On an October morning in 2009, an eighty-five-year-old man stood before a Manhattan jury to learn whether he had stolen from his own mother. Anthony Marshall had led Marines at Iwo Jima, served as a CIA officer, and represented the United States as ambassador to four countries. He had won two Tony Awards as a Broadway producer. None of that shielded him from the charges that he had exploited a woman who once gave away nearly two hundred million dollars.
The woman was Brooke Astor, and the trial that consumed five months of court time was the closing chapter of a life that had spanned the entire American century. She was born Roberta Brooke Russell in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on March 30, 1902, the only child of a Marine officer. Her father, John Henry Russell Jr. , came from a family of servicemen and would eventually rise to commandant of the Marine Corps.
Her mother, Mabel, came from money and never forgot the difference between the life she had known and the life a Marine’s pay could provide. That difference shaped everything that followed. Brooke’s childhood was measured in postings. She lived in Honolulu, in the Panama Canal Zone, and most importantly in Beijing, where her father commanded the Marine Guard at the American Legation from 1910 to 1913.
The Qing dynasty was collapsing around the little American girl, and she absorbed the gardens of the imperial city so deeply that seventy years later she would rebuild one inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was educated by governesses and, by her own account, found it easier to talk to her dolls than to other children. She wrote poems, kept diaries, and learned from her father a motto she would repeat for the rest of her life: die with your boots on. Keep going, keep working, never sit down and wait for the end.
Her mother had other plans. At seventeen, Brooke attended a prom at Princeton and caught the eye of a young man whose family had made a fortune in insurance. John Dryden Kuser was the grandson of the founder of Prudential, and Mabel Russell pushed the match hard. They married in April 1919.
Brooke was seventeen. It went wrong almost immediately. Her husband drank, womanized, and, by her own later admission on national television, was physically cruel to her. Her biographer would write that when she was six months pregnant, her husband broke her jaw.
The baby, Anthony Dryden Kuser, was born in May 1924. He was the only child she would ever have. She endured the marriage for more than ten years, calling it later the worst years of her life. In February 1930, she filed for divorce in Reno, Nevada, where the law made such things quick, and won custody of her son.
She moved to New York, wrote for magazines, and tried to build a life alone. In the early 1930s, she met a stockbroker named Charles Henry Marshall, known to everyone as Buddy. He had two children from a failed marriage, a punishing divorce settlement, and very little spare money. He also made her happy.
They married in 1932, and Brooke would call it a great love match. For twenty years, she lived the steadiest years of her life, working as a features editor at House and Garden, learning the language of rooms and design, and watching her son grow. In 1942, when the boy turned eighteen, he took his stepfather’s surname. Anthony Dryden Kuser became Anthony Dryden Marshall.
That same year, he enlisted in the Marine Corps, his grandfather’s service. He led a platoon at Iwo Jima, was wounded there, and received the Purple Heart. He came home, married a woman named Elizabeth Cryan, and began a career that would eventually take him into the CIA and then into the State Department as an ambassador. Buddy Marshall died suddenly of a heart attack in 1952.
Brooke was fifty years old, widowed, and without much money. At her first dinner party after his death, in May 1953, she met a man in his sixties, very rich, and about to be divorced for the second time. His name was Vincent Astor. His father had gone down with the Titanic.
He was the head of the most famous name in American money, and by nearly every account, one of the hardest men in New York to love. Vincent had inherited a fortune estimated at somewhere between sixty-five and one hundred million dollars when the Titanic sank. He trusted almost no one who came near it. He had married twice before, and his second wife, Minnie, reportedly went looking for someone to take her place before she left.
She suggested the widowed Mrs. Marshall. However the match was arranged, it moved fast. They married in October 1953, weeks after Vincent’s divorce.
She was fifty-one. He was sixty-one. The marriage was hard. Vincent was jealous, controlling, and by one account, dreadful.
She admitted to Mike Wallace in 1987 that he was jealous of Tony, jealous of her friends. She tried hard. She described later how she would dance with the dogs, sing, play the piano, and make him laugh, something no one had ever done before. She endured what one family historian called five and a half often miserable years of marriage.
Then Vincent died of a heart attack on February 3, 1959. He was sixty-seven. His will disposed of an estate Time magazine called one hundred million dollars plus. His widow received two million outright and the income from a trust of about sixty million.
The foundation that carried his name, worth perhaps sixty-seven million, was put entirely in her hands. He had told her she was going to have a hell of a lot of fun running it. A man who trusted nobody had trusted her with the one thing he could not take with him. Her first decision as president of the Vincent Astor Foundation was to change how it gave.
Borrowing an idea from John D. Rockefeller III, she decided that anyone who controlled the money should be personally involved in the giving. She went to see for herself. She went to Harlem, to Bedford-Stuyvesant, even into high-crime areas, dressed in a pretty hat, pearls, white gloves, and jewels, explaining that people expected to see Mrs.
Astor, not some dowdy old lady, and she did not intend to disappoint them. She had rules. The money had been made in New York, so it would be largely spent there. And she persuaded her trustees to give away the principal itself, so the fortune would be spent in her lifetime rather than sit forever in a vault.
In her first year, she gave away more than three million dollars. After that, the foundation made about a hundred grants a year. She gave millions to the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, to the South Street Seaport, to the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She paid to restore the porches of a row of houses on West 130th Street that became known as Astor Row.
She gave nearly twenty-five million to the New York Public Library, about eleven million to the Bronx Zoo, which named a baby elephant after her. In 1980, twenty-seven craftsmen came from Suzhou to build a Chinese garden inside the Metropolitan Museum, because a woman remembered one from Beijing. She paid for it with $9. 6 million.
