Alexandra Aldrich knew better than to play in the front hall. But she was hungry, and the only way to get to the kitchen was through that magnificent 40-foot-long room.
She could hear the vibrations of her uncle’s voice, likely lecturing someone on the nearly 200 years of Astor family history at the 420-acre estate — Rokeby, as it is called — beginning with William B. Astor Sr., who married into the property in 1818. Perhaps he was pointing out the busts of the Astor heirs or the Steinway grand pianos or the cabinets full of gold-rimmed china.
As she stepped into the hall, she felt the stare of 60 eyes. She had walked straight into a tour group.
She wondered if the paying guests noticed how unkempt the place was, if they saw the clumps of cat hair and mud splatters on the rugs, or the chipping paint and brown water stains on the white stucco walls.
“This is my niece, Alexandra, the oldest of the next generation of Rokeby owners,” her uncle John Winthrop Aldrich announced without missing a beat.
But Aldrich, not yet 10, did not swell with pride. “I was living history, an object in the house, an actor presenting to be somebody I wasn’t,” she says now.
As the group snaked through the 43-room manor on the Hudson River — her ancestral home — the girl darted off on her ever-daunting hunt for food. Most of the time, her search was fruit- less. The cupboards were bare and the fridge contained only expired milk and moldy pasta sauce.
Forget the gilt-framed oil paintings or the gold-plated china, this was what it really meant to be a modern-day Astor.
“I lived a double life,” Aldrich says. “Our poverty was the big secret.”
While most assumed the Aldrich family — the 10th generation of Astor heirs — were just eccentric Bohemians living off trust funds, the truth was “the Astor money that had supported generations of aristocrats, ill-equipped to earn or invest, is gone.”
The front of the house was a museum, a facade. Alexandra and her parents shared three cramped rooms on the house’s unvisited third floor — they were, literally, Astors in the attic.
Aldrich’s memoir, “The Astor Orphan” (Ecco), out Tuesday, reveals what it’s like to be American royalty after the money runs out.
“I always longed to be rescued,” she told The Post. She envied her middle-class neighbors with their “simple ranch, prefab houses. I wanted to live like them.”
Rokeby’s story begins in 1815, when John Armstrong Jr., a US senator from New York, finished building his country estate in Barrytown, Dutchess County.
The final product — built upon by each new owner — is considered “the embodiment of American Gothic style,” a classic Hudson Valley mansion.
The Astors entered the picture in 1818, when Armstrong’s daughter married William Backhouse Astor, whose trade in furs, pianos and real estate made him “the richest man in America.” (He would be the last Astor with that distinction.) The couple was so taken by the property that in 1836 Astor offered $50,000 to his father-in-law for the estate’s title. Margaret made it her own, as well, by naming the property Rokeby after a poem by Sir Walter Scott.
The next generation is where the division between “country” and “city” Astor is drawn. The storied New York Astor line begins with Astor’s middle child, William Backhouse Astor Jr., who married the grand dame of socialites, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn. The couple produced John Jacob Astor IV, who went down with the Titanic. His son, Vincent, still fabulously wealthy, married Brooke, considered the last doyenne of New York high society.
But the country Astors did not fare as well.
William B. Astor Sr.’s oldest daughter, Emily, died in childbirth. Her daughter Margaret died young of pneumonia, followed two years later by her husband. Their eight children, ages 4 to 14, became the “Astor orphans.”
Among them were Aldrich’s great-uncles — “Uncle Willie,” a friend of Teddy Roosevelt who worked as a gun runner in the Spanish-American War; “Uncle Archie,” who was incarcerated in a mental hospital; and “Uncle Lewis,” one of New York’s first pro-bono attorneys.
“These free-spirited Astor orphans left us, their descendents, our legacy: the house, its history, and contents, and a sense of entitlement and superiority,” writes Aldrich.
To this day, members of her family are still compared favorably (or unfavorably) to these long-gone Astor relatives.
The Astor orphan Aldrich most relates to is Margaret, who died before Aldrich was born. She was a strictly religious woman who took sole ownership of Rokeby.
For 60 years, Margaret ran Rokeby as a profitable dairy farm. Rarely, if ever, did the urban faction of the Astors visit their rural cousins.
