Vulture Culture
Bachrach, Judy
Vulture Culture What happens when a 103-year-old heiress falls ill. BY JUDY BACHRACH Brooke Astor’s Park Avenue apartment, stuffed in her old age with red velvet Louis XV chairs, her...
...Her fi rst husband broke her jaw and also very likely raped her...
...And thereby, of course, hangs not simply a tale but the tale that continues to both thrill and spook gossipy New York to this day: the story of Tony Marshall, as Brooke’s son came to be called (he was adopted by the doyenne’s second husband), and the slender, distant, upwardly mobile mother about whom he clearly has feelings so raw that he is, at 84, about to face trial for swindling her in her dotage out of millions...
...The fi rst, written two years ago by Frances Kiernan, a biographer evidently so embarrassed by all the sordid details that emerged that she could barely bring herself to mention them, was reviewed by me in these pages...
...Tony was meant to have a better, more loving mother...
...But even an acquittal would yield very little...
...It was this last felonious assault, as Meryl Gordon concludes in an especially incisive moment, that accounted for the birth of Brooke’s son Tony and all that happened subsequently between them...
...Word had it that a living room couch was stained with dog urine, which turned out to be untrue...
...Well, that was then...
...Tony has two sons, one of whom blew the whistle on him...
...She blighted his youth...
...two out of three times, at least...
...Judy Bachrach is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair...
...If you’re a fan of the New York papers (and here I’m defi nitely including the New York Times, which savored the greed and humiliation that defi ned this story every bit as much as Page Six), then you already know the bareboned facts...
...Brooke was 103 years old when these and other details emerged, two years away from death, and the combination of accumulated years and accumulated wealth, of terminal tragedy and the great good fortune that had preceded it, compelled all sorts of people to come to her aid...
...These include intergenerational alienation, rapacity, and, most remarkably, a will revised by Brooke, while she was suffering from Alzheimer’s, which provided her son with “an additional outright gift to you of $5 million . . . to assure Charlene’s comfort...
...A few years later the old lady was evidently so fl ush with cash and securities that Tony, as he would later acknowledge, received $2.38 million as recompense for the delightful job of managing his mother’s money—fi ve times his usual annual salary...
...It is a fascinating story of the problems that bedevil all the most interesting families: mismatched kinship and thwarted affection...
...and that certain of the old lady’s medications had been halted, which was true, but done at a doctor’s behest...
...The former Roberta Brooke Russell was neither really pretty nor born rich, and she married badly...
...In March 2006, as Tony Marshall’s son Philip complained at the time, Brooke’s nursing staff had been reduced...
...As Gordon remarks in one of her few ironic asides, “Who could say that Brooke Astor was not a good mother...
...With excellent reason, as things turned out...
...In 2002, she had sold it for $10 million (a paltry sum, as it turned out, since it was subsequently resold by a gallery for twice that amount...
...And he has a reputation that was, is, and will be for many, many months the stuff of headlines, some of them based on fact...
...Charlene, as it happened, was her son’s third wife, and the daughter-in-law Brooke famously detested...
...The cast of Brooke champions included David Rockefeller, Tony’s alienated son Philip, Annette de la Renta, Henry Kissinger, many lawyers equipped with many axes, and Barbara Walters...
...The cast of villains—a group whose members, as Gordon cautiously suggests, may not have entirely deserved the epithet, or at least not in every instance reported by the breathless media-—was very much smaller: Tony, his wife Charlene, and yet another lawyer...
...The Park Avenue duplex was “in such a dirty and dilapidated state” that she was “forced to live among peeling and falling paint and dusty and crumbling carpets...
...Brooke was meant to exit life much as she lived it: in a blaze of glory...
...Astor Regrets is actually the second account of Brooke’s relationship with her only child...
...But that isn’t likely because it would mean he would be 109 at the time of his release...
...His mother’s social friends despise him...
...In this time of economic distress, it is instructive to realize that, while money can most certainly buy you love and lots of other things, the one thing it still can’t get you is good press...
...Mrs...
...If he’s convicted of fi rst degree larceny, as Gordon points out, Tony could serve up to a quarter of a century in jail...
...That, among other things, is her triumph...
...He had a mother who turned out to be generous toward him only as her mental capacities failed...
...However, Gordon’s is the only account worth reading, and she tells it very well...
...her insubstantial meals consisted of pureed carrots and liver...
...BY JUDY BACHRACH Brooke Astor’s Park Avenue apartment, stuffed in her old age with red velvet Louis XV chairs, her late husband’s 3,000 Moroccan-bound fi rst editions, and an expensive Childe Hassam painting of American fl ags whipping in the breeze (which turned out to be the only true love of her life), was always emblematic of its owner: very old, very moneyed, a fortress of affl uence, that—like New York’s premiere philanthropist— hid a large pile of insecurities...
...Aside from Barbara Walters, the author appears to have managed to get everyone to dish, including the reserved Annette de la Renta...
...Gone, too, was the wonderful Childe Hassam painting, which Brooke had always intended to bequeath to the Metropolitan Museum...
...But there were other allegations, equally repellant, which made fi ne headlines, but contained little or no substance...
...In poor health, she had still remembered to make fi nancial concessions to a woman whom by most accounts she loathed...
...He helped ruin her old age...
...He has lawyers (four of them to date) and a wife people snub...
...Tony wanted me to sell the painting, because I’m running out of money,” Brooke told the deeply puzzled de la Renta, who found it impossible to suppose her friend was actually hurting for funds...
Vol. 14 • December 2008 • No. 12
