Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

Like his father, Jack Astor, Vincent Astor was aboard a boat, though it was a private yacht (the Nourmahal, one of several by that name in family history) rather than the Titanic. In 1930, he took a voyage with scientific guests, including the director of the New York Aquarium, and brought back a number of live specimens that won praise in the newspapers. In 1932, Vincent decided to do it again, although he engaged in an equal amount of partying. In the end, it was mainly booze, dancing, and the racist-tinged tourism of exotic locales that this time (as the Great Depression wore on) failed to gain any praise.

Vincent had inherited a love of yachts from his father, to whom he had turned seeking affection since his mother shunned him. He never really succeeded. His father’s remarriage and unexpected death left him adrift. In 1914, he sought solace in marriage to Helen Dinsmore Huntington, an eligible society girl. The marriage was unhappy, for reasons that remain unknown. One observer claimed she was a lesbian. Complicating matters further, Vincent became sterile after a case of the mumps. The couple nevertheless maintained a stoic facade in society for a while as they split their time between the Beechwood mansion at Newport, the former Mrs. Astor’s Fifth Avenue home, and a Catskills estate called Ferncliff.

The most surprising thing that Vincent did was develop a conscience about the slums his family owned. He built playgrounds for children and founded the Astor Home for Children as a convalescent home for sick youth. He sold his tenements on easy terms to the Metropolitan Housing Authority that managed public housing, and also sold other property, including the original Waldorf-Astoria building and the Fifth Avenue home. He and Helen collaborated on their charitable giving but otherwise remained generally apart. They still lived in luxury, however, and indulged in their hobbies. Vincent had a collection of more than 30 automobiles. His newly commissioned Nourmahal was the largest oil-burning yacht in the world when launched in 1929. It became his escape from reporters and sycophants seeking favors. He briefly flirted with politics given his loose family connections with Franklin D. Roosevelt, and then bought Newsweek to give his views (which had quickly turned against the liberal president) a voice.

In 1940, Vincent and Helen divorced. He then married Mary Benedict “Minnie” Cushing, but their marriage faltered too. He told Minnie he would agree to a divorce if she could find him a new wife. Her first choice, Janet Smith Bush, rejected him. Supposedly, when she said that she didn’t even like him, Vincent replied that the doctors only had given him three years to live and then she’d have his fortune. Janet retorted, “‘But, Vincent, what if the doctors are wrong?’” (228). In 1952, Minnie introduced Vincent to the recently widowed, financially precarious, and unsuspecting Brooke Marshall. After an initial meeting, they strongarmed her into coming to Ferncliff for Memorial Day weekend. Vincent immediately proposed to her and then sent her letters daily ardently proclaiming his love. Whether worn down by the pressure, charmed by the letters (as she said), or persuaded by the money (as the book insinuates), Brooke finally agreed. However, Vincent disliked her son, Anthony “Tony” Marshall, and rarely let him visit even though he loved Tony’s twin boys. Although Vincent was a controlling, jealous husband who made life difficult, Brooke endured and worked hard to please him. Her patience paid off five years later: He died in 1959, and she inherited an estate worth $130 million.

In 2013, an elderly, frail Tony Marshall lay in a hospital bed and was grilled by a parole board. His own son had accused him of mistreating and swindling his mother, Brooke Astor. He strenuously denied wrongdoing, saying he had managed her money the best that he could. He loved his mother, and she loved him back, even if it didn’t always show and even if she hated his wife. He plaintively asked if she didn’t love him.

