3

Disaster for Mrs. Astor

AT 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.

Salzman expected to leave Stackhouse’s office with the order to seal the lawsuit and take it directly to the clerk’s office. But the judge decided to hold on to it temporarily. Salzman called repeatedly to find out when he could pick it up. Late on Friday, Salzman finally took a photocopy of the order to the clerk’s office, but the clerk declined to accept it, insisting on having the original. Thus the case, “Index No. 500096/06: PHILIP MARSHALL for the Application of Guardians of the Person and Property of BROOKE ASTOR, an alleged Incapacitated Person,” was left in the public record.

On Monday afternoon, Helen Peterson, a Daily News reporter, received a tip that guardianship papers involving Brooke Astor had been filed. In light of Peterson’s six years of covering the legal doings at 60 Centre Street (and twenty-three years at the Daily News), her source was probably a courthouse employee, although all Peterson will say is, “It was not Ira Salzman.” While reporters routinely check the records room at 4 P.M. each day for new lawsuits, from slip-and-fall cases to business disputes, guardianship files are not typically requested. By the time Peterson got the tip, the record room was closed for the day.

At 10 A.M. on Tuesday, the reporter went to the musty basement office and asked for the Astor file. The clerk handed it over. “I started reading it and my hands started shaking,” Peterson recalled. “I knew it was a huge story.” Philip Marshall had charged his father with “elder abuse” of Brooke Astor. According to the document, Mrs. Astor, the city’s most beloved philanthropist, was living in squalor amid peeling paint and was being deprived of medical care. Peterson took out a roll of quarters and photocopied the hefty file—constantly looking over her shoulder in fear of rival reporters—and then took the subway to the Daily News headquarters. Her editor, Dean Chang, was in a meeting. “I have to talk to you,” she said. He waved her off; she went back twenty minutes later to interrupt again. “You don’t understand,” she said. “I have to talk to you right now. I have tomorrow’s front-page story.”

Late in the day she called Tony Marshall at his Upper East Side co-op for a comment prior to publication. He was so thrown by the situation that he did not immediately defend himself. “He sounded sad,” she says in retrospect. “Sometimes people start screaming at me. He was well brought up. He wasn’t rude—he was very polite.” Tony Marshall informed her, “No, I don’t want to comment.” Peterson told him that she found the allegations shocking. Tony’s reply, quoted the next day in the Daily News, was, “You said it is shocking, and I agree. It is a matter that is going to be coming up in a court of law and it should be left to the court.”

That night Philip Marshall, the instigator of it all, stayed in Queens with Tenzing Chadotsang, a Tibetan friend who worked for the Landmarks Preservation Commission. As they were driving back to the Chadotsang family’s modest brick home after dinner at a Korean restaurant, Philip’s cell phone rang. The Daily News wanted a comment. Philip was startled, since Salzman had assured him of privacy. As Chadotsang says, “I knew that Philip had filed the suit, but he expected it to be a quiet thing. Philip got off the phone and said, ‘Oh my going to be in the newspapers.’” Philip contemplated calling Annette de la Renta but decided not to ruin her evening. “At that point,” he said, “I didn’t know Annette well enough to call her at ten-thirty or eleven at night.”

Annette is an early riser, and at 5:30 the next morning she took her three rambunctious dogs for a walk, strolling down quiet Park Avenue, contemplating the day ahead and a visit to Brooke in the hospital. When she got back to her building, the doorman handed her the Daily News, delivered just minutes before. Annette was horrified by the sight of the huge black words on page one: “DISASTER FOR MRS. ASTOR: Son forces society queen to live on peas and porridge in dilapidated Park Avenue duplex.”

The story inside—“Battle of N.Y. Blue Bloods”—made for mesmerizing reading for the city’s entire five boroughs, with special double-takes all over the Upper East Side. “The sad and deplorable state of my family’s affairs has compelled me to bring the guardianship case,” Philip had written in his affidavit requesting that his father be removed as Brooke Astor’s legal guardian and replaced by Annette de la Renta. “Her bedroom is so cold in the winter that my grandmother is forced to sleep in the TV room in torn nightgowns on a filthy couch that smells, probably from dog urine.” Philip charged that his father “has turned a blind eye to her . . . while enriching himself with millions of dollars.”

Detailed affidavits about the alleged abuse had been signed by three nurses (Minnette Christie, Pearline Noble, and Beverly Thomson) and by Chris Ely, who had been fired by Tony eighteen months earlier.

