6

White-Glove Philanthropy

WHEN BROOKE ASTOR showed up for work at the Vincent Astor Foundation at 405 Park Avenue, she had a surprising reaction: she became angry. Assuming that she could not possibly be serious about taking over, the men in charge treated her with disdain. She later singled out as her nemesis Allan Betts, the foundation’s director, who expected to continue in his pleasant sinecure. “Vincent told me before he died, ‘You’re going to have a hell of a lot of fun with the foundation,’” Brooke told Peg Breen, the president of the Landmarks Conservancy, in a 1996 interview. “The people who were then running the foundation said to me, ‘You can go on having a good time, take a trip around the world.’ ‘No,’ I said, and sat down at this desk. ‘I’m going to stay here.’ Well, they didn’t like that.” In this prefeminist era (Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique arrived four years later, in 1963), Mrs. Astor did not see herself as a pioneer, yet she acted like one. “I don’t know whatever possessed me that I stood up to these two men—they wanted to run it. People came here to the office and asked for money, and they gave it,” she continued. “I said, ‘I don’t want to do that—I want to see what I’m giving to. Maybe it’s good or maybe it won’t be good.’”

Philanthropists have varied motivations, from humanitarian concern to guilt over their riches to the social-climbing benefits of being on the “right” boards. Brooke Astor had at times regretted marrying for money; the foundation offered her a chance to redeem herself, plus a way to make her own mark. Over the years, she had turned herself into the ideal cultured wife. “Brooke was perfectly aware that if she was going to circulate in the world of men, she needed to know about the things that interested them,” says Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum. “So she learned about finance and international diplomacy. She could talk about art, about any subject. She read assiduously and avidly.” Now she could build on that store of knowledge and use it for purposes beyond dinner-party chitchat.

Mrs. Astor started by giving relatively small grants that reflected her personal interests: literature and art, architecture and historic preservation. Since the Astor money came from New York real estate, she decided that it should go back to the city. Given Manhattan’s role as the nation’s media capital, this strategy also gave her foundation more visibility. A conscientious newspaper reader, Brooke Astor was engaged in the issues of her times, from the fledgling civil rights movement to Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. As someone who felt that she had been deprived of a good education, she was a soft touch for any grant proposal related to reading. In 1961, the first year that she was in control of the foundation, her grants ranged from $15,000 to the Boys’ Club to $1 million to the United Neighborhood Houses of New York. In 1962 she gave $500,000 to convert the Arnold Constable department store to the Mid-Manhattan Library. In 1963 she contributed $25,000 to the Legal Aid Society to pay for lawyers to represent indigent teens. During the city’s newspaper strike that year, when Robert Silvers, an editor, asked Brooke for backing to launch the New York Review of Books, she dipped into her own funds to invest $50,000.

Influenced by Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Mrs. Astor was inspired to improve slum housing by turning a concrete courtyard into a park and convinced city officials to let her experiment at the low-income George Washington Carver public housing development at East Ninety-ninth Street. A landscape architect was hired to install plantings, chess tables, and benches. This new gathering place was lauded as a success, and the foundation went on to underwrite a series of similar “outdoor living rooms.” Soon Mrs. Astor was getting national attention for her efforts. “Brooke really came into her own after Vincent died,” says Howard Phipps, the chairman of the Wildlife Conservancy, who served on the board of the Astor Foundation for eighteen years. “There hadn’t been an Astor for a long time associated with philanthropy. She loved playing Mrs. Astor when she went out on her visits.”

A lifelong Republican, Mrs. Astor crossed party lines to become friendly with Lady Bird Johnson and served on the first lady’s beautification committee. “Mrs. Astor came frequently to see Mrs. Johnson,” recalls Marie Ridder, Mrs. Johnson’s liaison to her husband’s Great Society programs. “She was enchanting. I encountered her once in the airport, coming to dinner at the White House. She said, ‘Of course I’m coming—Lady Bird asked me herself.’ She looked so chic.”

Mrs. Astor did not believe that she had to dress down to be taken seriously. She was a regular patron at the weekly fashion shows at Chez Ninon, the custom couture shop. “She had this wonderful personality—she never came in with a sour face. She loved suits and hats, and she liked little sexy things,” recalls Elizabeth Corbett, who began working at the store in 1960 as a model and eventually bought out the owners. “She would bring her mother. Her mother was a very elegant woman. She used to wear a hat with a veil and smoke her cigarette through the veil.”

The rhythm of Mrs. Astor’s life mimicked the Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan’s Travels: Wealthy Park Avenue matron goes to Kenneth’s salon to have her hair styled, meets friends for lunch at the Colony Club or the Knickerbocker, and then ventures in her chauffeured car to housing projects in East Harlem or the Bronx. The Mercedes pulls up, and Mrs. Gotrocks alights in a Chanel suit, white gloves, a hat, and a flash of pearls or sapphires. “I thought it was wonderful the way she was always perfectly dressed when she went to see all the places she was thinking of giving money to,” says Nancy Reagan. “Brooke always said, ‘They want to see Mrs. Brooke Astor—they didn’t want to see me schlepping there in slacks.’” Mrs. Astor explained her sartorial philosophy again and again, with slight variations in the wording. “If I go up to Harlem or down to Sixth Street and I’m not dressed up or I’m not wearing my jewelry, then the people feel like I’m talking down to them,” she told Marilyn Berger of the New York Times. “People expect to see Mrs. Astor, not some dowdy old lady, and I don’t intend to disappoint them.”

As word spread that Mrs. Astor was eager to write checks for good causes, she was deluged with letters and new friends. With more than seven hundred grant applications per year, the Astor Foundation gave its blessing to about one hundred groups, although sometimes the checks were for nominal amounts. Mrs. Astor could pick up the phone and meet anyone in New York. “Brooke, to her ever-loving credit, figured out that the foundation could be a vehicle not only to do good for people but to make a name for herself,” says Peter Duchin. “I think she really liked the name Astor.”

In 1964, Mrs. Astor received the ultimate recognition that she had arrived when she was invited to join the Metropolitan Museum board, an exclusive old-money bastion where Jews and African Americans were persona non grata for decades. Trusteeships were typically passed down within families as sacred heirlooms. (Tony Marshall later joined the board, at his mother’s behest.) The previous Mrs. Astor, Minnie Cushing Astor Fosburgh, was already a member. “There was consternation among people who worried about whether they could have two Mrs. Astors on the board,” recalls Ashton Hawkins. But Brooke had the support of her predecessor. As Hawkins recalls, “Minnie told me later that she liked Brooke and supported her coming on the board.”

