Mrs. Astor Regrets (20 page)

Charlene admired Brooke's jewelry, but her compliments displeased her mother-in-law. "Charlene is one of those people who is in your face," says Viscount Astor, who recalls an evening when Brooke wore her sapphires and Charlene overdid it. "Brooke grabbed my hand and whispered, 'She only said that because she wants it.'" Brooke always sensed a subtext, whether it was present or not, when Charlene was around.

At Cove End, Brooke's houseguests were struck by the simmering tensions time and again. "Tony and Charlene would be staying in the cottage and Brooke would say, 'We have to go see them,'" recalls John Dobkin, then the head of Historic Hudson Valley. "Tony would have prepared little Ritz crackers with peanut butter and bacon chips. We'd be there half an hour, and Brooke would heave a deep sigh of relief when we left, apologizing." Even Mrs. Astor's staff felt uncomfortable watching how she treated Tony. "Mrs. Astor used to tell Mr. Marshall what to do all the time," says Alicia Johnson, the housekeeper. "That grated on Charlene. He tried so hard to please his mother. He used to see her every day—he was kind to her. He'd go through the mail with her, set up dinner parties."

If Tony and Charlene were visiting when prominent guests arrived, Brooke would order the couple to vacate the large cottage and exile them to less desirable quarters, a cabin without a water view. "Brooke assigned them to the little cottage—I stayed in the big one," recalls Ashton Hawkins. "We wouldn't see them for meals, only for big parties. Brooke was very embarrassed and very upset and did not conceal it from Charlene." When Liz Smith visited, she heard an earful of complaints from her hostess. "She thought Charlene was taking her jewelry. I said, 'Oh, Brooke, surely not.' I thought it was geriatric insecurity," says Smith. "Brooke wasn't very nice to them. I felt she didn't want them there, but she had no choice."

Everyone in Northeast Harbor was aware of Mrs. Astor's deliberate efforts to maintain a friendship with Paul Gilbert. When Gilbert married his second wife, Patricia Roberts, in 1994, she magnanimously gave the newlyweds the use of her Maine summer camp, August Moon, for their honeymoon. She also paid for the addition of an extra bedroom at the minister's church-owned housing. These gestures, especially the honeymoon stay, undoubtedly struck Charlene and Tony as deliberately hurtful. When Charlene and Paul Gilbert's oldest daughter, Arden, was married in Northeast Harbor, with a reception at the Asticou Inn, Brooke Astor made a point of spending time with Gilbert's second wife, who recalls, "I loved sitting next to Mrs. Astor." Paul Gilbert's derogatory nickname for Charlene was his "ball and chain." He would tell Roberts, "I can't believe the ball and chain is going to get that house."

Tony and Charlene arrived for their annual visit to Cove End on July 25, 2002, and stayed for nearly three weeks. Tony had always loved boating, and Charlene took a triumphant pleasure in returning to this village where her life had changed for the better. She did not mingle much with old friends. "She behaved like a summer person," says Gunnar Hansen. "She'd be delighted to see me because I'm an old friend, but she would never invite me to the house. The summer community sticks with the summer community."

The Marshalls were solicitous of Brooke that summer, sharing at least one meal daily and taking her out to lunch at the Asticou or to dinner at the Bar Harbor Inn. They ferried her to cocktail parties and took her for a walk in the Rockefeller gardens. Now that she had fewer houseguests and was no longer such a formidable figure, she was more dependent on them for companionship—and Tony snapped a photo of Brooke and Charlene chatting amicably in the library.

Brooke had always told her son that he would inherit Cove End (valued at $6.2 million in 2004), but she had periodically considered giving the $850,000 waterfront cottage to someone else. She asked Vartan Gregorian if he was interested (he declined) and half offered it to the butler, Chris Ely, who became alarmed. As Hart recalls, "Chris said, 'Don't do that. I can't afford to keep it up, and Tony wouldn't be happy to have me here.'" She also told Steve Hamor Sr. that she might give him a portion of her Maine property for his own greenhouse—she even told Nancy Pyne about this plan—but she never followed up on that offer either.

