Mrs. Astor Regrets (10 page)

Tony was starved for affection and attention. He was sent off to stay with Brooke's parents for months on end, and at least his grandfather always appeared happy to see him. Those memories were so important that when Tony was eighty-one years old, he regaled a roomful of Marine generals with a luncheon speech stressing his recollections of General Russell. "At the age of six I visited my grandfather when he was commanding general of the Marine Corps base at San Diego and flew my kite from the garden of Quarters One," Tony said. "The following year I spent Christmas with him and my grandmother at Quarters One at Quantico and he toured me about the base."

Brooke did not want more children and took steps to avoid having a larger family. "I'm totally for abortion," she told the
Guardian
in a 1988 interview. "In my day we said we didn't have it, but of course we just called it curettage." She was even more candid in a conversation with three women friends during a walk in Palm Beach. When the conversation turned to abortion, Brooke announced, "In my day, we called it a D & C, and I had three of them."

As a teenager, Tony attended the Brooks School, in North Andover, Massachusetts. Sam Peabody, a fellow Brooks alumni, recalls, "He was very shy, somewhat isolated, a middle-of-the-road student." Peabody remembers meeting Brooke and Buddie Marshall when they came to visit Tony at school. "I must admit, I'd never seen such an attractive mother. I think Tony was very lonely," Peabody recalls. "My impression was that he was incidental to his parents."

Tony did not see much of his biological father, and in 1942 he decided to change his last name to Marshall, though his stepfather did not legally adopt him. ("I did not have a very happy relationship with my father," he later explained to me. "I did have a good relationship with my stepfather. I admired him a great deal, so I decided to change my name.") A few months later he enlisted in the Marines. He had intended to finish high school and then go into officer training school, but after he consulted his grandfather, his plans changed. "My grandfather said, 'You're a poor student—the right thing for you to do now is to go on active duty,'" Tony recalls. "So he telephoned to Washington, and a week later I was in boot camp." General Russell also called the Brooks School and successfully pressured the headmaster to give his grandson a diploma, since as a dropout he would not have been eligible for officer training. This was the first of many times in Tony Marshall's life when family connections meant everything.

Tony went to war armed with military heirlooms from his grandfather: a machete crafted at the turn of century from a carriage spring, and a silver-barreled, pearl-handled .38 Smith & Wesson pistol. When his father learned that he had enlisted, he asked Tony to take out life insurance for $250,000, making him the beneficiary if Tony died in battle. For Tony, it seemed that he was more valuable to his father dead than alive.

Assigned to the Third Marine Division, Tony attended boot camp at Parris Island and was stationed in Guam, where he contracted dengue fever. After he recovered, the young second lieutenant led his Marine unit in the brutal assault on Iwo Jima in 1945. His company arrived on D-Day plus 2, the third day of the attack. After several days of fighting, Tony was wounded in the leg and the arm by shrapnel, narrowly escaping the fate of the 6,800 American soldiers who died on that island. "I led a platoon, and half of them were killed and the others were wounded when I landed my platoon at Iwo Jima," he said. "Because I was wounded, I was evacuated. I had shrapnel in my leg—I could hardly walk. I was put on a hospital ship, and then in a hospital in Guam."

Back in New York, Brooke worried out loud about the fate of her son. As Louis Auchincloss recalls, "Brooke was in a dither. She was very emotionally fired up." Tony recuperated physically, but his mother wrote that he had nightmares for several years thereafter (though Tony brushes that off, saying, "My mother sometimes exaggerated").

After the war ended, Tony Marshall left the Marines. "I didn't really want to go to college. I had in mind writing, but I decided it would be better to get a degree," he told me. He enrolled at Brown University, in Providence, where he fell in love with eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Cryan, a pretty, lively freshman at Brown's sister college, Pembroke. They shared the bond of growing up in a one-parent family: Tony had an absentee father, and Liz had never known her father, who had died of a heart attack shortly before she was born. Liz and her two brothers had been raised by their mother in Switzerland, an upbringing that gave her a more cosmopolitan flair than her classmates. Four years older, Tony was a good-looking war hero with family money and an aloof persona. Liz later told friends that it was his loneliness that hooked her: she thought maybe she could fill that void.

