Mrs. Astor Regrets
Page 21
Dazzling in her custom-designed Oscar de la Renta gown, Brooke Astor celebrates at her one hundredth birthday party with intimates Laurance (left) and David Rockefeller.
Mary Hilliard/Courtesy of David Rockefeller
David Rockefeller welcomes Brooke Astor's son, Tony Marshall, and his lively wife, Charlene, to the festivities. Mary Hilliard/Courtesy of David Rockefeller
Nan Starr (left) with her husband, Philip Marshall, and his fraternal twin, Alec, with Brooke Astor. The twins, especially Philip, would grow closer to their grandmother during her last years.
Mary Hilliard/Courtesy of David Rockefeller
Philip and Alec Marshall at the grand birthday celebration. Philip had a difficult relationship with their father, but Alec was usually on good terms.
Collection of Philip Marshall
Brooke, age seventeen, and her new husband, Dryden Kuser, in Venice. The union was a disaster from the wedding night on.
Brooke and Buddie Marshall (husband number two and the man she considered the love of her life) at their country home in Tyringham, Massachusetts, in 1952. He died there unexpectedly later that year.
Collection of Philip Marshall
Dryden Kuser during a rare family visit with his two children, Suzanne and Tony.
Collection of Suzanne Kuser
Time's Vincent Astor cover, April 9, 1934. The twice-divorced millionaire misanthrope would marry Brooke nineteen years later. "If she married him for his charm," remarked the author Louis Auchincloss, "I'd have said she ought to be put in an asylum."
Time Magazine/Getty Images
Brooke Astor and Tony's first wife, Elizabeth Cryan Marshall, and the twins, who arrived in 1953.
Collection of Philip Marshall
Vincent and Brooke Astor, frolicking with her grandsons (whom he, uncharacteristically, adored) and a donkey at Ferncliff, Astor's country house. Vincent often took the twins for rides in his own train, Toonerville, which traveled through the estate.
Collection of Philip Marshall
Brooke Astor and her young grandsons. After the twins moved away from Manhattan with their divorced mother, Brooke saw them sporadically. She got to know and appreciate them later in life.
Collection of Philip Marshall
In 1960, shortly after Vincent Astor died, Tony Marshall, who had just left the CIA, visited his mother at Ferncliff. Collection of Tony and Charlene Marshall
Brooke Astor at the Astor Foundation in 1971. The philanthropist, always dressed to the nines, gave away $200 million to New York City organizations.
Mel Finkelstein/New York. Daily News
Brooke Astor hiking in Maine in 1976 with her son, grandsons, and beloved dachshunds.
Photograph by Alec Marshall
Philip and Tony Marshall, son and father, during a happy day in Maine in 1986, two decades before their relationship went awry. Photograph by Alec Marshall
A teenage Charlene Tyler in her 1963 Ashley Hall yearbook. Fleeing a tumultuous background, she was raised by her grandmother in Charleston. After leaving her first husband, Paul Gilbert, the priest of Brooke's Episcopal church in Maine, Charlene married Tony Marshall in 1992. Courtesy of Ashley Hall
Cove End, Brooke Astor's waterside estate in Northeast Harbor, Maine, represented a second existence for the urbane Mrs. Astor. Brooke's desire to leave a guest cottage to her grandson Philip, rather than her son, Tony, exacerbated family tensions.
Collection of Philip Marshall
Brooke Astor in a seemingly contemplative mood at her rural Maine retreat, August Moon, 1975. Divorced and then twice widowed, she chose to remain single from age fifty-seven on.
Photograph by Alec Marshall
Brooke Astor, grandson Alec Marshall, and his daughter, Hilary Brooke, at Holly Hill, April 1997. Alec lived just a mile away.
Photograph by Alec Marshall
Tony and Charlene Marshall, on holiday in London in 2003, won two Tony awards as successful Broadway producers.
Collection of Tony and Charlene Marshall
During her last summer in Maine, in 2002, Brooke Astor relaxes with daughter-in-law Charlene. Collection of Tony and Charlene Marshall
Annette de la Renta, Brooke Astor, and Oscar de la Renta. Brooke's best friend for four decades, Annette would later be appointed her guardian.
