Mrs. Astor Regrets (34 page)

But for Tony and Charlene—blindsided by the charges, shocked by the betrayal of Philip and erstwhile friends such as David Rockefeller—every day brought a new indignity. Overnight the Marshalls had gone from being proper Upper East Siders, welcome in any exclusive club in town, to Public Enemies. They had to endure headlines like this July 29 gem from the
New York Post:
"'EVIL' SON SEES ASTOR IN THE HOSPITAL." Everyone close to the Marshalls was hounded for comment by the press. The homebound Marshalls, who often held hands and cried during this ordeal, complained to friends about being stalked by reporters, receiving malicious late-night phone calls and about Justice Stackhouse's highhanded action in cutting off Tony's salary (for managing Brooke's money) without even holding a hearing over the allegations. Loyal friends expressed incredulity. "I thought, oh my God, how could anyone say this?" says Moises Kaufman, the director of
I Am My Own Wife.

Clinging to his honorific, Ambassador Anthony D. Marshall issued a statement saying that he was "shocked and deeply hurt" by the "completely untrue" allegations and insisting that he authorized $2.5 million a year to pay for Mrs. Astor's care. "My mother has a staff of eight with instructions to provide her with whatever she needs and whatever they think she should have," he wrote. Tony portrayed himself as a victim, and as outraged that Philip and his conspirators had not spoken to him before racing into court: "I am very troubled that allegations like these would first be made in a court petition, instead of discussing any concerns with me directly." Stressing that he was more invested in his mother's health than these interlopers were, he added, "I love my mother and no one cares more about her than I do. Her well-being, her comfort, and her dignity mean everything to me." But public opinion was at flood tide against him. When the
Daily News
reported on Tony's statement, the newspaper punctuated it with the sarcastic headline "I AM SON KIND OF WONDERFUL."

Locked out of his office at 405 Park Avenue by Judge Stackhouse and unable to retrieve receipts and paperwork attesting to bills paid on his mother's behalf, Tony was at a disadvantage in defending himself. This was war, and the Marshalls needed legal gladiators. Initially they hired Harvey Corn, of Greenfield, Stein & Senior, a respected former clerk to a surrogate court judge with an estate law practice. To supplement Corn's avuncular approach, the Marshalls brought in Kenneth Warner, an aggressive litigator whom they had met through Richenthal. Warner threw himself into the case as Tony's legal spokesman by lashing out at every perceived foe, from reporters covering the case to Susan Robbins, with no-holds-barred ferocity. A crisis management firm run by Warner's brother-in-law, George Sard, was hired to do damage control. It was a Sisyphean task, and as a result the Marshalls ended up working with four different PR firms during the next sixteen months.

While the Marshalls were losing every spin cycle in the newspapers, the lawyers quietly tried to work out a settlement offstage. Harvey Corn went to see Ira Salzman to assess the likelihood of a quick resolution. "In these family fights, everyone gets dirty, legal expenses get run up," Corn explains. "I tried to see if we could resolve it right away." The negotiations fell apart, however, after Corn and Salzman mutually broached the possibility of making Annette and Tony coguardians. Upon being told of the tentative plan, Annette flatly refused. Annoyed that Salzman would even float such an idea, she hired her own lawyer, Paul Saunders, a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, who had been recommended by Henry Kissinger. An urbane Harvard-trained lawyer whose expertise was international litigation, Saunders was more at home negotiating border disputes than refereeing a family squabble. "He was the class of the field," says a staffer for Justice Stackhouse. Susan Robbins joined with Annette in turning down the coguardianship proposal, based on her growing concerns about Tony Marshall's conduct. As she told Salzman in an incredulous tone, "Are you kidding? Tony can never be a guardian."

At Holly Hill on Friday, July 28, Chris Ely was eagerly readying the house for Mrs. Astor's return, patrolling the stone mansion to make sure that everything was in perfect order. The butler, who had been rehired by Annette, had also started taking inventory of missing property, from a chinchilla blanket to a set of breakfast china to a large painting of a dog that had been the centerpiece of a grouping of similar art in the hallway stairwell. Mrs. Astor's guardian had also rehired Brooke's French chef, Daniel Sucur, and his wife, Liliane. The pillows were fluffed, the kitchen was restocked, and the house was about to become a home again.

That rainy evening Susan Robbins finally felt it was time to go to Lenox Hill Hospital to meet her new client. She discovered that the place resembled an armed camp. "There was a guard in the hallway and a guard at her room," recalls Robbins. "Mrs. Astor was sleeping. She had been really sick. If she hadn't come to the hospital, she probably wouldn't be with us. She was very, very thin." Robbins stayed for three hours, talking to Dr. Gelbard and the nurses until her client woke up for dinner. "The cases that I've been on before when people are out of it, you can't talk to them," Robbins says. "But she was sitting up. She has beautiful blue eyes. She did try and talk a little bit. I thought there was recognition."

