WINTER PARK, Fla. – I did not know walking into Michael Mennello’s basement that I would reemerge in Tennessee, then in Boston, but as I met him and Marilyn a bit in ways — through exploring their Winter Park home Villa Bianca and talking with people who knew them — so too did I come to know Isabella Gardner, Earl Cunningham, Glenda Hood, Ronald Reagan and some others.
That is, how I’ve seen little pieces of these people’s lives that not many others have. Things they enjoyed, places they spent their time while they had it. It’s how I spent November and December.
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Bought in the ‘70s, renovated in the ‘80s and soon to be demolished at the behest of Matthew Morgan, the mansion at 1311 Via Tuscany was where the art-collecting Mennellos lived together for the better part of 30 years before Marilyn died in 2006, Michael in 2020.
Why was I there?
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I’m a journalist. I also do estate sales. It’s my family’s business, as well as antique doll appraising, and I just help out sometimes.
Villa Bianca was only the second Lake Maitland mansion I’ve ever agreed to work, but it was more of a volunteering opportunity how I jumped at it; even though I only recognized the Mennello name at the time, staying away from the access alone still would have given me nasty fear of missing out. This was Nov. 14.
Each estate is important. These are people’s lives, often their entire life, all there in a box. Family photos and degrees in drawers, music that they loved, souvenirs from places they intended to return, art of everything from brush strokes to Mod Podged puzzle pieces, the things they dropped behind dressers, lawn furniture.
Many items you’ll ever pick up at an estate sale are in the same place that their previous owner sat them down for the last time, and if you’ve ever wondered what will happen to your own belongings when you’ve moved on, I and my ilk are realistically one of those options. Prescription drugs though, we turn those over to the nearest fire department if we ever find them.
I’ve described estate sales as just another part of the natural order. When you pass away, we’re hired to sell your possessions and cut a check. Liquidation.
It’s standard fare, but I do my best to learn a thing or two about the departed out of respect and intrigue.
I was just at an estate sale in Franklin, Tennessee, while visiting my grandfather’s brother, otherwise doing much genealogy work, eating many biscuits in the downtime. There wasn’t much at that particular sale to go off of, but I could glean some things about Harold Scott, the gentleman who lived at the house.
Scott was once a police chaplain. He lived alone, he went to New Zealand at some point, he never used a Windows operating system past Vista, we used the same brand of face wash and he feared God. But, I was just a customer for that sale, so I only had about half an hour at the place before adopting his copies of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000, Mech Warrior 2 and Mad Dog McCree.
That example was brief, but I still don’t always get such a good glimpse at a person’s life by the time I arrive to these sales. Sometimes I get there after several days, when enough has been sold that there’s not much grip left for wonder, like obeying a faded flea market billboard and pulling off the interstate to find a desolate lot. This was almost the case with Michael and Marilyn’s home.
Our sales last three days – full price the first, half off the second and 75% off the third. I got to Villa Bianca on No. 3, making my entrance before the sale opened for the day, shuffling past a dusty Rolls Royce in the open garage so I could take in my surroundings. There were many, surroundings that is.
This place had a bona fide alley between the guest apartment and the rest of the structure, one of those builds that seems more like a community college or an institute than a home, and all of it was very quiet. Following the steps down from the garage and guest apartment let out into the pit of a grand entrance, a glass foyer with a dome ceiling flanked on the right by one of many hallways-to-everything and a wet bar on the left that we were using for storage.
I later learned this was where Michael kept the Deborah Butterfield sculptures he donated to the museum of his namesake in 2018, life-size bronze horses at different growth stages made of thoughtfully-placed driftwood that burned away in the casting process.
Further inside, much of what was left on day three were large and cumbersome things. Settled-in wood furniture, cooking utensils, a nigh unliftable glass sculpture in the foyer, a collection of office phones upstairs, lots of clothes. Some floors creaked while most clicked under a proper heel-toe walk; some were done up in marble, the ballroom had distinctive parquet flooring, guest bedrooms were confidently carpeted from the door to the bathroom’s back wall. That’s an eccentric art collector’s mid-century mansion for you, I guess. In a word, fun.
Up the carpeted stairs with help from a thick brass hand rail, Michael’s bedroom and office were straight ahead to the left, another guest bedroom was on the right and Marylin’s suite was behind you.
Going back to the idea that I enjoy spending time in private spaces where the departed spent theirs, I take a lot of pause in bedrooms. Not guest bedrooms really, though I found the one decorated with a circus theme amusing, but in these fantastic masters where Michael and Marilyn kept away here on the second floor.