Bill Cunningham/New York Times
Holly Hill, Brooke Astor's sixty-five-acre estate in Briarcliff Manor, New York. Collection of Philip Marshall
The serpentine staircase at Holly Hill, decorated with paintings of dogs. Photograph by Alec Marshall
Brooke Astor with her son, Tony, Charlene Marshall, and the star-crossed lawyer Francis X. Morrissey, Jr., at the Living Landmarks benefit, November 2002.
Ron Galella/Getty Images
Brooke with her longtime butler, Chris Ely. Fired by Tony Marshall in 2005, the devoted Ely was later rehired by Annette de la Renta and worked for Mrs. Astor until her death. Collection of Philip Marshall
At Holly Hill, Brooke Astor with grandson Philip, who would later instigate the suit against his father to improve his grandmother's living conditions. Photograph by Alec Marshall
November 27, 2007. Already in custody, Tony Marshall, accused of swindling tens of millions of dollars from his mother, arrives at court for arraignment on charges of fraud and larceny. John Marshall Mantel/New York Times/Redux
The last photograph of Brooke Astor, American icon, at Holly Hill with family members and nurses. The shot was taken on July 17, 2007, a month before her death. Girlsie, her beloved dachshund, is nearby. Collection of Philip Marshall
Brooke Astor in Maine, August 2000. Left: grandson Philip Marshall and great-granddaughter Sophie Marshall. Right: great-grandson Winslow Marshall and Nan Starr. Collection of Philip Marshall
10. "I Didn't Know It Would Be Armageddon"
THE FIFTY-SIXTH FLOOR at 30 Rockefeller Plaza has been occupied since 1933 by the family that built Rockefeller Center. The elevators open to reveal a glass foyer on the south side, featuring a bronze bust of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the dry goods clerk who founded the Standard Oil Company and eventually became the richest man in the world. A polite but firm security officer mans the desk, ensuring that no unwanted visitors intrude.
David Rockefeller, the grandson of the family patriarch and the last survivor of his generation of six siblings, operates out of a surprisingly small southwest corner office, albeit one with a panoramic view of the Empire State Building, the Hudson River, and the Statue of Liberty. Rockefeller Center was his father's crowning aesthetic achievement, but the influence of his mother, Abby, the artistic visionary who cofounded the Museum of Modern Art, is apparent on his walls. A Picasso cubist painting of a woman's head, a Gauguin (Portrait of Jacob Meyer de Haan), a large Signac of a man magically producing a flower, and a blue-and-yellow Dale Chihuly glass sculpture are among the $50 million worth of art in the office. Family photographs are scattered on the windowsills, including a picture of Rockefeller with Brooke Astor, beaming as recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
This is where the opening scene unfolded of what would become Tony and Charlene Marshall versus the world. In late May 2005, when Brooke Astor was 103 years old, Rockefeller called Tony Marshall and asked him to come by his office to discuss what might be euphemistically called his mother's living situation but in reality was a joint effort by Rockefeller and Annette de la Renta to move Brooke back to Holly Hill. "I remember going to the Central Park Zoo with Brooke in May," Annette says. "It was hot—there were bus fumes in your face. I thought, 'What are we doing?'" Making matters worse was that 778 Park Avenue, for all its luxuries, lacked central air conditioning. Bob Silvers remembers accompanying Annette to see Brooke around the same time, on a day that Tony had told his mother once again that she could not return to Holly Hill. "Brooke was sitting there, all dressed up, wearing a hat, and she was crying," he says. "She looked up, tears coming from her eyes. She said, 'It's not right. I want to go.'"
T
ony Marshall had recently received other pointed inquiries from Brooke's friends, who had heard that she had become a virtual prisoner of Park Avenue. Her care had been the topic of lunchtime gossip at the communal table at the venerable Brook Club. As John Richardson tells it, "I started saying that all the staff at Holly Hill had been fired. Then I looked up, and to my absolute horror, I saw Tony coming in. I realized, there's nobody next to me, and he's going to sit down." Trapped, Richardson asked directly for an update on Brooke and Holly Hill. As he recalls, "Tony went into this nauseating spiel—'Oh, poor darling Brooke, it was such a strain for her going every weekend, she is so old. We said to her, "Brooke, it's much better if we close down the house and keep you comfortable in New York, you'll be closer to your doctor and hospitals and your friends."'"
