5

An American Romance

BROOKE ASTOR was never the kind of woman who traveled light. When she went to Palm Beach every winter, she chartered a Gulfstream to accommodate her extraordinary amount of luggage, and before her arrival in Maine in the summer, her staff would drive up a station wagon or two full of her possessions. Her red T. Anthony suitcases trimmed with black leather contained ball gowns packed in tissue paper, a dozen pairs of shoes, Chanel suits, and silk nightgowns. Her maid would carry the black case containing her jewelry. In addition to her female finery, Brooke always took along two gold-framed photographs, which she propped up on her bedside table wherever the bed might be. These mementos reminded her of who she had been and who she had become. The photos were of Buddie Marshall and Vincent Astor.

Mrs. Astor was not a self-reflective person, but her life was full of might-have-beens. Just a quick glance at those pictures offered a constant reminder of how her life had changed in an instant and the bargain she had made. She was Mrs. Marshall for twenty years, and then, bereaved and panicked, within a year she married a man she did not love. She stood by Vincent Astor for five and a half years, until his death. But the title Mrs. Astor was then hers for life, another half-century, with tens of millions of dollars as her due, and that had made all the difference. Faced with tragedy, she had forged a new identity, yet she still needed to keep Buddie’s image close at hand, a reminder of what was lost.

His death had come without warning, on Thanksgiving weekend in 1952. Buddie and Brooke, along with her widowed mother, Mabel, were spending the holiday at their weekend spread in Tyringham, a hilly rural village in western Massachusetts. As she often described that day, the morning began with a cozy romantic scene, as she and her husband woke together and watched the sunrise from bed. He then went off to spend the morning hunting, bagging several pheasants. During the afternoon friends came by, and Buddie kept complaining that he felt cold, although the room was overheated. The family was sitting by the fire reading that evening when Buddie got up to let the dog out onto the back porch. Minutes later Brooke heard a sound, got up, and went into the kitchen. Her husband was lying on the floor, motionless. Whether he had had a heart attack or a stroke is unclear, but his death had been instantaneous. She cradled him in her arms until the doctor arrived and gave the official verdict.

To lose the love of your life is devastating. But Brooke soon learned that she had also lost her financial security. Buddie Marshall’s family trust fund reverted to his two children, and his divorce settlement granted his first wife a one-third interest in his estate. Brooke was left with approximately $525,000, according to Frances Kiernan’s book The Last Mrs. Astor. At a time when the average American family earned $4,500 a year, gas was 27 cents a gallon, and a loaf of bread cost 16 cents, this sum guaranteed an upper-middle-class existence. But to stretch that sum for the rest of a normal lifespan—what fifty-year-old could have imagined fifty-five years still to come?—would have required Brooke to change her lifestyle radically. She had been working as an editor at House and Garden, but that did not bring in enough to underwrite the country house, the New York apartment, the staff, the trips to Europe, and the designer clothes. Now that Tony was working at the State Department, he was dipping into his capital, so she knew that he could not solve her long-term problem. As someone who knew her well then recalls, “She was feeling poverty-stricken.”

Enter Vincent Astor, one of the wealthiest men in America. He was descended from John Jacob Astor, a butcher’s son from Waldorf, Germany, who came to Manhattan in April 1780 and hit it big as a fur trader, then plowed his profits into New York real estate. By the time his great-great-grandson Vincent inherited the bulk of the family fortune in 1912, Astor’s sprawling real estate empire was worth $87.2 million and included luxury hotels, apartment buildings, office buildings, and slums.

But Vincent Astor’s unhappy childhood had left emotional scars. His depression and suspicious nature proved a trial for all those who tried to love him, including Brooke Marshall. Never far from his mind was the memory of being locked by his imperious mother into a cedar dressing-room closet, where he wept for hours before he was rescued by a butler. He confided to Brooke that when he was four, his nanny had dressed him in a sailor suit and taken him to see his mother, who was having tea with friends. She reacted by saying, “Nanny, take him away, he looks perfectly horrid.”

From birth Astor was portrayed as a poor little rich boy in the press. A Washington Post story in 1904 began: “Always Kept Under Guard: The boy has heaps of money, loads of toys, but cannot eat candy and peanuts and never plays like other children.” Vincent, then thirteen, was described as a “captive” attended by five employees (tutor, valet, groom, bodyguard, chauffeur) and fed a bland diet. When he contracted the mumps, the event merited a newspaper story, as if the fate of the nation rested on his health.

