Mrs. Astor Regrets (15 page)

Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 boosted Brooke Astor's already high profile, as she reveled in her close friendship with the president and the first lady. She threw a celebratory party at her apartment right after the 1980 landslide victory over Jimmy Carter. Nancy Reagan now fondly recalls the evening as "the party where Ronnie was under the table looking for Brooke's earring."

Mrs. Astor had dined at the White House before, but during Reagan's two terms she took the shuttle to attend state dinners so often that she might just as well have left a toothbrush in the family quarters. "A lot of people wanted to sit next to Brooke—she was so much fun," says Mrs. Reagan. "She'd stay at the White House, in the Lincoln bedroom. She was more of a night owl than we were. Ronnie was tired and we would go to bed." In the morning the two women would dish. "We'd talk about who looked pretty and who didn't and who did what that they shouldn't have. I felt like I could tell her anything." Brooke Astor was reticent about personal matters but quietly conveyed her disappointment with Tony. "I did meet him," Mrs. Reagan says. "You got the feeling that all was not happy, but I never questioned her about him. They just didn't have a good relationship."

Mrs. Astor made a point of summoning many of the friends who attended her fete for the Reagans—the Kissingers, William Paley, Douglas Dillon, Liz and Felix Rohatyn, Victor and Betsy Gotbaum—back to 778 Park Avenue for another gathering almost exactly a year later. This was, in a sense, a revenge dinner. Always in denial about her age, she had been furious when officials at the Metropolitan Museum invoked the standard policy requiring board members to step down to nonvoting emeritus status when they reach age seventy-five. Mrs. Astor did not want to go quietly into the New York night. Now she was giving a dinner in honor of Vartan Gregorian, the newly hired president of the New York Public Library. For her, this was the equivalent of taking out a twopage ad in the
Times
to announce that she had chosen the library as her new philanthropic cause.

Gregorian was charmed when Brooke paraphrased Thornton Wilder to explain her approach to philanthropy: "Wealth is like manure—if you collect too much, it stinks. You've got to spread it around." He describes their relationship as friendship at first sight. "She could talk about books, about people, about issues, about nature, about gardens, about African Americans," he explains. "My wife told me that if Brooke were thirty years younger, she wouldn't have trusted me." The library was so cash-strapped during those days that books were moldering from neglect, the doors were closed on Thursdays to save money, and neighboring Bryant Park had become a haven for drug dealers. Mrs. Astor gave an influential grant of $10 million, urged her friends to join her, and created an annual fundraising gala for the library that became a sold-out event where socialites mixed with raffish authors.

There was something touchingly personal about Mrs. Astor's involvement in the library. Just walking into the building made her happy. She admired the underappreciated librarians and started a tradition of sharing lunch with the staff on her birthday. While she did not single-handedly save the library, she was profoundly involved in its renaissance. "By virtue of her prestige and influence and ability to inspire people, she brought a whole level of interest to giving to the library by New York's social-philanthropic-economic circles," says Paul LeClerc, the current library president. "She made the place."

But for all her warmth and generosity, Mrs. Astor had developed an imperious side. As her courtiers learned, attention had to be paid. Her elegant mask slipped at home, since no woman is a heroine to her social secretary. "You had to be tough to work for her, because she went after people," says John Meaney, her chauffeur from 1985 to 1995. "Her favorite thing was to say, 'I just took a hate on them.' She knew it was irrational, but she could be erratic and harsh. She needed to vent, and the only people she could vent with was staff. Familiarity breeds contempt."

Like her predecessor Caroline Astor, the twentieth century's Mrs. Astor believed that all guests, no matter how high their station, should abide by her rules. She was not subtle in expressing her feelings. When she hosted a lunch at her home for Nancy Reagan, she was not pleased when the guest of honor was late. She broke with protocol by seating her guests and telling the waiters to start serving the appetizer. As John Hart recalls, "It was Brooke's way of saying, 'You don't show up forty-five minutes late for a lunch, even if you are the president's wife.'" Mrs. Reagan still recalls the experience with mortification. "It was traffic," she explains, by way of apology. "She went ahead and started lunch. I was glad she did. I was upset because I was late—I didn't want her to be upset with me."

