Mrs. Astor Regrets (9 page)

John and Mabel Russell lived well overseas, with a household of servants, thanks to the strong dollar and officers' perks. But after the couple and their daughter moved to Washington, D.C., money became a problem. Brooke was forced to drop out of school, not for financial reasons but because her mother feared that a good education might hurt her marital prospects. "I revered Miss Madeira, but Mother took me out when I wanted to learn Greek and Latin," Brooke told
Women's Wear Daily
in 1991. "She thought I would become a bluestocking—a bore and not attractive, someone who wouldn't flirt at all."

Brooke was only sixteen when her life was upended by a phone call. A friend was supposed to attend a Princeton dance but had the measles; Mabel Russell encouraged Brooke to step in as a substitute. Brooke later wrote that she went to the dance against her will. Wearing borrowed clothing (a white and silver chiffon dress from an aunt, her grandmother's red mohair cape, and her own silver high-heeled slippers), she was on the dance floor when Dryden Kuser took her in his arms. He was a clumsy dancer, but in the following weeks he began to court her with visits and gifts, including a blue leather-bound copy of
The Oxford Book of English Verse,
and she was flattered.

The managing editor of the
Daily Princetonian,
the president of a debating society, and already the author of a modest book,
The Birds of Somerset Hills,
Dryden Kuser looked great on paper. And his family was rich—fabulously rich. His mother, Susie Dryden, was the daughter of the founder of Prudential Insurance Company, and his father, Anthony Kuser, was a New Jersey tycoon. The son of German and Austrian immigrants, Kuser had started out as a pants presser, found success as a wholesale dealer for a brewery, and gone on to become the founding stockholder in Fox Films and president of the local power company.

Mabel Russell was thrilled when it became clear that her daughter had the opportunity to marry into the Kuser family, an emotion shared by Brooke. She had not even come out as a debutante but was skipping straight to the engagement ring. During the entire whirlwind romance, Brooke's father was stationed in South America, and her mother decided to act quickly lest the moment pass. By the time John Russell returned to Washington to meet the groom, his daughter's engagement had been announced and wedding plans were under way.

The marriage was a disaster right from the wedding night. Brooke later complained that her mother had never explained to her precisely what happened during sex, and as a new bride she was horrified by Dryden's marital expectations. "We were a totally miscast pair," she wrote in
Footprints.
"Dryden was oversexed and completely inexperienced, and I was hopelessly ignorant and unprepared in any way for this great adventure." During the honeymoon, Dryden also displayed an ardor for alcohol that was a harbinger of future problems. Even half a century later, Brooke frequently recounted how she begged her parents to help her arrange for a divorce. A daddy's girl, she blamed her mother for getting her into this mess. As Liz Smith recalls, "She told me that she ran and jumped in her father's lap—she worshiped him. She was so unhappy. Whatever happened on her honeymoon, the guy was brutal. She was shocked by sex." But Brooke was married. The deed was done, and in that era it was not something easily undone.

Many of Brooke's friends speculated that she never did enjoy sex, although she wanted to be perceived by men as alluring. Whether this was a reaction to her wedding-night trauma, no one knew. She once confided to a close male friend that a Catholic bishop had made a pass at her and she had been so upset that she experienced several days of hysterical blindness. Brooke reveled in flirtation and the feeling of conquest and certainly had lovers through the years, but she gave the impression that the actual act was not for her the climax of romantic liaisons. Nonetheless, she played the part of sexy woman to the hilt. "She was naughty," recalls Philippe de Montebello. "She would deliberately say almost off-color things." In her novel
The Bluebird Is at Home,
written when she was sixty-three years old, an aging woman says, "When I can't sleep, instead of counting sheep I try to remember my lovers." Mrs. Astor loved that line so much that she often used it in conversation. Vernon Jordan laughs affectionately as he recalls how even in her dotage she was still vamping. At a conference in Bilderberg, Germany, he and the financier James Wolfensohn escorted Mrs. Astor, then in her nineties, back to her hotel room after a dinner, and she turned at the doorway to say, "If only I were younger, I'd invite you both in."

