13

A Wonderful Life

ALEC MARSHALL HAD never supported the guardianship lawsuit and had rightly feared the family chasm that the litigation would create. But now, a year later, he was nearly as estranged from his father as Philip was. But unlike his brother, Alec nurtured the hope of a partial reconciliation. On a July 2007 afternoon, Alec was about to leave his apartment for a 4 P.M. visit to his grandmother at Holly Hill when Chris Ely called to say that Tony and Charlene had turned up unexpectedly.

Alec had not spoken to his father since the legal fireworks went off. Tony had sent back Alec’s Christmas gifts and in May had written a letter excoriating Alec for not speaking up in his defense on the elder abuse charges. Blaming Alec for ruining his and Charlene’s lives, Tony insisted that by remaining silent, Alec had chosen to take his brother’s side. The scorching letter concluded with Tony’s statement that he was “ashamed” to call Alec and Philip his sons. Hurt by these words but determined to take the high road, Alec replied in a note: “I am very distressed about your letter. I am sorry that this is the way you feel about me. If your viewpoint changes, my door is always open to you. Much love, Alec.”

Alec says he still thought their relationship could be salvaged. He loved his father, despite everything that had happened. So when he heard that Tony was at Holly Hill, Alec hopped into his Subaru station wagon and headed over. He could take advantage of the fact that Charlene was not allowed in the house. “I thought this was the only chance I had to talk to my father in a private conversation,” Alec said. “I knew that once my grandmother died, that would be it. I arrived. I saw Charlene out in the car.”

Alec waited downstairs. He was looking out the window at the lush summer scenery when his father walked quietly into the room. “I gave him a hug,” Alec recalled. But Tony quickly backed off from the embrace. He had no interest in a heart-to-heart. No small talk, no hello, how have you been. Clearly he had already built to the crescendo, as he announced bitterly, “I never want to speak to you again.” Then he walked out.

The next day Alec was driving north on the Taconic State Parkway en route to Vermont when his cell phone rang. Tony did not apologize, but he did ask whether Alec could come into the city to talk. Alec explained that he was heading out of state to see his fiancée. Tony asked him to call when he got back home. But the moment for reconciliation had passed. Alec was wary of his father’s apparent change of heart. “I think that he and Charlene talked it over,” Alec says. “I think they wanted to see what information they could get out of me. So I didn’t call back.”

 

Tony and Charlene had escaped to Northeast Harbor earlier in the summer, but while Maine was usually a refuge, on this trip they received a chilly reception. “Trust me, they’re shunned up here,” says Clare Stone, a photographer who is the widow of the renowned Manhattan art dealer Allan Stone. “I had a funny feeling about how things were going to play out when Brooke began to fail. I thought that he might make her life miserable. It’s called payback. He’s mean-spirited—he feels a slight and doesn’t forget it.”

The Marshalls’ decision to fire Steve Hamor and his two sons upset the close-knit local community. “It was almost like we were all in mourning when they released the gardeners, because they had been with Mrs. Astor for so long,” says Betty Halpern, from the Kimball Shop. Several doors down on Main Street, Dot Renaud, the proprietor of McGrath’s newsstand, is positively vitriolic about the Marshalls. “They have a lot of nerve coming back here knowing that everyone in town dislikes them,” she says. “They come in here to get the newspapers, she gives me this fake smile. She got what she wanted, she got the house.”

Nonetheless, when I reached Tony in Maine, he sounded in reasonably good spirits and chatted pleasantly for a half-hour. “We came up the day before yesterday,” he said. “It’s the first time we’ve been able to give ourselves some time off in the last eleven months. It’s a beautiful state.” He and Charlene hoped to stay at Cove End for several weeks, but they ended up cutting their trip short. Reverend Mac Bigelow, of Union Church in Northeast Harbor, explains, “When the Marshalls came up to Maine, they were very tired and hoping to relax and refresh themselves. But the Marshalls were dealing every day on the phone with Tony’s mother’s care and medical issues. Tony finally said, ‘I have to go back.’”

