Mrs. Astor Regrets Read online

  Back in New York, Brooke worried out loud about the fate of her son. As Louis Auchincloss recalls, "Brooke was in a dither. She was very emotionally fired up." Tony recuperated physically, but his mother wrote that he had nightmares for several years thereafter (though Tony brushes that off, saying, "My mother sometimes exaggerated").

  After the war ended, Tony Marshall left the Marines. "I didn't really want to go to college. I had in mind writing, but I decided it would be better to get a degree," he told me. He enrolled at Brown University, in Providence, where he fell in love with eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Cryan, a pretty, lively freshman at Brown's sister college, Pembroke. They shared the bond of growing up in a one-parent family: Tony had an absentee father, and Liz had never known her father, who had died of a heart attack shortly before she was born. Liz and her two brothers had been raised by their mother in Switzerland, an upbringing that gave her a more cosmopolitan flair than her classmates. Four years older, Tony was a good-looking war hero with family money and an aloof persona. Liz later told friends that it was his loneliness that hooked her: she thought maybe she could fill that void.

  In March 1947, General Russell died suddenly of a heart attack at age seventy-four, leaving an emotional emptiness for his grandson. Although Tony had known Liz for only six months, he vowed to marry her, and she accepted his proposal. She began to have doubts as her wedding day approached, but her mother pressed her to keep the date. Brooke vehemently opposed the marriage, arguing that the couple was too young. Tony, uncharacteristically, stood up for himself. His wedding ceremony took place in June 1947 in suburban Philadelphia.

  Tony entered into his marriage with a substantial trust fund, believed by family members to consist of several hundred thousand dollars, a legacy stemming from his parents' divorce. When Brooke married Buddie Marshall, her alimony went into an account for Tony. She still thought the money should have been hers; she had earned it with bruises and a broken jaw. Buddie had an income from a family trust as well as a career as a stockbroker, but when he suffered a series of financial reversals, Brooke used guilt to induce her son to help out. Tony gave his mother a monthly allowance, paid to put in a swimming pool at Brooke and Buddie's country home in Tyringham, Massachusetts, and even bought his mother jewelry from Cartier and Tiffany. "She got a lot of money out of him," says someone who knew Tony well in that era. "She made him feel that this is money that she should have gotten."

  In the flush of his new marriage, Tony attempted a rapprochement with his father, arranging a lunch at the Biltmore Hotel in Providence to introduce his bride. Dryden showed up drunk. And then the phone calls began, with Dryden harassing the couple for money. Dryden finally took Tony to court, suing over his trust fund. His argument was that since Tony had rejected the Kuser name, he did not deserve to have Kuser money. Tony won the lawsuit, but this was such a painful topic that he turned stone-faced when I asked him about it, saying, "I won't discuss this."

  Both Brooke and Tony later wrote novels that included fictionalized elements of their emotionally complex relationship. In The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree, Brooke describes the conflicts between a rich widow, Mrs. Shrewsbury, and her ne'er-do-well son, Joe, who wants to be a writer and depends on his mother's handouts. "The boy was another of her problems. They had never wanted a child. When he was seven, they shipped him off to boarding school, and from then on, it had been school in the winter, summer camp in Maine, and finally, Princeton." When Mrs. Shrewsbury's lawyer, Wendell Ponderosa, suggests that she revise her will to leave money to a foundation for her son to run, the widow reacts with horror, saying, "Heavens! For Joe to run? You must be out of your mind, Wendell!" (Brooke Astor closed the Astor Foundation rather than pass the reins to Tony.) Mrs. Shrewsbury grudgingly comes to respect her son when she discovers that he has a knack for managing money, a task that Tony was performing adequately for his mother when she published this novel.

  In Tony's self-published 2001 thriller, Dash, the sad-sack protagonist, Mark, is the solitary scion of a rich British family with a distant mother and a tyrannical, cruel father. "From his first spanking as he exited his mother's womb, Mark Baldwin Wynwhip was expected to live up to his heritage of near-royal lineage, a confusing agenda for the tot," Tony wrote. "As the infant developed into childhood he was regarded in both physique as well as in manner as a hereditary mistake." After the fictional father arranges to have the beloved nanny murdered, the young boy is sent off to boarding school. Tony writes of his forlorn hero: "He was lonely, friendless, forever hungry and physically exhausted when he rose each morning after a night in the clutch of terrifying nightmares."