“The apartment is shabby and poorly maintained. It always has a foul odor because her two dogs are obliged to live enclosed in the dining room,” wrote Annette de la Renta in her affidavit. “Because of the failure of Mrs. Astor’s son, Anthony, to spend her money properly, the quality of life of Mrs. Astor has been significantly eroded.” David Rockefeller seconded this concern about Brooke’s “welfare,” and Henry Kissinger attested that Mrs. de la Renta would make an “excellent guardian” for Mrs. Astor.

By the time the Daily News published its story, Justice Stackhouse had already taken action to remedy the situation. The judge named two temporary guardians for Mrs. Astor, Annette de la Renta and JPMorgan Chase, the bank that Rockefeller had headed for decades. With the stroke of a pen, Tony Marshall lost responsibility for his mother’s care as well as his hefty salary for managing her money. The judge named a court evaluator, the lawyer Susan Robbins, an outspoken former social worker with expertise in guardianships. All this happened without a hearing, which the judge then scheduled for several weeks in the future. Tony Marshall had been stripped of his powers without the chance to offer his version of events and defend himself.

 

New York is a city that virtually, under civic charter, requires a summer scandal, and the Astor affair fit the bill. This was not just another family feud but a sprawling saga involving society figures, millions of dollars, appalling charges, and backstage intrigue. A media war erupted. The New York Times assigned a battalion of reporters and ran stories with eight different bylines in the next few days. Television and print reporters staked out the Marshalls’ Manhattan apartment as well as Alec’s place in Ossining and Philip’s forest green shingle-style home on a corner lot in Massachusetts, taking pictures of Winslow mowing the lawn. As Nan recalls, “That’s when I knew our lives would never be the same.”

At Lenox Hill Hospital, extra security guards were hired to keep interlopers such as reporters pretending to deliver flowers away from Mrs. Astor, who was recovering from a near fatal bout of pneumonia. “Reporters were outside my parents’ home,” recalls Dr. Sandra Gelbard, who was in charge of her care. “I don’t know how they got the address.”

On Northeast Harbor’s tiny Main Street, reporters from the Daily News, the New York Post, and the Boston Globe went from door to door, trying to dig up dirt. Bob Pyle, the town’s librarian, says, “We felt like we had to pull down our shades at night to escape the paparazzi.” Charlene’s daughter Inness, staying on at Cove End, was so distraught by the press attention and the gawkers that she called her mother to say she felt ill and was worried that her pregnancy would be endangered. “I thought the New York Post was going to give my daughter a miscarriage,” says Charlene Marshall. “But she went to the hospital and they saved the baby.”

The unfolding saga was polarizing Brooke Astor’s friends and the Marshalls’ social circle. People felt forced to take sides. In Washington, D.C., Suzanne Kuser, Tony Marshall’s half-sister and a former State Department intelligence analyst, got a call from her nephew Philip explaining the situation. Kuser says, “I thought he had a case.” Kuser had a distinct theory about the psychological underpinnings of her half-brother’s behavior, saying, “Tony has a lot of problems. Some of them are mommy issues. There’s a whole history.”

In California, Nancy Reagan was saddened but not entirely surprised to read of the scandal. “I felt terrible, just terrible, that this could happen to Brooke,” she told me. “We all knew that something was wrong up there. But nobody knew quite how wrong it was.” Mrs. Reagan called Annette de la Renta to inquire about the details. “Annette explained to me that she wasn’t supposed to talk.” Even to you? “Even to me.”

Viscount William Astor was on holiday in Scotland when the story hit the newspapers. He admitted that he had been worried about Brooke in recent years. “I’m just appalled by the way she’s been treated,” he said. “Annette de la Renta has done the right thing, and we’ve all been encouraging her to do something for a long time. It’s all about money.”

Indeed, nearly every day for the following six months Tony and Charlene Marshall were pilloried in the press. They were accused of finagling millions from Mrs. Astor, including diverting money to invest in their theatrical company. They were attacked for firing Mrs. Astor’s longtime staff—Chris Ely, her chauffeur, her French chef, her social secretary, and her Maine housekeeper—and denounced for preventing friends from visiting in order to isolate her. There were ominous reports that Tony had shredded eighty boxes of documents. He was criticized for selling the Childe Hassam painting for $10 million and taking a $2 million commission, and there was an uproar when he admitted that he had erred in filing his mother’s taxes, resulting in a huge underpayment of capital gains tax on the transaction.

The Marshalls protested their innocence in quaintly old-fashioned terms. “My mother has always emphasized the importance of good manners,” Tony said in a statement that he passed out to the press. “Those who have associated their names with this action taken against me and my wife Charlene have not only exercised bad manners but total disrespect and a lack of decency.” He charged that Rockefeller and Kissinger “have given undeserved credence to my son Philip’s charges against me and stirred up a massive media campaign.”

