Mrs. Astor Regrets

by Meryl Gordon

  Trailed by the press corps, Tony and Charlene went in search of the missing Mrs. Astor, their every word and movement chronicled for the curious masses. After entering her apartment building and speaking to the doorman, Charlene informed their entourage from the fourth estate, "She's gone to the country, up to Westchester." She then complained that she had been hoping to get some rest. The next stop for the Marshalls, after lunch at home, was Holly Hill. As the New York Times reported, Tony introduced himself to a security guard at the Briarcliff Manor estate, saying, "I'm here to see my mother." The gates were opened, and Tony and Charlene drove up the winding driveway to the imposing stone mansion.

  Brooke was seated in the sunroom, a pale green ground-floor room with framed bird prints, rattan chairs, overstuffed white couches, and a glass-walled view of her gardens with the Hudson River in the distance. Philip was sitting right beside her, holding his grandmother's hand. It was everything that Tony had ever feared: he had been replaced in his mother's affections by his own son. Philip stood so that his father could take his seat. He even made a filial gesture toward Tony, as if in denial about the blows he had inflicted to his father's reputation. "I touched him on the knee, and that did not come off right," Philip says. "It was probably not appropriate." Tony was infuriated, later telling Vanity Fair, "Ordinarily, it would have been a gesture of sympathy, courage. It made me want to..." According to the magazine, Tony's voice trailed off then, "his eyes blazing in fury."

  Tony Marshall, with a worldview that equates repression with good breeding, is not a man who raises his voice or loses his temper in public. Not so with Charlene. The humiliations had piled up to the point where she could not take the strain anymore. Her explosive rages were stunning to behold when witnessed by anyone—nurses, employees, family members, or prying reporters—in the vicinity. Those "cheeks like apple blossoms" in her Ashley Hall yearbook turned scarlet, and with her blue eyes flashing and her white hair bobbing, the third Mrs. Marshall resembled a wounded animal flailing at her enemies. A protective wife and mother of three, a respected lay minister who administered healing prayer to troubled parishioners at St. James' Church, she had seemingly lost all emotional governors.

  On that July day at Holly Hill, Philip recalls, "Charlene was seething." Railing at the nurses, she became teary-eyed in recounting how the press frenzy at Cove End had sent her pregnant daughter, Inness, to the hospital. "Mrs. Marshall was trying to make us feel guilty," says Pearline Noble, who was tending Mrs. Astor that day. "Her face became red—she was carrying on." Even defenders like Daniel Billy, Jr., would later acknowledge, "Charlene is a Leo, a lioness. If anything comes up that jeopardizes her husband or her children, watch out."

  Charlene's public trials were just beginning, as her image was transformed by the press into that of a man-stealing, child-neglecting, money-hungry adulteress who had become Brooke Astor's daughter-in-law from hell. The tabloids dispatched reporters to Northeast Harbor and gleefully recounted the tawdry details of her affair with Tony Marshall and her divorce from Paul Gilbert. The New York Post headlined a story by Stefanie Cohen: "ASTOR'S HAYSEED DAUGHTER-IN-LAW LEFT HER FIRST HUBBY WITH JUST...$578" and then, the next day, ran a follow-up depicting Charlene as a bad mother who had abandoned her own children to be with Tony: "ASTOR IN-LAW DUMPED KIDS." Adding insult to injury, tabloid articles about Charlene's Charleston roots made it sound as if her family had a rusted pickup on cement blocks in their front yard, depicting them as lowbrow trash rather than shabby gentility.

  The next day, when the Marshalls again visited Holly Hill, they took along a living symbol to convey their moral authority. This was Reverend John Andrew, the Episcopal priest from St. Thomas Church who was close to Brooke Astor and had married the Marshalls. Tony read another statement to the press corps camped by the side of the country road. "I know that I am right and they are wrong," he said. "I am devastated and regret only that we will never be able to erase the damage that has done by these people to us, our family and my mother." Asked why his son had issued such a damning public petition against him, Tony replied, "Oh, I couldn't possibly answer that question." The Marshalls' efforts to win the headline handicap were ham-handed. A spokeswoman for Tony, Brooke Morgenstein, later e-mailed a statement attacking Annette de la Renta to the New York Sun: "No protégée of Brooke Astor would conduct herself in this manner. Mrs. de la Renta is taking Mrs. Astor's name in vain and is acting contrary to everything Mrs. Astor has always stood for."

