In Mrs. Astor's Shadow - Vicky Ward

SOCIETY
In Mrs. Astor’s Shadow
Since Brooke Astor’s grandson, her powerful friends, and her
longtime staff alleged that the 104-year-old philanthropist’s son, Anthony Marshall,
and his wife, Charlene, were taking advantage of her failing health,
a New York court has removed her from the Marshalls’ care. The embattled couple
tell their side of the scandal
O
n Friday, September 29, early
on a dark evening, military
hero, former C.I.A. officer,
and former ambassador to Ken ya, the Malagasy
Republic, and Trinidad and Tobago
Anthony Marshall, 82, sat in the Midtown
Manhattan offi ces of his attorney Kenneth
Warner. Dressed smartly in a navy blazer
and red tie, Marshall was waiting for his
third wife, Charlene, 61, to arrive for a
meeting, so that the couple could discuss
with Vanity Fair the recent lurid press sto-
By Vicky Ward
ries that have accused them of abusively neglecting
his 104-year-old mother, the iconic
New York philanthropist Brooke Astor, and
of enriching themselves with income from
her assets. The allegations include forcing
Mrs. Astor to sleep on a urine-soaked sofa,
skimping on her medicines and clothes,
and locking up her beloved dachshunds
in a room away from her. Such images are
especially startling considering that Mrs.
Astor is famous for her wealth, her taste
and elegance, her good manners, and her
PORTRAIT OF A LADY
Brooke Astor, wearing
the emeralds that were her
husband’s last gift, in
her apartment, at 778 Park
Avenue, in Manhattan,
on May 15, 1997.
generosity in doling out nearly $200 million
to New York charities.
The allegations were made principally
by one of Anthony’s twin sons, Philip, 53, a
professor of historic preservation at Roger
Williams University, in Rhode Island, and
they were supported by giant fi gures in New
York society: Annette de la Renta, wife of the
designer Oscar and for years the great friend
and protégée of Mrs. Astor; another good
friend of hers, fi nancier David Rockefeller;
and former secretary of state Henry Kissin-
228 VANITY FAIR www.vanityfair.com DECEMBER 2006
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

SOCIETY
ger—all of whom in mid-July signed affi davits
recommending that de la Renta be appointed
Mrs. Astor’s personal guardian. De la Renta,
ordinarily press-shy in the extreme, said in an
affi davit that she felt that the Marshalls had
deprived Mrs. Astor of things that gave her
pleasure: visits from friends; getting her hair
done; fresh fl owers; and summer stays at her
Westchester residence, Holly Hill, where, she
has told people, she wants to die.
Within 24 hours of receiving the petition
and affidavits, Justice John Stackhouse
of New York’s Supreme Court
granted de la Renta temporary guardianship
of Mrs. Astor and J. P. Morgan Chase
temporary guardianship of her assets. Susan
Robbins, Mrs. Astor’s court-appointed
lawyer, had questioned the authenticity of
Mrs. Astor’s signature on at least one codicil
to her 2002 will, and raised the issue of
whether she knew what she was signing on
two others. It has also emerged that the
two latest codicils were worked on by a
lawyer with a questionable past, one Francis
X. Morrissey, 63, an acquaintance of
the Marshalls’. Morrissey was suspended
from the bar in 1995 for an unauthorized
withdrawal of $960,000 from a client’s
account. (Morrissey was reinstated to the
bar in 1998.) Subsequently he has been
accused of “undue infl uence and fraud”
in the execution of wills of elderly clients
who left him valuable real estate and artworks.
(Morrissey has denied any wrongdoing.)
On October 13 a settlement was
reached in which Annette de la Renta’s
role as guardian and J. P. Morgan Chase’s
as fi nancial steward became permanent.
Although Anthony and Charlene admitted
no wrong doing, they agreed to pay $1.35
million to the estate and also post substantial
collateral to cover future claims.
“There will be a battle royal
when Brooke Astor dies.... We expect to get
it all back,” says Charlene.
WHERE THERE’S
A WILL
Charlene and
Tony Marshall at
their apartment, in
New York City, on
October 10.
In return the bank agreed not to sue to
recover millions of dollars’ worth of assets
it believes were improperly obtained, and
other legal claims will be put on hold until
after Mrs. Astor’s death.
The settlement may calm the waters for
now, but as Charlene put it a few days after
the settlement, “There will be a battle royal
when Brooke Astor dies.”
A nthony
Marshall, or “Tony,” as he
is generally known, says he was
as shocked as anyone to learn of
Morrissey’s unsavory history when it was
recounted in the press in early August. He
also says he had no inkling that his son
Philip and Annette de la Renta were making
accusations against him until the court
removed him in July as his mother’s guardian.
His narrative of last summer goes like
this: “On July 24, I was up at Cove End
[Brooke Astor’s $5.5 million Maine compound,
which was given to him in 2003
and which he gave to his wife six months
later] when we learned that my mother had
been hospitalized.” Immediately, the couple
fl ew to New York, where they found her in
Lenox Hill Hospital. Tony left instructions
to be notifi ed should there be any change in
her condition.
