Mrs. Astor Regrets

by Meryl Gordon

  Open hostilities had erupted five months before Brooke's one hundredth birthday. Philip drove to Brooklyn in late October 2001, just six weeks after the September 11 attacks, for a historic preservation conference at Floyd Bennett Field. He ventured into Manhattan briefly to see the damage at Ground Zero but did not call his father. Heading home, he stopped in Westchester to spend the night with his brother and to visit Brooke at Holly Hill.

  His conversation with his grandmother took a strange turn that day, since Brooke was dwelling in the past. The collapse of the Twin Towers had been so wrenching that she preferred to discuss traumatic incidents from her own youth, particularly her 1919 honeymoon with her first husband, Dryden Kuser. Philip was in the awkward position of hearing intimate details of his grandmother's wedding night. "She kept saying that he didn't know anything about sex," Philip remembers, "that it was difficult for her."

  A few days later Philip received a call from his father, who had learned of his son's trip from Brooke and was perturbed that Philip had not made time to stop by to see him and Charlene. Tony appeared to be even more annoyed that Philip had spent an afternoon with Brooke without alerting him in advance. "In any other family, it would be, 'Oh, you saw your grandmother, how nice,'" says Philip. Instead, his father made saying, "You visited my mother" sound like an accusation. Philip thought his father's tone was possessive: "He didn't call her 'your grandmother.'" Philip regretted hurting his father's feelings but wondered why he suddenly needed a permission slip and a chaperone to see Brooke. "I thought, maybe I need therapy on this one."

  The estrangement deepened several weeks later when Philip, Nan, and Alec attended a New York Public Library gala honoring Brooke as a "Literary Lion." The three of them were standing together in Astor Hall, just inside the library's Fifth Avenue entrance, when Tony and Charlene swept past without a handshake or a nod. "I'll never forget their faces when they saw us and their smiles disappeared," recalls Nan. Philip adds, "They didn't say a word to us, not even to my brother. I thought, 'What's the big deal?'"

  Brooke left the Literary Lions party early, escorted by David Rockefeller, so she was unaware of the family tensions. Nan was so upset that she brooded on the four-hour train ride home the next day, remembering, "I was so hurt and confused." She then wrote Tony a letter asking what she and her husband had done to offend him and Charlene. This caused Tony to become even angrier. He called Philip and asked, "Why is your wife writing me a letter?" Philip explained that Nan was troubled by her in-laws' behavior and hoped for a conversation to air things out. Nan never did get a response from Tony, and she now says of her father-in-law, "It was the beginning of the end of any relationship I had with him. It was brutal." Next Alec got a call from his father apologizing for the cold shoulder. As Alec recalls, "He said he did not intend it towards me."

  Tony and Philip were now antagonists. Even though they made sporadic attempts at the rituals of reconciliation, such as exchanging gifts at holidays, beneath these gestures was an Oedipal struggle. But neither of them could have imagined that this family rupture would lead to Tony's being in a holding cell at One Hogan Place.

  New York City was engulfed in a heat wave in late July 2006, with sweltering temperatures and humidity. Mrs. Astor's apartment lacked central air-conditioning, so its owner and her nurses, who now worked round the clock, were confined to a few air-conditioned rooms. Tony and Charlene Marshall, however, had decamped to Northeast Harbor to spend the summer at Cove End, with its cooling breezes off the harbor. Vincent Astor had purchased the seven-acre estate in 1953, and for nearly a half-century Mrs. Astor had been in residence during the summer. Now the Marshalls had taken the place over, making changes to fit their tastes. Picture windows had been enlarged, and gardeners had plowed over Mrs. Astor's magnificent flower garden and installed its aesthetic antithesis, a lawn with a series of oversized plastic black and white chess pieces on it.

  In the four years since Brooke Astor's one hundredth birthday, Tony and Charlene had flourished in new careers as Broadway investors, producing two Tony Award-winning plays, A Long Day's Journey into Night and I Am My Own Wife. Mimicking his mother's rotating array of famous houseguests, Tony and Charlene now entertained theater friends, including the actors Frank Langella and Jefferson Mays and the couple's coproducer, David Richenthal. Martha Stewart, who owned a home in nearby Seal Harbor, and the painter Richard Estes were dinner guests. Family members were welcome too: Alec Marshall had visited just a few weeks earlier with his fiancée, Sue Ritchie, and now Charlene's pregnant daughter, Inness Gilbert Hancock, was staying in the large cottage. A weekend at the Marshalls' typically included a sail on the couple's luxurious new 55-foot, $900,000 boat, the General Russell, named after Tony's maternal grandfather. The couple had hired a full-time captain, putting him on Mrs. Astor's payroll along with the gardeners, the housekeeper, and other Maine employees.

