Lady Brooke Astor dies at 105

[SomethingElse]

A very sad day for Manhattan. We will no longer have the old world splendor of her celebrated birthday parties.

Brooke Astor, the civic leader, philanthropist and high society fixture who gave away nearly $200 million to support New York City's great cultural institutions and a host of humbler projects, died Monday. She was 105.

Astor, who recently was the center of a highly publicized legal dispute over her care, died of pneumonia at Holly Hill, her Westchester County estate in Briarcliff Manor, family lawyer Kenneth Warner said.

"Brooke was truly a remarkable woman," longtime family friend David Rockefeller said. "She was the leading lady of New York in every sense of the word."

Although a legendary figure in New York City and feted with a famous gala on her 100th birthday in March 2002, Astor was mostly interested in putting the fortune that husband Vincent Astor left to use helping others.

Her efforts won her a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1998.

"Money is like manure, it should be spread around," was her oft-quoted motto. There has been a lot to spread in the family ever since Vincent Astor's great-great-grandfather, John Jacob Astor, made a fortune in fur trading and New York real estate.

Brooke Astor gave millions to what she called the city's "crown jewels" -- among them the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Natural History, Central Park and the Bronx Zoo.

She also funded scores of smaller projects: Harlem's Apollo Theater; a new boiler for a youth center; beachside bungalow preservation; a church pipe organ; furniture for homeless families moving in to apartments.

It was a very personal sort of philanthropy. "People just can't come up here and say, `We're doing something marvelous, send a check.' We say, 'Oh, yes, we'll come and see it,"' she said.

Papers filed in July 2006 alleged her final years were marred by neglect, and in a settlement three months later her son, Anthony Marshall, was replaced as her legal guardian with Annette de la Renta, wife of the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta.

Marshall's son Philip Marshall, a professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, had alleged that his father was looting his grandmother's estate and allowing her to live in filthy conditions at her Park Avenue duplex. Anthony Marshall, a former diplomat and sometime Broadway producer who won Tony awards in 2003 and 2004, denied any wrongdoing.

In December, a Manhattan judge ruled that claims "regarding Mrs. Astor's medical and dental care, and the other allegations of intentional elder abuse" by Anthony Marshall were not substantiated.

Astor was born Brooke Russell in March 30, 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt was president, the U.S. had only 45 states and the Wright brothers had yet to make their first flight.

She was the only child of John H. Russell, a career Marine officer who rose to become commandant of the Corps from 1934 to 1936. She was fluent in Chinese after having spending her childhood in China and many other places, including the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Hawaii and Panama.

"I grew up feeling that the most important thing in life was to have good manners and to enhance the lives of others," Brooke Astor said in a 1992 interview with The Associated Press.

At age 16, she was pushed by her mother into marriage with J. Dryden Kuser, whom she had met at a Princeton prom. The marriage ended in divorce 10 years later.

Her second marriage was to stockbroker Charles "Buddie" Marshall. Her son Anthony, from her marriage to Kuser, took Marshall's name. During her marriage to Marshall, Astor wrote articles for various magazines and joined the staff of House & Garden, where she was feature editor for several years.

Marshall died in 1952. A year later, she married Vincent Astor, the eldest son of John Jacob Astor 4th, who died in the sinking of the Titanic.

Vincent Astor, who had no children, died in 1959. He left his widow $2 million plus the interest off $60 million and endowed the Vincent Astor Foundation with an additional $67 million. It gave away approximately $200 million by the time it closed at the end of 1997.

"Vincent was a very suspicious man," Brooke Astor recalled. "The fact that he had total confidence in me to run the foundation made me want to vindicate him, show him -- wherever he is -- that I could do a good job."

She decided that since the money was made in New York it should largely be spent there. She also persuaded the trustees to give away principal as well as interest so most of the money would be spent in her lifetime.

"I'm afraid that, to old John Jacob Astor, spending principal would seem like dancing naked in the streets," she acknowledged.

Hers was a hands-on approach, personally going over applications and then going out to meet the people who ran the programs.

"Even in the worst drug areas, I don't hesitate to go right in and see people," she once said.

Astor Foundation director Linda Gillies, several decades younger than Astor, once said Astor "wears us out."

"Often," Gillies said, "we can't keep up with her."

Astor wrote four books: "Patchwork Child," a 1962 autobiography; "The Bluebird is at Home," 1965, a novel; the autobiographical "Footprints," 1980; and "The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree," 1986, a period novel.

cnn.com

 

[SomethingElse]

Here is her obituary from the NY Times.

