Mrs. Astor Regrets (6 page)

It was a child's-eye view of Brooke's passage through life and the history that she had personally experienced. But the toast also included the image of a blithe mother oblivious of her stalwart son's discomfort. One guest recalled being struck by the poignancy of his words: "There would be Brooke swinging along and Tony carrying a dog, bringing up the rear, panting and puffing."

After the toasts, guests lingered for dancing, and as the music played on, the spring evening took on a special quality. "It was a magical night, her life in review," says Gregorian. John Dobkin agrees: "You looked around and everyone was there. She was beautiful, and she was engaged. It was a great place for her to say hello—and if things had been different, to say goodbye to everyone." As a keepsake, the evening's guests were given a beautifully bound book of Vincent Astor's love letters to Brooke. The guest of honor was tired and left early; Chris Ely drove her home, with Lord Astor.

Brooke Astor's birthday and the party got the royal treatment in newspapers around the globe. The
Hartford Courant
effusively called Mrs. Astor a "precious asset"; the
New York Times
said that "she has had everything to do with making New York a greater city than it would have been without her." In the
Times
of London, a columnist wrote, "On Saturday, the day that Britain began mourning Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, her near-equivalent in New York, Brooke Astor, was celebrating her 100 th birthday." Queen Brooke still reigned, in all her dignified glory.

But as she left that evening, many of her friends wondered if they had seen the last of Brooke Astor, the epitome of society, or at least the Brooke Astor they had known and loved. As tenaciously as she clung to the world, her faculties were going. She had been a public person for so long, but now her social circle was shrinking and she belonged to a few devoted friends, her family, and her servants. That night the velvet curtains were starting to quietly close, but her final act would continue—offstage.

3. Disaster for Mrs. Astor

A
T HOLLY HILL
the morning after the party, Philip Marshall and Nan Starr felt so queasy that they could scarcely get out of bed in the guest cottage. A roadside stop for food the previous day had been a mistake. By the time the couple made their way to the kitchen in the main house for coffee, Tony and Charlene had already left to drive back to New York. The chef was startled when Philip inquired about his father's whereabouts and blurted out, "I can't believe Mr. Marshall just went off without saying goodbye."

It was typical. Father and son had scarcely spoken the previous evening. Their relationship had been on a downhill slide, and Philip had begun to despair about making things right, as his father seemed committed to turning each encounter into a grudge match.

Philip dated the beginning of the problem to a trip nearly two years earlier, when he and Nan and their children, Winslow and Sophie, had spent five days with Brooke in Maine. Her estate in Northeast Harbor, Cove End, included a large house and a separate two-story cottage by the water, where the Marshalls stayed. Delighted by her great-grandchildren, Brooke offered on the spot to give the cottage to Philip, and she even called Terry Christensen to get the paperwork in order. Tony Marshall had expected to inherit the entire property and was upset to learn that his son would be a partial beneficiary. He urged both his mother and his son to maintain the status quo. The mansion was not winterized, and Tony argued that he wanted to be able to take advantage of the cottage off-season. As Philip recalls, his father told him, "'Philip, you don't want the cottage. It'll be a burden—you'll have to keep it up, you'll have to pay taxes. You can visit anytime and use it.'" Both Brooke and her grandson acceded to Tony's wishes. But ever since then, Tony had appeared wary of his son.

Open hostilities had erupted five months before Brooke's one hundredth birthday. Philip drove to Brooklyn in late October 2001, just six weeks after the September 11 attacks, for a historic preservation conference at Floyd Bennett Field. He ventured into Manhattan briefly to see the damage at Ground Zero but did not call his father. Heading home, he stopped in Westchester to spend the night with his brother and to visit Brooke at Holly Hill.

His conversation with his grandmother took a strange turn that day, since Brooke was dwelling in the past. The collapse of the Twin Towers had been so wrenching that she preferred to discuss traumatic incidents from her own youth, particularly her 1919 honeymoon with her first husband, Dryden Kuser. Philip was in the awkward position of hearing intimate details of his grandmother's wedding night. "She kept saying that he didn't know anything about sex," Philip remembers, "that it was difficult for her."

