Mrs. Astor Regrets Read online

  Mrs. Astor had a lifelong ability to rise to the occasion, however, and appeared in perfect command that week in an interview conducted over afternoon tea at her apartment with Alex Kuczynski of the New York Times. Although she came from a genteel generation that shied away from seeing their names in the newspapers, she was a master of public relations and used the press to publicize her causes, consistently providing great copy for generations of journalists. She recalled playing tennis with Ezra Pound (he was "terrible to the ball boys" she told USA Today), viewing Mussolini at a reception held at a grand Italian palazzo on the eve of World War II, and even meeting Henry Adams. Once again she did not disappoint, giving a performance that seemed to promise many more years of perfect bons mots. She slyly pointed out a statue of a young nude and claimed that it was her younger self. "Darn, I can't lie about my age any longer," she joked about her birthday.

  Mrs. Astor ended the interview with a favorite conversational gambit, bringing up the topic of plastic surgery. "I have never had any work done," she said, and then asked, with the perfect timing of a honed punch line, "Tell me honestly. Could I use some?" Even at one hundred, she delivered the goods. In truth, she had made a similar remark a few years earlier to Marian Heiskell, a member of the Sulzberger family, who had reacted with a skeptical smile. Brooke had then admitted, "Well, maybe just a little around the eyes."

  Kuczynski walked away impressed at Brooke Astor's stamina and well-maintained lifestyle. "She was pretty much all there—she was compos mentis. The apartment had a sweet smell, the smell you find in well-run homes. It has something to do with fine cotton and high-grade linen." (A few years earlier, a journalist from the Toronto Globe and Mail had described the odor as "that fine smell of beeswax and money.") But contemplating the aroma of old money can get a reporter only so far. Kuczynski needed another voice for her story, so she turned to Brooke Astor's son, Tony Marshall, for the expected filial quote.

  2. A Little Night Music

  TONY MARSHALL had a secret, and it was a secret that appeared to be nagging at him in the weeks prior to his mother's one hundredth birthday. Brooke Astor had begun behaving erratically in recent years, from getting lost on her property in Westchester to lashing out with displays of temper and frustration that were out of character. Her staff members had quietly confided their concerns about her behavior to Tony and repeatedly asked for his guidance. A little more than a year earlier, he had arranged for his mother to see a neurologist in December 2000. She was so furious at her son's effort to intrude and fearful of what might be learned that she delayed getting dressed on the day of the appointment, in order to be deliberately late. Tony accompanied her to the physician's office and subsequently received the dreaded diagnosis: Alzheimer's disease.

  Protective of his mother and her image, he did not want her friends or the public to know that her occasional slips masked a serious condition. But he and his third wife, Charlene, could not carry this burden alone. Tony informed his twin sons, Alec, a freelance photographer who lived just a mile from Brooke's country house, and Philip, a professor of historic preservation at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. While the brothers had seen their grandmother only intermittently as children, now, in their forties, they had developed a genuinely warm relationship and a determination to bask in the time they had left with her.

  "It was obvious that she was having problems," says Alec Marshall. "There were gray areas. I'd have tea with her; she'd repeat herself and get confused." Nonetheless, Philip Marshall remembers that his father was adamant about keeping the news confidential. Philip got the word during a weekend family visit to Holly Hill. "My father took me into the library and said, 'I have something important to talk about. Your grandmother has Alzheimer's. This is hush-hush, a big secret.' I thought to myself, what else is new?"

  In the early stages of the disease, people can often carry on, albeit with moments of disorientation. Brooke was still able to finesse most situations with her well-practiced charm and a century's worth of favorite anecdotes. She had handled herself quite well with the Times. But interviews offered the potential for danger. When Newsday called Tony to comment for a story on his mother's hundredth birthday, his careful facade cracked slightly, as if he could not help referring to the truth, even if obliquely. "Her health is pretty good, but with age comes the aging process," he told the newspaper. "She does have a little problem with her memory. She knows she's having the problem and it irritates the hell out of her when she can't remember someone's name." Tony acknowledged that his mother was unsteady, noting that she had recently lost her balance, fallen, and cut her leg, so she now needed a cane.

