Mrs. Astor Regrets (3 page)

The
New York Times
treated Brooke Astor's birthdays with the civic reverence granted to holidays on which alternate-side-of-the-street parking is suspended. Every year the event was commemorated with a story or a photograph. "I don't feel old. I can walk as fast as anybody. I got a new driving license this year," Brooke told the
Times
at age ninety. "I don't hear as well as I used to, have to wear a hearing aid, which I hate." She went on to add, "But I can't sit there with an open mouth when people are telling me some dreadfully wonderful story."

Peter Duchin played at so many parties that Mrs. Astor either gave or attended over four decades that the events had all become a blur. As a teenager, Duchin had known Vincent Astor and his second wife, Minnie Cushing, and recalls a raucous New Year's party at their country home where guests jumped into the pool. Valets stood by to press their sopping clothes. Duchin still remembers the ancient gossip about how Brooke became the third Mrs. Astor. "Vincent was a very difficult, overly possessive man," he says. "Minnie was great, she just got fed up with him. She and Babe Paley and Slim Keith got together and decided that Brooke Marshall would be the perfect bride for Vincent—that's the story I always heard."

Even in gala-fatigued New York, Brooke's ninetieth birthday party was a roaring social success, and it netted $892,741 besides. The Citizens Committee was eager to replicate the evening and celebrate one hundred years of Mrs. Astor's benevolent rule. "I went to Brooke, and she semi-agreed," recalls Elliott. The gossip columnist Liz Smith even ran a save-the-date item in her column on June 12, 2001, promising that a Broadway theater had been booked and Shakespearean actors would perform in honor of Mrs. Astor's centennial. "Then it got more iffy and Brooke backed out," says Elliott. She sent a note to her friend George Trescher, the public relations mastermind who had burnished her reputation and served as her social gatekeeper. Although Trescher died in June 2003 of emphysema, his second-in-command, Vincent Steffan, can still recite parts of Mrs. Astor's candid note from memory: "I'm old and I'm tired. I would like this birthday to be fun for me, instead of being on display for some organization."

Plans for a private celebration were already under way. On New Year's Eve 1999, Brooke had been a guest at a party given by David Rockefeller at the Playhouse at Kykuit, when her host turned to her and asked whether she would let him give her a dinner-dance right there. Of course she accepted. Brooke Astor had been friends with the Rockefeller family since her marriage to Vincent Astor. David Rockefeller, the youngest member of the family and her junior by thirteen years, recalls, "I think the first time I met her was in 1958, on a boat off Providence, Rhode Island. My uncle Winthrop Aldrich, who was the former ambassador to the Court of St. James's, took us out for a day sail on his boat, the
Wayfarer
."

Brooke became extended family to David Rockefeller and his brother Nelson. But her true confidant in the family was another brother, Laurance, the conservationist and philanthropist. They were so enamored of each other in public that rumors circulated for decades that Brooke and the long-married Laurance were having an affair. Whether amour or friendship, the feelings were powerful and long-lasting. In the closing hours of her ninety-fifth birthday party at the Carlyle Hotel, a girlish Brooke turned to her date, a prominent younger businessman, and said, "I hope you don't mind, but Laurance has asked to see me home."

Five years later, in 2002, Laurance was ninety-two, a widower, and in frail health, so it fell to the youngest Rockefeller brother, David, then eighty-six and also a recent widower, to host Mrs. Astor's festivities. The retired Chase Manhattan chairman and Brooke had much in common, from philanthropy to overlapping social circles to homes near each other on the Upper East Side, in Westchester County, and in Maine. "Laurance was in many ways the one of us that she saw the most of," says David Rockefell er. "I got to know her really well in the last twenty years, and saw a great deal of her." He took her out for horse-and-carriage rides in Westchester and Maine. When climbing into his carriage became difficult for her because of her advancing age, he bought her a two-step lift. "That made it easier for her," he says, "especially an elderly lady with a tight skirt."

Several months before her birthday, Rockefeller went to Brooke's apartment to discuss the arrangements for the party. The two old friends sat in her corner library, sipping tea in front of the fireplace, contemplating the momentous occasion. The seemingly insurmountable challenge would be to keep the guest list small enough for everyone to fit in the room where the dinner would be served yet allow plenty of space for dancing. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, Vincent Astor's status-conscious grandmother, had been renowned in the 1890s for entertaining "the Astor 400," the precise number that fit in the ballroom of her grand Fifth Avenue mansion. But Brooke Astor's fete had to be smaller and thus even more exclusive. Since Brooke was turning one hundred, Rockefeller suggested having one hundred guests. Asked whom she would like to invite, she replied, "Ninety-nine men would be nice."

She loved to flirt, to be provocative and even naughty, and it did not matter whether the men were straight, gay, married, or many decades younger. "There were rotating men in her life, which made it work," says the movie producer John Hart, who was fifty years her junior. He had joked with her one evening: "'The reason I have you at Café Daniel is I'm going to propose to you.' She looked at me and said, 'Why? Do you need money?'"