 

Even during the last few weeks of her life, Brooke Astor valiantly tried to keep going. Breathe in, breathe out. At times the breathing was labored. Yet her extraordinary will to live was in evidence. The nurses reported that she was talking more, even if the words were unintelligible, as if she were trying to convey “I’m still here.” After a difficult evening in which she had been truly gasping, the nurses put her in the wheelchair to take her downstairs to the sunroom. Chris Ely, looking up to the landing, called out that Mrs. Astor might prefer to stay in bed that morning. Noreen Nee recalls, “She grabbed my hand and shook her head as if to say, ‘No, I’m fine.’” Brooke could still understand what was being said and make her wishes known. But she drifted peacefully off to sleep for most of the day.

August was quiet at Holly Hill, with few visitors. Before heading off to Seal Harbor, David Rockefeller stopped by to see Brooke one more time. “When I first went in the room, I think she knew it was someone she knew, but wasn’t sure what my name was,” Rockefeller says. “But then when I said goodbye, she looked me in the eye, I could feel that she did. Even at the end, I think she felt very close to me.” Rockefeller, an old man himself, had no illusions about what was to come. As he recalls, “I thought that might be the last time that I would see her.”

On Saturday night, August 11, Brooke began to say her goodbyes. She was having trouble breathing. After urgent phone calls, her local physician, Dr. Richard Strongwater, rushed to the house, Annette arrived, and Reverend Pridemore was summoned. “I was there from nine P.M. almost until midnight. It appeared it would be the end,” Pridemore recalls. “We said all the prayers right up until last rites, and then she rallied. Her heartbeat and vital signs stabilized.”

Tony and Charlene sped up from New York; they were the last to arrive. Charlene wanted to be there at the end. She had known Brooke Astor for twenty-five years, and so much history had passed between the two women. Tony wanted his wife beside him at his mother’s bedside, to console him. At the front door, when the Marshalls arrived, Charlene started to walk in first, but Chris Ely blocked her way. “I’m sorry, but you can’t come in,” he said. The butler was nervous, but the judge had ruled that Charlene was not permitted to see Brooke. It was not Ely’s place to disobey a legal order. “Even now that she’s dying?” Charlene protested in disbelief. The butler replied, “She’s feeling better now.”

Inside the house, Tony found Annette talking to Pridemore and asked her permission to bring in Charlene. It was mortifying for him to be so powerless. He was rebuffed yet again. Tony later wrote that Annette was “heartless and hostile,” adding that “when I asked her personally that night to allow Charlene and me to spend some final moments with my mother—after so many years of being together with her as a couple—she emphatically refused.” But with Brooke near death, Annette felt strongly that she should prevent any encounter that might be stressful for her fragile friend. “I told Tony that was against the rules,” she recalls. “I told him that he would have to discuss it with Mr. Saunders, my lawyer.” Tony protested, saying, “My lawyer says it’s fine.” Annette says that she replied, “Tony, let it be. Go see your mother.”

Tony sat on his mother’s bed and held her hand and spoke to her. Pearline Noble and Minnette Christie, the two nurses who had caused him such trouble, were watching over their patient. “He glared at us, one to the other, like ‘Get out of the room so I can be with my mother,’” says Minnette, adding that they felt uncomfortable, but it would have been irresponsible to leave. “She was on oxygen, and a nurse needed to be there in case there was a crisis.”

Exacerbating the combative atmosphere, extra security sentries arrived at Holly Hill. Tony accused Chris Ely of bringing in guards to physically block Charlene from entering. The butler later explained that he feared reporters would descend on the house if Mrs. Astor died that night. The animosity on all sides precluded compassion and made every action seem suspicious.

Philip was in Vermont visiting his mother when the crisis occurred and drove the 180 miles to Holly Hill, arriving at 12:30 A.M. By then the medical emergency had passed and the visitors had left. On Sunday afternoon he headed back to Massachusetts. “There was a bit of a scare, but my grandmother is fine,” he reported by cell phone, driving east on the turnpike. “She’s amazing—she just keeps going. She still takes less meds than we all do.” He wanted to believe that his grandmother, at 105, was immortal; he was not yet ready to let her go.

But on Monday morning the nurses saw signs of serious decline. “She was sweating, so we gave her a quick sponge bath,” Minnette Christie recalls. “We got her back in bed, in a sitting position. Her pulse was dropping; her breathing pattern had changed.” They dressed Mrs. Astor in a white chiffon nightgown embroidered with flowers, a matching robe, and white socks and white gloves. Chris Ely came into the room, to stay with her until the end, as he had promised.

