Mrs. Astor Regrets

by Meryl Gordon

  Without the foundation's work to keep her busy, Brooke Astor appeared unmoored. She continued to make her social rounds night after night, but she had lost her sense of purpose. As one of her staff members recalls, "I'd see her pull herself together and go out with people and maintain her graciousness, but at the end of the night, she'd empty out like a paper bag—she'd gotten through the evening."

  For Tony, his mother's decision to close the foundation marked the end of his hopes of becoming a major New York philanthropist. He continued to manage his mother's money, signing the checks to pay for her expenses. Brooke Astor had always lived well, and her son looked askance at her extravagance. This was a theme in the mother-son relationship that Brooke's friends had been hearing about for years. "He was always giving her grief that she shouldn't spend so much money," recalls Robert Pirie. "She'd say to me, 'When Tony finds out how much I spent in England this trip, he's going to have a fit.'" Like many of Brooke's friends, he thought Tony's complaints were inappropriate. As he puts it, "Whose money was it? It wasn't his." But Tony knew that much of the money would eventually be his. It was just a matter of time. Given Brooke's remarkable longevity, however, each minute seemed to last an hour, and her son's life was ticking away too.

  7. The Perils of Charlene

  SUMMER MORNINGS in Northeast Harbor, Maine, have a quiet, magical feeling. The sun on the water, the birds in the trees, the profusion of blossoms in the gardens, make for an enchanting ambience. If the fog lingers, the salt-scented sea air and the swirling mist create a mysterious intimacy. Although Brooke Astor was a night owl in Manhattan, she always rose early at Cove End to savor the pleasures of island life—a morning swim, a walk with her dogs, or a stroll around her garden. But during her last summer there, in 2002, she slept in most mornings. She was, after all, one hundred years old. In her second-floor bedroom overlooking a quiet ocean cove, the floral drapes were closed to block out the sunlight, and she wore a sleep mask.

  When Mrs. Astor awoke in her antique four-poster bed, usually around 9:30 A.M., she rang a buzzer to summon her maid. The maid would open the drapes, help her into a robe, and bring her breakfast in bed. She drank hot water with a sugar cube dissolved in it, but even though the cook tried to tempt her with fresh fruit or eggs or Cheerios, she never ate very much. Her dachshunds, Boysie and Girlsie, slept beside her at night, one under the covers, one by her feet, and in the morning she let them nibble from her plate.

  Maine had been Brooke Astor's sanctuary for more than a half-century. She had visited nearby Bar Harbor during her marriage to Dryden Kuser, then returned as a divorcee and fallen in love with the pines and the mountains and the ocean. The house that Vincent Astor purchased at her urging was modest for a man of his wealth, but the shingled cottage was on the water, with two separate guest cottages and space for a half-acre garden, and was about a five-minute stroll from the quaint Main Street.

  Mrs. Astor had been summering in this tiny resort community for so long that three generations of local families had come to know her. Although she imported her own staff from New York and employed a few full-time Maine workers, each summer she hired extra cooks, maids, and gardeners. She wanted her constant stream of houseguests to feel cosseted—to have their clothes unpacked and pressed and to be served whatever special requests they had for meals. "Maine was perfect," recalls Judy Miller, a former New York Times reporter who visited several times with her husband, Jason Epstein, a highly respected Random House editor and one of the founders of the New York Review of Books. "Everyone in town knew her. You'd walk down the street, and it would be, 'Oh, Brooke,' every few steps." Adds Barbara Walters, "The house in Maine had the most glorious garden I've ever seen. Brooke and I would sit on the porch and read. She'd walk a great deal on the Rockefeller estate. She walked too fast for me."