Brooke had borne Tony to her first husband, Dryden Kuser, an abusive man who broke her jaw when she was pregnant. After he divorced her, she married and found joy with Buddie Marshall, a stockbroker. She had, however, a difficult time with her son, perhaps seeing him as a reminder of her brutish first husband. However, despite her lack of affection and her sending him off to boarding school, Tony seemed to flourish. During World War II, inspired by his maternal grandfather’s service, he joined the Marine Corps and took his stepfather’s last name. He served briefly in the CIA afterward. When his mother married Vincent, she became even more distant, though she still used her connections with Nelson Rockefeller to secure a diplomatic post for Tony in Madagascar. The government there accused him of plotting a coup and kicked him out. Brooke tried to get Tony a job at Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was a major donor, but the board rejected him as unqualified. One member remembered him as unpleasant and whiny. Brooke therefore gave Tony a job managing her personal investments. This dependence on his disinterested mother was, in Cooper and Howe’s view, “emasculating”—a constant low-level assault on his self-worth. Brooke meanwhile enjoyed her prestige as New York’s philanthropist par excellence.

Tony divorced his first wife, remarried, and then, in 1989 at age 65, fell in love again. He was still married, as was his lover, Charlene Gilbert. Worse, her husband was the minister of Mrs. Astor’s church. They divorced their spouses and married in 1992, causing a scandal. Meanwhile, Brooke’s memory began to fail as she entered her 90s. Rather than handing control of her charitable Vincent Astor Foundation to her son and new daughter-in-law (with all the social prestige that accompanied it), she decided to dissolve it. She declared that Tony was not an Astor and therefore she had no family to inherit it. She had given him a nice apartment and an almost half-million-dollar annual salary, but she made clear her feelings about the Astor family fortune. She provided a nice bequest for him in her will but left much of the remaining fortune to charity. Moreover, if he died first—and he’d already had one heart attack—his beloved Charlene would get nothing.

When Brooke turned 98, Tony took her to a doctor, who diagnosed her with Alzheimer’s. She rallied for her 100th birthday at a grand party filled with the rich and influential. Tony gradually took over her household and began cutting expenses, selling valuable items (such as a painting of the Fifth Avenue family home promised to charity), and removing loyal retainers. He had her sign over Cove End, a property she previously vowed to keep from Charlene, and he then promptly gave it to Charlene. In a series of codicils prepared by Tony’s previously disgraced lawyer, Francis Morrissey, Brooke changed her will, naming Tony as heir rather than her favorite charities. However, Brooke’s friends and grandsons noticed her increasingly isolated circumstances. Tony’s son Philip joined Brooke’s friends David Rockefeller and Annette de la Renta to challenge his father for guardianship. The authors note that this selfless act cost him a $9 million bequest when his father disinherited him. Although Philip and his associates tried to do this quietly, the media found out, and headlines trumpeted the family conflict, reveling in shocking details like the claim of the elegant Mrs. Astor sitting in a threadbare gown on a urine-stained couch. These attention-grabbing headlines of elder abuse were later judged unsubstantiated, but the charges of fraudulently altering her will attracted the attention of the Manhattan district attorney’s office. When it went to trial after Brooke’s death in 2007, the court gave a mixed result, acquitting Tony on some counts and convicting him on others—still enough to send him to prison. It upheld one change to the will but not subsequent ones, so Tony and Charlene still received a substantial bequest, but an equal sum went to charity. Tony’s health rapidly declined in prison, and the parole board granted him compassionate medical release. He died a year later.

Movie star Mary Astor was born Lucile Langhanke, but the committee of supporters who propelled her to stardom convinced her to legally adopt a fashionable name that sounded affluent and famous. Astor it was. Her German background and domineering father, obsessed with getting ahead, made the name apt. As Mary’s parents profited, money warped the family. At one point, they gave Mary a $5 per week allowance while raking in $2,500 per week from her contracts. This is only one example of how the name Astor entered popular culture as a symbol of affluence. Buildings, streets, subways, and even a German football club all bear the family’s name.

Astor could mean avarice. It also has come to signify the unexpected stories of grit, such as Mary Astor’s rise to stardom. Today, we live in a second Gilded Age of upper-class excess surpassing that of the Astors, in which private space flights have replaced Venetian-style galas. Meanwhile, traces of the original brutal Astor empire remain, such as beavers on the tiles in the Astor Place subway station.