  Brooke had always been extremely independent and was used to ruling her fiefdom of servants. She resented any interference from her son. But as Mrs. Astor's only child, Tony felt obligated to become more involved in supervising her household. At least it was convenient. He lived only a few blocks from his mother, in a second-floor duplex at Seventy-ninth and Lexington Avenue which was modest compared to his mother's apartment. Decorated with chintz-covered furniture, a spinet piano, an antique globe, and objects such as a carved giraffe and elephant, his apartment was a testament to his well-traveled life. Brooke Astor bought her son this co-op after he married his third wife, Charlene, and in 1999, his mother gave him $3.9 million to allow him to buy the apartment from her, a sum that also covered the gift tax. Tony had lived off his mother's financial generosity virtually all his life.

  His last name often confused people, since he was the product of his mother's first marriage, to Dryden Kuser, but took the last name of her second husband, Buddie Marshall.

  Tony had been managing his mother's money as a full-time job since 1980, after an action-filled early career. Enlisting in the Marines during World War II, he led his unit in the assault on Iwo Jima and was wounded in the leg and arms by shrapnel and was awarded a Purple Heart. He joined the CIA during the height of the cold war, spent a few years on Wall Street, and then, apparently thanks in large part to generous family donations to Richard Nixon, landed ambassadorships to Madagascar, Trinidad and Tobago, and Kenya during the Watergate years. Brooke was so committed to helping her son's career that she was willing to be cynical about her politics. She met Nixon shortly after he left office, at the California home of the media tycoon Walter Annenberg. Ashton Hawkins, the counsel for the Metropolitan Museum and her escort that evening, recalls, "Nixon didn't know who Tony was, or who she was. Afterwards, she told me, 'I supported Nixon not because I believed in him but because Tony got appointments.'"

  Over the years, from time to time Brooke lamented to friends—and even made indiscreet remarks to her staff—that her son always seemed to need a helping hand. Leaving Maine for a quick trip to Manhattan one summer weekend in the late 1970s, she told her veteran gardener, Steve Hamor, "I've got to go get my son a new job."

  Tony was indeed at loose ends after his government career ended with the Democratic takeover of the White House in the 1976 election. His mother's financial portfolio was stagnating, so she offered him a chance to manage it. His record as an investment adviser appears to have been decidedly mixed in the view of financial experts. Tony would later boast that he increased his mother's assets from $19 million to $82 million between 1980 and 2006, which works out to a compound growth rate of 5.9 percent a year. During the same period, the Standard & Poor's 500 grew by 11 percent per year.

  This new life, in which his annual compensation for managing his mother's money reached $450,000 by 2004, left Tony with ample time for leisure pursuits. He wrote a guidebook to American zoos and aquariums and in 2001 he self-published a novel, Dash, about financial hijinks. Tony also served on numerous boards, including those of the Wildlife Conservancy, the public television station WNET, and the Metropolitan Museum, where he assumed his mother's seat.

  Despite his comfortable livelihood, Tony was dependent on his mother's good will. He had hoped to succeed her in running the Astor Foundation, and she dangled that as a possi
bility but then decided to spend down the assets. She loved her son but often acted as if she did not like him. As hard as he tried to please her and earn her affection, she did not make it easy. It is difficult for any child of a famous parent to establish a separate identity, and in the eyes of New York, he was known by all as Brooke Astor's son.

  On the day in 2002 that the Times contacted him, Tony may have been tired of talking about Brooke Astor or nervous about letting his secret slip. Reporters never inquired about his own accomplishments, and sometimes his frustration showed. "He was cool in a frigid way, very unlike his mother," says Alex Kuczynski, the Times reporter, adding that he appeared annoyed by the mere fact of her call. Failing to elicit useful anecdotes, the reporter asked what Tony planned to say in his toast at his mother's birthday party, and the Times printed his solemn reply: "I think I'll talk about how I have loved and admired my mother for more than three-quarters of a century."

