by Meryl Gordon
Two days after Long Day's Journey opened, the Marshalls went to 778 Park to meet with Naomi Packard-Koot. They knew that Brooke had left a few hours earlier to go to Holly Hill for the weekend. At the start of the conversation, the Marshalls informed the social secretary that she was fired. "It was really sudden," she recalls. "I asked them why. Tony sort of fumbled and said that I didn't type quickly enough. First of all, I do type fast, but that wasn't part of my job anyway. My job was running her life and liaising with a lot of people and the staff." In a cruel twist, the Marshalls forbid her from returning to the apartment to say goodbye to Brooke.
By virtue of temperament and personality, Alec and Philip had developed very different relationships with their father. Alec was much closer to Tony emotionally, although Tony dictated the terms of their relationship, which was carried out at his convenience. Alec lived just a brief drive from Holly Hill, but even though Tony visited his mother there frequently, he had stopped by his son's apartment only a few times in a decade. Instead, he invited Alec into Manhattan for lunch every several weeks or so, usually at the New York Racquet Club or the Knickerbocker. Alec interrupted his workday and took the train in for the pleasure of his father's company.
For Alec, it had become troubling that his father and his brother did not get along, so he decided to play peacemaker, urging Philip to go into Manhattan alone, without Nan and the kids, to spend some time with Tony. The twins e-mail each other constantly and talk every other day, and finally, in early June 2003, Philip relented, agreeing to take his brother's advice and commit a few days to this exercise. The weekend that was good for him, unfortunately, was not ideal for his father. Still, when Philip arrived, his father proudly took him down to Times Square to see the theater where Long Day's Journey was playing. Tony had invited Philip to opening night, but the college professor had declined because of his teaching schedule. At least he could see the marquee, his father's bright lights, big city accomplishment.
Tony and Charlene had been invited to dine at Mike Wallace's apartment that evening and did not offer to take Philip along. Free on that first evening in Manhattan, Philip made a last-minute call to Naomi Packard-Koot—they had never met in person—and went out for what turned into a five-hour dinner at Island, on Madison Avenue. The former social secretary kept stressing her commitment to Mrs. Astor and voicing her concerns about Tony and Charlene's actions. Since Philip wanted his visit to improve family relations, he kept quiet the next morning at his father's apartment, where he had spent the night. But Tony had decided to cut the visit short. Announcing that it would be inconvenient for him and Charlene to host Philip for another evening, Tony reserved a room for his son at the Knickerbocker Club. As for dinner with Brooke, which had been scheduled, Tony said she was not feeling well and the get-together had been canceled.
Later that day Philip stopped by his grandmother's building to leave her a bouquet of flowers; when the doorman rang up, his grandmother's staff urged him to come up and see Brooke. She seemed in good spirits, although she chastised him for wearing shorts and sandals in the city. "I wasn't expecting to see her or I would have dressed up," he recalls. She did not look sick to him, nor did she mention an illness. That night, as Philip lay in bed in his room at the Knickerbocker, he mulled over his relationship with his father. Hurt feelings abounded on both sides. There had been Tony's seventy-fifth birthday celebration in Turkey: neither Philip nor Alec attended, duly noting that the invitation had arrived late and their father had not offered to subsidize the expensive trip. On the one hand, Tony kept saying he wanted to know his grandchildren, yet he and Charlene had last visited Philip in Massachusetts twelve years before, shortly after Winslow was born, in 1991. Invitations for return visits had been politely deflected. A reconciliation seemed to be nothing more than a shimmering mirage.
"I'm glad I made the effort, but I was disappointed," Philip later said about this trip. Nan Starr knew how much Philip longed for a connection to his father. "It felt to Philip that he was never accepted, that his father neither knew nor liked him," she says. "I think Tony had aspirations for his sons to follow in his footsteps or the footsteps of his own grandfather. But Philip chose a more bohemian academic life." She adds, "Philip could not let go of hoping that there was something more with his father in terms of unconditional love."
