Mrs. Astor Regrets (31 page)

Eager to terminate the interview, Tony decided to wrap things up by moving to a safer family topic—his son Alec. "I love photography. One of my sons, Alec, got the bug," he said. "I gave him a camera when he was eight. He's a professional photographer, done eighty or ninety assignments for
Architectural Digest.
He's very good, very attentive to details." After hearing this recital of paternal pride, I asked about his other son, Philip. Tony was dismissive, saying vaguely, "He's in historic preservation. He writes, does consulting work, he teaches." There was so little affection in his voice that it was evident there was some kind of strain between the two. "Your family has worked out their own worlds?" I asked. "Very much," Tony replied. "Very much indeed."

On October 25, Tony Marshall was in his element, receiving an honor named after his grandfather, the Major John H. Russell Leadership Award, from the Marine Corps University Foundation, a group that had been launched with the aid of a $100,000 grant from the Vincent Astor Foundation in 1980. Tony had been its founding chairman, and now he was receiving its highest honor in a roomful of generals and other successful Marines. Tony gave a sentimental and self-indulgent speech, offering glimpses of himself as a ten-year-old visiting his grandfather and firing his first shot at a Marine Corps shooting range. He invoked General Russell's heroism in Guam, Mexico, and Haiti and spoke earnestly about what a powerful influence the general had been on his life. "I think of my grandfather every day and have shared stories time and again with my mother about Bulba," Tony said, using his childhood nickname for the general. Reiterating the words he had used with me, he added, "He was the compass of my life, and he set me on the right course."

It was a heartfelt and triumphant address, but in hindsight it had a note of the-right-course-not-taken sadness. This would be Tony Marshall's last unchallenged moment of glory in his brief, late-in-life season basking in public acclaim. Little did this distinguished-looking eighty-one-year-old man with a hint of military bearing in his posture know how far and how fast he would fall.

Daniel Billy wrote a memo to Mrs. Astor's staff on December 9, 2005, detailing who was allowed to visit: two Episcopal ministers, Mrs. de la Renta and Mr. David Rockefeller, Mr. Melhado, Ms. Barbara Walters, Emily Harding, Randy Bourscheidt, Mr. Alexander Marshall, and Mr. and Mrs. Philip Marshall. The memo stated that several former staff members were not permitted unless specifically invited: Chris Ely, Erica Meyer, Marciano Amaral, a housekeeper named Natalia Patornal, and the former chef, Daniel Sucur, and his wife, Liliane. The memo warned, "
NO ONE
is to be allowed on the premises without prior approval."

Tony Marshall, like any employer, might have legitimate concerns about aggrieved former employees. But for the voraciously sociable Mrs. Astor, who had spent months in her apartment with no distractions, deprived of familiar faces, this was a lonely existence. Now being treated for skin cancer with radiation and sporting unsightly bandages on her nose, she had also lost her frequent outings to Central Park. As Marciano Amaral angrily says, "If you put me inside an apartment and I don't go out, I don't see friends, I'm not entitled to do anything, it's like being in a prison. This was murder in slow motion."

Christmas at 778 Park Avenue that year was short of good cheer for Brooke Astor's staff and caregivers. Pearline Noble, who earned $20 an hour as a nurse's aide, had recently requested her first raise after two years: she was granted a mere eighty cents an hour, a 2 percent raise per year. Rounding that number up to a dollar an hour would have cost Mrs. Astor an extra $8 a week. "They said there's no way they could go over this because things are hard," Pearline says. "They didn't expect nurses would take up so much money." With her perfect (presumably inadvertent) knack for making remarks that rub salt into wounds, Charlene announced to Pearline that her own children had worked for less money at minimum-wage jobs and they had survived just fine.

The Christmas bonuses were similarly meager. Private-duty nurses on the Upper East Side, who command $50 to $70 an hour, typically receive a week's pay at the holidays, perhaps as much as $2,000. Tony Marshall showed his appreciation by giving his mother's nurses $100 each. As even one of Tony's defenders later acknowledged, "He was really, really cheap."

