Mrs. Astor Regrets (8 page)

It seemed that the story would rival
The Fantasticks
as Manhattan's longest-running show, setting off a chain reaction of efforts to capitalize on the explosive charges. In Washington, the U.S. Senate was prompted to hold a hearing on exploitation of seniors, inviting testimony from Philip Marshall's lawyer, Ira Salzman. Oregon's Republican senator Gordon Smith declared, "As we have learned from the highly publicized Brooke Astor case, no matter your age, finances or social status, none of us in this room today are beyond potential abuse." And the television show
Law & Order: Criminal Intent
filmed a episode called "Privilege" in which an elderly character resembling Brooke Astor, played by the actress Doris Roberts, appears delirious after being denied medical care. She is forced to sign financial documents by her scheming son and his trophy wife. The phrase "urine-stained sheets," which was close to the wording in Philip's affidavit, was worked into the dialogue.

The foibles of the rich have always made for great copy, but Brooke Astor's prominent role in the life of New York City added an underlying note of poignancy to the tale. Adorned with diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds, she had perfected an image of herself as Lady Bountiful with a common touch, ever accessible to the admiring strangers who stopped her on Madison Avenue or shook her hand at a housing project in Queens. "She never went out at night with less than a million dollars around her neck," says Louis Auchincloss. "Someone once said to her, 'You might lose that,' and she said, 'So what? Be in the safe all night? Don't be ridiculous.'" She was unapologetic about her lavish life-style, which is why the charge in the lawsuit that expensive floral arrangements had been replaced by cheap Korean market bouquets seemed like such an insult. Auchincloss adds that Brooke once told him, "I know what people have. I know that Jayne Wrightsman [a wealthy widow and Metropolitan Museum trustee] could buy and sell me several times over, but look at the way she lives. I've got about fifty people in my employ and I know how to spend it. Jayne's got much more money, but she doesn't dare."

Yet Brooke Astor could also be obliviously obtuse about money and social class. In a
New York Times Magazine
profile in 1984, the reporter Marilyn Berger trailed her to the South Bronx to visit homes being constructed for poor families. During a lunch break, Berger wrote, Mrs. Astor noticed mustard and lumpy Russian dressing for sandwiches in little plastic containers and exclaimed, "Look at the marvelous sauces."

If her last name had remained Russell or Kuser or Marshall, Brooke would never have been quite so famous, even with a similar fortune. But a few names have held the American public in thrall for two centuries. In 1960 the writer Cleveland Amory published his bestseller
Who Killed Society?,
about the downfall of the American aristocracy, which highlighted the Astors as the epitome of privilege gone to seed. The Astor history was rife with destructive marriages, scandals, and embarrassing peccadilloes. "The American Astor Family in its fifth generation would have made the original John Jacob turn in his grave," Amory wrote, before concluding that by 1958 the Astors had "proved that by six generations an American family is about ready to start all over again."

Brooke Astor, newly widowed when the book was published, had saved society, rescuing the Astor name from ignominy and making it fashionable again. Mrs. Astor combined her noblesse with oblige, which won the hearts of jaded New Yorkers. At the depth of New York's fiscal crisis in 1975, she flamboyantly stepped up as a leader by doubling her foundation's giving, passing out $6.4 million to keep the doors of libraries and museums open. She loved chatting with museum curators, librarians, and security guards, even making a point of memorizing the doorkeepers' names. At the Metropolitan Museum, she funded a Christmas lunch for all the employees to boost morale, and she proudly showed up every year. "She loved to get to know the people who did the work," recalls Gregory Long. "She was endlessly interested in people. She wanted to know people high and low."

Brooke Astor was hardly a saint. She was mercurial, she made promises that she did not always keep, and her charming public persona vanished at times when she dealt with her family and employees. She could be imperious and hurtful to those near and dear and was a master of the devastating putdown. Caught up in being Mrs. Astor, she brooked no complaint. That said, many, many people shared the view held by Tom Brokaw: "She was irresistible."

The feud over Brooke Astor laid bare the schisms in a storied Manhattan clan. There is something spellbinding about the sight of a family falling apart in public, and there's a special schadenfreude to be had when tens of millions of dollars are at stake. The public and the press become voyeurs, everyone has an opinion, and the real people at the center of the drama are reduced to caricatures.

