Mrs. Astor Regrets (30 page)

Tony, straightforward and calm as always, stressed that his mother had a variety of medical problems and needed to be close to her Manhattan doctors. But Charlene could not camouflage her anger. A woman whose emotions often run close to the surface, she argued in an irked tone that Brooke disliked Holly Hill and Chris Ely but felt comfortable and safe on Park Avenue. Even though Charlene did not know Brooke nearly as intimately as the others in the room, her pseudo-certainty was not challenged. "We were upset," Annette recalls. "David and I were just sitting there looking at each other." Rockefeller, already perturbed by the sale of Brooke's Childe Hassam and Ely's dismissal, says, "By then I was concerned about the way Brooke was being treated."

As the meeting ended, when Tony and Charlene were halfway out the door, Rockefeller mentioned that he was heading up to Seal Harbor soon and offered to take Brooke and her nurses on his private plane to Maine so she could go to Cove End instead. "They said no, that would be even worse—she'd be farther away from her doctors," says Annette. "So we said goodbye. We didn't know they were already living in Cove End." Charlene, the new owner of the Maine property, had begun renovations, but her status as the owner was not widely known and certainly had not been shared with Brooke's friends. So even though David Rockefeller had made his offer as an impulsive gesture, Tony and Charlene may have perceived it as a threat. The next day, after consulting with Dr. Pritchett, Tony called Rockefeller to say that Brooke would be moved to Holly Hill after all. David Rockefeller was pleased: "What I said had an impact."

It certainly had an impact on Tony Marshall, although not entirely in the way that Rockefeller had envisioned. Tony was sufficiently annoyed by this interference that he mentioned it to Philip, who called to wish his father a happy eighty-first birthday, on May 30. Father and son had not seen each other for a year, but this ritual call remained an acknowledgment of their tie. At the time, Tony said, "Some of your grandmother's friends are trying to get me to open Holly Hill." Although he was not specific about the identity of these friends, Philip guessed that the instigators were Annette de la Renta and David Rockefeller, whom he knew slightly from an earlier visit to his grandmother at Cove End. "If I had not heard about that meeting, I wouldn't have known that David was concerned," Philip says. "My father was pissed off."

In hindsight, Philip believes he should have seized the opportunity to tell his father bluntly that he agreed with Annette and David that his grandmother would be happier in the country. "People always wonder, why didn't I talk to my father about this stuff? Give me another twenty years and I'll figure it out," Philip concedes. "I could have said, 'Why didn't you open Holly Hill? My grandmother can afford it.' But such is our relationship that we couldn't have that conversation. By then, I knew that Charlene was running things."

Brooke spent the summer at Holly Hill, but she was forlorn without Ely to keep her company and attend to her needs. Boysie and Girlsie, her beloved but boisterous dogs, were now kept away from her for fear that they would scratch her delicate skin. In prior years Ely had draped Brooke in blankets and towels for protection and allowed the dogs into the room under his supervision. "We were told she shouldn't have the dogs," says Beverly Thomson, the nurse. "The dogs would sit on her and rest on her and she'd have a bruise, so we would try to avoid that." Gone too were the long country drives. "She did not leave the property," recalls Pearline Noble, who pushed Brooke in a wheelchair to the boundaries of Holly Hill. Her patient became agitated when she saw that one of the gates was padlocked.

Mortality was constantly on Mrs. Astor's mind now. One evening, as Minnette Christie gave her employer a facial, Mrs. Astor, gazing at her own unadorned face in the mirror, announced, "When I die, don't let anyone see me like this." Pointing to her eye shadow and rouge, she added, "You put on the blue, and the red."

Brooke Astor's mortality was also on the minds of Francis Morrissey and G. Warren Whitaker that summer. They wrote a memo on August 23, 2005, noting that Anthony Marshall would be handling his mother's funeral arrangements. The lawyers wrote that "it is unlikely that the Attorney General or the charities will contest the will ... It is also unlikely that Terry Christensen will contest the will, or that he would be permitted to do so if he wanted to, since the will and codicils show a consistent pattern of giving greater control and authority to Anthony Marshall."

