Mrs. Astor Regrets (11 page)

To lose the love of your life is devastating. But Brooke soon learned that she had also lost her financial security. Buddie Marshall's family trust fund reverted to his two children, and his divorce settlement granted his first wife a one-third interest in his estate. Brooke was left with approximately $525,000, according to Frances Kiernan's book
The Last Mrs. Astor.
At a time when the average American family earned $4,500 a year, gas was 27 cents a gallon, and a loaf of bread cost 16 cents, this sum guaranteed an upper-middle-class existence. But to stretch that sum for the rest of a normal lifespan—what fifty-year-old could have imagined fifty-five years still to come?—would have required Brooke to change her lifestyle radically. She had been working as an editor at
House and Garden,
but that did not bring in enough to underwrite the country house, the New York apartment, the staff, the trips to Europe, and the designer clothes. Now that Tony was working at the State Department, he was dipping into his capital, so she knew that he could not solve her long-term problem. As someone who knew her well then recalls, "She was feeling poverty-stricken."

Enter Vincent Astor, one of the wealthiest men in America. He was descended from John Jacob Astor, a butcher's son from Waldorf, Germany, who came to Manhattan in April 1780 and hit it big as a fur trader, then plowed his profits into New York real estate. By the time his great-great-grandson Vincent inherited the bulk of the family fortune in 1912, Astor's sprawling real estate empire was worth $87.2 million and included luxury hotels, apartment buildings, office buildings, and slums.

But Vincent Astor's unhappy childhood had left emotional scars. His depression and suspicious nature proved a trial for all those who tried to love him, including Brooke Marshall. Never far from his mind was the memory of being locked by his imperious mother into a cedar dressing-room closet, where he wept for hours before he was rescued by a butler. He confided to Brooke that when he was four, his nanny had dressed him in a sailor suit and taken him to see his mother, who was having tea with friends. She reacted by saying, "Nanny, take him away, he looks perfectly horrid."

From birth Astor was portrayed as a poor little rich boy in the press. A
Washington Post
story in 1904 began: "Always Kept Under Guard: The boy has heaps of money, loads of toys, but cannot eat candy and peanuts and never plays like other children." Vincent, then thirteen, was described as a "captive" attended by five employees (tutor, valet, groom, bodyguard, chauffeur) and fed a bland diet. When he contracted the mumps, the event merited a newspaper story, as if the fate of the nation rested on his health.

His parents battled for years and finally ended their union with an acrimonious divorce, amid rumors that their daughter, Alice, was the product of Ava Astor's illicit affair. Vincent's formidable mother then married a British lord and became Lady Ribblesdale. Even as adults, Vincent and Alice Astor were frightened of their mother. "She was a tigress," says Ivan Obolensky, Alice Astor's son. "They were terrified of her. Things had to be perfect."

After attending St. George's School in Newport, Vincent Astor went off to Harvard with twenty suits, ten pairs of shoes, and six trunks. But his college days did not last long. His father, John Jacob Astor IV, had celebrated his freedom from a difficult marriage by marrying a teenage debutante, Madeleine Force, in 1911, and the newlyweds had headed off to Europe. When the couple learned that Madeleine, then nineteen, was pregnant, they decided to come back to New York. Sparing no expense, Astor purchased first-class tickets on a luxury ship boasting a squash court, a Turkish bath, and three libraries—the
Titanic.
Astor went down with the ship on April 14, 1912, but Madeleine survived, and four months later she gave birth to a son, John Jacob Astor VI, known as Jack. She had signed a prenuptial agreement that limited her inheritance to $5 million; her son received a $5 million trust fund. The bulk of the estate, more than $60 million, went to the firstborn son, Vincent, who was only twenty. He dropped out of Harvard to take over the family business and begin public life.

Besieged by women, he received thousands of letters from female admirers with dollar signs in their eyes. Uniformed police had to intervene to rescue him from hordes ofwomen while attending a social event at the Seventh Avenue Armory. "The perils of being young, unmarried and very wealthy were emphasized tonight when Mr. Astor almost was mobbed by throngs of maids and matrons," wrote the
Washington Post.
For a shy, gawky, six-foot, four-inch man, this was torture. Eager for stability, Vincent married a childhood playmate, Helen Dinsmore Huntington, telling reporters, "She is a typical American girl. She has no foolish notions or new fads. Horseback riding and tennis are her favorite recreations."

