Mrs. Astor Regrets (46 page)

In their opening arguments, the defense lawyers came out swinging. Kenneth Warner, still on board, had recruited Frederick Hafetz, a tough-talking seventy-year-old former prosecutor, and John Cuti, who had worked as a defense lawyer on the Martha Stewart case, as fellow counsels. Hafetz portrayed Tony as a "loyal and devoted son" who loved his mother. "There is no dispute that Mrs. Astor had dementia," Hafetz conceded, but added that "there were periods of time Mrs. Astor was confused, and periods of time she was not confused." Limping, his shoulders shaking, Hafetz, who still suffered from a legacy of childhood polio, insisted that Mrs. Astor constantly altered her estate plan, saying, "She changed wills like people change socks." At the end of her life, Brooke Astor had come to appreciate her daughter-in-law, he said, and frequently told friends, "Charlene makes Tony happy."

Thomas Puccio, Morrissey's attorney, kept his opening remarks brief. A legendary defense lawyer who had won the reversal-of-fortune acquittal of Claus von Bulow, Puccio described Morrissey as a "hard-working lawyer" and a man "who unfortunately and tragically is a casualty of this clash between two sides"—Tony Marshall and the leading cultural monoliths battling over Brooke Astor's estate. He urged the jury to be aware that many of the upcoming witnesses, the heads of New York's philanthropic institutions, had a financial stake in the outcome. As Puccio put it, "They want what Brooke Astor left to her only child."

The witness lineup during the opening few weeks of the trial came straight from the society pages. The stark waiting room, with its bare white walls, blue linoleum floor, wooden conference table, and leather chairs, became the equivalent of a green room at a TV studio. On the stand, Viscount William Astor, who had flown in from London, recalled how "Cousin Brooke" once told him that she was fearful of running out of money and felt "intimidated" by Tony and Charlene. The Met's Philippe de Montebello told endearing stories about Mrs. Astor—"She was not snobbish"—and discussed her frequent promises to give her Childe Hassam to the Metropolitan Museum.

The pedigrees of these witnesses gave credibility to their accounts of Brooke Astor's downward spiral into dementia.
Vanity Fair
's editor Graydon Carter recalled that as early as the 1990s, she "had trouble remembering what you talked about four or five minutes earlier." In 2003, she plaintively asked him, "Have you seen Graydon Carter? Do you know Graydon Carter?" He recalled replying, "I'm right here."

Carter's time in the witness room overlapped with Annette de la Renta's, and the duo ended up lunching together, perched on boxes, on Liz Loewy's stale Easter chocolates in the prosecutor's cramped office. Extremely nervous about testifying, Annette developed acute laryngitis the weekend before—"I'm the only person in New York who wants to have swine flu," she joked—but recovered by the time she took the witness stand.

During her two days of testimony, Annette was scarcely able to utter three consecutive sentences; Tony's lawyers objected at every turn. Justice A. Kirke Bartley, Jr., barred Annette from discussing her role as Brooke Astor's guardian, siding with Tony's lawyers who argued that the information was prejudicial. So Annette was mostly limited to describing her friend's increasing disorientation.

Brooke Astor's cherished photo album of her one hundredth birthday party was given to Annette to identify, then passed to the jurors for inspection. Annette looked as though she wanted to snatch it back. "I thought it was such an invasion," Annette told me later. "This was hers, it tied her to Mr. Rockefeller and his kindness in giving her the party, it kept her connected. It was like pawing through her underwear."

The prosecutors had decided to use that party as a "marker" of Brooke Astor's mental health, as Liz Loewy explained to me. The magical evening at Kykuit was re-created in a new light, with guests asked to describe Mrs. Astor's demeanor as if the Playhouse at the Rockefeller estate were a crime scene. As Henry Kissinger recalled, "I didn't think she recognized me."

David Rockefeller had commissioned a thirty-five-minute video of the party. Who could have imagined that this sentimental memento would be played for the jurors on a large screen in a criminal trial? It seemed so incongruous to see the protagonists, dressed in black tie, as the soundtrack of the Lester Lanin band played "The Lady Is a Tramp." Here was the family Astor and their intimates in happier times: Brooke Astor arriving on the arm of Viscount Astor; Charlene and Tony merrily greeting their soon-to-be nemesis David Rockefeller; Philip and Nan whirling on the dance floor; the trust-and-estate lawyer Terry Christensen applauding as the centenarian honoree in her blue Oscar de la Renta gown tremulously stepped up to the microphone.