  The television and radio news reports on the morning of the party, March 30, 2002, highlighted the sad changing of the guard across the Atlantic: the Queen Mother, aged 101, had died. Brooke Astor had been befriended by the royal family and had made a tradition of visiting London at least once a year. When Tony Marshall called to break the news to her, she was sleeping in at Holly Hill, so he asked her longtime butler, Christopher Ely, to pass it along. Ely was extremely reliable about Tony's requests, but this time he decided that he would "forget" the message. On Brooke's day, nothing should ruin her pleasure, or remind her of her own mortality. A former footman at Buckingham Palace, Ely, thirty-nine and single, never hesitated to stand up for himself when necessary. He had declined Brooke's request that he wear a uniform, in preference for a professional dark blazer and slacks. A slender, balding Englishman with an impish sense of humor, he had asked to be referred to as Chris rather than by his last name.

  When Mrs. Astor woke up on her birthday, she was in an anticipatory mood. Though the staff advised her to rest, she was too keyed up to take a nap, and besides, company kept arriving. First a beautician made a house call to administer a facial and a manicure. Then Viscount William Astor, a member of the House of Lords, arrived from London. The handsome Astor, then fifty, had often been Brooke's host in England and had known her since he was a child. "I came up at lunchtime," he recalls. "She was very excited—she was looking forward so much to the party." He was shown to the Cardinals' Room, a lemon yellow sanctuary decorated with portraits of cardinals (religious figures, not birds). When Freddy Melhado and his wife, Virginia, arrived, they were given a large chocolate brown bedroom with a red carpet and a water view. When Tony and Charlene arrived, they were directed to a second-tier room at the back of the house. Brooke had made the sleeping arrangements, but Ely carried them out, a job that did not always make him popular.

  Philip Marshall and his wife, the artist Nan Starr, who had driven from their home in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, were housed in a guest cottage. Ferrying the revelers to the party at Kykuit, a fifteen-minute drive, presented a logistical problem. The Marshall brothers and Nan had already arranged to go together, and the Melhados planned to take their own car. Viscount Astor was amused when Brooke asked him to escort her to the party. "Brooke had a mischievous streak," says Astor. "I think she did it to irritate her daughter-in-law, so they'd have to take a separate car. She said, 'Thank God you're here. I don't want to go with them.'"

  Brooke had never gushed over either of her son's first two wives—no one would ever be good enough for her boy—but she had particularly taken umbrage over Charlene. "Brooke never liked any of her daughters-in-law," says Vartan Gregorian. "Who she had in mind for Tony, I don't know, but she never became close to any of them." Gregorian felt a certain amount of sympathy for Mrs. Astor's son, saying, "He's a very private, reticent, sometimes humorous, earnest man. It's not easy to be Brooke's son, always in the shadow."

  Charlene met the Astor family when she was married to Paul Gilbert, the rector of St. Mary's-by-the-Sea, in Northeast Harbor, Maine. Brooke attended the church, which was just a few blocks from her summer home. The ensuing affair between Charlene and Tony and their decision to leave their spouses for each other had been a village scandal. Brooke complained to friends that she was embarrassed to show her face in church. Even ten years after the couple wed, with Brooke in attendance, the matriarch still opted for the periodic passive-aggressive gesture toward Charlene, as if just for sport.

  Her friends had witnessed Brooke's enmity. Shortly before her birthday party, Brooke gave a small dinner at her home, and Annette de la Renta arrived without jewelry. The hostess went into her bedroom and returned with a sparkling gold and diamond necklace and matching earrings, insured at $75,600, for Annette to wear, and later she insisted that Annette take them home as a gift. As Annette left the room in search of a mirror, Brooke turned to Nancy Kissinger and announced, "I don't want Charlene to get it."