In the end, there were surprising omissions from the guest list. When the historian Barbara Goldsmith called Mrs. Astor's home to RSVP, she got an earful from the social secretary, who confided, "You can't believe what's going on. All these people are calling and saying, 'Of course I'm included on the list, and I have to say, 'I don't know.'" As Goldsmith puts it, "People were lobbying to get in."

For twenty-three years, Linda Gillies had accompanied Brooke Astor to libraries in the South Bronx and renovated historic row houses in Harlem. As a child, Gillies had been visiting her grandparents in Paris when the famous Mrs. Astor showed up at a Sunday lunch wearing bracelets encrusted with diamonds, sapphires, and rubies. They had met again in New York when Gillies was working at the Metropolitan Museum, and Brooke had hired this granddaughter of friends to run the Astor Foundation, where she served from 1974 until Brooke decided to give away its assets and dissolve the foundation, in 1997. Brooke had often praised Gillies, telling an interviewer that her deputy had transformed the place: "When I got Linda to come here, we had a marvelous time." But Gillies was not on the guest list. Several friends attempted to intervene on Gillies's behalf to wangle an invitation. John Dobkin, then the head of Historic Hudson Valley, says, "Brooke was human and she was jealous. Linda was her sidekick and confidante for all those years. Linda was fifty-five, Brooke was one hundred—I think she was jealous and peeved. It was a huge mistake." But once the foundation closed its doors, the axis of their relationship shifted. "Once something was over, it was over for her," Gillies says. "There were several friends of the heart who died while I knew her, and once that happened, you never heard about that person again. I think for her I represented something that was over."

The developer Marshall Rose, who had been a guest at Brooke's ninety-fifth birthday celebration at the Carlyle Hotel, had been banished too. He and Brooke had bonded as fellow board members of the New York Public Library. Rose and his wife, Jill, were guests at Brooke's home in Maine, and after Jill died, Brooke tried to cheer him up by including him at dinners in her home and asking him to escort her to her nightly round of parties. Their friendship ended when Marshall began dating the actress Candice Bergen, whom he married in 2000. Eager for Brooke to meet his new love, he arranged for them to have tea at the Astor apartment. "We walked in, and the conversation was decidedly cold. Ice cold," remembers Rose. The couple made their excuses after a tense forty-five minutes. Brooke called him the next morning at 9
A.M.,
uncharacteristically early for her, to inquire, "Are you going to marry that woman?" Rose thought the phone call revealed a touching display of jealousy. "I laughed, because isn't it wonderful that that could enter her mind as an issue?"

Tom and Meredith Brokaw had been seated at the head table at the ninetieth birthday celebration but were among those passed over a decade later. "Brooke was a big flirt," says Nancy Reagan, whose mother introduced her to Mrs. Astor more than a half-century ago. "I remember when she had this huge crush on Tom Brokaw. She was so cute in her flirtations." Did she have a crush on President Reagan? "Not that I know of," the former first lady replied, laughing. Brokaw was succeeded by his professional competitor, the ABC News anchor Peter Jennings. "She had an infatuation at the time for Peter as well," recalls Brokaw, who says that Mrs. Astor tried to create a rivalry between them. "Peter and I talked about it. Brooke would say to me, 'Peter works in this homeless shelter.' I'd say, 'I know he does, Brooke.'" But Brokaw relished her company, saying, "She had this great spirited cackle." (Peter Jennings was among the guests who had every reason to believe they would outlive their hostess. Jennings died of lung cancer in August 2005 at the age of sixty-seven; nine other partygoers, all younger than the honoree, would pass away in the next five years while Brooke, remarkably, lived on.)

At an age when few people are healthy or even ambulatory, Brooke Astor was still in the thick of high society and had just hired a new social secretary, Naomi Dunn Packard-Koot, a blond and lithe Princeton graduate then in her early thirties. She was charged with sorting through the dozens of invitations that continued to arrive each month and to organize Mrs. Astor's appointments. "She could have kept every single minute occupied," marveled Packard-Koot. "She was still doing a lot." But the nonagenarian's memory was fading, and her friends were graciously trying to find ways to help her out.

"We had a little game," says Gregory Long, the president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, who had known Brooke Astor for thirty years, dating back to his first job at the Metropolitan Museum. "She'd say, 'I went to see these people last night—you wouldn't believe what happened.' I'd say, 'What people?' She'd say, 'Oh, you know,' and I'd say, 'No, you have to tell me.' So she'd say, 'Jewelry designer.' I'd come up with a list of designers whom she might know, and she'd tell me when I hit the right one." Several days before Brooke's hundredth birthday, she and Long had lunch at her favorite spot, the Knickerbocker Club, an exclusive private men's club founded in 1871, where she retained widow's rights after Vincent Astor died. "She was very excited about the party, thrilled that David was doing it," says Long, but he worried about whether she was up to the event. "She didn't say she was nervous, but I wondered. Things seemed hard for her."

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

T
ONY 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.