At the Metropolitan, Mrs. Astor’s interests were unconventional for the times. A member of the acquisitions committee, she was intrigued by Asian art, thanks to her childhood time in China, and she worked to expand the museum’s collection. And she was genuinely eager to befriend the museum’s staff. “She was not a snob,” says Philippe de Montebello. “She went to the curatorial departments, and she knew the guards by first name. She was a people person. When other trustees talked about bricks and mortar at the board meetings, she’d bring them back to the staff.”

Self-promotion is as ubiquitous in New York City as divorces once were in Reno. Brooke hired George Trescher to ensure that her good deeds and outings did not go unnoticed by the New York Times and the society columns. Liz Smith, whose items for the “Cholly Knickerbocker” column helped her launch her own syndicated column, recalls how things worked in those days. “I went to things, and George would put me in Brooke’s way,” she says. “He thought I’d be good for her.”

Mrs. Astor never met a reporter she did not like, and she played the press game adroitly, often emphasizing how hard it was to get people to take her seriously. “If you are an Astor, people expect you to be silly and jangling bracelets,” she told the Washington Post in 1966. She insisted that she felt an obligation to her former husband to do the right thing with the Astor money. “Vincent was a very suspicious man,” she later told the Associated Press. “The fact that he had total confidence in me to run the foundation made me want to vindicate him, show him—wherever he is—that I could do a good job.”

Although she always had a man on her arm, Mrs. Astor never expressed an interest in marrying for a fourth time. As she said to the Associated Press, “People have asked me to marry them, but I couldn’t. The foundation was more important to me.” After one happy marriage and two troubled experiences, she did not want to be tied down again. Watching two husbands die was enough, and she told friends that she did not want to wind up pushing an old man in a wheelchair. However, she was frequently infatuated with someone, and she confided in friends about her flirtations and romances: Laurance Rockefeller, a mysterious European, and, later in life, former treasury secretary Douglas Dillon, who shared her appreciation for Asian art. She told the writer Caroline Seebohm that she had turned down a proposal from Adlai Stevenson while they were hiking in Maine. “I knew he was hard up,” Brooke was quoted as saying in Seebohm’s biography of Marietta Tree, No Regrets. “I told him he did not love me. He agreed, but said that we were good friends and he hoped we might take it a little further.” Brooke remembered the moment fondly, adding, “I still walk past the rock where he talked about it.”

But Mrs. Astor cherished her name and her independence and kept serious suitors at bay. For company, she frequently turned to gay men. There was an endless supply of young men in the art world who were happy to escort her in the evening, board a chartered yacht, or take a gallery-hopping trek through Europe. Her secretary would send plane tickets; expenses were discreetly paid.

It was liberating for Mrs. Astor to be able to splurge on herself without having to ask anyone for permission. She sold Vincent Astor’s apartment at 120 East End Avenue and bought two floors at 778 Park Avenue, taking the sixteenth-floor aerie with a terrace for herself and installing her mother on the floor below. She had long since forgiven her mother for marrying her off to Dryden Kuser and was committed to Mabel Russell’s care, hiring the actor Frederic Bradlee (the newspaperman Ben Bradlee’s brother) to read aloud to her (Mrs. Russell died in 1967). To decorate her new flat, she hired Sister Parish; Parish and her junior partner, Albert Hadley, later found a nineteenth-century British painting of black whippets for the wall, a discovery that launched Mrs. Astor on a quest to collect dog paintings and helped inspire a high-society trend.

Unable to have much of a social life while she was with Vincent Astor, Brooke made up for lost time by entertaining constantly at all her homes. “She made a big effort to be Mrs. Northeast Harbor,” recalls James McCabe. In New York she was equally busy. To make her dinner parties distinctive, she instructed her chef to reverse the usual progression and serve hot appetizers and cold main courses. Potential guests were shrewdly assessed as she sought to mix the city’s up-and-comers with the social elite. She was always subtle, but the nouveau riche couples who donated generously to her favorite charities were often graciously rewarded with an invitation to her home. To be able to say that one had dined with Mrs. Astor gave one cachet.

In the glory days of New York society, she made all the rounds. Of course she attended Truman Capote’s masked Black and White Ball, given at the Plaza Hotel in 1966 for Katharine Graham, the Washington Post publisher. She loved making an entrance, and was once described in a society column as appearing “bathed in a glow of emeralds.” Brooke Astor was even cited as a guest at Leonard Bernstein’s notorious party in 1970 for the Black Panthers. She wrote an annoyed letter to the New York Times afterward, stressing that this was not her kind of scene: “I was invited to the party, as I imagine a whole list of New Yorkers were, but I did not attend.”

 

As Brooke was becoming the fabulous Mrs. Astor, her son, Tony, was also reinventing himself. After returning from Turkey for Vincent Astor’s funeral, he decided to leave the CIA for a more lucrative career in New York. He and Liz were still bickering. She relocated to Philadelphia with the twins to stay with her mother, but the separation was temporary, and the family soon joined Tony in New York. The couple bought a large fourth-floor apartment, with three bedrooms, a library, and an enormous living room, at 1030 Fifth Avenue. The Marshalls enrolled their sons at the Allen- Stevenson School and then the Browning School. Buddie Marshall’s brokerage firm, Butler, Herrick & Marshall, took Tony on for a while, and he then set up two companies to do business in Kenya and Nigeria. Like so many ex-CIA employees, he had severed his formal ties but remained on call. “The CIA never lets you go,” says someone who knew Tony well during this period. “After he left, they always kept in touch.”

In 1961 Tony’s fragile marriage with Liz finally broke down. Announcing that he wanted a divorce, Tony moved out. “I was desperately upset for the first six months,” Liz says, “and then I realized that it was a blessing. We were wrong for each other.” Liz went to Mexico for a divorce, accompanied by the twins and her mother, who suggested a side trip to visit relatives with a ranch in rural New Mexico. It’s odd to take a trip to end a marriage and fall in love again en route, but at the ranch Liz became enamored with her second cousin, Craig Wheaton-Smith, an Oxford-educated geneticist.

The Marshall twins were eight years old when their parents divorced. “I don’t think we saw it coming,” says Philip. “One day Dad wasn’t around, and then we were hanging in his new apartment. He saw quite a bit of us for the first few years. He’d take us to the park, and we’d go up to Rhinebeck with him for weekends and spend time there with him and our grandmother. My mother never talked about the divorce with us—she didn’t want to drag us in. She never dissed my father—it wasn’t painted as a ‘mean dad’ kind of thing.”