These were the whims of an elderly woman. But to Tony, Brooke's effort to give her grandson Philip the cottage in 2000 may have represented a serious change in his mother's estate plan. In deference to Tony's objections, Brooke backed off from the gift, but she had not entirely abandoned the idea. In the most recent version of her will, dated January 30, 2002, she had written: "My grandson, Philip Marshall, has visited me in Maine with his wife and children to our common pleasure. I hope that he will keep visiting his father there after my death and that his father will leave him an interest in the Maine property upon his death, if Philip still would like to own and use my home in Maine when that time comes." For Tony and, more important, for Charlene, that wording had worrisome implications. If Brooke, now one hundred, were to outlive Tony, with his history of heart attacks, Philip would have a legal claim to Cove End. Under that scenario, Charlene would never reign at that shingled Maine retreat. At the time, though, Mrs. Astor's will was a confidential document; only Tony, Charlene, and Terry Christensen had read the contents.

Unaware of his grandmother's wishes and his father's anxieties, Philip was still trying to be a dutiful son. He had sent his father a large fruit basket as a birthday gift in May 2002. Tony responded with a warm handwritten thank-you note, saying that he had been "delighted" to catch up during a recent conversation and was looking forward to seeing Philip soon. He signed the note "With much love, Father."

The Marshalls left Northeast Harbor in mid-August to return to Manhattan. Mrs. Astor spent a leisurely final few weeks at her cherished home. She took her entire staff out to dinner on Friday, August 30, as a gesture of gratitude. That Sunday she attended church at St. Mary's, and afterward, with plans to fly back to New York the next day, she spent the afternoon sitting in her backyard overlooking the water, soaking up the sun and the scenery.

"We went by and she was sitting in her chaise lounge," recalls Pyne. "My husband said, 'My God, Brooke you have the most beautiful ankles and feet.' She was known for that." Brooke was pleased but could not resist teasing her guests about their motives. As Pyne adds, "She paused and looked around at her possessions and said, 'What are you after?' It was so funny."

8. The Painting Vanishes

O
F ALL THE ROOMS
in Brooke Astor's Park Avenue apartment, the library was her favorite place to entertain visitors. The room gleamed with old-money elegance, from the red velvet Louis XV chairs to the walls shimmering with ten coats of oxblood lacquer, which the decorator Albert Hadley had used to replace fake wood paneling. Brass-accented bookcases showcased Vincent Astor's collection of three thousand first editions bound in Moroccan leather. For more than thirty years, the place of honor over the marble fireplace belonged to the Childe Hassam painting
Flags, Fifth Avenue.

Mrs. Astor reveled in compliments about her painting, an astute purchase that had taken on a powerful emotional resonance. "An exhilarating picture it is, full of high hopes," wrote Brendan Gill in
The New Yorker.
Mrs. Astor was often identified with the 1917 painting, a vibrant image of the city awash in patriotic sentiment in the month after the United States entered World War I. The red, white, and blue flags of America, Britain, and France are draped on the B. Altman department store and neighboring buildings, with a busy street scene below.

Hassam, America's best-known impressionist, painted a series of similar flag pictures, and when he died, in 1935, he left most of them to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which later sold the majority. The paintings slowly increased in value and renown. Mrs. Astor's Childe Hassam (also known by art historians as
Up the Avenue from Thirty-fourth Street, May 1917
) had previously belonged to Irving Mitchell Felt, a sports impresario and the president of Madison Square Garden Corporation, who had snapped up the New York Rangers and the New York Knicks. Like many first-generation mega-rich New Yorkers, Felt wanted to enhance his social standing through philanthropy. Already a Metropolitan Opera board member and a founding patron of Lincoln Center, he targeted the Metropolitan Museum, where in the early 1970s a donation of $250,000 in cash or art would make him a benefactor. Felt sensed that the Childe Hassam would be his ticket, but the Met disagreed. As Ashton Hawkins, then the secretary of the Met's board, recalls, "The curator felt it wasn't worth that."

Hawkins, disappointed by the Met's decision, thought of Brooke Astor's zest for the city and the patriotism of her Marine general father. When he told her about the painting, Mrs. Astor eagerly sought it out, purchasing it for $172,000 in 1971 through Wildenstein & Company. She loved flags; the sight stirred something in her dating back to her expatriate childhood. In the belief that the Metropolitan Museum had undervalued the work, she decided to have the last word. "After she unveiled it, we talked about how she got it," recalls Hawkins. "She said 'It's going to go to the Metropolitan, along with certain drawings.'"