Despite his sheltered background, Vincent Astor had developed a social conscience, and he was mortified when he saw the housing that had been built on Astor-owned property. Developers had put up shoddy buildings that had quickly deteriorated into slums known as "Astor Flats." "Mr. Astor was shocked at the conditions he found in houses on Astor land and decided to get rid of slum properties," a
New York Times
story recounted. Astor sold the bulk of those buildings to the city for a nominal amount.

That was a generous act, and there would be others in his career. "It is unreasonable to suppose that because a man is rich, he is also useless," said Astor, who established a well-endowed foundation "for the alleviation of human misery." But despite his magnanimous moments, he developed a reputation as a loner who favored machines more than people. He raced and wrecked automobiles; built and sailed one of the largest private yachts; installed a miniature railroad, Toonerville, at his Rhinebeck estate; supported early aviation; and was a director of a railroad corporation and a shipping company. He served honorably as an ensign in the navy in World War I, where his lungs were damaged by fumes during a trip home via submarine.

One childhood friendship that endured was with his neighbor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When the president-elect wanted privacy to choose his first cabinet, he took his advisers for a cruise on Astor's 263-foot yacht. (After the boat docked in Miami, Astor and the others accompanied FDR when he went to give a speech. As the group piled into cars to leave, Astor, in the car behind FDR, turned to his companions and said, "Any crank might take a shot at him. I don't like this." Minutes later a deranged man, Joe Zangara, shot at FDR, missed, and killed Chicago's mayor, Anton Cermak.) Astor's close relationship with FDR merited a
Time
cover on April 9, 1934, entitled "Fun with Friends." The newsmagazine sniffed that the multimillionaire lacked "social confidence" and referred to his "awkwardness."

But Vincent Astor's lineage and bank balance proved to be powerful draws for the opposite sex. Astor and Helen, a classical music enthusiast, discovered that they had little in common, and the childless couple began to lead separate lives. At a Washington dinner party in 1935, Astor met Minnie Cushing, the oldest and most intellectual of the three renowned Cushing sisters, daughters of a prominent Boston surgeon. (The sisters married well and often: Babe Cushing paired off with Standard Oil heir Stanley Mortimer, Jr., and moved on to CBS founder Bill Paley; Betsey Cushing's first husband was James Roosevelt, the president's son, and her second spouse was John Hay Whitney.)

The still-married Vincent Astor began traveling all over the world on his yacht with Minnie, not bothering to conceal the relationship. In 1940, Helen Astor asked for a divorce. Three weeks after the decree was final, Vincent married Minnie in a small, secret ceremony on Long Island.

After five years of amicable companionship, the tensions between the couple started to show. The hypersocial Minnie liked to spend time in Manhattan with artists and writers; Vincent preferred a solitary life on his boat. In
The Sisters: The Lives and Times of the Fabulous Cushing Sisters,
David Grafton makes a persuasive case that Minnie Cushing Astor was a lesbian, citing a list of her likely lovers (the department store heiress Kay Halle, a French actress named Annabella, and another French actress, Valentina.) But Astor was apparently besotted, and the couple stayed together for thirteen years.

During World War II, Astor enlisted in the navy again, at age fifty, and worked in intelligence. He was named commodore of convoy. But despite this achievement, he was a hypochondriac who smoked and drank relentlessly, and after the war his drinking escalated. "The word got out that if you wanted to do business with Vincent, you had to do it before eleven
A.M.,
" says his nephew Ivan Obolensky. Astor even scared off the neighborhood children. "I was terrified of him," says Reinaldo Herrera, a contributing editor at
Vanity Fair.
As a teenager, Herrera visited Alice Astor's daughters, who lived next to Vincent's Rhinebeck estate. "We'd be in the pool, and the butler would come and say, 'Get out, Captain Vincent is coming.' He was a scary gentleman."

But even the gloomiest personality can sparkle when combined with an awe-inspiring bank account and a touching dose of ardor. Six months after Buddie Marshall's death, when Brooke was panicked about her future, she attended a dinner where the guests included Vincent and Minnie Astor, both of whom she knew slightly. "I thought he was difficult. Everybody said he was," she told Charlie Rose in a 1994 television interview. "I made [up] my mind we were going to hit it off." At the end of the evening the Astors invited Brooke to their country home, the fabled Ferncliff, for Memorial Day weekend.

