4

“I Married a Terrible Man”

GUARDED BY TWO stone lions, Patience and Fortitude, the main branch of the New York Public Library is an imposing marble Beaux Arts landmark at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. Its cornerstone was laid in May 1902, two months after Brooke Astor was born. On a wintry December day nearly a century later, Mrs. Astor ascended the stairs to accept yet another in a long series of public service awards.

The library had been a second home for her in the past two decades. A bookish child who had turned into an insatiable reader, she had written two poignant autobiographies, Patchwork Child and Footprints, and two well-reviewed novels, The Bluebird Is at Home and The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree, which was deemed “a lovely summertime entertainment” by the New York Times. Her career as a writer began with a book review in Vogue in 1926; her most recent offering had been an essay in Vanity Fair in 2000 on the lost art of flirting. “She took books with her to the hairdresser’s, in her car—there was always a book by her side,” says Linda Gillies, of the Astor Foundation. “Mrs. Astor used to say that you can never be lonely if you read.”

The occasion at the library on December 10, 2001, was the inaugural awarding of the Andrew Carnegie Medals of Philanthropy. Mrs. Astor was being honored for spearheading the revival of the library, and her talk was preceded on the luncheon program by a series of yawn-inducing speeches from fellow honorees. The financier George Soros intoned, “We need better and stronger international institutions,” and then David Rockefeller observed, “We all have the responsibility for the well-being of our society and its citizens.”

Dressed in a blue suit and a large navy hat, and overwhelmed by three large strands of pearls, a huge diamond pin, diamond earrings, and a gold bracelet, Mrs. Astor appeared unsteady on her feet as Vartan Gregorian took her arm and escorted her to the podium. She gazed with pleasure at the audience and then, in a raspy aged voice still tinged with patrician pronunciation, she launched into a rambling speech that was rivetingly personal.

“My mother used to say to me, Brooke, don’t get beyond yourself. I am beyond myself in two ways,” she began. “The first is all of you being so nice to listen to me, since I have practically nothing to say. And the other, frankly, is that I’m still alive.” Mrs. Astor smiled tremulously, and the audience laughed in support. “I was an only child and I had my father, who was very sensible, and my mother, who was insensible,” she continued. “So here I am, a very mixed-up person who has had a wonderful life, and also a hard life at times.”

Then she spoke of an early mistake that had become a badge of shame. “I married a perfectly terrible man,” she recalled, harking back to her wedding at seventeen. “They were not what you call interesting people, but they had a lot of money. I was pushed into marriage, and in those days I thought if a man kissed you, a baby popped out of you. I didn’t know what it was all about.”

Then she suddenly looked disoriented, as if she had lost her bearings. Mrs. Astor became incoherent in the middle of a sentence. There were nervous titters; as Annette de la Renta recalls, “No one knew what to do.” After a moment, Mrs. Astor valiantly carried on, trying to wrap up with her views on dealing with her fellow men, albeit with an odd coda: “Don’t hurt them—always try to help them. If they’re absolutely nuts and stupid, stay away from them.” The protective Gregorian then whispered in her ear, and she replied, her words captured by the microphone, “You say I’ve said enough? All right, I think I’ve said enough.”

 

In a life that spans more than a century, innumerable events and memories compete for mental space; there are hours that linger for years and years that pass in a flash. Brooke Astor outlived three husbands and defined her life by those marriages. She was grateful to Vincent Astor for giving her the opportunity to become an influential member of society. Charles “Buddie” Marshall provided marital happiness. But Brooke’s first husband, John Dryden Kuser, cast a long and troubled shadow that haunted her until her dying day. Kuser materialized in her nightmares. Events occurred during their time together that she could neither forgive nor forget.

Her feelings toward her son were blunted by her rage toward his father. She knew it and felt guilty, but she could not help herself. Brooke Astor grew up in an era when psychoanalysis had yet to penetrate the straitlaced remnants of Victorian America. There was no such thing as a self-help aisle in the legendary Scribner Book Store. Rather than ruminate over traumatic experiences, Brooke forged ahead, determined to keep busy every single minute of the day. She accepted more engagements than anyone could possibly keep and then berated her social secretaries when she was late or forced to cancel at the last minute. If she could just stay in motion, she could avoid unpleasant thoughts. But the past caught up with her when she spent time with her son. “Keep in mind, Tony is the son of Brooke’s first husband, who treated Brooke abominably,” says Robert Pirie. Ashton Hawkins adds, “Part of the problem is that Tony always reminded her of Dryden. It’s not his fault, but he did.”

