune built on the first three, and a victim of the fourth. And although he’s sworn off coke for good, when he wrote a pre-prenup with his fiancé, Noelle Reno, in the form of a business contract, they put in a clause saying that if he ever touched coke (or any similar drug) he would owe her $1 million. In cash.
Why don’t we think of motivators like that when we decide to give up carbs?
Now that the marriage is off, and she is not longer part of Degrees of Freedom, the brand of luxury cashmere knits they established together last year, she brought suit in Manhattan Supreme Court on July 18 to enforce the rest of the agreement. The suit describes what it calls Mellon’s erratic behavior.
They were engaged in Paris, in 2006. The first agreement they signed, in 2007, said she would get $1 million if their home in London was sold.
The drug clause was added in February of this year, in an attempt to protect her financial interests in their design company if he fell off the wagon.
Instead, she walked away from the company and the relationship in June, and she isn’t the first designing woman to decide that Mellon, despite his obvious charms at 43, was too much of a handful.
Her lawyers at Pryor Cashman told “The New York Post,” “Noelle devoted three years of her life to this company and this man and was left with nothing from both.”
To fully understand the story, you have to know his history. The Mellons were on like the Gettys and the Rockefellers in acquiring wealth in America. Matthew Mellon came into a $25 million trust fund when he turned 21, and some have pegged his total fortune at closer to $3 billion.
Obviously, with money like that, there’s no motivation to punch a time card. He became part of a fast moving bunch of socialites in London.
He developed a taste for drugs, and nearly died of a drug overdose. In and out of rehab, he met his future wife, Tamara Yeardye, a woman who had created Jimmy Choo Ltd., a couture shoe line, in 1997 at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.
They married in 2000, had a daughter named Araminta, and within four years were in trouble. He went to Ibiza, where he admitted publicly that he had fallen back into drug addiction.
That’s why, he said, he didn’t blame his wife for her rather public affair with a much younger man, Oscar Humphreys, who bragged about it. Whoops.
Matthew Mellon also noted somewhat sourly that his wife, who had built Jimmy Choo Ltd. into a blockbuster, made more that he did. In 2004, an investor bought a majority stake in the company for $150 million.
Their marriage came to a screeching halt in 2005, and the divorce was messy. She got custody of their daughter.
But in the course of pursuing a divorce, she discovered that her husband had hired hackers to snoop through her emails in an effort to find out about her money. She is clearly the financial wizard in the family. Last year, two years after the divorce, she and a buyout specialist bought control of Jimmy Choo, which has sales of $128 million a year, back from the investor for $364 million.
After a court trial last year, some of those hackers who tried to pry information out of her computer were sent to jail.
But Matthew Mellon was found not guilty, primarily because he was portrayed during the trial as too addled to have known what the hackers were doing, or to have understood the information they would have given them.
As Tamara Mellon said in the hacker trial, her husband, “missed planes like other people missed buses,” never had a job, could not manage to pay bills and keep track of bank accounts, and "couldn't read a comic book, much less a legal document."
As for their daughter, she said, “He is too absent-minded to be alone with her.”
Tamara Mellon is now said to be dating Christian Slater, and is in firm control of the brand she built. She seems to be doing just fine.
Matthew Mellon is said now to be dating another designer, Nicole Hensley.
We hope she, like many women, has a lot of patience where men are concerned.