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The Astor 100

THE SMALL WHITE NOTECARD was a whisper of understatement, its simplicity suggesting how unlikely it was that anyone would forget this particular invitation: “Mr. David Rockefeller expects you on Saturday, March 30th for Dinner at 7 P.M. The Playhouse. Black Tie.” The New York Times later took the unusual step of printing both a partial list of invitees to this evening at Kykuit, the sprawling Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, New York, and the names of those who had sent their regrets. Those unfortunates who had not made the cut were faced not only with the original humiliation but a second reminder in a very public place.

The luster of the evening stemmed from the honored guest and the occasion. Brooke Astor was celebrating her one hundredth birthday on March 30, 2002. Thanks to Vincent Astor’s largesse, she had made herself indispensable in New York’s five boroughs, using his foundation’s millions to help revive the New York Public Library, create a serene Chinese courtyard at the Metropolitan Museum, underwrite an expansion at the Bronx Zoo, preserve historic Harlem houses, and endow innumerable worthy causes.

She had married well, but her real accomplishment had been taking a storied but fading American name and adding luster to it, rebranding the Astor image with a newfound glamour and respect. “She took on the Astor Foundation and made it something to be proud of,” says Viscount William Astor, the head of the British branch of the family and her cousin by marriage. “She did a lot for my family’s name and reputation in America.”

The daughter of a Marine Corps general and a status-obsessed southern belle, Roberta Brooke Russell was bred to ascend to the highest ranks of society. Her ambitious mother, Mabel, tutored her in the art of flirtation, pulled her out of Washington’s Madeira School for fear that she was becoming too intellectual, and married her off at the age of seventeen to the heir of a New Jersey fortune, John Dryden Kuser. “Mrs. Russell was a very material-minded woman,” says Louis Auchincloss, the novelist, who knew both mother and daughter. “She spent her life in the Marine Corps without any money at all. She wanted to set Brooke up, certainly persuaded her to do it.”

That early marriage produced, in 1924, Brooke’s only child, Tony. But Dryden Kuser turned out to be an alcoholic with a dangerous temper and a penchant for adultery. He left his young family for another woman, and Brooke headed to Reno in 1930 to obtain a divorce. Her second marriage, to Charles “Buddie” Marshall, a socially connected stockbroker with middling financial means, was more successful. The former first lady Nancy Reagan recalls, “Buddie was the love of her life.” But at age fifty, Brooke was suddenly widowed and went on to beat her Social Register contemporaries at their own game.

A mere six months after Buddie Marshall’s funeral, in November 1952, Brooke received a marriage proposal from Vincent Astor. Whether she chased him or he set out to win her remains a matter of dispute, although Brooke admitted later that her primary motivation for her marriage in 1953 was financial security. “She always said Vincent was difficult. I don’t think she ever loved him,” says Barbara Walters, a close friend, recalling Brooke’s account of the marriage. “But she did respect him and did her best to make him happy.”

When the moody and possessive Astor died at age sixty-seven, a mere five and a half years later, Brooke Astor was left with a famous surname, an intense desire for liberation from a claustrophobic existence, and a trust fund of more than $60 million. Luxury was hers for life. Her forty-two-person staff included a social secretary to manage her schedule, a French maid to choose her wardrobe, a chauffeur kept busy day and night, a French chef to create delicacies for her dinner parties, a butler, and seven gardeners, all to attend to her needs on Park Avenue and at her country homes in Northeast Harbor, Maine, and Briarcliff Manor, New York.

After a lifetime of being an accessory to men, she hungered for meaningful work and the chance to be valued on her own merits. With the well-endowed Astor Foundation, she shrewdly turned herself into a celebrated philanthropist and a sought-after social arbiter. The ability to dispense millions made her popular and powerful, and Mrs. Astor reveled in her long-running starring role, savoring the accolades.

“She always wanted to be in the limelight,” says Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum, who fondly recalls Mrs. Astor’s regal need to be paid her due. “At a cocktail party, if you were paying too little attention to her, she noticed and she let you know. She would regularly arrive one minute late at all our board meetings to make sure that everyone noticed the grand entrance.” Brooke Astor was a narcissist, but a beguiling one, admired and admiring, good-hearted in her deeds and her public persona. “She was terrified of boredom,” de Montebello adds. “So she arranged not to be bored.”