Mrs. Astor liked her privacy at night, and so she frequently ordered her aide to leave the room when she slept. But trying to get out of bed on the evening of June 24, she lost her balance and toppled to the floor, breaking her hip. Tony and Charlene met her in the emergency room at New York Hospital. After spending several days in the hospital, she returned to Park Avenue, and on July 15, Dr. John Lyden performed a hip replacement.
To be 101, disoriented, hard of hearing, suffering from insomnia, and now in intense pain was an ordeal. Her recuperation was slow, and Mrs. Astor became depressed and listless. This was the first summer in decades without Maine. At Holly Hill, Chris Ely had to wheedle and coax and finally argue with his employer, telling her that he was not going to let her rot in bed. He was on the phone continuously with her doctor, Rees Pritchett. Brooke did manage to walk again, but she would have nurses with her every day for the rest of her life.
Brooke was still recuperating at Holly Hill on August 13 when Terry Christensen arrived for a meeting. She was in her bedroom, seated on a sofa facing the Hudson River, when the lawyer was ushered in. Christensen had prepared yet another set of financial documents. This time Brooke magnanimously gave $5 million to Tony, ostensibly to take care of Charlene. Not long before, Brooke had been so frightened about her finances that she had agreed to part with her Childe Hassam. Now she was feeling profligate, sending her love and money in surprising directions.
Christensen had crafted a letter for her to sign:
Dear Tony,
Terry Christensen has reviewed with me again the terms of my Will, and of the charitable remainder trust which I establish for your life benefit under my Will. I am quite satisfied with that trust, except that I now realize that as the trust terminates on your death, there may not be enough to provide for Charlene.
I do want you to have enough money to provide for Charlene on your death.
I am therefore making an additional outright gift to you of $5,000,000. This should provide you with enough money to assure Charlene's comfort assuming that she survives you. You have my power of attorney, and I authorize you to transfer $5,000,000 of securities from my accounts to yours in order to effect the gift. I understand that there will be a gift tax payable on this gift, from my own assets (and not Vincent's trust), next year.
With my love.
Sincerely,
Brooke R. Astor
Who could say that Brooke Astor was not a good mother? In poor health, she had still remembered to make financial concessions to a woman whom by most accounts she loathed, and she volunteered to pay the gift tax too.
Unknown to Christensen, the walls had ears: his private conversation with Mrs. Astor was being overheard elsewhere in the house. Because Mrs. Astor kept demanding that the duty nurses leave her bedroom, a baby monitor had been unobtrusively installed to track her movements. As a result, every sound in her bedroom was broadcast to the room next door, where the nurses waited. A nurse's aide regaled the household staff with what she heard, claiming that Christensen mentioned a "rift between the Marshalls and Mrs. Astor" that could be resolved only by giving money to Charlene. The word millions got everyone's attention.
Chris Ely had been told by Tony twenty months earlier that Mrs. Astor had Alzheimer's disease. Now she was signing legal documents and giving away money? As Christensen was leaving, he stopped to chat with the butler. In a written account of the day, Ely acidly noted that Christensen "seemed to want me to agree with him that BRA. [Brooke Russell Astor] was very well and in good mind. This comment coming from a man who could not look [at] me straight."
Mrs. Astor's mood changed after the lawyer departed. She told one of the nurses t
hat she felt "foolish" and then retreated into silence. When she went down for dinner, she asked Ely what Christensen had wanted, as if she had no idea what had transpired. "I told her that I did not know, but as she had asked for a pen I thought she had signed something," wrote Ely. She asked to speak to Christensen, and the butler got the lawyer on the phone. But the conversation apparently did not alleviate her concerns.
The next morning Mrs. Astor, who believed that a lady should not be seen until fully dressed, broke tradition and summoned the butler to her bedroom. She "was not wearing make-up or her wig, she was lying flat on the bed without a pillow," Ely wrote. "I only see BRA. like this in an emergency. She asked me what had happened the day before and what she had signed." At Mrs. Astor's request, the butler called both Tony and Terry Christensen's office and asked for copies of the paperwork; both declined to provide the documents. Unsure of how to resolve this impasse, Ely jotted down detailed notes describing the lawyer's visit and his employer's distress. It never hurt to keep a record.