  Mrs. Astor was a local fixture in her straw hat and white gloves, marching proudly in the Memorial Day parade, popping into the library, visiting the shops on Main Street, and attending Sunday services at St. Mary's-by-the-Sea. Betty Halpern, a clerk at the Kimball Shop on Main Street, remembers watching her shop with Barbara Walters in tow. "They were fighting over who would buy this white embroidered negligee for the other," she says. Walters won, but Mrs. Astor then had the shop order and ship a duplicate to the anchorwoman. Mrs. Astor would also impulsively purchase gifts for her help. "She'd pick out something pretty for her housekeeper too," says Halpern. In the late 1990s she gave a party to thank the year-round townspeople, such as the assistant fire chief and the ambulance drivers. "This party was not for the big summer names but people who were precious to her," says Bob Pyle, the town librarian, who helped her draw up the guest list. "She used a different caterer, because her usual caterer was a guest."

  Pedestrians and fellow motorists had been mesmerized and terrified by the sight of Mrs. Astor tearing down the streets in her gold Opel, "old pal," and its replacement, a fire-engine red Ford Escort. As Judy Miller puts it, "She was hell on wheels." After several fender-benders, the police chief, along with her anxious friends and staff members, finally dissuaded her from taking the wheel. "She was terrible—went a mile a minute, bounced off curbs," recalls Freddy Melhado. "When she turned ninety-five, I started inventing everything I could to keep her out of the driver's seat. I'd say, 'You don't want to drive, it's a bore.' She'd look at me, her fists clenched, and say, 'You would deny me the thing I like most in the world.'"

  Mrs. Astor had prided herself on her vigor and had continued to hike up Parkman Mountain well into her nineties, but by 2002 even climbing a flight of stairs was difficult. In 1997 she had tripped and fallen in the ladies' room at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, breaking her hip. Tony and Charlene worried that Maine had become too difficult for her. "They wanted me to dissuade her from going," says Naomi Packard-Koot, Brooke's social secretary. "They said she wouldn't be able to get around the house. But I had tea with her in the library one day, and she kept talking about how much she loved Maine. So I made it my mission to make it happen." Packard-Koot arranged to have a chairlift installed on the Cove End stairwell prior to Mrs. Astor's summer visit.

  In 1995 Brooke had sold her rugged, wild 100-acre Maine camp, August Moon, a painful acknowledgment that her hiking, rambling, and ocean swimming days were over. She added a lap pool to Cove End. She had always proudly boasted that she swam a thousand strokes a day, and even now she managed to get into the water in an effort to keep her aged limbs in working order. Fiercely independent, she still insisted on privacy when in the pool, but her staff tried to keep an unobtrusive watch on her.

  Her mornings had a ritual quality these days. After breakfast, she would summon her housekeeper, Alicia Johnson, who loved animals as much as she did. "She would be sitting there with her dogs by her side," recalls Johnson. "I would go up and ask her plans for the day—was she going out, was she having friends for dinner, and if so, who would be seated by whom. Then she might go into the living room and read her mail." When Johnson had begun working at Cove End, ten years earlier, Mrs. Astor would arrive from New York with ten suitcases, and on many evenings there would be a sit-down dinner for as many as twenty-six people. The house was stocked with twenty complete sets of china—Wedgwood, Limoges, Valentino, and a precious gold-edged set that had been a gift from Nelson Rockefeller—and each season the Astor silver would be retrieved from a bank vault.

  The phone rang all day long back then, with calls from friends near and far. The staff logged in the messages: "Mrs. de la Renta sends you lots of love." "Mr. Marshall arrived safely and will call in the morning." "Reverend Paul Gilbert called." "Patricia phoned to say the flowers you have sent for the church in memory of Captain Astor are wonderful." "Pamela Harriman is arriving." "Gregory Long said to tell you he loves you and will try again." "Philip Marshall called twice, please call." "Mr. Laurance called." "David Rockefeller asked if you might like to take a walk." "Mrs. Reagan called, please return the call." But now Cove End was quiet. Gregory Long, Charles Rhysca
mp, and Freddy Melhado came up in the summer of 2002 to visit, but many of Brooke's close friends had died, and some New Yorkers had begun making excuses to avoid the trip to Maine. Brooke had put on an impressive public performance at her recent birthday party, but her wandering mind made conversation difficult. One of her most loyal friends, George Trescher, had visited the previous year but found the experience emotionally draining. "George went every summer, but he hated it in the later years," says his sister, Susan Trescher. "She was getting so addled, she kept repeating herself. It broke his heart." Paul Pearson, who had served as Mrs. Astor's butler from 1984 through 1997, had watched as Mrs. Astor's social life diminished. "By the time I left, the phone rang less frequently, which I found sad," he says. "She was someone who could make a difference for people—she'd give someone a push. But at the end they weren't doing their part for her."