Mrs. Astor—an instantly recognizable lady in white gloves, an ornate hat, pearls, and a diamond pin—became a symbol of aristocratic beneficence over the course of four decades. No stranger to Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant before gentrification, she supported programs for summer education for Puerto Rican teenagers, gave money to Catholic Charities to maintain a residence for the elderly, and paid for equipment for the Knickerbocker Drum and Bugle Corps. Instead of just writing checks, she went out to see how her money was being spent and to meet the recipients. Her involvement in a cause was the equivalent of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. “It always really helped to say the Astor Foundation is one of your backers,” recalls Peg Breen, the president of the Landmarks Conservancy. “The reaction was, ‘If Brooke Astor thinks this is a good idea . . .” Howard Phipps, the veteran president of the Wildlife Conservancy, adds, “Once Brooke began giving major grants to the zoo, others followed. We named an elephant after her, and when baby Astor died, she was very upset.”

At night Mrs. Astor turned her home into an elite salon where big ideas were discussed and connections were made. Bending the rules with her guest lists, she mixed the school chancellor with a curator, society ladies with an up-and-coming movie producer, an acclaimed writer with a Wall Street upstart or a venerated politician. Vernon Jordan, the civil rights leader and Clinton confidant, recalls meeting her in the early 1970s; soon he was a regular at her table in an era when Park Avenue dinners were not integrated. Mrs. Astor did not require a Mayflower genealogy or an eight-figure bank balance. The ticket to admission was being accomplished, interesting, and fun. “The worst thing she could say about someone was, ‘He was a dud,’” recalls Linda Gilles, the executive director of the Astor Foundation, who often got the morning-after report from Mrs. Astor about her dinners. “The best thing was, ‘He’s got plenty to say.’” Mrs. Astor expected amusement and witty banter with cocktails. Her dutiful son was a quiet fixture at her larger parties. Brooke would sometimes complain that he was “boring,” although he was widely perceived as conducting himself with aplomb. As Nancy Kissinger recalls, “Tony was always very nice and polite to me, a good conversationalist.”

Mrs. Astor boasted about dropping two or three dull friends every year. She was very loyal to her inner circle, but she did have a habit of moving on, replacing dour faces with young and frisky newcomers. “She didn’t like the same people to take her around,” recalls Vartan Gregorian, the president of the New York Public Library. “Brooke told me the rule of longevity is ‘Don’t speak to the same people all the time, otherwise I finish your sentences, you finish mine.’” This attitude created anxiety whenever major events like the hundredth birthday party came around. Freddy Melhado, a money manager who was thirty years her junior and her dance partner for decades, notes, “She was determined to have younger friends because she thought it was life-giving.”

 

In the kingdom of Astor, there was a flurry of pre-one-hundredth-birthday-party activity in the sixteenth-floor aerie at 778 Park Avenue where Mrs. Astor had entertained royalty, a president named Reagan, first ladies from Jacqueline Onassis to Lady Bird Johnson to Nancy Reagan, and a succession of mayors and governors. The fourteen-room apartment had been decorated by Sister Parish with Albert Hadley and updated by Mark Hampton. Visitors often admired the pearl-inlaid black wooden Chinese cabinet in the imposing entrance hall. Off to the right was Mrs. Astor’s famous red-lacquered library, which housed Vincent Astor’s collection of leather-bound first editions and showcased his widow’s favorite and most valuable painting, Childe Hassam’s Flags, Fifth Avenue, which hung over the eighteenth-century French marble fireplace.

The sumptuous central living room, with Louis XVI furniture, overlooked Park Avenue; to the left, the green dining room was decorated with eighteenth-century French scenic panels and billowing curtains designed by Hadley “to look like ballgowns.” An eclectic collector, Mrs. Astor scattered valuable jade figurines, dog paintings, and bronze and vermeil animal sculptures around her rooms, along with an inexpensive but eye-pleasing array of teapots. She had recently added a new off-white ceramic version from Swifty’s; a mere admiring glance had had the restaurant’s owner, Robert Caravaggi, reaching for a gift bag. “She was talking so nicely that I gave her four, for her residences,” he recalls. “She seemed so happy.” People delighted in giving her presents, for the reward of her radiant smile.