Michael’s space was modest yet regal, separated into three cavities at different heights. The main area was highest and farthest away, like it was supposed to be framed and looked at instead of lived in. There was a dark wood bed with four pillars and drapes that I couldn’t believe someone was going to try and move out of there, other furniture made out of mirrors, a big window overlooking Lake Maitland. I didn’t get a good look at his study – one of several ‘Do not enter’ rooms, per the executor – but I do know it overlooked the ballroom.
Marylin’s side comprised most of the actual floor, covered in white carpet and dark wood paneling. Aside from the clearly visible balcony and carpeted wet bar, I could only imagine what kind of furniture had been in the main room based on the imprints left behind, like a tracker.
The walk-in closet, on the other hand, was mostly intact. Anyone looking to get their hands on the Mennellos’ toiletries or clothing was still very much in luck that day. I got several dinner jackets myself.
In the end, the home was left with its aging amenities: an intercom system with brass buttons, a dumbwaiter and elevator to Marylin’s bedroom and so on. Long obsolete, but in some ways more involved and opulent than any Echo this or Google that on the shelf these days. There was even another bar attached to the ballroom on the first floor, making for three in total.
There usually isn’t much of a backyard to explore at any given estate sale I work, but Villa Bianca was full of expansive exceptions. Exploring the grounds, it took several minutes to find ways through the vegetation, which was still being trimmed apart from places like the bottomed-out boathouse — really, there was no floor to stand on.
Without wondering how long the structure had been in disrepair, it was enough then to just appreciate how quickly things can fall apart the closer they are to water, an element even better than time at wiping away the past. That’s what it has in common with fire, I think.
Here’s the best view of the place, anyway, down the slope by the shore. Heads and shoulders were moving back and forth through the windows, but you could only imagine what would be in frame during a party if you’d stumbled down here away from the crowd. These people I saw were either busy shopping or sorting, not reveling.
The house was indeed used for many parties. Entertainment and philanthropy are largely what the Mennellos had become known for in Orlando. I learned this after speaking with Ross Silverbach, the executor of the estate, who I met as he helped load a large turtle-shaped water feature onto a trailer to be pulled away to its new home. The trailer was being hitched to a Porsche, of course.
“They were in the top echelon of art collectors in this country. They both had a keen sense of vision. They both had an incredible love for community and mankind. They loved the arts. They were wonderful about anyone who was interested in the arts, they would take you under their wing and educate you to however far you wanted to understand the arts,” Ross said. “(They) entertained at an almost, what I call these days, at a lost level, just the upper echelon of the formalness of entertaining that I’ve rarely witnessed as I’ve been invited to other places around the country.”
Ronald Reagan spent time in this house as a guest while president, Ross said, recalling a story Michael told him and Marilyn about the Secret Service visiting first. There were said to be pictures of the Mennellos with both Bushes. Rep. John Mica was a neighbor, a close friend and an attendee of many parties.
But let’s take a step back. You likely know the Mennellos from the Loch Haven Park museum of their namesake.
Yes, this lovely little place. It opened in 1998 as the Mennello Museum of American Folk Art through the efforts of Marilyn, Michael and then-mayor of Orlando Glenda Hood.
According to Shannon Fitzgerald, executive director of the Mennello Museum of American Art, the building itself was once the home of Howard Phillips, firstborn son of Dr. Phillip Phillips, before the city outfitted it to preserve and display works by the American folk artist Earl Cunningham.
Marilyn moved to Orlando in the ‘60s. At the time, she was married to Hamer Wilson, president of Tupperware International. She burned much shoe rubber for that company, a powerful businesswoman credited for helping build the Tupperware brand by flying around the world to market and sell the products.
She had an interest in culture as well. Marilyn helped found the Council of 101 in 1965, a fundraising group benefiting the Orlando Museum of Art, but it was a chance encounter several years later with Cunningham at his St. Augustine studio that would really change Marilyn’s trajectory from Tupperware lady to patron of the arts.
“She met him very briefly while she was shopping with a friend and he was a curmudgeon. He had a shop, he sold tools and gadgets in the front and his artwork was in the back. They happened to see some of it, they tried to buy it, he wouldn’t sell it. He had a sign, ‘No art for sale,’ so he was a challenging human being, cranky. They came back, insisted, she was very determined, then they each bought one piece and brought it back,” Fitzgerald said.
Marylin and Wilson divorced in 1975, around the same time Michael Mennello moved from Miami to Winter Park. It wasn’t long before they met.