  On Monday morning, July 24, the serenity of Tony and Charlene's Maine vacation was shattered. First Brooke Astor's doctor, Rees Pritchett, called to say that his 104-year-old patient had been taken by ambulance early that morning to Lenox Hill Hospital, suffering from pneumonia. Then Philip Marshall called. He and his father had not spoken at all for a year or seen each other for two years. "I said, 'Gagi is in the hospital,'" recalls Philip. "My father said, 'I know.' He was livid that I had found out first. I said, 'Well, things have changed.'"

  And then Philip made such a startling announcement that his father, who wears a hearing aid, just kept saying, "What?" as if he could not believe Philip's words. Philip had to repeat himself three times to get his message across: he had filed a guardianship petition in court to wrest the control of Brooke Astor's care and, perhaps more important, her fortune away from his father. Twisting the knife, Philip told Tony that he had powerful backers: David Rockefeller, Annette de la Renta, and Henry Kissinger had joined him in this legal action. Tony, furious, told his son, "I can't believe this. I'll never talk to you again." Then he hung up. Charlene, who had been listening on an extension, remained on the line. Philip kept talking, saying, "I am sorry I had to do this." He recalls her sarcastic reply: "I'm sure you are."

  Charlene's tone of voice irked Philip and he let loose, criticizing his stepmother's sense of entitlement to Brooke's money. A staffer in Mrs. Astor's office had confided to him that Charlene had recently demanded $25,000 for a new truck and then complained about the expense of having two of Brooke's nurses overlap on a shift. "I'm sorry you made me have to do this, because of your actions," Philip told his stepmother. He accused her of "trying to deny my grandmother health care while you're buying yourself a truck."

  Tony promptly called his other son, Alec, to ask whether he knew about the lawsuit. Alec had sailed and dined with his father and Charlene in Maine recently but had given no hint that anything was amiss. "Yes," said Alec, admitting that his twin had confided in him. Tony followed up by asking, "Do you agree with Philip?" "No," Alec replied. Tony sounded relieved, and wrapped up the brief conversation by saying, "That's all I wanted to know." Alec thought afterward that the conversation had gone as well as it could have under the circumstances. But his father had a different reaction. As Tony brooded over it, he became enraged that Alec had not warned him but had chosen brotherly loyalty over filial obligation.

  The phone rang again in Northeast Harbor. This time it was the Marshalls' friend Daniel Billy, Jr. Billy had trained with Charlene to be lay ministers at St. James' Church, an Episcopal bastion on Madison Avenue, and their religious commitment had evolved into friendship. With managerial expertise from running a small foundation, Billy had been hired ten months earlier by the Marshalls to supervise Mrs. Astor's staff, and he was now working out of an office in her apartment. He told Tony that he too had just received a call from Philip, with instructions to take his personal effects, lock up, and leave the keys. Billy recalls, "I offered to barricade myself into the office." But Tony told him to go home—it would all be sorted out.

  Next Tony tracked down his f
riend Francis X. Morrissey, Jr., in Paris to tell him about the lawsuit. Two years after Brooke's hundredth birthday party, Tony had fired his mother's attorney, Terry Christensen, and replaced him with Morrissey, who immediately presided over two codicils to Brooke Astor's will. While Tony needed legal advice to deal with this sudden crisis, Morrissey was not a courtroom litigator. In fact, Morrissey would soon find himself embroiled in the case, with the need to hire his own lawyer.

  Frantic to understand what had happened, Tony summoned Steve Hamor, his mother's gardener, who had been working out in the yard, into the library. Hamor had worked for Mrs. Astor in Maine since 1965; his wife, Pat, laundered her linens, and his two sons were employed as full-time gardeners on her estate in Maine. "Tony asked me, 'Have you been talking to Philip?'" recalls Hamor. "I said, 'I haven't spoken to Philip for two or three years.' Tony said, 'Philip is accusing me of wrongly spending my mother's money.'" Hamor adds, "That afternoon Tony boarded a plane and went to New York. He seemed very upset."