Tony was stunned by the betrayal of these people he knew—or at least thought he knew. As an ambassador in the Nixon administration, he had reported to Kissinger, then the secretary of state. Through his mother, Tony had known and socialized with the entire Rockefeller family for decades. He and Annette both served on the board of the Metropolitan Museum, and they were often thrown together at Brooke’s larger parties. “I thought they were all friends,” Tony later told me, and then, without prompting, he conceded, “Of my mother’s.”

Rockefeller and Kissinger, who have spent their lifetimes in the public eye, serenely took the high road, declining to respond to Tony Marshall’s criticisms and authorizing Rockefeller’s veteran public relations adviser Fraser Seitel to handle the media. Even more than a year later, when Rockefeller and Kissinger spoke with me, they avoided directly criticizing Tony and pointedly praised Philip. In a lengthy conversation in his art-filled office on the fifty-sixth floor of Rockefeller Center, Rockefeller insisted that he became involved because he was concerned about Brooke’s “personal comfort and happiness.” He added, “I don’t know Philip well, but I felt his motives were totally unselfish and caring for his grandmother. I’ve been very impressed.” Kissinger, speaking at his Park Avenue office several blocks away, explained, “Nobody said, ‘Let’s get all these names together and really do a job here.’ When we were caucusing among ourselves, it was entirely on the issue of how can we make life better for Brooke in her final years?”

Thanks to the star power arrayed against the Marshalls, only a few of their friends were willing to support them openly. David Richenthal, the lead partner in Delphi Productions, the couple’s theatrical venture, was their staunchest vocal defender. He lashed out at Philip, calling him “a disturbed attention-getting young man who is acting irrationally.” The CBS newsman Mike Wallace, who had met the Marshalls when he profiled Brooke Astor for 60 Minutes, issued a formal statement saying, “I am perplexed by the attacks leveled against Anthony. I believe they are completely undeserved.” Wallace later told me, “When I read about it, I said, ‘This is horseshit.’ I’ve spent time with these people. They seemed reasonable and not greedy.” At St. James’ Church, Rector Brenda Husson was convinced that the Marshalls were innocent of all charges. “I was dumbfounded,” she says. “It just did not line up with anything I knew either about them or about their relationship with Brooke. I’m very aware of regular visits and ongoing care.”

The controversy dominated conversations and created schisms. Eleanor Elliott, a former Vogue editor who had attended Brooke’s hundredth birthday party, wrote a note of support to the Marshalls, declaring that she was not a fair-weather friend. But her brother-in-law Oz Elliott thought the charges were probably credible, saying, “If David Rockefeller got involved, there must have been more fire than smoke.”

For a son to take his father to court is a stunning act of familial disloyalty. William F. Buckley, Jr., Brooke’s neighbor at 778 Park Avenue, described Philip’s lawsuit in his syndicated newspaper column as a “parricidal intervention.” Tony told close friends that he could not fathom his sons’ behavior. As Daniel Billy, Jr., says, “What they’ve done is biblical in their betrayal.” Alec did not join in the lawsuit, but in his father’s eyes he was as culpable as Philip. As Billy adds, “By not taking sides, he’s taken sides.”

The Marshalls descended into a nightmarish existence in which everything they had ever said or done was scrutinized by the press. They were villains in the tabloid drama, and they confided to friends that strangers called in the middle of the night with death threats. Virtually every newspaper story featured lovely old photos of Mrs. Astor decked out in her finest jewels and hats and smiling benignly, alongside unattractive new photos of an enraged Charlene snarling at the cameras like Cruella de Vil, with a baffled and somber Tony at her side.

It seemed that the story would rival The Fantasticks as Manhattan’s longest-running show, setting off a chain reaction of efforts to capitalize on the explosive charges. In Washington, the U.S. Senate was prompted to hold a hearing on exploitation of seniors, inviting testimony from Philip Marshall’s lawyer, Ira Salzman. Oregon’s Republican senator Gordon Smith declared, “As we have learned from the highly publicized Brooke Astor case, no matter your age, finances or social status, none of us in this room today are beyond potential abuse.” And the television show Law & Order: Criminal Intent filmed a episode called “Privilege” in which an elderly character resembling Brooke Astor, played by the actress Doris Roberts, appears delirious after being denied medical care. She is forced to sign financial documents by her scheming son and his trophy wife. The phrase “urine-stained sheets,” which was close to the wording in Philip’s affidavit, was worked into the dialogue.