But as a teenage bride, Brooke was thrust into an alien environment. She and Dryden moved in with his parents and his younger sister, Cynthia, at Faircourt, the family's grandiose Italianate villa in Bernardsville, New Jersey. Perched on a hillside, the mansion sported a red-tiled roof, marble floors, and elaborate wood-paneled rooms finished with gold leaf. Nearly a century later, it is still considered one of the great historic houses of this moneyed enclave. Back then the landscaped grounds sprawled over 250 acres, and the colonel, a bird lover, kept a huge flock of pheasants. While Brooke was initially awed by the grand lifestyle—the Kusers employed sixteen servants—she thought the family had terrible taste and she felt ill at ease, like a caged bird. Her father-in-law was so domineering that he kept his watch on the dining room table, and if Brooke and Dryden were late for dinner, he docked their allowance by $100 per minute.

Brooke had been dazzled during her courtship by Dryden's accomplishments. But in her autobiography, she paints her ten years with him as a long stretch of misery. Colonel Kuser used his clout as a major shareholder with Lenox China to get his son a job with the company, based in Princeton, New Jersey. During his year with the firm, his bride was so unhappy that she gorged herself, briefly weighing ten pounds more than her husband. Brooke and Dryden moved back in with the Kusers again and had the bad luck to be on the premises during a notorious robbery in 1921. The robber broke in late at night, chloroformed the family, and stole $20,000 worth of jewelry, most of which belonged to Brooke. (Her mother-in-law's jewels were in a safe deposit box.) Brooke later downplayed the incident, saying that she had been pleased to receive the insurance money, but it must have been frightening to be rendered unconscious while her engagement ring was slipped off her finger.

The couple eventually moved to their own large stucco home, just down the hill from Faircourt. From the master bedroom on the second floor with its wrought-iron balcony, Brooke could look out and see a regal corridor of maple trees flanking the long driveway. Her dressing room was adorned with a beautiful crystal chandelier and a full-length mirror. But even with a generous stipend from Dryden's parents, the couple never had enough money and quarreled constantly. Dryden was a gambler; he lost $36,000 in bets at the nearby Somerset golf club in one afternoon. "Dryden was fast drinking, fast smoking, fast women, and an incredibly calculating, fast, brilliant mind," says his nephew, Andrew Kravchenko. "He wasn't great at making fortunes like his father, Colonel Kuser. He was great at spending them."

Dryden Kuser gravitated to the perfect career for a man with his spendthrift ways—politics. He was elected as a Bernardsville city councilman and moved on to the New Jersey legislature as an assemblyman and then a state senator. He never built a career as a distinguished lawmaker; his major accomplishment was the passage of a bill that designated the eastern goldfinch as New Jersey's state bird, a gesture meant to please his father the pheasant fancier.

Brooke and Dryden's marriage contained dark secrets. Brooke remarked in her autobiography, regarding the news from a doctor that she was pregnant with her first and only child, "Having not participated very willingly in this future event, I was perturbed." Given the implication that her son was conceived during a marital rape, it is hardly surprising that Brooke dreaded motherhood.

Later in life Brooke repeatedly dropped hints to friends and even mere acquaintances about her problems with Dryden Kuser. In the summer of 1967 she was parked near the fire station in Northeast Harbor when she spotted Bob Pyle, who had recently graduated from soda jerk to summer police officer. As he recalls, Mrs. Astor walked over, put her hand on his forearm for emphasis, and said, "Now, Bob dear, don't be influenced by name or social position in dealing with domestic abuse. Wealthy people can be bastards too." Pyle was taken aback and says, "I thought to myself, who beat her?" Similarly, Sandra Graves, who worked as a summer cook for Mrs. Astor in Maine, interviewed her employer for a college class and says, "She wanted to talk about the husband who beat her. Tony's father."

It was not until Brooke was eighty-two years old that she publicly revealed what she had been hinting at for so long: she had been a battered wife. In an interview with Marilyn Berger for the
New York Times Magazine
profile in 1984, Brooke said of Kuser, "One day he knocked me down and broke my jaw. Father wanted me to leave him, but I said I couldn't because I was having his child." She was six months pregnant with Tony. The abuse was apparently not a one-time event; she told friends that when Kuser got drunk he hit her, and he drank early and often.