 

On April 27, 1919, the Washington Post featured a lengthy story on its society page about the wedding of Roberta Brooke Russell to John Dryden Kuser at St. John’s Episcopal Church. The ceremony was noteworthy because the daughter of Colonel John Russell of the Marine Corps was marrying into a wealthy and well-connected family. “Mr. Kuser is a grandson of the late Senator John F. Dryden of Bernardsville, N.J.,” the Post wrote, noting that the senator’s District of Columbia residence “was the scene of some of the most brilliant and elaborate of official entertainments which made up the social history of Washington in the past 20 years.”

Brooke was accompanied by eight bridesmaids in the lavish wedding. As the Post noted, “The little bride wore a girlish graceful gown of soft white satin” and a veil trimmed with orange blossoms. Brooke’s mother, Mabel, who had encouraged the match, “wore gray chiffon with a blue hat veiled in tulle and trimmed with ostrich feathers.” The newspaper pointed out that Brooke was young for marriage. The bride and groom would head off by train for a wedding trip to the palatial Hotel Greenbriar in West Virginia, “after which they will go to Princeton, where the bridegroom will complete his courses at the university where he graduates in June.”

Brooke would later tear up her wedding pictures in a fury. She had grown up as a sheltered only child, traveling the world with her parents as her father moved from her birthplace, New Hampshire, to Hawaii, Panama, Newport, and China with the Marine Corps. The Russells were a patriotic family with a tradition of military service; Brooke’s paternal grandfather, Admiral John Russell, had been praised by President Lincoln for defeating Confederate warships during the Civil War. Her mother’s parents, the lawyer George Howard and his wife, Roberta, a society belle, had been disappointed by Mabel’s decision to marry a military man without significant independent means. Although Mabel opted for love, she came to appreciate her parents’ concerns and was determined that her own daughter would make a more financially advantageous union.

Although Brooke was not always a reliable narrator in chronicling her life in her autobiographies, she showed a keen eye in describing her parents’ expatriate social life in China—and her mother’s provocative flirtations and the resulting family quarrels. Brooke learned her social skills from a self-confident master of the art. When the New York Times profiled her father, newly named as commandant of the Marines, in 1934, the Washington bureau chief, Arthur Krock, went out of his way to compliment Mabel as “extraordinarily able and attractive.” An acquaintance who knew Brooke’s mother in the 1940s says, “Mrs. Russell was divine. She was charming beyond belief. She would say, ‘It’s so lovely going to a party when you know you’re going to make the evening for some young man.’” According to Ivan Obolensky, Vincent Astor’s nephew, “Mrs. Russell was jolly, intelligent, the perfect commandant’s wife. The problem was, the family had influence but was without money. Brooke was brought up in penury, but with all the accoutrements.”

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.

Tony was starved for affection and attention. He was sent off to stay with Brooke’s parents for months on end, and at least his grandfather always appeared happy to see him. Those memories were so important that when Tony was eighty-one years old, he regaled a roomful of Marine generals with a luncheon speech stressing his recollections of General Russell. “At the age of six I visited my grandfather when he was commanding general of the Marine Corps base at San Diego and flew my kite from the garden of Quarters One,” Tony said. “The following year I spent Christmas with him and my grandmother at Quarters One at Quantico and he toured me about the base.”

Brooke did not want more children and took steps to avoid having a larger family. “I’m totally for abortion,” she told the Guardian in a 1988 interview. “In my day we said we didn’t have it, but of course we just called it curettage.” She was even more candid in a conversation with three women friends during a walk in Palm Beach. When the conversation turned to abortion, Brooke announced, “In my day, we called it a D & C, and I had three of them.”

As a teenager, Tony attended the Brooks School, in North Andover, Massachusetts. Sam Peabody, a fellow Brooks alumni, recalls, “He was very shy, somewhat isolated, a middle-of-the-road student.” Peabody remembers meeting Brooke and Buddie Marshall when they came to visit Tony at school. “I must admit, I’d never seen such an attractive mother. I think Tony was very lonely,” Peabody recalls. “My impression was that he was incidental to his parents.”

