Mrs. Astor Regrets (35 page)

When lawyers from both sides descended on 778 Park to view Brooke Astor's living situation, Louise Milligan, a Chase managing director who had sealed the apartment earlier, pointed out that a table had mysteriously appeared in the dining room. There were other inexplicable changes. "Someone got in there," recalls Robbins. "There were no clothes. Where were all her clothes?" The Chanel suits, the thousands of dollars' worth of designer ball gowns—treasures that might well have been auctioned off at Sotheby's or donated to the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute—had gone missing. To this day, the dis-appearances have never been explained.

Like perfume testers, the lawyers lined up in a procession to sniff the infamous couch in quest of the elusive scent of dog urine. The consensus was that the sofa was odorless—a point in favor of Tony. His lawyer Harvey Corn wrote in court papers: "The couch referred to in the petition is richly upholstered and without any bad smell, urine or otherwise." But the argument from the other side was that the couch had been surreptitiously cleaned. The public relations consultant Fraser Seitel insisted, "We don't know who did it and we don't know when." With black humor, Philip Marshall joked with Annette and Chris Ely that he hoped to bring Boysie into court as a witness.

During this summer when New Yorkers were bewitched, bothered, and bewildered over Brooke, prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney's office were reading the headlines too. Susan Robbins received a voicemail message from Elizabeth Loewy, the prosecutor who ran the elder abuse unit in District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office. Robbins decided not to respond to Loewy's offer of help. She saw her responsibility as trying to determine Mrs. Astor's wishes, and she could not believe that any mother would want her son investigated by criminal authorities.

At home in South Dartmouth, Philip spent hours on the phone with the lawyers and the press while sitting in his small second-floor office, with a window overlooking the backyard trees. The room, decorated with American Indian pottery from his stepfather and a landscape painted by Nan, was just a few steps away from the Buddhist prayer corner tucked into a stairwell, featuring a small bronze Buddha, incense, a rug, and beads. The rest of the house was filled with mementos of happier times: an oil portrait of Brooke Astor in her heyday, framed photos of Philip's father and mother during their marriage, snapshots of Winslow and Sophie with their doting great-grandmother. One evening Philip drove to Providence for a drink at a riverfront hotel with his vacationing aunt, Sukie Kuser, Tony's half-sister. "I was on Philip's side from the beginning," explains Kuser. Commiserating over their fractured family, they both blamed the same person for all that had gone wrong. As Philip says, "We kept talking about 'What did Charlene think she was doing?'"

What Tony and Charlene were actually doing at this moment was taking a hard look at their finances. Without access to Brooke's money to pay for the Maine expenses and with their legal bills piling up, the couple decided they needed to cut back. Steve Hamor, aged sixty-three and Mrs. Astor's Maine gardener for forty-one years, learned during a phone call that he and his two sons were about to be unemployed. "Mr. Marshall told me, 'I have bad news—we're going to have to let you go,'" Hamor recalls. He offered to take a pay cut, but the couple was adamant, granting three months' severance pay to Hamor and his sons, Steve Jr. and Scott. It was not until a year later that Hamor discovered that Brooke Astor had left him $50,000 in her will, but with the condition that he had to be working at Cove End at the time of her death. Tony knew, just as he had when he had fired Chris Ely, that he was depriving the loyal employee of Mrs. Astor's bequest.

During Act One of the Astor affair, the playbill kept producing characters on the periphery of Brooke Astor's life, who emerged for a moment into the spotlight, some by choice and others unwittingly. Paul Gilbert, now living quietly in Charleston with his third wife, was startled when a
New York Post
photographer turned up at his front door—he was now immortalized as Charlene's wronged first husband. Alice Perdue voluntarily went to the
New York Times
as the scandal's whistle-blower ("A Former Astor Aide Tells How Spending Habits Changed"). But no character made more of a grand entrance, or an impression on the critics, than Francis X. Morrissey, Jr. For a graying middle-aged man who usually blends into the background, he initially appeared in the press with such an ominous drum roll that he might just as well have been wearing a black hat and a sandwich board emblazoned with the identifier
VILLAIN.
Morrissey's tangled legal history caught up with him as reporters searched happily through the boxes of documents on public file: "Lawyer Advising Astor Affairs Was Suspended for Two Years"
(New York Times);
"ASTOR LAWYER'S WILLFUL DECEIT? HE INHERITED MILLIONS FROM ESTATES OF OLD FRIENDS"
(Daily News);
"'THERE IS EVIL IN ME'—ASTOR LAWYER $HAME"
(New York Post).