Brooke remained married to Dryden for five years after she gave birth, on May 30, 1924, to Anthony Dryden Kuser, named after his paternal grandfather and his father. She dealt with her anger toward her husband by spending as much time as possible in Manhattan with friends, avoiding her home. She professed to love her son but handed off his daily care to nannies, which was typical for women of her social class in those days. When she visited her parents in Haiti for several weeks on her own, Brooke justified her absence by saying that Tony would ultimately benefit from her improved mood.

Even in a marriage where the joy has long since vanished for both parties, it often takes an external event to trigger a divorce. The death of Colonel Kuser in February 1929 proved to be the catalyst. En route home after the funeral, Dryden asked Brooke for a divorce. He wanted to marry Vieva Fisher Banks, a married woman with three daughters, with whom he had been having an affair. (She too promptly filed for divorce.) Just as Brooke's marriage made the society pages, so did its demise. The
New York Times
carried a story on February 16, 1930, with the headline "Mrs. Kuser Files Suit; Gets Custody of Son." The story noted that the couple's problems had begun early in their union. "Mrs. Kuser complained that a year later her husband began to embarrass her in social activities, that he told her he no longer loved her, and that their marriage was a failure." An Associated Press story noted that Mrs. Kuser said her husband "was critical of her dress and upbraided her because of alleged extravagance."

Brooke won a substantial settlement and custody of Tony. In a letter discussing the family's finances, Dryden Kuser's second wife, Vieva, later disclosed that Dryden paid Brooke about $680,000 for an apartment and alimony, which included "a trust fund that brought $90,000 per year." Brooke agreed that if she remarried, her alimony would go into a trust for Tony until he turned twenty-one. She would come to regret this clause.

Once the divorce was finalized, Brooke moved to an apartment at Gracie Square in Manhattan, uprooting her six-year-old son from his pony and country life. Dryden Kuser remained in the Bernardsville house, and he and his new wife had a child, Suzanne, in 1931. Tony was not a regular visitor to the household, and he and his half-sister, known as Sukie, got to know one another only as adults, when both worked at the State Department. Dryden Kuser walked out on his second marriage two years later, after becoming enamored of another married woman, a secretary to a committee that he chaired in the state legislature. The revelation of this affair ended his political career. "I hardly ever saw my father," says Sukie Kuser. "He moved to Reno, where he could divorce his various wives. He had a drinking problem and a gambling problem." Dryden Kuser eventually married three more times. Although he inherited $600,000 when his mother died, sold real estate, and worked as a columnist for the
Nevada State Journal,
he was perpetually short of cash. As his nephew recalls, "He once created a manifesto about why everyone who owed him money should give him more, and they did. He was incredibly charming."

Before her divorce from Kuser, Brooke had been quietly seeing a married stockbroker, Buddie Marshall, a Yale graduate from a well-to-do family, whom she had met on a fox hunt. She was discreet for many years but conceded in an interview with the author Eileen Simpson in 1996: "I had an affair with him while we were each still in our marriages. My father, who heard the gossip about it, told me to break it off." She followed his advice. Buddie Marshall finally left his wife, with whom he had a daughter and a son, to marry Brooke in 1932, in a small ceremony at her apartment. Brooke had apparently been living above her means. "I was quite shocked when Brooke called Dryden and asked for a couple of thousand to pay off her debts so she wouldn't have to ask Buddy [sic] for it," Vieva Kuser wrote in a letter to her daughter many years later. "Of course, he obliged."

Tony, who was eight years old when his mother remarried, was very attached to his nanny, Madame Grumeau, who had been the one constant in his domestically tumultuous life. But Buddie Marshall disliked the woman, so Brooke fired her. When the newlyweds moved into a luxurious penthouse at 10 Gracie Square, Tony was exiled to a room built on the roof. But after a year or two, his mother decided that he was still too close for comfort. Abruptly announcing that Tony had become spoiled, she shipped him off to the Harvey School, in Westchester County, with her new husband's enthusiastic blessing. With typical understatement, Tony told me, "I didn't like it very much. I went downhill on a sled and ran into a tree. It put me back a bit." The accident nearly killed him; he suffered serious internal injuries, and the event left his mother with intense guilt.