She carried the gardens of her childhood for nearly seventy years, and now she brought one home. She had a motto she loved to repeat: money is like manure, it is not worth a thing unless it is spread around. The honors arrived. President Reagan gave her the Presidential Citizens Medal in 1988.
President Clinton gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January 1998, calling her America’s guardian angel, and read aloud the poem she had written at fifteen: take thy spade and take thine axe, make the flowers bloom. On March 30, 2002, she turned one hundred. David Rockefeller gave the party. Kofi Annan, Barbara Walters, and Peter Jennings were there.
Henry Kissinger rose to toast her. She wore a blue gown by Oscar de la Renta. It was the brightest night of the last chapter of her life. Few of the people raising their glasses that night knew what her doctors already knew.
In late 2000, when she was ninety-eight, she was diagnosed with mild Alzheimer’s disease. The following spring, the diagnosis became moderate dementia. The woman who had inspected every grant in person for thirty-eight years was beginning slowly to lose the thread of her own affairs. Someone had to hold that thread, and that someone was her son.
Tony Marshall was in his late seventies, a successful Broadway producer who had shared two Tony Awards. In January 2002, his mother signed a new will under the supervision of her longtime lawyer. That same year, the painting over her fireplace, a Childe Hassam of flags along Fifth Avenue bought in 1970 for $172,010, was sold to a gallery for ten million dollars. Tony Marshall took a two-million-dollar commission on the sale.
Years later, her butler testified that when she heard a million dollars had come in from the sale, she asked whether she could buy some dresses. Over the next two years, the will was changed three times. A codicil in December 2003 raised her son’s power over one of Vincent’s old trusts to forty-nine percent. A second, signed after a meeting of twenty minutes, removed the requirement that money go to charity and gave her son the remainder of her estate outright.
By one estimate, that change moved about sixty million dollars from her charities to her son. Her longtime lawyer was replaced by Francis Morrissey Jr. , an estate lawyer suspended from the bar in 1995 over an unauthorized withdrawal of nearly a million dollars. A third codicil moved millions away from charities and raised Morrissey’s own pay.
A jury would later decide that the signature on that third codicil was forged, and that Morrissey was the forger. Between September 2003 and March 2004, her medical records documented about sixty-eight instances of confusion and forty-six instances of paranoia. At some point, Tony Marshall authorized a large increase in his own pay for managing his mother’s affairs, a raise a jury would later convict him for. In January 2006, Brooke Astor’s grandson Philip Marshall, a professor of historic preservation whose entire profession was the rescue of old places from neglect, filed a petition under New York’s guardianship law.
He asked the court to remove his father from control of his grandmother’s affairs. His sworn statement said that his father had turned a blind eye to her, intentionally and repeatedly ignoring her health, safety, personal, and household needs while enriching himself. The petition described a household that had run down around her. She could not sleep in her own bedroom in winter because it was too cold, so she slept on a couch in the television room, dressed in torn nightgowns, on a couch that smelled of urine.
Her meals were oatmeal and pureed vegetables served Monday through Friday for months. Her face creams had been swapped for petroleum jelly. Her two dogs had been shut in the pantry for six months. Staff had been told not to call 911 without her son’s permission.
Her nurses bought her socks and hair bonnets out of their own pockets. The fired butler had bought her slippers, electric blankets, and face creams with his own money. The petition included sworn statements from Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller. Her son answered at once.
I love my mother, he said, and no one cares more about her than I do. He said he spent $2. 5 million a year on her care and she had a staff of eight. The judge had already acted.
Even before the story broke, Justice John Stackhouse had made Annette de la Renta, Brooke’s closest friend, the temporary guardian of her person, and JP Morgan Chase the temporary guardian of her property. Tony Marshall’s salary was cut off. The case settled in October 2006. Tony and Charlene Marshall returned more than eleven million dollars in cash, jewelry, and art, and pledged more than ten million more.
There was no admission of wrongdoing. Nothing about neglect was ever decided. Brooke Astor died on August 13, 2007, at Holly Hill, her country house in Westchester, of pneumonia. One account says she died holding hands with her butler, her nurses, and Annette de la Renta.
She was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery beside Vincent, forty-eight years after his death. She had chosen her own words for her gravestone long before any of this. They are there now: I had a wonderful life. Three months after her funeral, her only son surrendered in Manhattan to face criminal charges.
The trial began on March 30, 2009, the day she would have turned 107. The prosecution called seventy-two witnesses. Tony Marshall was convicted on fourteen of sixteen counts, including first-degree grand larceny. A jury found that he had improperly authorized a significant increase in his own compensation after his mother’s health deteriorated.
Francis Morrissey was convicted on every count against him, including the forgery of her signature. On the charge tied to the sale of the Hassam painting, the jury found Tony Marshall not guilty. He was sentenced to one to three years in prison, the least the law allowed, and ordered to repay $12. 3 million.
The appeals took more than three years. On June 21, 2013, an eighty-nine-year-old man who had led Marines at Iwo Jima went to prison for stealing from his mother. Her money had already gone where her will of 2002 had meant it to go. In 2012, the attorney general settled the fight over her estate.
One hundred million dollars went to charity, including thirty million to create a new Brooke Astor Fund for New York City education. The Metropolitan Museum received three million, recorded as being for the Hassam painting. Her son’s share was cut from about thirty-one million to 14. 5 million.
Her apartment at 778 Park Avenue, with its red library, sold for twenty-one million dollars. The contents of her homes brought $18. 8 million at auction. Her grandson Philip went to Washington in 2015 and told the United States Senate what had happened to her.
The garden she remembered from Beijing is still standing inside the museum on Fifth Avenue, and anyone can walk into it. The woman who gave away nearly two hundred million dollars in a hat and white gloves, who said that power is the ability to do good things for others, lies beside the man who called her Pooky, under words she chose herself. I had a wonderful life.