His parents battled for years and finally ended their union with an acrimonious divorce, amid rumors that their daughter, Alice, was the product of Ava Astor’s illicit affair. Vincent’s formidable mother then married a British lord and became Lady Ribblesdale. Even as adults, Vincent and Alice Astor were frightened of their mother. “She was a tigress,” says Ivan Obolensky, Alice Astor’s son. “They were terrified of her. Things had to be perfect.”

After attending St. George’s School in Newport, Vincent Astor went off to Harvard with twenty suits, ten pairs of shoes, and six trunks. But his college days did not last long. His father, John Jacob Astor IV, had celebrated his freedom from a difficult marriage by marrying a teenage debutante, Madeleine Force, in 1911, and the newlyweds had headed off to Europe. When the couple learned that Madeleine, then nineteen, was pregnant, they decided to come back to New York. Sparing no expense, Astor purchased first-class tickets on a luxury ship boasting a squash court, a Turkish bath, and three libraries—the Titanic. Astor went down with the ship on April 14, 1912, but Madeleine survived, and four months later she gave birth to a son, John Jacob Astor VI, known as Jack. She had signed a prenuptial agreement that limited her inheritance to $5 million; her son received a $5 million trust fund. The bulk of the estate, more than $60 million, went to the firstborn son, Vincent, who was only twenty. He dropped out of Harvard to take over the family business and begin public life.

Besieged by women, he received thousands of letters from female admirers with dollar signs in their eyes. Uniformed police had to intervene to rescue him from hordes of women while attending a social event at the Seventh Avenue Armory. “The perils of being young, unmarried and very wealthy were emphasized tonight when Mr. Astor almost was mobbed by throngs of maids and matrons,” wrote the Washington Post. For a shy, gawky, six-foot, four-inch man, this was torture. Eager for stability, Vincent married a childhood playmate, Helen Dinsmore Huntington, telling reporters, “She is a typical American girl. She has no foolish notions or new fads. Horseback riding and tennis are her favorite recreations.”

Despite his sheltered background, Vincent Astor had developed a social conscience, and he was mortified when he saw the housing that had been built on Astor-owned property. Developers had put up shoddy buildings that had quickly deteriorated into slums known as “Astor Flats.” “Mr. Astor was shocked at the conditions he found in houses on Astor land and decided to get rid of slum properties,” a New York Times story recounted. Astor sold the bulk of those buildings to the city for a nominal amount.

That was a generous act, and there would be others in his career. “It is unreasonable to suppose that because a man is rich, he is also useless,” said Astor, who established a well-endowed foundation “for the alleviation of human misery.” But despite his magnanimous moments, he developed a reputation as a loner who favored machines more than people. He raced and wrecked automobiles; built and sailed one of the largest private yachts; installed a miniature railroad, Toonerville, at his Rhinebeck estate; supported early aviation; and was a director of a railroad corporation and a shipping company. He served honorably as an ensign in the navy in World War I, where his lungs were damaged by fumes during a trip home via submarine.

One childhood friendship that endured was with his neighbor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When the president-elect wanted privacy to choose his first cabinet, he took his advisers for a cruise on Astor’s 263-foot yacht. (After the boat docked in Miami, Astor and the others accompanied FDR when he went to give a speech. As the group piled into cars to leave, Astor, in the car behind FDR, turned to his companions and said, “Any crank might take a shot at him. I don’t like this.” Minutes later a deranged man, Joe Zangara, shot at FDR, missed, and killed Chicago’s mayor, Anton Cermak.) Astor’s close relationship with FDR merited a Time cover on April 9, 1934, entitled “Fun with Friends.” The newsmagazine sniffed that the multimillionaire lacked “social confidence” and referred to his “awkwardness.”

But Vincent Astor’s lineage and bank balance proved to be powerful draws for the opposite sex. Astor and Helen, a classical music enthusiast, discovered that they had little in common, and the childless couple began to lead separate lives. At a Washington dinner party in 1935, Astor met Minnie Cushing, the oldest and most intellectual of the three renowned Cushing sisters, daughters of a prominent Boston surgeon. (The sisters married well and often: Babe Cushing paired off with Standard Oil heir Stanley Mortimer, Jr., and moved on to CBS founder Bill Paley; Betsey Cushing’s first husband was James Roosevelt, the president’s son, and her second spouse was John Hay Whitney.)