Tony was astonished, therefore, to walk
into the hospital room on July 29 and fi nd
his mother gone. All the fl owers people had
sent had also been removed. Ex-
cept for one vase of pink roses.
The ones he had given her.
After talking with the doorman
at his mother’s building, at
778 Park Avenue, he discovered
that she had been taken the day
before to Holly Hill and that
de la Renta had organized the
whole operation. (De la Renta’s spokesperson
says that she had nothing to do with the
removal of flowers from the hospital and
230 VANITY FAIR www.vanityfair.com DECEMBER 2006
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK SCHÄFER

FROM TOP: BY BRIAN VANDEN BRINK, MICHAEL ALBANS, BRIGITTE STELZER
SOCIETY
that she did not go there that day.)
Tony drove out to Holly Hill with
his wife. En route Charlene, who
has short ash-blond hair, received
a phone call from one
of her daughters, in Maine.
The daughter was pregnant,
and she said the stress of being
pestered by the press had
made her cramp and spot
blood. Her mother advised
her to get to a hospital immediately.
At the gates of
Holly Hill, the press was
waiting, and flashbulbs
popped as Tony and Charlene
asked permission to be
let into his mother’s house.
There they encountered several
staff they had fi red, including Chris
Ely, the chief butler, who had given
an affi davit supporting Philip’s allegations.
The couple went into Mrs.
Astor’s sunroom, where Philip, tall and thin
like his father, greeted them. Unlike his father,
Philip prefers casual attire—T-shirts,
sandals, and shapeless slacks. Tony says
Philip patted his leg. “Ordinarily it would
have been a gesture of sympathy, courage,”
Tony says. “[But under the circumstances] it
made me want to … ” He trails off , his eyes
blazing with fury.
Father and son had seen each other only
a handful of times over the past decade.
On one of these occasions, at Philip’s twin
brother’s wedding in Vermont in 1995, Tony
claims, Philip had leaned over and whispered,
“You know the annual gift a father can
give a son has been raised from $10,000 to
$11,000.” (Philip says, “I certainly wouldn’t
have said this, especially since he has never
given me more than a couple of hundred dol-
lars for birthdays or Christmas, so I
wouldn’t expect it.”) Tony also claims
that Philip later asked what was in
his grandmother’s will for him, to
which Tony replied a minimum of a
million dollars. After that, Tony says,
Philip “acted strangely” and broke
off all contact. According to Philip,
he met with his father and Charlene
in 2004. When discussions came to
Mrs. Astor’s will, Charlene stepped
in to do the talking. “Charlene said
that my grandmother had originally
left Alec [Philip’s twin brother] and
A HOUSE IS
NOT A HOME
From top: the Cove End
estate, in Northeast
Harbor, Maine; Tony
and Charlene after an
August 2 private court
conference; the
Northeast Harbor rectory
where Charlene lived
with her fi rst husband,
the Reverend Paul
Gilbert.
“Cove End was given to
Tony on the understanding it would be
passed on to his children,” says a friend.
me $10,000 each.” She then informed Philip
that his father had been able to change Mrs.
Astor’s will so that he and his brother would
get a million dollars each. Philip wonders,
“How could my father have changed my
grandmother’s will, especially since she was
clearly not capable of making such decisions
on her own?
“This was particularly amazing,” he
continues, “since, in early 2001, my father
told me that my grandmother had been diagnosed
with Alzheimer’s, a fact he had
also shared with my grandmother’s lawyer,
butler, and then secretary.” (The Marshalls
say that Astor was never diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s.)
“If my goal were to inherit money,” Philip
adds, “I would have never instigated this
petition. I risk a lot in doing so, including being
cut off by my father.”
According to one person who knows
him, Tony is a bit of a Prince
Charles–like figure, who has lived
in the shadow of his formidable mother.
(Tony says, “I was purposefully in her
shadow when it came to the foundation,
but otherwise not at all.”) About two years
ago, after her health declined dramatically,
he decided to take matters into his
own hands. Around that time her
will was amended so that he would
inherit almost all of her assets.
(Tony says, “My mother ran her
own staff and affairs until 2004,
but in the last two years she got
more infi rm physically and, as her
power of attorney and son, I have
had to help her.”)
Furthermore, it was reported
this summer, a painting that was
perhaps Mrs. Astor’s most prized
possession, Childe Hassam’s Flags,
DECEMBER 2006 www.vanityfair.com VANITY FAIR 235

SOCIETY
Fifth Avenue, which she had bought in 1970
for $172,010 and which hung above the
fi replace in the library of her Park Avenue
apartment, had been sold by Tony for $10
million in 2002. He took a $2 million “commission”
on the sale and says his mother authorized
him to proceed with it.
The New York tabloids had a fi eld day
alleging that Marshall’s bad behavior had
been egged on by Charlene, the former
wife of an Episcopalian minister. She has
been portrayed as a greedy, gaudy creature,
even referred to as “Lady Macbeth,” and
she drew sharp criticism for wearing her
mother-in-law’s dazzling emerald necklace
to the 2003 Tony Awards.
Since the story broke, Tony says, he and
his wife have received death threats and
horrible phone calls at three in the morning.
