The Battle for Mrs. Astor
From being queen of New York society and one of her century’s great philanthropists, Brooke Astor became America’s most prominent case of alleged elder abuse. With her son, Anthony Marshall, expected to stand trial this winter on financial charges, John Richardson draws on years of friendship with the late doyenne, and accounts of those closest to her, to document the fear and confusion that marked Astor’s final years.
John Richardson
October 2008
Vanity Fair
http://www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2008/10/astor200810?printable=true&currentPage=all
In January, The New York Times printed a piece about a 94-year-old woman named Minnie Motz, whose son, an Upper East Side doctor, had been accused of ripping his mother off to the tune of $800,000. The elderly woman’s daughter and a grand-niece suspected elder abuse and went to the district attorney. The chief of investigations in the D.A.’s office, which later indicted the doctor, said, “It’s a mini Astor case.” Mrs. Motz’s daughter said, “We’re upper-middle-class, intellectual people. I think people think this sort of thing doesn’t happen in families like that.… Of course, we do have the example of the Astors, don’t we?” They were both referring to the much-publicized case of the late Brooke Astor, the infinitely charitable New York icon, who is alleged to have suffered similar abuse at the hands of her son, former ambassador Anthony “Tony” Marshall, and his attorney, Francis X. Morrissey. In his campaign against this all too prevalent, all too seldom prosecuted crime, New York district attorney Robert Morgenthau’s trial of Marshall and Morrissey, which begins in Manhattan early next year, will, it is hoped, discourage unscrupulous heirs and their lawyers from terrorizing or threatening elderly and often mentally disturbed relatives on the brink of death. The charges against Marshall include conspiracy, grand larceny, and possession of stolen property. The charges against Morrissey include conspiracy and forgery.

The alleged elder abuse of Brooke Astor began after the marriage of Tony Marshall to his third wife, Charlene Gilbert, in 1992, when Brooke was 90 and within a few years of lapsing into Alzheimer’s. Although Brooke did her best to conceal her condition, friends soon realized its nature. At a book party given by Henry and Nancy Kissinger on February 13, 1997, I found the hitherto ageless 94-year-old out on the sidewalk, dressed to the nines, with no idea where she was or what she was doing. “Who’s that smiling at me?” she whispered, pointing to an old friend. Concern with bella figura, however, obliged Brooke to demonstrate that she could still function on her own. On another of her outings, a saleswoman at Bergdorf Goodman found her wandering around unaware that she was in a store.

But trust Brooke to be at pains to look her best. With movie-star makeup, a smart hat coquettishly perched on honey-colored hair, white gloves, and three strands of pearls, she continued to cut a radiant figure as Queen of New York. Though in 1997 she closed down the Vincent Astor Foundation—the vehicle of her fame—she did not intend to step out of the limelight. On the contrary; besides dining at friends’ houses or in restaurants (La Grenouille, by preference), Brooke continued to show up at trustees’ meetings at the Metropolitan Museum and the New York Public Library (co-founded by Vincent Astor’s great-great-grandfather), where she held court over a succession of besotted directors.

Despite the onset of Alzheimer’s, Brooke could not be dissuaded from taking long walks with her two dachshunds or, worse, from driving her battered Mercedes-Benz. Chris Ely, her butler (a Buckingham Palace alumnus), who presided over Holly Hill, Brooke’s Westchester estate, did his best to stop her, but she would not listen, and she once had to be rescued by the police as she sped into oncoming traffic on Route 9A. It was difficult to prevent her, because her driver’s license was valid until 2011, when she would be 109. The refusal of one of her beloved dogs to get into the car with her was a providential warning. Halfway through one last petrifying ride, she told Ely, “You drive.” Saving Brooke from herself was difficult enough; removing her from the supervision of her son would prove even more daunting.

