Mrs. Astor Regrets (40 page)

Even during the last few weeks of her life, Brooke Astor valiantly tried to keep going. Breathe in, breathe out. At times the breathing was labored. Yet her extraordinary will to live was in evidence. The nurses reported that she was talking more, even if the words were unintelligible, as if she were trying to convey "I'm still here." After a difficult evening in which she had been truly gasping, the nurses put her in the wheelchair to take her downstairs to the sunroom. Chris Ely, looking up to the landing, called out that Mrs. Astor might prefer to stay in bed that morning. Noreen Nee recalls, "She grabbed my hand and shook her head as if to say, 'No, I'm fine.'" Brooke could still understand what was being said and make her wishes known. But she drifted peacefully off to sleep for most of the day.

August was quiet at Holly Hill, with few visitors. Before heading off to Seal Harbor, David Rockefeller stopped by to see Brooke one more time. "When I first went in the room, I think she knew it was someone she knew, but wasn't sure what my name was," Rockefeller says. "But then when I said goodbye, she looked me in the eye, I could feel that she did. Even at the end, I think she felt very close to me." Rockefeller, an old man himself, had no illusions about what was to come. As he recalls, "I thought that might be the last time that I would see her."

On Saturday night, August 11, Brooke began to say her goodbyes. She was having trouble breathing. After urgent phone calls, her local physician, Dr. Richard Strongwater, rushed to the house, Annette arrived, and Reverend Pridemore was summoned. "I was there from nine
P.M.
almost until midnight. It appeared it would be the end," Pridemore recalls. "We said all the prayers right up until last rites, and then she rallied. Her heartbeat and vital signs stabilized."

Tony and Charlene sped up from New York; they were the last to arrive. Charlene wanted to be there at the end. She had known Brooke Astor for twenty-five years, and so much history had passed between the two women. Tony wanted his wife beside him at his mother's bedside, to console him. At the front door, when the Marshalls arrived, Charlene started to walk in first, but Chris Ely blocked her way. "I'm sorry, but you can't come in," he said. The butler was nervous, but the judge had ruled that Charlene was not permitted to see Brooke. It was not Ely's place to disobey a legal order. "Even now that she's dying?" Charlene protested in disbelief. The butler replied, "She's feeling better now."

Inside the house, Tony found Annette talking to Pridemore and asked her permission to bring in Charlene. It was mortifying for him to be so powerless. He was rebuffed yet again. Tony later wrote that Annette was "heartless and hostile," adding that "when I asked her personally that night to allow Charlene and me to spend some final moments with my mother—after so many years of being together with her as a couple—she emphatically refused." But with Brooke near death, Annette felt strongly that she should prevent any encounter that might be stressful for her fragile friend. "I told Tony that was against the rules," she recalls. "I told him that he would have to discuss it with Mr. Saunders, my lawyer." Tony protested, saying, "My lawyer says it's fine." Annette says that she replied, "Tony, let it be. Go see your mother."

Tony sat on his mother's bed and held her hand and spoke to her. Pearline Noble and Minnette Christie, the two nurses who had caused him such trouble, were watching over their patient. "He glared at us, one to the other, like 'Get out of the room so I can be with my mother,'" says Minnette, adding that they felt uncomfortable, but it would have been irresponsible to leave. "She was on oxygen, and a nurse needed to be there in case there was a crisis."

Exacerbating the combative atmosphere, extra security sentries arrived at Holly Hill. Tony accused Chris Ely of bringing in guards to physically block Charlene from entering. The butler later explained that he feared reporters would descend on the house if Mrs. Astor died that night. The animosity on all sides precluded compassion and made every action seem suspicious.

Philip was in Vermont visiting his mother when the crisis occurred and drove the 180 miles to Holly Hill, arriving at 12:30
A.M.
By then the medical emergency had passed and the visitors had left. On Sunday afternoon he headed back to Massachusetts. "There was a bit of a scare, but my grandmother is fine," he reported by cell phone, driving east on the turnpike. "She's amazing—she just keeps going. She still takes less meds than we all do." He wanted to believe that his grandmother, at 105, was immortal; he was not yet ready to let her go.

But on Monday morning the nurses saw signs of serious decline. "She was sweating, so we gave her a quick sponge bath," Minnette Christie recalls. "We got her back in bed, in a sitting position. Her pulse was dropping; her breathing pattern had changed." They dressed Mrs. Astor in a white chiffon nightgown embroidered with flowers, a matching robe, and white socks and white gloves. Chris Ely came into the room, to stay with her until the end, as he had promised.