  Mrs. Astor knew that all eyes would be upon her tonight. How much more advantageous to arrive on the arm of the attractive and aristocratic viscount than on that of her watchful son. Chris Ely drove the pair of Astors over to the party in a forest green Mercedes Benz. David Rockefeller, aware of the butler's devotion, had personally invited him to be one of the hundred guests at tonight's party. But Ely begged off because he did not feel that it was appropriate for him to cross this social boundary.

  During the brief ride, Mrs. Astor, eager to make a good impression and fearful of appearing forgetful, worried out loud about the evening. "She was in quite a nervous state," Lord Astor recalls. She instructed him to 'hold my arm, take me in. Every time someone comes up to say hello to me, whisper in my ear who it is, in case I don't recognize them.'"

  At dusk the black town cars and limousines crept slowly up the long, twisting drive to Kykuit. The estate, which once belonged to John D. Rockefeller, who founded Standard Oil, is now operated by the National Historic Trust as a tourist site. The gracious stone palace was built in 1906 on 250 acres of pristine land and has an incomparable view of the Palisades. Perfectly situated on the broad expanses of lawn are enormous sculptures by Picasso, Alexander Calder, and Gaston Lachaise collected by Nelson Rockefeller, and visitors can glimpse the artworks through the trees. On the evening of Mrs. Astor's party, the main house, with its oriental rugs and eclectic art collection (a roomful of Ming ceramics, a Rodin sculpture, and paintings by John Singer Sargent, Gilbert Stuart, and Robert Motherwell), was closed for the evening. But just down the hill, the large Playhouse, built to amuse the Rockefeller children with a bowling alley, squash court, and tennis court, was invitingly lit. The swimming pool had been boarded over for dancing. The tuxedoed waiters were on standby; the musicians were in their places. It was a stage set, ready for action to begin.

  And oh, what a famous cast began emerging from the vehicles. There was Kofi Annan, the secretary-general of the United Nations; a trio of TV anchors (Jennings, Walters, Mike Wallace), the former New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal; Henry and Nancy Kissinger; Vartan Gregorian and his successor at the New York Public Library, Paul LeClerc; the political widows Happy Rockefeller and Casey Ribicoff; the writers George Plimpton, John Richardson, and Barbara Goldsmith; the jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane; and a full cadre of socialites, philanthropists, and officials from various museums (the Metropolitan, the Frick, the Museum of Natural History). The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire had declined, and the Marquis and Marchioness of Salisbury had sent their regrets, but Annette and Oscar de la Renta had flown back from their getaway in the Dominican Republic.

  As Lester Lanin's band played Cole Porter and George Gershwin favorites, songs written as Brooke was just starting her ascension to American royalty, the guests mingled and joked and reminisced. Brooke was a wisp of a woman, but she had been a towering influence on the lives of her friends. She had ignited their careers, introduced them to new worlds, made them laugh, given their lives sparkle. There were so many memories: Brooke flirting with every man in the room, marching energetically up mounta
ins, entertaining on a rented yacht in the Caribbean, helping friends in trouble, reading from The Wild Party to liven up a dull dinner. She sent plane tickets so intimates could visit her in Maine or Palm Beach, lost her emeralds (repeatedly), wrote poetry that was published in The New Yorker, discussed novels in a highbrow book group, and sent elegant thank-you notes, a lifetime of meaningful and memorable gestures.

  For Gregorian, entrusted in 1981 with reviving the moldering New York Public Library, she had opened her home, giving dinners to introduce him to her moneyed world, making calls with him to try to wring donations from tough targets such as Donald Trump, whispering amusing asides. For Emily Harding, she was Aunt Brooke, who had swooped in to help when Emily's mother, Alice Astor—Vincent Astor's sister—suddenly died. Brooke and Vincent offered to adopt Emily, who was then fourteen, and when Emily declined, Brooke toured boarding schools with her. Even after Vincent died, Brooke worked with his two ex-wives to give Emily a coming-out party at the St. Regis, the hotel that Vincent had owned. "The three aunties did it together," Harding recalls. "It showed there were no hard feelings among them."