  Even after Dryden Kuser lost his lawsuit against his son, he was incorrigible. As Tony's first wife, now Elizabeth Wheaton-Smith, recalls, "Dryden used to call only when he needed money. It went on and on. He'd invent these stories—'I'm in the hospital, I can't pay the bill.'" And Tony would obediently write a check. Yet another attempt at a father-son reconciliation was made in the late 1950s, when Dryden, newly sober, took his fifth wife to meet his son and daughter-in-law. "They came for dinner," recalls Wheaton-Smith. "Dryden was offered a drink, and he said, 'No, can I have some coffee?'"

  Most children expect their parents to provide for them financially. But Tony's Kuser trust fund was a toxic lure for his divorced parents. Instead of fending them off, Tony tried to win their love by writing checks. Despite their patrician pretensions, Dryden and Brooke, both with a sense of entitlement, set an avaricious standard of behavior for their son. They used Tony, sending him the message that all tactics are fair, from emotional blackmail to legal wrangling, in grabbing for a family's fortune.

  By the early 1960s, Dryden Kuser, ill with emphysema, had been reduced to a sinecure as caretaker at High Point State Park, more than 10,000 wild acres that his father had donated to New Jersey back in 1923. He went to see Mrs. Astor at her Park Avenue apartment to beg for money. Brooke savored the moment—the man who had ruined her youth was groveling, and now she held power over him. Despite her bitter memories, however, she chose to be magnanimous. "Brooke was supporting him at the end, and did she enjoy it," says Louis Auchincloss. "It's the ultimate satisfaction, supporting a person who has been mean to you. He was destitute. She couldn't let her son's father starve when she had millions." Kuser died on March 3, 1964, at age sixty-six. Neither Tony nor Brooke went to the sparsely attended funeral.

  Colonel Kuser's once glorious mansion in Bernardsville fell into disrepair after changing hands several times. The place had degenerated into a Jersey version of Grey Gardens by the time that Clive Meanwell, a British pharmaceutical executive, and his wife, Cynthia, bought the house in 2001. During the renovation, a black luxury car with New York plates pulled up in front of the secluded property and a couple got out. "Who the hell is that man wearing an ascot?" Mrs. Meanwell exclaimed to her husband. Tony Marshall introduced himself and Charlene, explained that this had been his grandfather's home, and requested a tour.

  Tony and Charlene walked through the rooms, lingering in the forty-foot wood-paneled ballroom and walking past the intricate bronze and iron stairway and the living room with its marble fireplace. For historical reasons, the new owners had retained elements of the old intercom system, which included Dryden's name on a button. Recalling his visit later, Tony smiled wistfully as he described the house's layout to me, saying, "They've changed things around, but if you go to the left, there's the room where my grandfather kept stuffed pheasants. I remembered that room."

  Perhaps that house represented Paradise Lost to Tony, harking back to a time when his parents, although battling, were still together and a cherished nanny cared for him. Shipped off to boarding schools, disdained by his father and stepfathers, and frequently ignored by his ambitious mother, Tony Marshall never had the security of unconditional love. Only at age sixty-eight did he finally find happiness, when he married Charlene.

  5. An American Romance

  BROOKE ASTOR was never the kind of woman who traveled li
ght. When she went to Palm Beach every winter, she chartered a Gulfstream to accommodate her extraordinary amount of luggage, and before her arrival in Maine in the summer, her staff would drive up a station wagon or two full of her possessions. Her red T. Anthony suitcases trimmed with black leather contained ball gowns packed in tissue paper, a dozen pairs of shoes, Chanel suits, and silk nightgowns. Her maid would carry the black case containing her jewelry. In addition to her female finery, Brooke always took along two gold-framed photographs, which she propped up on her bedside table wherever the bed might be. These mementos reminded her of who she had been and who she had become. The photos were of Buddie Marshall and Vincent Astor.