“He hosted an event at his house on Georgia Avenue in Winter Park, and I don’t remember exactly who the event was for, had something to do with the arts, a charitable event,” Silverbach said. “Anyway, she came to that event, and he said many times — and she would just light up — he said, you know, ‘When she opened the door, I knew I was going to marry that woman.’”
They were wed in 1977, the power couple of Winter Park. In Marylin’s obituary, Michael is quoted calling her an “Earth angel.” For Silverbach, he spoke of Marylin’s “air of elegance.”
“If you looked at Marylin, there could be there could be 100 people in a room and if she came up to you, she would have a conversation with you and she would never drop her eyes from your eyes. She talked to you, regardless if people came up and stood close to interrupt or anything — she would have a conversation with you, when she finished that conversation, then she would thank you and then she would turn away and pick up another conversation with another person,” he said. “You knew that she was intently listening to what you had to say and she would come back and remember a couple of weeks later about your conversation and pick it right back up and I watched her do it over and over again.”
From the impressive black tie parties that Michael could throw at the drop of a hat to the Social Register of Greater Orlando — a social club that Michael founded, with Marilyn’s name affectionally on the letterhead — the couple was committed to a good time for all. The Mennellos’ annual Christmas party was among their most famous events, drawing a who’s who of attendees, and was a tradition that Michael continued after Marilyn’s death to carry on the legacy.
This is also the right place to discuss the Michael A. and The Honorable Marilyn Logsdon Mennello Foundation, which Ross wanted me to mention. Like the museum, the foundation is to exist as something good that the Mennellos left behind for the rest of us Orlandoans. Its four primarily outlets are to provide funding for the museum, educational resources, medicines for the indigent and aid for animals, according to Silverbach.
In 1977, Cunningham died by his own hand at 84 years old.
Marilyn — by her own admission in the book “Earl Cunningham: Dreams Realized” — didn’t know this had happened until 1984, after her daughter Lynda Wilson visited St. Augustine and was requested by Michael to seek Earl out and purchase another painting while she was there.
Lynda left Marilyn’s name with local art galleries in case any more Cunninghams were found, given that the artist didn’t have a will and his work was scattered among his relatives. Sure enough, Michael eventually negotiated the sale of 62 paintings from a man who had answered the call; on that drive home from St. Augustine, Marylin reflected on how she and her husband were making a great commitment, noting the acquisition as just the collection’s beginning.
By 1985, she and Michael had amassed the majority of their collection, going as far as Maine, Seattle and Connecticut to retrieve it.
Though standoffish in life, the self-taught artist had Marylin to thank for securing his place in art history, according to Fitzgerald.
“Her stumbling upon this just kind of opened a path for her curiosity to begin with her friends, and then she became really determined to make sure this artist had a role in art history, which previously he did not, he was not recognized. She began with OMA, got him a show, and then the next 20-30 years she dedicated herself to securing his place in art history, and that means talking to the museum directors and curators and introducing them to work up and down the East Coast,” Fitzgerald said. “Marilyn was a national appointee, first by President Reagan, to the National Arts Council in Washington DC, so she was in pretty significant circles in art and culture. Over the course of the years, his work lands in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection, the Whitney’s Collection, MoMA, the Rockefeller, Smithsonian, up and down the Eastern board. He has a place in art history, and then curators start writing about him, contextualizing his work, placing him in the context of art history, which means his peers, which means in a timeline and lineage, which means style: self-taught folk art. All those things started happening.”
Marilyn brought Cunningham’s art to Mayor Hood, asking that she help find a home for it, imploring that it needed to be shared with the community. Michael again is credited here, said to have been a very intricate part of establishing the Cunningham legacy from its financial aspects to logistics and the negotiations with Hood and the city for the establishment of the museum.
“That wasn’t going as smoothly in the beginning. It was a risk, it was a venture, it was kind of an unknown to build a space for this collection and Marilyn was talking to the state of Florida and possibly Tallahassee and the collection up there because they did have a place,” Fitzgerald said. “Mayor Hood did not want to see that happen, meaning she did not want Orlando to lose it.”
Thus, the museum came to be, and there now inside stands a prominent bronze statue of Marilyn, still greeting guests to the room with the Cunninghams.
I asked Fitzgerald what else she could tell me.
She talked about how Jackie Kennedy once visited Cunningham, in what sounds like a warmer reception than Marilyn received.