Minnette sat on Brooke’s bed and said, “Let’s pray. Let’s hold hands like old times.” Brooke’s eyes had been closed, but she opened them at the word pray, and her breathing became calmer, less ragged. Minnette, Pearline and Chris recited the Lord’s Prayer, Brooke’s favorite. Then, in unison, they added, “In my little bed I lie, heavenly father hear my cry, if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Brooke Astor squeezed the nurses’ hands. Minnette finished with a benediction: “May the Lord bless you and keep you. Let his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you and give you peace. Amen.” Brooke let out a deep sigh. As Pearline recalls, “I will never forget that sound.”

Annette’s footsteps broke the reverie. Minette rushed out of the room to meet her and to report of Brooke, “She’s traveling.” Annette ran into the room and kissed her friend’s face, saying, “Brooke, I’m here. Brooke, I love you.” Brooke died a few minutes later, at 1:50 P.M.

 

For the next few hours, until Tony Marshall issued a statement, Brooke Astor’s death remained a secret to the world at large. Philip, calling me a half-hour after his grandmother passed away, was so choked up that he could scarcely speak. Tony was at home in Manhattan when his mother died and wanted to see her one more time. Even though he had been expecting this call for years—for decades—the news was still wrenching. He and Charlene drove to Holly Hill. Annette had left by then, but Reverend Pridemore was waiting for them.

The staff finally allowed Charlene inside, enabling her to see Brooke literally over her dead body. The couple waited for the undertakers from Frank E. Campbell to arrive. Tony held on to Charlene’s hand. As the Marshalls were leaving, Charlene made a point of graciously shaking Chris Ely’s hand. The butler later admitted that he was startled by the gesture, but this was a day when all squabbling was temporarily put aside.

At 4:43 P.M. the Associated Press ran a news alert saying that Mrs. Astor had died. “I have lost my beloved mother,” Tony said in his statement, “and New York and the world have lost a great lady . . . I will miss her deeply and always.” Annette released her own statement, alluding to the guardianship fight: “Brooke left the world peacefully, in a dignified manner, in her own home. We could not have asked for more.”

Reporters were staking out the Marshalls’ apartment at Seventy-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue by the time the couple returned from Holly Hill. Asked if they had had the chance to bid Brooke farewell, Tony and Charlene gave answers that implied they had been at the bedside when she died. “He was able to cradle her in his arms,” Charlene told the Daily News. “She looked at him. She knew he was there. He told her he loved her. We said a prayer over her.” Reporters called around for confirmation; the News printed comments from an unnamed party stating that the Marshalls had not been with Brooke at the end. The public bickering had already begun. “The Marshalls got there after I did,” Reverend Pridemore says. “But Tony did cradle her in his arms on Saturday night—perhaps that’s what he was thinking of, since for all purposes, that was the end for him.”

Newspapers around the globe donned black crepe with obituaries and reminiscences of Mrs. Astor. The New York Times immortalized her with the apt headline “Brooke Astor, Wry Aristocrat of the People, Is Dead at 105.” Alec Marshall’s teenage daughter, Hilary Brooke, wrote a note to her great-grandmother on the New York Times Web site, saying, “YOU PUT UP A GOOD FIGHT! I MISS YOU SO MUCH GAGI! RIP. LOVE ALWAYS.” Yet the affectionate stories saluting Brooke Astor’s philanthropy inevitably turned to the news, the scandal, the salable. The tributes to Mrs. Astor became coming attractions for the spectacle that lay ahead: the fight for her fortune.

Whenever Tony and Charlene stepped out the front door, a gaggle of reporters and photographers awaited them. At this time of mourning, they were forced to defend themselves. “The accusation of my having pocketed millions is untrue,” Tony told reporters on the day after his mother’s death. “I see no valid reason to contest this will. For twenty-seven years, I managed my mother’s investments. I did extremely well for her. I made it very comfortable for her to live the life she led.” Charlene fiercely jumped in to defend her husband and insisted that Brooke “adored” her only son. Then she added a grandiose sentence that infuriated Brooke’s close friends, saying, “She was Brooke Astor because of him.”

