Mrs. Astor Regrets Read online

  The still-married Vincent Astor began traveling all over the world on his yacht with Minnie, not bothering to conceal the relationship. In 1940, Helen Astor asked for a divorce. Three weeks after the decree was final, Vincent married Minnie in a small, secret ceremony on Long Island.

  After five years of amicable companionship, the tensions between the couple started to show. The hypersocial Minnie liked to spend time in Manhattan with artists and writers; Vincent preferred a solitary life on his boat. In The Sisters: The Lives and Times of the Fabulous Cushing Sisters, David Grafton makes a persuasive case that Minnie Cushing Astor was a lesbian, citing a list of her likely lovers (the department store heiress Kay Halle, a French actress named Annabella, and another French actress, Valentina.) But Astor was apparently besotted, and the couple stayed together for thirteen years.

  During World War II, Astor enlisted in the navy again, at age fifty, and worked in intelligence. He was named commodore of convoy. But despite this achievement, he was a hypochondriac who smoked and drank relentlessly, and after the war his drinking escalated. "The word got out that if you wanted to do business with Vincent, you had to do it before eleven A.M.," says his nephew Ivan Obolensky. Astor even scared off the neighborhood children. "I was terrified of him," says Reinaldo Herrera, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. As a teenager, Herrera visited Alice Astor's daughters, who lived next to Vincent's Rhinebeck estate. "We'd be in the pool, and the butler would come and say, 'Get out, Captain Vincent is coming.' He was a scary gentleman."

  But even the gloomiest personality can sparkle when combined with an awe-inspiring bank account and a touching dose of ardor. Six months after Buddie Marshall's death, when Brooke was panicked about her future, she attended a dinner where the guests included Vincent and Minnie Astor, both of whom she knew slightly. "I thought he was difficult. Everybody said he was," she told Charlie Rose in a 1994 television interview. "I made [up] my mind we were going to hit it off." At the end of the evening the Astors invited Brooke to their country home, the fabled Ferncliff, for Memorial Day weekend.

  What a sophisticated and civilized pair they were, Vincent and Minnie, out shopping together for a replacement wife for Vincent. As Brooke later described the weekend, Vincent whisked her away for a drive in his Mercedes and proposed. He told her that Minnie had asked for a divorce and he had resisted, but now that he had met Brooke, he would be willing to go through with the divorce. Brooke always insisted that she resisted this snap proposal but was won over by Vincent's letters, which she found "beguiling." Decades later she would frequently pull out these letters and read them aloud to friends as proof that she had not married merely for money. "If you have the slightest doubt of my love of Brooke, I wish that you could at this moment look inside my head or wherever it is that emotions lie," Astor wrote in a letter included in the set given to guests at Brooke's hundredth birthday party. Barbara Goldsmith says, "It was important to her to believe that Vincent loved her. I don't think she would have married someone if she didn't think she could have a relationship."

  Vincent Astor's family welcomed Brooke's arrival on the scene. But Ivan Obolensky is convinced that Brooke's tale of the couple's courtship omitted an earlier meeting. "Vincent would go to this sanitorium to dry out, Silver Hill," said Obolensky. "She was one of the companions to jolly people up. She met him there. When you get a guy worth two hundred million dollars under your thumb, that's an opportunity. She was predatory." (Obolensky was a major beneficiary of his uncle's wills before Brooke entered the picture, but Vincent Astor subsequently wrote him out, which may explain his jaundiced view of the third Mrs. Astor.)

  Did she love him? Louis Auchincloss, who knew and heartily disliked Vincent Astor, has repeatedly insisted that Brooke embarked on the union for purely mercenary reasons. "If she married him for his charm, I'd have said she ought to be put in an asylum," says the novelist, who has long chronicled the mores of Upper East Side aristocracy. "Vincent was an enormously unattractive, bullheaded man, no fun to have around whatsoever. He was mad for her. The people who say that marriage was not consummated are crazy. I just know that randy old goat certainly looked after himself." But Auchincloss was impressed at how well Brooke behaved once she married Vincent Astor. "It was a bargain, and she kept it. She was the only one of his three wives who made him happy. That was quite a job, but she did it."

  Vincent Astor made a hobby of perpetually changing his will. In the Poughkeepsie, New York, courthouse, several file cabinet drawers bulge with versions of his last wishes. Less than four months after meeting Brooke, he wrote a new will, on September 24, 1953, which gave his "prospective wife Brooke Russell Marshall" the sum of $5 million plus ownership of Ferncliff. This was the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement, and her payout only improved over time.