What a sophisticated and civilized pair they were, Vincent and Minnie, out shopping together for a replacement wife for Vincent. As Brooke later described the weekend, Vincent whisked her away for a drive in his Mercedes and proposed. He told her that Minnie had asked for a divorce and he had resisted, but now that he had met Brooke, he would be willing to go through with the divorce. Brooke always insisted that she resisted this snap proposal but was won over by Vincent's letters, which she found "beguiling." Decades later she would frequently pull out these letters and read them aloud to friends as proof that she had not married merely for money. "If you have the slightest doubt of my love of Brooke, I wish that you could at this moment look inside my head or wherever it is that emotions lie," Astor wrote in a letter included in the set given to guests at Brooke's hundredth birthday party. Barbara Goldsmith says, "It was important to her to believe that Vincent loved her. I don't think she would have married someone if she didn't think she could have a relationship."

Vincent Astor's family welcomed Brooke's arrival on the scene. But Ivan Obolensky is convinced that Brooke's tale of the couple's courtship omitted an earlier meeting. "Vincent would go to this sanitorium to dry out, Silver Hill," said Obolensky. "She was one of the companions to jolly people up. She met him there. When you get a guy worth two hundred million dollars under your thumb, that's an opportunity. She was predatory." (Obolensky was a major beneficiary of his uncle's wills before Brooke entered the picture, but Vincent Astor subsequently wrote him out, which may explain his jaundiced view of the third Mrs. Astor.)

Did she love him? Louis Auchincloss, who knew and heartily disliked Vincent Astor, has repeatedly insisted that Brooke embarked on the union for purely mercenary reasons. "If she married him for his charm, I'd have said she ought to be put in an asylum," says the novelist, who has long chronicled the mores of Upper East Side aristocracy. "Vincent was an enormously unattractive, bullheaded man, no fun to have around whatsoever. He was mad for her. The people who say that marriage was not consummated are crazy. I just know that randy old goat certainly looked after himself." But Auchincloss was impressed at how well Brooke behaved once she married Vincent Astor. "It was a bargain, and she kept it. She was the only one of his three wives who made him happy. That was quite a job, but she did it."

Vincent Astor made a hobby of perpetually changing his will. In the Poughkeepsie, New York, courthouse, several file cabinet drawers bulge with versions of his last wishes. Less than four months after meeting Brooke, he wrote a new will, on September 24, 1953, which gave his "prospective wife Brooke Russell Marshall" the sum of $5 million plus ownership of Ferncliff. This was the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement, and her payout only improved over time.

When Vincent Astor and Brooke Marshall married, on October 8, 1953, the
New York Times
mentioned that "only a few relatives and friends attended the ceremony." The hastily scheduled wedding took place at Joseph Pulitzer's home in Bar Harbor, Maine, a remote location chosen to avoid the paparazzi of the day and minimize attention to the unseemly haste with which the widow was remarrying.

Brooke had been a social nobody, a well-to-do matron on the edges of the aristocracy. But now she was Mrs. Astor, with all that the name implied. Her husband owned the St. Regis Hotel and
Newsweek
magazine, and he was a major shareholder of the premier shipping firm, the United States Lines. A wedding day photo shows the newlyweds boarding Astor's plane to return home. Brooke is grinning happily, while Astor, a boutonniere in his lapel, is posed awkwardly, almost shyly, by his new possession.

Tony, then twenty-nine, was among the wedding guests, but his wife, Liz, did not make the trip to Maine. She was home caring for the couple's twins, Alec and Philip, who had been born prematurely on May 14. The babies were so small that the doctor warned they might not survive, especially firstborn Philip, who had a heart murmur as well as a partial harelip (which was surgically corrected, leaving a faint scar). Later, as fun-loving and affectionate toddlers, Brooke's grandsons proved an asset to her new marriage, as Vincent Astor became enamored of the boys. But he took an instant dislike to his new stepson.

Despite the tensions between the two men, they had interests in common. Proud of his war record and his role as one of FDR's advisers, Vincent was a patriot who believed in government service. After graduating from Brown in 1950, Tony had gone to work at the State Department as an intelligence analyst. His first government job paid a paltry $3,100 a year, but thanks to his trust fund, he and Liz were able to buy a nineteenth-century row house in the heart of Georgetown. Tony hoped to enter the foreign service but failed the arduous entrance exam, so he went to see General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II spy agency that was the predecessor of the CIA. "I asked him what I should do. I wanted to get into civilian government, and I was a reserve officer," recalls Tony. Donovan arranged for Tony to take a job with the CIA as a roving recruiter.