Mrs. Astor Regrets

by Meryl Gordon

  Through much of 2002, Mrs. Astor was either in Palm Beach or in Maine or was enveloped in the pleasant haze of birthday preparations. Only when she returned from Cove End in September did the space where the Childe Hassam had hung seem hauntingly vacant, although the picture had been replaced by a portrait of her father, General Russell. David Rockefeller did not pry, but he was baffled by her decision to part with the Hassam. "It was a picture she always enjoyed," he said. "To have it removed from the apartment—I found it difficult to understand." Annette de la Renta was especially mystified when she heard Brooke's explanation for the sale. "I didn't even have to ask—Brooke volunteered," she recalls. "Brooke said, 'Tony wanted me to sell the painting because I'm running out of money.'" Annette found the notion of Brooke having to hock her possessions inexplicable, and said so. But Brooke repeated, "He says I'm running out of money. We sold it and got a very good price for it." Chris Ely would later tell many people involved in the Astor case that upon hearing that the painting had been sold for millions, Brooke plaintively asked, "Now can I buy a dress?"

  For years Brooke had laughed with her friends about Tony's dreary efforts to force her to curtail her extravagance, but now she seemed genuinely frightened. No one knew whether this was a symptom of the sometimes exaggerated fears of the elderly or whether Tony was encouraging her to worry about money. Viscount Astor recalls a typical conversation, over dinner at La Cote Basque in the fall of 2002, with Brooke complaining, "'Tony says I have to sell this or that—I haven't any money.'" Alarmed, Lord Astor made surreptitious financial inquiries. "I finally looked into it, and discovered it was rubbish," he said. He learned that his friend was solvent enough to "keep anyone going for a long time, even at her level."

  Four years later Tony offered his own explanation for the painting's sale. According to him, the triggering event occurred when his mother lent the painting to the Adelson Galleries for a Manhattan exhibition in the fall of 2001. "At the time the exhibition was arranged, we had some discussions about selling the painting if it generated interest," he wrote in a detailed chronology. "Not long after the Adelson exhibition ended, a potential buyer approached me ... When I told my Mother how much was being offered, she decided to sell it, and to share some of the profit with me by paying me a 'commission' for arranging the purchase." That so-called commission was $2 million, but Tony has never explained how his mother settled on that figure. If she had taken a standard route and auctioned Flags, Fifth Avenue at Christie's for the same price, the fee would have been slightly more than $1 million. At the time, none of Brooke's friends or any Metropolitan Museum officials knew that Tony had profited directly from this transaction. "I remember her delight when she bought the Childe Hassam," Peggy Pierrepont recalls. "So when I heard the painting was gone, I thought, 'Oh, there's hanky-panky.' It just did not seem right."

  Tony's chronology makes it seem as if the art dealer Gerald Peters aggressively pursued the painting. But Peters insists that Tony was the one eager to make a sale. "Tony Marshall was at a dinner sitting next to someone who works for me," Peters recalls. "He brought up the painting, and we took it on consignment, and after a period of time decided to buy it. He told us that he got the appraisal from the auction houses, and marked it up." Peters never dealt directly with Tony; everything was done through lawyers. But the gallery owner says that he was given the impression that everyone was being altruistic: "The implication was that we were helping Mrs. Astor and helping her philanthropy."

  Peters resold the painting to George Soros, who kept the artwork in his country home. According to the New York Times, Soros bought the Childe Hassam for $20 million, twice the price that Peters paid to Brooke Astor and her agent, Tony Marshall. Peters will not comment on the price but says, with some justice, "It worked out well."

  Like many people contemplating their mortality, Mrs. Astor had begun in recent years to shower her friends with gifts. In September 2002, she sent her string of René Boivin French estate seed pearls with a ruby clasp, insured for $29,000, to Van Cleef & Arpels to be cleaned and restrung and then presented the necklace to Annette, who recalls, "I was touched." Most of the gifts were not that valuable but more in the nature of knickknacks to remember her by. Everett Fahy, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum and a friend for thirty years, says that Brooke called him at three o'clock one afternoon to say, "I want to see you." He replied, "Brooke, I want to see you too." She said, "I want to see you right now." So fifteen minutes later he was ushered into the red library, where Brooke presented him with a small Chinese jade figurine. He felt sad, knowing that "it was her farewell gift to me."