  When Vincent Astor and Brooke Marshall married, on October 8, 1953, the New York Times mentioned that "only a few relatives and friends attended the ceremony." The hastily scheduled wedding took place at Joseph Pulitzer's home in Bar Harbor, Maine, a remote location chosen to avoid the paparazzi of the day and minimize attention to the unseemly haste with which the widow was remarrying.

  Brooke had been a social nobody, a well-to-do matron on the edges of the aristocracy. But now she was Mrs. Astor, with all that the name implied. Her husband owned the St. Regis Hotel and Newsweek magazine, and he was a major shareholder of the premier shipping firm, the United States Lines. A wedding day photo shows the newlyweds boarding Astor's plane to return home. Brooke is grinning happily, while Astor, a boutonniere in his lapel, is posed awkwardly, almost shyly, by his new possession.

  Tony, then twenty-nine, was among the wedding guests, but his wife, Liz, did not make the trip to Maine. She was home caring for the couple's twins, Alec and Philip, who had been born prematurely on May 14. The babies were so small that the doctor warned they might not survive, especially firstborn Philip, who had a heart murmur as well as a partial harelip (which was surgically corrected, leaving a faint scar). Later, as fun-loving and affectionate toddlers, Brooke's grandsons proved an asset to her new marriage, as Vincent Astor became enamored of the boys. But he took an instant dislike to his new stepson.

  Despite the tensions between the two men, they had interests in common. Proud of his war record and his role as one of FDR's advisers, Vincent was a patriot who believed in government service. After graduating from Brown in 1950, Tony had gone to work at the State Department as an intelligence analyst. His first government job paid a paltry $3,100 a year, but thanks to his trust fund, he and Liz were able to buy a nineteenth-century row house in the heart of Georgetown. Tony hoped to enter the foreign service but failed the arduous entrance exam, so he went to see General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II spy agency that was the predecessor of the CIA. "I asked him what I should do. I wanted to get into civilian government, and I was a reserve officer," recalls Tony. Donovan arranged for Tony to take a job with the CIA as a roving recruiter.

  The early days of the cold war were a heady time to be a CIA operative, and Tony, with his Ivy League background and sterling war record, had the perfect pedigree. After two years as a recruiter, he took the opportunity to become a special assistant to Richard Bissell, a rising star who would become the head of clandestine operations. Bissell had been put in charge of developing the U-2 spy plane, and one of Tony's assignments was to fly to Pakistan to obtain the government's permission for the U-2 to use an airstrip. He later recalled his time in the CIA as the peak of his career, according to Frances Fitzgerald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, whose father, Desmond, was a major figure at the CIA. "Tony clearly loved those days," recalls Fitzgerald. "You got the feeling that he was a man of action, slightly frustrated by not having made it all the way."

  Vincent Astor showered his new wife with jewels, and Brooke found herself spending time with his famous friends, including the Time magazine founder Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce; the Wrigleys, of the c
hewing gum fortune; and the three Rockefeller brothers. But the new Mrs. Astor was not universally welcomed by society. Winthrop Aldrich, now the deputy New York State commissioner for historic preservation, remembers that his grandmother Margaret Chandler, an Astor cousin, banned Brooke from her home. "She did not approve of the remarriage," Aldrich says. "Vincent drove by the home with Brooke and said, 'That's a place where you'll never be able to go.'"

  Just as Vincent's grandmother Caroline Schermerhorn Astor had been in the 1890s, Brooke was eager to make her mark in society as a hostess. But although Vincent grudgingly allowed her to give one dinner-dance at the St. Regis for 275 people during their first year of marriage, he then drew the line. He made it clear that his fantasy evening was a quiet night at home with Brooke playing the piano for him. The marriage proved suffocating for Brooke, who later described her husband as so possessive that he asked her not to talk on the phone when he was at home. He wanted to see only his friends, not hers, and urged her to limit contact with her emotionally needy son. Brooke chose to appease her wealthy husband. "I saw very little of Tony," she wrote in Footprints. "I concentrated on Vincent. It was what he longed for and needed desperately, and what I had to give." She later described her married life as Mrs. Astor with a simple refrain: "I was lying fallow."