In March 1947, General Russell died suddenly of a heart attack at age seventy-four, leaving an emotional emptiness for his grandson. Although Tony had known Liz for only six months, he vowed to marry her, and she accepted his proposal. She began to have doubts as her wedding day approached, but her mother pressed her to keep the date. Brooke vehemently opposed the marriage, arguing that the couple was too young. Tony, uncharacteristically, stood up for himself. His wedding ceremony took place in June 1947 in suburban Philadelphia.

Tony entered into his marriage with a substantial trust fund, believed by family members to consist of several hundred thousand dollars, a legacy stemming from his parents' divorce. When Brooke married Buddie Marshall, her alimony went into an account for Tony. She still thought the money should have been hers; she had earned it with bruises and a broken jaw. Buddie had an income from a family trust as well as a career as a stockbroker, but when he suffered a series of financial reversals, Brooke used guilt to induce her son to help out. Tony gave his mother a monthly allowance, paid to put in a swimming pool at Brooke and Buddie's country home in Tyringham, Massachusetts, and even bought his mother jewelry from Cartier and Tiffany. "She got a lot of money out of him," says someone who knew Tony well in that era. "She made him feel that this is money that she should have gotten."

In the flush of his new marriage, Tony attempted a rapprochement with his father, arranging a lunch at the Biltmore Hotel in Providence to introduce his bride. Dryden showed up drunk. And then the phone calls began, with Dryden harassing the couple for money. Dryden finally took Tony to court, suing over his trust fund. His argument was that since Tony had rejected the Kuser name, he did not deserve to have Kuser money. Tony won the lawsuit, but this was such a painful topic that he turned stone-faced when I asked him about it, saying, "I won't discuss this."

Both Brooke and Tony later wrote novels that included fictionalized elements of their emotionally complex relationship. In
The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree,
Brooke describes the conflicts between a rich widow, Mrs. Shrewsbury, and her ne'er-do-well son, Joe, who wants to be a writer and depends on his mother's handouts. "The boy was another of her problems. They had never wanted a child. When he was seven, they shipped him off to boarding school, and from then on, it had been school in the winter, summer camp in Maine, and finally, Princeton." When Mrs. Shrewsbury's lawyer, Wendell Ponderosa, suggests that she revise her will to leave money to a foundation for her son to run, the widow reacts with horror, saying, "Heavens! For Joe to run? You must be out of your mind, Wendell!" (Brooke Astor closed the Astor Foundation rather than pass the reins to Tony.) Mrs. Shrewsbury grudgingly comes to respect her son when she discovers that he has a knack for managing money, a task that Tony was performing adequately for his mother when she published this novel.

In Tony's self-published 2001 thriller,
Dash,
the sad-sack protagonist, Mark, is the solitary scion of a rich British family with a distant mother and a tyrannical, cruel father. "From his first spanking as he exited his mother's womb, Mark Baldwin Wynwhip was expected to live up to his heritage of near-royal lineage, a confusing agenda for the tot," Tony wrote. "As the infant developed into childhood he was regarded in both physique as well as in manner as a hereditary mistake." After the fictional father arranges to have the beloved nanny murdered, the young boy is sent off to boarding school. Tony writes of his forlorn hero: "He was lonely, friendless, forever hungry and physically exhausted when he rose each morning after a night in the clutch of terrifying nightmares."

Even after Dryden Kuser lost his lawsuit against his son, he was incorrigible. As Tony's first wife, now Elizabeth Wheaton-Smith, recalls, "Dryden used to call only when he needed money. It went on and on. He'd invent these stories—'I'm in the hospital, I can't pay the bill.'" And Tony would obediently write a check. Yet another attempt at a father-son reconciliation was made in the late 1950s, when Dryden, newly sober, took his fifth wife to meet his son and daughter-in-law. "They came for dinner," recalls Wheaton-Smith. "Dryden was offered a drink, and he said, 'No, can I have some coffee?'"

Most children expect their parents to provide for them financially. But Tony's Kuser trust fund was a toxic lure for his divorced parents. Instead of fending them off, Tony tried to win their love by writing checks. Despite their patrician pretensions, Dryden and Brooke, both with a sense of entitlement, set an avaricious standard of behavior for their son. They used Tony, sending him the message that all tactics are fair, from emotional blackmail to legal wrangling, in grabbing for a family's fortune.