In fact, Brooke Astor visited only once, long after Margaret’s death, for a lunch party.
“She arrived by helicopter and had to walk through the tall grass in high heels,” Aldrich recalls. “She didn’t seem excited to be there.”
The family had hoped the most charitable woman in New York would help with Rokeby’s finances — but “she wasn’t really interested in us, and we weren’t blood relatives,” Aldrich told The Post.
Rokeby’s decline began after Margaret’s death in 1963 and continued unabated through the 1980s, while Aldrich was a child. For the first time in Astor history, money was tight, and the taxes and operating costs became a noose around the family’s neck.
The house was now jointly owned by Margaret’s daughter Susan Kean-Cutler Aldrich and her three children, Richard “Ricky” Aldrich, John Winthrop “Wint” Aldrich and Rosalind Michahelles.
“Joint ownership brought out the worst in everyone,” Aldrich says. “Everyone had different views of what should happen to Rokeby.”
Much of the tension settled squarely on the back of Alexandra’s father, Ricky, who worked as Rokeby’s unpaid handyman.
While the two siblings had pursued careers, Ricky, who had been trained at Harvard, returned to Rokeby as a “gentleman farmer.” His mother had another name for it: “a blue-collar maintenance man.”
The house deteriorated quickly without the staff of 25 it once boasted. Tree trunks were used to hold up the porch, rain leaked through the roof, junk littered the lawn. Cleaning and upkeep were the last items on the to-do lists.
Because Ricky didn’t make any money, he couldn’t pay the house’s taxes and became his family’s “willing slave,” says Aldrich.
The house was divided, and where you lived was a reflection of your status in the family. Her uncle and his family lived in a spacious apartment — with its own private kitchen — on the first floor. While Ricky, his temperamental Polish artist wife, and his daughter were banished to the third floor’s servant’s quarters.
“The lonely squalor of the third floor” was in such great contrast to the grandeur of the rest of the house — a place of broken-down furniture mingled and bare bulbs — that Alexandra “felt ashamed each time I climbed the stairs.”
Often they didn’t have enough cash to buy groceries and had to borrow money from the local gas station owner to fund trips to A&P. They bartered. Hunters would give them fresh deer in exchange for hunting privileges. Neighbors filled Ricky with beer and ice cream in exchange for his backhoe or bulldozer.
The house was also overrun with her father’s collection of “irregulars,” as her uncle called them. There was Roy, the one-armed ice boater; “Bob the Ghost,” a man with schizophrenia; and Walter, the grave robber.
“Poverty was amusing” for her father, “a delightful challenge.”
Not so for Alexandra, who tried desperately to keep up appearances by learning the violin and acing her classes.
“I enjoyed keeping the myth alive that I lived in a mansion,” she says. “I didn’t want to bring anyone home and show them that I really live on the third floor and the front of the house is a museum.”
Drama at the madhouse continued. Her grandmother, who helped raise her and provided her with the basic necessities out of a secret trust fund, was shipped off to rehab. Her mother had become moodier and more withdrawn. Then her father came home with a French woman who would later give birth to her half-brother.
After attending boarding school, she moved to Poland, where she discovered the wonderful regimen of religion.
“An obvious reaction to my childhood,” she says with a laugh.
In 1998, she moved to Brooklyn, converted to Orthodox Judaism, married, and gave birth to her son, Shlomo.
But Rokeby called her back.
After a drawn-out divorce battle, she moved back to her homestead in 2005 and stayed there with her son for six years.
Though Rokeby is still “dirty and rundown” to outsiders’ eyes, she says the place has improved dramatically since her youth. Tax breaks from conservation easements and land donations have raised capital — and the leaky roof and ceiling plaster have been updated. But her father, now in his 70s, still lives in an 18-by-11-foot room that hasn’t changed a bit.
One day, she and her four female cousins, and perhaps her half-brother, may own Rokeby. It depends how the wills shake out.
“We will never sell it,” she says. “My family is not interested in money. All of my cousins have been convinced that they should never sell. It’s part of our identities, part of who we are.”
FADED GLORY: Rokeby, the 43-room Dutchess County mansion that has been home to the so-called country Astors, has fallen into disrepair as the family’s fortunes have dried up. (Shannon DeCelle)
Alexandra Aldrich