  Tony and Charlene left so abruptly that they neglected to alert Sam Peabody, a Manhattan philanthropist who was en route to stay for a week with the couple. "I drove up the driveway, got out and took my bags and rang the bell, and the housekeeper said that Mr. and Mrs. Marshall had been called to New York on an emergency," says Peabody. "I thought, 'Oh, thank goodness, poor Mrs. Astor has finally died.'"

  With each phone call that Monday, the news of the lawsuit spread. But the warring parties all believed, naively, that this would remain a private family battle, conducted behind closed doors. Unbeknown to those personally affected, events that would soon make the lawsuit notoriously public had already taken place. Three days earlier, Ira Salzman, Philip's lawyer, had filed a copy of the lawsuit with the Manhattan clerk's office to get a docket number and then walked the original file to Justice John Stackhouse's office. The lawyer requested in writing that the judge seal the papers. "Ira asked us not to talk about it," says a courthouse employee.

  Salzman expected to leave Stackhouse's office with the order to seal the lawsuit and take it directly to the clerk's office. But the judge decided to hold on to it temporarily. Salzman called repeatedly to find out when he could pick it up. Late on Friday, Salzman finally took a photocopy of the order to the clerk's office, but the clerk declined to accept it, insisting on having the original. Thus the case, "Index No. 500096/06: PHILIP MARSHALL for the Application of Guardians of the Person and Property of BROOKE ASTOR, an alleged Incapacitated Person," was left in the public record.

  On Monday afternoon, Helen Peterson, a Daily News reporter, received a tip that guardianship papers involving Brooke Astor had been filed. In light of Peterson's six years of covering the legal doings at 60 Centre Street (and twenty-three years at the Daily News), her source was probably a courthouse employee, although all Peterson will say is, "It was not Ira Salzman." While reporters routinely check the records room at 4 P.M. each day for new lawsuits, from slip-and-fall cases to business disputes, guardianship files are not typically requested. By the time Peterson got the tip, the record room was closed for the day.

  At 10 A.M. on Tuesday, the reporter went to the musty basement office and asked for the Astor file. The clerk handed it over. "I started reading it and my hands started shaking," Peterson recalled. "I knew it was a huge story." Philip Marshall had charged his father with "elder abuse" of Brooke Astor. According to the document, Mrs. Astor, the city's most beloved philanthropist, was living in squalor amid peeling paint and was being deprived of medical care. Peterson took out a roll of quarters and photocopied the hefty file—constantly looking over her shoulder in fear of rival reporters—and then took the subway to the Daily News headquarters. Her editor, Dean Chang, was in a meeting. "I have to talk to you," she said. He waved her off; she went back twenty minutes later to interrupt again. "You don't understand," she said. "I have to talk to you right now. I have tomorrow's front-page story."

  Late in the day she called Tony Marshall at his Upper East Side co-op for a comment prior to publication. He was so thrown by the situation that he did not immediately defend himself. "He sounded sad," she says in retrospect. "Sometimes people start screaming at me. He was well brought up. He wasn't rude—he was very polite." Tony Marshall informed her, "No, I don't want to comment." Peterson told him that she found the allegations shocking. Tony's reply, quoted the next day in the Daily News, was, "You said it is shocking, and I agree. It is a matter that is going to be coming up in a court of law and it should be left to the court."

  That night Philip Marshall, the instigator of it all, stayed in Queens with Tenzing Chadotsang, a Tibetan friend who worked for the Landmarks Preservation Commission. As they were driving back to the Chadotsang family's modest brick home after dinner at a Korean restaurant, Philip's cell phone rang. The Daily News wanted a comment. Philip was startled, since Salzman had assured him of privacy. As Chadotsang says, "I knew that Philip had filed the suit, but he expected it to be a quiet thing. Philip got off the phone and said, 'Oh my going to be in the newspapers.'" Philip contemplated calling Annette de la Renta but decided not to ruin her evening. "At that point," he said, "I didn't know Annette well enough to call her at ten-thirty or eleven at night."