When Tony married his former secretary, Thelma Hoegnell, known as Tee, in 1962, the wedding was held in Brooke Astor’s living room, with the twins in attendance. But Philip and Alec scarcely spent time with their father after that event, even though he lived nearby; according to Liz’s appointment calendars, the twins saw Tony only eight times in 1964. The next year Liz married Wheaton-Smith, who was divorced with two children of his own. The twins then led a schizophrenic life. Vacations with their father and stepmother involved trips to luxury spots such as Beverly Hills or stays with Brooke in Maine. “Visiting my father and my grandmother was a formal situation—it always required a tie and jacket,” Alec recalls. Liz and Craig had less money and a rugged concept of family fun: driving cross-country with the twins to Wheaton-Smith’s New Mexico ranch, with cooking equipment in the car and roadside picnics to save on expenses. The private-school boys spent summers mending fences and herding cattle.

The Wheaton-Smiths abandoned Manhattan for a suburb outside Boston and ultimately, in search of a cheaper and more rural lifestyle, relocated to Dorset, Vermont. The boys went off to separate boarding schools. In 1967, Philip, then fourteen and with a strong academic record, began attending Vincent Astor’s prestigious alma mater, St. George’s School in Newport. Toby Hilliard, a classmate from Texas, recalls, “Philip was artistic—he was well-liked and looked up to. He didn’t have an agenda.” At school he painted, and his interest in art became a bond with his grandmother. When Brooke visited friends in Newport, she would arrange to see Philip, and when he went to Manhattan, she would take him to museums and introduce him to curators. “For a lot of years, family didn’t come first—she was busy with New York,” Philip says. “My grandmother and I connected through art.”

His twin, Alec, had a harder road. Alec struggled with dyslexia and had repeated second grade, so he was a year behind his brother in school. But at the Proctor Academy in Andover, New Hampshire, he thrived. Tony Marshall, a talented amateur photographer, presented the teenage Alec with an Agfa camera and showed him how to use the speed and aperture control settings. It was an insightful and influential gift. Alec is shy, and the camera gave him a new way to see the world, to quietly observe events rather than participate. Alec snapped family photographs that intimately captured candid moments, and he spent hours in Brooke’s gardens creating Monet-like images of her glorious flowers, an adolescent hobby that later became a career.

Tony Marshall lacked role models for a father, and his upbringing led him to value proper behavior over displays of emotion. He has such a formal demeanor that he told his boys that hugging and kissing were not manly, a lesson that did not take. But he made an effort to stay involved with the twins, writing and calling and conveying interest. As Philip puts it, “I’ve got to give my father credit for trying hard, since he wasn’t with us all the time.”

 

While Americans reeled from the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy in the spring of 1968, the society pages marched on. On June 16, just ten days after Kennedy’s death, the New York Times ran an article headlined, “The Goal of Brooke Astor: Easing Misery of Others.” The writer, Judy Klemesrud, described Mrs. Astor as “svelte, sixtyish, a swinging blonde grandmother with bright blue eyes that sparkle.” Her two dachshunds, Benny and Judy Montague, leapt repeatedly onto Mrs. Astor’s lap during the interview, as she complained about being treated as a dilettante. “I think I have to overcome quite a lot,” she said. “Being Mrs. Astor, a lot of social workers are against you. They think you’re a silly Lady Bountiful, who doesn’t know a thing. When that happens I try to be as attractive as possible and win them over.”

To stress her relevance, she brought up her interest in politics and race relations. She was that rare upper-crust Manhattanite who had actually been north of Ninety-sixth Street and to the South Bronx. She admitted to the Times that as finance cochairman with John Hay Whitney of Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign, she had advised the candidate: “Having a Whitney and an Astor on a finance committee for a Rockefeller seemed a bit much, but he didn’t mind.” She noted that she had recently accompanied Nelson and Happy Rockefeller and Laurance and Mary Rockefeller to Martin Luther King’s funeral in Atlanta and described marching in the cortege. Klemesrud’s piece ended by naming Mrs. Astor’s favorite designers (Valentino and Mila Schon) and describing her relaxing weekends at her country home, where she “plays croquet [and] romps with her twin 14-year-old grandsons.”

Mrs. Astor, who had given the reporter a Rockefeller button, worked hard for her Hudson Valley neighbor. If Rockefeller had won the GOP nomination and the presidency, a post in the new administration might have opened up for Tony. Tony had joined the board of his mother’s foundation, but he had higher aspirations. Once Richard Nixon became the Republican standard-bearer, Brooke, according to her friends, made generous contributions to his campaign on her son’s behalf. A year after Nixon took office, the president named Tony Marshall as ambassador to Madagascar, a volatile former French colony off the coast of Africa. “I’m sure that her contributions were a factor,” says Henry Kissinger. Tony’s half-sister, Sukie Kuser, who spent her entire career at the State Department, is blunter, saying, “Brooke bought the ambassadorship for him.”

Just how much Mrs. Astor contributed to the Nixon campaign cannot be determined: full and accurate record-keeping began only after the Federal Election Commission was established in the wake of the Watergate scandal. According to transcripts of the White House tapes, Richard Nixon instructed his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, on June 17, 1971, “Anybody who wants to be an ambassador must give at least $250,000.” As Louis Auchincloss recalls, “Brooke used to say that he was a great ambassador to Madagascar. I said, ‘Have you ever heard of a bad ambassador to Madagascar?’ She said, ‘That’s enough out of you.’”

Tony Marshall has a more elevated view of his diplomatic career. “I was a friend of Dick Nixon, I helped him in ’64 and ’68,” he told me. “After he won the election, he asked me where I wanted to go to be an ambassador. I did not want to go to Europe. I wanted to go to Africa.” After Common Cause, a public-interest group, successfully sued for information about Nixon donors who became ambassadors, it was revealed that Tony Marshall contributed $20,000 to Nixon’s campaign in 1968.

“Suzy Says,” the syndicated gossip column by Aileen Mehle, made mention of Tony’s new job, with the assumption that readers had no idea who he was but might be interested because of his mother. The item referred to “Anthony [Tony] Marshall, Mrs. Vincent Astor’s son.” He could not escape that comma after his name.

