Mrs. Astor Regrets (16 page)

Annette came of age with a strict mother who was the family disciplinarian and an indulgent father who gave her free rein. "Her stepfather adored her—he was fun and he let us do everything we wanted," recalls Gotbaum. "Her mother was quite formidable. She scared me." The Engelhard parents traveled constantly, and once their daughters were old enough for boarding school, they saw each other mostly during summers and school vacations. "We had the nannies and the tutors and the servants," recalls Susan O'Connor. "Our parents were very busy with their own lives."

With a mother on the best-dressed list and photographed by Cecil Beaton and Horst for
Vogue,
Annette rebelled via food, eating her way into plump adolescence. At Foxcroft, the exclusive girls' boarding school in Middleburg, Virginia, her roommate Elise Lufkin recalls, "She'd make everybody laugh in class, and teachers would be irritated. She looked very different than she does today. She got very thin when she was seventeen."

Annette slimmed down in time to be presented as a debutante in the 1957–58 season. After spending a year in Paris studying art, at age twenty she married Samuel Pryor Reed, a Trinity College graduate whose prominent parents, Joseph and Permelia Reed, had turned Jupiter Island, Florida, into an exclusive WASP retreat. As the ruler of the Jupiter Island Club, Permelia Reed was famous as a social arbiter and for being shamelessly anti-Semitic. "People practically committed suicide because she wouldn't give them the time of day," wrote Liz Smith in her book
Dishing.
But Annette was well equipped to deal with her imposing mother-in-law. "I loved her and she loved me," says Annette, who was raised Catholic. "You always knew where you stood with Permelia."

Charles and Jane Engelhard were devoted Democrats—Jane helped Jacqueline Kennedy redecorate the White House—and the couple's parties at Cragwood were legendary for their extravagance. Dinner guests still recall the stacks of gold Krugerrands used as table decor and given away as party favors.

Living in Manhattan, Annette and Sam, who worked for his father-in-law, attended a dinner at Cragwood honoring the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Oscar de la Renta, then designing clothing for Elizabeth Arden, had been invited, along with his wife, Françoise, because they knew the royals. Oscar recalls, "They served this enormous chocolate cake for dessert, but no one touched it." He too declined, but he asked Annette what would become of the cake. "She took me into the pantry," he says, and they gorged like children. The Reeds and the de la Rentas were soon vacationing together and always seemed to be the best of friends.

As a society phenomenon, Annette was profiled by the
New York Times
in 1967 along with her friends Mica Ertegun and Chessy Rayner. "They Look Alike, They Dress Alike, They Like Each Other Very Much" read the headline. Looking radiant in a Maximilian mink coat, Annette, then the mother of two children (Beatrice and Charles, and later there would be Eliza), was described as living in a ten-room apartment, having a Swiss nanny, and boasting a size 6 figure. "They are among the current crop of switched-on young matrons," gushed the
Times.
"They know what to do before everyone does it, what to wear before it becomes popular, and where to go before the hordes descend."

When Charles Engelhard, who was morbidly overweight, died of a heart attack in 1971 at his Florida home, at age fifty-four, Annette lost the only father she had known. Jane Engelhard created the Charles W. Engelhard Court at the Metropolitan Museum in her husband's honor and forged on—just as the widowed Brooke Astor had—by taking on new challenges, such as serving as the first woman member of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In the years ahead, Annette's four younger sisters chose to make their lives away from their mother's sphere of influence, but Annette stayed within her mother's social world.

Relationships often build slowly, as small moments accumulate. Brooke Astor had watched Annette grow up and was drawn to her tarttongued wit. By the early 1980s, Mrs. Astor had begun to reach out a welcoming white-gloved hand, offering uncritical friendship. "Annette was unquestionably the brightest, most cultivated, most humorous and good-hearted of the ladies whom Brooke knew," says the writer John Richardson. As Florence Irving, a Metropolitan Museum board member, adds, "Brooke was a better mother to Annette than Annette's own mother. Brooke was available, she paid attention." Extremely shy, Annette, with Brooke, could allow herself to be both warm and mercilessly funny. Randy Bourscheidt, New York's deputy cultural commissioner in the 1970s, watched their friendship evolve and says, "They could be unguarded—they trusted each other. More than anything, they laughed together."