Ten days later, John Hart went out to see Brooke at Holly Hill, and she told him wearily, "John, I'm gaga." Hart tried to reassure her and read out loud from Patchwork Child. "I'd show her pictures and say, 'Who's that?' and she would say, 'That's me!'" Once they moved from the sunroom to the living room, she had trouble carrying on a conversation and began to joke about the furniture. "She'd look at a chair and go, 'Way too big, way too fat,'" he recalls. "Inanimate objects became animate, they had personalities." His heart went out to his valiant friend. Hart says, "I cried when I left."
9. The Treacherous Codicils
BROOKE ASTOR had always rotated in new friends, like a stockbroker trying to beat a bear market. In the fall of 2003, the uniformed doormen at 778 Park Avenue watched as the latest group of regulars headed up to the fifteenth and sixteenth floors of Mrs. Astor's diminished world.
After Tony and Charlene set up a theatrical partnership, Delphi Productions, with David Richenthal, the gruff Broadway veteran moved into the handsome fifteenth-floor office that had previously been used by Naomi Packard-Koot. Long Day's Journey had not only made a substantial profit but won the 2003 Tony Award for best revival. Charlene also hired Erica Meyer, a friend of one of her daughter's, to take on the title of Mrs. Astor's social secretary.
Francis Morrissey, now entwined in so many aspects of the Marshalls' lives, had also become a regular visitor. The attorney joined Delphi's board of advisers and invested in upcoming shows. He also catered to Mrs. Astor, just as he had to many elderly friends and clients in the past. He brought cupcakes to her staff, going out of his way to be friendly. Catia Chapin, the wife of former New York cultural affairs commissioner Schuyler Chapin, was friendly with Morrissey and Mrs. Astor. She was impressed by the lawyer's thoughtful efforts, recalling, "He used to go visit Brooke every Wednesday. Every Wednesday, it was a joke, 'Where's Frank?' Of course, he's with Brooke. He'd go for tea in the afternoon, check in, see if she's all right." The lawyer told friends that he was honored to be close to Mrs. Astor and her son, and hoped to be as valued by this family as his father had been by the Kennedys.
In midtown, at 405 Park Avenue, Mrs. Astor maintained a separate business office with a two-person staff employed to pay her bills, for everything from the Chanel suits to the weekly arrangements of roses and lilies from Windsor Florist. Since 1993 the bookkeeper Alice Perdue had prepared checks, which Tony signed. A petite, animated woman with curly hair, Perdue was startled when Tony asked her to write two large checks in 2003 from his mother's accounts: $200,000 to Richenthal's company, Barking Dog Productions, followed by $250,000 to Delphi Productions. During the next two years, Perdue prepared two other theater-related checks at Tony's request: another $250,000 to Delphi and $200,000 to the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Vincent Astor had so disliked the performing arts that Brooke, in keeping with his wishes, had given only minimal foundation grants in this arena. But now she became quite the Broadway supporter, parting with a total of $900,000.
Tony later insisted that his mother had authorized those checks because she was eager to support his new ventures. But Perdue recognized that supporting the theater was out of keeping with Mrs. Astor's usual behavior. "Everything was fine until Mrs. Astor broke her hip in June 2003," Perdue says. "But there was a definite change in everything after that. I saw things happening—I didn't know what to do."
Alicia Johnson, the housekeeper in Maine, noticed a curious item in her local newspaper, the Ellsworth American, that autumn: a fine-print listing of the property title transfer of Cove End to Charlene Marshall. Johnson sent a copy to Chris Ely, who lived at Holly Hill. The butler was on friendly terms with Philip Marshall and mentioned it the next time they spoke, assuming that Tony's son was already aware of what had happened. Philip was caught off-guard. "I knew there was no way my father was going to let me have it, after the conversation we'd had about the cottage," says Philip, but he adds that Tony's lack of candor was yet another blow. "I was mad at my father that he did not do this aboveboard." He also viewed his father's gift to Charlene as a harbinger of things to come, or, as he puts it, updating a witticism about bygone presidential politics, "As goes Maine, so goes the rest of the estate."