Brooke Astor, who by night reigned over New York society with a disdain for pretension and by day devoted her time and considerable resources to New York’s unfortunate, died this afternoon at her weekend estate, Holly Hill, in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. She was 105.

Her death was confirmed by Kenneth E. Warner, a lawyer for Mrs. Astor’s son, Anthony D. Marshall.

Mrs. Astor’s image as a benevolent society matron was overshadowed last year by that of a victimized dowager at the center of a very public family battle over her care and fortune.

Yet for decades she had been known as the city’s unofficial first lady, one who moved effortlessly from the sumptuous apartments of Fifth Avenue to the ragged barrios of East Harlem, deploying her inherited millions to help the poor help themselves.

Among the rich of New York, she was perhaps the last bridge to the Gilded Age, when “society” was a closed world of old-money families, the so-called Four Hundred, ruled over by a grandmother of Mrs. Astor’s by marriage, Mrs. William Backhouse Astor.

But it was a changing social order that Brooke Astor oversaw. Hers was a society defined more by balance sheets than bloodline. It opened its doors to entrepreneurs and Wall Street movers and shakers who had bought entree with so many millions that in the 1980s Mrs. Astor declared herself “nouveau pauvre.”

Although aristocratic in upbringing, style and social milieu, she never sought to be the arbiter of society that the Astor name might have entitled her to be. She never wanted to rule over a world that she was among the first to recognize was no more.

And in her advanced age, her own world seemed to collapse as well. In a startling episode that played out in court and on the front pages of the city’s newspapers last year, one of her grandsons, Philip Marshall, accused her only son of neglecting her care and exploiting her to enrich himself and his wife.

Although Anthony Marshall vigorously denied the accusations, the public was suddenly given a picture of Mrs. Astor as a mistreated centenarian. By the grandson’s account, she had been stripped of her dignity and some of her favorite art, denied medicine and the company of her two dogs, Boysie and Girlsie, and forced to sleep in chilly misery on a couch smelling of urine.

The dispute stretched over months, its every wrinkle making headlines. Then, on Oct. 13, the parties announced a settlement, avoiding what could have been a costly and sensational trial.

Her close friends said her declining physical condition left her unaware of the tumult, but it was a bitter and unlikely last chapter for a woman who had defined high society and made philanthropy her career for almost four decades.

She took up that vocation after her third husband, Vincent Astor, heir to the fur and real estate fortune of John Jacob Astor, died and left about $60 million to her personally and an equal amount for a foundation “for the alleviation of human suffering.” Her husband had told her, “You’ll have fun, Pookie.”

In fact, she said she had a great deal of fun giving money away. With a wink and a sly smile, she liked to quote the leading character in Thornton Wilder’s play “The Matchmaker,” saying, “Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around.”

It was Mrs. Astor who decided that because most of the Astor fortune had been made in New York real estate, it should be spent in New York, for New Yorkers. Grants supported the city’s museums and libraries, its boys’ and girls’ clubs, homes for the elderly, churches, landmarks and other institutions and programs.

She made it her duty to evaluate for herself every organization or group that sought help from the Vincent Astor Foundation. In her chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz, she traveled all over New York to visit the tenements and churches and neighborhood programs she was considering for foundation grants. Many times a welcoming lunch awaited her on paper plates and plastic folding tables set up for the occasion. She would exclaim over what she called the “delicious sauces”: deli mustard and pickle relish.

At night — almost every night, even into her 90s — she could be found surrounded by crystal and caviar, done up in her designer dresses and magnificent jewels, seated to the right of the host. (She was always seated to the right of the host.)

If she nurtured a playful and sometimes wicked eye for the manners of high society (she once said that “unlike Queen Victoria, we are amused — we are always amused”), she made a point of showing her appreciation for people who worked to help the needy. She always “made an effort,” to use a phrase of the upper class.

For her forays around the city, she dressed as she did when she joined the ladies who lunch at East Side bistros: a finely tailored suit or a designer dress, a hat in any weather, a cashmere coat when it was cool and, in her last years, an elegant cane, her one apparent concession to age. She always wore a ring of precious stones, a bracelet, a brooch and earrings.

“If I go up to Harlem or down to Sixth Street, and I’m not dressed up or I’m not wearing my jewelry, then the people feel I’m talking down to them,” she said. “People expect to see Mrs. Astor, not some dowdy old lady, and I don’t intend to disappoint them.”