Tony was Brooke’s only child, fathered by her first husband, Dryden Kuser, who was very rich and incorrigibly dissolute, an alcoholic wife beater addicted to gambling, floozies, and golf, which he played most days for $2,000 a hole. He and Brooke lived off his grim, horsey parents on their vast estate in Somerset County, New Jersey. The Kusers expected Brooke to rehabilitate their awful son, but that proved an impossible task. However, as the strong-willed, albeit disciplined, daughter of a Marine brigadier general, Brooke adapted to this difficult situation and made the best of it. While playing the role of a dutiful wife, she cultivated her exceptional gifts as a homemaker and a gardener, but above all as a writer. Polishing her prose kept her spirits up, she later said.

Until Brooke’s friend Robert Silvers reminded us, people had forgotten that, despite a lack of formal education, by the time Brooke was 21 she had become Vogue’s first book-review columnist. Eighty-five years later, her work has not dated; her acerbic put-down of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry (1923) still packs a mean punch. For the rest of her life, Brooke continued to write, and write well. In 1969 she published a charming memoir called Patchwork Child, in 1980 an altogether tougher, more sharply observed account of her life, Footprints, and in 1986 a fascinating roman à clef, called The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree. Brooke was also a literary patron. In 1963, to her eternal credit, she was a principal backer of Silvers’s New York Review of Books, where I was an early contributor. Like so many of Brooke’s writer friends, I felt I could always count on her support.

After five years of a loveless marriage, Brooke finally became pregnant. She was 22. Kuser may have suspected that he was not the father, for in her sixth month of pregnancy he broke her jaw. Brooke was delighted to have a son, even in her painful circumstances. She nicknamed him Toad. Kuser cared nothing for the boy, nor did the next Mrs. Kuser, Vieva Perrin, who earned Brooke’s undying gratitude for taking dreadful Dryden off her hands.

Free at last, Brooke embarked on a discreet affair or two, including one with the handsome English movie star Brian Aherne. Aherne would be forgotten when Brooke fell in love with and married Charles “Buddie” Marshall, a genial and attractive lawyer. Buddie was the great love of her life. Not much affection was left over for her son, at a time when he sorely needed it. Sadly, Buddie, who had children of his own from a previous marriage, never took to Tony and never adopted him. As a result Tony became, according to Frances Kiernan’s excellent 2007 biography of Brooke, “jealous and rude, particularly to his mother.” Brooke did her best to be a caring parent, but her heart belonged to Buddie. To get her son out of the way, she packed him off to a succession of tough, English-style boarding schools, where his grades were on the low side. Later in life, Tony would claim with some justice that this had made for resentment and sorrow. It was
only when Tony went to enlist in the Marines in World War II—deciding on the spur of the moment to use the Marshall name rather than his own—that the fervently patriotic fille du régiment took pride in her son, especially when he was wounded in the leg at Iwo Jima.

Buddie’s sudden death, in 1952, left Brooke bereft, not only of her adored husband but also of their affluent lifestyle, which had included idyllic summers in a picturesque castello in Portofino, on the Italian Riviera. Given her contributions to Vogue and her familiarity with the beau monde, Brooke had been taken on as a features editor at House & Garden a few years earlier, but even with this independent source of income her quality of life had been diminished. Once again she embarked on romance. An unashamed flirt, who would reportedly have lovers well into her 80s, Brooke fancied herself a grande amoureuse and would proudly show friends photographs of her beaux, which she kept on a table in her sitting room. One of her great pals, the writer Louis Auchincloss, described Brooke in her mid-50s as “the most attractive woman I have ever known. She was never beautiful, but she was radiant and charming. There was nothing highfalutin about
her Funds were by no means unlimited, but her parties were better than anything she did later.” Others—among them Vincent Astor’s nephew Ivan Obolensky—called her an “adventuress.” Although not strictly true, this designation would have amused her.

Marrying Money

Buddie Marshall’s widow made no bones about being on the lookout for a well-off, patrician husband. Vincent Astor’s recently divorced but far from estranged second wife, Minnie Cushing, decided that Brooke would be the perfect woman to take this notoriously angry, psychotic, drunken, but by no means stupid grandee off her fragile hands. Vincent was still smarting from a rejection by the beautiful heiress Janet Rhinelander Stewart. To cajole Janet into marriage, Vincent told her that his doctors had said he would be dead within three years. “But, Vincent, what if the doctors are wrong?” she famously replied.