  Whenever Vartan Gregorian visited, Brooke constantly asked, "What can I do for you, what would you like? You want my paintings, you want my rare books?" Gregorian, who gently pointed out to her that she had already promised the books to the library, worried about people who might take advantage of Brooke's generosity. He called Tony to warn him that visitors might feel "compelled to take things because they didn't want to offend her." As Gregorian recalls, "Tony thanked me for it."

  Mrs. Astor was still keeping an active schedule of lunches and dinners. But in October her physician, Dr. Rees Pritchett, called to convey his concern for her safety, according to the staff's log of phone calls: "He stressed that you absolutely have to have someone on your elbow going to and from all of your appointments." She went to dinner twice in eight days at the home of Louise and Henry Grunwald, but as the hostess recalls, "She really didn't know that she had been here the week before." Oscar de la Renta laments that Brooke's advanced age and diminished hearing made chitchat awkward. "She always looked wonderful, impeccable, but it was very difficult to have a conversation," he says. "She wasn't really hearing. She was deeply embarrassed and would pretend she understood you. You could tell that she did not. It was her hearing, and old age." Yet Brooke could still summon up her vibrant personality enough to hearten her friends. According to her phone log, "You told Mr. Rockefeller that you were very upset about the nasty review of his Memoirs in The New York Times Book Review and that you had torn up a copy of it while speaking with him this morning!"

  Tony Marshall dutifully called his mother every other day like clockwork and stopped by 778 Park Avenue once or twice a week, occasionally bringing Charlene along. The Marshalls had a complicated relationship with Mrs. Astor's staff. Tony had grown up with servants, and he was invariably pleasant and detached. The staff perceived Charlene as simultaneously overly friendly and oddly suspicious.

  Tony and Charlene had hired Brooke's new social secretary, Naomi Packard-Koot, a statuesque actor-filmmaker trying to underwrite her artistic pursuits. A struggle over Brooke's care began almost immediately. Protective of Mrs. Astor, the new social secretary quickly realized that the ornate curving staircase connecting the fifteenth and sixteenth floors was a potential hazard. "A cook had fallen down years before and injured herself badly," Packard-Koot says. "Mrs. Astor was unsteady on her feet, and sometimes she'd wander around at night." She went to Tony and Charlene with a reasonable suggestion to install a gate at the head of the staircase. The social secretary was startled by the Marshalls' reaction: "They said it was too expensive and it would ruin the value of the apartment." Tony later conceded that he had turned down that request, arguing that his mother had an aide at night. But this was just a foreshadowing of the hostilities ahead. As Brooke's chauffeur, Marciano Amaral, puts it, "When Mrs. Astor began to lose her mind a little bit, they started to take control."

  Tony knew that his mother was happiest with a man on her arm whenever she went out, and he had the ideal escort—Francis X. Morrissey, Jr. The charming Mr. Morrissey, with a gift for gab and an ingratiating manner, was someone almost everyone instantly liked. The cultured attorney knew how to curry favor without being obvious, sending Mrs. Astor books such as The Diaries of Beatrice Webb along with flowers and notes. She reciprocated with an autographed copy of her poem "Discipline," which had been published in The New Yorker. In years past she had frequently
run into Morrissey at the home of Jack and Nancy Pierrepont, and she had presumably heard of the lawyer's kindness to the couple's retarded daughter, Mary Rutherford.

  On November 6, 2002, Morrissey escorted Mrs. Astor to the annual black-tie benefit for the New York Landmarks Conservancy. In a photograph taken by Ron Gallela, she looks fashionable in her dark fur coat, black evening gown, and glistening diamonds—pendulous earrings and a necklace. But holding tightly on to Tony and Morrissey with her white-gloved hands, she appears frail and a bit bewildered, smiling faintly. Charlene, wearing a double strand of pearls, grins exuberantly, while Morrissey, a slender man with thinning hair and a tuxedo tailored to perfection, gazes with a look of concern and fondness at Mrs. Astor. This must have been a moment of splendid vindication for Morrissey; a once disgraced attorney, he was on the arm of the Living Landmark Brooke Astor.