  Brooke's first husband's alcoholism had been a problem, but this time she chose to ignore the fact that Vincent drank too much. At least Vincent was only a morose drunk, not a violent one. When Tony and Liz went to Ferncliff for a rare weekend visit, Brooke's daughter-in-law was astounded to witness the alcohol intake. "At ten-thirty A.M. the sherry came out. Before lunch the martinis came. Wine with lunch. At five o'clock the scotch came out, and then everyone went and changed for dinner. Dinner was martinis and wine, and liquor afterward," says Liz. She adds, "I was appalled, because Vincent was on a million medications. I remember looking in the bedroom once, and he had this chest of drawers, and the entire top was covered with medicines."

  The Astors spent winters in Phoenix, and at Brooke's behest, Vincent purchased Cove End as a warm-weather retreat. The Rockefeller clan was based nearby, in Seal Harbor, and Brooke worked hard to fit in among the summering aristocrats. "Vincent had a boat called the Little Nourmahal," says James McCabe, a Philadelphia money manager whose father, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, socialized with the Astors. "Vincent drank a lot. I don't think he felt comfortable being social."

  But he could be kind when it mattered. After his sister, Alice, died suddenly, in 1956, Vincent and Brooke took two of his nieces to Maine for the summer. "He was tall and gruff and bearlike, but that was his appearance. He really did try to be nice to me," recalls Emily Harding, who declined the couple's offer to adopt her, choosing her older sister, Ramona, as her guardian. "He was always trying to joke with me and bring me out of my shell. He and Aunt Brooke seemed happy together."

  Vincent also took Brooke's grandsons, Philip and Alec, to Maine for a summer of sailing, and welcomed them for weekend visits at Ferncliff. He sometimes took the twins on his private train, Toonerville, or hoisted them onto his donkey. Photographs from that era show Vincent smiling as he roughhouses outdoors, in suit and tie, with Philip and Alec. Brooke, sitting on the ground, maternally cuddles one of the boys in her lap. "Vincent had one of the early VWs, and his idea of fun would be to throw us in the back and drive around," recalls Philip. "He really liked croquet, and the professional rigors of croquet. He would teach us to play, and afterwards we'd go to the teahouse." Vincent Astor was so fond of the boys that on May 15, 1957, he revised his will to give Alec and Philip $100,000 each. He did not leave a penny to Tony Marshall. Through their words and deeds, both Brooke and Vincent Astor created a family dynamic that gave Tony good reason to resent his own young sons.

  Vincent Astor half seriously suggested to Brooke that they consider adopting her two grandchildren, whose parents were not getting along. Tony had come to regret marrying so young. Liz lamented that she had dropped out of college at Tony's insistence, and confided to friends that her husband had a wandering eye. He confessed to one affair, and Liz suspected several others. But they patched things up enough so that in 1958, when the CIA sent Tony to Turkey as vice consul for economic affairs, they decided to go together, with the twins.

  Just before they left, Tony and Liz paid a farewell visit to Brooke and Vincent at Ferncliff. Brooke usually put on a good front about her life with Vincent, but on this weekend she chose to be honest. She took a walk on the grounds with her daughter-in-law and confided, "I don't think I can stand being married to him anymore. I don't think I can take it. He never wants to go anywhere—he's so antisocial."

  Vincent Astor suffered from serious cardiovascular problems, a legacy of his damaged lungs and his smoking and drinking habits, and his health was deteriorating. There was a constant parade of doctors and nurses on the premises. Brooke's feelings about that grim period were reflected in the advice she later gave to Barbara Goldsmith, a fellow trustee of the New York Public Library. When Goldsmith's husband, the filmmaker Frank Perry, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he reacted by asking for a divorce. In a heart-to-heart at the Four Seasons restaurant, Brooke announced to her friend: "You are the luckiest person in the world." The stunned Goldsmith replied, "I beg your pardon?" Brooke explained, "You had a very good marriage. I know you would have stuck with it until the bitter end, and it will be a bitter end. This way, you're forgoing all the nurses around the clock, the bedpans, all the craziness. You can walk away with your head held high."

  If Lloyd's of London had taken bets on the longevity of the union between Vincent and Brooke Astor, who had five marriages between them, the odds would not have favored a silver jubilee. Rumors circulated that Vincent had also tired of Brooke and was on the verge of asking for a divorce shortly before he died. Ivan Obolensky heard that Vincent had gone so far as to contact his lawyer, Roland Redmond, to say, "I've had it—I want to divorce Brooke." Frances Kiernan writes in The Last Mrs. Astor that that conversation occurred while Vincent, Brooke, and Redmond were crossing the Atlantic by ship. In Kiernan's version, upon arriving in London, the remorseful Astor ordered an elaborate emerald necklace for his wife. Whatever the timing, he did not follow up on his threat.