The still-married Vincent Astor began traveling all over the world on his yacht with Minnie, not bothering to conceal the relationship. In 1940, Helen Astor asked for a divorce. Three weeks after the decree was final, Vincent married Minnie in a small, secret ceremony on Long Island.

After five years of amicable companionship, the tensions between the couple started to show. The hypersocial Minnie liked to spend time in Manhattan with artists and writers; Vincent preferred a solitary life on his boat. In The Sisters: The Lives and Times of the Fabulous Cushing Sisters, David Grafton makes a persuasive case that Minnie Cushing Astor was a lesbian, citing a list of her likely lovers (the department store heiress Kay Halle, a French actress named Annabella, and another French actress, Valentina.) But Astor was apparently besotted, and the couple stayed together for thirteen years.

During World War II, Astor enlisted in the navy again, at age fifty, and worked in intelligence. He was named commodore of convoy. But despite this achievement, he was a hypochondriac who smoked and drank relentlessly, and after the war his drinking escalated. “The word got out that if you wanted to do business with Vincent, you had to do it before eleven A.M.,” says his nephew Ivan Obolensky. Astor even scared off the neighborhood children. “I was terrified of him,” says Reinaldo Herrera, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. As a teenager, Herrera visited Alice Astor’s daughters, who lived next to Vincent’s Rhinebeck estate. “We’d be in the pool, and the butler would come and say, ‘Get out, Captain Vincent is coming.’ He was a scary gentleman.”

But even the gloomiest personality can sparkle when combined with an awe-inspiring bank account and a touching dose of ardor. Six months after Buddie Marshall’s death, when Brooke was panicked about her future, she attended a dinner where the guests included Vincent and Minnie Astor, both of whom she knew slightly. “I thought he was difficult. Everybody said he was,” she told Charlie Rose in a 1994 television interview. “I made [up] my mind we were going to hit it off.” At the end of the evening the Astors invited Brooke to their country home, the fabled Ferncliff, for Memorial Day weekend.

What a sophisticated and civilized pair they were, Vincent and Minnie, out shopping together for a replacement wife for Vincent. As Brooke later described the weekend, Vincent whisked her away for a drive in his Mercedes and proposed. He told her that Minnie had asked for a divorce and he had resisted, but now that he had met Brooke, he would be willing to go through with the divorce. Brooke always insisted that she resisted this snap proposal but was won over by Vincent’s letters, which she found “beguiling.” Decades later she would frequently pull out these letters and read them aloud to friends as proof that she had not married merely for money. “If you have the slightest doubt of my love of Brooke, I wish that you could at this moment look inside my head or wherever it is that emotions lie,” Astor wrote in a letter included in the set given to guests at Brooke’s hundredth birthday party. Barbara Goldsmith says, “It was important to her to believe that Vincent loved her. I don’t think she would have married someone if she didn’t think she could have a relationship.”

Vincent Astor’s family welcomed Brooke’s arrival on the scene. But Ivan Obolensky is convinced that Brooke’s tale of the couple’s courtship omitted an earlier meeting. “Vincent would go to this sanitorium to dry out, Silver Hill,” said Obolensky. “She was one of the companions to jolly people up. She met him there. When you get a guy worth two hundred million dollars under your thumb, that’s an opportunity. She was predatory.” (Obolensky was a major beneficiary of his uncle’s wills before Brooke entered the picture, but Vincent Astor subsequently wrote him out, which may explain his jaundiced view of the third Mrs. Astor.)

Did she love him? Louis Auchincloss, who knew and heartily disliked Vincent Astor, has repeatedly insisted that Brooke embarked on the union for purely mercenary reasons. “If she married him for his charm, I’d have said she ought to be put in an asylum,” says the novelist, who has long chronicled the mores of Upper East Side aristocracy. “Vincent was an enormously unattractive, bullheaded man, no fun to have around whatsoever. He was mad for her. The people who say that marriage was not consummated are crazy. I just know that randy old goat certainly looked after himself.” But Auchincloss was impressed at how well Brooke behaved once she married Vincent Astor. “It was a bargain, and she kept it. She was the only one of his three wives who made him happy. That was quite a job, but she did it.”