Robbins also got an earful from Mrs. Astor's private-duty nurses. "The staff really hated Charlene," said Robbins. "Charlene had come into the hospital, and she was really pissed off that the nurses had given these affidavits." For their part, the nurses complained that Mrs. Marshall had been disruptive and intimidating.

The next morning, at the start of an elaborately choreographed getaway, the nurses dressed Mrs. Astor up in a wig, makeup, sunglasses, and a large hat, as if she were a publicity-shy Greta Garbo in need of a dignified disguise. Then they helped her into a wheelchair, spirited her out the back entrance of Lenox Hill, and put her in a waiting ambulance. Destination: Holly Hill. "She was stable to go," says Dr. Gelbard. "I didn't know whether she would live for three weeks, three months, or a year."

No one had the courtesy to tell Tony Marshall that his mother had been discharged from the hospital. When he and Charlene showed up at Lenox Hill later in the day, they discovered that Brooke's room was empty, and no one would tell them her whereabouts. Tony repeatedly asked, "What do you mean, she's not here?" He was stung to see that the only flowers left in the room were a vase of pink roses that he had brought to his mother.

Trailed by the press corps, Tony and Charlene went in search of the missing Mrs. Astor, their every word and movement chronicled for the curious masses. After entering her apartment building and speaking to the doorman, Charlene informed their entourage from the fourth estate, "She's gone to the country, up to Westchester." She then complained that she had been hoping to get some rest. The next stop for the Marshalls, after lunch at home, was Holly Hill. As the
New York Times
reported, Tony introduced himself to a security guard at the Briarcliff Manor estate, saying, "I'm here to see my mother." The gates were opened, and Tony and Charlene drove up the winding driveway to the imposing stone mansion.

Brooke was seated in the sunroom, a pale green ground-floor room with framed bird prints, rattan chairs, overstuffed white couches, and a glass-walled view of her gardens with the Hudson River in the distance. Philip was sitting right beside her, holding his grandmother's hand. It was everything that Tony had ever feared: he had been replaced in his mother's affections by his own son. Philip stood so that his father could take his seat. He even made a filial gesture toward Tony, as if in denial about the blows he had inflicted to his father's reputation. "I touched him on the knee, and that did not come off right," Philip says. "It was probably not appropriate." Tony was infuriated, later telling
Vanity Fair,
"Ordinarily, it would have been a gesture of sympathy, courage. It made me want to..." According to the magazine, Tony's voice trailed off then, "his eyes blazing in fury."

Tony Marshall, with a worldview that equates repression with good breeding, is not a man who raises his voice or loses his temper in public. Not so with Charlene. The humiliations had piled up to the point where she could not take the strain anymore. Her explosive rages were stunning to behold when witnessed by anyone—nurses, employees, family members, or prying reporters—in the vicinity. Those "cheeks like apple blossoms" in her Ashley Hall yearbook turned scarlet, and with her blue eyes flashing and her white hair bobbing, the third Mrs. Marshall resembled a wounded animal flailing at her enemies. A protective wife and mother of three, a respected lay minister who administered healing prayer to troubled parishioners at St. James' Church, she had seemingly lost all emotional governors.

On that July day at Holly Hill, Philip recalls, "Charlene was seething." Railing at the nurses, she became teary-eyed in recounting how the press frenzy at Cove End had sent her pregnant daughter, Inness, to the hospital. "Mrs. Marshall was trying to make us feel guilty," says Pearline Noble, who was tending Mrs. Astor that day. "Her face became red—she was carrying on." Even defenders like Daniel Billy, Jr., would later acknowledge, "Charlene is a Leo, a lioness. If anything comes up that jeopardizes her husband or her children, watch out."

Charlene's public trials were just beginning, as her image was transformed by the press into that of a man-stealing, child-neglecting, money-hungry adulteress who had become Brooke Astor's daughter-in-law from hell. The tabloids dispatched reporters to Northeast Harbor and gleefully recounted the tawdry details of her affair with Tony Marshall and her divorce from Paul Gilbert. The
New York Post
headlined a story by Stefanie Cohen: "
ASTOR'S HAYSEED DAUGHTER-IN-LAW LEFT HER FIRST HUBBY WITH JUST
...$578" and then, the next day, ran a follow-up depicting Charlene as a bad mother who had abandoned her own children to be with Tony: "ASTOR IN-LAW DUMPED KIDS." Adding insult to injury, tabloid articles about Charlene's Charleston roots made it sound as if her family had a rusted pickup on cement blocks in their front yard, depicting them as lowbrow trash rather than shabby gentility.