  Charlene's tirades, which sometimes occurred in the presence of her fragile mother-in-law, had handed the opposition a useful weapon. At the next closed-to-the-press courthouse meeting, when Justice Stackhouse suggested making a list of those who would be permitted to visit Mrs. Astor, Paul Saunders, Annette's lawyer, requested that Charlene be banned from Holly Hill. "I understood that Charlene had been disruptive with the staff," Saunders recalls. "I was concerned that this would spill over and have an effect on Mrs. Astor's well-being." Susan Robbins also voiced her concerns about Charlene's behavior. Taking these complaints to heart, the judge barred Tony's wife from visiting her mother-in-law. From that day forward, if Charlene accompanied Tony to Holly Hill, she had to wait in the car or walk in the gardens, since she could not legally enter the house. Charlene would never see Brooke Astor alive again.

  In this game of legal tit for tat, Ken Warner informed the judge that there was bad blood between his client, Tony Marshall, and Chris Ely. The judge ordered Ely to stay out of Tony's way and let the nurses chaperone Mrs. Astor's son. It may have seemed like a small legal victory to Warner, but in truth it was a huge relief to Chris Ely. The butler had already received the reward he craved, a gesture of affection from his 104-year-old employer. Although Mrs. Astor mostly spoke in fragments, a few days after returning to Holly Hill, she put her head on the butler's shoulder and croaked a plaintive four-word inquiry: "Where have you been?" Ely finessed the answer, simply replying, "I've been around." Everyone at Holly Hill had agreed to sensible rules: there would be no mention of the lawsuit in front of Mrs. Astor, nor any criticism of her son. She would be carried through this time with loving arms.

  Astorgate was quickly becoming God's gift to the legal profession. Fortunes in billable hours were being created from exhaustive simultaneous investigations into all elements of Brooke Astor's life. JPMorgan Chase, the bank that assumed control of Mrs. Astor's finances, hired its own team, led by Leslie Fagen, from the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison to examine Tony's handling of his mother's books. Paul Saunders began rounding up Mrs. Astor's voluminous medical records on behalf of her guardian, Annette de la Renta. Susan Robbins knew that she would have to be a virtual mind reader, since her client was incapable of answering questions, but this was a common circumstance in her practice. Although the 104-year-old was obviously mentally incapacitated, Mrs. Astor's staff had mentioned her numerous meetings with lawyers in recent years. Wondering when Mrs. Astor had ceased to understand what she was signing, Robbins won permission from Justice Stackhouse to examine her client's recent wills.

  Justice Stackhouse chose another lawyer, Sam Liebowitz, as the court evaluator, the judge's eyes and ears in researching the facts surrounding Brooke Astor. Already alerted that Mrs. Astor feared men in suits, Stackhouse gave Liebowitz sartorial advice: "When you go to see her, Sam, no suits—sneakers, T-shirt, jeans." Liebowitz replied, "Not a problem, your honor." This was a moment richly symbolic of how the world of the grande dame of New York society had tilted off its axis—sneakers and jeans to meet Mrs. Astor, a woman who had been thrilled when her nine-year-old great-grandson had worn a jacket to dinner. But the fashion advice proved irrelevant; when Liebowitz and Robbins went to Holly Hill on August 6, Mrs. Astor slept through their visit. Instead of speaking with her, the casually dressed lawyers spoke to the staff and admired the "memory room," a study where every inch of wall space was covered by photographs of Brooke with celebrities from Jimmy Stewart and Lady Bird Johnson to Princess Diana. Amid the plentitude
of lawyers, strategic alliances evolved. Although Susan Robbins, Paul Saunders, Ira Salzman, and Les Fagen all worked independently for different clients, they began to share documents and discuss strategy.

  When lawyers from both sides descended on 778 Park to view Brooke Astor's living situation, Louise Milligan, a Chase managing director who had sealed the apartment earlier, pointed out that a table had mysteriously appeared in the dining room. There were other inexplicable changes. "Someone got in there," recalls Robbins. "There were no clothes. Where were all her clothes?" The Chanel suits, the thousands of dollars' worth of designer ball gowns—treasures that might well have been auctioned off at Sotheby's or donated to the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute—had gone missing. To this day, the dis-appearances have never been explained.