All was forgiven. And a few years later, when Mrs. Reagan was going through a difficult time, her friend reached out with memorable words of comfort. "After my mother died, Brooke said to me, 'Now Nancy, I know nobody can replace your mother, but I'd certainly like to try. Anything I can do for you, anything you want, just think of me as your mother.' It was so sweet."

In truth, a younger woman was already playing the role of Brooke's surrogate daughter. This intimate relationship had begun in the 1950s and lasted for nearly half a century, with powerful repercussions for both women.

Annette de la Renta was a central figure in the drama during Brooke Astor's last years, yet despite her rarefied social standing (or, perhaps, because of it), she has always been a reclusive figure to reporters. It was not until the early days of 2008, six months after Mrs. Astor's death, that I finally arranged my first formal interview with her.

A butler answers the door at the de la Renta apartment, which occupies an entire floor of a Park Avenue building in the east sixties. An enormous Edward Lear landscape of Kilimanjaro dominates the marble-floored foyer. The sixty-foot living and dining room, which encompasses the entire width of the building, is sumptuous, with eighteenth-century English furniture, an Aubusson rug, yellow walls, and cranberry drapes. The room is filled with so many beautiful objects—a collection of little leather boxes, a Saint-Gaudens sculpture of Diana, two severe portraits of Elizabethan women all in white, a Gericault painting of a nude man, ornate side tables, pink peonies in a vase—that one's eyes dart around trying to take everything in. On this wintry afternoon, both fireplaces are ablaze.

Wearing a simple brown wool sheath dress from her husband's designer collection and brown suede stiletto boots, the sixty-eight-year-old Annette enters the room accompanied by her three dogs. The dogs are mutts, rescued dogs, and they jump all over the valuable furniture while Annette smiles indulgently. She has four more dogs at the couple's home in the Dominican Republic. There's something about stray dogs—"those eyes," she says—that tugs at her emotions. She has a fierce public persona, so her attitude to the dogs reveals a surprisingly soft side. "I would have twenty more if Oscar would let me," she says. Oscar later described how his wife noticed a stray dog by the side of the road while racing to the airport in the Dominican Republic and then repeatedly called to beg him to find the stray. "How am I going to find that one dog?" he asked with a tone of puzzled affection. A love of dogs was one of the many things that Annette shared with Brooke Astor, although Brooke favored pedigreed dachshunds rather than roadside strays.

Perching on a wooden chair by the fireplace, Annette presides over the silver tea service brought by her butler, Hans Dreschel, a family retainer for forty-two years. "Brooke was always a friend. She gave sage advice," she says. Although many mutual friends likened their relationship to a mother-daughter connection, Annette balks at the description. "I never saw her as a mother figure. She treated me as a contemporary. I had a fantastic mother, but one was enough."

If Annette's family history were fictionalized, the result would be a Harold Robbins potboiler about the super-rich combined with an Alan Furst novel about prewar Europe. Small wonder that Brooke Astor, the general's daughter with pretensions, would be drawn to Annette, who grew up in a wealthy Social Register family shadowed by tragedy and who took delight in breaking the rules.

Wildly rebellious as an adolescent, Annette famously rode her horse, Next Chance, into the living room of her parents' estate in Far Hills, New Jersey. Her friend Betsy Gotbaum, New York City's public advocate, who has known Annette since she was thirteen, recalls, "She was a hellion. She was mischievous, a lot of fun, and she still has that." There is a core of steel within her too. As Betsy's husband, Victor Gotbaum, adds with a wry smile, "I'm glad Annette is my friend, because I wouldn't want her as my enemy."

Annette's father, the German Jewish financier Fritz Mannheimer, was the director of the Mendelssohn Bank of Amsterdam and has often been described as one of the richest men in the world, but he died several months before Annette was born. Jane Pinto-Reis Brian, her strikingly beautiful mother, was born in Qingdao, China, the daughter of a Brazilian diplomat and his American wife, Ignatia Mary Murphy. Jane's father died young, her mother remarried, and Jane was brought up in Paris as a convent-educated Catholic. The twenty-year-old was pregnant with Annette when she married Mannheimer, an art collector who had filled his homes with Rembrandts, Vermeers, and Fragonards, at a ceremony attended by the French finance minister Paul Reynaud. Already in poor health, Mannheimer died two months later, in August 1939, at the age of forty-nine. His death, on the cusp of World War II, unleashed havoc in the European financial markets. Although physicians listed a heart ailment as his cause of death, rumors still abound that he committed suicide. The day after he died, his bank went bankrupt.