But Mrs. Astor's generosity knew no bounds when it came to her daughter-in-law. On December 20, Charlene wrote her a note of "heartfelt thanks" for contributing $100,000—the entire endowment—to a fledgling charitable entity, the Shepherd Community Foundation, which had the third Mrs. Marshall as its president. The lawyer Peter J. Kelley explained that Francis Morrissey had asked him to draw up the paperwork to create the foundation, in 2002, in anticipation of Brooke Astor's demise. "They could see that she was declining," Kelley says. "The will provided for a goodly part of her fortune to be put into a foundation to be set up later. So he [Morrissey] figured it would be good to set it up in advance."

Francis Morrissey appeared to have discovered a legal loophole that would allow the Marshalls to circumvent the conditions established by Terry Christensen in the first codicil to Brooke Astor's will. That codicil, which would transfer some $30 million from Vincent Astor's trust to the Anthony Marshall Fund upon Mrs. Astor's death, pointedly excluded Charlene. She could not be a trustee, and the fund would cease to exist when Tony died. However, if Tony's foundation wanted to give millions to a charitable foundation run by Charlene, there was no legal stricture preventing him from doing so. Now, thanks to that $100,000 infusion, Mrs. Marshall, the president of the Shepherd Community Foundation, could write her own charitable checks: the Juilliard School received $12,500, and St. James' Church benefited too. Just as Brooke had burnished the Astor name with her philanthropic gifts, Charlene was on her way to enhancing the Marshall name as well as her own social standing.

While Roger Williams University was on winter break in early January 2006, Philip Marshall used his precious free time to head into Manhattan to visit friends and his grandmother. When he was in New York, he usually stayed either with his brother in Ossining or in the basement of his friend Tenzing Chadotsang's home in Queens. Despite his pedigree, he had never felt comfortable on the Upper East Side. The Chadot-sangs, devout Buddhists, had a prayer corner in their brick home where Philip would perform his devotions along with the Tibetan family. His hosts were mystified by the formality of his relationship with his father, since they could not believe that he had to make an appointment to see Tony. As Tenzing Chadotsang put it, "If I want to see my father, I show up."

When Philip went to see his grandmother on Park Avenue, he arrived late in the day, when he assumed that his father and Daniel Billy, Jr., would not be on the premises. "I did not want my father to be chaperoning," he said. He usually did not linger. "My grandmother was a twenty-minute visit, because she'd fall asleep," he said. "Sometimes I'd just sit there. What do you do with someone who is a hundred and four years old? You hold their hand, you give them a very gentle foot massage. You say 'I love you' a lot and make kissing sounds. My grandmother liked that."

Brooke no longer greeted her visitors in the red-lacquered library. Now her days were spent in the blue room, a sitting room adjoining her bedroom. Decorated with a floral tapestry rug, a pink-and-blue chintz couch, blue drapes, an antique mirror, and a framed dog painting, it had become a bit of a jumble, with books piled every which way and wear and tear evident on the furnishings. Brooke ate her meals there, watched
Animal Planet
on the ancient 13-inch TV, and dozed on the couch. On this visit, Philip sang children's songs to her; she smiled sweetly in response, closed her eyes like a child who has heard a comforting lullaby, and drifted off.

As Philip was leaving, he chatted with Pearline Noble and greeted Minnette Christie when she arrived for her shift. There was no overt agenda, just a chance to show his concern and appreciation by asking a few questions about his grandmother's life. Rarely have such pleasantries provoked such an outpouring. Emboldened by Philip's interest and fortified by each other, the nurses seized the moment and expressed all their frustrations and fears.

"Minnette said my grandmother was only going to the doctor once a month, and she wasn't going outside at all," Philip explains. The nurses complained that Tony had turned down their requests for equipment, from a hospital bed to an air purifier. They mentioned an unusual year-old memo from Erica Meyer instructing them not to call 911 immediately if Mrs. Astor had a medical emergency but to contact people on an attached list instead. The women claimed that the household was a shambles because no one was in charge and Daniel Billy was too polite to enforce a semblance of discipline. As a result, Boysie and Girlsie were not being walked regularly, with predictable results. Minnette said that she had complained to Dr. Pritchett that Mrs. Astor was being fed the same meal of leftovers four days a week. Tony and Daniel Billy had been told and had demanded that the cook make fresh meals daily, but those instructions had promptly been ignored.