Minnette sat on Brooke's bed and said, "Let's pray. Let's hold hands like old times." Brooke's eyes had been closed, but she opened them at the word
pray,
and her breathing became calmer, less ragged. Minnette, Pearline and Chris recited the Lord's Prayer, Brooke's favorite. Then, in unison, they added, "In my little bed I lie, heavenly father hear my cry, if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." Brooke Astor squeezed the nurses' hands. Minnette finished with a benediction: "May the Lord bless you and keep you. Let his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you and give you peace. Amen." Brooke let out a deep sigh. As Pearline recalls, "I will never forget that sound."

Annette's footsteps broke the reverie. Minette rushed out of the room to meet her and to report of Brooke, "She's traveling." Annette ran into the room and kissed her friend's face, saying, "Brooke, I'm here. Brooke, I love you." Brooke died a few minutes later, at 1:50
P.M.

For the next few hours, until Tony Marshall issued a statement, Brooke Astor's death remained a secret to the world at large. Philip, calling me a half-hour after his grandmother passed away, was so choked up that he could scarcely speak. Tony was at home in Manhattan when his mother died and wanted to see her one more time. Even though he had been expecting this call for years—for decades—the news was still wrenching. He and Charlene drove to Holly Hill. Annette had left by then, but Reverend Pridemore was waiting for them.

The staff finally allowed Charlene inside, enabling her to see Brooke literally over her dead body. The couple waited for the undertakers from Frank E. Campbell to arrive. Tony held on to Charlene's hand. As the Marshalls were leaving, Charlene made a point of graciously shaking Chris Ely's hand. The butler later admitted that he was startled by the gesture, but this was a day when all squabbling was temporarily put aside.

At 4:43
P.M.
the Associated Press ran a news alert saying that Mrs. Astor had died. "I have lost my beloved mother," Tony said in his statement, "and New York and the world have lost a great lady ... I will miss her deeply and always." Annette released her own statement, alluding to the guardianship fight: "Brooke left the world peacefully, in a dignified manner, in her own home. We could not have asked for more."

Reporters were staking out the Marshalls' apartment at Seventy-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue by the time the couple returned from Holly Hill. Asked if they had had the chance to bid Brooke farewell, Tony and Charlene gave answers that implied they had been at the bedside when she died. "He was able to cradle her in his arms," Charlene told the
Daily News.
"She looked at him. She knew he was there. He told her he loved her. We said a prayer over her." Reporters called around for confirmation; the
News
printed comments from an unnamed party stating that the Marshalls had not been with Brooke at the end. The public bickering had already begun. "The Marshalls got there after I did," Reverend Pridemore says. "But Tony did cradle her in his arms on Saturday night—perhaps that's what he was thinking of, since for all purposes, that was the end for him."

Newspapers around the globe donned black crepe with obituaries and reminiscences of Mrs. Astor. The
New York Times
immortalized her with the apt headline "Brooke Astor, Wry Aristocrat of the People, Is Dead at 105." Alec Marshall's teenage daughter, Hilary Brooke, wrote a note to her great-grandmother on the
New York Times
Web site, saying, "YOU PUT UP A GOOD FIGHT! I MISS YOU SO MUCH GAGI! RIP. LOVE ALWAYS." Yet the affectionate stories saluting Brooke Astor's philanthropy inevitably turned to the news, the scandal, the salable. The tributes to Mrs. Astor became coming attractions for the spectacle that lay ahead: the fight for her fortune.

Whenever Tony and Charlene stepped out the front door, a gaggle of reporters and photographers awaited them. At this time of mourning, they were forced to defend themselves. "The accusation of my having pocketed millions is untrue," Tony told reporters on the day after his mother's death. "I see no valid reason to contest this will. For twenty-seven years, I managed my mother's investments. I did extremely well for her. I made it very comfortable for her to live the life she led." Charlene fiercely jumped in to defend her husband and insisted that Brooke "adored" her only son. Then she added a grandiose sentence that infuriated Brooke's close friends, saying, "She was Brooke Astor because of him."