Viscount Astor had been troubled by a disconcerting recent visit to Brooke but had chosen not to confront Tony Marshall. "She didn't recognize me to start with," he recalls, "but halfway through, she squeezed my hand and said, 'I'm having a miserable time—please take me away.'"
All these tales eventually flowed back to Annette, in her role as Brooke's best friend and ultimate protector. Although she, David Rockefeller, and Tony Marshall lived within a few blocks of each other, she suggested that the meeting be held at Rockefeller's office, for its aura of power and authority. The two white-haired men, only nine years apart in age, had always gotten along reasonably well. "We had a perfectly cordial relationship, not a close one," says Rockefeller, the elder of the two, who hoped there was enough of a bond for him to be persuasive.
At the appointed hour, Tony showed up at Rockefeller's office with the uninvited Charlene in tow. Everyone was extremely polite, almost exaggeratedly so, and yet tension radiated as the four of them sat at the small white marble table. Rockefell er urged the Marshalls to reopen Holly Hill, stressing that he thought Brooke would appreciate the fresh air and countryside. "She always loved it out there in the spring—she loved to see the daffodils, she had a whole field of daffodils," says Rockefeller. "It seemed cruel that she was unable to go."
Tony, straightforward and calm as always, stressed that his mother had a variety of medical problems and needed to be close to her Manhattan doctors. But Charlene could not camouflage her anger. A woman whose emotions often run close to the surface, she argued in an irked tone that Brooke disliked Holly Hill and Chris Ely but felt comfortable and safe on Park Avenue. Even though Charlene did not know Brooke nearly as intimately as the others in the room, her pseudo-certainty was not challenged. "We were upset," Annette recalls. "David and I were just sitting there looking at each other." Rockefeller, already perturbed by the sale of Brooke's Childe Hassam and Ely's dismissal, says, "By then I was concerned about the way Brooke was being treated."
As the meeting ended, when Tony and Charlene were halfway out the door, Rockefeller mentioned that he was heading up to Seal Harbor soon and offered to take Brooke and her nurses on his private plane to Maine so she could go to Cove End instead. "They said no, that would be even worse—she'd be farther away from her doctors," says Annette. "So we said goodbye. We didn't know they were already living in Cove End." Charlene, the new owner of the Maine property, had begun renovations, but her status as the owner was not widely known and certainly had not been shared with Brooke's friends. So even though David Rockefeller had made his offer as an impulsive gesture, Tony and Charlene may have perceived it as a threat. The next day, after consulting with Dr. Pritchett, Tony called Rockefeller to say that Brooke would be moved to Holly Hill after all. David Rockefeller was pleased: "What I said had an impact."
It certainly had an impact on Tony Marshall, although not entirely in the way that Rockefeller had envisioned. Tony was sufficiently annoyed by this interference that he mentioned it to Philip, who called to wish his father a happy eighty-first birthday, on May 30. Father and son had not seen each other for a year, but this ritual call remained an acknowledgment of their tie. At the time, Tony said, "Some of your grandmother's friends are trying to get me to open Holly Hill." Although he was not specific about the identity of these friends, Philip guessed that the instigators were Annette de la Renta and David Rockefeller, whom he knew slightly from an earlier visit to his grandmother at Cove End. "If I had not heard about that meeting, I wouldn't have known that David was concerned," Philip says. "My father was pissed off."
In hindsight, Philip believes he should have seized the opportunity to tell his father bluntly that he agreed with Annette and David that his grandmother would be happier in the country. "People always wonder, why didn't I talk to my father about this stuff? Give me another twenty years and I'll figure it out," Philip concedes. "I could have said, 'Why didn't you open Holly Hill? My grandmother can afford it.' But such is our relationship that we couldn't have that conversation. By then, I knew that Charlene was running things."