When Brooke returned to Park Avenue that fall, there were fewer familiar faces to greet her. Tony and Charlene had decided to purge more longtime retainers from the staff to reduce the payroll. Marciano Amaral, Mrs. Astor's chauffeur for the past ten years, was given a month's pay and thirty days to vacate a small apartment on East Seventy-second Street owned by Mrs. Astor. "I was a driver and a companion," Amaral says, recalling how he took her to Central Park frequently and walked her dogs several times a day. "She made me promise that I will stay with her until the last day of her life."

The next staffer to be shown the door was the bookkeeper Alice Perdue. "Tony said that he was terribly sorry he had to let me go, but he had so much work that he needed someone who could take shorthand and was more savvy with the computer," says Perdue. "These two things are diametrically opposite." The bookkeeper had been so worried for two years about Tony's unorthodox spending that she had started keeping a file at home listing questionable transactions. Perdue, who needed the job, had never directly challenged Tony's orders. But she wondered whether her facial expression or tone of voice might have signaled her growing disquiet to Tony or, more likely, to Charlene. "Mrs. Marshall had stopped talking to me a year or so before," Perdue says. "I think she felt I was too loyal to Mrs. Astor. They assumed Mrs. Astor was dying soon and wanted people loyal to them."

Brooke Astor, whose values came from an era when lifelong retainers were the norm in wealthy families, prized loyalty. As a sign of enduring gratitude, she had left Amaral $25,000 and Perdue $10,000 in her 2001 will. But both these bequests had been dropped without explanation from her 2002 will.

The Marshalls had previously installed one employee who was presumably loyal to them, the social secretary, Erica Meyer. But Meyer too received her walking papers that September, just after returning from her honeymoon.

In the wake of the departures, there was a new and unlikely arrival at 778 Park Avenue, Daniel Billy, Jr., a middle-aged man with a background in marketing and fundraising who was hired to supervise the staff. "Ambassador Marshall wanted someone to answer the phone who wasn't a servant," explains Billy, who had come into the picture through Charlene and a friendship forged at St. James' Church. To Mrs. Astor's oft-belittled son, Billy's admiration for "Ambassador Marshall" must have felt like a burst of sunlight after decades of chill. "If I didn't already have a terrific father, I would have wanted Tony for my father," says Billy, the son of a professional golfer. "Listening him talk about Richard Bissell and the U-2 plane was a wonderful tutorial. It's a pleasure to hear his stories. I've told Charlene that it breaks my heart that his sons have not had the experience with him that I've had."

The new major-domo, inexperienced in running a household staff, quickly discovered that he had entered a combat zone. "It was warring factions," Billy says. Mrs. Astor's all-woman staff, of various ethnicities and with different perceptions of their own social status, were at each other's throats. "The nurses treated the servants like servants," he says. "The household staff felt their job was to make Mrs. Astor comfortable. I do believe that everyone saw Mrs. Astor's comfort as a priority. But the execution was problematic."

Loyal to the Marshalls, Billy took on the role of gatekeeper. Tony now required almost everyone to call him in advance for permission to visit his mother, making only a few exceptions, for the likes of Annette de la Renta and David Rockefeller. "You'd make an appointment to go see her, and then Tony would cancel, several times," says Robert Pirie. "One time I was at the door of the apartment building and my secretary called to say he'd canceled. He wanted to control who saw her." Pirie finally gave up, but his last visit was poignant. "It was so sad to see her," he says. "She wasn't properly dressed, the flowers were dead, the place looked like hell. Yuck." Equally sad for Pirie was that it took Brooke four or five minutes to recognize him, at which point she said, "We had a lot of fun together, didn't we?" Pirie, who had always teasingly called her "kid," replied, "Yeah, kid, we had a good time.'"

The elevator was broken on September 16, 2005, when I went to see Tony and Charlene Marshall at their apartment at Seventy-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue, so I walked past the garbage bins and up the back stairs to the second floor and entered through the kitchen. An elaborate silver service that appeared to have been just polished was on the table. Tony escorted me past the dining room to the front of the apartment and the sunny corner living room, decorated with comfortable chintz furniture and a spinet piano, where Charlene was waiting.