“The story goes that she was in St. Augustine and he was in the store and he saw a lot of men in black suits. At this time, he was concerned about the social climate in the United States. He got worried and they came in his store, he was very concerned, it ended up being her security detail,” Fitzgerald said. “She came in and he asked her if he could show her the work in the back. She said, ‘Yes.’ Then she was apparently complimentary of it, very polite, and then left. He sent a piece to the White House and they accepted it. We have the letter from Jacqueline Kennedy’s first lady’s office thanking him for it.”
The piece was called “The Everglades” and now resides at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. According to the book “Painting an American Eden,” Cunningham claimed to some that the first lady bought the painting for $1,200.
Concerning Boston, that’s where Fitzgerald is from. I was there for another short trip ahead of Christmas. I visited the Gardner Museum.
Isabella Stewart Gardner was known colloquially, at least in newspaper clippings of her day, as one of the richest and most fashionable women in Boston. She had a son in 1863, only one, who died of pneumonia before he was two years old. So the story goes, Isabella’s doctor prescribed travel in 1867 to treat her severe depression.
It seemed to work, one obsession for another. She was invited in the 1870s to join the Dante Society at Harvard, collecting early editions of Dante’s works and other texts. This blossomed into what I would describe as an insane art collection, which is why I bring her up. This article is about art collectors, isn’t it?
That’s what the Gardner Museum is, anyway, Isabella’s art collection, still arranged how she saw fit. I don’t know if it’s very fair to compare Gardner’s collection to the Mennellos’, and I probably should have realized that as I stared down Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait, Aged 23″ wondering what it was doing there, wondering what Botticelli’s “Story of Lucretia” was doing there, so I asked Fitzgerald if she could make a comparison instead.
“I could, and I’ve actually talked about this to different patrons. It’s a different time period, different economy, economy of means, but they’re both women and many of our great museums across the country have been built by women — you know, Baltimore and the East Coast and the Frick family, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Lauderdales, it goes on and on, are women — and I think that the spirit of Isabella Stewart Gardner, she was all about art, she was much more friends with artists than, say, Marilyn was. She was within the salon and the poets and the musicians and she funded artists, she funded John Singer Sargent and paid for those trips to Europe so that they would have a place in art history. So in a different way, Marilyn Mennello was absolutely doing something like that. She was interested in culture, she thought Orlando needed more of it. Michael definitely talked about that,” Fitzgerald said. “He was always involved. He thought Orlando and Winter Park needed more art education, that these kids weren’t getting it. They weren’t on the East Coast, they didn’t have those major monstrous museums where as little tots you went on field trips, so that’s what motivated them. So she’s got similarities to Isabella Stewart Gardner. Maybe not as eccentric. She didn’t have a lion and didn’t have that kind of property at the turn of the last century, you know?”
Anecdotally, Villa Bianca was used in the beginning as a kitchen to cater food over to the nearby Alabama Hotel, potentially as far back as the ‘20s, which itself has since been converted to condos. Silverbach served as president of the Alabama’s board for 18 years, he said, adding his unit was part of the hotel’s dining room.
He and the Mennellos were close. While he sees it as a major responsibility and an honor to be the executor of their estate, he misses them both dearly.
“I say I’m so blessed in my life, I considered them my third set of parents,” he said. “There’s a saying in martial arts, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will come.’”
There are no surviving Mennellos, per se. Marilyn had two daughters from her marriage to Wilson and that was it. Really, concerning the Mennellos as entertainers, as philanthropists, as patrons of the arts, it’s Ross who’s left.
“They took me in and we would all go out to dinner together, three of us. At that time, I was single and they would try and set me up with some dates, none of them quite worked out, but still, they were always trying to find me the right girl. I bought a plate in the Alabama right across the street and when I did that, you know, I could walk across the street and they began to teach me about the arts,” Silverbach said. “Michael would want to come over to my house and have coffee every Sunday morning and I had no idea what he wanted to do, and I was just thinking, ‘Man, this is crazy. You know, it’s Sunday, I want to go surfing or I want to go work on my cars or something,’ but anyway, he’d come over and he talked about his properties, he’d talk about his art, he’d tell me what was going on, different things that were going on in his head, and he was actually grooming me — and I had no idea at the time — to become the executor of this estate, and Marilyn was in full agreeance with it. So, I really considered them my third set of parents that I’ve fortunately been able to know. I consider them like parents. I mean, incredibly generous, you know, always making sure I was good, teaching me anything I wanted to learn.”
I asked Silverbach what his favorite part of the home was. This got him talking about the ballroom, an important story that defined my understanding.
“Michael and I sat in that ballroom and drank together.