  Mrs. Astor was not a self-reflective person, but her life was full of might-have-beens. Just a quick glance at those pictures offered a constant reminder of how her life had changed in an instant and the bargain she had made. She was Mrs. Marshall for twenty years, and then, bereaved and panicked, within a year she married a man she did not love. She stood by Vincent Astor for five and a half years, until his death. But the title Mrs. Astor was then hers for life, another half-century, with tens of millions of dollars as her due, and that had made all the difference. Faced with tragedy, she had forged a new identity, yet she still needed to keep Buddie's image close at hand, a reminder of what was lost.

  His death had come without warning, on Thanksgiving weekend in 1952. Buddie and Brooke, along with her widowed mother, Mabel, were spending the holiday at their weekend spread in Tyringham, a hilly rural village in western Massachusetts. As she often described that day, the morning began with a cozy romantic scene, as she and her husband woke together and watched the sunrise from bed. He then went off to spend the morning hunting, bagging several pheasants. During the afternoon friends came by, and Buddie kept complaining that he felt cold, although the room was overheated. The family was sitting by the fire reading that evening when Buddie got up to let the dog out onto the back porch. Minutes later Brooke heard a sound, got up, and went into the kitchen. Her husband was lying on the floor, motionless. Whether he had had a heart attack or a stroke is unclear, but his death had been instantaneous. She cradled him in her arms until the doctor arrived and gave the official verdict.

  To lose the love of your life is devastating. But Brooke soon learned that she had also lost her financial security. Buddie Marshall's family trust fund reverted to his two children, and his divorce settlement granted his first wife a one-third interest in his estate. Brooke was left with approximately $525,000, according to Frances Kiernan's book The Last Mrs. Astor. At a time when the average American family earned $4,500 a year, gas was 27 cents a gallon, and a loaf of bread cost 16 cents, this sum guaranteed an upper-middle-class existence. But to stretch that sum for the rest of a normal lifespan—what fifty-year-old could have imagined fifty-five years still to come?—would have required Brooke to change her lifestyle radically. She had been working as an editor at House and Garden, but that did not bring in enough to underwrite the country house, the New York apartment, the staff, the trips to Europe, and the designer clothes. Now that Tony was working at the State Department, he was dipping into his capital, so she knew that he could not solve her long-term problem. As someone who knew her well then recalls, "She was feeling poverty-stricken."

  Enter Vincent Astor, one of the wealthiest men in America. He was descended from John Jacob Astor, a butcher's son from Waldorf, Germany, who came to Manhattan in April 1780 and hit it big as a fur trader, then plowed his profits into New York real estate. By the time his great-great-grandson Vincent inherited the bulk of the family fortune in 1912, Astor's sprawling real estate empire was worth $87.2 million and included luxury hotels, apartment buildings, office buildings, and slums.

  But Vincent Astor's unhappy childhood had left emotional scars. His depression and suspicious nature proved a trial for all those who tried to love him, including Brooke Marshall. Never far from his mind was the memory of being locked by his imperious mother into a cedar dressing-room closet, where he wept for hours before he was rescued by a butler. He confided to Brooke that when he was four, his nanny had dressed him in a sailor suit and taken him to see his mother, who was having tea with friends. She reacted by saying, "Nanny, take him away, he looks perfectly horrid."

  From birth Astor was portrayed as a poor little rich boy in the press. A Washington Post story in 1904 began: "Always Kept Under Guard: The boy has heaps of money, loads of toys, but cannot eat candy and peanuts and never plays like other children." Vincent, then thirteen, was described as a "captive" attended by five employees (tutor, valet, groom, bodyguard, chauffeur) and fed a bland diet. When he contracted the mumps, the event merited a newspaper story, as if the fate of the nation rested on his health.

  His parents battled for years and finally ended their union with an acrimonious divorce, amid rumors that their daughter, Alice, was the product of Ava Astor's illicit affair. Vincent's formidable mother then married a British lord and became Lady Ribblesdale. Even as adults, Vincent and Alice Astor were frightened of their mother. "She was a tigress," says Ivan Obolensky, Alice Astor's son. "They were terrified of her. Things had to be perfect."