The legal war erupted within twenty-four hours of Brooke Astor’s death, before the funeral arrangements had even been finalized. Aiming for a preemptive strike, lawyers representing Brooke’s guardians, Annette de la Renta and Chase Bank, hastened to the Westchester County Surrogate’s Court and filed papers on Tuesday, August 14, 2007. They charged that Mrs. Astor “was not competent to execute” any of her most recent wills and had been “under undue influence and duress” to do so. In a startling tactic, the lawyers urged the court to reject her final 2002 will completely and instead roll back the clock by five years and admit her 1997 will for probate, a document that gave significantly more money to charity and much less to Tony Marshall.

The implicit message was that the guardians planned to produce proof that Mrs. Astor had been mentally unsound for the last decade of her life. Her medical records had been sealed during her lifetime, but now, in death, every sad detail and diagnosis would be open to scrutiny. Brooke Astor had valiantly tried to mask her decline in her last years, to dress beautifully and continue to grace social occasions. Even if she was not always contributing to or instigating conversation, she tried to give the impression that she was at least taking it all in. She had developed her skills as a performer, cherishing her role as Mrs. Astor, playing it with dignity until the end. Now her facade would be ruthlessly stripped away.

Her estate had been left in legal limbo with the settlement of the guardianship case a year earlier when Tony, Charlene, and the other executors all agreed to step aside. Annette de la Renta was determined to continue protecting her friend Brooke even after death. She and Chase Bank asked to become coadministrators of the estate. New York City’s major cultural institutions, concerned about protecting their share of Mrs. Astor’s nearly $200 million fortune, rushed to support Annette. Paul LeClerc, the president of the New York Public Library, filed an affidavit backing her and the bank. A few days later, the Metropolitan Museum, Rockefeller University, and the Morgan Library joined in the cause.

The Marshalls were stunned by the swiftness of the legal assault. They had known it was coming but hoped for a brief respite from the confrontational headlines. Charlene, drained, initially held her tongue, informing the reporters camped on her doorstep that she had no comment, but then, perhaps predictably, she erupted, telling the Daily News that Annette’s maneuver was “disgusting.” “For someone who is supposed to have cared about her so much,” Charlene said, “it is very dishonorable. She isn’t even buried yet.” Tony later told me that he was enraged by the opposition’s insensitivity and by the idea that Annette and the bank’s lawyers were drafting paperwork within minutes of Brooke’s death. As he put it to me, his manner grim and wounded, “I was at my mother’s bedside holding her hands when they did it.” Finally father and son had one thing in common. Philip was upset too by the rush into court. He did not return calls from the Chase lawyers, who were urging him to sign an affidavit. “I thought it was tacky,” he says. “I didn’t want to sign anything until after the funeral.”

Paul Saunders, Annette’s lawyer, defends the legal gambit. “It was unclear whether the bank’s role as guardian of the assets continued,” he says. “You have an estate with seventy-five acres, you have the apartment, you have assets and securities, you have bills to pay, you have staff—all these things someone needed to deal with.” Saunders insists, “This had to be done, and done right away. It would have been malpractice for the bank as fiduciary to sit back and allow the property to sit there with no one in charge.” Annette later added, “In a perfect world, we would have waited, but the bank felt they had to act.”

A less incendiary step probably would have been equally effective. Lawyers for Chase and Annette later requested and received permission from Justice Stackhouse to continue as guardians until the Westchester Surrogate’s Court chose administrators. If the lawyers had taken that simple action after Brooke Astor’s death rather than immediately mounting a will challenge, there would have been fewer glaring headlines and less immediate family turmoil. Susan Robbins thought the legal haste was in bad taste, saying, “There was no need to do it this week.”

 

Brooke Astor had been planning her own funeral for decades, specifying in writing the prayers, hymns, pallbearers, and guest list of dignitaries. Her parties had always been planned with meticulous detail, so how could she delegate the arrangements of such an important occasion? But she had left it to Tony to carry out her wishes with a service at St. Thomas Church, on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-third Street. Given the media Mardi Gras, it was a given that even the guest list would be news. Just as the New York Times had published the list of guests at Mrs. Astor’s hundredth birthday party, the newspaper of record also featured “Funeral A-List: New Version of Mrs. Astor’s 400.” Included were Nancy Reagan, President and Mrs. George H. W. Bush, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather. The list had not been updated for some time and included friends who had died, like Kitty Carlisle Hart. The Times article took a swipe at the Marshalls: “The list appears to not be an entirely direct reflection of Mrs. Astor’s life. At least a couple of people on it—Whoopi Goldberg and [Martha] Stewart—are friends of Mr. Marshall but did not know Mrs. Astor well.”