Their relationship intensified as Jane Engelhard began to withdraw from public life, resigning from her boards. Annette took her mother's place at the Metropolitan Museum in 1981. Jane began to spend more and more time in Nantucket and finally moved there full-time. "Jane gathered into herself," recalls Robert Silvers. "She had frail health and trouble getting around." Annette, then in her early forties, was ready to take on a more public role. "When my mother moved to Nantucket, Annette took her place as Mrs. Astor's friend," says Susan O'Connor, adding that her older sister also took on the family mantle in society and in philanthropy. "She stepped right into my mother's shoes in a big way."

Brooke encouraged Annette's election to the boards of Rockefeller University and the New York Public Library. Although Annette was not as diplomatic as her mentor—"She does not suffer fools gladly," says an acquaintance—she made herself indispensable at the Metropolitan Museum.

Oscar and Françoise de la Renta were regulars at Brooke's table during this time. All the ladies loved Oscar: his Latin warmth lit up a room, and his lush creations made their wearers feel sensuously elegant. When Françoise died of cancer in 1983, Oscar turned to Annette for comfort. "My wife died at four
A.M.
and I called Annette at six
A.M.
and she didn't leave my side for twenty-four hours," he recalls. It was an Upper East Side scandal when Annette left Sam Reed, a quiet man with the perfect pedigree, for this exuberant foreigner who had built a multimillion-dollar garment district company. The divorce was treated as a news story with major repercussions. In
Manhattan Inc.
magazine, Julia Reed outlined the resulting succession crisis in society: "Astor herself had chosen Annette Reed to carry the torch, but Reed left her husband, as well as her status as a serious contender, when designer Oscar de la Renta caught her eye."

That was a prediction that did not stand the test of time. Brooke loyally gave her blessing to her friend's divorce and remarriage. "It was unpleasant," Annette says. "It's always unpleasant when you leave your husband. Brooke was the first to come to call on me. She said that she was sorry that it had gotten into the papers. She was very supportive of me and Oscar."

Oscar and Annette, who married in 1990, treated Brooke as a beloved member of the family and always tried to think of new adventures when she visited them in the Dominican Republic. Betsy Gotbaum recalls Brooke's reaction when the couple arranged for houseguests to swim with the dolphins, saying, "I was a little nervous, but Brooke was the first one in the water." On another visit to the island, Oscar organized a helicopter trip to take Brooke to Santiago, where her father had been stationed as a Marine general. "Brooke was clinging to a portrait of her father when we arrived, and she started to cry," Oscar de la Renta recalls. What Silvers, who was also visiting, remembers is the army band in full red-uniformed regalia which magically appeared, as arranged, to serenade Mrs. Astor. As he recalls, "They were playing 1930s swing songs for her—'It Had to Be You.'"

As Brooke Astor reached her nineties, she worked hard at remaining contemporary. During the 1992 presidential campaign, she summoned Tom Brokaw to lunch at the Knickerbocker Club to discuss his political coverage. As the anchorman recalls, "She leaned over and tapped me on the knee and said, 'Thomas, lay off on this stuff about Bill Clinton and his girlfriends.'" Brokaw told her that he was surprised she was taking such an interest. "It doesn't mean that I'm going to vote for him, but every man is entitled," she said. Then Mrs. Astor mischievously added, "Of course, he should be having affairs with Hillary's friends, not with that trailer trash." Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., quoted Mrs. Astor as saying to the Democratic powerhouse Pamela Harriman, "Why couldn't Mr. Clinton have stayed with girls of his own class?"

Brooke Astor did not object to other people's messy romantic lives, but her attitude was different toward her son's misadventures. She was genuinely upset by Tony's decision to leave his second wife for Charlene Gilbert, whom he married in 1992. For decades she had dangled before her son the possibility that he would inherit her role as head of the Vincent Astor Foundation. Given her obsession with control, perhaps she never intended to let him take over, but Brooke's friends believe that Tony's third marriage lowered the odds. Board members watched from the sidelines as Brooke and Tony struggled over his future role. "I think there was a moment when they were in real disagreement about what would happen with the foundation," says Howard Phipps. "It was not clear that she wanted to entrust Tony to manage things and advise her and play that role with the foundation forever."