For decades Mrs. Astor repeated that verbal promise to museum officials. Philippe de Montebello says, "Every time I went to her house for dinner, she'd say, 'See that—that's for you someday.'" Dating from 1992 and perhaps earlier, her wills bequeath the Childe Hassam to the Metropolitan but feature a provision that was pure Brooke, insisting that the painting be kept on permanent display rather than risk the indignity of storage.

But then, in early 2002, Mrs. Astor suddenly sold her beloved painting to the Gerald Peters Gallery for $10 million, the highest price ever paid for a Childe Hassam flag painting. (The previous record, set at Christie's in 1998, was $7.9 million for
Afternoon on the Avenue.
) Even though she was still an emeritus member of the board and attended meetings, Mrs. Astor did not notify the Metropolitan; the bequest simply vanished from her most recent will. She could be capricious, but to many of her friends, the disappearance of the Childe Hassam seemed to reflect more than the whims of a one-hundred-year-old society matriarch.

Through much of 2002, Mrs. Astor was either in Palm Beach or in Maine or was enveloped in the pleasant haze of birthday preparations. Only when she returned from Cove End in September did the space where the Childe Hassam had hung seem hauntingly vacant, although the picture had been replaced by a portrait of her father, General Russell. David Rockefeller did not pry, but he was baffled by her decision to part with the Hassam. "It was a picture she always enjoyed," he said. "To have it removed from the apartment—I found it difficult to understand." Annette de la Renta was especially mystified when she heard Brooke's explanation for the sale. "I didn't even have to ask—Brooke volunteered," she recalls. "Brooke said, 'Tony wanted me to sell the painting because I'm running out of money.'" Annette found the notion of Brooke having to hock her possessions inexplicable, and said so. But Brooke repeated, "He says I'm running out of money. We sold it and got a very good price for it." Chris Ely would later tell many people involved in the Astor case that upon hearing that the painting had been sold for millions, Brooke plaintively asked, "Now can I buy a dress?"

For years Brooke had laughed with her friends about Tony's dreary efforts to force her to curtail her extravagance, but now she seemed genuinely frightened. No one knew whether this was a symptom of the sometimes exaggerated fears of the elderly or whether Tony was encouraging her to worry about money. Viscount Astor recalls a typical conversation, over dinner at La Cote Basque in the fall of 2002, with Brooke complaining, "'Tony says I have to sell this or that—I haven't any money.'" Alarmed, Lord Astor made surreptitious financial inquiries. "I finally looked into it, and discovered it was rubbish," he said. He learned that his friend was solvent enough to "keep anyone going for a long time, even at her level."

Four years later Tony offered his own explanation for the painting's sale. According to him, the triggering event occurred when his mother lent the painting to the Adelson Galleries for a Manhattan exhibition in the fall of 2001. "At the time the exhibition was arranged, we had some discussions about selling the painting if it generated interest," he wrote in a detailed chronology. "Not long after the Adelson exhibition ended, a potential buyer approached me ... When I told my Mother how much was being offered, she decided to sell it, and to share some of the profit with me by paying me a 'commission' for arranging the purchase." That so-called commission was $2 million, but Tony has never explained how his mother settled on that figure. If she had taken a standard route and auctioned
Flags, Fifth Avenue
at Christie's for the same price, the fee would have been slightly more than $1 million. At the time, none of Brooke's friends or any Metropolitan Museum officials knew that Tony had profited directly from this transaction. "I remember her delight when she bought the Childe Hassam," Peggy Pierrepont recalls. "So when I heard the painting was gone, I thought, 'Oh, there's hanky-panky.' It just did not seem right."

Tony's chronology makes it seem as if the art dealer Gerald Peters aggressively pursued the painting. But Peters insists that Tony was the one eager to make a sale. "Tony Marshall was at a dinner sitting next to someone who works for me," Peters recalls. "He brought up the painting, and we took it on consignment, and after a period of time decided to buy it. He told us that he got the appraisal from the auction houses, and marked it up." Peters never dealt directly with Tony; everything was done through lawyers. But the gallery owner says that he was given the impression that everyone was being altruistic: "The implication was that we were helping Mrs. Astor and helping her philanthropy."

Peters resold the painting to George Soros, who kept the artwork in his country home. According to the
New York Times,
Soros bought the Childe Hassam for $20 million, twice the price that Peters paid to Brooke Astor and her agent, Tony Marshall. Peters will not comment on the price but says, with some justice, "It worked out well."