A few days later Philip received a call from his father, who had learned of his son's trip from Brooke and was perturbed that Philip had not made time to stop by to see him and Charlene. Tony appeared to be even more annoyed that Philip had spent an afternoon with Brooke without alerting him in advance. "In any other family, it would be, 'Oh, you saw your grandmother, how nice,'" says Philip. Instead, his father made saying, "You visited my mother" sound like an accusation. Philip thought his father's tone was possessive: "He didn't call her 'your grandmother.'" Philip regretted hurting his father's feelings but wondered why he suddenly needed a permission slip and a chaperone to see Brooke. "I thought, maybe I need therapy on this one."

The estrangement deepened several weeks later when Philip, Nan, and Alec attended a New York Public Library gala honoring Brooke as a "Literary Lion." The three of them were standing together in Astor Hall, just inside the library's Fifth Avenue entrance, when Tony and Charlene swept past without a handshake or a nod. "I'll never forget their faces when they saw us and their smiles disappeared," recalls Nan. Philip adds, "They didn't say a word to us, not even to my brother. I thought, 'What's the big deal?'"

Brooke left the Literary Lions party early, escorted by David Rockefeller, so she was unaware of the family tensions. Nan was so upset that she brooded on the four-hour train ride home the next day, remembering, "I was so hurt and confused." She then wrote Tony a letter asking what she and her husband had done to offend him and Charlene. This caused Tony to become even angrier. He called Philip and asked, "Why is your wife writing me a letter?" Philip explained that Nan was troubled by her in-laws' behavior and hoped for a conversation to air things out. Nan never did get a response from Tony, and she now says of her father-in-law, "It was the beginning of the end of any relationship I had with him. It was brutal." Next Alec got a call from his father apologizing for the cold shoulder. As Alec recalls, "He said he did not intend it towards me."

Tony and Philip were now antagonists. Even though they made sporadic attempts at the rituals of reconciliation, such as exchanging gifts at holidays, beneath these gestures was an Oedipal struggle. But neither of them could have imagined that this family rupture would lead to Tony's being in a holding cell at One Hogan Place.

New York City was engulfed in a heat wave in late July 2006, with sweltering temperatures and humidity. Mrs. Astor's apartment lacked central air-conditioning, so its owner and her nurses, who now worked round the clock, were confined to a few air-conditioned rooms. Tony and Charlene Marshall, however, had decamped to Northeast Harbor to spend the summer at Cove End, with its cooling breezes off the harbor. Vincent Astor had purchased the seven-acre estate in 1953, and for nearly a half-century Mrs. Astor had been in residence during the summer. Now the Marshalls had taken the place over, making changes to fit their tastes. Picture windows had been enlarged, and gardeners had plowed over Mrs. Astor's magnificent flower garden and installed its aesthetic antithesis, a lawn with a series of oversized plastic black and white chess pieces on it.

In the four years since Brooke Astor's one hundredth birthday, Tony and Charlene had flourished in new careers as Broadway investors, producing two Tony Award-winning plays,
A Long Day's Journey into Night
and
I Am My Own Wife.
Mimicking his mother's rotating array of famous houseguests, Tony and Charlene now entertained theater friends, including the actors Frank Langella and Jefferson Mays and the couple's coproducer, David Richenthal. Martha Stewart, who owned a home in nearby Seal Harbor, and the painter Richard Estes were dinner guests. Family members were welcome too: Alec Marshall had visited just a few weeks earlier with his fiancée, Sue Ritchie, and now Charlene's pregnant daughter, Inness Gilbert Hancock, was staying in the large cottage. A weekend at the Marshalls' typically included a sail on the couple's luxurious new 55-foot, $900,000 boat, the
General Russell,
named after Tony's maternal grandfather. The couple had hired a full-time captain, putting him on Mrs. Astor's payroll along with the gardeners, the housekeeper, and other Maine employees.

On Monday morning, July 24, the serenity of Tony and Charlene's Maine vacation was shattered. First Brooke Astor's doctor, Rees Pritchett, called to say that his 104-year-old patient had been taken by ambulance early that morning to Lenox Hill Hospital, suffering from pneumonia. Then Philip Marshall called. He and his father had not spoken at all for a year or seen each other for two years. "I said, 'Gagi is in the hospital,'" recalls Philip. "My father said, 'I know.' He was livid that I had found out first. I said, 'Well, things have changed.'"