She offered the job instead to Viscount William Astor. "She always wanted it to remain an Astor Foundation," Lord Astor recalls. "Tony was always trying to get a bit of it. She said to me, 'Would you take the foundation on?' I said, 'If you want it to be for things in New York, no.' I was in England. I told her to wind it up, which she decided to do."

Mrs. Astor had started to grow forgetful, which was becoming an increasing problem for those in her orbit and employ. "She unraveled to the point that I had to talk to her son," says John Meaney, dating the problem back as far as the early 1990s. "Tony was so intimidated by her: 'She's my mother, what can I do?' She was a mess, rattled, confused. She was clearly slipping, but then she willed herself back."

By 1996, however, even the indomitable Mrs. Astor, then ninety-four, was feeling her age. The Metropolitan Museum staff would meet her at the entrance with a wheelchair so she could avoid the long walks down the corridors. But she retained her competitive spirit. Awaiting the arrival of the ninety-nine-year-old Madame Chiang Kai-shek for a reception at Astor Court, she ordered Philippe de Montebello to scout out the situation, because she was worried about being upstaged. As he recalls, "Brooke said, 'Go out and see if Mrs. Kai-shek is in a wheelchair.' So I went around the corner, and came back and told Brooke, 'She's not.' The speed at which Brooke got out of her wheelchair was amazing."

But that autumn Mrs. Astor was finally forced to acknowledge her mental decline. For several months she and Linda Gillies had been discussing a major grant for an after-school program. But one Friday afternoon, when Gillies broached the topic, Brooke went completely blank and asked, "What project?" Gillies tried to finesse the situation, but Mrs. Astor was shaken by her lapse of memory. She spent the weekend at Holly Hill considering her options, and early on Monday morning she called Gillies and requested a meeting. Mrs. Astor arrived at the office and without pleasantries announced that she had decided to close the Astor Foundation. She would spend down the remaining funds in the next year, and the doors would shut in 1997. Making her decision public, Brooke explained her reason for closing the foundation in an interview with the
New York Times
reporter Geraldine Fabrikant in December 1996. "My son is not an Astor," Mrs. Astor said. "There is no family to leave it to. If you have children, like the Rockefellers did, you leave it to your children. If you have no children, I think it's a nice idea to close it." Her only child was sitting right beside her as she made these comments. Tony Marshall told Fabrikant that he supported his mother's decision, saying, "I would hate to second-guess 'Is this something that my mother would like to give to?'"

Without the foundation's work to keep her busy, Brooke Astor appeared unmoored. She continued to make her social rounds night after night, but she had lost her sense of purpose. As one of her staff members recalls, "I'd see her pull herself together and go out with people and maintain her graciousness, but at the end of the night, she'd empty out like a paper bag—she'd gotten through the evening."

For Tony, his mother's decision to close the foundation marked the end of his hopes of becoming a major New York philanthropist. He continued to manage his mother's money, signing the checks to pay for her expenses. Brooke Astor had always lived well, and her son looked askance at her extravagance. This was a theme in the mother-son relationship that Brooke's friends had been hearing about for years. "He was always giving her grief that she shouldn't spend so much money," recalls Robert Pirie. "She'd say to me, 'When Tony finds out how much I spent in England this trip, he's going to have a fit.'" Like many of Brooke's friends, he thought Tony's complaints were inappropriate. As he puts it, "Whose money was it? It wasn't his." But Tony knew that much of the money would eventually be his. It was just a matter of time. Given Brooke's remarkable longevity, however, each minute seemed to last an hour, and her son's life was ticking away too.

7. The Perils of Charlene

S
UMMER MORNINGS
in Northeast Harbor, Maine, have a quiet, magical feeling. The sun on the water, the birds in the trees, the profusion of blossoms in the gardens, make for an enchanting ambience. If the fog lingers, the salt-scented sea air and the swirling mist create a mysterious intimacy. Although Brooke Astor was a night owl in Manhattan, she always rose early at Cove End to savor the pleasures of island life—a morning swim, a walk with her dogs, or a stroll around her garden. But during her last summer there, in 2002, she slept in most mornings. She was, after all, one hundred years old. In her second-floor bedroom overlooking a quiet ocean cove, the floral drapes were closed to block out the sunlight, and she wore a sleep mask.