Mrs. Astor Regrets

by Meryl Gordon

  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 treasur
y 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 b
right 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."