Of course Mrs. Astor needed a new dress for her party, and of course Oscar de la Renta, the designer husband of her best friend, Annette de la Renta, had offered to create a couture gown. “Brooke loved dressing up,” recalls Annette. “What else could you get her?”

Brooke and Annette, Annette and Brooke—the two were inseparable, despite a thirty-seven-year age difference. They spoke on the phone every day. They served on the same boards (the Metropolitan Museum, Rockefeller University, the Morgan Library, the New York Public Library) and presided over countless charity galas. The society queen and her protégé were so in sync that observers often remarked that they seemed like mother and daughter. Tom Brokaw says, “It was kind of genetic between them, as if they had the same DNA.”

Brooke had initially been close to Annette’s mother, Jane Engelhard, a formidable woman known for her beauty and her awesome wealth, which she had gained through her second marriage, to the metals titan Charles Engelhard. An art collector and a Democratic Party power broker, Charlie Engelhard owned a string of racehorses and was said to be the model for the James Bond villain Goldfinger. (Forbes estimated Jane Engelhard’s fortune, including trust funds for her five daughters, at more than $365 million in 1986.)

Annette was the only child from her mother’s brief first marriage. Adopted by her stepfather, she had transformed herself from a self-described “huge” adolescent into a slender, much-photographed epitome of style, perfectly dressed and groomed. She met Brooke through her parents when she was a teenager, recalling, “I inherited her.” When Annette, at age twenty, married her first husband, Samuel Reed, in 1960, Brooke attended the wedding and began inviting the newlyweds to her dinner parties. As Annette says, “She was incredibly nice to me as a young married woman in New York, when she didn’t need to be.” Under Brooke’s affectionate tutelage, the once-shy Annette became a power player in board rooms, admired and even a bit feared. “Brooke looked upon Annette as the next Brooke Astor,” says Philippe de Montebello. “It was a very conscious mentoring process that she was passing the baton on to Annette.”

The relationship between the women had gradually altered in the past decade, as the preternaturally energetic Brooke reached her nineties and began showing her age. Annette had become Brooke’s defender and protector, attentive and thoughtful, ever eager to please. She always sat next to Brooke at the Metropolitan Museum’s board meetings, helping her follow the agenda and even reaching over to turn pages.

As was her custom, Brooke was wintering at a $45,000-per-month rental house by the ocean in Palm Beach when Annette rang to say that Oscar wanted to make her a dress. When Brooke returned to New York, she eagerly met with the tailors, who went to her apartment for several fittings. Even approaching one hundred, she still cared about her looks and worked with a physical trainer to stay fit. “Brooke always felt it was her duty to enchant everybody,” says Oscar de la Renta, who adds that for her special day, she was determined to attract admiring eyes. “In her flirtatious way,” he goes on, “she used to always tell me that she could wear a deeper neckline than other ladies of her age.” De la Renta’s elegant gown was nonetheless age-appropriate, with a neckline high enough for the convent. Brooke was absolutely thrilled by the elaborate concoction, with ruffled long sleeves and a bow at her waist. Even the color had a pedigree; it was called Natier blue and was associated with the eighteenth-century painter Jean-Marc Natier.

Birthdays could be a dilemma, for Brooke Astor loathed acknowledging her age but did love a good party. Vartan Gregorian had orchestrated one celebration for her and instructed the guests not to mention her age. But his warning did not deter Henry Kissinger, who got up and gave a toast, saying, “For an eighty-year-old woman, you look great.” Gregorian recalls the upset look on Mrs. Astor’s face, saying, “She didn’t like that. Because in many ways she was ageless.”

Ten years later, on her ninetieth, she had allowed the Citizens Committee for New York City, which she had helped launch with an early donation of $50,000, to hold a fundraiser in her honor. The vast Seventh Regiment Armory was transformed into a rose-covered gazebo and confetti was shot out of a cannon, raining down on the more than 1,500 revelers, including Jacqueline Onassis and Mayor David Dinkins. The entertainment included three musical groups: the Peter Duchin Orchestra, the Marine Corps Band (in honor of her father, the general), and the Illinois Jacquet Big Band. “She had a ball that night,” says Oz Elliott, the former Newsweek editor, who was then president of the Citizens Committee. Mrs. Astor loved to foxtrot, and even at ninety she danced nearly all night.