“After Marilyn died, he really went through the floor. I would go over there every night and have a drink with him, and he was mad.
“I mean, he was mad at God, he was mad at the world, but you know, I would go there every single night, have a drink with him and try and cheer him up, and he was just mad and mad and mad, and he would try and take that out on me because I was, you know, I was over there trying to help him.
“One night I just said, ‘Michael, I’ve had enough man. You can’t beat me up this way. You know, all of us love you and all of us, all your closest friends, none of us will ever be what Marylin was, but we all care about you. Try to understand, there’s a lot of people who still love you and want to hang out with you and help you any way we can.’
“And he was mad, mad, mad.
“Finally I said, ‘Man, I’m gonna go, I’m just, this isn’t any good.’
“So I got up, started walking to the back door, got about three quarters of the way there and he goes,
“‘Ross.’
“I said, ‘Yes, sir.’
“He says, ‘Please don’t leave.’
“‘Alright.’
“I turn around, we had a drink and that really, really helped him. I mean, it’s kind of like I had to set a boundary of some sort,” Silverbach said.
Ross followed up by telling another story with the same morals, about motivating a reluctant Michael to join him for a late meal, being thanked in the end for getting him out of the house.
Michael had two strokes in his later years, according to Silverbach. After the first, he threw a dinner party within days and without problems. After the second, he was in a hospital for about 11 months. Ross said he checked on him daily, missing only one visit the entire time, ensuring that he had caretakers at Villa Bianca once he was back.
Villa Bianca is about to be gone, anyway. The art that filled the home is now in the museum’s possession, kept in secure locations. I drove along Via Tuscany one last time toward the end of the year. Heavy equipment’s on site ready to do its thing and the city has already marked off the trees it wishes to keep.
The property is owned by the limited liability company HLJ North Star. According to HLJ North Star LLC’s operating agreement, its manager is Matthew Morgan. You know, son of John Morgan, lives next door at the gargantuan property he made headlines for purchasing in January 2022. It has little putting greens now.
So, to the best of our knowledge, Morgan now owns the land at 1311 Via Tuscany and seeks to have the building demolished. A corner or two has already been chipped at, I could see from the road. There was a rumor floating around the sale that he was going to have it torn down to build a playground, but that’s just hearsay.
Does it matter much that we know what we do, though? Really, the revelation of finding Morgan’s name in the paperwork at all brought me back to the Dickson County archives in Tennessee, amid that genealogy mess I was working on with my family.
There aren’t many actual answers to be found in genealogy, just more paths to follow. I’d heard that a relative of mine had been shot dead in a game of craps, we were able to verify it was my great great great great grandfather. We also learned that another relative fought in the 45th Regiment of Tennessee’s Infantry, was wounded at the Battle of Chickamauga and was eventually given a pension that his family had to claw at the government for following his death. It’s academic stuff you take away, not just about who married who and who died when, but about the history surrounding these people and why they lived a certain way. Most of them were tobacco sharecroppers.
My brother and my mother, her uncle and I, we were a small group that still left a lot of room in that archival basement, easily surveilled by one employee as the other browsed Facebook marketplace for Playstations. Finding our relatives’ names in old Census records, I asked if there was anything more that one could glean from it. We corrected two entries — one was “Odis” instead of “Otis,” the other had “Bee” confused for “Bea” — but she replied, “No, you just point to it.”
I understood then that the thrill or benefit at all of finding a name this way is knowing that someone existed, knowing that you were looking in the right place.
So, there was Matthew Morgan in the paperwork for 1311 Via Tuscany. What could be gleaned from that? Not a lot. Is the playground in the details? No, but there he was.
When I asked Ross if he saw the Mennellos’ deaths and the destruction of their home as a departure for Orlando in any way from the art and fun that they fostered, he spoke of the opposite.
“Not in my world (...) Once I get settled in here, once we get the foundation head all set up, the paintings all sorted, I’m going to start that process again of promoting the Earl Cunningham collection, and that’s how this whole thing started,” Silverbach said. “I’m gonna do my damnedest to continue this legacy.”
Up next for the museum, at some point, will be a 40,000 square foot expansion. It was set to begin much sooner before the pandemic hit, but according to Ross, it’s definitely still happening.
The other weekend, I wore one of Michael’s jackets to dinner at Cítricos. I ordered the filet, as he likely would have. I found an unwrapped mint in one of the pockets.
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Any suggestions for another article I could write about a local place that residents know and love? Contact me at bfhogan@wkmg.com.
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