The New York
THE GRANDSON
ALSO RISES
Philip Marshall at the
Governor Henry Lippitt
House, in Providence,
Rhode Island, on
October 4.
Post’s Cindy Adams
sent them a copy of
a column she wrote criticizing them, they
claim, over which she scrawled “THIEVES.”
(Adams fl atly denies this.) Tony found himself
locked out of his offi ces in his mother’s
apartment and had to go to court to obtain
access to his own computer.
When Charlene, dressed simply in a
black sweater and pencil skirt, fi nally arrived
for our interview, apologizing that she
had been stuck in other meetings, her eyes
were red, and she was clearly distraught.
She ignored everyone else in the room
and made straight for her husband, who
leapt up to hug her. “I love you,” he said.
“You’ve had a really hard day. I can tell.”
She nodded. Tony turned to me, and with
pride in his voice that one seldom hears in
a man who has been married to the same
woman for 17 years, he said, “I would like
you to meet my wife, Charlene.”
a Wasp, we don’t talk about
these things,” says Carter Peabody,
‘Being
an old friend of the Astor family’s.
He did, however, say that he liked Tony
Marshall and really could not understand
“I was wounded in
Iwo Jima . . . but the wounds Philip inflicted
on me will never heal,” says Tony.
how this mess had come to be. It was a
sentiment shared by many in his set.
At the center of it all is Brooke Astor,
the philanthropic doyenne of New York
society for the past four decades. Her only
real rival was Jackie Onassis’s great friend
Jayne Wrightsman, 87, who by comparison
is considered something of a lightweight
in that she gives mostly to a few
select arts institutions, such as the Hermitage
and the Metropolitan Museum of
Art. The Astor Foundation under Brooke,
on the other hand, gave to hundreds of
worthy causes, such as the New York
Public Library and the Coalition for the
Homeless. Dressed in her trademark hat,
gloves, and pearls, Mrs. Astor personally
visited all those institutions to which her
foundation gave money, and the people
involved with them usually took that as a
great compliment.
Brooke Astor was, however, also a
narcissist, obsessed with fashion and her
own image, and a self-confessed lousy
mother. Her 1980 memoir, Footprints, is
remarkable in many aspects, not the least
of which is how little it mentions her only
child. She herself was an only child, raised
in Beijing, where her father, John Russell,
was a Marine offi cer. The family was not
rich, but they were genteel, and she never
knew life without a staff . Tony was the
product of an unhappy first marriage,
entered into when Brooke was only 16,
to Dryden Kuser, a Princeton grad who
came from what Brooke’s mother called
a “nouveau riche” family. After Dryden
displayed problems with alcohol and
philandering, Brooke divorced him, but
continued to live a comfortable lifestyle,
thanks to the generosity of her mother-inlaw—though,
she notes wryly in her autobiography,
had she been older and less naïve
236 VANITY FAIR www.vanityfair.com DECEMBER 2006
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK SCHÄFER

SOCIETY
she might have thought about asking
for more in the settlement.
She soon met a married stockbroker,
Charles “Buddie” Marshall,
12 years her senior. In her
memoir she wrote that she cut
off all contact with Buddie for
two years on her father’s advice
because Buddie was married with
two children. Ivan Obolensky, 82,
from a famous Russian aristocratic
family and also an
Astor nephew, says, “[Buddie’s
wife] Alice was no ball
of fire and Brooke swiped
him away.”
Brooke and Buddie married
in 1932 and made their
home in a Manhattan penthouse
at 10 Gracie Square
and later in Tyringham, Massachusetts,
in the Berkshires.
Brooke took a job at House &
Garden magazine, where one
of her great pleasures was
styling places that seemed gloomy and
hopeless. The couple also bought a castello
in Italy and spent much time touring Europe.
Brooke recalled that Tony, who later
adopted his stepfather’s surname, was sometimes
pres ent on such travels, and when he
was 11, he was sent to boarding school.
At 17, Tony signed up to join the Marines
and distinguished himself in the Battle of
Iwo Jima. “Most of his colleagues did not
survive that fi ght,” says one of his friends.
Tony was awarded a Purple Heart, among
other medals.
“Being a Wasp, we don’t talk
about these things,” says Carter Peabody.
In 1952, Buddie Mar shall suddenly
died, at age 62. Brooke wrote that she
dealt with her grief by keeping busy,
but her fi nances were shaky, and she knew
she would have to sell the Tyringham
house. Within a year, however, she had
married the very wealthy Vincent Astor,
who proposed while he was still married
to his second wife. Obolensky describes
Brooke’s appeal to Vincent: “She was
cheery. She had a penchant for whistling.
She’d go around the party, and she was a
great whistler. Unbelievable. She’d whistle
lieder. She was very cultured, and she was
funny. And she’d giggle. It was exactly
what a lugubrious, diffi cult man [like Vincent
Astor] likes.”
