by Meryl Gordon
In California, Nancy Reagan was saddened but not entirely surprised to read of the scandal. "I felt terrible, just terrible, that this could happen to Brooke," she told me. "We all knew that something was wrong up there. But nobody knew quite how wrong it was." Mrs. Reagan called Annette de la Renta to inquire about the details. "Annette explained to me that she wasn't supposed to talk." Even to you? "Even to me."
Viscount William Astor was on holiday in Scotland when the story hit the newspapers. He admitted that he had been worried about Brooke in recent years. "I'm just appalled by the way she's been treated," he said. "Annette de la Renta has done the right thing, and we've all been encouraging her to do something for a long time. It's all about money."
Indeed, nearly every day for the following six months Tony and Charlene Marshall were pilloried in the press. They were accused of finagling millions from Mrs. Astor, including diverting money to invest in their theatrical company. They were attacked for firing Mrs. Astor's longtime staff—Chris Ely, her chauffeur, her French chef, her social secretary, and her Maine housekeeper—and denounced for preventing friends from visiting in order to isolate her. There were ominous reports that Tony had shredded eighty boxes of documents. He was criticized for selling the Childe Hassam painting for $10 million and taking a $2 million commission, and there was an uproar when he admitted that he had erred in filing his mother's taxes, resulting in a huge underpayment of capital gains tax on the transaction.
The Marshalls protested their innocence in quaintly old-fashioned terms. "My mother has always emphasized the importance of good manners," Tony said in a statement that he passed out to the press. "Those who have associated their names with this action taken against me and my wife Charlene have not only exercised bad manners but total disrespect and a lack of decency." He charged that Rockefeller and Kissinger "have given undeserved credence to my son Philip's charges against me and stirred up a massive media campaign."
Tony was stunned by the betrayal of these people he knew—or at least thought he knew. As an ambassador in the Nixon administration, he had reported to Kissinger, then the secretary of state. Through his mother, Tony had known and socialized with the entire Rockefeller family for decades. He and Annette both served on the board of the Metropolitan Museum, and they were often thrown together at Brooke's larger parties. "I thought they were all friends," Tony later told me, and then, without prompting, he conceded, "Of my mother's."
Rockefeller and Kissinger, who have spent their lifetimes in the public eye, serenely took the high road, declining to respond to Tony Marshall's criticisms and authorizing Rockefeller's veteran public relations adviser Fraser Seitel to handle the media. Even more than a year later, when Rockefeller and Kissinger spoke with me, they avoided directly criticizing Tony and pointedly praised Philip. In a lengthy conversation in his art-filled office on the fifty-sixth floor of Rockefeller Center, Rockefeller insisted that he became involved because he was concerned about Brooke's "personal comfort and happiness." He added, "I don't know Philip well, but I felt his motives were totally unselfish and caring for his grandmother. I've been very impressed." Kissinger, speaking at his Park Avenue office several blocks away, explained, "Nobody said, 'Let's get all these names together and really do a job here.' When we were caucusing among ourselves, it was entirely on the issue of how can we make life better for Brooke in her final years?"
Thanks to the star power arrayed against the Marshalls, only a few of their friends were willing to support them openly. David Richenthal, the lead partner in Delphi Productions, the couple's theatrical venture, was their staunchest vocal defender. He lashed out at Philip, calling him "a disturbed attention-getting young man who is acting irrationally." The CBS newsman Mike Wallace, who had met the Marshalls when he profiled Brooke Astor for 60 Minutes, issued a formal statement saying, "I am perplexed by the attacks leveled against Anthony. I believe they are completely undeserved." Wallace later told me, "When I read about it, I said, 'This is horseshit.' I've spent time with these people. They seemed reasonable and not greedy." At St. James' Church, Rector Brenda Husson was convinced that the Marshalls were innocent of all charges. "I was dumbfounded," she says. "It just did not line up with anything I knew either about them or about their relationship with Brooke. I'm very aware of regular visits and ongoing care."
The controversy dominated conversations and created schisms. Eleanor Elliott, a former Vogue editor who had attended Brooke's hundredth birthday party, wrote a note of support to the Marshalls, declaring that she was not a fair-weather friend. But her brother-in-law Oz Elliott thought the charges were probably credible, saying, "If David Rockefeller got involved, there must have been more fire than smoke."
For a son to take his father to court is a stunning act of familial disloyalty. William F. Buckley, Jr., Brooke's neighbor at 778 Park Avenue, described Philip's lawsuit in his syndicated newspaper column as a "parricidal intervention." Tony told close friends that he could not fathom his sons' behavior. As Daniel Billy, Jr., says, "What they've done is biblical in their betrayal." Alec did not join in the lawsuit, but in his father's eyes he was as culpable as Philip. As Billy adds, "By not taking sides, he's taken sides."
The Marshalls descended into a nightmarish existence in which everything they had ever said or done was scrutinized by the press. They were villains in the tabloid drama, and they confided to friends that strangers called in the middle of the night with death threats. Virtually every newspaper story featured lovely old photos of Mrs. Astor decked out in her finest jewels and hats and smiling benignly, alongside unattractive new photos of an enraged Charlene snarling at the cameras like Cruella de Vil, with a baffled and somber Tony at her side.
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 cont
ainers 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"
GUARDED 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 s
tay 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.