William Fulbright, then the leading Democratic critic of the Vietnam War, held a confirmation hearing on Tony’s nomination before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on December 12, 1969. The senator lobbed softballs, inquiring how long it would take to travel to Madagascar (“You can make it if you hurry in about four days,” Tony replied) and asking what language the natives spoke (French, Tony replied, noting his own “brushing knowledge” of Swahili). Tony’s résumé, provided to the committee, seemed almost a parody of a clubbable man, listing eighteen memberships in organizations and private societies, including the Brook Club and Explorers Club in New York, the Metropolitan Club in Washington, the Chevy Chase Club in Maryland, and Buck’s Club and the Royal Geographic Society in London. Asked about his occupation, Tony told the committee that “my principal interest was in food manufacturing in Nigeria using locally available raw materials.” When pressed, he acknowledged that he ran a company that used cocoa, yams, plantains, and potatoes to make doughnuts and chips in Nigeria. He listed his apartment as his office address.

“Madagascar was not one of our critical posts,” said David Newsom, who was then the assistant secretary of state for African affairs. “He had some Africa experience, and therefore he wasn’t totally the new boy on the block.” Pamela Walker, whose husband, Peter, a career foreign service officer, spent six months as Tony’s deputy in Madagascar, recalls, “We wondered what Tony Marshall would be like, given his background, but he turned out to be a very good friend and a good ambassador.” But she came away with the impression that there was tension between Tony and his wife, Tee. “They both were only children and both had difficult mothers,” Walker says. “Tee’s mother was constantly sick and needed to be cared for. I don’t think Tee cared much for Mrs. Astor.”

While Brooke rarely spent time alone with her grandchildren, she made an effort during those years, taking the teenage twins to Europe on a ski trip. They flew to Paris, where she took them to a cocktail party with Jackie Onassis and Sargent Shriver, and then went on to St. Moritz. “I had brought my ratty clothes, and my suitcase was lost on the flight,” recalls Philip. “She took me to Pierre Cardin—I wasn’t used to shopping. She got us each our own personal ski instructor, and would meet us back at the chalet for lunch.”

After eighteen months, Tony’s tour in Madagascar ended abruptly under mysterious circumstances. On June 1, 1971, local officials asked that he be sent home, and Tony left the country five days later. “He was persona non grata with the Malagasy government,” recalls Sukie Kuser. “They said he was a spy—he had been with the CIA.” A 1971 Wall Street Journal article titled “Little Black Lies: Spy Groups Increase Use of False Material to Put Enemy on the Spot,” led with the tale of Tony Marshall’s ouster. The Malagasy government claimed to have received a secret document that implicated Tony “in a supposed coup planned against President Tsiranana,” according to the Journal. The U.S. government dismissed the document as a hoax. The Washington Post noted that Tony Marshall “aggressively attempted to attract American business and ranching investment to Madagascar.”

Getting booted out of Madagascar, even if the charges were fraudulent, did not boost Tony’s stock at the State Department. His next diplomatic appointment was a distinct step down: ambassador to the tiny Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago. Languishing in the tropics on an ambassador’s yearly salary of $31,000, Tony donated $48,505 to the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) between January 1971 and March 1972. In January 1974, Nixon named him ambassador to Kenya, a post that he held until Jimmy Carter took office in 1977. “I suspect the influence of Mrs. Astor in the White House was not an insignificant factor,” Newsom said drily.

Kenya was unquestionably Tony Marshall’s most challenging diplomatic assignment. A former British colony, the country won independence in 1963 after the violent Mau Mau uprising and was led by President Jomo Kenyatta, whose regime was marred by charges of corruption and brutality. With American companies eager to invest and a large Peace Corps contingent in the country, Tony had his hands full representing U.S. interests.

“Tony was competent,” says Henry Kissinger. On a visit to Kenya, Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state, met with Kenyatta to discuss U.S. military aid, accompanied by Tony, and posed for the cameras on a safari, telling reporters that he had borrowed Tony’s bush jacket. Declassified cables and news stories show Tony negotiating over American aid, protesting the expulsion of American businessmen, helping a high-ranking African leader get medical treatment in the United States, and flying back to Washington to brief the White House national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft.

During his time as an ambassador, Tony scarcely saw his sons, and he was furious when Philip ridiculed Nixon in a cartoon for the St. George’s School magazine in the wake of the Kent State shootings. But after the twins went off to college—Philip attended his father’s alma mater, Brown University, while Alec went to the University of Vermont—they visited him in Kenya. Brooke wrote to Tony during this period expressing her concerns about Philip and Alec and urging her son to be more involved as a parent. She was particularly troubled by Philip’s rebelliousness and the lack of an authority figure in his life.

 

After the Democrats took over in Washington, Tony Marshall and his wife returned to New York, in the spring of 1977. He did some consulting work for Amoco and United Technologies, but ended up dependent on his mother once he took on managing her money in 1980 as a full-time job. “I was very glad to do it,” Tony told me. “I discovered things were being mismanaged badly. The trouble was that a bank had all of my mother’s money, which wasn’t very much at the time, and banks, in my opinion, don’t manage money well.”

At the Vincent Astor Foundation, Tony took over an office right next door to his mother’s. He placed some of her money with Freddy Melhado’s firm and also invested in bonds, options, and stocks. Over the next twenty-five years, his rate of return lagged significantly behind the Standard and Poor’s index. Monitoring these investments was not a nine-to-five job, so he had ample time for long lunches and to dabble as a writer. Linda Gillies recalls that Brooke was happy to have her son on the premises: “You could often hear them laughing together.” As the secretary of the Vincent Astor Foundation, Tony kept an eye on the budget, but he never joined his mother on her trips to the slums or weighed in on grant proposals.

By then Tony was accustomed to seeing his sons sporadically. After college, Alec moved to New York to study medical photography, and at the last minute his housing arrangements fell through. “My father had plenty of room, but he didn’t take me in,” Alec says. “It would have disrupted his life.” First as children and then as adults, the twins learned that if they wanted to see their father, they needed to make an appointment. As Alec puts it, “He told us when to arrive and when to leave.”

During the years that Tony had been overseas, Brooke had been running the most famous salon on the Upper East Side. She had tepid feelings toward her son’s second wife, Tee, which became more of an issue once the couple was back in New York. “The wives couldn’t get along with her,” says Sukie Kuser. “It got so that when he was married to Tee, they had separate holidays, he with his mother, she with her mother.”

The publication of Brooke’s autobiography Footprints in 1980 led her to grant another interview to the New York Times. She coyly told the newspaper that in the twenty-one years since Vincent Astor’s death, she had received “lots of proposals” but preferred single life. “I’d have to marry a man of suitable age and somebody who was a somebody, and that’s not easy,” she said. “Frankly, I think I’m unmarriageable now. I’m too used to having my way.” She mentioned her affection for her grandsons. “They were hippies to begin with,” she said. “But now they’ve emerged and they both have paying jobs.” Alec was then working as a medical photographer for Mt. Sinai Hospital, while Philip had just received his master’s degree in historic preservation at the University of Vermont.