Tony did not see much of his biological father, and in 1942 he decided to change his last name to Marshall, though his stepfather did not legally adopt him. (“I did not have a very happy relationship with my father,” he later explained to me. “I did have a good relationship with my stepfather. I admired him a great deal, so I decided to change my name.”) A few months later he enlisted in the Marines. He had intended to finish high school and then go into officer training school, but after he consulted his grandfather, his plans changed. “My grandfather said, ‘You’re a poor student—the right thing for you to do now is to go on active duty,’” Tony recalls. “So he telephoned to Washington, and a week later I was in boot camp.” General Russell also called the Brooks School and successfully pressured the headmaster to give his grandson a diploma, since as a dropout he would not have been eligible for officer training. This was the first of many times in Tony Marshall’s life when family connections meant everything.

Tony went to war armed with military heirlooms from his grandfather: a machete crafted at the turn of century from a carriage spring, and a silver-barreled, pearl-handled .38 Smith & Wesson pistol. When his father learned that he had enlisted, he asked Tony to take out life insurance for $250,000, making him the beneficiary if Tony died in battle. For Tony, it seemed that he was more valuable to his father dead than alive.

Assigned to the Third Marine Division, Tony attended boot camp at Parris Island and was stationed in Guam, where he contracted dengue fever. After he recovered, the young second lieutenant led his Marine unit in the brutal assault on Iwo Jima in 1945. His company arrived on D-Day plus 2, the third day of the attack. After several days of fighting, Tony was wounded in the leg and the arm by shrapnel, narrowly escaping the fate of the 6,800 American soldiers who died on that island. “I led a platoon, and half of them were killed and the others were wounded when I landed my platoon at Iwo Jima,” he said. “Because I was wounded, I was evacuated. I had shrapnel in my leg—I could hardly walk. I was put on a hospital ship, and then in a hospital in Guam.”

Back in New York, Brooke worried out loud about the fate of her son. As Louis Auchincloss recalls, “Brooke was in a dither. She was very emotionally fired up.” Tony recuperated physically, but his mother wrote that he had nightmares for several years thereafter (though Tony brushes that off, saying, “My mother sometimes exaggerated”).

After the war ended, Tony Marshall left the Marines. “I didn’t really want to go to college. I had in mind writing, but I decided it would be better to get a degree,” he told me. He enrolled at Brown University, in Providence, where he fell in love with eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Cryan, a pretty, lively freshman at Brown’s sister college, Pembroke. They shared the bond of growing up in a one-parent family: Tony had an absentee father, and Liz had never known her father, who had died of a heart attack shortly before she was born. Liz and her two brothers had been raised by their mother in Switzerland, an upbringing that gave her a more cosmopolitan flair than her classmates. Four years older, Tony was a good-looking war hero with family money and an aloof persona. Liz later told friends that it was his loneliness that hooked her: she thought maybe she could fill that void.

In March 1947, General Russell died suddenly of a heart attack at age seventy-four, leaving an emotional emptiness for his grandson. Although Tony had known Liz for only six months, he vowed to marry her, and she accepted his proposal. She began to have doubts as her wedding day approached, but her mother pressed her to keep the date. Brooke vehemently opposed the marriage, arguing that the couple was too young. Tony, uncharacteristically, stood up for himself. His wedding ceremony took place in June 1947 in suburban Philadelphia.

Tony entered into his marriage with a substantial trust fund, believed by family members to consist of several hundred thousand dollars, a legacy stemming from his parents’ divorce. When Brooke married Buddie Marshall, her alimony went into an account for Tony. She still thought the money should have been hers; she had earned it with bruises and a broken jaw. Buddie had an income from a family trust as well as a career as a stockbroker, but when he suffered a series of financial reversals, Brooke used guilt to induce her son to help out. Tony gave his mother a monthly allowance, paid to put in a swimming pool at Brooke and Buddie’s country home in Tyringham, Massachusetts, and even bought his mother jewelry from Cartier and Tiffany. “She got a lot of money out of him,” says someone who knew Tony well in that era. “She made him feel that this is money that she should have gotten.”

In the flush of his new marriage, Tony attempted a rapprochement with his father, arranging a lunch at the Biltmore Hotel in Providence to introduce his bride. Dryden showed up drunk. And then the phone calls began, with Dryden harassing the couple for money. Dryden finally took Tony to court, suing over his trust fund. His argument was that since Tony had rejected the Kuser name, he did not deserve to have Kuser money. Tony won the lawsuit, but this was such a painful topic that he turned stone-faced when I asked him about it, saying, “I won’t discuss this.”