  Like perfume testers, the lawyers lined up in a procession to sniff the infamous couch in quest of the elusive scent of dog urine. The consensus was that the sofa was odorless—a point in favor of Tony. His lawyer Harvey Corn wrote in court papers: "The couch referred to in the petition is richly upholstered and without any bad smell, urine or otherwise." But the argument from the other side was that the couch had been surreptitiously cleaned. The public relations consultant Fraser Seitel insisted, "We don't know who did it and we don't know when." With black humor, Philip Marshall joked with Annette and Chris Ely that he hoped to bring Boysie into court as a witness.

  During this summer when New Yorkers were bewitched, bothered, and bewildered over Brooke, prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney's office were reading the headlines too. Susan Robbins received a voicemail message from Elizabeth Loewy, the prosecutor who ran the elder abuse unit in District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office. Robbins decided not to respond to Loewy's offer of help. She saw her responsibility as trying to determine Mrs. Astor's wishes, and she could not believe that any mother would want her son investigated by criminal authorities.

  At home in South Dartmouth, Philip spent hours on the phone with the lawyers and the press while sitting in his small second-floor office, with a window overlooking the backyard trees. The room, decorated with American Indian pottery from his stepfather and a landscape painted by Nan, was just a few steps away from the Buddhist prayer corner tucked into a stairwell, featuring a small bronze Buddha, incense, a rug, and beads. The rest of the house was filled with mementos of happier times: an oil portrait of Brooke Astor in her heyday, framed photos of Philip's father and mother during their marriage, snapshots of Winslow and Sophie with their doting great-grandmother. One evening Philip drove to Providence for a drink at a riverfront hotel with his vacationing aunt, Sukie Kuser, Tony's half-sister. "I was on Philip's side from the beginning," explains Kuser. Commiserating over their fractured family, they both blamed the same person for all that had gone wrong. As Philip says, "We kept talking about 'What did Charlene think she was doing?'"

  What Tony and Charlene were actually doing at this moment was taking a hard look at their finances. Without access to Brooke's money to pay for the Maine expenses and with their legal bills piling up, the couple decided they needed to cut back. Steve Hamor, aged sixty-three and Mrs. Astor's Maine gardener for forty-one years, learned during a phone call that he and his two sons were about to be unemployed. "Mr. Marshall told me, 'I have bad news—we're going to have to let you go,'" Hamor recalls. He offered to take a pay cut, but the couple was adamant, granting three months' severance pay to Hamor and his sons, Steve Jr. and Scott. It was not until a year later that Hamor discovered that Brooke Astor had left him $50,000 in her will, but with the condition that he had to be working at Cove End at the time of her death. Tony knew, just as he had when he had fired Chris Ely, that he was depriving the loyal employee of Mrs. Astor's bequest.

  During Act One of the Astor affair, the playbill kept producing characters on the periphery of Brooke Astor's life, who emerged for a moment into the spotlight, some by choice and others unwittingly. Paul Gilbert, now living quietly in Charleston with his third wife, was startled when a New York Post photographer turned up at his front door—he was now immortalized as Charlene's wronged first husband. Alice Perdue voluntarily went to the New York Times as the scandal's whistle-blower ("A Former Astor Aide Tells How Spending Habits Changed"). But no character made more of a grand entrance, or an impression on the critics, than Francis X. Morrissey, Jr. For a graying middle-aged man who usually blends into the background, he initially appeared in the press with such an ominous drum roll that he might just as well have been wearing a black hat and a sandwich board emblazoned with the identifier VILLAIN. Morrissey's tangled legal history caught up with him as reporters searched happily through the boxes of documents on public file: "Lawyer Advising Astor Affairs Was Suspended for Two Years" (New York Times); "ASTOR LAWYER'S WILLFUL DECEIT? HE INHERITED MILLIONS FROM ESTATES OF OLD FRIENDS" (Daily News); "'THERE IS EVIL IN ME'—ASTOR LAWYER $HAME" (New York Post).

  For Tony and Charlene, this was death by a thousand cuts. Their lawyers insisted to the press that Morrissey was a trusted family friend and that they were unaware that he had ever been suspended from practicing law. After the Times ran an editorial about elder abuse ("The Brooke Astor Effect"), noting that the "philanthropist now appears to be getting the attention she needs," Ken Warner and Harvey Corn jointly wrote a published letter to the editor: "Mr. Marshall has been lovingly devoted to his mother and her care. He does not deserve the one-sided, unremitting media attack that he and his wife have been subjected to."