Even though the seventy-eight-year-old Mrs. Astor was reflecting back on her life, she was then in the midst of creating her crowning achievement at the Metropolitan Museum—Astor Court, a courtyard crafted in Soochow, China, and installed on the second floor at the museum. She had lived in China from 1911 to 1914 and devoted much of her memoir Patchwork Child to those years. She would often reminisce about a peaceful summer spent with Buddhist monks. Under Mrs. Astor, her foundation spent nearly $10 million to install the courtyard, which featured a skylight, a koi pond, and Ming Dynasty furniture, at the museum.

The New York Times Book Review described Footprints as “delightful” and “bubbling,” but avid readers in Brooke’s social circle thought her portrayal of Tony was cruel. She described him as a “spoiled” boy and an emotionally wounded war veteran who would “cry out in his sleep,” and she admitted that she had not been a good mother. “A lot of us knew there had been difficult times between Brooke and Tony and he legitimately could have felt a little bit hurt by her autobiography,” said Howard Phipps. In the closing pages of the book, she did write that “one of my great delights is my son Tony.” But that did not atone for the pages that came before.

However, there were perks associated with being Mrs. Astor’s son. She used her clout at the Metropolitan Museum, the Wildlife Conservancy, and the New York public television station, Channel 13, to help Tony win seats on those boards. “She asked all of the boards to take him on as a trustee,” says Ashton Hawkins. “They did it, swallowing hard.”

 

Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 boosted Brooke Astor’s already high profile, as she reveled in her close friendship with the president and the first lady. She threw a celebratory party at her apartment right after the 1980 landslide victory over Jimmy Carter. Nancy Reagan now fondly recalls the evening as “the party where Ronnie was under the table looking for Brooke’s earring.”

Mrs. Astor had dined at the White House before, but during Reagan’s two terms she took the shuttle to attend state dinners so often that she might just as well have left a toothbrush in the family quarters. “A lot of people wanted to sit next to Brooke—she was so much fun,” says Mrs. Reagan. “She’d stay at the White House, in the Lincoln bedroom. She was more of a night owl than we were. Ronnie was tired and we would go to bed.” In the morning the two women would dish. “We’d talk about who looked pretty and who didn’t and who did what that they shouldn’t have. I felt like I could tell her anything.” Brooke Astor was reticent about personal matters but quietly conveyed her disappointment with Tony. “I did meet him,” Mrs. Reagan says. “You got the feeling that all was not happy, but I never questioned her about him. They just didn’t have a good relationship.”

Mrs. Astor made a point of summoning many of the friends who attended her fete for the Reagans—the Kissingers, William Paley, Douglas Dillon, Liz and Felix Rohatyn, Victor and Betsy Gotbaum—back to 778 Park Avenue for another gathering almost exactly a year later. This was, in a sense, a revenge dinner. Always in denial about her age, she had been furious when officials at the Metropolitan Museum invoked the standard policy requiring board members to step down to nonvoting emeritus status when they reach age seventy-five. Mrs. Astor did not want to go quietly into the New York night. Now she was giving a dinner in honor of Vartan Gregorian, the newly hired president of the New York Public Library. For her, this was the equivalent of taking out a two-page ad in the Times to announce that she had chosen the library as her new philanthropic cause.

Gregorian was charmed when Brooke paraphrased Thornton Wilder to explain her approach to philanthropy: “Wealth is like manure—if you collect too much, it stinks. You’ve got to spread it around.” He describes their relationship as friendship at first sight. “She could talk about books, about people, about issues, about nature, about gardens, about African Americans,” he explains. “My wife told me that if Brooke were thirty years younger, she wouldn’t have trusted me.” The library was so cash-strapped during those days that books were moldering from neglect, the doors were closed on Thursdays to save money, and neighboring Bryant Park had become a haven for drug dealers. Mrs. Astor gave an influential grant of $10 million, urged her friends to join her, and created an annual fundraising gala for the library that became a sold-out event where socialites mixed with raffish authors.

There was something touchingly personal about Mrs. Astor’s involvement in the library. Just walking into the building made her happy. She admired the underappreciated librarians and started a tradition of sharing lunch with the staff on her birthday. While she did not single-handedly save the library, she was profoundly involved in its renaissance. “By virtue of her prestige and influence and ability to inspire people, she brought a whole level of interest to giving to the library by New York’s social-philanthropic-economic circles,” says Paul LeClerc, the current library president. “She made the place.”

But for all her warmth and generosity, Mrs. Astor had developed an imperious side. As her courtiers learned, attention had to be paid. Her elegant mask slipped at home, since no woman is a heroine to her social secretary. “You had to be tough to work for her, because she went after people,” says John Meaney, her chauffeur from 1985 to 1995. “Her favorite thing was to say, ‘I just took a hate on them.’ She knew it was irrational, but she could be erratic and harsh. She needed to vent, and the only people she could vent with was staff. Familiarity breeds contempt.”

Like her predecessor Caroline Astor, the twentieth century’s Mrs. Astor believed that all guests, no matter how high their station, should abide by her rules. She was not subtle in expressing her feelings. When she hosted a lunch at her home for Nancy Reagan, she was not pleased when the guest of honor was late. She broke with protocol by seating her guests and telling the waiters to start serving the appetizer. As John Hart recalls, “It was Brooke’s way of saying, ‘You don’t show up forty-five minutes late for a lunch, even if you are the president’s wife.’” Mrs. Reagan still recalls the experience with mortification. “It was traffic,” she explains, by way of apology. “She went ahead and started lunch. I was glad she did. I was upset because I was late—I didn’t want her to be upset with me.”

All was forgiven. And a few years later, when Mrs. Reagan was going through a difficult time, her friend reached out with memorable words of comfort. “After my mother died, Brooke said to me, ‘Now Nancy, I know nobody can replace your mother, but I’d certainly like to try. Anything I can do for you, anything you want, just think of me as your mother.’ It was so sweet.”

In truth, a younger woman was already playing the role of Brooke’s surrogate daughter. This intimate relationship had begun in the 1950s and lasted for nearly half a century, with powerful repercussions for both women.

 

Annette de la Renta was a central figure in the drama during Brooke Astor’s last years, yet despite her rarefied social standing (or, perhaps, because of it), she has always been a reclusive figure to reporters. It was not until the early days of 2008, six months after Mrs. Astor’s death, that I finally arranged my first formal interview with her.