Although Charlene was now the lady of the house, the Maine expenses were still paid from Mrs. Astor's accounts. Tony expected his mother's bookkeepers to continue to pay for the gardeners, the housekeeper, the electricity, the cable TV, repairs, and taxes as they had before. "I did think it was odd. I didn't think it was right. I questioned a lot of things, but who was I going to talk to?" Alice Perdue says. "I didn't know Philip and Alec Marshall well. If I questioned Tony, I would have been out on the street."
For Mrs. Astor, her new reality was a New York life surrounded by nurses and aides. But she was still going out to see friends occasionally, and, ever conscious of appearances, she insisted that the nurses wear street clothes. They would accompany her in the car and help seat her at dinner parties, then retreat until it was time for her to leave. "All the nurses got dressed up for her, and she would tell us how nice we looked," recalls Minnette Christie, a stylish and slender Jamaican nurse with a passing resemblance to Angela Bassett. Christie had taken care of Mrs. Astor during her recuperation from her first broken hip, five years earlier, so this was a return engagement. The nurse noted that in her absence, the household staff had come up with a new nickname for Charlene, Miss Piggy.
Pearline Noble, another Jamaican, with an ebullient personality and a church choir voice, joined the staff as a nurse's aide with her friend Minnette's encouragement. Both women were in their forties, married, with three children each; they had met while caring for patients at Lenox Hill Hospital. Like a Broadway musical star who bursts into unexpected song, Noble sang to her patient through the day to cheer her up. "Suppose I'm taking her to the bathroom," Noble recalls. "I'd sing a kicky song and she'd pick up her nightgown and rock to the music and dance. She'd move faster."
Rounding out Mrs. Astor's primary team of nurses was Beverly Thomson, a gentle, friendly woman who had been living in Florida but who flew to New York when she heard about the job opening. "I started in Holly Hill just after she broke her hip," recalls Thomson. "She wasn't talking much, but she could hold a conversation. She told me about her grandchildren, who would come and play in the pool. She talked about her dogs, and food." These three women would be Mrs. Astor's constant companions for the next few years, with others rotating in and out as needed.
It is standard practice for nurses to jot down medical notes, but Mrs. Astor's caregivers kept unusually detailed accounts describing her activities, moods, nightmares, and reactions to visitors. Pearline Noble was the most prolific note-taker, with a vivid, descriptive writing style. "I just wanted to put down her state of mind—it wasn't meant for public knowledge," says Noble, who hoped her notes might be helpful to the next shift. In truth, there was a subtext here. Chris Ely kept hearing complaints from the nurses about events in the Park Avenue apartment. He urged them to write
down anything unusual. If anyone ever asked, there would be a contemporaneous chronicle by eyewitnesses.
What the nurses captured in more than thirty voluminous notebooks over a four-year period was a portrait of a despairing woman who felt that she had lived too long. "She is dead set against eating, saying she wants to die," wrote Noble on September 25, 2003. "She said she is old and wanted the window shades down." The aide noted that Dr. Pritchett called that day to try to cheer her up and the housekeeper finally talked her into eating, but Mrs. Astor remained inconsolable. "She ignores us all and covers her face with the napkin." Mrs. Astor's emotions were even more turbulent three days later, as a night nurse wrote: "A very restless night. Had nightmares. Was not able to tell her dreams, only that someone was trying to kill her, and I showed her that the door was locked." The nurses took special notice of Tony's visits, writing that Mrs. Astor appeared "unhappy" after being in his presence.
Brooke had always appeared to be the last woman in need of Prozac or other mood elevators. Now she was tormented by panic attacks and nightmares. At 101 years old, perhaps she was fearful of being stalked by death, or was beset by the paranoia that often characterizes Alzheimer's. At times she appeared to be recalling Dryden Kuser and the beatings she had suffered. Like a mother trying to comfort a frightened child, Minnette Christie would pretend to search under her bed every night. "Mrs. Astor would tell me to use the cane to make sure," Christie recalls. "You know that no one is under the bed, but you do it to reassure her."