And then Philip made such a startling announcement that his father, who wears a hearing aid, just kept saying, "What?" as if he could not believe Philip's words. Philip had to repeat himself three times to get his message across: he had filed a guardianship petition in court to wrest the control of Brooke Astor's care and, perhaps more important, her fortune away from his father. Twisting the knife, Philip told Tony that he had powerful backers: David Rockefeller, Annette de la Renta, and Henry Kissinger had joined him in this legal action. Tony, furious, told his son, "I can't believe this. I'll never talk to you again." Then he hung up. Charlene, who had been listening on an extension, remained on the line. Philip kept talking, saying, "I am sorry I had to do this." He recalls her sarcastic reply: "I'm sure you are."

Charlene's tone of voice irked Philip and he let loose, criticizing his stepmother's sense of entitlement to Brooke's money. A staffer in Mrs. Astor's office had confided to him that Charlene had recently demanded $25,000 for a new truck and then complained about the expense of having two of Brooke's nurses overlap on a shift. "I'm sorry you made me have to do this, because of your actions," Philip told his stepmother. He accused her of "trying to deny my grandmother health care while you're buying yourself a truck."

Tony promptly called his other son, Alec, to ask whether he knew about the lawsuit. Alec had sailed and dined with his father and Charlene in Maine recently but had given no hint that anything was amiss. "Yes," said Alec, admitting that his twin had confided in him. Tony followed up by asking, "Do you agree with Philip?" "No," Alec replied. Tony sounded relieved, and wrapped up the brief conversation by saying, "That's all I wanted to know." Alec thought afterward that the conversation had gone as well as it could have under the circumstances. But his father had a different reaction. As Tony brooded over it, he became enraged that Alec had not warned him but had chosen brotherly loyalty over filial obligation.

The phone rang again in Northeast Harbor. This time it was the Marshalls' friend Daniel Billy, Jr. Billy had trained with Charlene to be lay ministers at St. James' Church, an Episcopal bastion on Madison Avenue, and their religious commitment had evolved into friendship. With managerial expertise from running a small foundation, Billy had been hired ten months earlier by the Marshalls to supervise Mrs. Astor's staff, and he was now working out of an office in her apartment. He told Tony that he too had just received a call from Philip, with instructions to take his personal effects, lock up, and leave the keys. Billy recalls, "I offered to barricade myself into the office." But Tony told him to go home—it would all be sorted out.

Next Tony tracked down his friend Francis X. Morrissey, Jr., in Paris to tell him about the lawsuit. Two years after Brooke's hundredth birthday party, Tony had fired his mother's attorney, Terry Christensen, and replaced him with Morrissey, who immediately presided over two codicils to Brooke Astor's will. While Tony needed legal advice to deal with this sudden crisis, Morrissey was not a courtroom litigator. In fact, Morrissey would soon find himself embroiled in the case, with the need to hire his own lawyer.

Frantic to understand what had happened, Tony summoned Steve Hamor, his mother's gardener, who had been working out in the yard, into the library. Hamor had worked for Mrs. Astor in Maine since 1965; his wife, Pat, laundered her linens, and his two sons were employed as full-time gardeners on her estate in Maine. "Tony asked me, 'Have you been talking to Philip?'" recalls Hamor. "I said, 'I haven't spoken to Philip for two or three years.' Tony said, 'Philip is accusing me of wrongly spending my mother's money.'" Hamor adds, "That afternoon Tony boarded a plane and went to New York. He seemed very upset."

Tony and Charlene left so abruptly that they neglected to alert Sam Peabody, a Manhattan philanthropist who was en route to stay for a week with the couple. "I drove up the driveway, got out and took my bags and rang the bell, and the housekeeper said that Mr. and Mrs. Marshall had been called to New York on an emergency," says Peabody. "I thought, 'Oh, thank goodness, poor Mrs. Astor has finally died.'"

With each phone call that Monday, the news of the lawsuit spread. But the warring parties all believed, naively, that this would remain a private family battle, conducted behind closed doors. Unbeknown to those personally affected, events that would soon make the lawsuit notoriously public had already taken place. Three days earlier, Ira Salzman, Philip's lawyer, had filed a copy of the lawsuit with the Manhattan clerk's office to get a docket number and then walked the original file to Justice John Stackhouse's office. The lawyer requested in writing that the judge seal the papers. "Ira asked us not to talk about it," says a courthouse employee.