Matthew Mellon[1] sounded like he had everything to live for when I spoke to him over the phone a week before he died.
The rich and handsome banking heir — who had fought drug addiction his whole adult life — said he’d been sober for 85 days.
I’d known Matthew since I was editing Page Six years ago and he was married to Tamara Mellon and trying to emulate her Jimmy Choo success with a men’s shoe line, Harrys of London.
We’d have occasional lunches as he divorced Tamara, mother of his daughter Minty, and then married fashion designer Nicole Hanley, who added daughter Olympia and son Force.
I was at his 50th birthday party at the Four Seasons restaurant when Lindsay Lohan serenaded him in front of such pals as Alex von Furstenberg, Vikram Chatwal, and Paris and Nicky Hilton.
Matthew was upset he was so notorious for his drug abuse and angry when Tamara, in her 2013 memoir “In My Shoes,”[2] wrote that it had wrecked their marriage.
“I was in the office every day, working hard, and Matthew had nothing but free time on his hands — and I’d come home and find him free-basing in the kitchen,” she wrote.
In 2016, when Matthew went to Passages rehab in Malibu, Calif., he gave me the news that he’d been spending $100,000 a month and taking about 80 OxyContin pills a day. “The doctors kept writing prescriptions like they were Smarties. It’s very irresponsible,” he told me.
I called him on April 9 because I’d heard he was dating Kick Kennedy, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But Matthew indicated that whatever it was between them was over. “I’m 54 and