Once the headlines faded away, the New Yorkers who thought they knew Brooke Astor—as well as Tony and Charlene Marshall—retained a haunting curiosity about what had actually happened, and why. At Park Avenue dinner parties, guests offered up theories as if playing an adult game of Clue with a lineup of suspects and motives. Had Mrs. Astor somehow brought this all on herself? Was Tony seeking revenge for his mother's lifelong detachment? Did Philip Marshall have ulterior motives, ranging from a simmering hatred for his father to old-fashioned greed? Was the real culprit Charlene Marshall, twenty-one years younger than her husband and acting to protect her own financial future? Was Annette de la Renta trying to displace Brooke Astor as the leader of society, as Tony and his supporters loudly claimed, or was she truly selfless? What if there had been a rush to judgment and the Marshalls had been wrongly accused?

Truth is elusive. But maybe the simplest answer is that it had all begun long before, so long before that Woodrow Wilson was in the White House. Perhaps it had begun with Brooke's marriage to her first husband, John Dryden Kuser.

4. "I Married a Terrible Man"

G
UARDED BY TWO
stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, the main branch of the New York Public Library is an imposing marble Beaux Arts landmark at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. Its cornerstone was laid in May 1902, two months after Brooke Astor was born. On a wintry December day nearly a century later, Mrs. Astor ascended the stairs to accept yet another in a long series of public service awards.

The library had been a second home for her in the past two decades. A bookish child who had turned into an insatiable reader, she had written two poignant autobiographies,
Patchwork Child
and
Footprints,
and two well-reviewed novels,
The Bluebird Is at Home
and
The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree,
which was deemed "a lovely summertime entertainment" by the
New York Times.
Her career as a writer began with a book review in
Vogue
in 1926; her most recent offering had been an essay in
Vanity Fair
in 2000 on the lost art of flirting. "She took books with her to the hairdresser's, in her car—there was always a book by her side," says Linda Gillies, of the Astor Foundation. "Mrs. Astor used to say that you can never be lonely if you read."

The occasion at the library on December 10, 2001, was the inaugural awarding of the Andrew Carnegie Medals of Philanthropy. Mrs. Astor was being honored for spearheading the revival of the library, and her talk was preceded on the luncheon program by a series of yawn-inducing speeches from fellow honorees. The financier George Soros intoned, "We need better and stronger international institutions," and then David Rockefeller observed, "We all have the responsibility for the well-being of our society and its citizens."

Dressed in a blue suit and a large navy hat, and overwhelmed by three large strands of pearls, a huge diamond pin, diamond earrings, and a gold bracelet, Mrs. Astor appeared unsteady on her feet as Vartan Gregorian took her arm and escorted her to the podium. She gazed with pleasure at the audience and then, in a raspy aged voice still tinged with patrician pronunciation, she launched into a rambling speech that was rivetingly personal.

"My mother used to say to me, Brooke, don't get beyond yourself. I am beyond myself in two ways," she began. "The first is all of you being so nice to listen to me, since I have practically nothing to say. And the other, frankly, is that I'm still alive." Mrs. Astor smiled tremulously, and the audience laughed in support. "I was an only child and I had my father, who was very sensible, and my mother, who was insensible," she continued. "So here I am, a very mixed-up person who has had a wonderful life, and also a hard life at times."

Then she spoke of an early mistake that had become a badge of shame. "I married a perfectly terrible man," she recalled, harking back to her wedding at seventeen. "They were not what you call interesting people, but they had a lot of money. I was pushed into marriage, and in those days I thought if a man kissed you, a baby popped out of you. I didn't know what it was all about."

Then she suddenly looked disoriented, as if she had lost her bearings. Mrs. Astor became incoherent in the middle of a sentence. There were nervous titters; as Annette de la Renta recalls, "No one knew what to do." After a moment, Mrs. Astor valiantly carried on, trying to wrap up with her views on dealing with her fellow men, albeit with an odd coda: "Don't hurt them—always try to help them. If they're absolutely nuts and stupid, stay away from them." The protective Gregorian then whispered in her ear, and she replied, her words captured by the microphone, "You say I've said enough? All right, I think I've said enough."