  Francis X. Morrissey, Jr., is the man in the shadows of this story, and he is difficult to assess. The tabloids reduced him to a stock character out of a nineteenth-century melodrama, the swindler of the innocent, a con man whom the New York Post labeled a "shady lawyer." Yet some friends and relatives of former clients speak movingly of his care for and generosity to sick, elderly, and disabled people who had been neglected at times by their own families. The protracted debate over his character has been waged repeatedly in the Manhattan surrogate's court and takes up six boxes in the files of the New York State Appellate Division, with testimony from friends and foes. Rarely has a wills and estates lawyer been so loved and so loathed.

  "You'd think he'd look like Sean Connery, that you'd swoon when you look at him—how could a lady resist?—but he's kind of a nonentity," marvels a lawyer who was involved in the battle over the estate of Elisabeth Von Knapitsch. Relatives of that Park Avenue widow claimed that Morrissey duped the dying woman into leaving him the bulk of her $15 million estate, including her apartment and two Renoirs.

  "On July 17, 1997, decedent Elisabeth Von Knapitsch was not of sound mind or memory and was not mentally capable of making a will," charged her stepson Walter Von Knapitsch in his court complaint, insisting that she was the victim of "duress and undue influence" by Morrissey. According to court papers, she had previously been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. All sides agreed to settle the case out of court, with a confidentiality agreement. A similar case involving another one of Morrissey's elderly clients ended the same way. The attorney never testified, and the propriety (or impropriety) of his conduct was never determined by a court.

  There is a mythic quality to Morrissey's background. His father, Francis Xavier Morrissey, Sr., one of twelve children of a stevedore, put himself through night law school and then took advantage of Massachusetts's Irish-dominated patronage system. Morrissey Sr. was working for Governor Maurice Tobin when he had his Horatio Alger moment. Joseph Kennedy snatched him up to work on the 1946 congressional campaign of his war-hero son Jack.

  In an interview with the Kennedy Library, Morrissey reminisced, "It was my responsibility to put him to bed at night and that would be around one-thirty or two; then I had to get him up very early in the morning so we could start." After Kennedy's election, Morrissey helped run his Boston congressional office, worked on JFK's triumphant 1952 Senate campaign, and attended his 1953 Newport wedding to Jackie. Appointed a municipal court judge in Boston in 1958, Morrissey was widely regarded as a Kennedy family retainer. He was described by the Washington Post as a man "who never let Joe Kennedy's coat hit the ground."

  His namesake was born in 1942, the second of seven surviving children. "Young Frank is a charming man," recalled Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. "He's a WASP version of his father." Morrissey attended Harvard and majored in English. His conversations today are peppered with references to Shakespeare, Plutarch, and Zola. Frederic Kass, the executive vice chair at Columbia University's psychiatry department, recalls being befriended by Morrissey at Harvard: "Frank appeared one day and he was like an older brother, extraordinarily bright and sensitive." As Kass, who remains friendly with Morrissey, puts it, "Frank has associated for all his life with people who are powerful and influential."

  But Morrissey learned at a formative age the limitations of connections as he watched his father be humiliated as his reward for decades of service to the Kennedys. In 1961, John Kennedy told White House aides, according to Schlesinger, "Look, my father has come to me and said that he has never asked me for anything, that he wants to ask me only this one thing—to make Frank Morrissey a federal judge. What can I do?" Kennedy went through the motions but abandoned the effort after the American Bar Association issued a scathing report branding Morrissey unqualified. After the president was assassinated, Bobby and Teddy Kennedy tried again with Lyndon Johnson. As Schlesinger explained, LBJ gleefully nominated Morrissey, savoring the prospect of his least favorite family's near-certain embarrassment. Predictably, the 1965 nomination of Morrissey as a federal judge was greeted with outrage in the Senate, where he was denounced as a Boston political hack. The Boston Globe won a Pulitzer Prize for tracing his tangled path to practicing law after he repeatedly failed the Massachusetts bar exam, and Morrissey finally withdrew his name, telling LBJ in a letter that he wanted to "prevent further anguish to my family." Back in Boston, he remained a controversial figure and was later censured and fined $5,000 by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court for failing to avoid the appearance of impropriety (he had sought information about a criminal case against a friend, who obligingly gave him a $4,000 gift). In the example he set for his son, the premium was on loyalty at all costs.