At a carefully orchestrated dinner, Brooke found herself seated opposite Vincent, who kept his dark, brooding eyes pinned on her and pressed her to spend the weekend at Ferncliff, in the vast pool house—all that remained of the Astors’ mammoth Stanford White mansion in Rhinebeck. She had promised to attend Tony’s birthday, but it was his 35th, so she had no call for guilt. Vincent proceeded to fall passionately in love. After proposing marriage, he left for Asia and courted her by mail. Five letters a day worked their magic, as Brooke admitted when she had them privately published 50 years later. After two months, they were quietly married at a friend’s house in Maine. Brooke’s resilience, common sense, and good humor did away with the worst of Vincent’s hang-ups—his problems with rage and drink and women. Although she never upbraided him, and addressed him affectionately as “Captain Bob,” she never entirely tamed the wounded beast within him any more than she ever entirely eliminated the woman physician who had him in her thrall, and who gave Brooke a very hard time.

Vincent had led a troubled life. His father, John Jacob Astor IV, went down on the Titanic; when the ship struck the iceberg, he supposedly said, “I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous.” According to one of Vincent’s nieces, a no less disastrous iceberg was his beautiful mother, Ava Willing, described by the biographer James Fox as “magnificently selfish and spoiled, sharp-tongued, fearless in her pursuit of pleasure, furiously social and permanently dissatisfied.” After divorcing Vincent’s father, she had married Lord Ribblesdale, who was immortalized by John Singer Sargent as the epitome of a grand Edwardian sportsman. The marriage did not last. Ava soon left Ribblesdale to wander Europe in search of lovers, while little Vincent was locked away and forgotten in a boarding school or consigned to the servants’ quarters of some great house.

Besides living up to her new name, Brooke involved herself in Vincent’s obsession with the ocean, as exemplified by his yacht (48 in the crew), which served for scientific expeditions as well as social cruises. However, what most interested Brooke were Vincent’s philanthropic programs. His foundation had been established partly for “the alleviation of human misery” and partly as a hedge against future inheritance taxes. Philanthropy would give Brooke a sense of vocation; it would enable her to burnish her new family’s image more brightly than any previous Mrs. Astor.  The only problem was Tony. Vincent could not abide him; he denied him the Astor name and kept him at a distance. But then, Vincent resented anyone who had access to Brooke; he wanted her for himself. Ironically, in view of what was to come, Vincent took a great shine to Tony’s twin boys, Philip and Alec, who were born in 1953, the year of his marriage to Brooke. They were the children he never had.

Vincent would live three years longer than his doctors had predicted. On his death, in 1959, Brooke inherited his personal fortune of $60 million, referred to as the Vincent Astor Trust, as well as the Vincent Astor Foundation, also valued at $60 million, to administer as she saw fit. “Pookie, you are going to have a hell of a lot of fun running it,” Vincent had told her. “You will have full control. It is a great tribute to you.” Frances Kiernan relates how difficult it was for Brooke to wrench control away from the people who had been running Vincent’s affairs. “You’re a very wealthy woman,” one of these patronizing men said. “Why don’t you take a trip around the world?” Canniness and charm enabled her to prevail. With the support of Linda Gillies, her immensely capable director, Brooke would emerge as New York’s star philanthropist. In doing so, she would devote rather more attention to her foundation than she would to the middle-aged son whom, in due course, she would allow to share in its activities.

Besides fighting for the foundation, Brooke had to fight for the fortune Vincent had left her. His half-brother, Jack, who was born after John Jacob IV went down on the Titanic, felt that he had a right to half of his father’s money. Becomingly arrayed in widow’s weeds, Brooke used a few artful sobs to sway the court in her favor and scotch the rumor that, before his death, Vincent had been contemplating divorce. “I told the truth,” she said, not entirely truthfully, “so there was nothing to fear.” Vincent’s alluring and much-married sister, Alice Obolensky Von Hofmannsthal Harding Pleydell-Bouverie, is also said to have felt shortchanged. Vincent was apparently convinced that she was not really an Astor, but the daughter of one of his mother’s reputed lovers, a Cuban polo player.