  After attending St. George's School in Newport, Vincent Astor went off to Harvard with twenty suits, ten pairs of shoes, and six trunks. But his college days did not last long. His father, John Jacob Astor IV, had celebrated his freedom from a difficult marriage by marrying a teenage debutante, Madeleine Force, in 1911, and the newlyweds had headed off to Europe. When the couple learned that Madeleine, then nineteen, was pregnant, they decided to come back to New York. Sparing no expense, Astor purchased first-class tickets on a luxury ship boasting a squash court, a Turkish bath, and three libraries—the Titanic. Astor went down with the ship on April 14, 1912, but Madeleine survived, and four months later she gave birth to a son, John Jacob Astor VI, known as Jack. She had signed a prenuptial agreement that limited her inheritance to $5 million; her son received a $5 million trust fund. The bulk of the estate, more than $60 million, went to the firstborn son, Vincent, who was only twenty. He dropped out of Harvard to take over the family business and begin public life.

  Besieged by women, he received thousands of letters from female admirers with dollar signs in their eyes. Uniformed police had to intervene to rescue him from hordes ofwomen while attending a social event at the Seventh Avenue Armory. "The perils of being young, unmarried and very wealthy were emphasized tonight when Mr. Astor almost was mobbed by throngs of maids and matrons," wrote the Washington Post. For a shy, gawky, six-foot, four-inch man, this was torture. Eager for stability, Vincent married a childhood playmate, Helen Dinsmore Huntington, telling reporters, "She is a typical American girl. She has no foolish notions or new fads. Horseback riding and tennis are her favorite recreations."

  Despite his sheltered background, Vincent Astor had developed a social conscience, and he was mortified when he saw the housing that had been built on Astor-owned property. Developers had put up shoddy buildings that had quickly deteriorated into slums known as "Astor Flats." "Mr. Astor was shocked at the conditions he found in houses on Astor land and decided to get rid of slum properties," a New York Times story recounted. Astor sold the bulk of those buildings to the city for a nominal amount.

  That was a generous act, and there would be others in his career. "It is unreasonable to suppose that because a man is rich, he is also useless," said Astor, who established a well-endowed foundation "for the alleviation of human misery." But despite his magnanimous moments, he developed a reputation as a loner who favored machines more than people. He raced and wrecked automobiles; built and sailed one of the largest private yachts; installed a miniature railroad, Toonerville, at his Rhinebeck estate; supported early aviation; and was a director of a railroad corporation and a shipping company. He served honorably as an ensign in the navy in World War I, where his lungs were damaged by fumes during a trip home via submarine.

  One childhood friendship that endured was with his neighbor Franklin Dela
no Roosevelt. When the president-elect wanted privacy to choose his first cabinet, he took his advisers for a cruise on Astor's 263-foot yacht. (After the boat docked in Miami, Astor and the others accompanied FDR when he went to give a speech. As the group piled into cars to leave, Astor, in the car behind FDR, turned to his companions and said, "Any crank might take a shot at him. I don't like this." Minutes later a deranged man, Joe Zangara, shot at FDR, missed, and killed Chicago's mayor, Anton Cermak.) Astor's close relationship with FDR merited a Time cover on April 9, 1934, entitled "Fun with Friends." The newsmagazine sniffed that the multimillionaire lacked "social confidence" and referred to his "awkwardness."

  But Vincent Astor's lineage and bank balance proved to be powerful draws for the opposite sex. Astor and Helen, a classical music enthusiast, discovered that they had little in common, and the childless couple began to lead separate lives. At a Washington dinner party in 1935, Astor met Minnie Cushing, the oldest and most intellectual of the three renowned Cushing sisters, daughters of a prominent Boston surgeon. (The sisters married well and often: Babe Cushing paired off with Standard Oil heir Stanley Mortimer, Jr., and moved on to CBS founder Bill Paley; Betsey Cushing's first husband was James Roosevelt, the president's son, and her second spouse was John Hay Whitney.)