Adele Chatfield-Taylor (1984 Fellow) is president of the American Academy in Rome.
Millicent Mercer Johnsen and I became fast friends the minute we met, which was in the fall of 1988, just as I was starting out as the new president of the American Academy in Rome.
She was very distinguished: a longtime Trustee of the American Academy in Rome and eventually a Trustee Emerita (a perch from which she invented the Trustees Emeriti lunch, the social event of our year), President of the Garden Club of America, a Trustee of the Horticultural Society of New York, the World Wildlife Fund, the Twin Lights Historical Society, and Skidmore College, a member of the Women’s Committee of the Central Park Conservancy, a volunteer in the flower program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York City, and my personal favorite, a member of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association, and the founder of the Cheval Corporation which owned, trained, and raced thoroughbred horses.
She was always beautifully turned out, generally in a pastel bouclé suit, perfect hair, somewhat sensible shoes, and a radiant smile. She lived just down the street from our office, at that time on East 65th Street, and so we saw a good deal of her as she dropped in, in the course of making her rounds. We looked forward to her visits; she took an interest in every member of the staff. During the holidays, she presented us with a big package of Christmas cookies that she had made herself. She would slip them in the door with a note and then bustle off to do the same for her other organizations and friends.
Her house was enchanting, with a garden room carved out of the ground floor, where she often had dinners following Academy events, and a jewel of a garden visible through the windows. She had taken on the rescue of this house as a project that amazed and alarmed her husband Niels, and she made it a cozy New York base for the weekdays between their time in Rumsen, NJ, the family seat.
Every winter, she put up Rome staff, jurors, and young artists or scholars who needed a place to stay while the interviews for the Rome Prize were going on; the candidates were always nervous, so she made them breakfast and made them feel at home through these daunting ordeals.
Millicent was one of the first to get involved in the twenty-year rebuilding effort at the Academy. When she understood that we were determined to tackle not only the physical plant but also the endowment that empowered the Rome Prize, she decided to help with both. An avid gardener, Millicent was a prime mover in the restoration of all our gardens; she also single handedly replenished the endowment under the Garden Club of America (GCA) Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture, which dated from 1928; she began a tradition that each year the GCA Rome Prize winner would address the fellowship committee at its annual meeting. Thus was born an enduring friendship between the Academy and the GCA.
In 1989, four Trustees volunteered to help with the garden: Laurie Olin, FAAR’74, RAAR’90, ’08, contributing a history and master plan for the ten acres in question; Marella Agnelli finding an Italian garden guru, who turned out to be Alessandra Vinciguerra; and Arthur Ross putting up a fund (a few years years later, once she had joined the board, Mercedes Bass also joined the group). Millicent was the de facto head gardener and she relished the responsibility.
When she made her first solo visit to Rome, Millicent got off the plane, perfectly dressed as always, and went directly to the site, greeting all the gardeners, inspecting the tools, studying the lay of the land, and assessing what had to be done first.
This was the moment we were introduced to her mantra: “tidy up and then maintenance, maintenance, maintenance.” By the time she returned to New York several busy days later, she had launched a major clean up, purchased rakes for every man on the work force (in the interest of frugality they had been sharing a single rake). Before long she had provided all sorts of new or missing equipment: shovels, hoes, ladders, a tractor, a chipper, and a truck. Subsequent visits had the same pattern.
One bitterly cold winter day, when the ground was too frozen to work, Millicent organized an outing to Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s famous summer villa. She stopped to treat everyone to coffee, and when one of the men conveyed that he was feeling sheepish that she had had to get up so early to lead their caravan, she explained that she got up early every morning to cook her husband’s breakfast. At that, the men understood they were in the presence of a great lady as well as a kindred spirit, and they fell in love.
Throughout the 1990s Millicent crossed the Atlantic three or four times a year to keep things going, until Alessandra Vinciguerra joined the staff as Bass Superintendent of Gardens, and they forged a legendary partnership that still governs many gardening decisions.
Besides investing time and resources in the GCA Rome Prize and the gardens, Millicent quietly supported many other things. She closely followed the renovation of all the buildings, inspecting the work from basement to roof on every visit, never failing to wear her hard hat. She subsidized the first renovation of the kitchen, the restoration of the pool table, books for the library, the repaving of the vicolo cieco with sanpietrini to prevent us from succumbing to asphalt, publications that needed to come into being, and countless other projects. She always had an eye out for any need, and she helped—quietly, invisibly, and anonymously. There was never a show. Things simply got better.
Her masterwork is the Secret Garden on the Villa Aurelia grounds, with its Millicent Fountain, which is now the centerpiece of a thriving events enterprise that contributes greatly to the Academy bottom line.
Several years ago, her family established the Millicent Mercer Johnsen Post-Doctoral Rome Prize, so there will be many flying under her flags for a long time to come.
I once asked Millicent how she decided on the amount she would bet on her horses. She said she backed every horse she ever ran, and she always went to the $2 window. To me this epitomized her approach to life—unwavering loyalty, endearing modesty, unflappable optimism, and fun. She was our guardian angel, our mother, and our dear, dear friend, and we will love and remember her forever.