An Only Child

Despite her efforts to advance Tony’s career, Brooke is said to have been disappointed with him. In the course of his college years at Brown, he had married an attractive fellow student, Elizabeth Cynthia Cryan. She bore him the aforementioned twins: Alec, who is now a photographer, and Philip, who is a professor at Roger Williams University, in Bristol, Rhode Island. A passionate preservationist and practicing Buddhist, Philip has inherited his grandmother’s warmth, wit, and wisdom, and put them to great use.

After leaving the armed service, Tony was recruited by the newly formed C.I.A. and was eventually put in charge of the Istanbul desk. Next, he abandoned espionage for diplomacy. Brooke had contributed enough money to Nelson Rockefeller’s political campaigns to obtain a suitable ambassadorship for Tony: Madagascar, where, through no fault of his own, he was declared persona non grata. He was then transferred to Trinidad and Tobago. Next, he was moved to Kenya, where Brooke and his sons visited him. This assignment included the Seychelles, tiny beautiful islands in the Indian Ocean a thousand miles from the African mainland, with nothing much for Tony to do except watch the sun set on his diplomatic career.

Brooke then worked hard to find her son a suitable niche back home. Her old friend Jack Pierrepont was a trustee at the Bronx Zoo, so why not put Tony in charge? The zoo balked, as did the Metropolitan Museum when Brooke—a generous trustee—proposed him as president. Faute de mieux, she had her son take control of her considerable portfolio and eventually paid him $450,000 a year for doing so. Although he charged his expenses to her, Tony evidently felt he deserved even more: in August 2005 he would use his mother’s power of attorney to give himself a bonus, raising his total income to $2.4 million for that year. The bonus would enable him to buy a yacht; it would also earn him a criminal indictment.

Tony fancied himself a writer, and, to the extent that he wrote several unsalable books with publishing and book-party costs paid by his mother, he was one. He had an agent approach publishers with a proposal for a memoir to be called In the Monument’s Shadow. When asked whether such a book would sell, his agent informed a publisher’s representative that the focus would be on Tony’s “difficult” relationship with his august mother—in other words, it was to be a sort of Mommie Dearest. Nothing came of this idea, and probably for a good reason. If Tony was going to take over the Astor Trust as well as his mother’s personal fortune, he would need to be seen as a devoted son.

Although obliged to support Tony’s first two wives, Brooke was never particularly close to either of them. For the third wife, she would express the deepest disapproval. Charlene Tyler Gilbert was the wife of the Reverend Paul Gilbert, vicar of Saint-Mary’s-by-the-Sea, Brooke’s parish church in Northeast Harbor, Maine, where she spent her summers relaxing at her estate Cove End and working on her spectacular gardens. According to the New York Daily News, Charlene was allegedly fed up with being “poor as a church mouse” and wanted to exchange her life of genteel poverty for great wealth and high society. After studying at a seminary to become a lay minister, Charlene would start up her own congregation, the Church of the Good Shepherd, in 2005, with $100,000 from Brooke’s personal account. Brooke had gotten along well enough with Reverend Gilbert, but her opinion of the wife darkened when, she claimed, she spotted her trying
to catch the eye of Brooke’s 70-year-old son, whose failing second marriage had left him susceptible and potentially available. She was aghast, as were the locals, when Tony and Charlene eloped. (Reverend Gilbert promptly remarried, divorced, and remarried yet again.) An inveterate churchgoer who enjoyed a good sermon, Brooke complained of frustration that she “could not go to church anymore.” She would have much more to regret once Charlene and Tony were married. A formal ceremony took place, as a favor to Brooke, at her Episcopal parish in New York, Saint Thomas Church, on Fifth Avenue.