Yet she also let her mask slip that evening, revealing her vulnerability in a five-minute videotaped interview that was broadcast at the event. Speaking about a recent dream, Mrs. Astor described a nighttime vision in which her long-dead grandmother, so gaunt as to be initially unrecognizable, materialized on the street. “I ran back and threw my arms around her,” Brooke recalled. “She pushed me off. I said, ‘Granny, I didn’t recognize you, you were so thin.’ She said, ‘Do you know why? Because the dead live off the thoughts of the living. And nobody is thinking of me.’” It was an odd story to evoke at this celebration of her life, but at ninety, Brooke was worrying about her legacy and wondering how or if she would be remembered.

The New York Times treated Brooke Astor’s birthdays with the civic reverence granted to holidays on which alternate-side-of-the-street parking is suspended. Every year the event was commemorated with a story or a photograph. “I don’t feel old. I can walk as fast as anybody. I got a new driving license this year,” Brooke told the Times at age ninety. “I don’t hear as well as I used to, have to wear a hearing aid, which I hate.” She went on to add, “But I can’t sit there with an open mouth when people are telling me some dreadfully wonderful story.”

Peter Duchin played at so many parties that Mrs. Astor either gave or attended over four decades that the events had all become a blur. As a teenager, Duchin had known Vincent Astor and his second wife, Minnie Cushing, and recalls a raucous New Year’s party at their country home where guests jumped into the pool. Valets stood by to press their sopping clothes. Duchin still remembers the ancient gossip about how Brooke became the third Mrs. Astor. “Vincent was a very difficult, overly possessive man,” he says. “Minnie was great, she just got fed up with him. She and Babe Paley and Slim Keith got together and decided that Brooke Marshall would be the perfect bride for Vincent—that’s the story I always heard.”

Even in gala-fatigued New York, Brooke’s ninetieth birthday party was a roaring social success, and it netted $892,741 besides. The Citizens Committee was eager to replicate the evening and celebrate one hundred years of Mrs. Astor’s benevolent rule. “I went to Brooke, and she semi-agreed,” recalls Elliott. The gossip columnist Liz Smith even ran a save-the-date item in her column on June 12, 2001, promising that a Broadway theater had been booked and Shakespearean actors would perform in honor of Mrs. Astor’s centennial. “Then it got more iffy and Brooke backed out,” says Elliott. She sent a note to her friend George Trescher, the public relations mastermind who had burnished her reputation and served as her social gatekeeper. Although Trescher died in June 2003 of emphysema, his second-in-command, Vincent Steffan, can still recite parts of Mrs. Astor’s candid note from memory: “I’m old and I’m tired. I would like this birthday to be fun for me, instead of being on display for some organization.”

Plans for a private celebration were already under way. On New Year’s Eve 1999, Brooke had been a guest at a party given by David Rockefeller at the Playhouse at Kykuit, when her host turned to her and asked whether she would let him give her a dinner-dance right there. Of course she accepted. Brooke Astor had been friends with the Rockefeller family since her marriage to Vincent Astor. David Rockefeller, the youngest member of the family and her junior by thirteen years, recalls, “I think the first time I met her was in 1958, on a boat off Providence, Rhode Island. My uncle Winthrop Aldrich, who was the former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, took us out for a day sail on his boat, the Wayfarer.”

Brooke became extended family to David Rockefeller and his brother Nelson. But her true confidant in the family was another brother, Laurance, the conservationist and philanthropist. They were so enamored of each other in public that rumors circulated for decades that Brooke and the long-married Laurance were having an affair. Whether amour or friendship, the feelings were powerful and long-lasting. In the closing hours of her ninety-fifth birthday party at the Carlyle Hotel, a girlish Brooke turned to her date, a prominent younger businessman, and said, “I hope you don’t mind, but Laurance has asked to see me home.”