The foibles of the rich have always made for great copy, but Brooke Astor’s prominent role in the life of New York City added an underlying note of poignancy to the tale. Adorned with diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds, she had perfected an image of herself as Lady Bountiful with a common touch, ever accessible to the admiring strangers who stopped her on Madison Avenue or shook her hand at a housing project in Queens. “She never went out at night with less than a million dollars around her neck,” says Louis Auchincloss. “Someone once said to her, ‘You might lose that,’ and she said, ‘So what? Be in the safe all night? Don’t be ridiculous.’” She was unapologetic about her lavish life-style, which is why the charge in the lawsuit that expensive floral arrangements had been replaced by cheap Korean market bouquets seemed like such an insult. Auchincloss adds that Brooke once told him, “I know what people have. I know that Jayne Wrightsman [a wealthy widow and Metropolitan Museum trustee] could buy and sell me several times over, but look at the way she lives. I’ve got about fifty people in my employ and I know how to spend it. Jayne’s got much more money, but she doesn’t dare.”

Yet Brooke Astor could also be obliviously obtuse about money and social class. In a New York Times Magazine profile in 1984, the reporter Marilyn Berger trailed her to the South Bronx to visit homes being constructed for poor families. During a lunch break, Berger wrote, Mrs. Astor noticed mustard and lumpy Russian dressing for sandwiches in little plastic containers and exclaimed, “Look at the marvelous sauces.”

If her last name had remained Russell or Kuser or Marshall, Brooke would never have been quite so famous, even with a similar fortune. But a few names have held the American public in thrall for two centuries. In 1960 the writer Cleveland Amory published his bestseller Who Killed Society?, about the downfall of the American aristocracy, which highlighted the Astors as the epitome of privilege gone to seed. The Astor history was rife with destructive marriages, scandals, and embarrassing peccadilloes. “The American Astor Family in its fifth generation would have made the original John Jacob turn in his grave,” Amory wrote, before concluding that by 1958 the Astors had “proved that by six generations an American family is about ready to start all over again.”

Brooke Astor, newly widowed when the book was published, had saved society, rescuing the Astor name from ignominy and making it fashionable again. Mrs. Astor combined her noblesse with oblige, which won the hearts of jaded New Yorkers. At the depth of New York’s fiscal crisis in 1975, she flamboyantly stepped up as a leader by doubling her foundation’s giving, passing out $6.4 million to keep the doors of libraries and museums open. She loved chatting with museum curators, librarians, and security guards, even making a point of memorizing the doorkeepers’ names. At the Metropolitan Museum, she funded a Christmas lunch for all the employees to boost morale, and she proudly showed up every year. “She loved to get to know the people who did the work,” recalls Gregory Long. “She was endlessly interested in people. She wanted to know people high and low.”

Brooke Astor was hardly a saint. She was mercurial, she made promises that she did not always keep, and her charming public persona vanished at times when she dealt with her family and employees. She could be imperious and hurtful to those near and dear and was a master of the devastating putdown. Caught up in being Mrs. Astor, she brooked no complaint. That said, many, many people shared the view held by Tom Brokaw: “She was irresistible.”

The feud over Brooke Astor laid bare the schisms in a storied Manhattan clan. There is something spellbinding about the sight of a family falling apart in public, and there’s a special schadenfreude to be had when tens of millions of dollars are at stake. The public and the press become voyeurs, everyone has an opinion, and the real people at the center of the drama are reduced to caricatures.

Once the headlines faded away, the New Yorkers who thought they knew Brooke Astor—as well as Tony and Charlene Marshall—retained a haunting curiosity about what had actually happened, and why. At Park Avenue dinner parties, guests offered up theories as if playing an adult game of Clue with a lineup of suspects and motives. Had Mrs. Astor somehow brought this all on herself? Was Tony seeking revenge for his mother’s lifelong detachment? Did Philip Marshall have ulterior motives, ranging from a simmering hatred for his father to old-fashioned greed? Was the real culprit Charlene Marshall, twenty-one years younger than her husband and acting to protect her own financial future? Was Annette de la Renta trying to displace Brooke Astor as the leader of society, as Tony and his supporters loudly claimed, or was she truly selfless? What if there had been a rush to judgment and the Marshalls had been wrongly accused?

Truth is elusive. But maybe the simplest answer is that it had all begun long before, so long before that Woodrow Wilson was in the White House. Perhaps it had begun with Brooke’s marriage to her first husband, John Dryden Kuser.