Matthew Mellon 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,” 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 she’s 30,” he told me. Besides the huge age gap, she would threaten his sobriety, he said, without elaborating.
On Friday, Kennedy — who recently had spent four months with Mellon traveling to Switzerland, London, Washington DC and New York — said in a statement given exclusively to me: “Matthew had an incredible way of manifesting wildly unpredictable miracles that shocked and awed us all, over and over again . . . I remember him turning to me once and saying, ‘Don’t let the fear of losing be greater than the excitement of winning,’ before going back to UFOs and future human cloning possibilities.”
Matthew told me that his new romantic target was Lady Alexandra Spencer-Churchill, daughter of the Duke of Marlborough.
“I’m moving to London for her, but don’t write it yet. I have to talk to her first,” Matthew said. Lady Alexandra couldn’t be reached for comment.
He told me he had made $4.5 billion with his early investment in cryptocurrency, and that he had bought a Falcon jet and chartered at least three yachts for a summer on the Mediterranean. He seemed excited for the future.
Six days later, he flew to Mexico to revisit Clear Sky Recovery clinic, where he had been treated before with the controversial hallucinogen ibogaine — which is illegal in the US, but whose adherents claim is magically effective in treating addiction, anxiety and depression.
Friends told me Matthew was able to confront the childhood trauma of his father’s suicide during an ibogaine trip and considered the drug a lifesaver.
In October 2016, he posted on Instagram: “A Spiritual crossing in Cancun with #ibogaine Let me know if you ever hit a wall in life and you need help I will send you here for free on me!”
He was due to check in on Monday, but that morning was found dead in his hotel room. No autopsy was done before his body was cremated. The ashes will be scattered today in Malibu. A funeral will be held Saturday, in Boynton Beach, Fla., where Matthew’s mother, Anne, lives.
Kennedy also told me how much Matthew adored his three children. “They will inherit his charm, his wisdom and a spectacularly bizarre wardrobe,” she said.
While Matthew might have exaggerated his investing profits when he told me $4.5 billion, Forbes estimated last year he was worth nearly $1 billion. He was an early investor in XRP, the digital currency.
Jenna Cavelle, a movie producer in LA, was also in mourning, and posted on Facebook that she had known him for 16 years.
“Over the past year I have become so very close to you during the darkest and most tragic time of your struggle,” Cavelle wrote. “I love you, Matthew Mellon. And I will miss you every single day.”
Amen to that. I feel privileged to have known him.