A butler answers the door at the de la Renta apartment, which occupies an entire floor of a Park Avenue building in the east sixties. An enormous Edward Lear landscape of Kilimanjaro dominates the marble-floored foyer. The sixty-foot living and dining room, which encompasses the entire width of the building, is sumptuous, with eighteenth-century English furniture, an Aubusson rug, yellow walls, and cranberry drapes. The room is filled with so many beautiful objects—a collection of little leather boxes, a Saint-Gaudens sculpture of Diana, two severe portraits of Elizabethan women all in white, a Gericault painting of a nude man, ornate side tables, pink peonies in a vase—that one’s eyes dart around trying to take everything in. On this wintry afternoon, both fireplaces are ablaze.

Wearing a simple brown wool sheath dress from her husband’s designer collection and brown suede stiletto boots, the sixty-eight-year-old Annette enters the room accompanied by her three dogs. The dogs are mutts, rescued dogs, and they jump all over the valuable furniture while Annette smiles indulgently. She has four more dogs at the couple’s home in the Dominican Republic. There’s something about stray dogs—“those eyes,” she says—that tugs at her emotions. She has a fierce public persona, so her attitude to the dogs reveals a surprisingly soft side. “I would have twenty more if Oscar would let me,” she says. Oscar later described how his wife noticed a stray dog by the side of the road while racing to the airport in the Dominican Republic and then repeatedly called to beg him to find the stray. “How am I going to find that one dog?” he asked with a tone of puzzled affection. A love of dogs was one of the many things that Annette shared with Brooke Astor, although Brooke favored pedigreed dachshunds rather than roadside strays.

Perching on a wooden chair by the fireplace, Annette presides over the silver tea service brought by her butler, Hans Dreschel, a family retainer for forty-two years. “Brooke was always a friend. She gave sage advice,” she says. Although many mutual friends likened their relationship to a mother-daughter connection, Annette balks at the description. “I never saw her as a mother figure. She treated me as a contemporary. I had a fantastic mother, but one was enough.”

If Annette’s family history were fictionalized, the result would be a Harold Robbins potboiler about the super-rich combined with an Alan Furst novel about prewar Europe. Small wonder that Brooke Astor, the general’s daughter with pretensions, would be drawn to Annette, who grew up in a wealthy Social Register family shadowed by tragedy and who took delight in breaking the rules.

Wildly rebellious as an adolescent, Annette famously rode her horse, Next Chance, into the living room of her parents’ estate in Far Hills, New Jersey. Her friend Betsy Gotbaum, New York City’s public advocate, who has known Annette since she was thirteen, recalls, “She was a hellion. She was mischievous, a lot of fun, and she still has that.” There is a core of steel within her too. As Betsy’s husband, Victor Gotbaum, adds with a wry smile, “I’m glad Annette is my friend, because I wouldn’t want her as my enemy.”

Annette’s father, the German Jewish financier Fritz Mannheimer, was the director of the Mendelssohn Bank of Amsterdam and has often been described as one of the richest men in the world, but he died several months before Annette was born. Jane Pinto-Reis Brian, her strikingly beautiful mother, was born in Qingdao, China, the daughter of a Brazilian diplomat and his American wife, Ignatia Mary Murphy. Jane’s father died young, her mother remarried, and Jane was brought up in Paris as a convent-educated Catholic. The twenty-year-old was pregnant with Annette when she married Mannheimer, an art collector who had filled his homes with Rembrandts, Vermeers, and Fragonards, at a ceremony attended by the French finance minister Paul Reynaud. Already in poor health, Mannheimer died two months later, in August 1939, at the age of forty-nine. His death, on the cusp of World War II, unleashed havoc in the European financial markets. Although physicians listed a heart ailment as his cause of death, rumors still abound that he committed suicide. The day after he died, his bank went bankrupt.

A New York Times obituary described Mannheimer as a genius in currency manipulation and so influential that “when the Nazi regime made it impossible for him to live in Germany, he obtained Netherlands citizenship by act of Parliament.” Based in Paris, Mannheimer, a grand officer of the Legion of Honor, made large donations to the French government’s national defense fund. A Time obituary drew on anti-Semitic caricatures to portray him as brilliant and controversial, a “cigar-smoking German Jew . . . No one ever liked Fritz. He was too smart. During the War [World War I], barely out of college, he got a job in the German Government bureau directing the flow of raw materials through Germany. In no time, he headed it.” The magazine noted, “His was the last Jewish-owned bank allowed to do business in Germany.”

After Annette was born, with the patriotic given name of Anne France, in December 1939, Jane left the infant with her mother in Cannes and fled to Argentina and then New York. She retrieved her baby a year later, during the Nazi occupation of France. Jane Mannheimer had inherited a microfilm company that copied U.S. war records, and she joined the firm as a vice president for marketing. Her legacy was Mannheimer’s extraordinary art collection, but she had to battle both his creditors and Nazi impounders to obtain a mere three paintings. By 1942, Jane had become a glamorous figure in New York society. Statuesque and exquisitely dressed, she was one of those rare women of whom it can truly be said that she walked into a room and conversations stopped.

Jane Mannheimer made a fortuitous marital match to Charles Engelhard, a globe-girdling industrialist who traded in precious metals. Engelhard, a man of large appetites, did everything in a big way. He owned a string of 250 racehorses, including the legendary Nijinsky, winner of the Triple Crown. He turned his family’s business into a personal fortune worth more than $300 million. He evaded India’s ban on gold bullion exports by making “pure-gold bracelets and other trinkets that were just as quickly melted back into bars once they arrived as such destinations as Hong Kong,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Settling down in the horse country of New Jersey where he had been raised, Charles Engelhard adopted his young stepdaughter, and he and Jane went on to have four more daughters. The former Jane Mannheimer behaved as if she had never had an identity before becoming Mrs. Engelhard in deference to her husband’s wishes. Annette’s half-sister Susan, seven years her junior, says, “I didn’t know Annette wasn’t a full sister until I was thirty or forty years old. We knew my mother had a previous life, but we never went there. Our mother never talked about it.” Oscar de la Renta, ever protective of his wife, adds, “People think Annette is in denial about her father. But she never knew him, and her mother would not tell her about him.” Expressing regret that Fritz Mannheimer will be forever unknown to her, Annette says, “As far as I was concerned, my father was Charles Engelhard.”