Like academic film critics, the prosecutors and defense lawyers argued over this video frame by frame, halting and replaying scenes. One of the prosecutors, Joel Seidemann, a courtroom showman belatedly added to the prosecution team of Loewy and Peirce Moser, pointed out that Mrs. Astor did not mention any of the guests by name and referred to Rockefeller as "that man." Defense lawyers Fred Hafetz and Kenneth Warner insisted that Mrs. Astor seemed lucid. Asked about the party on the witness stand, Barbara Walters recalled that Mrs. Astor appeared to be "a little vague." But the anchorwoman's most damaging comments came when she described her final visit, some eighteen months after the gala, to Brooke Astor at 778 Park Avenue on December 29, 2003. "She had no idea who I was," she sadly recalled. This was a crucial point of testimony. Mrs. Astor had signed the second codicil on January 12, 2004. If she could not even recognize her old friend, one of the most famous women in America, it stood to reason that the 101-year-old was incapable of understanding intricate legal provisions presented to her by Francis Morrissey and his new team of trust-and-estate lawyers.

For Tony and Charlene, their new, abnormal life in courtroom 1536 four days a week became normal as they developed daily rituals. Charlene was often joined by such companions as her daughter Inness, the philanthropist Sam Peabody, and the painter Richard Osterweil. At lunchtime, the couple would retreat to a wooden bench in the hallway to eat sandwiches that Charlene had brought from home. As the trial moved from spring into summer, the usually well-groomed couple began to look ragged: Charlene's wrinkled khaki skirt sported a rip at a seam, and Tony's Brooks Brothers suits were as rumpled as if he had slept in them.

The Marshalls had stopped going out to dinner or the theater at night, keeping to their Lexington Avenue apartment under self-imposed house arrest. "I just go home and go to sleep," Tony told me one day in court, saying he was too exhausted to read a novel or watch a movie. Charlene explained that she often stayed up late: "These lawyers keep me working to ten or eleven at night, e-mailing with questions." On Sundays, Charlene made her regular pilgrimage to St. James' Church. As she put it, "All I do is cry and pray."

If New York State had permitted a commercial sponsor for the trial, Kleenex would have been an apt choice. Charlene broke down sobbing so frequently that after a while the jaded press corps stopped writing about it. On May 7, her seventeenth wedding anniversary with Tony, the
New York Times
ran an unflattering front-page story by John Eligon about Charlene: "Not On Trial but Being Judged as a Villain in the Astor Drama." Charlene arrived at court crying uncontrollably. To her friends, she tried to spin her reaction, telling Richard Osterweil: "They can say whatever the hell they want about me as long as it deflects attention from Tony. I'll take it. I don't care."

Most of the time, Tony maintained a stiff-upper-lip composure. But even he lost control on the day when the inevitable Oedipal collision finally occurred—his two sons testifying as prosecution witnesses against him. The twins arrived at court together, presenting a united front. Alec, who had not seen his father since Brooke Astor's funeral, took the witness stand first. Wearing a blue blazer and gray slacks, he gave a slightly nervous smile as he glanced in the direction of his father. Asked about his grandmother's fading mental abilities, Alec said that after 2000, "she was having trouble remembering names." He said that around 2001 or 2002, his grandmother asked if he would like to inherit Holly Hill. "I said, 'oh no,'" Alec recalled. "At that point, I knew it was too late to add any changes to her will." This was, of course, a thinly veiled criticism of his father.

Tony was weeping as he left the courtroom for the lunch break, and Charlene, crying too, led him over to a bench. Alec came out of the nearby men's room only to find himself just a few feet from the couple. "I walked out and there was my father. Charlene was looking at me," he recalled. "I just kept walking."

That afternoon, Philip, in a crisp white shirt, blue tie, and dark suit, looked braced for battle as he took his seat in the witness chair. He sat erect, exuding coiled tension. Loewy began by asking him to talk about family history, and he described his aloof relationship with his father and Charlene ("They never visited us at our home"). Once the testimony turned to Brooke Astor's final years, Philip's raw emotions began spilling out. He choked up as he described Brooke's distress during the period when she was, unbeknownst to him, meeting with Tony's lawyers ("She looked terrified"). With anger in his voice, he spoke with disgust about how his father had let her living situation deteriorate ("It was very, very dirty"). Philip was allowed to mention the guardianship lawsuit, but the judge refused to let him discuss such details as the dog feces in the dining room. The next day, under cross-examination by Kenneth Warner, Philip's enmity overflowed to the point that the two of them erupted into a shouting match. Justice Bartley interrupted, saying, "The court reporter's machine is beginning to smoke."