I had been asked by
New York
magazine, where I was a contributing editor, to write an article about Brooke Astor, who had disappeared from public view. When I telephoned Tony right after Labor Day to request an interview about his mother—having no idea that this was a potentially explosive topic—he was friendly and obligingly invited me over, saying that he would be "delighted" to talk. I learned only much later that this was right around the time that the Marshalls fired both Alice Perdue and Erica Meyer and installed Daniel Billy. There may be no connection, but Tony's warmth had inexplicably vanished by the time I arrived to talk about Mrs. Astor.

After iced tea was served, Tony abruptly announced that he had changed his mind about the interview. "I really don't want to talk about my mother," he said. "She's going to be one hundred and four next March, and I feel uncomfortable. She can't talk for herself, so I don't think I should talk for her. She has said what she wanted to say during an active life, and now is a moment of peace for her. Maybe you should have your drink and go." Perhaps to temper his brusque dismissal, he suggested an alternative. "I thought that maybe you wanted to talk to me about my life, which I would be delighted to do."

Curious about where the conversation might lead, I began plying him with questions while looking at all the framed photographs perched on the piano and bookshelves showing Tony with his mother during various stages of their lives. During the next forty minutes, Tony ended up talking volubly about his mother, or at least around her, with a mixture of pride and pique. The Marshalls' dachshund, Pichou, lay at his feet, barking whenever his master tensed. Charlene, her arms folded across her chest in disapproval, kept vigilant watch, often interrupting with a hostile word whenever I displayed too much interest in Mrs. Astor rather than Tony. She seemed to view Brooke Astor as She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

"I've had a very independent life," Tony began. Yet even as he listed his accomplishments (the Marine Corps and storming the beaches at Iwo Jima, the intrigues of the 1950s CIA, his exotic ambassadorial service under Nixon, his self-published novel
Dash,
and his prestigious boards), all roads led back to his mother. He mentioned that he had put aside his own career to manage the Astor money, insisting, "I was happy to do it." Even though he portrayed himself as a dutiful son, he could not resist a bit of one-upmanship, saying, "I'm on the board of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. My mother was never on that."

In an effort to prolong the odd conversation, I mentioned that the Marshalls did not seem to be involved in the Upper East Side social circuit, unlike Mrs. Astor; was I right? "Yes, you are," Tony replied. "My mother loved people. I love people but on a different basis. My mother had"—he corrected himself—"has lots of friends, although a lot of them are dying off." When I followed up by remarking that he and his wife were not regularly featured in the
New York Times
Sunday society pictures by Bill Cunningham, Charlene interjected, "No. We're not by choice."

Then Tony turned the conversation to his life with Charlene, talking with palpable enthusiasm about their experience together as theatrical producers and her involvement at Juilliard and St. James' Church. Smiling at his wife with affection, he said, "We support each other's interests." With the dachshund at his master's feet, I asked whether Pichou was a relative of the famous Boysie and Girlsie. "No," he replied. "Pichou means 'darling' in Genoese," he explained. "My mother had a house in Portofino that we went to for many summers, from 1932 until the war broke out in '39. She had a dachshund, and the staff called the dog Pichou."

Most of what I knew about Tony Marshall before this interview was derived from his mother's autobiography
Footprints.
Using my memory as a guide, I asked about parts of his life described in the book. The conversation remained pleasant until I brought up Brooke's admission that Vincent Astor had been jealous of the time she spent with her son. Tony became silent, and Pichou, sensing his discomfort, howled. "It must have been complicated," I ventured, puzzled by what I had blundered into. Tony started to say something, and Charlene cut him off, saying, "No comment."

Then, unprompted, Tony began to reminisce about the one family member who had given him unconditional love: Brooke's father, Major General John Henry Russell. "My grandfather was the compass of my life. Still is, although he died in 1947. He was a wonderful person—good judgment. I spent a lot of time with him," Tony said, the words pouring out in a torrent. "He wrote me a great deal, gave me very good advice on life. I was the only grandchild. He never dictated to me. He never said, 'You must do this, must do that.'"

Tony looked so animated in expressing his love that I dared to ask, "Did you feel that your family, your mother and stepfathers, were supportive of you too?" Charlene interrupted, saying, "You don't want to get into that." Tony echoed her, saying, "No, that's too close." Pichou howled again.