Mrs. Astor Regrets

by Meryl Gordon

  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 tarttongued 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 m
oment 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?'"