Mrs. Astor Regrets (44 page)

On the Monday morning after Thanksgiving weekend, prosecutors called Tony Marshall's and Francis Morrissey's lawyers and quietly informed them that their clients had been indicted and were required to turn themselves in the following day. Bail negotiations began immediately. Morrissey was in Argentina, and his lawyer, Michael Ross, told the authorities that he would return as soon as possible. Charlene called her children to tell them the bad news; they promptly contacted their father, Paul Gilbert.

There was no press announcement, but Serge Kovaleski, the
New York Times
reporter who had repeatedly made news on the Astor beat, got this one first too. His story appeared on-line at 4:30
P.M.
A half-hour earlier, Kovaleski called Philip, who was at home in South Dartmouth, to inform him that his father had been indicted. Although Philip had been expecting this call for months, it still choked him up, and he declined comment. Later in the day, Alec Marshall looked out the window of his second-floor apartment in Ossining and saw photographers below on the street. As Alec says, "I thought of going downstairs with my camera and taking pictures of them."

The next morning Tony Marshall faced the Social Register's version of the O. J. Simpson trial. When he showed up at One Hogan Place to turn himself in, he was met by a firing squad of photographers and TV crews. Tony and Charlene and Tony's lawyers stepped out of a black town car, and the entourage went through security and up to the ninth floor. Charlene and the lawyers were allowed to stay with Tony for a few minutes in the squad room, but then they had to leave; he belonged to law enforcement now.

At his Massachusetts home, Philip responded to a knock on the door and was greeted by a
Daily News
reporter, Melissa Grace, and a photographer, Anthony Delmundo. Philip did not let them inside but agreed to go for a walk on a nearby beach, where he posed for a photo and provided a quote, saying, "I sincerely hope there is a way that justice can be achieved without my father going to jail." Meanwhile, at Holly Hill, ap-praisers from Sotheby's arrived as scheduled to look over Brooke Astor's possessions for insurance purposes and perhaps eventual auction. Her worldly goods, her child, her entire life, was being appraised and deconstructed on so many different levels.

Down at One Hogan Place, Robert Morgenthau, flanked by eight staffers, walked into a small conference room on the eighth floor at 11:30
A.M.
and sat down at a table behind a mound of microphones. The eighty-eight-year-old district attorney, the son of Franklin Roosevelt's treasury secretary and a man whose social circle overlapped with Brooke Astor's, came from his own line of Manhattan royalty. He read with relish from a press release, declaring that Anthony Marshall and Francis Morrissey had been indicted for "swindling Mrs. Astor out of millions of dollars and valuable property" and "took advantage of Mrs. Astor's diminished mental capacity." The fourteen-page, eighteen-count indictment charged that Tony "falsely informed his mother that she was running out of money in order to induce her to sell one of her favorite paintings"—the Childe Hassam. The indictment accused Tony of having stolen a $2 million commission for the sale.

Tony was also charged with spending $600,000 of his mother's money, without her knowledge, to pay for the upkeep of Cove End in Maine after ownership had been transferred to him and then Charlene. The indictment made it seem as if Tony had used a vacuum cleaner on his mother's finances, sucking up everything but the loose change under the cushions of her blue chintz couch. It alleged that he used Brooke's money to give himself an unauthorized salary increase (from $450,000 to $1.4 million in 2005), to underwrite the salary of his personal boat captain on the
General Russell
($52,000), and to pay for a secretary (Erica Meyer) who was primarily working for his theatrical production company. He was also accused of walking off with two of his mother's major artworks, a drawing of donkeys by Giovanni Tiepolo, an eighteenth-century Italian Rococo painter, and a painting by John Frederick Lewis, a nineteenth-century British artist, each worth half a million dollars. His mother, who owned two Tiepolos, had left Tony one of the drawings in her will. The district attorney's office charged Tony with stealing the other Tiepolo, taking it without authorization.

If convicted of first-degree grand larceny, Tony could receive up to twenty-five years in jail, which theoretically would put him behind bars until he was 108 years old. It was an astonishing plunge for a man with such a polished pedigree and pretensions, this aged ex-diplomat who had served on the city's most prestigious cultural boards.

Francis X. Morrissey, Jr., was charged with conspiring with Anthony Marshall to induce Brooke Astor to sign two codicils to her will and with forging the second document.