In Manhattan, where being on the right list is a constant source of status anxiety, an invitation to Mrs. Astor’s funeral was perceived as an important validation. Liz Smith mentioned in her syndicated column that she had been among the anointed. “Our side didn’t leak that list—it was convenient for the other side to create a misimpression,” complained Daniel Billy, Jr. “This was always intended to be open to the public.” He added that the publicity was painful for the Marshalls. “He’s an eighty-three-year-old man and his mother just died. They are really stressed out.”

 

Annette and Oscar de la Renta hosted a lunch at their Park Avenue apartment hours before the Friday, August 17, funeral. The guests represented a cross-section of those who had been Mrs. Astor’s most vigilant defenders in final years: David Rockefeller and his executive assistant, Alice Victor; Henry and Nancy Kissinger; Philip, Nan, Winslow, and Sophie Marshall; Chris Ely; Minnette Christie and Pearline Noble; and Dr. Strongwater and Dr. Pritchett and their wives. (Alec, given his role as a neutral party, was not invited.) Annette told her guests, “Brooke would love to look around this table, because it represented her life.” The menu was soup and a cheese soufflé, salad and peaches and cream, with Annette reassuring Sophie, a vegetarian, that she could eat everything. “It was a roomful of people who felt that they had done the right thing but didn’t feel self-righteous about it,” says Henry Kissinger. “It wasn’t a combative lunch—it was not a discussion of the dispute or Tony. It was sort of a reflective lunch.”

Their fight to help Brooke had imbued their lives with a sense of purpose. During the past year, this group had been in control of all arrangements involving Brooke Astor, but on this day they were powerless. The funeral, the guest list, the speakers—Tony was in charge of it all.

David Rockefeller had been worrying for months that he would not be allowed to say a few words at his dear friend’s funeral. He feared that Tony would punish him by shutting him out. But several days earlier Tony had called him in Maine, inviting him to the funeral and then asking him to speak. “I was pretty much planning to do it,” Rockefeller told me later, “and Tony called. I was glad that he did. It was a very nice for him to ask. Under the circumstances, it would have been wrong for me not to speak.”

The two men had a cordial conversation, and Rockefeller felt relieved. But then Tony’s lawyer, Ken Warner, had the temerity to call Rockefeller’s office to ask that he refrain from mentioning Annette in his funeral remarks. Rockefeller planned to simply ignore the plea, as “Annette was the person closest to Brooke.”

Shortly after 2 P.M., the luncheon group filed downstairs, where town cars were waiting to take them to the funeral. Crowds clogged the sidewalk in front of St. Thomas Church, although the ceremony wasn’t scheduled to start until 2:30. Police had erected metal barricades on either side of the Fifth Avenue entrance to hold back photographers, cameramen, reporters, and gawkers. As street vendors sold hot dogs, crepes, and sodas, it was easy to forget there was a funeral.

The famous friends, the courtiers, the hangers-on, and the true-blue pals were turning up and clustering together in front of the church. Sean Driscoll, the owner of Glorious Food, who had catered many of Mrs. Astor’s dinners, and Albert Hadley, who had designed her red library, were the first to arrive. Howard Rubenstein, the image-maker who has handled decades of damage control for George Steinbrenner and Leona Helmsley, was working the event. Hired the day before by the Marshalls, he had spent several hours with the embattled couple. (Three days later he resigned from the account, citing a conflict with another client, the New York Public Library. Even the battle-hardened Rubenstein probably concluded that no amount of cash would compensate for alienating every major cultural institution in New York.) The New York Post columnist Cindy Adams wrote that the Marshalls were shopping for a PR man and cattily commented, “I suggest maybe Osama bin Laden’s spokes-terrorist.”