A
New York Times
obituary described Mannheimer as a genius in currency manipulation and so influential that "when the Nazi regime made it impossible for him to live in Germany, he obtained Netherlands citizenship by act of Parliament." Based in Paris, Mannheimer, a grand officer of the Legion of Honor, made large donations to the French government's national defense fund. A
Time
obituary drew on anti-Semitic caricatures to portray him as brilliant and controversial, a "cigar-smoking German Jew ... No one ever liked Fritz. He was too smart. During the War [World War I], barely out of college, he got a job in the German Government bureau directing the flow of raw materials through Germany. In no time, he headed it." The magazine noted, "His was the last Jewish-owned bank allowed to do business in Germany."

After Annette was born, with the patriotic given name of Anne France, in December 1939, Jane left the infant with her mother in Cannes and fled to Argentina and then New York. She retrieved her baby a year later, during the Nazi occupation of France. Jane Mannheimer had inherited a microfilm company that copied U.S. war records, and she joined the firm as a vice president for marketing. Her legacy was Mannheimer's extraordinary art collection, but she had to battle both his creditors and Nazi impounders to obtain a mere three paintings. By 1942, Jane had become a glamorous figure in New York society. Statuesque and exquisitely dressed, she was one of those rare women of whom it can truly be said that she walked into a room and conversations stopped.

Jane Mannheimer made a fortuitous marital match to Charles Engelhard, a globe-girdling industrialist who traded in precious metals. Engelhard, a man of large appetites, did everything in a big way. He owned a string of 250 racehorses, including the legendary Nijinsky, winner of the Triple Crown. He turned his family's business into a personal fortune worth more than $300 million. He evaded India's ban on gold bullion exports by making "pure-gold bracelets and other trinkets that were just as quickly melted back into bars once they arrived as such destinations as Hong Kong," according to the
Wall Street Journal.

Settling down in the horse country of New Jersey where he had been raised, Charles Engelhard adopted his young stepdaughter, and he and Jane went on to have four more daughters. The former Jane Mannheimer behaved as if she had never had an identity before becoming Mrs. Engelhard in deference to her husband's wishes. Annette's half-sister Susan, seven years her junior, says, "I didn't know Annette wasn't a full sister until I was thirty or forty years old. We knew my mother had a previous life, but we never went there. Our mother never talked about it." Oscar de la Renta, ever protective of his wife, adds, "People think Annette is in denial about her father. But she never knew him, and her mother would not tell her about him." Expressing regret that Fritz Mannheimer will be forever unknown to her, Annette says, "As far as I was concerned, my father was Charles Engelhard."

Cragwood, the family's estate in Far Hills, was a Georgian brick manor house with a staff of twenty.
Town & Country
described the property as so extensive that "one could not infer the existence of another human settlement in the state of New Jersey." Charles Engelhard collected properties the way his wife collected Monets and Picassos. There was the fishing camp on the Gaspe Peninsula, an estate in Boca Grande called Pamplemousse, a seaside home in Dark Harbor, Maine, an apartment in London, and a game park in South Africa, where he had mining interests.

In New York during the 1970s, Brooke Astor and Jane Engelhard moved in the same world, from serving on the board of the Metropolitan Museum to regularly visiting Miss Craig, the fitness instructor at Elizabeth Arden. The two women could have easily been social rivals, but they chose to become friends (although the couture dressmaker Elizabeth Corbett admits that they checked with her to make sure they did not purchase the same gowns). With so much in common—childhood in China, a love of art, widowhood followed by marriage to a fabulously wealthy man, a desire to be influential rather than merely decorative—they came to appreciate each other's company. Robert Silvers, the editor of the
New York Review of Books,
recalls, "Brooke admired Jane, and she thought that Jane had created a little duchy in New Jersey."