By the early 1960s, Dryden Kuser, ill with emphysema, had been reduced to a sinecure as caretaker at High Point State Park, more than 10,000 wild acres that his father had donated to New Jersey back in 1923. He went to see Mrs. Astor at her Park Avenue apartment to beg for money. Brooke savored the moment—the man who had ruined her youth was groveling, and now she held power over him. Despite her bitter memories, however, she chose to be magnanimous. "Brooke was supporting him at the end, and did she enjoy it," says Louis Auchincloss. "It's the ultimate satisfaction, supporting a person who has been mean to you. He was destitute. She couldn't let her son's father starve when she had millions." Kuser died on March 3, 1964, at age sixty-six. Neither Tony nor Brooke went to the sparsely attended funeral.

Colonel Kuser's once glorious mansion in Bernardsville fell into disrepair after changing hands several times. The place had degenerated into a Jersey version of
Grey Gardens
by the time that Clive Meanwell, a British pharmaceutical executive, and his wife, Cynthia, bought the house in 2001. During the renovation, a black luxury car with New York plates pulled up in front of the secluded property and a couple got out. "Who the hell is that man wearing an ascot?" Mrs. Meanwell exclaimed to her husband. Tony Marshall introduced himself and Charlene, explained that this had been his grandfather's home, and requested a tour.

Tony and Charlene walked through the rooms, lingering in the forty-foot wood-paneled ballroom and walking past the intricate bronze and iron stairway and the living room with its marble fireplace. For historical reasons, the new owners had retained elements of the old intercom system, which included Dryden's name on a button. Recalling his visit later, Tony smiled wistfully as he described the house's layout to me, saying, "They've changed things around, but if you go to the left, there's the room where my grandfather kept stuffed pheasants. I remembered that room."

Perhaps that house represented Paradise Lost to Tony, harking back to a time when his parents, although battling, were still together and a cherished nanny cared for him. Shipped off to boarding schools, disdained by his father and stepfathers, and frequently ignored by his ambitious mother, Tony Marshall never had the security of unconditional love. Only at age sixty-eight did he finally find happiness, when he married Charlene.

5. An American Romance

B
ROOKE ASTOR
was never the kind of woman who traveled light. When she went to Palm Beach every winter, she chartered a Gulfstream to accommodate her extraordinary amount of luggage, and before her arrival in Maine in the summer, her staff would drive up a station wagon or two full of her possessions. Her red T. Anthony suitcases trimmed with black leather contained ball gowns packed in tissue paper, a dozen pairs of shoes, Chanel suits, and silk nightgowns. Her maid would carry the black case containing her jewelry. In addition to her female finery, Brooke always took along two gold-framed photographs, which she propped up on her bedside table wherever the bed might be. These mementos reminded her of who she had been and who she had become. The photos were of Buddie Marshall and Vincent Astor.

Mrs. Astor was not a self-reflective person, but her life was full of might-have-beens. Just a quick glance at those pictures offered a constant reminder of how her life had changed in an instant and the bargain she had made. She was Mrs. Marshall for twenty years, and then, bereaved and panicked, within a year she married a man she did not love. She stood by Vincent Astor for five and a half years, until his death. But the title Mrs. Astor was then hers for life, another half-century, with tens of millions of dollars as her due, and that had made all the difference. Faced with tragedy, she had forged a new identity, yet she still needed to keep Buddie's image close at hand, a reminder of what was lost.

His death had come without warning, on Thanksgiving weekend in 1952. Buddie and Brooke, along with her widowed mother, Mabel, were spending the holiday at their weekend spread in Tyringham, a hilly rural village in western Massachusetts. As she often described that day, the morning began with a cozy romantic scene, as she and her husband woke together and watched the sunrise from bed. He then went off to spend the morning hunting, bagging several pheasants. During the afternoon friends came by, and Buddie kept complaining that he felt cold, although the room was overheated. The family was sitting by the fire reading that evening when Buddie got up to let the dog out onto the back porch. Minutes later Brooke heard a sound, got up, and went into the kitchen. Her husband was lying on the floor, motionless. Whether he had had a heart attack or a stroke is unclear, but his death had been instantaneous. She cradled him in her arms until the doctor arrived and gave the official verdict.