***

In a life that spans more than a century, innumerable events and memories compete for mental space; there are hours that linger for years and years that pass in a flash. Brooke Astor outlived three husbands and defined her life by those marriages. She was grateful to Vincent Astor for giving her the opportunity to become an influential member of society. Charles "Buddie" Marshall provided marital happiness. But Brooke's first husband, John Dryden Kuser, cast a long and troubled shadow that haunted her until her dying day. Kuser materialized in her nightmares. Events occurred during their time together that she could neither forgive nor forget.

Her feelings toward her son were blunted by her rage toward his father. She knew it and felt guilty, but she could not help herself. Brooke Astor grew up in an era when psychoanalysis had yet to penetrate the straitlaced remnants of Victorian America. There was no such thing as a self-help aisle in the legendary Scribner Book Store. Rather than ruminate over traumatic experiences, Brooke forged ahead, determined to keep busy every single minute of the day. She accepted more engagements than anyone could possibly keep and then berated her social secretaries when she was late or forced to cancel at the last minute. If she could just stay in motion, she could avoid unpleasant thoughts. But the past caught up with her when she spent time with her son. "Keep in mind, Tony is the son of Brooke's first husband, who treated Brooke abominably," says Robert Pirie. Ashton Hawkins adds, "Part of the problem is that Tony always reminded her of Dryden. It's not his fault, but he did."

On April 27, 1919, the
Washington Post
featured a lengthy story on its society page about the wedding of Roberta Brooke Russell to John Dryden Kuser at St. John's Episcopal Church. The ceremony was noteworthy because the daughter of Colonel John Russell of the Marine Corps was marrying into a wealthy and well-connected family. "Mr. Kuser is a grandson of the late Senator John F. Dryden of Bernardsville, N.J.," the
Post
wrote, noting that the senator's District of Columbia residence "was the scene of some of the most brilliant and elaborate of official entertainments which made up the social history of Washington in the past 20 years."

Brooke was accompanied by eight bridesmaids in the lavish wedding. As the
Post
noted, "The little bride wore a girlish graceful gown of soft white satin" and a veil trimmed with orange blossoms. Brooke's mother, Mabel, who had encouraged the match, "wore gray chiffon with a blue hat veiled in tulle and trimmed with ostrich feathers." The newspaper pointed out that Brooke was young for marriage. The bride and groom would head off by train for a wedding trip to the palatial Hotel Greenbriar in West Virginia, "after which they will go to Princeton, where the bridegroom will complete his courses at the university where he graduates in June."

Brooke would later tear up her wedding pictures in a fury. She had grown up as a sheltered only child, traveling the world with her parents as her father moved from her birthplace, New Hampshire, to Hawaii, Panama, Newport, and China with the Marine Corps. The Russells were a patriotic family with a tradition of military service; Brooke's paternal grandfather, Admiral John Russell, had been praised by President Lincoln for defeating Confederate warships during the Civil War. Her mother's parents, the lawyer George Howard and his wife, Roberta, a society belle, had been disappointed by Mabel's decision to marry a military man without significant independent means. Although Mabel opted for love, she came to appreciate her parents' concerns and was determined that her own daughter would make a more financially advantageous union.

Although Brooke was not always a reliable narrator in chronicling her life in her autobiographies, she showed a keen eye in describing her parents' expatriate social life in China—and her mother's provocative flirtations and the resulting family quarrels. Brooke learned her social skills from a self-confident master of the art. When the
New York Times
profiled her father, newly named as commandant of the Marines, in 1934, the Washington bureau chief, Arthur Krock, went out of his way to compliment Mabel as "extraordinarily able and attractive." An acquaintance who knew Brooke's mother in the 1940s says, "Mrs. Russell was divine. She was charming beyond belief. She would say, 'It's so lovely going to a party when you know you're going to make the evening for some young man.'" According to Ivan Obolensky, Vincent Astor's nephew, "Mrs. Russell was jolly, intelligent, the perfect commandant's wife. The problem was, the family had influence but was without money. Brooke was brought up in penury, but with all the accoutrements."