Vincent, the son of millionaire inventor
John Jacob Astor IV, had multiplied his
sizable inheritance through investing in real
estate and various other business ventures,
including Newsweek magazine. Brooke admitted
that the marriage, which lasted fi ve
and a half years, until Vincent’s death in
1959, was not without its hardships. Vincent,
who suff ered from cardiac disease, was
willful and possessive. “Soon after we were
married, I discovered that Vincent was extremely
jealous. He was jealous of my old
friends… I lost many friends forever,” she
recalled. “Worst of all, he was jealous of
Tony. Tony was not happy in his own life at
that time, so this was very hard on me.”
When Vincent died, though, a new world
opened up for her. He left $60 million to
the Vincent Astor charitable foundation,
of which Brooke would be president. Another
$60 million made up the Vincent Astor
Trust, which he designated for her life
benefi t. She could do with it as she pleased
and she had “general power
of appointment,” meaning
she could leave it to anyone
she chose upon her death.
To get it, though, she had
to face down a legal challenge
by Jack Astor, Vincent’s halfbrother.
Traditionally, the Astors
passed money through
their male heirs. “My grandfather’s
will states that the longheld
money [the Vincent Astor
Trust] was to be passed to his
son, then his son,” says Jackie Drexel, Jack’s
daughter, now in her 50s. But according to
a family relative, Jack chose to contest the
will, for the benefi t of his
children, by claiming that
the marriage to Brooke
was unconsummated,
and by questioning Vincent’s
mental competence.
“There were much stronger
ways he could have
contested it,” says Jackie.
Ivan Obolensky says that
he might have received
some of the money, but
that he refused to join in
Jack Astor’s lawsuit. “Even if I wanted to
rock [the boat], do you think I’d rock it on
the same side with Jack Astor?” says Obolensky,
who explains that he despised Jack
for being a draft dodger. Brooke hired the
law fi rm Sullivan & Cromwell, and a lawyer
there named David Peck won the case for
her. “He became my knight in shining armor,”
she wrote, and she retained Sullivan &
Cromwell ever after—until 2004, that is.
For her third act, Brooke did not dwell
on being Vincent Astor’s widow, but honed
her own legend, rather to the annoyance of
the surviving Astors. “She had a publicist
[George Trescher] work on her image,”
says Jackie Drexel dryly. “She was not
afraid to be in the press.” The columnist
Liz Smith recalls, “George Trescher was
a genius at opinion- and image-making,
and Brooke adored him and relied on him
more than anyone else to guide her. It was
George who would tell her which institutions
and people were worth her attention
and which were not. He told her to cultivate
me, for example, and that’s how we
became friends! He taught her how to be
media-savvy.”
Obolensky was livid when the New
York Public Library main hallway was
named not after Vincent but after Brooke.
“In that big hall there was the commemoration
to Brooke,” says Obolensky. “She
forgot she was Mrs. Astor. What she did
was to completely put poor Vincent in a
kiosk relegated to this little latrine.”
Yet, there was something about Brooke
that set her apart from the crowd. “She
HER KIND OF PEOPLE
From top: Brooke Astor,
Katharine Graham,
Annette de la Renta,
Henry Kissinger, and
Jayne Wrightsman
in 1992; Astor and David
Rockefeller in 1984;
Childe Hassam’s Flags,
Fifth Avenue as it once
hung in Astor’s apartment.
238 VANITY FAIR www.vanityfair.com DECEMBER 2006
FROM TOP: BY LILY LANE, RICHARD CORKERY, DMITRI KASTERINE

SOCIETY
was somehow 20 feet higher than everyone
else,” says someone who knew her. “It
was the wit, charm, the intensity, the fun.
There was simply no one like her.” When
she gave her late husband’s money away,
she did it in style, personally and intensely.
A poem she wrote, which I came across in
the legal papers, displays her resolve and
optimism. It is called “Discipline.” There
is no date on it and it is not attached to any
other documents.
I am old and I have had
more than my share of good and bad.
I’ve had love and sorrow, seen sudden
death
and been left alone and of love bereft.
I thought I would never love again
and I thought my life was grief and pain.
The edge between life and death was thin,
but then I discovered discipline.
I learned to smile when I felt sad,
I learned to take the good and bad,
I learned to care a great deal more
for the world about me than before.
I began to forget the “Me” and “I”
and joined in life as it rolled by;
this may not mean sheer ecstasy
but is better by far than “I” and “Me.”
Brooke appealed to people from all
walks of life. An Englishwoman
named Daphne Riley was employed
to manage her Smythson diary, known to
some as “the red book” (although sometimes
they were blue, according to Tony).
Whatever their color, they were big—“several
inches long and several inches wide,” according
to a friend, and packed with engagements
from morning until night. Riley says
she loved the work because “we had been
friends for many, many years.” It was a sentiment
echoed by many of those on Brooke’s
staff (some of whom called her “Mama”
as she got older), and it was reciprocated.
“Mrs. Astor made me promise that I would
stay with her the rest of her life,” says Marciano
Amaral, her Portuguese chauff eur of
10 years. Amaral, to whom Brooke lent a
New York apartment, promised he would.
“It was a very solemn moment,” he recalls.
Even her lawyers became her friends. As
Peck got older he was succeeded on the
Vincent Astor Foundation board by Henry
Ess, also of Sullivan & Cromwell, who in
turn was replaced by Henry “Terry” Christen
sen III, another partner in that fi rm.