Vincent Astor made a hobby of perpetually changing his will. In the Poughkeepsie, New York, courthouse, several file cabinet drawers bulge with versions of his last wishes. Less than four months after meeting Brooke, he wrote a new will, on September 24, 1953, which gave his “prospective wife Brooke Russell Marshall” the sum of $5 million plus ownership of Ferncliff. This was the equivalent of a prenuptial agreement, and her payout only improved over time.

When Vincent Astor and Brooke Marshall married, on October 8, 1953, the New York Times mentioned that “only a few relatives and friends attended the ceremony.” The hastily scheduled wedding took place at Joseph Pulitzer’s home in Bar Harbor, Maine, a remote location chosen to avoid the paparazzi of the day and minimize attention to the unseemly haste with which the widow was remarrying.

Brooke had been a social nobody, a well-to-do matron on the edges of the aristocracy. But now she was Mrs. Astor, with all that the name implied. Her husband owned the St. Regis Hotel and Newsweek magazine, and he was a major shareholder of the premier shipping firm, the United States Lines. A wedding day photo shows the newlyweds boarding Astor’s plane to return home. Brooke is grinning happily, while Astor, a boutonniere in his lapel, is posed awkwardly, almost shyly, by his new possession.

Tony, then twenty-nine, was among the wedding guests, but his wife, Liz, did not make the trip to Maine. She was home caring for the couple’s twins, Alec and Philip, who had been born prematurely on May 14. The babies were so small that the doctor warned they might not survive, especially firstborn Philip, who had a heart murmur as well as a partial harelip (which was surgically corrected, leaving a faint scar). Later, as fun-loving and affectionate toddlers, Brooke’s grandsons proved an asset to her new marriage, as Vincent Astor became enamored of the boys. But he took an instant dislike to his new stepson.

Despite the tensions between the two men, they had interests in common. Proud of his war record and his role as one of FDR’s advisers, Vincent was a patriot who believed in government service. After graduating from Brown in 1950, Tony had gone to work at the State Department as an intelligence analyst. His first government job paid a paltry $3,100 a year, but thanks to his trust fund, he and Liz were able to buy a nineteenth-century row house in the heart of Georgetown. Tony hoped to enter the foreign service but failed the arduous entrance exam, so he went to see General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II spy agency that was the predecessor of the CIA. “I asked him what I should do. I wanted to get into civilian government, and I was a reserve officer,” recalls Tony. Donovan arranged for Tony to take a job with the CIA as a roving recruiter.

The early days of the cold war were a heady time to be a CIA operative, and Tony, with his Ivy League background and sterling war record, had the perfect pedigree. After two years as a recruiter, he took the opportunity to become a special assistant to Richard Bissell, a rising star who would become the head of clandestine operations. Bissell had been put in charge of developing the U-2 spy plane, and one of Tony’s assignments was to fly to Pakistan to obtain the government’s permission for the U-2 to use an airstrip. He later recalled his time in the CIA as the peak of his career, according to Frances Fitzgerald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, whose father, Desmond, was a major figure at the CIA. “Tony clearly loved those days,” recalls Fitzgerald. “You got the feeling that he was a man of action, slightly frustrated by not having made it all the way.”

Vincent Astor showered his new wife with jewels, and Brooke found herself spending time with his famous friends, including the Time magazine founder Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe Luce; the Wrigleys, of the chewing gum fortune; and the three Rockefeller brothers. But the new Mrs. Astor was not universally welcomed by society. Winthrop Aldrich, now the deputy New York State commissioner for historic preservation, remembers that his grandmother Margaret Chandler, an Astor cousin, banned Brooke from her home. “She did not approve of the remarriage,” Aldrich says. “Vincent drove by the home with Brooke and said, ‘That’s a place where you’ll never be able to go.’”