There was more, much more. Minnette and Pearline also mentioned the curious ubiquity of Francis Morrissey. On the one hand, the lawyer had always gone out of his way to be kind to the staff, even handing Pearline $100 when she complained about how poorly she was being paid. At the same time, the nurses could not forget Mrs. Astor's distress before and after every meeting with Morrissey and the other lawyers.

The two women believed that they were blowing off steam and did not expect to be taken seriously. "We weren't saying anything bad about anyone in the family," Pearline later insisted. "Things were not getting done. We weren't trying to set the son against the father, never."

Philip walked out of Brooke's apartment in a daze. His father and Charlene either were not paying attention or were callously ignoring obvious problems. The nurses, who knew they were risking their jobs if their words were seen as disloyal, seemed motivated by genuine concern for his grandmother. Baffled as to what to do next, Philip needed a confidant who could put the nurses' words in a larger context. The obvious candidate was Chris Ely, who eagerly met Philip in Manhattan the next day at the Pershing Square Café, across from Grand Central Station. Unlike their conversation a year earlier, after Ely had been fired, this time the former butler spoke bluntly about Tony and Charlene and their "meanness" to Mrs. Astor. As Philip remembers, "Chris egged me on. He was really angry."

At the Chadotsang home, Philip telephoned other members of the Astor staff who had been fired by his father. He hit pay dirt with a call to Alice Perdue, who was relieved that someone was interested in hearing her tale about financial irregularities and odd disbursements from Mrs. Astor's accounts to Tony and Charlene. "I thought, 'Oh, good, I can tell someone,'" Perdue says. Philip also reached Lourdes Hilario, the remaining bookkeeper who handled Mrs. Astor's accounts, and she was also willing to talk. "By the time I left Manhattan," Philip says, "I knew that things were much worse than I could ever have imagined."

At home in South Dartmouth, Philip ran a Google search on Morrissey and immediately found the 1993
New York Times
article detailing the attorney's ethics problems surrounding his fee dispute with Mar Oil. Why would Tony hire a lawyer with such a history? "It was really tearing Philip up," says Toby Hilliard, Philip's prep school friend, who lives in New Mexico. "I spent hours on the phone with him. I was a good sounding board, since I was far away from the scene."

As a professor of historic preservation, Philip's specialty is paint-chip analysis, in which decades of grime and multiple coats of paint are scraped away to determine the original color and chemical formula. State agencies wishing to know the original color of bridges, railroad stations, and historic landmarks seek Philip out. Applying his skills at historical documentation to his grandmother's life, he tried to learn as much as he could about her medical and financial history. Although Tony's main office was at 405 Park Avenue, he kept a computer and some files in Daniel Billy's office in Brooke's apartment. On a return trip to New York, Philip, feeling a trifle ridiculous in this cloak-and-dagger role, went sleuthing. He snapped photographs of the peeling paint on the window frames and the stained carpets—signs of neglect—and poked around the fifteenth-floor office.

The more he learned, the angrier he became. The paper trail appeared to show that his father and Charlene had excised virtually everyone and everything that gave Brooke Astor pleasure. Their actions were more than aggressive cost-cutting; it felt to Philip like a vendetta. The Marshalls were using Brooke's money to buy everything they had ever wanted. The juxtaposition of their actions and his grandmother's straitened circumstances fueled Philip's rage. Unwilling to face his father's culpability, he blamed Charlene.

As Philip pondered his options, he conferred with Boston lawyers recommended by Nan's family and then was handed off gracefully to the venerable New York law firm of Milbank Tweed, which, not coincidentally, represented David Rockefeller. The Milbank lawyers told Philip that he might indeed have a case in challenging Tony Marshall's care of Brooke Astor. But they cautioned that the cost would be astronomical, far out of the reach of a college professor. As a last resort, Philip contacted David Rockefeller, since the retired banker had been the one who had convinced Tony to open Holly Hill for Brooke the previous summer. On March 6, 2006, Philip wrote:

Dear Mr. Rockefeller,

I am sending you the enclosed material in light of our shared concern for Brooke and given what I have found out about her circumstances. I am extremely concerned about and frustrated about Brooke's situation. I am looking for your advice.