  After Harvard, the younger Frank Morrissey acquired a continental patina and fluency in French by attending the Institute of Political Science at the Sorbonne. Turning his attention to a legal career, he attended the Hastings Law School at the University of California. Despite his gilt-edged education, he suffered from dyslexia, a problem that later affected his practice as a lawyer and had repercussions in his dealings with Mrs. Astor. Admitted to the New York bar in 1973, he had his choice of good offers and joined the blue-chip firm of Willkie Farr & Gallagher. As a friend puts it, "Kennedy's name opened doors—he met a lot of people in New York." Morrissey soon jumped to another top law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, then left with a partner to start their own boutique firm, representing the heirs of the founder of John Deere Co. "I'm one of the people who think Frank is a saint," says Nancy Colhoun, a descendent of the Deere family who was in her twenties when she met Morrissey in the mid-1970s. "I was raised on a farm. All of a sudden this gentleman was paying attention to me, giving me sweet little presents." Colhoun was particularly pleased when Morrissey introduced her to his family, recalling, "His father is the most delightful creature you have ever met, very short like a leprechaun, extraordinarily bright."

  Colhoun stresses that Morrissey, who continued to represent her periodically after he established a solo practice in the General Motors Building, has never been a legal shark obsessed with fees and billable hours. "Frank lives very simply. He's not a bling-bling lifestyle kind of person," she says. "I believe that doing bad deeds would be against the fiber of who he is. However, I also know that money is a real tricky thing."

  Indeed it is, and Morrissey's initial mistake may have been in trying to be too tricky in pursuit of it. The case that left a permanent blot on his legal record came his way in March 1980. A Spanish corporation, Mar Oil, owned a supertanker that had blown up and sunk. The firm's president, Carlos Garcia-Monzon, hired Morrissey to pursue a $10.6 million claim against the New Hampshire Insurance Company. With no experience in maritime insurance litigation, Morrissey brought in another law firm to handle much of the work. When the case was settled for $8 million, the money was paid into Morrissey's escrow account, and according to court records he withdrew $925,675, claiming that he was owed that amount in legal fees. Mar Oil sued Morrissey, charging that the lawyer had vastly overbilled, and won the trial. Morrissey was ordered to repay $1.388 million, which included interest. Brought up on disciplinary charges in
1994 before the New York Supreme Court's Appellate Division, he was accused of excessive billing and misleading Garcia-Monzon into signing a document approving the fee.

  The New York University professor Stephen Gillers, who specializes in legal ethics, teaches the Mar Oil case as a classic example of untoward legal behavior. "It's blatantly improper for a lawyer to do what he did," Gillers says. "It has great value in teaching the students how not to behave. It's stark and dramatic."

  Fighting disbarment or the lesser penalty of suspension, Morrissey submitted a stack of character references, from August Heckscher ("Of all men I know he is the least avaricious and the most caring"), the art book author Deborah Harding ("If you're in trouble in the middle of the night, he will be there"), his younger brother Richard, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell ("I have long ago concluded that he is incapable of dishonesty, fraud, deceit"), and his favorite waiter at a New York deli, whom Morrissey had helped gain U.S. citizenship. Even Brooke Astor's name was dropped to convey his rectitude. Marcia Mehan Schaeffer, of the Youth Counseling League, wrote that Morrissey "was instrumental in soliciting a significant contribution from Brooke Astor for a special laboratory for children." Schaeffer also commended Morrissey for donning a bright pink stegosaurus costume to entertain children at a Halloween party at the Museum of Natural History.

  The glowing testimonials presumably helped. Jay Topkis, who chaired the disciplinary panel, noted at the end of a two-day hearing in 1996 that his staff had recommended disbarring Morrissey. But the three-lawyer panel chose merely to suspend him from practicing law for two years. Granting that Morrissey had "in a deceptive manner obtained his client's signature" as well as billed for watching television while waiting for his client to call, Topkis nonetheless wrote that "we are not convinced he is a totally lost cause."