  Yet even as Tony continued to claim that his conduct was blameless, new documents emerged to suggest otherwise. While at Holly Hill in mid-August, Philip found the nurses' notebooks in a second-floor bedroom. Skimming through a few pages, he became transfixed by the details, including his grandmother's worry that "they" were considering "putting her away" and her nightmares of a man trying to kill her. Just then he heard the sound of a car; it was his father and Charlene. Philip hid upstairs and kept paging through the heartbreaking notebooks, a litany of his grandmother's sorrows.

  Under normal circumstances, Brooke Astor's final 2002 will and its three codicils would have become public only upon her death, when submitted for probate in Westchester County Surrogate's Court. Earlier wills and all correspondence involving the lawyers (including Terry Christensen, Francis Morrissey, and Warren Whitaker) would have remained private documents forever. But instead, Susan Robbins was reading her way through voluminous paperwork with a mixture of disbelief and gusto. Who could have imagined that an intricately plotted legal thriller worthy of Scott Turow could be found by reading between the lines of Brooke Astor's ever-changing final wishes? Robbins kept getting up and going into the office of Geoffrey Chinn, a colleague in her firm, to announce: "Oh my God, this doesn't make any sense."

  Robbins knew that Brooke Astor had closed the Vincent Astor Foundation rather than let Tony run it. She could see that earlier wills bequeathed the Childe Hassam to the Metropolitan Museum, and even the most recent 2002 will gave an interest in Cove End to Philip Marshall and the bulk of her estate to charity. So it appeared implausible that after reaching age one hundred, the elderly philanthropist had suddenly decided to tear up her entire estate plan and make every subsequent change benefit her son.

  Most out of character was the firing of Sullivan & Cromwell, the firm that Brooke Astor had trusted for four decades. But given Mrs. Astor's age and apparently limited mental acuity, Robbins was also skeptical about the first codicil, prepared under Sullivan & Cromwell's watch by Terry Christensen. Typically, Brooke exchanged letters with Christensen when she wanted to change her will, but Robbins did not see any correspondence indicating that Brooke had sought this codicil. As Robbins says, "I had a clear vision that all the lawyers were doing bad things to her. It was just so obvious."

  When Terry Christensen met with Robbins and Chinn at his impressive Sullivan & Cromwell office on the waterfront at the tip of Manhattan, he declined to offer enlightenment as to why he had used the unusual phrase "first and last codicil."
To Robbins, those magic words signified that "something wasn't right and he knew it. No lawyer ever says that." Christensen spoke with anger about Tony Marshall's decision to cut his mother's ties to Sullivan & Cromwell. As Robbins recalls, "Terry told us it was a balancing act for him, dealing with Tony and Mrs. Astor and trying to please them both."

  Another mystery that perplexed Robbins was Brooke Astor's signature on the third codicil. "It was too perfect," Robbins says. "If you look at the two codicils before, she could barely sign her name. How did her signature get so good on this one?" The lawyer initially thought an old-fashioned ink stamp must have been used. When Robbins and the other lawyers took a field trip to Tony's office at 405 Park Avenue to examine his files, she sat at Tony's desk and searched in vain for the stamp.

  Francis Morrissey was actually eager to talk to Robbins when she requested a meeting, since he welcomed the opportunity to defend Tony and Charlene on the charges of elder abuse. As someone who had seen Brooke constantly in recent years, he viewed himself as a character witness for the embattled Marshalls. He was cautious enough, however, to bring his own lawyer, Michael Ross, who had helped him regain his law license, to the late August meeting at Robbins's office. Morrissey kept insisting that he and Tony had done nothing wrong. His voice at times rose in passion and conviction as he repeatedly spoke of Mrs. Astor's late-in-life desire to shower her son with love.

  The two-hour meeting was an exercise in mutual frustration. Morrissey later told a friend that Robbins was "crude and unsophisticated" in her questioning and that he found it difficult "to control my big Irish temper and keep my mouth shut." Robbins was so irritated by his unyielding tale of maternal love that at the end of the session she lectured him: "You should be ashamed of yourself. You're the reason that Brooke Astor is afraid of men in suits."