She could talk to anyone as she made her rounds, offering encouragement to a child working at a library computer, counseling a mother about the importance of reading. To a janitor pushing a broom at a branch library — and she tried to visit every branch — she might give a word of thanks “for keeping this place so clean.” She was thrilled when the Bronx Zoo named a baby elephant Astor in her honor, delighted when a baker at a market the foundation supported pressed two loaves of bread on her.

When the Astor Foundation closed its doors in December 1997, Mrs. Astor had overseen the disbursement of almost $195 million, almost all within New York City. Although the foundation was not large compared with powerhouses like Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie, its contributions often served as seed money: others followed, knowing that if Mrs. Astor had given her seal of approval to a cause, it was worthy of support.

As she neared 99, she said she was glad she had not lived in the kind of indolence her fortune would have allowed. She had had fun helping the needy, she said. If she regretted anything, she said, it was that she had not visited friends in Europe often enough and that she had not been able to read, and write, all the books she would have wished.

She was slight of build, somewhat frail and very thin in her last years, but her hair remained honey-colored, and she liked to boast, although it was widely doubted, that she had never had a face-lift. She kept fit well into her advanced years by swimming 1,000 strokes each weekend day and nearly every day in summer, even in the chilly waters that surrounded her house in Northeast Harbor, Me. Every year she liked to march behind the fire engine in Northeast Harbor’s Memorial Day parade, waving a little American flag.

Even into her 90s, she loved to go out, especially to places where there would be dancing. “When that music starts,” she said, “it enters my blood like a fever.” When she stayed home, she would have people in. An invitation to one of her small luncheons or dinners — especially if it was for a first lady, like her friend Nancy Reagan — was a sign of having arrived at the highest level of society.

When Mrs. Astor slowed down, it was often at Holly Hill, her 68-acre weekend estate. “It’s like backing up to the Esso and getting refueled,” she once said. “I love people, but I couldn’t do it seven days a week.”

In her 98th year she was still writing articles for Vanity Fair magazine, noting with regret, for example, that gentlemen no longer wore hats and that women no longer flirted, something she said she herself never failed to do.

If she had any weakness, it was for her dogs. She always had several and called them her “lovey babes.” She loved Henry O. K. Astor, a dachshund, even after he bit off a piece of her middle finger.

Mrs. Astor spent a good deal of her time in the boardrooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, Rockefeller University and other prestigious cultural centers. A trustee of each, she worked with curators and other staff members. She finally devoted herself almost exclusively to the New York Public Library.

Vartan Gregorian, who was president of the library when Mrs. Astor took it as her main cause, observed then that Mrs. Astor stood apart from her class. “She is of them, but not part of them,” said Mr. Gregorian, who is now president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. “She’s not dominated by the same considerations many socialites are.

“Hers is not a socialite’s attitude,” he went on. “She is genuinely concerned. There’s a lot of effort and mental discipline. She’s one of the few who have read so much. She’s a teacher; she teaches by example, by analogy. If you spend an evening with Brooke Astor and come away empty, there’s something wrong with your antennae.”

 

[SomethingElse]

Here is the remainder of the obituary...

Brooke Russell was born in Portsmouth, N.H., on March 30, 1902. She remembered a childhood that was secure and happy, if often solitary. She had no siblings and spent much of that time in foreign lands. One of her earliest memories was of standing on her bed saluting as a marine bugler outside played during a flag-raising at the American legation in Beijing, where her father, Maj. Gen. John H. Russell, was commander of the guard. (She remembered that the bugler’s name was Johnny Malone, and that she had loved him.)

Her father, who later became commandant of the Marine Corps, also took the family along when he was assigned to Hawaii and Panama. She remembered her mother, Mabel Howard, as beautiful and flirtatious and said that patriotism ran in the family on both sides.

Mrs. Astor kept the diaries, letters and drawings from her childhood travels squirreled away in Briarcliff Manor in a closet that she called her “archive room.” Some of her early drawings, poems and plays were reproduced in an illustrated edition of “Patchwork Child: Early Memories,” published in 1993.

“I’ve been scribbling all my life,” she said. Her writing came to include many magazine articles, two published volumes of autobiography — a 1962 edition of “Patchwork Child” and “Footprints” (1980) — and two novels, “The Bluebird Is at Home” (1965) and “The Last Blossom on the Plum Tree: A Period Piece” (1986).