All three men were invited to her weekend
homes. “What she wanted to know was
whether or not some one was really worth
knowing because they were suffi ciently cultured,”
says a close friend.
With such a powerhouse of a mother, it
was small wonder, perhaps, that Tony appeared
“totally intimidated,” as Obolensky
puts it. In 1977, Tony returned to America
“There’s no polite way of
saying it: the Marshalls are a little cheap,”
says a source.
after serving in the diplomatic corps in Africa
and the Caribbean, and spent two years
trying out various consulting jobs. In 1979,
his mother asked him to help her manage
her office, and the next year she granted
him power of attorney, jointly with Henry
Ess and later Terry Christensen. Tony, who
cites his fi nancial experience at the investment
house of Tucker, Anthony & R. L. Day
(subsequently acquired by John Hancock),
says he was horrifi ed when he looked at the
books. The trust had shrunk to $29 million.
At fi rst, Tony was paid $50,000 a year
to fi x the situation—and he did. The trust is
now worth $82 million—or, as he points out,
it was on July 24, when it was taken from
his control. Tony denies that he relied on
anyone else to manage his mother’s money.
“At one point,” he says with great pride, “I
was invested in 12 diff erent funds. One was
doing really well in gas but terribly in health
care, so I pulled out, and the manager of
the fund told me he’d have done the same
thing.” A friend of Brooke’s says, “I don’t
think he was an actual investment adviser,
but he did keep the banks on their toes.”
The mother-son relationship was always
odd and frustrating to both. “On the one
hand she was grateful for everything he
did for her; on the other hand she wanted
him to be his own person,” says a friend.
Because he was Brooke Astor’s son, few
people gave him any credit for accomplishments
of his own. “He couldn’t paddle a
canoe,” says Obolensky. “All things were
set in motion by Brooke.”
Tony had twin sons, Philip and Alec,
with his fi rst wife, Elizabeth Cryan, a woman
from Philadelphia whom he had wed in
1947. It was not a happy marriage, and when
they divorced, the boys were seven. Eventually
they moved with their mother to Massachusetts.
Since Tony was abroad much of
the time during this period, they saw little of
him when they were growing up. In 1962, he
married his secretary, Thelma Hoegnell, or
“Tee,” as she was known. They divorced in
the late 1980s. Although he had inherited
some money from his grandfather Kuser,
Tee’s alimony was substantial, and she kept
the couple’s suite in Manhattan’s Carlyle
hotel. One person says Brooke owned this;
Tony says he did.
In the late 80s, Tony met Charlene Gilbert,
the lively wife of the Reverend
Paul Gilbert, of Northeast Harbor’s St.
Mary’s-by-the-Sea church, which Brooke attended
when she was at Cove End. “In fact,
Brooke introduced us,” says Tony. When
asked what attracted him to Charlene, he
replies, “Chemistry,” and then delivers a
paean to his wife’s energy. Charlene smiles
and says, “He is my soul mate. I was in a
bad marriage, and then I met the person I
was meant to be with.”
When Charlene realized that she’d fallen
for Tony, she believed she had no option
but to leave Northeast Harbor. “My husband
couldn’t exactly leave his pa rish ioners,
so I had to go.” She moved into what
she calls a New York “studio” and Tony
calls a “ratty hole.”
“I want to make one thing clear: I did not
abandon my three children [Robert, Inness,
and Arden],” Charlene says. “I had to be
the one to leave because it was his parish.”
She got joint custody and says she spent the
next few months attending “every soccer
game, every ballet exhibition,” in which the
two children who were still in school participated.
“I was on the plane to Bar Harbor all
the time,” she says. (In the 1990s, Paul Gilbert
became rector of St. John’s of Lattingtown,
in Locust Valley, New York, where
he caused his own scandal, by leaving his
second wife, Patricia, for a parishion er. He
is now a pastor in South Carolina. When
contacted by Vanity Fair, he did not want to
talk about his fi rst wife.)
Brooke was perfectly polite to her new
daughter-in-law, giving her a ring
when she married Tony and inviting
the couple to Cove End for dinner. Charlene
says that—contrary to an earlier report in
this magazine—Brooke did indeed attend
the 1999 wedding of Charlene’s daughter,
Inness. But Brooke also set boundaries,
and few people thought she was fond of
Charlene. According to Alicia Johnson, the
housekeeper at Cove End, when Charlene
became friendly with Martha Stewart (who
also has a house in Maine) and invited her
over for dinner, Brooke suddenly discovered
another engagement, and the group had to
dine at one of the cottages on the property,
not in the main house.
Brooke’s staff actively disliked Charlene.
Alicia Johnson claims that she is the type
to go to the local diner and pocket the ketchup
packets off the table. (Charlene responds,
“That’s ludicrous. Alicia Johnson is a disgruntled
former employee.”)
240 VANITY FAIR www.vanityfair.com DECEMBER 2006

SOCIETY
Inevitably, as Brooke got older she became
more dependent on her son. She was
particularly anxious about her fi nances, even
though she received about $2 million a year
from the interest on her capital, and there
was always the money in the trust if she
needed to dip into it. “She grew more and
more worried about money, even though
she didn’t need to,” says a person who knew
her. Another says she used to joke, “I am
the nouveau pauvre.” Tony recalls he used
to banter with her, “ ‘Mother, you’ll be fi ne.