Five years later, in 2002, Laurance was ninety-two, a widower, and in frail health, so it fell to the youngest Rockefeller brother, David, then eighty-six and also a recent widower, to host Mrs. Astor’s festivities. The retired Chase Manhattan chairman and Brooke had much in common, from philanthropy to overlapping social circles to homes near each other on the Upper East Side, in Westchester County, and in Maine. “Laurance was in many ways the one of us that she saw the most of,” says David Rockefeller. “I got to know her really well in the last twenty years, and saw a great deal of her.” He took her out for horse-and-carriage rides in Westchester and Maine. When climbing into his carriage became difficult for her because of her advancing age, he bought her a two-step lift. “That made it easier for her,” he says, “especially an elderly lady with a tight skirt.”

 

Several months before her birthday, Rockefeller went to Brooke’s apartment to discuss the arrangements for the party. The two old friends sat in her corner library, sipping tea in front of the fireplace, contemplating the momentous occasion. The seemingly insurmountable challenge would be to keep the guest list small enough for everyone to fit in the room where the dinner would be served yet allow plenty of space for dancing. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, Vincent Astor’s status-conscious grandmother, had been renowned in the 1890s for entertaining “the Astor 400,” the precise number that fit in the ballroom of her grand Fifth Avenue mansion. But Brooke Astor’s fete had to be smaller and thus even more exclusive. Since Brooke was turning one hundred, Rockefeller suggested having one hundred guests. Asked whom she would like to invite, she replied, “Ninety-nine men would be nice.”

She loved to flirt, to be provocative and even naughty, and it did not matter whether the men were straight, gay, married, or many decades younger. “There were rotating men in her life, which made it work,” says the movie producer John Hart, who was fifty years her junior. He had joked with her one evening: “‘The reason I have you at Café Daniel is I’m going to propose to you.’ She looked at me and said, ‘Why? Do you need money?’”

In the end, there were surprising omissions from the guest list. When the historian Barbara Goldsmith called Mrs. Astor’s home to RSVP, she got an earful from the social secretary, who confided, “You can’t believe what’s going on. All these people are calling and saying, ‘Of course I’m included on the list, and I have to say, ‘I don’t know.’” As Goldsmith puts it, “People were lobbying to get in.”

For twenty-three years, Linda Gillies had accompanied Brooke Astor to libraries in the South Bronx and renovated historic row houses in Harlem. As a child, Gillies had been visiting her grandparents in Paris when the famous Mrs. Astor showed up at a Sunday lunch wearing bracelets encrusted with diamonds, sapphires, and rubies. They had met again in New York when Gillies was working at the Metropolitan Museum, and Brooke had hired this granddaughter of friends to run the Astor Foundation, where she served from 1974 until Brooke decided to give away its assets and dissolve the foundation, in 1997. Brooke had often praised Gillies, telling an interviewer that her deputy had transformed the place: “When I got Linda to come here, we had a marvelous time.” But Gillies was not on the guest list. Several friends attempted to intervene on Gillies’s behalf to wangle an invitation. John Dobkin, then the head of Historic Hudson Valley, says, “Brooke was human and she was jealous. Linda was her sidekick and confidante for all those years. Linda was fifty-five, Brooke was one hundred—I think she was jealous and peeved. It was a huge mistake.” But once the foundation closed its doors, the axis of their relationship shifted. “Once something was over, it was over for her,” Gillies says. “There were several friends of the heart who died while I knew her, and once that happened, you never heard about that person again. I think for her I represented something that was over.”

The developer Marshall Rose, who had been a guest at Brooke’s ninety-fifth birthday celebration at the Carlyle Hotel, had been banished too. He and Brooke had bonded as fellow board members of the New York Public Library. Rose and his wife, Jill, were guests at Brooke’s home in Maine, and after Jill died, Brooke tried to cheer him up by including him at dinners in her home and asking him to escort her to her nightly round of parties. Their friendship ended when Marshall began dating the actress Candice Bergen, whom he married in 2000. Eager for Brooke to meet his new love, he arranged for them to have tea at the Astor apartment. “We walked in, and the conversation was decidedly cold. Ice cold,” remembers Rose. The couple made their excuses after a tense forty-five minutes. Brooke called him the next morning at 9 A.M., uncharacteristically early for her, to inquire, “Are you going to marry that woman?” Rose thought the phone call revealed a touching display of jealousy. “I laughed, because isn’t it wonderful that that could enter her mind as an issue?”