Brooke spent the summer at Holly Hill, but she was forlorn without Ely to keep her company and attend to her needs. Boysie and Girlsie, her beloved but boisterous dogs, were now kept away from her for fear that they would scratch her delicate skin. In prior years Ely had draped Brooke in blankets and towels for protection and allowed the dogs into the room under his supervision. "We were told she shouldn't have the dogs," says Beverly Thomson, the nurse. "The dogs would sit on her and rest on her and she'd have a bruise, so we would try to avoid that." Gone too were the long country drives. "She did not leave the property," recalls Pearline Noble, who pushed Brooke in a wheelchair to the boundaries of Holly Hill. Her patient became agitated when she saw that one of the gates was padlocked.
Mortality was constantly on Mrs. Astor's mind now. One evening, as Minnette Christie gave her employer a facial, Mrs. Astor, gazing at her own unadorned face in the mirror, announced, "When I die, don't let anyone see me like this." Pointing to her eye shadow and rouge, she added, "You put on the blue, and the red."
Brooke Astor's mortality was also on the minds of Francis Morrissey and G. Warren Whitaker that summer. They wrote a memo on August 23, 2005, noting that Anthony Marshall would be handling his mother's funeral arrangements. The lawyers wrote that "it is unlikely that the Attorney General or the charities will contest the will ... It is also unlikely that Terry Christensen will contest the will, or that he would be permitted to do so if he wanted to, since the will and codicils show a consistent pattern of giving greater control and authority to Anthony Marshall."
When Brooke returned to Park Avenue that fall, there were fewer familiar faces to greet her. Tony and Charlene had decided to purge more longtime retainers from the staff to reduce the payroll. Marciano Amaral, Mrs. Astor's chauffeur for the past ten years, was given a month's pay and thirty days to vacate a small apartment on East Seventy-second Street owned by Mrs. Astor. "I was a driver and a companion," Amaral says, recalling how he took her to Central Park frequently and walked her dogs several times a day. "She made me promise that I will stay with her until the last day of her life."
The next staffer to be shown the door was the bookkeeper Alice Perdue. "Tony said that he was terribly sorry he had to let me go, but he had so much work that he needed someone who could take shorthand and was more savvy with the computer," says Perdue. "These two things are diametrically opposite." The bookkeeper had been so worried for two years about Tony's unorthodox spending that she had started keeping a file at home listing questionable transactions. Perdue, who needed the job, had never directly challenged Tony's orders. But she wondered whether her facial expression or tone of voice might have signaled her growing disquiet to Tony or, more likely, to Charlene. "Mrs. Marshall had stopped talking to me a year or so before," Perdue says. "I think she felt I was too loyal to Mrs. Astor. They assumed Mrs. Astor was dying soon and wanted people loyal to them."
Brooke Astor, whose values came from an era when lifelong retainers were the norm in wealthy families, prized loyalty. As a sign of enduring gratitude, she had left Amaral $25,000 and Perdue $10,000 in her 2001 will. But both these bequests had been dropped without expla
nation from her 2002 will.
The Marshalls had previously installed one employee who was presumably loyal to them, the social secretary, Erica Meyer. But Meyer too received her walking papers that September, just after returning from her honeymoon.
In the wake of the departures, there was a new and unlikely arrival at 778 Park Avenue, Daniel Billy, Jr., a middle-aged man with a background in marketing and fundraising who was hired to supervise the staff. "Ambassador Marshall wanted someone to answer the phone who wasn't a servant," explains Billy, who had come into the picture through Charlene and a friendship forged at St. James' Church. To Mrs. Astor's oft-belittled son, Billy's admiration for "Ambassador Marshall" must have felt like a burst of sunlight after decades of chill. "If I didn't already have a terrific father, I would have wanted Tony for my father," says Billy, the son of a professional golfer. "Listening him talk about Richard Bissell and the U-2 plane was a wonderful tutorial. It's a pleasure to hear his stories. I've told Charlene that it breaks my heart that his sons have not had the experience with him that I've had."
The new major-domo, inexperienced in running a household staff, quickly discovered that he had entered a combat zone. "It was warring factions," Billy says. Mrs. Astor's all-woman staff, of various ethnicities and with different perceptions of their own social status, were at each other's throats. "The nurses treated the servants like servants," he says. "The household staff felt their job was to make Mrs. Astor comfortable. I do believe that everyone saw Mrs. Astor's comfort as a priority. But the execution was problematic."