Tony and Charlene arrived inconspicuously at the church and entered through the side door on Fifty-third Street. Reverend John Andrew had married the Marshalls back in 1992, and although he was now rector emeritus at the church, he was to conduct the service, at Mrs. Astor’s request. For the Marshalls, he was a familiar and consoling presence.

Alec arrived at St. Thomas along with his fiancée, his daughter, Hilary Brooke, and her mother, his first wife, Susie Secondo, and was directed upstairs to the family room, where he promptly encountered Tony and Charlene. Alec thought they could at least grieve for Brooke together. “My father walked over to the other side of the room to get away from me,” Alec recalls. He thought it best to leave the room.

When the large wooden doors of St. Thomas opened, all the guests rushed up the stairs to enter, stepping into the marble entry with its welcoming phrase, “Peace on Earth to Men of Good Will.” Despite the predictions, many seats remained empty. Press reports later estimated that 900 people attended the service in this church, which seats 1,400. Many of the VIPs mentioned in the Times (Nancy Reagan, the Bushes) did not attend. It was a Friday in August, a time when New York is left to the tourists, and many of Brooke’s close friends, such as Vartan Gregorian, were out of the country. In the more accessible Hamptons, several of Brooke’s friends not so quietly let it be known that they were boycotting because Tony was in charge. But that may simply have been an excuse to avoid missing a day at the beach. Mrs. Astor no longer needed to be courted.

Philip and his family were escorted to their seats by Daniel Billy, Jr. He had seen the Marshalls in agony because of Philip’s actions, but this was not the moment for confrontation. With a poker face, he politely introduced himself and walked Philip and his family to their seats. Philip got a warm welcome from those nearby, including the producer John Hart, who murmured, “I couldn’t be more honored to be seated near you.” Philip’s expression changed as he caught sight of his father. “It was hard for Philip,” recalls Hart. “He was looking at his father, but not wanting to.”

The service began. Eight Marines carried the heavy wood coffin to the altar. After “Rock of Ages”—and the sight of Whoopi Goldberg running in ten minutes late to join Tony and Charlene—Mayor Michael Bloomberg rose to speak. He quoted a poem by Brooke that had been published in The New Yorker in March 1996: “Love is an apple, round and firm/without a blemish or a worm/Bite into it and you will find/you’ve found your heart and lost your mind.” He added that the poem “was full of the tart insight that was Brooke’s hallmark.” He remarked on her love affair with the Big Apple. Then the mayor conveyed exactly where he stood in the family fight. “Thanks to Annette de la Renta,” he began, “I had lunch once with Brooke in her apartment.” The mere mention of Annette enraged Tony’s friends. The mayor closed his remarks by mentioning Brooke’s well-known sartorial splendor: “There’s a Yiddish saying that our mitzvahs, our good deeds, are the clothing of our soul. In more ways than one, Brooke Astor was always the best-dressed woman in the room.”

David Rockefeller, the next eulogist, looked every bit his ninety-two years as he walked slowly to the podium. His speech was brief and heartfelt. He described Brooke as a “close and loving friend for five magical decades.” “The most wonderful thing about Brooke, besides the fact she was great fun, was that she treated each and every person she met with warmth and respect,” he said. “For those of us who were fortunate to know her well, it was always a warm kiss, especially for the men. How lucky we felt!” And then he added the sentence that Tony had dreaded: “Even in her final peaceful days, when I visited Holly Hill with her dear and loyal friend Annette, Brooke would still look at us with that amazing twinkle in her eye, which she always had and never gave up.”

Next it was Tony Marshall’s turn to speak, not only to face his critics but to claim his mother for himself. “My mother was an only child and so was I,” he began. “This gave us a closer understanding of each other. We shared a love of nature. And we particularly loved the times when Charlene and I were alone with my mother, either in New York or on trips we took together here and abroad . . . We also shared a sense of humor,” he continued. “Three years ago, on my eightieth birthday, Mother informed me with a twinkle in her eye, ‘You are only halfway there.’” These words were greeted with warm laughter.