What she remembered as an idyllic childhood ended abruptly, she said, when, at age 16, she was invited to the senior prom at Princeton to fill in for a girl who had fallen ill. There she met J. Dryden Kuser. Her mother, she said, was “dazzled” by Mr. Kuser’s substantial fortune. After a brief courtship, he asked Brooke to marry him, and though she felt unprepared for marriage, she said, she reluctantly agreed.

“Dryden promised me my own house, all the dogs I wanted, and a car as soon as I was old enough to have a driver’s license,” she said.

Married Life, Times Three

They married in 1919, and for 11 years they lived in great luxury and considerable misery. Her merry nature gradually darkened as the marriage headed for disaster in every respect except for the birth of her son, Anthony. She and Mr. Kuser divorced in 1930.

Her second marriage, two years later, to Charles Marshall, known to everyone as Buddie, brought her 20 years of happiness. Mr. Marshall, she said, was the love of her life. She wrote that her son admired him so much that he adopted his last name as his own.

Charles Marshall died suddenly in 1952, leaving Mrs. Astor without an inheritance. She took a job at House & Garden, a Condé Nast magazine, where she had previously worked.

Not long afterward, still in mourning, she met Vincent Astor at a dinner. A month later, he proposed. She described the scene in “Footprints”: “I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘But you hardly know me,’ I said. ‘We really don’t know each other at all.’

“ ‘I know a lot about you,’ Vincent answered. ‘And I can swear on the Bible that if you marry me I will do everything I possibly can to take care of you and make you happy — and earn your love.’ Well, such suddenness would have thrilled me and elated me at 20, but in my late 40s, I was frightened by it.”

Within months, however, she became his third wife, in 1953. She had, perhaps, been right to hesitate. Vincent Astor, she said, was a suspicious man who thought everyone wanted something from him. As a result, the couple were often alone. She said she lost contact with her friends. He even asked her not to chat on the telephone when he was at home. But she tried to make him cheerful, she said, playing the piano for him and amusing him.

The marriage was brief. In five and a half years, Mr. Astor was dead, leaving his millions for her and for the foundation. “After Vincent died, I recreated myself,” she said, referring to her decades of philanthropy at the Vincent Astor Foundation. “Now I feel I’ve become a public monument,” she said during one of many meetings and interviews since the 1980s.

A Living Landmark

She was, in fact, named a living landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, which said in 1996 that “a list of the city monuments is incomplete without her name alongside.” At bicentennial celebrations in 1976, the Municipal Art Society of New York had a medal struck in bronze to proclaim her achievements. Mayor Abraham D. Beame said Mrs. Astor had done more for New York than any other person.

The Astor Foundation’s annual reports had become a Baedeker to the city, showing important contributions to what she called New York’s “crown jewels”: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library and the New York Botanical Garden, as well as the Cornell University Medical College, Rockefeller University, the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society), the South Street Seaport and many others.

In 1977, when Mrs. Astor made the New York Public Library her primary cause, the Astor Foundation offered a $5 million matching grant if the library could raise $10 million. She then went out to help raise the $10 million. The main entrance of the research library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street was named Astor Hall in her honor. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she took a particular interest in the construction of the Chinese courtyard and scholar’s room, which was named Astor Court.

But having her name on a wall was never much of a priority. Foundation money often went for necessities the public never knew anything about. There was no Astor name affixed to things like air-conditioning or a staff lunch room at one institution or another.

Astor money went to provide new windows for a nursing home on Riverside Drive, fire escapes for a homeless residence in the Bronx, a boiler for a youth center in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and vest-pocket parks around the city. The foundation was among the first to support neighborhood and community-based development projects as well as jobs programs. Grants, to name a few, also went to institutions then known as the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the National Academy of Design and Columbia College as well as Carnegie Hall, Central Park, the Museum of Natural History, Ellis Island and the Animal Medical Center, to care for the pets of the elderly poor.

“Old people have old pets,” she said. “It’s a wonderful place. When I’m sick, that’s where I want them to take me.”

A Family Divided

Mrs. Astor remained at her Park Avenue duplex apartment as age and infirmity overtook her. Though she made occasional social appearances in her last years — David Rockefeller gave her a 100th birthday party at the Rockefeller family’s Hudson Valley estate in 2002 — she had become all but a recluse toward the end.