Cragwood, the family’s estate in Far Hills, was a Georgian brick manor house with a staff of twenty. Town & Country described the property as so extensive that “one could not infer the existence of another human settlement in the state of New Jersey.” Charles Engelhard collected properties the way his wife collected Monets and Picassos. There was the fishing camp on the Gaspe Peninsula, an estate in Boca Grande called Pamplemousse, a seaside home in Dark Harbor, Maine, an apartment in London, and a game park in South Africa, where he had mining interests.

In New York during the 1970s, Brooke Astor and Jane Engelhard moved in the same world, from serving on the board of the Metropolitan Museum to regularly visiting Miss Craig, the fitness instructor at Elizabeth Arden. The two women could have easily been social rivals, but they chose to become friends (although the couture dressmaker Elizabeth Corbett admits that they checked with her to make sure they did not purchase the same gowns). With so much in common—childhood in China, a love of art, widowhood followed by marriage to a fabulously wealthy man, a desire to be influential rather than merely decorative—they came to appreciate each other’s company. Robert Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books, recalls, “Brooke admired Jane, and she thought that Jane had created a little duchy in New Jersey.”

Annette came of age with a strict mother who was the family disciplinarian and an indulgent father who gave her free rein. “Her stepfather adored her—he was fun and he let us do everything we wanted,” recalls Gotbaum. “Her mother was quite formidable. She scared me.” The Engelhard parents traveled constantly, and once their daughters were old enough for boarding school, they saw each other mostly during summers and school vacations. “We had the nannies and the tutors and the servants,” recalls Susan O’Connor. “Our parents were very busy with their own lives.”

With a mother on the best-dressed list and photographed by Cecil Beaton and Horst for Vogue, Annette rebelled via food, eating her way into plump adolescence. At Foxcroft, the exclusive girls’ boarding school in Middleburg, Virginia, her roommate Elise Lufkin recalls, “She’d make everybody laugh in class, and teachers would be irritated. She looked very different than she does today. She got very thin when she was seventeen.”

Annette slimmed down in time to be presented as a debutante in the 1957–58 season. After spending a year in Paris studying art, at age twenty she married Samuel Pryor Reed, a Trinity College graduate whose prominent parents, Joseph and Permelia Reed, had turned Jupiter Island, Florida, into an exclusive WASP retreat. As the ruler of the Jupiter Island Club, Permelia Reed was famous as a social arbiter and for being shamelessly anti-Semitic. “People practically committed suicide because she wouldn’t give them the time of day,” wrote Liz Smith in her book Dishing. But Annette was well equipped to deal with her imposing mother-in-law. “I loved her and she loved me,” says Annette, who was raised Catholic. “You always knew where you stood with Permelia.”

Charles and Jane Engelhard were devoted Democrats—Jane helped Jacqueline Kennedy redecorate the White House—and the couple’s parties at Cragwood were legendary for their extravagance. Dinner guests still recall the stacks of gold Krugerrands used as table decor and given away as party favors.

Living in Manhattan, Annette and Sam, who worked for his father-in-law, attended a dinner at Cragwood honoring the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Oscar de la Renta, then designing clothing for Elizabeth Arden, had been invited, along with his wife, Françoise, because they knew the royals. Oscar recalls, “They served this enormous chocolate cake for dessert, but no one touched it.” He too declined, but he asked Annette what would become of the cake. “She took me into the pantry,” he says, and they gorged like children. The Reeds and the de la Rentas were soon vacationing together and always seemed to be the best of friends.

As a society phenomenon, Annette was profiled by the New York Times in 1967 along with her friends Mica Ertegun and Chessy Rayner. “They Look Alike, They Dress Alike, They Like Each Other Very Much” read the headline. Looking radiant in a Maximilian mink coat, Annette, then the mother of two children (Beatrice and Charles, and later there would be Eliza), was described as living in a ten-room apartment, having a Swiss nanny, and boasting a size 6 figure. “They are among the current crop of switched-on young matrons,” gushed the Times. “They know what to do before everyone does it, what to wear before it becomes popular, and where to go before the hordes descend.”

When Charles Engelhard, who was morbidly overweight, died of a heart attack in 1971 at his Florida home, at age fifty-four, Annette lost the only father she had known. Jane Engelhard created the Charles W. Engelhard Court at the Metropolitan Museum in her husband’s honor and forged on—just as the widowed Brooke Astor had—by taking on new challenges, such as serving as the first woman member of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In the years ahead, Annette’s four younger sisters chose to make their lives away from their mother’s sphere of influence, but Annette stayed within her mother’s social world.

Relationships often build slowly, as small moments accumulate. Brooke Astor had watched Annette grow up and was drawn to her tart-tongued wit. By the early 1980s, Mrs. Astor had begun to reach out a welcoming white-gloved hand, offering uncritical friendship. “Annette was unquestionably the brightest, most cultivated, most humorous and good-hearted of the ladies whom Brooke knew,” says the writer John Richardson. As Florence Irving, a Metropolitan Museum board member, adds, “Brooke was a better mother to Annette than Annette’s own mother. Brooke was available, she paid attention.” Extremely shy, Annette, with Brooke, could allow herself to be both warm and mercilessly funny. Randy Bourscheidt, New York’s deputy cultural commissioner in the 1970s, watched their friendship evolve and says, “They could be unguarded—they trusted each other. More than anything, they laughed together.”

Their relationship intensified as Jane Engelhard began to withdraw from public life, resigning from her boards. Annette took her mother’s place at the Metropolitan Museum in 1981. Jane began to spend more and more time in Nantucket and finally moved there full-time. “Jane gathered into herself,” recalls Robert Silvers. “She had frail health and trouble getting around.” Annette, then in her early forties, was ready to take on a more public role. “When my mother moved to Nantucket, Annette took her place as Mrs. Astor’s friend,” says Susan O’Connor, adding that her older sister also took on the family mantle in society and in philanthropy. “She stepped right into my mother’s shoes in a big way.”

Brooke encouraged Annette’s election to the boards of Rockefeller University and the New York Public Library. Although Annette was not as diplomatic as her mentor—“She does not suffer fools gladly,” says an acquaintance—she made herself indispensable at the Metropolitan Museum.

Oscar and Françoise de la Renta were regulars at Brooke’s table during this time. All the ladies loved Oscar: his Latin warmth lit up a room, and his lush creations made their wearers feel sensuously elegant. When Françoise died of cancer in 1983, Oscar turned to Annette for comfort. “My wife died at four A.M. and I called Annette at six A.M. and she didn’t leave my side for twenty-four hours,” he recalls. It was an Upper East Side scandal when Annette left Sam Reed, a quiet man with the perfect pedigree, for this exuberant foreigner who had built a multimillion-dollar garment district company. The divorce was treated as a news story with major repercussions. In Manhattan Inc. magazine, Julia Reed outlined the resulting succession crisis in society: “Astor herself had chosen Annette Reed to carry the torch, but Reed left her husband, as well as her status as a serious contender, when designer Oscar de la Renta caught her eye.”