The press conference was raucous as Robert Morgenthau and Dan Castleman took turns answering questions. Early on, Steve Fishman of
New York
lobbed a query that seemed like a softball, asking, "Is there any chance his mother meant him to have those things?" When the laughter died down, Castleman replied, "Not according to the grand jury." A British journalist called out, "What was the motive? Wasn't he rich already?" Castleman couldn't resist the easy answer: "You'd have to say the motive was greed." A tabloid reporter followed up with, "Was the motive Charlene?" People roared as Castleman added, "We'll let you make that decision."

The district attorney stressed his hope that this high-profile indictment would send a message. "It happens fairly frequently that a son or daughter or grandson will steal from their parent or grandparent," Morgenthau said. "That's why these cases are important, because we want the public to know that if you take advantage of an elderly person with diminished capacity, you're going to get prosecuted." If Tony Marshall had hoped to be treated leniently by this fellow octogenarian, these words did not bode well.

Tony Marshall was supposed to be arraigned before Justice A. Kirke Bartley, Jr., at 2:30
P.M.
in a ninth-floor courtroom at 111 Centre Street, but he was delayed because of the fingerprint snafu. Charlene Marshall, wearing a fitted heather blue wool suit, a gold snake bracelet on her right wrist, and a matching ring, arrived on time. The attitude of the press corps toward her was contemptuous. The reporters whispered loudly: "I think she wears the pants," and "She's the brains of the outfit." Shirley Shepard, a sketch artist for TV networks, walked over to Charlene and stood in the aisle with a makeshift easel to capture her likeness. Shepard leaned over to inquire about the designer label on Charlene's suit, asking, "Whose suit is that?" Charlene looked dumbfounded and replied, "It's mine." Shepard, softening, replied, "You're much prettier than your photographs." Charlene burst out laughing, saying, "That was the kindest thing anyone has said to me today."

Tony's courtroom appearance was brief, although he appeared distraught when he arrived, barely able to take in the proceedings. His only audible words were "Not guilty." He signed a personal appearance bond for $100,000 and handed over an old passport, which was later discovered to have expired. (The mistake required a return trip to the courthouse the following week with his valid passport.) Then he and Charlene were free to leave, the day's ordeal over.

Charlene handed Tony his wooden cane, and he shuffled slowly out of the courtroom and rested on the bench in the hallway while she went off to call for their car. Gary Naftalis, trying to cheer up his client, turned to Tony and said supportively, "We've got a lot of work to do. It's our turn next." He asked Tony which was worse, this day in court or being shelled at Iwo Jima. Tony grimaced. Once they hit the street, Barbara Ross of the
Daily News
asked Naftalis how Tony was doing. The attorney smiled and waved her off, and as he walked away, she wisecracked, "There won't be any violins in my story unless you play them."

Late that afternoon Philip sat at his kitchen table at home with Nan. A funeral wreath made of branches still hung on the wall, a gift from a student in honor of his grandmother. He was exhausted beyond description. He had promised to give a quote to the enterprising Stefanie Cohen of the
New York Post,
but his mind had gone blank. He and Nan still had to tell Sophie and Winslow about the indictment, a task they were dreading. Sophie arrived home from school and swept into the room, a graceful, athletic girl with long brown hair and a radiant smile. They told her that her grandfather had been indicted, the climax of this long, strange, sad year. Philip then mentioned his dilemma in finding the right words for the newspaper. Sophie thought for a few minutes. Then Brooke Astor's self-assured great-granddaughter came up with two sentences, which Philip promptly e-mailed to the
Post:
"My concern for my grandmother's health and well-being prompted me to help her. Little did I know the outcome would be so profound."

In London, Viscount Astor reacted to the news by saying to me in a telephone interview what many others close to Brooke were thinking: "They may have arrested the wrong person." He believed that Charlene was largely to blame. "The whole thing came down to the fact that the new wife realized that if Tony died before his mother, she didn't get any money," Lord Astor said. "I'm irritated that he was trying to take Astor money that was going to New York institutions and grabbing it for himself." He insisted that he took no pleasure in the indictment and hoped that there would be a financial resolution. "I don't want to see any person aged eighty-three go to jail. Just give the money back." But he was angry that Brooke's final years had been marred. "What rankles me is not only the unkindness, but that they figured it all out—it wasn't spur-of-the-moment or done in anger, it was cold-hearted planning," he said. "They're the ultimate cold-hearted couple out of an Agatha Christie plot."