Just don’t buy a plane.’ I said that because
David Rockefeller had a plane.”
Still, there was friction between mother
and son about expenditures, according to
the staff . “I remember one time she told
Chris Ely [the butler] to buy pres ents for her
grandchildren and Tony complained,” says
a former member of the staff , who also says
that Brooke once said as a joke to her son,
“Is it O.K. if I buy a pair of shoes, Tony?”
(“Almost certainly my mother would have
told Chris Ely to buy presents for the greatgrandchildren
[not grandchildren] and I
would have never complained about it,”
Tony responds. He denies the shoe incident
happened.)
In 2002, Tony proposed selling the Hassam
painting to Santa Fe art dealer Gerald
Peters. Peters had seen the painting at Manhattan’s
Adelson Galleries, where it was on
loan, and expressed interest in buying it.
Tony says he went back to his mother, who
asked how much Peters was off ering. The
fi gure turned out to be $10 million. Tony
says he checked around with the auction
houses and discovered that this amount
was several million more than any other
Hassam had ever sold for (which is true).
“Great,” he says his mother said. “Sell it.
I’ll put my father’s portrait up there.” Tony
adds, “She told me, ‘I am going to give you
a $2 million commission, but you’re going
to have to pay taxes.’ ” He challenges those
who doubt his account: “Find me one person
who says she doesn’t prefer having a
picture of General Russell hanging in that
spot.” A friend of Brooke’s believes that she
did not include the painting in a new will
she made in 2002, and approved the sale.
Tony did not help his own credibility,
however, when he suddenly came forward
last September, after the press had run
stories about the sale of the painting. Now
he admitted that an error was made in his
mother’s 2002 tax return, overstating by
more than $7 million the price she had originally
paid for the painting, and thereby underpaying
the capital-gains taxes by roughly
a million dollars. Tony says that erroneous
fi ling was made by the accountants and was
only just pointed out by him to J. P. Morgan
Chase, when the bank handed over fi nan-
cial documents this summer. “When the
tax returns came before me at the time, I
took a look at it, and I saw the accountant’s
signature, so I just signed, which is what a
lot of people do,” he says. Ironically, Peters
later sold the painting for between $20 and
$25 million to a private investor.
Already in the mid-1990s an incident
had occurred that Brooke’s Maine
neighbor Susan Lyall says shocked
her. Lyall wanted to buy August Moon, a
parcel of the Maine property that Brooke
wanted to get rid of. Lyall says Brooke
told her that the price was just over $1 million,
less than Lyall had expected. As they
walked the land together, Brooke explained
that she wanted Lyall to have it at a good
price because she understood conservation.
When they returned to Cove End, they encountered
Tony, and Brooke told him about
the planned sale. To Lyall’s embarrassment
he got very irritated and said, “No, that’s
the price before estate agents’ fees and taxes
and so on.” He wanted an extra $800,000.
Lyall says that Brooke later rang her up and
said, “No, I want you to have the land at the
price I fi rst mentioned.” (Tony says, “August
Moon was eventually sold for just over $1
million in the end. I didn’t get into the haggling.”)
“There’s no polite way of saying it: the
DECEMBER 2006 www.vanityfair.com VANITY FAIR 241

SOCIETY
Marshalls are a little cheap,” says someone
who has dealt with their Delphi Productions
company, a theatrical joint venture
the couple formed in 2003 with producer
David Richenthal. It operated, at Tony’s
sug gestion, from offi ces on the fi rst fl oor of
his mother’s apartment. Their fi rst production
was the highly praised, Tony Award–
winning 2003 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s
Long Day’s Journey into Night, which starred
Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy. Alice
Perdue, 59, who worked for a decade for
Brooke, paying the bills, told The New York
Times that starting in 2003 Tony had asked
her to write checks totaling about $900,000
to Delphi—a departure from previous expenses
she had been covering. “Things
changed when Mrs. Astor broke her hip for
the second time in 2003,” Perdue told the
Times. “Mr. and Mrs. Marshall got aggressive
about taking over then.”
Closely involved with Delphi was Francis
X. Morrissey, the soft-spoken,
silver-haired lawyer, whom Charlene
had known in Maine. There he had acted
as a trustee for Seal Harbor resident Anne
Hilde Huston, who bequeathed her 29-
acre property to him. It has been reported
also that Huston’s childhood
friend Elisabeth Von Knapitsch left
him her Park Avenue apartment,
two Renoir paintings, two Guillemain
paintings, and cash. (Von
Knapitsch had initially left him her
entire $15 million estate, but the
court public administra-
tor accused Morrissey of
using undue influence,
and the case was settled.)