The legal war erupted within twenty-four hours of Brooke Astor's death, before the funeral arrangements had even been finalized. Aiming for a preemptive strike, lawyers representing Brooke's guardians, Annette de la Renta and Chase Bank, hastened to the Westchester County Surrogate's Court and filed papers on Tuesday, August 14, 2007. They charged that Mrs. Astor "was not competent to execute" any of her most recent wills and had been "under undue influence and duress" to do so. In a startling tactic, the lawyers urged the court to reject her final 2002 will completely and instead roll back the clock by five years and admit her 1997 will for probate, a document that gave significantly more money to charity and much less to Tony Marshall.

The implicit message was that the guardians planned to produce proof that Mrs. Astor had been mentally unsound for the last decade of her life. Her medical records had been sealed during her lifetime, but now, in death, every sad detail and diagnosis would be open to scrutiny. Brooke Astor had valiantly tried to mask her decline in her last years, to dress beautifully and continue to grace social occasions. Even if she was not always contributing to or instigating conversation, she tried to give the impression that she was at least taking it all in. She had developed her skills as a performer, cherishing her role as Mrs. Astor, playing it with dignity until the end. Now her facade would be ruthlessly stripped away.

Her estate had been left in legal limbo with the settlement of the guardianship case a year earlier when Tony, Charlene, and the other executors all agreed to step aside. Annette de la Renta was determined to continue protecting her friend Brooke even after death. She and Chase Bank asked to become coadministrators of the estate. New York City's major cultural institutions, concerned about protecting their share of Mrs. Astor's nearly $200 million fortune, rushed to support Annette. Paul LeClerc, the president of the New York Public Library, filed an affidavit backing her and the bank. A few days later, the Metropolitan Museum, Rockefeller University, and the Morgan Library joined in the cause.

The Marshalls were stunned by the swiftness of the legal assault. They had known it was coming but hoped for a brief respite from the confrontational headlines. Charlene, drained, initially held her tongue, informing the reporters camped on her doorstep that she had no comment, but then, perhaps predictably, she erupted, telling the
Daily News
that Annette's maneuver was "disgusting." "For someone who is supposed to have cared about her so much," Charlene said, "it is very dishonorable. She isn't even buried yet." Tony later told me that he was enraged by the opposition's insensitivity and by the idea that Annette and the bank's lawyers were drafting paperwork within minutes of Brooke's death. As he put it to me, his manner grim and wounded, "I was at my mother's bedside holding her hands when they did it." Finally father and son had one thing in common. Philip was upset too by the rush into court. He did not return calls from the Chase lawyers, who were urging him to sign an affidavit. "I thought it was tacky," he says. "I didn't want to sign anything until after the funeral."

Paul Saunders, Annette's lawyer, defends the legal gambit. "It was unclear whether the bank's role as guardian of the assets continued," he says. "You have an estate with seventy-five acres, you have the apartment, you have assets and securities, you have bills to pay, you have staff—all these things someone needed to deal with." Saunders insists, "This had to be done, and done right away. It would have been malpractice for the bank as fiduciary to sit back and allow the property to sit there with no one in charge." Annette later added, "In a perfect world, we would have waited, but the bank felt they had to act."

A less incendiary step probably would have been equally effective. Lawyers for Chase and Annette later requested and received permission from Justice Stackhouse to continue as guardians until the Westchester Surrogate's Court chose administrators. If the lawyers had taken that simple action after Brooke Astor's death rather than immediately mounting a will challenge, there would have been fewer glaring headlines and less immediate family turmoil. Susan Robbins thought the legal haste was in bad taste, saying, "There was no need to do it this week."

Brooke Astor had been planning her own funeral for decades, specifying in writing the prayers, hymns, pallbearers, and guest list of dignitaries. Her parties had always been planned with meticulous detail, so how could she delegate the arrangements of such an important occasion? But she had left it to Tony to carry out her wishes with a service at St. Thomas Church, on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-third Street. Given the media Mardi Gras, it was a given that even the guest list would be news. Just as the
New York Times
had published the list of guests at Mrs. Astor's hundredth birthday party, the newspaper of record also featured "Funeral A-List: New Version of Mrs. Astor's 400." Included were Nancy Reagan, President and Mrs. George H. W. Bush, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather. The list had not been updated for some time and included friends who had died, like Kitty Carlisle Hart. The
Times
article took a swipe at the Marshalls: "The list appears to not be an entirely direct reflection of Mrs. Astor's life. At least a couple of people on it—Whoopi Goldberg and [Martha] Stewart—are friends of Mr. Marshall but did not know Mrs. Astor well."