Just as Vincent’s grandmother Caroline Schermerhorn Astor had been in the 1890s, Brooke was eager to make her mark in society as a hostess. But although Vincent grudgingly allowed her to give one dinner-dance at the St. Regis for 275 people during their first year of marriage, he then drew the line. He made it clear that his fantasy evening was a quiet night at home with Brooke playing the piano for him. The marriage proved suffocating for Brooke, who later described her husband as so possessive that he asked her not to talk on the phone when he was at home. He wanted to see only his friends, not hers, and urged her to limit contact with her emotionally needy son. Brooke chose to appease her wealthy husband. “I saw very little of Tony,” she wrote in Footprints. “I concentrated on Vincent. It was what he longed for and needed desperately, and what I had to give.” She later described her married life as Mrs. Astor with a simple refrain: “I was lying fallow.”

Brooke’s first husband’s alcoholism had been a problem, but this time she chose to ignore the fact that Vincent drank too much. At least Vincent was only a morose drunk, not a violent one. When Tony and Liz went to Ferncliff for a rare weekend visit, Brooke’s daughter-in-law was astounded to witness the alcohol intake. “At ten-thirty A.M. the sherry came out. Before lunch the martinis came. Wine with lunch. At five o’clock the scotch came out, and then everyone went and changed for dinner. Dinner was martinis and wine, and liquor afterward,” says Liz. She adds, “I was appalled, because Vincent was on a million medications. I remember looking in the bedroom once, and he had this chest of drawers, and the entire top was covered with medicines.”

The Astors spent winters in Phoenix, and at Brooke’s behest, Vincent purchased Cove End as a warm-weather retreat. The Rockefeller clan was based nearby, in Seal Harbor, and Brooke worked hard to fit in among the summering aristocrats. “Vincent had a boat called the Little Nourmahal,” says James McCabe, a Philadelphia money manager whose father, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, socialized with the Astors. “Vincent drank a lot. I don’t think he felt comfortable being social.”

But he could be kind when it mattered. After his sister, Alice, died suddenly, in 1956, Vincent and Brooke took two of his nieces to Maine for the summer. “He was tall and gruff and bearlike, but that was his appearance. He really did try to be nice to me,” recalls Emily Harding, who declined the couple’s offer to adopt her, choosing her older sister, Ramona, as her guardian. “He was always trying to joke with me and bring me out of my shell. He and Aunt Brooke seemed happy together.”

Vincent also took Brooke’s grandsons, Philip and Alec, to Maine for a summer of sailing, and welcomed them for weekend visits at Ferncliff. He sometimes took the twins on his private train, Toonerville, or hoisted them onto his donkey. Photographs from that era show Vincent smiling as he roughhouses outdoors, in suit and tie, with Philip and Alec. Brooke, sitting on the ground, maternally cuddles one of the boys in her lap. “Vincent had one of the early VWs, and his idea of fun would be to throw us in the back and drive around,” recalls Philip. “He really liked croquet, and the professional rigors of croquet. He would teach us to play, and afterwards we’d go to the teahouse.” Vincent Astor was so fond of the boys that on May 15, 1957, he revised his will to give Alec and Philip $100,000 each. He did not leave a penny to Tony Marshall. Through their words and deeds, both Brooke and Vincent Astor created a family dynamic that gave Tony good reason to resent his own young sons.

Vincent Astor half seriously suggested to Brooke that they consider adopting her two grandchildren, whose parents were not getting along. Tony had come to regret marrying so young. Liz lamented that she had dropped out of college at Tony’s insistence, and confided to friends that her husband had a wandering eye. He confessed to one affair, and Liz suspected several others. But they patched things up enough so that in 1958, when the CIA sent Tony to Turkey as vice consul for economic affairs, they decided to go together, with the twins.

Just before they left, Tony and Liz paid a farewell visit to Brooke and Vincent at Ferncliff. Brooke usually put on a good front about her life with Vincent, but on this weekend she chose to be honest. She took a walk on the grounds with her daughter-in-law and confided, “I don’t think I can stand being married to him anymore. I don’t think I can take it. He never wants to go anywhere—he’s so antisocial.”

Vincent Astor suffered from serious cardiovascular problems, a legacy of his damaged lungs and his smoking and drinking habits, and his health was deteriorating. There was a constant parade of doctors and nurses on the premises. Brooke’s feelings about that grim period were reflected in the advice she later gave to Barbara Goldsmith, a fellow trustee of the New York Public Library. When Goldsmith’s husband, the filmmaker Frank Perry, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he reacted by asking for a divorce. In a heart-to-heart at the Four Seasons restaurant, Brooke announced to her friend: “You are the luckiest person in the world.” The stunned Goldsmith replied, “I beg your pardon?” Brooke explained, “You had a very good marriage. I know you would have stuck with it until the bitter end, and it will be a bitter end. This way, you’re forgoing all the nurses around the clock, the bedpans, all the craziness. You can walk away with your head held high.”

