Mrs. Astor Regrets (5 page)

Henry Kissinger remembers Mrs. Astor's spark when they all spent Christmas holidays together at the de la Rentas' luxurious Dominican Republic vacation home. "We always took a walk at the end of the day, on the golf course—Annette, Brooke, myself, Barbara Walters," Kissinger says with a smile. "We had a rule that on walks you could not talk about any subject, only people, and you could not say a good word about anybody. Brooke lived up to it."

Among the guests at the party were several family retainers who had now become old friends: George Trescher; Dr. Rees Pritchett, who oversaw Brooke's physical care; and Henry "Terry" Christensen III, the third generation of Sullivan & Cromwell partners to handle her legal needs and estate planning. Brooke had been loyal to the white-shoe firm since 1959, when a partner had successfully fended off a challenge to Vincent Astor's will on her behalf. Fond of the debonair Christensen, a Harvard Law School graduate who had taken over her legal affairs in 1991, she had put him on the board of her foundation.

At 778 Park Avenue, Christensen was a familiar face. He often went by to discuss his and Brooke's favorite author, Anthony Trollope, the chronicler of Victorian mores. But literature was a side topic. Brooke relished updating her will, rewarding or downgrading friends and family members via gifts of artwork and jewelry and cash, revising bequests to museums and charities. Considering that she had personal assets of $120 million plus a charitable trust worth more than $60 million, the contents of her will would have made for gripping reading. She often dropped hints about her decisions, but only Christensen, her son, and her daughter-in-law were aware of the details. Just two months before her birthday, on January 30, 2002, Brooke had approved the most recent draft.

Christensen had established a relationship with Tony as well, having referred him to a lawyer for Tony's second divorce. When Tony turned seventy-five and gave a party for himself in Turkey, Christensen was among the guests. On that occasion Christensen met Tony's new friend Francis X. Morrissey, Jr., a Bostonborn lawyer whose father, a municipal judge, had been one of Joseph Kennedy's cronies. When Morrissey Sr. was nominated to a federal judgeship by Ted Kennedy, the
Boston Globe
won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing his lack of qualifications.

The younger Morrissey, who summered in Maine, had befriended Charlene back when she had been the rector's wife. A fixture in society, he was the frequent escort of wealthy widows. Although he had been suspended from practicing law for two years over a fee dispute with a client, this inconvenient fact was not well known. Christensen felt confident enough about his relationships with both Mrs. Astor and her son that he did not consider Francis Morrissey, Jr., a potential threat. Besides, he knew Morrissey's younger brother, Richard, a partner in Sullivan & Cromwell's London office; it would have been ungentlemanly for Francis to poach a client from his sibling's firm. But Morrissey had begun to ingratiate himself with Mrs. Astor through visits and flowers. Although he had not been invited to the birthday party, he had joined Tony and Charlene in taking Brooke out for a celebratory lunch a few days earlier.

Several of the birthday guests speculated that Mrs. Astor was already starting to deaccession. Her Childe Hassam painting was no longer hanging in its honored place in the library and had been replaced by a portrait of her father. Brooke had loved the color and patriotism and Manhattan vibrancy of the Hassam, which she had purchased in 1971, and had vowed for years to donate it to the Metropolitan Museum as her legacy. "She lived with that painting," says Florence Irving, a museum trustee. "Whenever she had people over, she had cocktails or coffee in the library so they could see the painting. It was New York City, it was her." But now the artwork was on display in the country home of its new owner, the billionaire George Soros. "I didn't want to sell it," Brooke confided to a friend. "But Tony said I needed the money." This odd comment was taken by her friend as a sign that Brooke must be joining the ranks of elderly widows who worry unnecessarily about their finances.

As observant social insiders scanned the crowd for amusing indiscretions or faux pas, two men strolled around the party aimlessly, looking out of their depth. Philip and Alec Marshall, then forty-nine, had met a few of these important guests before, but they had not grown up in their grandmother's Upper East Side world. "We hardly knew anyone," says Philip. Only nine years old when their parents divorced, they had left Manhattan with their mother, Elizabeth Cryan, after she married the geneticist Craig Wheaton-Smith and moved to the Boston suburbs and then to Vermont. Their father had presented the twins with two stepmothers: Tony was married to his former secretary, Thelma Hoegnell, known as Tee, for more than twenty-five years before he left her for Charlene. For the twins, weekends and summer vacations with Tony often took them into the company of their grandmother, whom they called Gagi. "We did not grow up in my grandmother's world," says Alec. "We were raised by my mother and stepfather." Since their last name was Marshall, most of their classmates and adult friends were unaware that they had a connection to the Astor family.