Then Tony read aloud a “declaration of faith” that Brooke had written many years before to be read at her funeral. Wonderfully narcissistic and poetic, this was vintage Brooke. “When I go from here, I want to leave behind me the world richer for the experience of me,” she had written. For Brooke Astor, who loved to hike and hug trees, nature was much on her mind. “I want to leave the trees rustling with my thoughts,” she wrote, adding that she hoped that the “tears that I shed for love” would return to the earth as dew. With the wisdom and joie de vivre of a woman who relished her 105 years, her farewell message was to tell her fellow man that “death is nothing and life is everything.”

After he finished, Tony paused, a deliberately theatrical moment. “Yes, New York and her many friends have lost a wonderful person,” he said. Then his voice choked up, as he added in a tone of almost childish disbelief, “But I’ve lost my mother.” It was a cry of anguish, particularly moving because on some level he may have felt that all the world had gotten more of her than he had.

At the close of the service, Reverend Andrew Mead, the current rector of St. Thomas Church, made a point of announcing that Brooke Astor had chosen all the prayers. It seemed like an unnecessary comment, but his rationale for making it became clear once he read the next prayer.

“Lord, make us instruments of thy peace,” he read. “Where there is hatred, let us sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is discord, union. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console. To be understood as to understand. To be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. It is in pardoning that we are pardoned. And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.” People looked around with raised eyebrows. As one woman said later, “It was if Brooke were talking from the grave.”

A bagpiper played “Amazing Grace” as the Marines carried the coffin down the aisle and the congregation followed them out. Tony and Charlene clutched each other’s arms for support. Philip was fighting back tears; his wife reached into her purse and handed him a tissue. The doors to the church opened to reveal an astonishing scene: hundreds of people lining Fifth Avenue, waiting for a glimpse of Brooke Astor’s coffin, while traffic was halted by the police. The scene of the crowd, just for a moment, resembled Brooke Astor’s painting Flags, Fifth Avenue, with New Yorkers of all social strata stopping to bear witness. It began raining just as the pallbearers walked down the stairs and the church bells rang. People applauded, as an impromptu thank-you. As the men loaded the coffin into the hearse, the rain stopped.

A small card in the program left on the seats in the church invited all the guests to a reception given by Tony and Charlene at the Colony Club. But Philip and Alec and their familial entourages opted instead to go to Starbucks in Rockefeller Center, where they watched the CNN coverage of the funeral.

At the Colony Club, waiters served salmon rolls and chicken brochettes and passed around trays of white wine to 120 people who came to pay condolences. Alice Astor’s two daughters, Emily Harding and her half-sister, Ramona McEwan, who had flown over from London for the funeral, stopped by to honor Mrs. Astor. “It was perfectly pleasant, but what was clear was that a great many people did not come,” says Harding. “They were clearly making a statement, the Annette de la Renta camp. I didn’t want to be in any camp. John Richardson and Kenneth Jay Lane, people whom I’ve known for years, did not go to the Colony Club.”

The guests at the reception sponsored by Tony included the Metropolitan Museum trustee Carl Spielvogel and his wife, Barbaralee Diamonstein; the president of the Museum of National History, Ellen Futter; Barbara Goldsmith; Elihu Rose; Marshall Rose; Randy Bourscheidt; and Whoopi Goldberg. Out of earshot of the Marshalls, some quietly murmured about the feud. As one woman speculated, “It’s as if Tony and Annette are fighting over whose mother Brooke was.”

 

There was a fierce thunderstorm that afternoon, but the next day was sunny and clear. Tony and Charlene had decided to bury Brooke privately at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, her chosen spot, without informing the rest of the family or Brooke’s friends. The New York Post assigned a reporter and a photographer to stake out the cemetery, and the team caught a shot of the couple praying over the flower-strewn coffin, accompanied by Father Andrew. The Marshalls left before the grave was filled. An hour after they had gone, Alec arrived with Sue Ritchie and was startled to discover that the burial was still in progress. “We just stopped by to pay our last respects,” he told the Post. “I didn’t even know [the burial] was today.” To his surprise, Alec recognized the worker tending the plot: Ramon Acosta, who had been the head gardener at Holly Hill for eight years, until Tony Marshall had cut back on staff. Acosta paused to reminisce about how much Mrs. Astor had loved her daffodils and her flower garden, saying, “I never thought I’d be burying your grandmother.” Alec lingered on at the cemetery, to watch as the last shovels of dirt were placed on Brooke Astor’s grave.