On Friday afternoon, November 30, Francis Morrissey surrendered to the authorities. The night before, a neighbor in his building on East Fifty-first Street, had shared an elevator with Morrissey and noted, "He was ashen and agitated. He couldn't look people in the eye." At the courthouse Morrissey, wearing glasses and a dark blue suit, did not get as much press attention as his codefendant but had a worse time in custody. Unlike Tony, he was handcuffed when escorted across the street by the officers, and the cuffs were removed only when he was taken into court. Morrissey did not say a word in response to the charges of forgery, leaving it to one of his lawyers, Pery Krinsky, to utter the words "Not guilty." He tried to avoid eye contact with reporters as he left the courthouse. Five weeks later, Morrissey's father died, at age ninety-seven. Morrissey mournfully told friends that it was the great tragedy of his life that his indictment had been his father's last memory.

The weekend after the indictments were announced, Philip Marshall drove into New York to join his historic preservation students on a tour of New York landmarks. En route he spent forty-five minutes on the phone with me discussing the week's events. "I can argue that I brought this on him or that he brought it on himself," Philip said, as if having that argument with himself. "I hope I'm not delusional, but I hope there is an opportunity here. I hope that he can face the harsh reality. I'm afraid he's going to try to fight this. I'm totally sad."

Charlene and Tony did not go to services at St. James' Church that Sunday. The curious congregation kept looking at the couple's usual spot, but they did not appear. Charlene did, however, take the strange step of showing up a week or so later at a reading by the writer Frances Kiernan, the author of
The Last Mrs. Astor,
at a Barnes & Noble across from Lincoln Center and the Juilliard School. The widely praised biography of Brooke Astor does not devote much space to the controversy, but Kiernan's nine-page summary portrays the Marshalls in an unfavorable light. When the book had been published eight months earlier, Charlene and Tony had attended Kiernan's lecture at the Colony Club.

Charlene's return visit to hear Kiernan at this well-publicized event did not appear to be motivated by a fan's desire to see a favorite author. Charlene had alerted her ex-husband, Paul Gilbert, about her plan to attend the event, and he had tried unsuccessfully to talk her out of it. As Gilbert told me later, "I think that Tony and Charlene believe they did nothing wrong and are determined to prove that."

Charlene took notes as Kiernan, an elegant woman who wears her long white hair wrapped into a braid and pinned up to frame her face, read from the book and answered questions. At the very end, Charlene stood up and waved her hand, and Kiernan called on her. Charlene then angrily asked questions aimed at undermining the author, suggesting that Kiernan had met Mrs. Astor only once (they had six meetings) and complaining that Kiernan had downplayed how often Tony visited his mother. It was an astonishing performance before an uncomfortable but rapt audience of sixty people, including Alice Perdue. "Charlene was so hostile," recalls Kiernan. "I was very guarded. I kept thinking, 'This has to be so painful for you. Why are you here?'"

Twenty-four hours later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's executive committee quietly took the unprecedented step of voting to suspend Tony Marshall as a trustee emeritus. The decision was never publicly announced. Annette de la Renta recused herself from that vote. In the legal system, Tony might be presumed innocent, but in the court of public opinion, the verdict was already in.

That weekend Paul Gilbert came to Manhattan to fulfill a longstanding date to be the Sunday guest preacher at St. John's in the Village Episcopal Church. The small modern brick church was busy for the eleven o'clock service, and the congregation included his oldest daughter, Arden Delacey, a pretty redhead who resembles her mother, Charlene. Wearing white clerical robes, Gilbert went to the pulpit toward the end of the service to give the homily. With a compelling speaking style, he gave a curious speech, in light of the indictment of his children's stepfather, a man who had stolen his wife away. He spoke of violence in the Bible, using as his very first example an adulterer who died for his sins. He described the common desire that people have for "revenge and justice." In an empathetic tone, he stressed the importance of "compassion" and of learning to "let things go." It was a traditional Christmas season sermon, with a theme of renewal and redemption. But given the events of recent weeks, it was also more than that.