The next day, when the Marshalls again visited Holly Hill, they took along a living symbol to convey their moral authority. This was Reverend John Andrew, the Episcopal priest from St. Thomas Church who was close to Brooke Astor and had married the Marshalls. Tony read another statement to the press corps camped by the side of the country road. "I know that I am right and they are wrong," he said. "I am devastated and regret only that we will never be able to erase the damage that has done by these people to us, our family and my mother." Asked why his son had issued such a damning public petition against him, Tony replied, "Oh, I couldn't possibly answer that question." The Marshalls' efforts to win the headline handicap were ham-handed. A spokeswoman for Tony, Brooke Morgenstein, later e-mailed a statement attacking Annette de la Renta to the
New York Sun:
"No protégée of Brooke Astor would conduct herself in this manner. Mrs. de la Renta is taking Mrs. Astor's name in vain and is acting contrary to everything Mrs. Astor has always stood for."

Charlene's tirades, which sometimes occurred in the presence of her fragile mother-in-law, had handed the opposition a useful weapon. At the next closed-to-the-press courthouse meeting, when Justice Stackhouse suggested making a list of those who would be permitted to visit Mrs. Astor, Paul Saunders, Annette's lawyer, requested that Charlene be banned from Holly Hill. "I understood that Charlene had been disruptive with the staff," Saunders recalls. "I was concerned that this would spill over and have an effect on Mrs. Astor's well-being." Susan Robbins also voiced her concerns about Charlene's behavior. Taking these complaints to heart, the judge barred Tony's wife from visiting her mother-in-law. From that day forward, if Charlene accompanied Tony to Holly Hill, she had to wait in the car or walk in the gardens, since she could not legally enter the house. Charlene would never see Brooke Astor alive again.

In this game of legal tit for tat, Ken Warner informed the judge that there was bad blood between his client, Tony Marshall, and Chris Ely. The judge ordered Ely to stay out of Tony's way and let the nurses chaperone Mrs. Astor's son. It may have seemed like a small legal victory to Warner, but in truth it was a huge relief to Chris Ely. The butler had already received the reward he craved, a gesture of affection from his 104-year-old employer. Although Mrs. Astor mostly spoke in fragments, a few days after returning to Holly Hill, she put her head on the butler's shoulder and croaked a plaintive four-word inquiry: "Where have you been?" Ely finessed the answer, simply replying, "I've been around." Everyone at Holly Hill had agreed to sensible rules: there would be no mention of the lawsuit in front of Mrs. Astor, nor any criticism of her son. She would be carried through this time with loving arms.

Astorgate was quickly becoming God's gift to the legal profession. Fortunes in billable hours were being created from exhaustive simultaneous investigations into all elements of Brooke Astor's life. JPMorgan Chase, the bank that assumed control of Mrs. Astor's finances, hired its own team, led by Leslie Fagen, from the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison to examine Tony's handling of his mother's books. Paul Saunders began rounding up Mrs. Astor's voluminous medical records on behalf of her guardian, Annette de la Renta. Susan Robbins knew that she would have to be a virtual mind reader, since her client was incapable of answering questions, but this was a common circumstance in her practice. Although the 104-year-old was obviously mentally incapacitated, Mrs. Astor's staff had mentioned her numerous meetings with lawyers in recent years. Wondering when Mrs. Astor had ceased to understand what she was signing, Robbins won permission from Justice Stackhouse to examine her client's recent wills.

Justice Stackhouse chose another lawyer, Sam Liebowitz, as the court evaluator, the judge's eyes and ears in researching the facts surrounding Brooke Astor. Already alerted that Mrs. Astor feared men in suits, Stackhouse gave Liebowitz sartorial advice: "When you go to see her, Sam, no suits—sneakers, T-shirt, jeans." Liebowitz replied, "Not a problem, your honor." This was a moment richly symbolic of how the world of the grande dame of New York society had tilted off its axis—sneakers and jeans to meet Mrs. Astor, a woman who had been thrilled when her nine-year-old great-grandson had worn a jacket to dinner. But the fashion advice proved irrelevant; when Liebowitz and Robbins went to Holly Hill on August 6, Mrs. Astor slept through their visit. Instead of speaking with her, the casually dressed lawyers spoke to the staff and admired the "memory room," a study where every inch of wall space was covered by photographs of Brooke with celebrities from Jimmy Stewart and Lady Bird Johnson to Princess Diana. Amid the plentitude of lawyers, strategic alliances evolved. Although Susan Robbins, Paul Saunders, Ira Salzman, and Les Fagen all worked independently for different clients, they began to share documents and discuss strategy.