Tom and Meredith Brokaw had been seated at the head table at the ninetieth birthday celebration but were among those passed over a decade later. “Brooke was a big flirt,” says Nancy Reagan, whose mother introduced her to Mrs. Astor more than a half-century ago. “I remember when she had this huge crush on Tom Brokaw. She was so cute in her flirtations.” Did she have a crush on President Reagan? “Not that I know of,” the former first lady replied, laughing. Brokaw was succeeded by his professional competitor, the ABC News anchor Peter Jennings. “She had an infatuation at the time for Peter as well,” recalls Brokaw, who says that Mrs. Astor tried to create a rivalry between them. “Peter and I talked about it. Brooke would say to me, ‘Peter works in this homeless shelter.’ I’d say, ‘I know he does, Brooke.’” But Brokaw relished her company, saying, “She had this great spirited cackle.” (Peter Jennings was among the guests who had every reason to believe they would outlive their hostess. Jennings died of lung cancer in August 2005 at the age of sixty-seven; nine other partygoers, all younger than the honoree, would pass away in the next five years while Brooke, remarkably, lived on.)

At an age when few people are healthy or even ambulatory, Brooke Astor was still in the thick of high society and had just hired a new social secretary, Naomi Dunn Packard-Koot, a blond and lithe Princeton graduate then in her early thirties. She was charged with sorting through the dozens of invitations that continued to arrive each month and to organize Mrs. Astor’s appointments. “She could have kept every single minute occupied,” marveled Packard-Koot. “She was still doing a lot.” But the nonagenarian’s memory was fading, and her friends were graciously trying to find ways to help her out.

“We had a little game,” says Gregory Long, the president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, who had known Brooke Astor for thirty years, dating back to his first job at the Metropolitan Museum. “She’d say, ‘I went to see these people last night—you wouldn’t believe what happened.’ I’d say, ‘What people?’ She’d say, ‘Oh, you know,’ and I’d say, ‘No, you have to tell me.’ So she’d say, ‘Jewelry designer.’ I’d come up with a list of designers whom she might know, and she’d tell me when I hit the right one.” Several days before Brooke’s hundredth birthday, she and Long had lunch at her favorite spot, the Knickerbocker Club, an exclusive private men’s club founded in 1871, where she retained widow’s rights after Vincent Astor died. “She was very excited about the party, thrilled that David was doing it,” says Long, but he worried about whether she was up to the event. “She didn’t say she was nervous, but I wondered. Things seemed hard for her.”

Mrs. Astor had a lifelong ability to rise to the occasion, however, and appeared in perfect command that week in an interview conducted over afternoon tea at her apartment with Alex Kuczynski of the New York Times. Although she came from a genteel generation that shied away from seeing their names in the newspapers, she was a master of public relations and used the press to publicize her causes, consistently providing great copy for generations of journalists. She recalled playing tennis with Ezra Pound (he was “terrible to the ball boys” she told USA Today), viewing Mussolini at a reception held at a grand Italian palazzo on the eve of World War II, and even meeting Henry Adams. Once again she did not disappoint, giving a performance that seemed to promise many more years of perfect bons mots. She slyly pointed out a statue of a young nude and claimed that it was her younger self. “Darn, I can’t lie about my age any longer,” she joked about her birthday.

Mrs. Astor ended the interview with a favorite conversational gambit, bringing up the topic of plastic surgery. “I have never had any work done,” she said, and then asked, with the perfect timing of a honed punch line, “Tell me honestly. Could I use some?” Even at one hundred, she delivered the goods. In truth, she had made a similar remark a few years earlier to Marian Heiskell, a member of the Sulzberger family, who had reacted with a skeptical smile. Brooke had then admitted, “Well, maybe just a little around the eyes.”

Kuczynski walked away impressed at Brooke Astor’s stamina and well-maintained lifestyle. “She was pretty much all there—she was compos mentis. The apartment had a sweet smell, the smell you find in well-run homes. It has something to do with fine cotton and high-grade linen.” (A few years earlier, a journalist from the Toronto Globe and Mail had described the odor as “that fine smell of beeswax and money.”) But contemplating the aroma of old money can get a reporter only so far. Kuczynski needed another voice for her story, so she turned to Brooke Astor’s son, Tony Marshall, for the expected filial quote.