"Brooke was fond of them and felt sorry that they had gotten short shrift as children," says Ashton Hawkins. "Alec was a bit of a lost soul, very nice, very well-intentioned." John Hart had a similar take, recalling that "Philip was very nice, but seemed out of place. It was not their world. He was happy to be there."

Some pairs of twins are eerily similar in personality and appearance, but the Marshall twins scarcely seemed to come from the same gene pool, or, as their paternal aunt, Suzanne Kuser, puts it, "They could not be more different." They share deep-set, piercing blue eyes and identical rakish smiles, but there the similarities end.

Alec, a good-looking man with a full head of dark brown hair, is a photographer who specializes in lifestyle magazine and architectural assignments. "I am more conservative," he says. Quiet and reserved like his father, Alec is listed in the Social Register but does not have the luxurious life of his contemporaries in that aristocratic breeding book. Twice divorced, with a daughter, Hilary Brooke, Alec supports himself as a freelancer, living in a small apartment on the second floor of an aluminum-sided 1915 Sears, Roebuck kit house in Ossining, New York.

Philip, the firstborn, is taller than his brother by several inches, athletically wiry, and has shaved his balding head. Exuberant and outgoing like his grandmother, he has no interest in claiming his place in the Social Register. Philip had been the family rebel, rejecting his Episcopalian background to become a practicing Buddhist. As a teenager he had visited his father in Trinidad, where Tony was serving as ambassador, wearing his long hair in a ponytail, which provoked the predictable reaction. At Brown University, Philip purchased a one-dollar suit at a thrift shop and wore it for formal occasions, including parties given by his grandmother. By the time of the hundredth birthday party, he had settled into a comfortable life as a tenured professor with a free-wheeling, charismatic style. "Philip's courses aren't very structured, but he knows so much and he really cares," says Kevin Clark, who was his student in 2007. "He e-mails us all on our birthdays." Philip and his wife, Nan Starr, a painter from a wealthy Philadelphia family, have two children, Winslow and Sophie, and her inheritance supplements his academic income.

The Marshall twins were not rich, or even close to it, despite their link to one of America's great fortunes. For all her generosity to philanthropic causes, Brooke was not a financially doting grandmother. Her clothes were couture—she spent $25,000 twice a year, fall and spring, at Chez Ninon, a Manhattan dressmaker—but she did not establish trust funds for her grandsons. She provided a $30,000 down payment to help Philip buy his first house, and she underwrote part of Alec's rent during his first years after college and paid for half a used car. Otherwise she restricted her gifts to her grandsons to $10,000 or so per year, most likely less than the sum of her Christmas bonuses to her staff and doorman. Money was not the currency of her relationship with Alec and Philip. She apparently viewed her son's financial dependence on her as crippling and wanted her grandsons to be self-sufficient. But she was happy to use her contacts to help their careers. When Alec left a staff job as a medical photographer at New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital in 1983, Brooke wrote to the editor of
Architectural Digest
and asked that he be given a chance. As Alec now says, "They have been my steadiest client."

A handful of Brooke's friends had met the twins over the years. "She wasn't a grandmother who wanted to sit around and chuck babies under the chin, but she wanted to know them," says Gregory Long. "She was proud of her grandsons. They were very attractive. Alec is very quiet, shy, sweet, very handsome." In recent years she had become closer to Philip and Alec, welcoming their visits and afterward even joking with friends, saying, "Now you know I don't like children" and then proudly showing off pictures of her three great-grandchildren.

In the whirl of the birthday celebration, Tony and Charlene greeted guests, acting as unofficial hosts to Brooke's friends. Surrounded by women for whom thinness was a religion and a competition, Charlene stood out for her normal-size figure, closer to a size 12 than a 2. With a playful, earthy, and emotional personality, she was her husband's opposite, all heat and impulse to his cool, starched demeanor. The Marshalls had their own social circle but were familiar with the guests from previous occasions. They extended the occasional invitation to Brooke's friends, who felt obliged to accept. "I liked Tony. I went to a couple of dinners he gave," says Barbara Walters. "I can't say I felt sorry for him, but I felt something like that." Fiercely protective of her husband and sensitive to her mother-in-law's all-too-frequent slights, Charlene was eager to play a central role this evening. "Tony and Charlene seemed very keen on having their pictures taken with Brooke," says one guest, putting his own amused spin on it all. "You could see them hovering."