Then, in July, came the astonishing news that Philip Marshall had sued his father, Anthony Marshall, accusing him of stripping Mrs. Astor’s apartment of artwork to enrich himself and neglecting her in ways that threatened her health and safety.

Philip Marshall enlisted the help and affidavits of Annette de la Renta, Mrs. Astor’s friend of more than 45 years, as well as Mr. Rockefeller, Henry A. Kissinger and others as he sought to wrest control of Mrs. Astor’s affairs from his father.

Anthony Marshall, 83, a Broadway producer and former diplomat who once worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, said the accusations were “completely untrue.”

Under the settlement, he and his wife, Charlene, admitted no wrongdoing, but both were required to give up their roles as co-executors of Mrs. Astor’s estate, and Mr. Marshall agreed to cease being steward of his mother’s health care and financial affairs. They also were required to rescind the transfer of Mrs. Astor’s Maine estate to themselves.

The settlement stipulated that JPMorgan Chase & Company and Mrs. de la Renta would be her permanent guardians. Mrs. de la Renta quickly moved Mrs. Astor from New York to her beloved estate in Briarcliff Manor and was said to have visited her regularly. The bank, which had overseen Mrs. Astor’s finances since the court filing in July 2006, agreed not to pursue litigation to recover millions of dollars in cash, property and stocks that it believed Mr. Marshall might have improperly obtained while managing his mother’s holdings.

Any future legal claims against Mr. Marshall, the settlement said, were to be dealt with in Surrogate’s Court on Mrs. Astor’s death and left to the discretion of the executor of her estate, to be named by a judge.

Besides her son, Anthony, of New York, and her grandson Philip, of South Dartmouth, Mass., Mrs. Astor is survived by another grandson, Philip’s twin brother, Alec.

A widow for 48 years, Mrs. Astor had a number of suitors in that time but did not want to marry again. “I just don’t want anyone tugging at my sleeve at 10 o’clock telling me it’s time to go home,” she once told her friend Marietta Tree. “I want to go at my own speed, and it’s a lot faster than theirs.”

But she remained open to new friends. She used to say that each year she took on one new friend to replace an old one who had died. While Mrs. Astor lost track of some of those friends over the years, she regretted the misunderstandings that arose from time to time. When she was 98, she recalled with satisfaction that she had telephoned a man who had once made her so angry that she had stopped talking to him. The call was to compliment him on an article he had written. “I want to be at peace with all of my friends when I die,” she said.

 

[*Happiness*]

What a remarkable woman!!!!
Such an inspiration.
So sad that she is no longer with us.
R.I.P. Brooke Astor.

 

[SomethingElse]

My apologies! Source on the first quote is cnn.com. And of course, nytimes.com for the obituary postings.

 

[jackieonassis]

RIP Brooke. A legend.

 

[seanutbutter]

Style.com has their own obituary up, located here.

Brooke Astor, photographed with her dogs in 1962 by Horst P. Horst.

style.com

 

[PrinceOfCats]

Not to quibble over the dead but only the British Astors held peerages.

 

[SomethingElse]

^ Absolutely true, but I have always heard the older people in my family refer to her as Lady Astor. I thought it charming and not meant to offend anyone.

 

[kissmesweet]

Awww, she was such a legend.
RIP, Lady Astor.

 

[Yanka]

I never heard of her before she died... But she seemed like a nice person. And living till 105... wow... i wonder if there are any secrets involved

 

[zembla]

Wasn't one of the Astor men on the Titanic?

 

[manzana]

^Yes, John Jacob Astor IV.

RIP Brooke.

 

[maffam]

i very much appreciate this post, but mrs. astor was not actually a 'lady,' and therefore i think the thread title should be changed from 'lady brooke astor' to 'brooke astor.' i believe that if she was in fact 'lady astor,' the ny times and cnn obituaries would have referred to her as such. she was indeed a wonderful and generous woman who did so much for the people of new york, and will hopefully serve as an example for generations to come. may she rest in peace.

 

[fashionista-ta]

What a sweet picture of Brooke with her dogs A life well lived.

 

[Alejandro]

RIP, she was FIERCE til her last days

 

[Dylan.]

i grew up with my mothers vogue's and i remember her in this one picture she's inside her home leaning on a table, i think it is, with a hand on her hip in a black suit. that kind of class and sophistication makes quite an impression on you when your young. iconic.
rip.

 

[liberty33r1b]

what a lady. RIP