If Lloyd’s of London had taken bets on the longevity of the union between Vincent and Brooke Astor, who had five marriages between them, the odds would not have favored a silver jubilee. Rumors circulated that Vincent had also tired of Brooke and was on the verge of asking for a divorce shortly before he died. Ivan Obolensky heard that Vincent had gone so far as to contact his lawyer, Roland Redmond, to say, “I’ve had it—I want to divorce Brooke.” Frances Kiernan writes in The Last Mrs. Astor that that conversation occurred while Vincent, Brooke, and Redmond were crossing the Atlantic by ship. In Kiernan’s version, upon arriving in London, the remorseful Astor ordered an elaborate emerald necklace for his wife. Whatever the timing, he did not follow up on his threat.

Vincent Astor died of a heart attack at the couple’s apartment at 120 East End Avenue on February 3, 1959, at the age of sixty-seven. His funeral, attended by four hundred mourners, took place at St. James’ Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue. The coffin was covered with yellow jonquils and ferns, and the altar was obscured by 140 floral arrangements. A Who’s Who of dignitaries attended, and a fifty-person choir sang Astor’s favorite hymn, “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Brooke later requested that the same hymn be sung at her funeral.

The contents of Vincent Astor’s will were splashed across the newspapers. His estate was worth $127 million, $60.5 million of which had been left to his foundation. Astor gave $827,500 to other beneficiaries (including $100,000 to Emily Harding, $25,000 to his first wife, Helen, and $2,500 to each of his servants). Brooke became a rich woman, with $2 million in cash, $60 million in a trust for her benefit, and valuable real estate, including the couple’s New York apartment, Ferncliff, and the houses in Maine and Arizona. She also received her husband’s blessing to run the Astor Foundation. When Vincent had rewritten his will on June 26, 1958, he had eliminated the $100,000 bequests to her grandsons, Alec and Philip Marshall. Perhaps he assumed that the boys would inherit money from Brooke, or his initial affection had waned.

Brooke always insisted that she was not involved in Vincent’s decision to revise his will in her favor. “He used to change his will constantly. It was a game with him—almost a social event—and it always put him in a merry mood,” she wrote in Footprints. “I did not know or care about the will.”

Other Astor family members had suspicions, however. Vincent’s half-brother, Jack, promptly sued Brooke for a half share, insisting that Vincent had been mentally incompetent when he had signed his June 1958 will, during a stay at New York Hospital. Jack Astor charged that Brooke and the estate’s executors had used “undue influence” and that Brooke had taken liquor to her husband while he was in the hospital. Brooke hired as her defender David Peck, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, which was the beginning of a four-decade relationship with the firm.

Brooke’s first act as the Widow Astor was to take the witness stand in pretrial hearings in a Poughkeepsie courtroom. She admitted that Vincent drank but insisted that he had been fully competent. She later recalled that Jack Astor’s lawyer snarled at her: “‘Vincent drank so much that he had a bottle of liquor in the hospital. Did you know that?’ And I said, ‘Of course I did, I took it to him.’” Jack Astor hired a forgery expert to examine the will. The sensational trial was treated by the press as a joke. “Please Help Poor John Jacob Astor” read the headline in the Washington Post, and the columnist Charles Van Deusen mocked the plaintiff’s three marriages and his 270-pound girth. Just before a jury was about to be picked, Jack Astor settled for a paltry $250,000.

This was an awkward beginning for Brooke’s new life as a woman on her own, although a touch of scandal had its allure. Now wealthy and free, Mrs. Astor celebrated with a classic symbolic gesture: she called in a decorator to change her sleeping arrangements. “Vincent Astor had died, and she wanted a new bed,” recalls Albert Hadley. “It was my first commission for her.” He designed a headboard upholstered in lettuce green silk, a color inspired by that season of renewal, spring. Mrs. Astor could now lie down alone between soft sheets on her new double bed and daydream about her fresh start.