  His successor as butler, Christopher Ely, had an impressive resume: a stint at Buckingham Palace as a senior footman to Queen Elizabeth, several years with an Arab sheik, and five years in Los Angeles working for the movie producer Joel Schumacher. "Christopher is outstanding and perfect," wrote Schumacher in a job recommendation, adding that Ely was "loyal, honest, completely trustworthy, charming, extraordinarily well mannered and well dispositioned." He was also able to develop a comfortable rapport with Mrs. Astor. He was deft at playing the role of "veddy proper" butler, but he could make her laugh. John Hart recalls how he once came into the library in Maine to inform Mrs. Astor that a man invited for dinner that evening had sent over his butler in advance with a list of wines that he wanted to have served—Château Margaux and other rare vintages. Ely was straight-faced in passing along the presumptuous request, but his employer knew exactly what he thought of such impudence. "Brooke read it and rolled her eyes," Hart recalled.

  In theory, Ely's job was to manage Mrs. Astor's households in Maine and at Holly Hill (she no longer had a butler in Manhattan), but in reality his job was much larger. The butler's responsibilities had expanded as Mrs. Astor faded. Ely spent quite a bit of time alone with her, and he tried to be inventive in helping fill her days. Long drives in the countryside, in Maine as well as Westchester, cheered her up and eased the claustrophobia of spending too much time at home. Ely had been one of the few people in whom Tony Marshall had confided about Brooke's mental condition. Discreet and concerned, the butler had bought a book to read up on Alzheimer's disease. Now he was in the awkward position of telling his frail employer what she could or could not do. Her moods had become unpredictable, and she was sometimes childish in her whims. As Alicia Johnson recalls, "She would get into this firing mode—maybe the maid wore the wrong dress. Chris would have to talk her out of it."

  Self-aware enough to know that she was being impossible at times, Mrs. Astor was worried that Ely, now the central man in her life, might be tempted to leave, so she kept begging him to promise to stay with her as long as she lived. Of course he agreed—how could he not? Ely, who was single, had become emotionally attached to his employer, and his position had become much more than a job. Although he was careful not to overstep his place, Brooke's friends had gotten into the habit of calling him to ask after her and to conspire with him on her behalf. "Brooke couldn't talk on the phone anymore because she was so hard of hearing," said Emily Harding. "So Chris was the person you talked to. He was always very nice, and good with her."

  Even with her hearing aids, Brooke had great difficulty following conversations. She would valiantly carry a notebook to jot things down. A friend had given her pills, vitamins that were supposed to help. "I need to take my memory pills," Brooke told her housekeeper one day, searching with annoyance for the bottle, and then added wryly, " They're not a lot of good, are they? I can't remember where I put them."

  Her calendar that summer included frequent outings with Eben Pyne, a banker who had known Vincent Astor, and his wife, Nancy, one of Brooke's favorite traveling companions. "We were both nutty about dogs," says Nancy Pyne, who is proud of the antique dog paintings that decorate the stairwell in her Maine house. "Brooke loved coming into my hallway and looking around and saying 'I have sixty-eight dog pictures,' compared to my pitiful ten. She did it with such humor—she loved to rub it in." But Pyne, who had attended the one hundredth birthday party, adds, "She was fading that last summer. She wasn't the zippy, incredible conversationalist that she always had been."

  Small-town admirers felt protective of Mrs. Astor, and in the summer of 2002, people politely tried to smooth over awkward moments. She had been one of a group of wealthy summer residents who banded together to save the town's financially beleaguered grand hotel, the Asticou Inn. Now, at the annual board meeting, she showed up overdressed—everyone else was in khakis and polo shirts—and appeared disoriented. As James McCabe recalls, she asked, "Is this another thing I'm supposed to give to?" before being escorted out. At a party, she plaintively told the philanthropist Gerrit Livingston Lansing, "I don't know why I'm living so long."