Charlene had married a man destined to be very rich, but Tony would have to outlive his mother, who was hell-bent on reaching her 100th birthday, if the money was to come their way. Brooke had always taken good care of herself—weekly visits to her doctor and occasional rest cures in a hospital—and thanks to a super-strong heart she was in great physical shape for her age. Should Tony, who had suffered several heart attacks and had a pacemaker, pre-decease her, Charlene would get precious little from an estate that would have two ex-wives and two sons to provide for, and nothing to expect from an exceedingly resentful mother-in-law. According to prosecutors, Tony would therefore have to invoke the help of attorneys if he was going to lay hands on Brooke’s assets before she died. After that, the Astor Trust would go to charities. That, in essence, is what the Brooke Astor case is all about.

Brooke had entrusted her legal affairs to one of the most prestigious law firms in the city, Sullivan & Cromwell, and the partners had done well by her. However, 10 years before the events that would result in Tony’s indictment, she had expressed reservations about the methods reputable law firms used in order to keep their rich elderly clients faithful to them. This is a principal theme of The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree, which Brooke published in 1986, shortly before Henry “Terry” Christensen III would take over as her lawyer.

In this novel, set in 1928, the 84-year-old author sees herself as Emily Codway, a sprightly widow 16 years younger than she, who is having an affair with a sexy Italian prince. A less attractive but more crucial character is Emily’s exceedingly rich and tiresome sister-in-law, Irma Shrewsbury, aged 72, whose circumstances correspond in many ways to the author’s. Irma’s lawyer, Wendell Ponderosa, is seemingly based on Brooke’s said-to-have-been-ponderous lawyer Henry Ess, a senior partner at Sullivan & Cromwell. (“Do you think he will notice?,” Brooke asked Louis Auchincloss.) In the novel, Ponderosa passes Irma on to his smart young colleague, Charlie Hopewell, much as Henry Ess had passed Brooke on to Terry Christensen.

There is a touch of spite to Brooke’s characterization of Charlie: “Very good-looking [but] not the sort of looks that were generally admired in Mr. Ponderosa’s circle. Charlie was an Arrow Collar ad … good-looking but not quite a gentleman.” After doing his best to keep Irma faithful to the firm, Charlie comes to grief. Just as this situation is central to Brooke’s golden swizzle stick of a novel, a similar one would be central to the tragedy that would disrupt the last years of her life.

Brooke’s novel provides Irma with an unsatisfactory son, Joe—“another of her problems.” Irma and her rich husband “had never wanted a child. When he was seven they had sent him off to boarding school … in winter, summer at camp in Maine.… Joe did not want to go into business but wanted to be a writer. His father was disgusted and gave him a small allowance, saying, ‘Remember, just because you have a checkbook, it doesn’t mean that you have money in the bank.’” The son ends up as a deus ex machina in the novel, in a dénouement that smacks of wishful thinking. In certain ways Brooke’s book was astonishingly prophetic. It looks ahead to Christensen’s performance as her lawyer, intent on keeping a rich and powerful family faithful to his firm.

Brooke’s contempt for Charlene made the situation increasingly fraught. “The woman is so pushy—she has no style and no neck,” she complained to friends. These shortcomings became clear at the White House in 1998, when Brooke and her friend and neighbor David Rockefeller flew down on his plane to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. Protocol entitled the honorees to invite family members and old friends to the ceremony. Brooke invited the distinguished bibliophile and lawyer Robert Pirie, who had recently lost a daughter, to be her principal guest. She also took Raymonde, her lady’s maid. The Marshalls arrived separately. Hitherto a merciless critic of Clinton, Brooke was bowled over by the president’s flirtatiousness and could not resist flirting back. She would proudly wear the medal he gave her until her dying day. At the ceremony, Brooke’s friends observed, Charlene proved an embarrassment to her mother-in-law. Pirie recalls seeing Brooke wince at her gauche behavior as she buttonholed celebrities and barged into groups being photographed.

Brooke Astor’s story, part 2