Brooke radiated happiness, although her friends kept a watchful eye, given her emotional and physical frailty. "She wasn't totally there, but she was there enough," says Henry Kissinger. "David Rockefeller did an extraordinary job of very delicately taking her around." Brooke perched regally on a sofa in her gown, accepting compliments. "Oscar did this phenomenal dress for her, this exquisite blue taffeta, all these ruffles, a work of art. She knew how fabulous it was. She took great pleasure in being attractive," recalls Paul LeClerc. "She put herself forth as an object of pleasure for other people, by virtue of being Mrs. Astor and never abandoning the glamor of that." At dinner she was seated at a table which included Laurance and David Rockefeller, Kofi Annan and his wife, Nan, Viscount Astor, Walters, and the de la Rentas. Tony and Charlene were seated at another table that was near and yet so far—the equivalent of being in Siberia in a Brooke-centric universe.

The waiters served an appetizer of trout mousse with sauteed spinach and a caviar beurre blanc sauce, followed by poussin, asparagus with hazelnuts, and pureed potatoes and pears. Tony stepped up to the microphone and announced that Charlene would be presenting his mother with an arrangement of flowers that had been sent by Prince Charles. If the crowd had been surveyed at the moment, the collective sentiment would have been taken straight from Bette Davis: "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night." Robert Pirie, the former chairman of Rothschild Inc., recalls, "Everybody knew that Brooke did not like Charlene, and Tony did it to try to establish the impression of a relationship." All eyes went to the centenarian, who looked dismayed. As Walters says, "Charlene brought over the flowers to Brooke, who made a terrible face. The pleasure of the flowers coming from Prince Charles was taken away by the fact it was Charlene delivering them."

A wave of discomfort drifted through the room at this obvious rebuff, as guests registered the hurt look on Charlene's face. "Brooke had some kind of altercation with Charlene," says Liz Smith. "She thought Charlene was horning in on her big moment. I was just horrified." Smith's sympathies were with Charlene, who was humiliated in front of her mother-in-law's famous friends. Brooke had always had a reputation as a gracious hostess; she might raise a quizzical eyebrow, but she never revealed exasperation. As Pirie puts it, "This time, her feelings got shown in public."

The moment passed, the champagne flowed, and everyone oohed and ahhed over the desserts, extravaganzas of vanilla cake with plum filling, each one topped with a fantastical marzipan hat, in honor of Brooke's signature accessory. "The cakes were gorgeous," recalls Alec. Chris Ely slipped into the back of the room to listen to the speeches. Summoning her energy and wits, Brooke rose to her feet to speak. She echoed her mother's advice never to get above herself and repeated the line "I guess I can't lie about my age anymore." She sweetly reached out to urge the two Rockefeller brothers to stand up with her, as she wanted to acknowledge their importance in her life. David Rockefeller read aloud a letter sent by President George W. Bush, lauding Brooke as a "trailblazer." Bush wrote, "You have served your community, your friends, and the people of New York in at least one hundred generous ways ... May you continue to bring joy to those around you."

Tony Marshall had prepared in advance for his turn, crafting a formal speech and memorizing his lines. At his mother's ninety-fifth birthday party, he had started off his toast by saying with a poker face, "I am not my mother's only child. There was Freddy"—and he glanced over at Freddy Melhado—"and Sandy and Daisy and Siegfried," running through the names of all his mother's dogs, to much laughter. His dry wit softened his reserved demeanor. Tonight his mother had exchanged his arm for a viscount's and then behaved hurtfully to his wife. Long skilled at repressing his feelings, he graciously continued as planned with his affectionate toast.

Tony wanted to do something "innovative and pixyish," so he ran through the things that had happened during his mother's lifetime. "My mother was born a year before Orville Wright's ... Kitty Hawk flight. She missed that flight but in recent years has been a passenger on the Concorde at Mac 2 speed," he said. He added that she was born before five states had been admitted to the union, nine years after the invention of the zipper, six years before the Model T Ford. "Fortunately, she was born two years after the invention of the telephone." (Everyone chuckled, but in truth Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, twenty-six years before Brooke Astor's birth.) Next Tony spoke of a recurring childhood memory of taking long walks with his mother. "Her loves have always been books, people, and her dogs, although sometimes I've gotten stuck with the dogs. Once when my mother, Buddie, and I were hiking in Switzerland in September 1939, we went for a walk but were overly ambitious and ended up walking twenty-four miles. I carried an exhausted dachshund named Fafner in my rucksack for the last ten miles. When we returned to the hotel, we were told that the Germans had moved into Poland."