  The deterioration was a painful sight. "She'd be right on top of things one minute, and then her mind would be gone and she'd have no idea what we were talking about," says Steve Hamor, her gardener, a lanky man with a New England drawl. "Mrs. Astor always said, 'You'll be well taken care of—you don't need a retirement plan,'" he adds. His son Steve Jr. recalls that when he joined her staff, Brooke told him, "'You'll have a job here as long as I'm alive, and five years after that, which will give you time to find another job.' When Mrs. Astor said that, you could take it to the bank. It would have insulted her to ask for it in writing."

  The elder Steve Hamor was accustomed to giving Mrs. Astor's guests a tour of her flower garden, a riot of snapdragons and zinnias and roses. But that summer one tour took a sad turn. When a visitor asked him how long he had worked there, Hamor replied, "I've been here thirty-seven years." After Mrs. Astor escorted her friends to their cars, he heard the gate creak open again. "Mrs. Astor was coming up the main walk, and she was crying. I said, 'What is it, Mrs. Astor?' She said, 'You've been here thirty-seven years, and I can't even remember your name.'"

  Yet there were also still good days and moments of lucidity, when she displayed her wit and legendary charm. Robert Pirie, who had known her for more than thirty years, accompanied Brooke and David Rockefeller to see the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth II, which had docked in Maine. "The high point came when the idiot who was taking us around turned to Brooke and said, 'Which of your relatives went down in the Titanic?.'" Pirie recalls. Brooke replied, "It was my husband's father. His new wife survived, but fortuitously, the will leaving everything to her went down with him. My husband always used to say, 'It was a grand ship, the Titanic'."

  Mrs. Astor could often be found that summer dozing in her chair in the living room, with a yellow legal pad with scribbled notes in her lap, a blue pen leaking onto her clothes or the furniture. "Sometimes I lie down and daydream," she had once told Marilyn Berger of the New York Times. "Now and then I let waves of nothing sweep over me." Maine was a place with so many memories stretching back to her girlhood. "Brooke told me that the first time she came up here, she was sixteen and the war had just started," said the developer Marshall Rose. "She was talking about World War I." Her emerald engagement ring from Vincent Astor was still lying in the Maine waters; it had slipped off her finger a half-century before, when she and Vincent were stepping off his yacht onto Jack Pierrepont's dock. "I didn't understand then how expensive emeralds are," recalls Pierrepont's daughter Peggy, a child at the time, "but there were a lot of people trying to find it."

  For Brooke, Maine had held out the promise of nature's beauty and rejuvenation for five decades. If she felt low, Cove End lifted her spirits, and she treated the townspeople like extended family. Ever eager to help, she embraced civic betterment, creating scholarships so schoolteachers could take trips to Europe and underwriting library renovations. This was her town. But something wrenching had happened here, and she still brooded over the experience. Her long-rooted feelings of
security had been swept away, leaving her embarrassed in front of the entire community. She blamed that humiliation squarely on the shoulders of Tony, and even more on his third wife, Charlene.

  Mrs. Astor's church in Northeast Harbor, St. Mary's-by-the-Sea, was founded in 1882 by a visiting Episcopal minister and has always catered to the village's summer aristocracy. The picturesque unheated stone chapel with soaring wooden arches was built in 1902, the year Brooke Astor was born, and a smaller winterized chapel was later added a few blocks away from Cove End. In 1982 a new minister was hired: Paul Gilbert, a Wesleyan graduate and naval officer who had come late to his calling. The convivial Gilbert, whose previous congregation had been in the affluent New Jersey suburb of Short Hills, was an avid sailor. He and his wife of fourteen years, Charlene, concluded that Northeast Harbor was an ideal place for their three young children, Arden, Inness, and Robert. True, the salary was low—$18,000 a year—and the church-provided residence was cramped, with a tiny living room and mismatched furniture. But the job offered the prestige of preaching to and influencing one of the most elite congregations in America.