For Tony and Charlene, this was death by a thousand cuts. Their lawyers insisted to the press that Morrissey was a trusted family friend and that they were unaware that he had ever been suspended from practicing law. After the
Times
ran an editorial about elder abuse ("The Brooke Astor Effect"), noting that the "philanthropist now appears to be getting the attention she needs," Ken Warner and Harvey Corn jointly wrote a published letter to the editor: "Mr. Marshall has been lovingly devoted to his mother and her care. He does not deserve the one-sided, unremitting media attack that he and his wife have been subjected to."

Yet even as Tony continued to claim that his conduct was blameless, new documents emerged to suggest otherwise. While at Holly Hill in mid-August, Philip found the nurses' notebooks in a second-floor bedroom. Skimming through a few pages, he became transfixed by the details, including his grandmother's worry that "they" were considering "putting her away" and her nightmares of a man trying to kill her. Just then he heard the sound of a car; it was his father and Charlene. Philip hid upstairs and kept paging through the heartbreaking notebooks, a litany of his grandmother's sorrows.

Under normal circumstances, Brooke Astor's final 2002 will and its three codicils would have become public only upon her death, when submitted for probate in Westchester County Surrogate's Court. Earlier wills and all correspondence involving the lawyers (including Terry Christensen, Francis Morrissey, and Warren Whitaker) would have remained private documents forever. But instead, Susan Robbins was reading her way through voluminous paperwork with a mixture of disbelief and gusto. Who could have imagined that an intricately plotted legal thriller worthy of Scott Turow could be found by reading between the lines of Brooke Astor's ever-changing final wishes? Robbins kept getting up and going into the office of Geoffrey Chinn, a colleague in her firm, to announce: "Oh my God, this doesn't make any sense."

Robbins knew that Brooke Astor had closed the Vincent Astor Foundation rather than let Tony run it. She could see that earlier wills bequeathed the Childe Hassam to the Metropolitan Museum, and even the most recent 2002 will gave an interest in Cove End to Philip Marshall and the bulk of her estate to charity. So it appeared implausible that after reaching age one hundred, the elderly philanthropist had suddenly decided to tear up her entire estate plan and make every subsequent change benefit her son.

Most out of character was the firing of Sullivan & Cromwell, the firm that Brooke Astor had trusted for four decades. But given Mrs. Astor's age and apparently limited mental acuity, Robbins was also skeptical about the first codicil, prepared under Sullivan & Cromwell's watch by Terry Christensen. Typically, Brooke exchanged letters with Christensen when she wanted to change her will, but Robbins did not see any correspondence indicating that Brooke had sought this codicil. As Robbins says, "I had a clear vision that all the lawyers were doing bad things to her. It was just so obvious."

When Terry Christensen met with Robbins and Chinn at his impressive Sullivan & Cromwell office on the waterfront at the tip of Manhattan, he declined to offer enlightenment as to why he had used the unusual phrase "first and last codicil." To Robbins, those magic words signified that "something wasn't right and he knew it. No lawyer ever says that." Christensen spoke with anger about Tony Marshall's decision to cut his mother's ties to Sullivan & Cromwell. As Robbins recalls, "Terry told us it was a balancing act for him, dealing with Tony and Mrs. Astor and trying to please them both."

Another mystery that perplexed Robbins was Brooke Astor's signature on the third codicil. "It was too perfect," Robbins says. "If you look at the two codicils before, she could barely sign her name. How did her signature get so good on this one?" The lawyer initially thought an old-fashioned ink stamp must have been used. When Robbins and the other lawyers took a field trip to Tony's office at 405 Park Avenue to examine his files, she sat at Tony's desk and searched in vain for the stamp.

Francis Morrissey was actually eager to talk to Robbins when she requested a meeting, since he welcomed the opportunity to defend Tony and Charlene on the charges of elder abuse. As someone who had seen Brooke constantly in recent years, he viewed himself as a character witness for the embattled Marshalls. He was cautious enough, however, to bring his own lawyer, Michael Ross, who had helped him regain his law license, to the late August meeting at Robbins's office. Morrissey kept insisting that he and Tony had done nothing wrong. His voice at times rose in passion and conviction as he repeatedly spoke of Mrs. Astor's late-in-life desire to shower her son with love.