Another Morrissey
client, the economist
Sam Schurr, changed
his will the day before he
died, at age 83, in 2002,
to leave Morrissey his
Manhattan apartment,
a drawing by Diego Rivera,
and $300,000 in
cash. Schurr’s nephew challenged
the will, and Morrissey was again
NEXT GENERATION
Top, Brooke, her grandson
Philip Marshall, and her
dachshund Girlsie at the
pool house at Holly Hill,
in Briarcliff Manor, New
York, 2002. Right, Tony
Marshall with Brooke and
Charlene at a benefit at
Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel
on November 6, 2002.
accused of using “undue infl uence,” taking
advantage of an elderly client’s mental
state. That case, too, was settled, and Morrissey
has denied any wrongdoing in both.
Marciano Amaral, Brooke Astor’s chauffeur,
says he did not like Morrissey. “He’d
deliver cupcakes for her with the price tag
on them,” he recalls. “Fortunately, the staff
had more sense than to give them to Mrs.
Astor—she’d have had a fi t at such lack of
refi nement.”
In 2000, Philip Marshall says, his grandmother
told him she wanted him, his wife,
and their two children to have a cottage on
the Maine property. He had begun visiting
her in recent years, and because they were
both interested in art and history, they got
on. Brooke also thought his children well behaved,
says a friend of hers, although ordinarily
she did not like children. (She had less
in common with his twin, Alec, a photographer.)
According to Philip, “Apparently my
grandmother followed through to the extent
of talking with Terry Christensen and my
father after she got back to New York City.
My father called me in September [2000] to
convince me that the house would be a bur-
den to us, we would have to pay the taxes
and maintenance, and, anyway, we could
use it any time we want to come up to visit.
Understanding the reality of the situation, I
told my father that was fi ne with us.”
But the idea stuck with Brooke, according
to several on her staff . In 2003, a chef
employed by Mrs. Astor recalls, Philip
and his family were asked to dinner, and
“Mama” wanted a special meal, to celebrate
giving Philip the property in Maine.
Then, says the chef, Tony and Charlene
were told about it, and the dinner was canceled
just hours before it was supposed to
occur. (The Marshalls deny this.)
When Charlene borrowed
Brooke’s “snowflakes” diamond necklace,
she recalls, “Brooke said, ‘Keep them.’”
Tony claims that Brooke decided to give
him Cove End in 2003, along with a gift of
$5 million to “provide for” Charlene. “Had
Philip showed any interest, I would have given
him a cottage,” says Tony, “but he never
came down, saying he preferred to go to the
Adirondacks, where his wife’s family had
property.” Philip says that this is not true
and that he visited Cove End every summer.
A good friend of Brooke’s claims that
Tony was all too aware that his mother did
not want Charlene to inherit anything of
hers when Tony died. “Cove End
was given to him on the understanding
it would be passed on to his children,”
says the friend. Tony denies
this, and six months after his mother
gave it to him, he gave it to his wife.
In January 2004, Terry Christensen
was fi red out of the blue and
eff ectively replaced with Morrissey.
Amaral and people around Brooke
were shocked that she would agree
to this move. “She loved Terry. He
was a good friend,” says the former
chauff eur. Christensen, an elegant
man who is highly respected for his
work in trusts and estate planning,
was stunned and frightened for
Brooke, says a colleague. A document
included among legal papers
suggests that he subsequently told
Marshall of his low opinion of Morrissey
and to be careful.
In 2003 and 2004, Brooke
Astor’s will was amended with GALELL
three codicils. The fi rst, the only
RON
one supervised by Terry Chris-
BY
tensen, authorized Tony to distribute
49 percent of the Vincent
Astor Trust to charities of his BOTTOM, A
242 VANITY FAIR www.vanityfair.com DECEMBER 2006

SOCIETY
choosing, provided he took no fee and any
money remaining at his death went to charity.
(The 2002 will had stated the money
was to go directly to charity.) The second
codicil made Tony the sole executor of his
mother’s estate and the recipient of all assets
remaining after bequests and obligations.
(In her 2002 will the executor responsibilities
were to be shared with Sullivan &
Cromwell, and her assets were to be put in
a special trust for Tony, who would receive
an income of 7 percent of the total value
every year until his death. Thereafter the
capital would go to charities she had chosen.)
Tony, after becoming executor, named
his wife and Morrissey as co-executors.
(He removed Morrissey in August of this
year.) According to the third codicil, upon
Brooke’s death the executor was to sell
her real estate, including the Park Avenue
apartment. (The will had previously stated
that the real estate should simply be given
to Tony.) Susan Robbins, Astor’s courtappointed
lawyer, claimed in legal papers
that the latter two codicils drastically
changed the “basic spirit” of the will. She
also claimed that “something is amiss with
[Astor’s] signature” in the last codicil, and
requested that handwriting experts analyze
it. After Tony’s lawyers resisted, the court
ordered the tests, which are still pending
as of this writing. When asked about the
changes, the Marshalls say they cannot
comment on the will or on Robbins’s allegations.
Kenneth Warner, Tony Marshall’s
attorney, says it is outrageous that Robbins
has discussed the will in public.
As Brooke was seen in public less and
less, Charlene sometimes appeared
wearing Brooke’s famous jewels.
When Charlene ran up onstage to collect the
2003 Tony Award for best revival, she wore
Brooke’s dazzling emeralds. “They were
quite something,” says one observer wryly.