  Annette is an early riser, and at 5:30 the next morning she took her three rambunctious dogs for a walk, strolling down quiet Park Avenue, contemplating the day ahead and a visit to Brooke in the hospital. When she got back to her building, the doorman handed her the Daily News, delivered just minutes before. Annette was horrified by the sight of the huge black words on page one: "DISASTER FOR MRS. ASTOR: Son forces society queen to live on peas and porridge in dilapidated Park Avenue duplex."

  The story inside—"Battle of N.Y. Blue Bloods"—made for mesmerizing reading for the city's entire five boroughs, with special double-takes all over the Upper East Side. "The sad and deplorable state of my family's affairs has compelled me to bring the guardianship case," Philip had written in his affidavit requesting that his father be removed as Brooke Astor's legal guardian and replaced by Annette de la Renta. "Her bedroom is so cold in the winter that my grandmother is forced to sleep in the TV room in torn nightgowns on a filthy couch that smells, probably from dog urine." Philip charged that his father "has turned a blind eye to her ... while enriching himself with millions of dollars."

  Detailed affidavits about the alleged abuse had been signed by three nurses (Minnette Christie, Pearline Noble, and Beverly Thomson) and by Chris Ely, who had been fired by Tony eighteen months earlier.

  "The apartment is shabby and poorly maintained. It always has a foul odor because her two dogs are obliged to live enclosed in the dining room," wrote Annette de la Renta in her affidavit. "Because of the failure of Mrs. Astor's son, Anthony, to spend her money properly, the quality of life of Mrs. Astor has been significantly eroded." David Rockefeller seconded this concern about Brooke's "welfare," and Henry Kissinger attested that Mrs. de la Renta would make an "excellent guardian" for Mrs. Astor.

  By the time the Daily News published its story, Justice Stackhouse had already taken action to remedy the situation. The judge named two temporary guardians for Mrs. Astor, Annette de la Renta and JPMorgan Chase, the bank that Rockefeller had headed for decades. With the stroke of a pen, Tony Marshall lost responsibility for his mother's care as well as his hefty salary for managing her money. The judge named a court evaluator, the lawyer Susan Robbins, an outspoken former social worker with expertise in guardianships. All this happened without a hearing, which the judge then scheduled for several weeks in the future. Tony Marshall had been stripped of his powers without the chance to offer his version of events and defend himself.

  New York is a city that virtually, under civic charter, requires a summer scandal, and the Astor affair fit the bill. This was not just another family feud but a sprawling saga involving society figures, millions of dollars, appalling charges, and backstage intrigue. A media war erupted. The New York Times assigned a battalion of reporters and ran stories with eight diffe
rent bylines in the next few days. Television and print reporters staked out the Marshalls' Manhattan apartment as well as Alec's place in Ossining and Philip's forest green shingle-style home on a corner lot in Massachusetts, taking pictures of Winslow mowing the lawn. As Nan recalls, "That's when I knew our lives would never be the same."

  At Lenox Hill Hospital, extra security guards were hired to keep interlopers such as reporters pretending to deliver flowers away from Mrs. Astor, who was recovering from a near fatal bout of pneumonia. "Reporters were outside my parents' home," recalls Dr. Sandra Gelbard, who was in charge of her care. "I don't know how they got the address."

  On Northeast Harbor's tiny Main Street, reporters from the Daily News, the New York Post, and the Boston Globe went from door to door, trying to dig up dirt. Bob Pyle, the town's librarian, says, "We felt like we had to pull down our shades at night to escape the paparazzi." Charlene's daughter Inness, staying on at Cove End, was so distraught by the press attention and the gawkers that she called her mother to say she felt ill and was worried that her pregnancy would be endangered. "I thought the New York Post was going to give my daughter a miscarriage," says Charlene Marshall. "But she went to the hospital and they saved the baby."

  The unfolding saga was polarizing Brooke Astor's friends and the Marshalls' social circle. People felt forced to take sides. In Washington, D.C., Suzanne Kuser, Tony Marshall's half-sister and a former State Department intelligence analyst, got a call from her nephew Philip explaining the situation. Kuser says, "I thought he had a case." Kuser had a distinct theory about the psychological underpinnings of her half-brother's behavior, saying, "Tony has a lot of problems. Some of them are mommy issues. There's a whole history."