  Vincent Astor died of a heart attack at the couple's apartment at 120 East End Avenue on February 3, 1959, at the age of sixty-seven. His funeral, attended by four hundred mourners, took place at St. James' Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue. The coffin was covered with yellow jonquils and ferns, and the altar was obscured by 140 floral arrangements. A Who's Who of dignitaries attended, and a fifty-person choir sang Astor's favorite hymn, "Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past." Brooke later requested that the same hymn be sung at her funeral.

  The contents of Vincent Astor's will were splashed across the newspapers. His estate was worth $127 million, $60.5 million of which had been left to his foundation. Astor gave $827,500 to other beneficiaries (including $100,000 to Emily Harding, $25,000 to his first wife, Helen, and $2,500 to each of his servants). Brooke became a rich woman, with $2 million in cash, $60 million in a trust for her benefit, and valuable real estate, including the couple's New York apartment, Ferncliff, and the houses in Maine and Arizona. She also received her husband's blessing to run the Astor Foundation. When Vincent had rewritten his will on June 26, 1958, he had eliminated the $100,000 bequests to her grandsons, Alec and Philip Marshall. Perhaps he assumed that the boys would inherit money from Brooke, or his initial affection had waned.

  Brooke always insisted that she was not involved in Vincent's decision to revise his will in her favor. "He used to change his will constantly. It was a game with him—almost a social event—and it always put him in a merry mood," she wrote in Footprints. "I did not know or care about the will."

  Other Astor family members had suspicions, however. Vincent's half-brother, Jack, promptly sued Brooke for a half share, insisting that Vincent had been mentally incompetent when he had signed his June 1958 will, during a stay
at New York Hospital. Jack Astor charged that Brooke and the estate's executors had used "undue influence" and that Brooke had taken liquor to her husband while he was in the hospital. Brooke hired as her defender David Peck, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, which was the beginning of a four-decade relationship with the firm.

  Brooke's first act as the Widow Astor was to take the witness stand in pretrial hearings in a Poughkeepsie courtroom. She admitted that Vincent drank but insisted that he had been fully competent. She later recalled that Jack Astor's lawyer snarled at her: "'Vincent drank so much that he had a bottle of liquor in the hospital. Did you know that?' And I said, 'Of course I did, I took it to him.'" Jack Astor hired a forgery expert to examine the will. The sensational trial was treated by the press as a joke. "Please Help Poor John Jacob Astor" read the headline in the Washington Post, and the columnist Charles Van Deusen mocked the plaintiff's three marriages and his 270-pound girth. Just before a jury was about to be picked, Jack Astor settled for a paltry $250,000.

  This was an awkward beginning for Brooke's new life as a woman on her own, although a touch of scandal had its allure. Now wealthy and free, Mrs. Astor celebrated with a classic symbolic gesture: she called in a decorator to change her sleeping arrangements. "Vincent Astor had died, and she wanted a new bed," recalls Albert Hadley. "It was my first commission for her." He designed a headboard upholstered in lettuce green silk, a color inspired by that season of renewal, spring. Mrs. Astor could now lie down alone between soft sheets on her new double bed and daydream about her fresh start.

  6. White-Glove Philanthropy

  WHEN BROOKE ASTOR showed up for work at the Vincent Astor Foundation at 405 Park Avenue, she had a surprising reaction: she became angry. Assuming that she could not possibly be serious about taking over, the men in charge treated her with disdain. She later singled out as her nemesis Allan Betts, the foundation's director, who expected to continue in his pleasant sinecure. "Vincent told me before he died, 'You're going to have a hell of a lot of fun with the foundation,'" Brooke told Peg Breen, the president of the Landmarks Conservancy, in a 1996 interview. "The people who were then running the foundation said to me, 'You can go on having a good time, take a trip around the world.' 'No,' I said, and sat down at this desk. 'I'm going to stay here.' Well, they didn't like that." In this prefeminist era (Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique arrived four years later, in 1963), Mrs. Astor did not see herself as a pioneer, yet she acted like one. "I don't know whatever possessed me that I stood up to these two men—they wanted to run it. People came here to the office and asked for money, and they gave it," she continued. "I said, 'I don't want to do that—I want to see what I'm giving to. Maybe it's good or maybe it won't be good.'"