That was a prediction that did not stand the test of time. Brooke loyally gave her blessing to her friend’s divorce and remarriage. “It was unpleasant,” Annette says. “It’s always unpleasant when you leave your husband. Brooke was the first to come to call on me. She said that she was sorry that it had gotten into the papers. She was very supportive of me and Oscar.”

 

Oscar and Annette, who married in 1990, treated Brooke as a beloved member of the family and always tried to think of new adventures when she visited them in the Dominican Republic. Betsy Gotbaum recalls Brooke’s reaction when the couple arranged for houseguests to swim with the dolphins, saying, “I was a little nervous, but Brooke was the first one in the water.” On another visit to the island, Oscar organized a helicopter trip to take Brooke to Santiago, where her father had been stationed as a Marine general. “Brooke was clinging to a portrait of her father when we arrived, and she started to cry,” Oscar de la Renta recalls. What Silvers, who was also visiting, remembers is the army band in full red-uniformed regalia which magically appeared, as arranged, to serenade Mrs. Astor. As he recalls, “They were playing 1930s swing songs for her—‘It Had to Be You.’”

 

As Brooke Astor reached her nineties, she worked hard at remaining contemporary. During the 1992 presidential campaign, she summoned Tom Brokaw to lunch at the Knickerbocker Club to discuss his political coverage. As the anchorman recalls, “She leaned over and tapped me on the knee and said, ‘Thomas, lay off on this stuff about Bill Clinton and his girlfriends.’” Brokaw told her that he was surprised she was taking such an interest. “It doesn’t mean that I’m going to vote for him, but every man is entitled,” she said. Then Mrs. Astor mischievously added, “Of course, he should be having affairs with Hillary’s friends, not with that trailer trash.” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., quoted Mrs. Astor as saying to the Democratic powerhouse Pamela Harriman, “Why couldn’t Mr. Clinton have stayed with girls of his own class?”

Brooke Astor did not object to other people’s messy romantic lives, but her attitude was different toward her son’s misadventures. She was genuinely upset by Tony’s decision to leave his second wife for Charlene Gilbert, whom he married in 1992. For decades she had dangled before her son the possibility that he would inherit her role as head of the Vincent Astor Foundation. Given her obsession with control, perhaps she never intended to let him take over, but Brooke’s friends believe that Tony’s third marriage lowered the odds. Board members watched from the sidelines as Brooke and Tony struggled over his future role. “I think there was a moment when they were in real disagreement about what would happen with the foundation,” says Howard Phipps. “It was not clear that she wanted to entrust Tony to manage things and advise her and play that role with the foundation forever.”

She offered the job instead to Viscount William Astor. “She always wanted it to remain an Astor Foundation,” Lord Astor recalls. “Tony was always trying to get a bit of it. She said to me, ‘Would you take the foundation on?’ I said, ‘If you want it to be for things in New York, no.’ I was in England. I told her to wind it up, which she decided to do.”

Mrs. Astor had started to grow forgetful, which was becoming an increasing problem for those in her orbit and employ. “She unraveled to the point that I had to talk to her son,” says John Meaney, dating the problem back as far as the early 1990s. “Tony was so intimidated by her: ‘She’s my mother, what can I do?’ She was a mess, rattled, confused. She was clearly slipping, but then she willed herself back.”

By 1996, however, even the indomitable Mrs. Astor, then ninety-four, was feeling her age. The Metropolitan Museum staff would meet her at the entrance with a wheelchair so she could avoid the long walks down the corridors. But she retained her competitive spirit. Awaiting the arrival of the ninety-nine-year-old Madame Chiang Kai-shek for a reception at Astor Court, she ordered Philippe de Montebello to scout out the situation, because she was worried about being upstaged. As he recalls, “Brooke said, ‘Go out and see if Mrs. Kai-shek is in a wheelchair.’ So I went around the corner, and came back and told Brooke, ‘She’s not.’ The speed at which Brooke got out of her wheelchair was amazing.”

But that autumn Mrs. Astor was finally forced to acknowledge her mental decline. For several months she and Linda Gillies had been discussing a major grant for an after-school program. But one Friday afternoon, when Gillies broached the topic, Brooke went completely blank and asked, “What project?” Gillies tried to finesse the situation, but Mrs. Astor was shaken by her lapse of memory. She spent the weekend at Holly Hill considering her options, and early on Monday morning she called Gillies and requested a meeting. Mrs. Astor arrived at the office and without pleasantries announced that she had decided to close the Astor Foundation. She would spend down the remaining funds in the next year, and the doors would shut in 1997. Making her decision public, Brooke explained her reason for closing the foundation in an interview with the New York Times reporter Geraldine Fabrikant in December 1996. “My son is not an Astor,” Mrs. Astor said. “There is no family to leave it to. If you have children, like the Rockefellers did, you leave it to your children. If you have no children, I think it’s a nice idea to close it.” Her only child was sitting right beside her as she made these comments. Tony Marshall told Fabrikant that he supported his mother’s decision, saying, “I would hate to second-guess ‘Is this something that my mother would like to give to?’”

Without the foundation’s work to keep her busy, Brooke Astor appeared unmoored. She continued to make her social rounds night after night, but she had lost her sense of purpose. As one of her staff members recalls, “I’d see her pull herself together and go out with people and maintain her graciousness, but at the end of the night, she’d empty out like a paper bag—she’d gotten through the evening.”

For Tony, his mother’s decision to close the foundation marked the end of his hopes of becoming a major New York philanthropist. He continued to manage his mother’s money, signing the checks to pay for her expenses. Brooke Astor had always lived well, and her son looked askance at her extravagance. This was a theme in the mother-son relationship that Brooke’s friends had been hearing about for years. “He was always giving her grief that she shouldn’t spend so much money,” recalls Robert Pirie. “She’d say to me, ‘When Tony finds out how much I spent in England this trip, he’s going to have a fit.’” Like many of Brooke’s friends, he thought Tony’s complaints were inappropriate. As he puts it, “Whose money was it? It wasn’t his.” But Tony knew that much of the money would eventually be his. It was just a matter of time. Given Brooke’s remarkable longevity, however, each minute seemed to last an hour, and her son’s life was ticking away too.