The two-hour meeting was an exercise in mutual frustration. Morrissey later told a friend that Robbins was "crude and unsophisticated" in her questioning and that he found it difficult "to control my big Irish temper and keep my mouth shut." Robbins was so irritated by his unyielding tale of maternal love that at the end of the session she lectured him: "You should be ashamed of yourself. You're the reason that Brooke Astor is afraid of men in suits."

12. The Art of Shunning

T
HE BOARD OF TRUSTEES
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art meets twice a year in the serene C. Douglas Dillon boardroom, with members taking their places around a richly stained dark brown oak table crafted by Viscount David Linley, the son of Princess Margaret. Those chosen for Manhattan's most sought-after board memberships represent a mixture of New York aristocracy, both old money and new money, culled from society and Wall Street.

Annette de la Renta, a board member since 1981, is vice chairman of the museum and heads the acquisitions committee, two powerful positions. On the afternoon of September 12, 2006, when the first board meeting since the Astor scandal hit the newspapers was scheduled, the museum staff believed that Tony Marshall would not be attending, since he had not RSVPed. Many gathered at the handsome table had been angry to learn that Tony had not only sold his mother's Childe Hassam, repeatedly promised to the museum, but made off with a $2 million commission. The assumption was that Tony would be too embarrassed to show his face. So there was a collective gasp when, just as the meeting was beginning, he strode in. "We thought he did it for shock value," says one staffer. Heads swiveled to Annette de la Renta, who conveyed her fury with a what-the-hell-is-he-doing-here grimace.

"I debated, should I go or not?" Tony told me several months later. Elected to the board in 1986, he had graduated to nonvoting emeritus status in 2000 when he turned seventy-six, so his appearance at this meeting was primarily symbolic. "I thought, Look, I know I'm right. I know the truth, we know the truth. I'm not going to shy away from there. I want to see how people react to my being there."

The answer was immediately apparent: he was persona non grata. The museum's director, Philippe de Montebello, recalls, "I averted my eyes—my gaze never met his. Everyone did. We were rather surprised that he showed up." For Tony, walking to his seat was the equivalent of a long day's journey into social death. It was a shunning worthy of Edith Wharton, although Tony lacked the rebelliousness of Lily Bart in
The House of Mirth.
Out of compassion, two men broke ranks. Carl Spielvogel, the retired advertising CEO and Clinton ambassador, turned to Tony and simply asked, "How are you?" Malcolm Wiener, a wealthy commodities trader, made a point of walking all the way around the table to be gracious, saying, "I'm sorry to hear about all this. Did you know about it beforehand?" Tony replied, "Absolutely not." Wiener replied, "That's appalling." Tony was so grateful for the gesture of support that he later wrote Wiener a thank-you note.

As de Montebello launched into his description of upcoming exhibitions, the other board members kept glancing at the adversaries. "It was an unpleasant situation," Annette de la Renta says. "I just did not look at him." Tony, who had seated himself across from Annette, carefully watched her reaction, happily remarking later, "By my being there, for the next hour and forty-five minutes, she was visibly upset." Spouses had been invited to join the members after the meeting for a private tour of the new exhibit, "Cézanne to Picasso," but Charlene stayed away, maintaining an anxious vigil at home with Daniel Billy. When the meeting ended, Tony headed for the exit. "One female—I won't say who it is—went down in the elevator with me," Tony says. "She gave me the worst look you can possibly imagine, this stare." But he had shown up, and he was rather proud of having faced everyone down. He vowed to me that he would not be forced out by social stigma, but this would turn out to be his last board meeting.

***

In public, Tony Marshall was sticking with his Marine Corps attitude, holding his head high and being tough under fire. But in private, his life was a shambles. Ten days before the Metropolitan board meeting he had sent Alec a two-page typed letter that was a howl of pure pain, describing the sleepless nights, death threats, and damage to his reputation. Tony painted a bleak picture of himself and Charlene cowering at home, weeping. With skyrocketing legal bills and no salary, Tony wrote, he was worried about running out of money.