As the process wore on, Tony's health deteriorated. He suffered a minor, albeit worrisome, stroke in early June, causing him to miss two days of the trial. Two weeks later, he was on his treadmill, at the advice of his cardiologist, when he lost his balance and fell, hitting his head. He came to court the next morning but left at lunchtime to get an MRI. Charlene gave an impromptu press conference after the couple returned to court that afternoon, saying that Tony had been diagnosed with a concussion and was confused. "He couldn't find his way around the doctor's office," she said, adding, "We're there so often that I'm thinking of leaving a nightgown."

In early July, the octogenarian became dizzy in the men's room and fell again, this time hitting his head on a stall. Medics arrived and wheeled Tony out on a gurney to the elevator as photographers snapped away. Taken to a hospital, he was examined and released. The press corps had been debating about creating a ghoul pool, betting on whether Tony—at eighty-five, reported to be the oldest defendant ever tried in Manhattan Supreme Court—would survive the trial. The idea was dropped as Tony's mortality became all too real.

Much of the sympathy that Tony's fragility engendered was dampened by the parade of prosecution witnesses describing his mistreatment of his mother. Chris Ely, the butler, described how Mrs. Astor, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, began to refer to Tony as "my husband." According to Ely, Mrs. Astor fearfully confided, "My husband wants to put me in an old ladies' home." Her former maid Angela Moore recounted that several hours after Mrs. Astor signed the second codicil, she began hallucinating that "men in suits" were hiding in her bedroom. Moore told her, "The only man in the house is Boysie your dachshund."

From her mid-nineties on, Brooke Astor worked valiantly to maintain appearances, bravely doing everything she could to continue as a bright spot in any room she chose to grace. But her mask of refined living was stripped away in the courtroom as her doctors testified about her lengthy mental decline, producing detailed medical records. Her bowtied physician Dr. Rees Pritchett, an eighty-five-year-old who still practices medicine, said that his patient first began to complain that her memory was "no good" in 1995, and in 2003 she repeatedly told him, "I'm gaga." The neurologist Dr. Howard Fillit bluntly explained that in 2000, Mrs. Astor had performed poorly on simple tests such as drawing a clock and repeating a string of words.

The heartbreaking medical testimony was leavened by a series of dishy anecdotes about Astor family dysfunction. The prosecution elicited nasty stories from witnesses conveying Mrs. Astor's contempt for both Charlene and Tony. Dwight Johnson, a former professor at the Pratt Institute, recalled Mrs. Astor telling him, "My son is nothing like me. All he wants is money, money, money, and I don't know what he's going to do with this money." David Rockefeller's granddaughter Miranda Kaiser said that when she asked Mrs. Astor why she had only one child, the grande dame said of Tony, "He was so unfortunate that I decided not to have any more." Francis Morrissey sought me out at the next break, speaking with dismay: "Did you see Tony's face?"

The most memorable barbs, however, were the comments that Mrs. Astor and Charlene reportedly made about each other, according to witnesses. Dr. Kevin O'Flaherty, an audiologist, recalled Mrs. Astor discussing her Christmas plans: "She'd rather have Boysie and Girlsie, her dogs there, than her son and that b-i-t-c-h." The judge refused to let Brooke's former social secretary Naomi Packard-Koot tell the jury about overhearing Charlene scream, "What the fuck does that cunt want now?" Another former social secretary, Birgit Darby, was also barred from repeating her conversation with Charlene about Mrs. Astor. "She's killing him!" Charlene had purportedly told Darby. "If he dies before she dies, I get nothing. She's going to give him a heart attack."

Of all the witnesses, the man in the most uncomfortable position was the former Sullivan & Cromwell partner Terry Christensen, who spent seven grueling days on the stand. The prosecutors painted the longtime attorney for Mrs. Astor as a man who had ignored her deteriorating mental state and abandoned his responsibilities to her so he could cater to her son, also a client. Loewy charged Christensen with "enabling" Tony and "giving in to his demands." The defense praised Christensen —who had been fired by Tony and replaced with Morrissey and G. Warren Whitaker—as a pillar of legal rectitude. Fred Hafetz said of the prosecution's attack on Christensen: "They are accusing this honorable, valor-able, reputable lawyer because he gets in their way."