At the next year’s Tony ceremony, when
Delphi won for best play with I Am My Own
Wife, Charlene wore a diamond necklace of
Brooke’s known as “the snowfl akes.” When
asked about the jewelry, Charlene explains,
“I knew we might win for Long Day’s Journey
into Night, so I asked Brooke if I could
borrow something. She said, ‘Here, have
the emeralds … but I want them back the
next day,’ so I brought them back. The next
year, I went to her again and said, ‘I don’t
think we are going to win, but I’d love to
wear something great,’ so this time she lent
me the snowfl akes. I took them back, but
this time she said, ‘Keep them. I never wear
them,’ so I did.”
By this time Brooke’s mental competence
and Charlene’s increasing infl uence
in the household were becoming regular
topics of conversation among the staff.
Some say that every time they asked Tony
for something they were referred to Charlene,
who was noticeably penny-pinching.
(Tony responds: “The staff had charge accounts.
They could get what they wanted
at any time without asking anyone, and I
certainly did not have to ask Charlene.”)
One by one, they were fi red. Zorida Santana,
the chef, returned from maternity
leave to be told there was no need for her
services, since Mrs. Astor could no longer
aff ord them. In August 2005, Marciano
Amaral went on vacation and returned to
similar news, with the added twist that
he had only 30 days to vacate his apartment.
He was shocked. “Mrs. Astor had
always said I could stay as long as I needed,”
says Amaral. He adds, “Tony Marshall
didn’t have the courage to face me.”
The secretary Alice Perdue was fi red, along
with another secretary, Noemie. Amid all
this cost-cutting, Tony’s compensation for
managing Brooke’s finances increased in
2005 from $450,000 a year to $2 million,
according to J. P. Morgan Chase. Tony’s
lawyers responded that the $2 million was
a one-time payment, and that the bank has
demonstrated “unremitting hostility,” motivated
by the fees it might collect.
In February 2005 the butler Chris Ely
was fi red, which was seen by the rest of
the staff as a turning point. Holly Hill was
closed up. “Chris was the one person who
had infl uence over Mrs. Astor—who could
gainsay Mr. Marshall,” says one staff
member. (Tony responds, “We let certain
staff go—I wouldn’t say they were fired—
and all staff , except Marciano, who had
both a free apartment and nothing to do for
a year before he was let go, were replaced.”)
Ely was so upset, he went to Annette
de la Renta and David Rockefeller,
who held a meeting with Tony. In her
affi davit de la Renta writes that she asked
repeatedly for two air purifi ers to be put in
Brooke’s room, and since it was never done,
she had to purchase them herself. (Charlene
says, “We were looking into getting her the
right kind of purifier and were talking it
through with one of the nurses when Annette
de la Renta rushed out and bought one.”)
Philip was also hearing reports from the
nurses and staff that worried him greatly.
Ely had already told him he was forced to
use his own money to buy such basics as
slip pers, elec tric blankets, and face creams.
Now Philip heard reports about skimping on
med ications, including Procrit, which treats
anemia. (Mar shall strongly denies this.)
De la Renta and Rockefeller agreed to sign
affi davits supporting Philip’s petition to remove
his father as Brooke’s guardian. A spokesperson
for de la Renta says she did not inform
Marshall because she feared he would fire the
remaining members of the staff who had also
signed affi davits in support of the petition.
In the October 13 settlement, removing
Tony permanently from his mother’s fi nancial
and health aff airs, he agreed not only to
pay the estate $1.35 million, but also to return
a painting by Andrew Wyeth, jewelry,
and a grandfather clock to serve as col lateral
against future legal claims. His yacht, General
Russell, has also been designated for that purpose.
Char lene was made to trans fer back to
Tony the ownership of Cove End, so it can be
similarly used. A few days after the settlement,
Charlene tells me, “We feel very relieved this
is over for now. The impor tant point is that
the money we are returning is not ‘taken’
money or ‘stolen’ money, but money for collateral,
in case of future disputes. The things
are presents given to us since 1992. They are
in the will, and we expect to get it all back.”
When asked about his feelings toward
his son, Tony says, “Charlene
says we should feel sorry for
Philip. That’s too generous. Alec wrote me
about three weeks ago, and I wrote back
explicitly laying out in great detail what we
were going through, so Philip must know. I
am very relieved that the settlement has tak-
“Charlene says we
should feel sorry for Philıp. That’s too
generous,” says Tony.
en place, but I stick with what I said once
before, that I was wounded in Iwo Jima, and
my wounds healed, but the wounds Philip
infl icted on me will never heal.”
Charlene adds, “I had a phone call Sunday
evening from one of the nurses, who
has just been let go. She told me that when
Philip recently visited Holly Hill and asked
for something to eat and drink, Chris Ely
lit into him and refused. So their little happy
unit is already beginning to implode.”
(Philip says, “That sounds really weird. I
don’t know where she got that idea.”)
“Given my grandmother’s health and the
care she is getting,” says Philip, “any talk of
a will contest is premature. That said, we remain
vigilant about respecting her wishes
and legacy, especially as they involve her
love of New York.”
DECEMBER 2006 www.vanityfair.com VANITY FAIR 243