Both Brooke and Tony later wrote novels that included fictionalized elements of their emotionally complex relationship. In The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree, Brooke describes the conflicts between a rich widow, Mrs. Shrewsbury, and her ne’er-do-well son, Joe, who wants to be a writer and depends on his mother’s handouts. “The boy was another of her problems. They had never wanted a child. When he was seven, they shipped him off to boarding school, and from then on, it had been school in the winter, summer camp in Maine, and finally, Princeton.” When Mrs. Shrewsbury’s lawyer, Wendell Ponderosa, suggests that she revise her will to leave money to a foundation for her son to run, the widow reacts with horror, saying, “Heavens! For Joe to run? You must be out of your mind, Wendell!” (Brooke Astor closed the Astor Foundation rather than pass the reins to Tony.) Mrs. Shrewsbury grudgingly comes to respect her son when she discovers that he has a knack for managing money, a task that Tony was performing adequately for his mother when she published this novel.

In Tony’s self-published 2001 thriller, Dash, the sad-sack protagonist, Mark, is the solitary scion of a rich British family with a distant mother and a tyrannical, cruel father. “From his first spanking as he exited his mother’s womb, Mark Baldwin Wynwhip was expected to live up to his heritage of near-royal lineage, a confusing agenda for the tot,” Tony wrote. “As the infant developed into childhood he was regarded in both physique as well as in manner as a hereditary mistake.” After the fictional father arranges to have the beloved nanny murdered, the young boy is sent off to boarding school. Tony writes of his forlorn hero: “He was lonely, friendless, forever hungry and physically exhausted when he rose each morning after a night in the clutch of terrifying nightmares.”

Even after Dryden Kuser lost his lawsuit against his son, he was incorrigible. As Tony’s first wife, now Elizabeth Wheaton-Smith, recalls, “Dryden used to call only when he needed money. It went on and on. He’d invent these stories—‘I’m in the hospital, I can’t pay the bill.’” And Tony would obediently write a check. Yet another attempt at a father-son reconciliation was made in the late 1950s, when Dryden, newly sober, took his fifth wife to meet his son and daughter-in-law. “They came for dinner,” recalls Wheaton-Smith. “Dryden was offered a drink, and he said, ‘No, can I have some coffee?’”

Most children expect their parents to provide for them financially. But Tony’s Kuser trust fund was a toxic lure for his divorced parents. Instead of fending them off, Tony tried to win their love by writing checks. Despite their patrician pretensions, Dryden and Brooke, both with a sense of entitlement, set an avaricious standard of behavior for their son. They used Tony, sending him the message that all tactics are fair, from emotional blackmail to legal wrangling, in grabbing for a family’s fortune.

By the early 1960s, Dryden Kuser, ill with emphysema, had been reduced to a sinecure as caretaker at High Point State Park, more than 10,000 wild acres that his father had donated to New Jersey back in 1923. He went to see Mrs. Astor at her Park Avenue apartment to beg for money. Brooke savored the moment—the man who had ruined her youth was groveling, and now she held power over him. Despite her bitter memories, however, she chose to be magnanimous. “Brooke was supporting him at the end, and did she enjoy it,” says Louis Auchincloss. “It’s the ultimate satisfaction, supporting a person who has been mean to you. He was destitute. She couldn’t let her son’s father starve when she had millions.” Kuser died on March 3, 1964, at age sixty-six. Neither Tony nor Brooke went to the sparsely attended funeral.

Colonel Kuser’s once glorious mansion in Bernardsville fell into disrepair after changing hands several times. The place had degenerated into a Jersey version of Grey Gardens by the time that Clive Meanwell, a British pharmaceutical executive, and his wife, Cynthia, bought the house in 2001. During the renovation, a black luxury car with New York plates pulled up in front of the secluded property and a couple got out. “Who the hell is that man wearing an ascot?” Mrs. Meanwell exclaimed to her husband. Tony Marshall introduced himself and Charlene, explained that this had been his grandfather’s home, and requested a tour.

Tony and Charlene walked through the rooms, lingering in the forty-foot wood-paneled ballroom and walking past the intricate bronze and iron stairway and the living room with its marble fireplace. For historical reasons, the new owners had retained elements of the old intercom system, which included Dryden’s name on a button. Recalling his visit later, Tony smiled wistfully as he described the house’s layout to me, saying, “They’ve changed things around, but if you go to the left, there’s the room where my grandfather kept stuffed pheasants. I remembered that room.”

Perhaps that house represented Paradise Lost to Tony, harking back to a time when his parents, although battling, were still together and a cherished nanny cared for him. Shipped off to boarding schools, disdained by his father and stepfathers, and frequently ignored by his ambitious mother, Tony Marshall never had the security of unconditional love. Only at age sixty-eight did he finally find happiness, when he married Charlene.