Mrs. Astor Regrets (28 page)

Vincent and Brooke Astor, frolicking with her grandsons (whom he, uncharacteristically, adored) and a donkey at Ferncliff, Astor's country house. Vincent often took the twins for rides in his own train, Toonerville, which traveled through the estate.

Collection of Philip Marshall

Brooke Astor and her young grandsons. After the twins moved away from Manhattan with their divorced mother, Brooke saw them sporadically. She got to know and appreciate them later in life.

Collection of Philip Marshall

In 1960, shortly after Vincent Astor died, Tony Marshall, who had just left the CIA, visited his mother at Ferncliff.
Collection of Tony and Charlene Marshall

Brooke Astor at the Astor Foundation in 1971. The philanthropist, always dressed to the nines, gave away $200 million to New York City organizations.

Mel Finkelstein/New York. Daily News

Brooke Astor hiking in Maine in 1976 with her son, grandsons, and beloved dachshunds.

Photograph by Alec Marshall

Philip and Tony Marshall, son and father, during a happy day in Maine in 1986, two decades before their relationship went awry.
Photograph by Alec Marshall

A teenage Charlene Tyler in her 1963 Ashley Hall yearbook. Fleeing a tumultuous background, she was raised by her grandmother in Charleston. After leaving her first husband, Paul Gilbert, the priest of Brooke's Episcopal church in Maine, Charlene married Tony Marshall in 1992.
Courtesy of Ashley Hall

Cove End, Brooke Astor's waterside estate in Northeast Harbor, Maine, represented a second existence for the urbane Mrs. Astor. Brooke's desire to leave a guest cottage to her grandson Philip, rather than her son, Tony, exacerbated family tensions.

Collection of Philip Marshall

Brooke Astor in a seemingly contemplative mood at her rural Maine retreat, August Moon, 1975. Divorced and then twice widowed, she chose to remain single from age fifty-seven on.

Photograph by Alec Marshall

Brooke Astor, grandson Alec Marshall, and his daughter, Hilary Brooke, at Holly Hill, April 1997. Alec lived just a mile away.

Photograph by Alec Marshall

Tony and Charlene Marshall, on holiday in London in 2003, won two Tony awards as successful Broadway producers.

Collection of Tony and Charlene Marshall

During her last summer in Maine, in 2002, Brooke Astor relaxes with daughter-in-law Charlene.
Collection of Tony and Charlene Marshall